Authors: Parand A. Alamdari, Toryn Q. Klassen, Rodrigo Toro Icarte, Sheila A. McIlraith
Abstract: Pluralistic alignment is concerned with ensuring that an AI system's objectives and behaviors are in harmony with the diversity of human values and perspectives. In this paper we study the notion of pluralistic alignment in the context of agentic AI, and in particular in the context of an agent that is trying to learn a policy in a manner that is mindful of the values and perspective of others in the environment. To this end, we show how being considerate of the future wellbeing and agency of other (human) agents can promote a form of pluralistic alignment.
Authors: Toryn Q. Klassen, Parand A. Alamdari, Sheila A. McIlraith
Abstract: If an AI system makes decisions over time, how should we evaluate how aligned it is with a group of stakeholders (who may have conflicting values and preferences)? In this position paper, we advocate for consideration of temporal aspects including stakeholders' changing levels of satisfaction and their possibly temporally extended preferences. We suggest how a recent approach to evaluating fairness over time could be applied to a new form of pluralistic alignment: temporal pluralism, where the AI system reflects different stakeholders' values at different times.
Authors: Medant Sharan, Chandranath Adak
Abstract: This paper examines the use of classical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, DQN, DDQN, and Dueling DQN, in the strategy game So Long Sucker (SLS), a diplomacy-driven game defined by coalition-building and strategic betrayal. SLS poses unique challenges due to its blend of cooperative and adversarial dynamics, making it an ideal platform for studying multi-agent learning and game theory. The study's primary goal is to teach autonomous agents the game's rules and strategies using classical DRL methods. To support this effort, the authors developed a novel, publicly available implementation of SLS, featuring a graphical user interface (GUI) and benchmarking tools for DRL algorithms. Experimental results reveal that while considered basic by modern DRL standards, DQN, DDQN, and Dueling DQN agents achieved roughly 50% of the maximum possible game reward. This suggests a baseline understanding of the game's mechanics, with agents favoring legal moves over illegal ones. However, a significant limitation was the extensive training required, around 2000 games, for agents to reach peak performance, compared to human players who grasp the game within a few rounds. Even after prolonged training, agents occasionally made illegal moves, highlighting both the potential and limitations of these classical DRL methods in semi-complex, socially driven games. The findings establish a foundational benchmark for training agents in SLS and similar negotiation-based environments while underscoring the need for advanced or hybrid DRL approaches to improve learning efficiency and adaptability. Future research could incorporate game-theoretic strategies to enhance agent decision-making in dynamic multi-agent contexts.
Authors: Ryan Sullivan, Ryan P\'egoud, Ameen Ur Rahmen, Xinchen Yang, Junyun Huang, Aayush Verma, Nistha Mitra, John P. Dickerson
Abstract: Curriculum learning has been a quiet yet crucial component of many of the high-profile successes of reinforcement learning. Despite this, none of the major reinforcement learning libraries directly support curriculum learning or include curriculum learning implementations. These methods can improve the capabilities and robustness of RL agents, but often require significant, complex changes to agent training code. We introduce Syllabus, a library for training RL agents with curriculum learning, as a solution to this problem. Syllabus provides a universal API for curriculum learning algorithms, implementations of popular curriculum learning methods, and infrastructure for easily integrating them with distributed training code written in nearly any RL library. Syllabus provides a minimal API for each of the core components of curriculum learning, dramatically simplifying the process of designing new algorithms and applying existing algorithms to new environments. We demonstrate that the same Syllabus code can be used to train agents written in multiple different RL libraries on numerous domains. In doing so, we present the first examples of curriculum learning in NetHack and Neural MMO, two of the premier challenges for single-agent and multi-agent RL respectively, achieving strong results compared to state of the art baselines.
Authors: Marnix Suilen, Thom Badings, Eline M. Bovy, David Parker, Nils Jansen
Abstract: Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a standard model for sequential decision-making problems and are widely used across many scientific areas, including formal methods and artificial intelligence (AI). MDPs do, however, come with the restrictive assumption that the transition probabilities need to be precisely known. Robust MDPs (RMDPs) overcome this assumption by instead defining the transition probabilities to belong to some uncertainty set. We present a gentle survey on RMDPs, providing a tutorial covering their fundamentals. In particular, we discuss RMDP semantics and how to solve them by extending standard MDP methods such as value iteration and policy iteration. We also discuss how RMDPs relate to other models and how they are used in several contexts, including reinforcement learning and abstraction techniques. We conclude with some challenges for future work on RMDPs.
Authors: Alejandro Hernandez, Levin Brinkmann, Ignacio Serna, Nasim Rahaman, Hassan Abu Alhaija, Hiromu Yakura, Mar Canet Sola, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Iyad Rahwan
Abstract: While AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in constrained domains like game strategy, their potential for genuine creativity in open-ended domains like art remains debated. We explore this question by examining how AI can transcend human cognitive limitations in visual art creation. Our research hypothesizes that visual art contains a vast unexplored space of conceptual combinations, constrained not by inherent incompatibility, but by cognitive limitations imposed by artists' cultural, temporal, geographical and social contexts. To test this hypothesis, we present the Alien Recombination method, a novel approach utilizing fine-tuned large language models to identify and generate concept combinations that lie beyond human cognitive availability. The system models and deliberately counteracts human availability bias, the tendency to rely on immediately accessible examples, to discover novel artistic combinations. This system not only produces combinations that have never been attempted before within our dataset but also identifies and generates combinations that are cognitively unavailable to all artists in the domain. Furthermore, we translate these combinations into visual representations, enabling the exploration of subjective perceptions of novelty. Our findings suggest that cognitive unavailability is a promising metric for optimizing artistic novelty, outperforming merely temperature scaling without additional evaluation criteria. This approach uses generative models to connect previously unconnected ideas, providing new insight into the potential of framing AI-driven creativity as a combinatorial problem.
Authors: Xinyan Guan, Yanjiang Liu, Xinyu Lu, Boxi Cao, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Jie Lou, Bowen Yu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin
Abstract: The evolution of machine learning has increasingly prioritized the development of powerful models and more scalable supervision signals. However, the emergence of foundation models presents significant challenges in providing effective supervision signals necessary for further enhancing their capabilities. Consequently, there is an urgent need to explore novel supervision signals and technical approaches. In this paper, we propose verifier engineering, a novel post-training paradigm specifically designed for the era of foundation models. The core of verifier engineering involves leveraging a suite of automated verifiers to perform verification tasks and deliver meaningful feedback to foundation models. We systematically categorize the verifier engineering process into three essential stages: search, verify, and feedback, and provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research developments within each stage. We believe that verifier engineering constitutes a fundamental pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence.
Authors: Jean Vassoyan (CB), Anan Sch\"utt (UNIA), Jill-J\^enn Vie (SODA), Arun-Balajiee Lekshmi-Narayanan (PITT), Elisabeth Andr\'e (UNIA), Nicolas Vayatis (CB)
Abstract: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have greatly contributed to making education more accessible.However, many MOOCs maintain a rigid, one-size-fits-all structure that fails to address the diverse needs and backgrounds of individual learners.Learning path personalization aims to address this limitation, by tailoring sequences of educational content to optimize individual student learning outcomes.Existing approaches, however, often require either massive student interaction data or extensive expert annotation, limiting their broad application.In this study, we introduce a novel data-efficient framework for learning path personalization that operates without expert annotation.Our method employs a flexible recommender system pre-trained with reinforcement learning on a dataset of raw course materials.Through experiments on semi-synthetic data, we show that this pre-training stage substantially improves data-efficiency in a range of adaptive learning scenarios featuring new educational materials.This opens up new perspectives for the design of foundation models for adaptive learning.
Authors: Antonio Norelli
Abstract: Rooted in the explosion of deep learning over the past decade, this thesis spans from AlphaGo to ChatGPT to empirically examine the fundamental concepts needed to realize the vision of an artificial scientist: a machine with the capacity to autonomously generate original research and contribute to the expansion of human knowledge. The investigation begins with {\sc Olivaw}, an AlphaGo Zero-like agent that discovers Othello knowledge from scratch but is unable to communicate it. This realization leads to the development of the Explanatory Learning (EL) framework, a formalization of the problem faced by a scientist when trying to explain a new phenomenon to their peers. The effective EL prescriptions allow us to crack Zendo, a board game simulating the scientific endeavor. This success comes with a fundamental insight: an artificial scientist must develop its own interpretation of the language used to explain its findings. This perspective then leads us to see modern multimodal models as interpreters, and to devise a new way to build interpretable and cost-effective CLIP-like models: by coupling two unimodal models using little multimodal data and no further training. Finally, we discuss what ChatGPT and its siblings are still missing to become artificial scientists, and introduce Odeen, a benchmark about interpreting explanations that sees LLMs going no further than random chance while being instead fully solved by humans.
Authors: Jiawei Li, Xinyue Liang, Yizhe Yang, Chong Feng, Yang Gao
Abstract: Process supervision enhances the performance of large language models in reasoning tasks by providing feedback at each step of chain-of-thought reasoning. However, due to the lack of effective process supervision methods, even advanced large language models are prone to logical errors and redundant reasoning. We claim that the effectiveness of process supervision significantly depends on both the accuracy and the length of reasoning chains. Moreover, we identify that these factors exhibit a nonlinear relationship with the overall reward score of the reasoning process. Inspired by these insights, we propose a novel process supervision paradigm, PSPO*, which systematically outlines the workflow from reward model training to policy optimization, and highlights the importance of nonlinear rewards in process supervision. Based on PSPO*, we develop the PSPO-WRS, which considers the number of reasoning steps in determining reward scores and utilizes an adjusted Weibull distribution for nonlinear reward shaping. Experimental results on six mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that PSPO-WRS consistently outperforms current mainstream models.
Authors: Malte Luttermann, Ralf M\"oller, Marcel Gehrke
Abstract: Lifted probabilistic inference exploits symmetries in a probabilistic model to allow for tractable probabilistic inference with respect to domain sizes of logical variables. We found that the current state-of-the-art algorithm to construct a lifted representation in form of a parametric factor graph misses symmetries between factors that are exchangeable but scaled differently, thereby leading to a less compact representation. In this paper, we propose a generalisation of the advanced colour passing (ACP) algorithm, which is the state of the art to construct a parametric factor graph. Our proposed algorithm allows for potentials of factors to be scaled arbitrarily and efficiently detects more symmetries than the original ACP algorithm. By detecting strictly more symmetries than ACP, our algorithm significantly reduces online query times for probabilistic inference when the resulting model is applied, which we also confirm in our experiments.
Authors: Jens Knappe
Abstract: The year 2022 marks a watershed in technology, and arguably in human history, with the release of powerful generative AIs capable of convincingly performing creative tasks. With the help of these systems, anyone can create something that would previously have been considered a remarkable work of art. In human-AI collaboration, the computer seems to have become more than a tool. Many who have made their first contact with current generative AIs see them as "creativity machines" while for others the term "machine creativity" remains an oxymoron. This article is about (the possibility of) creativity in computers within the current Machine Learning paradigm. It outlines some of the key concepts behind the technologies and the innovations that have contributed to this qualitative shift, with a focus on text-to-image systems. The nature of Artificial Creativity as such is discussed, as well as what this might mean for art. AI may become a responsible collaborator with elements of independent machine authorship in the artistic process.
Authors: Zhang Zhang, Da Li, Geng Wu, Yaoning Li, Xiaobing Sun, Liang Wang
Abstract: In this paper, we create "Love in Action" (LIA), a body language-based social game utilizing video cameras installed in public spaces to enhance social relationships in real-world. In the game, participants assume dual roles, i.e., requesters, who issue social requests, and performers, who respond social requests through performing specified body languages. To mediate the communication between participants, we build an AI-enhanced video analysis system incorporating multiple visual analysis modules like person detection, attribute recognition, and action recognition, to assess the performer's body language quality. A two-week field study involving 27 participants shows significant improvements in their social friendships, as indicated by self-reported questionnaires. Moreover, user experiences are investigated to highlight the potential of public video cameras as a novel communication medium for socializing in public spaces.
Authors: Sung-Jin Kim, Dae-Hyeok Lee, Hyeon-Taek Han
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a generally used neuroimaging approach in brain-computer interfaces due to its non-invasive characteristics and convenience, making it an effective tool for understanding human intentions. Therefore, recent research has focused on decoding human intentions from EEG signals utilizing deep learning methods. However, since EEG signals are highly susceptible to noise during acquisition, there is a high possibility of the existence of noisy data in the dataset. Although pioneer studies have generally assumed that the dataset is well-curated, this assumption is not always met in the EEG dataset. In this paper, we addressed this issue by designing a dataset refinement algorithm that can eliminate noisy data based on metrics evaluating data influence during the training process. We applied the proposed algorithm to two motor imagery EEG public datasets and three different models to perform dataset refinement. The results indicated that retraining the model with the refined dataset consistently led to better generalization performance compared to using the original dataset. Hence, we demonstrated that removing noisy data from the training dataset alone can effectively improve the generalization performance of deep learning models in the EEG domain.
Authors: Gabriel Istrate
Abstract: Motivated by phase transitions in combinatorial optimization problems, we define two kinds of geometry-preserving reductions between constraint satisfaction problems and other NP-search problems. We give a couple of examples and counterexamples for these reductions.
Authors: Kevin F. Dunnell, Andrew P. Stoddard
Abstract: This paper presents "Biotic Browser," an innovative AI assistant leveraging StreamingLLM to transform web navigation and task execution. Characterized by its ability to simulate the experience of a passenger in an autonomous vehicle, the Biotic Browser excels in managing extended interactions and complex, multi-step web-based tasks. It marks a significant advancement in AI technology, particularly in the realm of long-term context management, and offers promising applications for enhancing productivity and efficiency in both personal and professional settings.
Authors: Zhuoyan Li, Ming Yin
Abstract: Recent advances in AI models have increased the integration of AI-based decision aids into the human decision making process. To fully unlock the potential of AI-assisted decision making, researchers have computationally modeled how humans incorporate AI recommendations into their final decisions, and utilized these models to improve human-AI team performance. Meanwhile, due to the ``black-box'' nature of AI models, providing AI explanations to human decision makers to help them rely on AI recommendations more appropriately has become a common practice. In this paper, we explore whether we can quantitatively model how humans integrate both AI recommendations and explanations into their decision process, and whether this quantitative understanding of human behavior from the learned model can be utilized to manipulate AI explanations, thereby nudging individuals towards making targeted decisions. Our extensive human experiments across various tasks demonstrate that human behavior can be easily influenced by these manipulated explanations towards targeted outcomes, regardless of the intent being adversarial or benign. Furthermore, individuals often fail to detect any anomalies in these explanations, despite their decisions being affected by them.
Authors: Ziyang Guo, Yifan Wu, Jason Hartline, Jessica Hullman
Abstract: Humans and AIs are often paired on decision tasks with the expectation of achieving complementary performance -- where the combination of human and AI outperforms either one alone. However, how to improve performance of a human-AI team is often not clear without knowing more about what particular information and strategies each agent employs. In this paper, we propose a model based in statistically decision theory to analyze human-AI collaboration from the perspective of what information could be used to improve a human or AI decision. We demonstrate our model on a deepfake detection task to investigate seven video-level features by their unexploited value of information. We compare the human alone, AI alone and human-AI team and offer insights on how the AI assistance impacts people's usage of the information and what information that the AI exploits well might be useful for improving human decisions.
Authors: Ahmed Mohamed, Mostafa Ali, Shahd Ahmed, Nouran Hani, Mohammed Hisham, Meram Mahmoud
Abstract: Student disengagement in online learning has become a critical challenge, particularly post-pandemic. This review explores deep learning techniques used to detect disengagement, emphasizing computer vision and affective computing as effective approaches. We examine recent studies focusing on facial expressions, eye movements, and posture to assess student attention, along with non-face-based indicators like mouse activity. A systematic review of 38 selected studies outlines the indicators, methods, and models employed in this field, providing insights for future research on real-time engagement monitoring in online classrooms
Authors: Edoardo Sebastiano De Duro, Enrique Taietta, Riccardo Improta, Massimo Stella
Abstract: Machine psychology aims to reconstruct the mindset of Large Language Models (LLMs), i.e. how these artificial intelligences perceive and associate ideas. This work introduces PhDGPT, a prompting framework and synthetic dataset that encapsulates the machine psychology of PhD researchers and professors as perceived by OpenAI's GPT-3.5. The dataset consists of 756,000 datapoints, counting 300 iterations repeated across 15 academic events, 2 biological genders, 2 career levels and 42 unique item responses of the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-42). PhDGPT integrates these psychometric scores with their explanations in plain language. This synergy of scores and texts offers a dual, comprehensive perspective on the emotional well-being of simulated academics, e.g. male/female PhD students or professors. By combining network psychometrics and psycholinguistic dimensions, this study identifies several similarities and distinctions between human and LLM data. The psychometric networks of simulated male professors do not differ between physical and emotional anxiety subscales, unlike humans. Other LLMs' personification can reconstruct human DASS factors with a purity up to 80%. Furthemore, LLM-generated personifications across different scenarios are found to elicit explanations lower in concreteness and imageability in items coding for anxiety, in agreement with past studies about human psychology. Our findings indicate an advanced yet incomplete ability for LLMs to reproduce the complexity of human psychometric data, unveiling convenient advantages and limitations in using LLMs to replace human participants. PhDGPT also intriguingly capture the ability for LLMs to adapt and change language patterns according to prompted mental distress contextual features, opening new quantitative opportunities for assessing the machine psychology of these artificial intelligences.
Authors: Romy M\"uller, Judith Schmidt
Abstract: When trains collide with obstacles, the consequences are often severe. To assess how artificial intelligence might contribute to avoiding collisions, we need to understand how train drivers do it. What aspects of a situation do they consider when evaluating the risk of collision? In the present study, we assumed that train drivers do not only identify potential obstacles but interpret what they see in order to anticipate how the situation might unfold. However, to date it is unclear how exactly this is accomplished. Therefore, we assessed which cues train drivers use and what inferences they make. To this end, image-based expert interviews were conducted with 33 train drivers. Participants saw images with potential obstacles, rated the risk of collision, and explained their evaluation. Moreover, they were asked how the situation would need to change to decrease or increase collision risk. From their verbal reports, we extracted concepts about the potential obstacles, contexts, or consequences, and assigned these concepts to various categories (e.g., people's identity, location, movement, action, physical features, and mental states). The results revealed that especially for people, train drivers reason about their actions and mental states, and draw relations between concepts to make further inferences. These inferences systematically differ between situations. Our findings emphasise the need to understand train drivers' risk evaluation processes when aiming to enhance the safety of both human and automatic train operation.
Authors: Yang Gu, Hengyu You, Jian Cao, Muran Yu
Abstract: Building effective machine learning (ML) workflows to address complex tasks is a primary focus of the Automatic ML (AutoML) community and a critical step toward achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Recently, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into ML workflows has shown great potential for automating and enhancing various stages of the ML pipeline. This survey provides a comprehensive and up-to-date review of recent advancements in using LLMs to construct and optimize ML workflows, focusing on key components encompassing data and feature engineering, model selection and hyperparameter optimization, and workflow evaluation. We discuss both the advantages and limitations of LLM-driven approaches, emphasizing their capacity to streamline and enhance ML workflow modeling process through language understanding, reasoning, interaction, and generation. Finally, we highlight open challenges and propose future research directions to advance the effective application of LLMs in ML workflows.
Authors: Rongxin Ouyang, Kokil Jaidka, Subhayan Mukerjee, Guangyu Cui
Abstract: The prevalence of multi-modal content on social media complicates automated moderation strategies. This calls for an enhancement in multi-modal classification and a deeper understanding of understated meanings in images and memes. Although previous efforts have aimed at improving model performance through fine-tuning, few have explored an end-to-end optimization pipeline that accounts for modalities, prompting, labeling, and fine-tuning. In this study, we propose an end-to-end conceptual framework for model optimization in complex tasks. Experiments support the efficacy of this traditional yet novel framework, achieving the highest accuracy and AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that isolated optimizations are not ineffective on their own.
Authors: Selestine Melchane, Youssef Elmir, Farid Kacimi, Larbi Boubchir
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and infectious diseases prediction have recently experienced a common development and advancement. Machine learning (ML) apparition, along with deep learning (DL) emergence, extended many approaches against diseases apparition and their spread. And despite their outstanding results in predicting infectious diseases, conflicts appeared regarding the types of data used and how they can be studied, analyzed, and exploited using various emerging methods. This has led to some ongoing discussions in the field. This research aims not only to provide an overview of what has been accomplished, but also to highlight the difficulties related to the types of data used, and the learning methods applied for each research objective. It categorizes these contributions into three areas: predictions using Public Health Data to prevent the spread of a transmissible disease within a region; predictions using Patients' Medical Data to detect whether a person is infected by a transmissible disease; and predictions using both Public and patient medical data to estimate the extent of disease spread in a population. The paper also critically assesses the potential of AI and outlines its limitations in infectious disease management.
Authors: Axel Niklasson, Sean Rintel, Stephann Makri, Alex Taylor
Abstract: In this short paper, we introduce work that is aiming to purposefully venture into this mesh of questions from a different starting point. Interjecting into the conversation, we want to ask: 'What is it to be skilled at work?' Building on work from scholars like Tim Ingold, and strands of longstanding research in workplace studies and CSCW, our interest is in turning the attention to the active work of 'being good', or 'being skilled', at what we as workers do. As we see it, skill provides a counterpoint to the version of intelligence that appears to be easily blackboxed in systems like Slack, and that ultimately reduces much of what people do to work well together. To put it slightly differently, skill - as we will argue below - gives us a way into thinking about work as a much more entangled endeavour, unfolding through multiple and interweaving sets of practices, places, tools and collaborations. In this vein, designing for the future of work seems to be about much more than where work is done or how we might bolt on discrete containers of intelligence. More fruitful would be attending to how we succeed in threading so many entities together to do our jobs well - in 'coming to be skilled'.
Authors: Ayush Agarwal, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Sushma Venkatesh, S. R. Mahadeva Prasanna
Abstract: In the domain of Extended Reality (XR), particularly Virtual Reality (VR), extensive research has been devoted to harnessing this transformative technology in various real-world applications. However, a critical challenge that must be addressed before unleashing the full potential of XR in practical scenarios is to ensure robust security and safeguard user privacy. This paper presents a systematic survey of the utility of biometric characteristics applied in the XR environment. To this end, we present a comprehensive overview of the different types of biometric modalities used for authentication and representation of users in a virtual environment. We discuss different biometric vulnerability gateways in general XR systems for the first time in the literature along with taxonomy. A comprehensive discussion on generating and authenticating biometric-based photorealistic avatars in XR environments is presented with a stringent taxonomy. We also discuss the availability of different datasets that are widely employed in evaluating biometric authentication in XR environments together with performance evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the open challenges and potential future work that need to be addressed in the field of biometrics in XR.
Authors: Gilles Eerlings, Sebe Vanbrabant, Jori Liesenborgs, Gustavo Rovelo Ruiz, Davy Vanacken, Kris Luyten
Abstract: We present an approach, AI-Spectra, to leverage model multiplicity for interactive systems. Model multiplicity means using slightly different AI models yielding equally valid outcomes or predictions for the same task, thus relying on many simultaneous "expert advisors" that can have different opinions. Dealing with multiple AI models that generate potentially divergent results for the same task is challenging for users to deal with. It helps users understand and identify AI models are not always correct and might differ, but it can also result in an information overload when being confronted with multiple results instead of one. AI-Spectra leverages model multiplicity by using a visual dashboard designed for conveying what AI models generate which results while minimizing the cognitive effort to detect consensus among models and what type of models might have different opinions. We use a custom adaptation of Chernoff faces for AI-Spectra; Chernoff Bots. This visualization technique lets users quickly interpret complex, multivariate model configurations and compare predictions across multiple models. Our design is informed by building on established Human-AI Interaction guidelines and well know practices in information visualization. We validated our approach through a series of experiments training a wide variation of models with the MNIST dataset to perform number recognition. Our work contributes to the growing discourse on making AI systems more transparent, trustworthy, and effective through the strategic use of multiple models.
Authors: Jian Guo, Saizhuo Wang, Yiyan Qi
Abstract: Multi-stage decision-making is crucial in various real-world artificial intelligence applications, including recommendation systems, autonomous driving, and quantitative investment systems. In quantitative investment, for example, the process typically involves several sequential stages such as factor mining, alpha prediction, portfolio optimization, and sometimes order execution. While state-of-the-art end-to-end modeling aims to unify these stages into a single global framework, it faces significant challenges: (1) training such a unified neural network consisting of multiple stages between initial inputs and final outputs often leads to suboptimal solutions, or even collapse, and (2) many decision-making scenarios are not easily reducible to standard prediction problems. To overcome these challenges, we propose Guided Learning, a novel methodological framework designed to enhance end-to-end learning in multi-stage decision-making. We introduce the concept of a ``guide'', a function that induces the training of intermediate neural network layers towards some phased goals, directing gradients away from suboptimal collapse. For decision scenarios lacking explicit supervisory labels, we incorporate a utility function that quantifies the ``reward'' of the throughout decision. Additionally, we explore the connections between Guided Learning and classic machine learning paradigms such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, multi-task, and reinforcement learning. Experiments on quantitative investment strategy building demonstrate that guided learning significantly outperforms both traditional stage-wise approaches and existing end-to-end methods.
Authors: Giulio Rossolini, Tommaso Baldi, Alessandro Biondi, Giorgio Buttazzo
Abstract: Distributed learning frameworks, which partition neural network models across multiple computing nodes, enhance efficiency in collaborative edge-cloud systems but may also introduce new vulnerabilities. In this work, we explore the feasibility of generating universal adversarial attacks when an attacker has access to the edge part of the model only, which consists in the first network layers. Unlike traditional universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) that require full model knowledge, our approach shows that adversaries can induce effective mispredictions in the unknown cloud part by leveraging key features on the edge side. Specifically, we train lightweight classifiers from intermediate features available at the edge, i.e., before the split point, and use them in a novel targeted optimization to craft effective UAPs. Our results on ImageNet demonstrate strong attack transferability to the unknown cloud part. Additionally, we analyze the capability of an attacker to achieve targeted adversarial effect with edge-only knowledge, revealing intriguing behaviors. By introducing the first adversarial attacks with edge-only knowledge in split inference, this work underscores the importance of addressing partial model access in adversarial robustness, encouraging further research in this area.
Authors: Kang Chen, Jiyuan Zhang, Zecheng Hao, Yajing Zheng, Tiejun Huang, Zhaofei Yu
Abstract: Spike cameras, as an innovative neuromorphic camera that captures scenes with the 0-1 bit stream at 40 kHz, are increasingly employed for the 3D reconstruction task via Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) or 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Previous spike-based 3D reconstruction approaches often employ a casecased pipeline: starting with high-quality image reconstruction from spike streams based on established spike-to-image reconstruction algorithms, then progressing to camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction. However, this cascaded approach suffers from substantial cumulative errors, where quality limitations of initial image reconstructions negatively impact pose estimation, ultimately degrading the fidelity of the 3D reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose a synergistic optimization framework, \textbf{USP-Gaussian}, that unifies spike-based image reconstruction, pose correction, and Gaussian splatting into an end-to-end framework. Leveraging the multi-view consistency afforded by 3DGS and the motion capture capability of the spike camera, our framework enables a joint iterative optimization that seamlessly integrates information between the spike-to-image network and 3DGS. Experiments on synthetic datasets with accurate poses demonstrate that our method surpasses previous approaches by effectively eliminating cascading errors. Moreover, we integrate pose optimization to achieve robust 3D reconstruction in real-world scenarios with inaccurate initial poses, outperforming alternative methods by effectively reducing noise and preserving fine texture details. Our code, data and trained models will be available at \url{https://github.com/chenkang455/USP-Gaussian}.
Authors: Andrew Konya, Aviv Ovadya, Kevin Feng, Quan Ze Chen, Lisa Schirch, Colin Irwin, Amy X. Zhang
Abstract: We introduce a method to measure the alignment between public will and language model (LM) behavior that can be applied to fine-tuning, online oversight, and pre-release safety checks. Our `chain of alignment' (CoA) approach produces a rule based reward (RBR) by creating model behavior $\textit{rules}$ aligned to normative $\textit{objectives}$ aligned to $\textit{public will}$. This factoring enables a nonexpert public to directly specify their will through the normative objectives, while expert intelligence is used to figure out rules entailing model behavior that best achieves those objectives. We validate our approach by applying it across three different domains of LM prompts related to mental health. We demonstrate a public input process built on collective dialogues and bridging-based ranking that reliably produces normative objectives supported by at least $96\% \pm 2\%$ of the US public. We then show that rules developed by mental health experts to achieve those objectives enable a RBR that evaluates an LM response's alignment with the objectives similarly to human experts (Pearson's $r=0.841$, $AUC=0.964$). By measuring alignment with objectives that have near unanimous public support, these CoA RBRs provide an approximate measure of alignment between LM behavior and public will.
Authors: Peter Halmos, Xinhao Liu, Julian Gold, Benjamin J Raphael
Abstract: Optimal transport (OT) is a general framework for finding a minimum-cost transport plan, or coupling, between probability distributions, and has many applications in machine learning. A key challenge in applying OT to massive datasets is the quadratic scaling of the coupling matrix with the size of the dataset. [Forrow et al. 2019] introduced a factored coupling for the k-Wasserstein barycenter problem, which [Scetbon et al. 2021] adapted to solve the primal low-rank OT problem. We derive an alternative parameterization of the low-rank problem based on the $\textit{latent coupling}$ (LC) factorization previously introduced by [Lin et al. 2021] generalizing [Forrow et al. 2019]. The LC factorization has multiple advantages for low-rank OT including decoupling the problem into three OT problems and greater flexibility and interpretability. We leverage these advantages to derive a new algorithm $\textit{Factor Relaxation with Latent Coupling}$ (FRLC), which uses $\textit{coordinate}$ mirror descent to compute the LC factorization. FRLC handles multiple OT objectives (Wasserstein, Gromov-Wasserstein, Fused Gromov-Wasserstein), and marginal constraints (balanced, unbalanced, and semi-relaxed) with linear space complexity. We provide theoretical results on FRLC, and demonstrate superior performance on diverse applications -- including graph clustering and spatial transcriptomics -- while demonstrating its interpretability.
Authors: Peter beim Graben
Abstract: A phenomenological model for aesthetic appraisal is proposed in terms of pragmatic information for a dynamic update semantics over belief states on an aesthetic appreciator. The model qualitatively correlates with aesthetic pleasure ratings in an experimental study on cadential effects in Western tonal music. Finally, related computational and neurodynamical accounts are discussed.
Authors: Mahmudul Hasan
Abstract: In computer vision tasks, the ability to focus on relevant regions within an image is crucial for improving model performance, particularly when key features are small, subtle, or spatially dispersed. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) typically treat all regions of an image equally, which can lead to inefficient feature extraction. To address this challenge, I have introduced Vision Eagle Attention, a novel attention mechanism that enhances visual feature extraction using convolutional spatial attention. The model applies convolution to capture local spatial features and generates an attention map that selectively emphasizes the most informative regions of the image. This attention mechanism enables the model to focus on discriminative features while suppressing irrelevant background information. I have integrated Vision Eagle Attention into a lightweight ResNet-18 architecture, demonstrating that this combination results in an efficient and powerful model. I have evaluated the performance of the proposed model on three widely used benchmark datasets: FashionMNIST, Intel Image Classification, and OracleMNIST, with a primary focus on image classification. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves classification accuracy. Additionally, this method has the potential to be extended to other vision tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and visual tracking, offering a computationally efficient solution for a wide range of vision-based applications. Code is available at: https://github.com/MahmudulHasan11085/Vision-Eagle-Attention.git
URLs: https://github.com/MahmudulHasan11085/Vision-Eagle-Attention.git
Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Jen-tse Huang, Zhaopeng Tu, Michael R. Lyu
Abstract: In this study, we revisit the commonly-cited off-target issue in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT). By carefully designing experiments on different MNMT scenarios and models, we attribute the off-target issue to the overfitting of the shortcuts of (non-centric, centric) language mappings. Specifically, the learned shortcuts biases MNMT to mistakenly translate non-centric languages into the centric language instead of the expected non-centric language for zero-shot translation. Analyses on learning dynamics show that the shortcut learning generally occurs in the later stage of model training, and multilingual pretraining accelerates and aggravates the shortcut learning. Based on these observations, we propose a simple and effective training strategy to eliminate the shortcuts in MNMT models by leveraging the forgetting nature of model training. The only difference from the standard training is that we remove the training instances that may induce the shortcut learning in the later stage of model training. Without introducing any additional data and computational costs, our approach can consistently and significantly improve the zero-shot translation performance by alleviating the shortcut learning for different MNMT models and benchmarks.
Authors: Caspar Oesterheld, Emery Cooper, Miles Kodama, Linh Chi Nguyen, Ethan Perez
Abstract: We introduce a dataset of natural-language questions in the decision theory of so-called Newcomb-like problems. Newcomb-like problems include, for instance, decision problems in which an agent interacts with a similar other agent, and thus has to reason about the fact that the other agent will likely reason in similar ways. Evaluating LLM reasoning about Newcomb-like problems is important because interactions between foundation-model-based agents will often be Newcomb-like. Some ways of reasoning about Newcomb-like problems may allow for greater cooperation between models. Our dataset contains both capabilities questions (i.e., questions with a unique, uncontroversially correct answer) and attitude questions (i.e., questions about which decision theorists would disagree). We use our dataset for an investigation of decision-theoretical capabilities and expressed attitudes and their interplay in existing models (different models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, GDM, Reka, etc.), as well as models under simple prompt-based interventions. We find, among other things, that attitudes vary significantly between existing models; that high capabilities are associated with attitudes more favorable toward so-called evidential decision theory; and that attitudes are consistent across different types of questions.
Authors: Minglu Zhao, Dehong Xu, Deqian Kong, Wen-Hao Zhang, Ying Nian Wu
Abstract: We present a minimalistic representation model for the head direction (HD) system, aiming to learn a high-dimensional representation of head direction that captures essential properties of HD cells. Our model is a representation of rotation group $U(1)$, and we study both the fully connected version and convolutional version. We demonstrate the emergence of Gaussian-like tuning profiles and a 2D circle geometry in both versions of the model. We also demonstrate that the learned model is capable of accurate path integration.
Authors: Tom Cappendijk, Pepijn de Reus, Ana Oprescu
Abstract: The increasing electricity demands of personal computers, communication networks, and data centers contribute to higher atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn lead to global warming and climate change. Therefore the energy consumption of code must be minimized. Code can be generated by large language models. We look at the influence of prompt modification on the energy consumption of the code generated. We use three different Python code problems of varying difficulty levels. Prompt modification is done by adding the sentence ``Give me an energy-optimized solution for this problem'' or by using two Python coding best practices. The large language models used are CodeLlama-70b, CodeLlama-70b-Instruct, CodeLlama-70b-Python, DeepSeek-Coder-33b-base, and DeepSeek-Coder-33b-instruct. We find a decrease in energy consumption for a specific combination of prompt optimization, LLM, and Python code problem. However, no single optimization prompt consistently decreases energy consumption for the same LLM across the different Python code problems.
Authors: Yonggan Fu, Zhongzhi Yu, Junwei Li, Jiayi Qian, Yongan Zhang, Xiangchi Yuan, Dachuan Shi, Roman Yakunin, Yingyan Celine Lin
Abstract: Motivated by the transformative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across various natural language tasks, there has been a growing demand to deploy these models effectively across diverse real-world applications and platforms. However, the challenge of efficiently deploying LLMs has become increasingly pronounced due to the varying application-specific performance requirements and the rapid evolution of computational platforms, which feature diverse resource constraints and deployment flows. These varying requirements necessitate LLMs that can adapt their structures (depth and width) for optimal efficiency across different platforms and application specifications. To address this critical gap, we propose AmoebaLLM, a novel framework designed to enable the instant derivation of LLM subnets of arbitrary shapes, which achieve the accuracy-efficiency frontier and can be extracted immediately after a one-time fine-tuning. In this way, AmoebaLLM significantly facilitates rapid deployment tailored to various platforms and applications. Specifically, AmoebaLLM integrates three innovative components: (1) a knowledge-preserving subnet selection strategy that features a dynamic-programming approach for depth shrinking and an importance-driven method for width shrinking; (2) a shape-aware mixture of LoRAs to mitigate gradient conflicts among subnets during fine-tuning; and (3) an in-place distillation scheme with loss-magnitude balancing as the fine-tuning objective. Extensive experiments validate that AmoebaLLM not only sets new standards in LLM adaptability but also successfully delivers subnets that achieve state-of-the-art trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency.
Authors: Jingcheng Lu, Jeff Calder
Abstract: We propose a new method for data visualization based on attraction-repulsion swarming (ARS) dynamics, which we call ARS visualization. ARS is a generalized framework that is based on viewing the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) visualization technique as a swarm of interacting agents driven by attraction and repulsion. Motivated by recent developments in swarming, we modify the t-SNE dynamics to include a normalization by the \emph{total influence}, which results in better posed dynamics in which we can use a data size independent time step (of $h=1$) and a simple iteration, without the need for the array of optimization tricks employed in t-SNE. ARS also includes the ability to separately tune the attraction and repulsion kernels, which gives the user control over the tightness within clusters and the spacing between them in the visualization. In contrast with t-SNE, our proposed ARS data visualization method is not gradient descent on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be viewed solely as an interacting particle system driven by attraction and repulsion forces. We provide theoretical results illustrating how the choice of interaction kernel affects the dynamics, and experimental results to validate our method and compare to t-SNE on the MNIST and Cifar-10 data sets.
Authors: Guido Governatori
Abstract: We consider the notion of weak permission as the failure to conclude that the opposite obligation. We investigate the issue from the point of non-monotonic reasoning, specifically logic programming and structured argumentation, and we show that it is not possible to capture weak permission in the presence of deontic conflicts under the well-founded, grounded and (sceptical) stable semantics.
Authors: Miriam Asare-Baiden, Kathleen Jordan, Andrew Chung, Sharon Eve Sonenblum, Joyce C. Ho
Abstract: Pressure injury (PI) detection is challenging, especially in dark skin tones, due to the unreliability of visual inspection. Thermography has been suggested as a viable alternative as temperature differences in the skin can indicate impending tissue damage. Although deep learning models have demonstrated considerable promise toward reliably detecting PI, the existing work fails to evaluate the performance on darker skin tones and varying data collection protocols. In this paper, we introduce a new thermal and optical imaging dataset of 35 participants focused on darker skin tones where temperature differences are induced through cooling and cupping protocols. We vary the image collection process to include different cameras, lighting, patient pose, and camera distance. We compare the performance of a small convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on either the thermal or the optical images on all skin tones. Our preliminary results suggest that thermography-based CNN is robust to data collection protocols for all skin tones.
Authors: Xiaowei Xu, Bi T. Foua, Xingqiao Wang, Vivek Gunasekaran, John R. Talburt
Abstract: In this paper, the authors propose TriBERTa, a supervised entity resolution system that utilizes a pre-trained large language model and a triplet loss function to learn representations for entity matching. The system consists of two steps: first, name entity records are fed into a Sentence Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (SBERT) model to generate vector representations, which are then fine-tuned using contrastive learning based on a triplet loss function. Fine-tuned representations are used as input for entity matching tasks, and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art representations, including SBERT without fine-tuning and conventional Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), by a margin of 3 - 19%. Additionally, the representations generated by TriBERTa demonstrated increased robustness, maintaining consistently higher performance across a range of datasets. The authors also discussed the importance of entity resolution in today's data-driven landscape and the challenges that arise when identifying and reconciling duplicate data across different sources. They also described the ER process, which involves several crucial steps, including blocking, entity matching, and clustering.
Authors: Sajib Kumar Saha Joy, Arman Hassan Mahy, Meherin Sultana, Azizah Mamun Abha, MD Piyal Ahmmed, Yue Dong, G M Shahariar
Abstract: In this study, we investigate gender bias in Bangla pretrained language models, a largely under explored area in low-resource languages. To assess this bias, we applied gender-name swapping techniques to existing datasets, creating four manually annotated, task-specific datasets for sentiment analysis, toxicity detection, hate speech detection, and sarcasm detection. By altering names and gender-specific terms, we ensured these datasets were suitable for detecting and mitigating gender bias. We then proposed a joint loss optimization technique to mitigate gender bias across task-specific pretrained models. Our approach was evaluated against existing bias mitigation methods, with results showing that our technique not only effectively reduces bias but also maintains competitive accuracy compared to other baseline approaches. To promote further research, we have made both our implementation and datasets publicly available https://github.com/sajib-kumar/Gender-Bias-Mitigation-From-Bangla-PLM
URLs: https://github.com/sajib-kumar/Gender-Bias-Mitigation-From-Bangla-PLM
Authors: Yunsheng Ma, Burhaneddin Yaman, Xin Ye, Feng Tao, Abhirup Mallik, Ziran Wang, Liu Ren
Abstract: Bird's eye view (BEV)-based 3D perception plays a crucial role in autonomous driving applications. The rise of large language models has spurred interest in BEV-based captioning to understand object behavior in the surrounding environment. However, existing approaches treat perception and captioning as separate tasks, focusing on the performance of only one of the tasks and overlooking the potential benefits of multimodal alignment. To bridge this gap between modalities, we introduce MTA, a novel multimodal task alignment framework that boosts both BEV perception and captioning. MTA consists of two key components: (1) BEV-Language Alignment (BLA), a contextual learning mechanism that aligns the BEV scene representations with ground-truth language representations, and (2) Detection-Captioning Alignment (DCA), a cross-modal prompting mechanism that aligns detection and captioning outputs. MTA integrates into state-of-the-art baselines during training, adding no extra computational complexity at runtime. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and TOD3Cap datasets show that MTA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 4.9% improvement in perception and a 9.2% improvement in captioning. These results underscore the effectiveness of unified alignment in reconciling BEV-based perception and captioning.
Authors: Huy Tran, Yikun Bai, Ashkan Shahbazi, John R. Hershey, Soheil Kolouri
Abstract: The practical applications of Wasserstein distances (WDs) are constrained by their sample and computational complexities. Sliced-Wasserstein distances (SWDs) provide a workaround by projecting distributions onto one-dimensional subspaces, leveraging the more efficient, closed-form WDs for one-dimensional distributions. However, in high dimensions, most random projections become uninformative due to the concentration of measure phenomenon. Although several SWD variants have been proposed to focus on \textit{informative} slices, they often introduce additional complexity, numerical instability, and compromise desirable theoretical (metric) properties of SWD. Amidst the growing literature that focuses on directly modifying the slicing distribution, which often face challenges, we revisit the classical Sliced-Wasserstein and propose instead to rescale the 1D Wasserstein to make all slices equally informative. Importantly, we show that with an appropriate data assumption and notion of \textit{slice informativeness}, rescaling for all individual slices simplifies to \textbf{a single global scaling factor} on the SWD. This, in turn, translates to the standard learning rate search for gradient-based learning in common machine learning workflows. We perform extensive experiments across various machine learning tasks showing that the classical SWD, when properly configured, can often match or surpass the performance of more complex variants. We then answer the following question: "Is Sliced-Wasserstein all you need for common learning tasks?"
Authors: Yuxuan Hu, Ke Wang, Jing Zhang, Cuiping Li, Hong Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by unifying tasks into text generation, yet their large parameter sizes and autoregressive nature limit inference speed. SAM-Decoding addresses this by introducing a novel retrieval-based speculative decoding method that uses a suffix automaton for efficient and accurate draft generation. Unlike n-gram matching used by the existing method, SAM-Decoding finds the longest suffix match in generating text and text corpuss, achieving an average time complexity of $O(1)$ per generation step. SAM-Decoding constructs static and dynamic suffix automatons for the text corpus and input prompts, respectively, enabling fast and precise draft generation. Meanwhile, it is designed as an approach that can be combined with existing methods, allowing SAM-Decoding to adaptively select a draft generation strategy based on the matching length, thus increasing the inference speed of the LLM. When combined with Token Recycling, evaluations show SAM-Decoding outperforms existing model-free methods, achieving a speedup of $2.27\times$ over autoregressive decoding on Spec-Bench. When combined with EAGLE2, it reaches a speedup of $2.49\times$, surpassing all current approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyx1999/SAM-Decoding.
Authors: Zhangchi Zhu, Wei Zhang
Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the feature-based knowledge distillation for recommendation from the frequency perspective. By defining knowledge as different frequency components of the features, we theoretically demonstrate that regular feature-based knowledge distillation is equivalent to equally minimizing losses on all knowledge and further analyze how this equal loss weight allocation method leads to important knowledge being overlooked. In light of this, we propose to emphasize important knowledge by redistributing knowledge weights. Furthermore, we propose FreqD, a lightweight knowledge reweighting method, to avoid the computational cost of calculating losses on each knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreqD consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge distillation methods for recommender systems. Our code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FreqKD/}
Authors: Nikhil P Ghanathe, Steven J E Wilton
Abstract: TinyML models often operate in remote, dynamic environments without cloud connectivity, making them prone to failures. Ensuring reliability in such scenarios requires not only detecting model failures but also identifying their root causes. However, transient failures, privacy concerns, and the safety-critical nature of many applications-where systems cannot be interrupted for debugging-complicate the use of raw sensor data for offline analysis. We propose DEBUG-HD, a novel, resource-efficient on-device debugging approach optimized for KB-sized tinyML devices that utilizes hyper-dimensional computing (HDC). Our method introduces a new HDC encoding technique that leverages conventional neural networks, allowing DEBUG-HD to outperform prior binary HDC methods by 27% on average in detecting input corruptions across various image and audio datasets.
Authors: Huaqin Zhao, Jiaxi Li, Yi Pan, Shizhe Liang, Xiaofeng Yang, Wei Liu, Xiang Li, Fei Dou, Tianming Liu, Jin Lu
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) poses significant memory challenges, as the back-propagation process demands extensive resources, especially with growing model sizes. Recent work, MeZO, addresses this issue using a zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method, which reduces memory consumption by matching the usage to the inference phase. However, MeZO experiences slow convergence due to varying curvatures across model parameters. To overcome this limitation, we introduce HELENE, a novel scalable and memory-efficient optimizer that integrates annealed A-GNB gradients with a diagonal Hessian estimation and layer-wise clipping, serving as a second-order pre-conditioner. This combination allows for faster and more stable convergence. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that HELENE improves convergence rates, particularly for models with heterogeneous layer dimensions, by reducing the dependency on the total parameter space dimension. Instead, the method scales with the largest layer dimension, making it highly suitable for modern LLM architectures. Experimental results on RoBERTa-large and OPT-1.3B across multiple tasks show that HELENE achieves up to a 20x speedup compared to MeZO, with average accuracy improvements of 1.5%. Furthermore, HELENE remains compatible with both full parameter tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), outperforming several state-of-the-art optimizers. The codes will be released after reviewing.
Authors: Yuhong Chou, Man Yao, Kexin Wang, Yuqi Pan, Ruijie Zhu, Yiran Zhong, Yu Qiao, Jibin Wu, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
Abstract: Various linear complexity models, such as Linear Transformer (LinFormer), State Space Model (SSM), and Linear RNN (LinRNN), have been proposed to replace the conventional softmax attention in Transformer structures. However, the optimal design of these linear models is still an open question. In this work, we attempt to answer this question by finding the best linear approximation to softmax attention from a theoretical perspective. We start by unifying existing linear complexity models as the linear attention form and then identify three conditions for the optimal linear attention design: 1) Dynamic memory ability; 2) Static approximation ability; 3) Least parameter approximation. We find that none of the current linear models meet all three conditions, resulting in suboptimal performance. Instead, we propose Meta Linear Attention (MetaLA) as a solution that satisfies these conditions. Our experiments on Multi-Query Associative Recall (MQAR) task, language modeling, image classification, and Long-Range Arena (LRA) benchmark demonstrate that MetaLA is more effective than the existing linear models.
Authors: Lucas Lamata
Abstract: Machine Learning algorithms are extensively used in an increasing number of systems, applications, technologies, and products, both in industry and in society as a whole. They enable computing devices to learn from previous experience and therefore improve their performance in a certain context or environment. In this way, many useful possibilities have been made accessible. However, dealing with an increasing amount of data poses difficulties for classical devices. Quantum systems may offer a way forward, possibly enabling to scale up machine learning calculations in certain contexts. On the other hand, quantum systems themselves are also hard to scale up, due to decoherence and the fragility of quantum superpositions. In the short and mid term, it has been evidenced that a quantum paradigm that combines evolution under large analog blocks with discrete quantum gates, may be fruitful to achieve new knowledge of classical and quantum systems with no need of having a fault-tolerant quantum computer. In this Perspective, we review some recent works that employ this digital-analog quantum paradigm to carry out efficient machine learning calculations with current quantum devices.
Authors: Chin-Wei Huang, Mu-Yi Shen, Kuan-Chang Shih, Shih-Chih Lin, Chi-Yu Chen, Po-Chih Kuo
Abstract: Chest X-rays (CXRs) often display various diseases with disparate class frequencies, leading to a long-tailed, multi-label data distribution. In response to this challenge, we explore the Pruned MIMIC-CXR-LT dataset, a curated collection derived from the MIMIC-CXR dataset, specifically designed to represent a long-tailed and multi-label data scenario. We introduce LTCXNet, a novel framework that integrates the ConvNeXt model, ML-Decoder, and strategic data augmentation, further enhanced by an ensemble approach. We demonstrate that LTCXNet improves the performance of CXR interpretation across all classes, especially enhancing detection in rarer classes like `Pneumoperitoneum' and `Pneumomediastinum' by 79\% and 48\%, respectively. Beyond performance metrics, our research extends into evaluating fairness, highlighting that some methods, while improving model accuracy, could inadvertently affect fairness across different demographic groups negatively. This work contributes to advancing the understanding and management of long-tailed, multi-label data distributions in medical imaging, paving the way for more equitable and effective diagnostic tools.
Authors: Shuyang Hou, Haoyue Jiao, Zhangxiao Shen, Jianyuan Liang, Anqi Zhao, Xiaopu Zhang, Jianxun Wang, Huayi Wu
Abstract: With the rapid growth of interdisciplinary demands for geospatial modeling and the rise of large language models (LLMs), geospatial code generation technology has seen significant advancements. However, existing LLMs often face challenges in the geospatial code generation process due to incomplete or unclear user requirements and insufficient knowledge of specific platform syntax rules, leading to the generation of non-executable code, a phenomenon known as "code hallucination." To address this issue, this paper proposes a Chain of Programming (CoP) framework, which decomposes the code generation process into five steps: requirement analysis, algorithm design, code implementation, code debugging, and code annotation. The framework incorporates a shared information pool, knowledge base retrieval, and user feedback mechanisms, forming an end-to-end code generation flow from requirements to code without the need for model fine-tuning. Based on a geospatial problem classification framework and evaluation benchmarks, the CoP strategy significantly improves the logical clarity, syntactical correctness, and executability of the generated code, with improvements ranging from 3.0% to 48.8%. Comparative and ablation experiments further validate the superiority of the CoP strategy over other optimization approaches and confirm the rationality and necessity of its key components. Through case studies on building data visualization and fire data analysis, this paper demonstrates the application and effectiveness of CoP in various geospatial scenarios. The CoP framework offers a systematic, step-by-step approach to LLM-based geospatial code generation tasks, significantly enhancing code generation performance in geospatial tasks and providing valuable insights for code generation in other vertical domains.
Authors: Zachary Dana, Ahmed Ammar Naseer, Botros Toro, Sumanth Swaminathan
Abstract: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a significant public health challenge, often progressing to end-stage renal disease (ESRD) if not detected and managed early. Early intervention, warranted by silent disease progression, can significantly reduce associated morbidity, mortality, and financial burden. In this study, we propose a novel approach to modeling CKD progression using a combination of machine learning techniques and classical statistical models. Building on the work of Liu et al. (2023), we evaluate linear models, tree-based methods, and deep learning models to extract novel predictors for CKD progression, with feature importance assessed using Shapley values. These newly identified predictors, integrated with established clinical features from the Kidney Failure Risk Equation, are then applied within the framework of Cox proportional hazards models to predict CKD progression.
Authors: Moucheng Xu, Yukun Zhou, Tobias Goodwin-Allcock, Kimia Firoozabadi, Joseph Jacob, Daniel C. Alexander, Paddy J. Slator
Abstract: We introduce and demonstrate a new paradigm for quantitative parameter mapping in MRI. Parameter mapping techniques, such as diffusion MRI and quantitative MRI, have the potential to robustly and repeatably measure biologically-relevant tissue maps that strongly relate to underlying microstructure. Quantitative maps are calculated by fitting a model to multiple images, e.g. with least-squares or machine learning. However, the overwhelming majority of model fitting techniques assume that each voxel is independent, ignoring any co-dependencies in the data. This makes model fitting sensitive to voxelwise measurement noise, hampering reliability and repeatability. We propose a self-supervised deep variational approach that breaks the assumption of independent pixels, leveraging redundancies in the data to effectively perform data-driven regularisation of quantitative maps. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms current model fitting techniques in dMRI simulations and real data. Especially with a Gaussian mixture prior, our model enables sharper quantitative maps, revealing finer anatomical details that are not presented in the baselines. Our approach can hence support the clinical adoption of parameter mapping methods such as dMRI and qMRI.
Authors: Zihao Li, Yuan Cao, Cheng Gao, Yihan He, Han Liu, Jason M. Klusowski, Jianqing Fan, Mengdi Wang
Abstract: Transformers have achieved great success in recent years. Interestingly, transformers have shown particularly strong in-context learning capability -- even without fine-tuning, they are still able to solve unseen tasks well purely based on task-specific prompts. In this paper, we study the capability of one-layer transformers in learning one of the most classical nonparametric estimators, the one-nearest neighbor prediction rule. Under a theoretical framework where the prompt contains a sequence of labeled training data and unlabeled test data, we show that, although the loss function is nonconvex when trained with gradient descent, a single softmax attention layer can successfully learn to behave like a one-nearest neighbor classifier. Our result gives a concrete example of how transformers can be trained to implement nonparametric machine learning algorithms, and sheds light on the role of softmax attention in transformer models.
Authors: Akash Agrawal (Carnegie Mellon University), Christopher McComb (Carnegie Mellon University)
Abstract: Multi-fidelity Reinforcement Learning (RL) frameworks significantly enhance the efficiency of engineering design by leveraging analysis models with varying levels of accuracy and computational costs. The prevailing methodologies, characterized by transfer learning, human-inspired strategies, control variate techniques, and adaptive sampling, predominantly depend on a structured hierarchy of models. However, this reliance on a model hierarchy overlooks the heterogeneous error distributions of models across the design space, extending beyond mere fidelity levels. This work proposes ALPHA (Adaptively Learned Policy with Heterogeneous Analyses), a novel multi-fidelity RL framework to efficiently learn a high-fidelity policy by adaptively leveraging an arbitrary set of non-hierarchical, heterogeneous, low-fidelity models alongside a high-fidelity model. Specifically, low-fidelity policies and their experience data are dynamically used for efficient targeted learning, guided by their alignment with the high-fidelity policy. The effectiveness of ALPHA is demonstrated in analytical test optimization and octocopter design problems, utilizing two low-fidelity models alongside a high-fidelity one. The results highlight ALPHA's adaptive capability to dynamically utilize models across time and design space, eliminating the need for scheduling models as required in a hierarchical framework. Furthermore, the adaptive agents find more direct paths to high-performance solutions, showing superior convergence behavior compared to hierarchical agents.
Authors: Jialun Cao, Songqiang Chen, Wuqi Zhang, Hau Ching Lo, Shing-Chi Cheung
Abstract: Data contamination presents a critical barrier preventing widespread industrial adoption of advanced software engineering techniques that leverage code language models (CLMs). This phenomenon occurs when evaluation data inadvertently overlaps with the public code repositories used to train CLMs, severely undermining the credibility of performance evaluations. For software companies considering the integration of CLM-based techniques into their development pipeline, this uncertainty about true performance metrics poses an unacceptable business risk. Code refactoring, which comprises code restructuring and variable renaming, has emerged as a promising measure to mitigate data contamination. It provides a practical alternative to the resource-intensive process of building contamination-free evaluation datasets, which would require companies to collect, clean, and label code created after the CLMs' training cutoff dates. However, the lack of automated code refactoring tools and scientifically validated refactoring techniques has hampered widespread industrial implementation. To bridge the gap, this paper presents the first systematic study to examine the efficacy of code refactoring operators at multiple scales (method-level, class-level, and cross-class level) and in different programming languages. In particular, we develop an open-sourced toolkit, CODECLEANER, which includes 11 operators for Python, with nine method-level, one class-level, and one cross-class-level operator. A drop of 65% overlap ratio is found when applying all operators in CODECLEANER, demonstrating their effectiveness in addressing data contamination. Additionally, we migrate four operators to Java, showing their generalizability to another language. We make CODECLEANER online available to facilitate further studies on mitigating CLM data contamination.
Authors: Pandiyaraju V, Santhosh Malarvannan, Shravan Venkatraman, Abeshek A, Priyadarshini B, Kannan A
Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness around the world and demands precise AI-based diagnostic tools. Traditional loss functions in multi-class classification, such as Categorical Cross-Entropy (CCE), are very common but break down with class imbalance, especially in cases with inherently challenging or overlapping classes, which leads to biased and less sensitive models. Since a heavy imbalance exists in the number of examples for higher severity stage 4 diabetic retinopathy, etc., classes compared to those very early stages like class 0, achieving class balance is key. For this purpose, we propose the Adaptive Hybrid Focal-Entropy Loss which combines the ideas of focal loss and entropy loss with adaptive weighting in order to focus on minority classes and highlight the challenging samples. The state-of-the art models applied for diabetic retinopathy detection with AHFE revealed good performance improvements, indicating the top performances of ResNet50 at 99.79%, DenseNet121 at 98.86%, Xception at 98.92%, MobileNetV2 at 97.84%, and InceptionV3 at 93.62% accuracy. This sheds light into how AHFE promotes enhancement in AI-driven diagnostics for complex and imbalanced medical datasets.
Authors: Ruslan Idelfonso Maga\~na Vsevolodovna
Abstract: The generation of complex, large-scale code projects using generative AI models presents challenges due to token limitations, dependency management, and iterative refinement requirements. This paper introduces the See-Saw generative mechanism, a novel methodology for dynamic and recursive code generation. The proposed approach alternates between main code updates and dependency generation to ensure alignment and functionality. By dynamically optimizing token usage and incorporating key elements of the main code into the generation of dependencies, the method enables efficient and scalable code generation for projects requiring hundreds of interdependent files. The mechanism ensures that all code components are synchronized and functional, enabling scalable and efficient project generation. Experimental validation demonstrates the method's capability to manage dependencies effectively while maintaining coherence and minimizing computational overhead.
Authors: Vipula Rawte, Sarthak Jain, Aarush Sinha, Garv Kaushik, Aman Bansal, Prathiksha Rumale Vishwanath, Samyak Rajesh Jain, Aishwarya Naresh Reganti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Amit P. Sheth, Amitava Das
Abstract: Latest developments in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have broadened their capabilities to include video understanding. Specifically, Text-to-video (T2V) models have made significant progress in quality, comprehension, and duration, excelling at creating videos from simple textual prompts. Yet, they still frequently produce hallucinated content that clearly signals the video is AI-generated. We introduce ViBe: a large-scale Text-to-Video Benchmark of hallucinated videos from T2V models. We identify five major types of hallucination: Vanishing Subject, Numeric Variability, Temporal Dysmorphia, Omission Error, and Physical Incongruity. Using 10 open-source T2V models, we developed the first large-scale dataset of hallucinated videos, comprising 3,782 videos annotated by humans into these five categories. ViBe offers a unique resource for evaluating the reliability of T2V models and provides a foundation for improving hallucination detection and mitigation in video generation. We establish classification as a baseline and present various ensemble classifier configurations, with the TimeSFormer + CNN combination yielding the best performance, achieving 0.345 accuracy and 0.342 F1 score. This benchmark aims to drive the development of robust T2V models that produce videos more accurately aligned with input prompts.
Authors: Trevor Stalnaker, Nathan Wintersgill, Oscar Chaparro, Laura A. Heymann, Massimiliano Di Penta, Daniel M German, Denys Poshyvanyk
Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) tools have already started to transform software development practices. Despite their utility in tasks such as writing code, the use of these tools raises important legal questions and potential risks, particularly those associated with copyright law. In the midst of this uncertainty, this paper presents a study jointly conducted by software engineering and legal researchers that surveyed 574 GitHub developers who use GenAI tools for development activities. The survey and follow-up interviews probed the developers' opinions on emerging legal issues as well as their perception of copyrightability, ownership of generated code, and related considerations. We also investigate potential developer misconceptions, the impact of GenAI on developers' work, and developers' awareness of licensing/copyright risks. Qualitative and quantitative analysis showed that developers' opinions on copyright issues vary broadly and that many developers are aware of the nuances these legal questions involve. We provide: (1) a survey of 574 developers on the licensing and copyright aspects of GenAI for coding, (2) a snapshot of practitioners' views at a time when GenAI and perceptions of it are rapidly evolving, and (3) an analysis of developers' views, yielding insights and recommendations that can inform future regulatory decisions in this evolving field.
Authors: Jawad Ibn Ahad, Rafeed Mohammad Sultan, Abraham Kaikobad, Fuad Rahman, Mohammad Ruhul Amin, Nabeel Mohammed, Shafin Rahman
Abstract: This study investigates the automation of meta-analysis in scientific documents using large language models (LLMs). Meta-analysis is a robust statistical method that synthesizes the findings of multiple studies support articles to provide a comprehensive understanding. We know that a meta-article provides a structured analysis of several articles. However, conducting meta-analysis by hand is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and susceptible to human error, highlighting the need for automated pipelines to streamline the process. Our research introduces a novel approach that fine-tunes the LLM on extensive scientific datasets to address challenges in big data handling and structured data extraction. We automate and optimize the meta-analysis process by integrating Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Tailored through prompt engineering and a new loss metric, Inverse Cosine Distance (ICD), designed for fine-tuning on large contextual datasets, LLMs efficiently generate structured meta-analysis content. Human evaluation then assesses relevance and provides information on model performance in key metrics. This research demonstrates that fine-tuned models outperform non-fine-tuned models, with fine-tuned LLMs generating 87.6% relevant meta-analysis abstracts. The relevance of the context, based on human evaluation, shows a reduction in irrelevancy from 4.56% to 1.9%. These experiments were conducted in a low-resource environment, highlighting the study's contribution to enhancing the efficiency and reliability of meta-analysis automation.
Authors: Md. Nazmus Sadat Samin, Jawad Ibn Ahad, Tanjila Ahmed Medha, Fuad Rahman, Mohammad Ruhul Amin, Nabeel Mohammed, Shafin Rahman
Abstract: This study focuses on recognizing Bangladeshi dialects and converting diverse Bengali accents into standardized formal Bengali speech. Dialects, often referred to as regional languages, are distinctive variations of a language spoken in a particular location and are identified by their phonetics, pronunciations, and lexicon. Subtle changes in pronunciation and intonation are also influenced by geographic location, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status. Dialect standardization is needed to ensure effective communication, educational consistency, access to technology, economic opportunities, and the preservation of linguistic resources while respecting cultural diversity. Being the fifth most spoken language with around 55 distinct dialects spoken by 160 million people, addressing Bangla dialects is crucial for developing inclusive communication tools. However, limited research exists due to a lack of comprehensive datasets and the challenges of handling diverse dialects. With the advancement in multilingual Large Language Models (mLLMs), emerging possibilities have been created to address the challenges of dialectal Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Translation (MT). This study presents an end-to-end pipeline for converting dialectal Noakhali speech to standard Bangla speech. This investigation includes constructing a large-scale diverse dataset with dialectal speech signals that tailored the fine-tuning process in ASR and LLM for transcribing the dialect speech to dialect text and translating the dialect text to standard Bangla text. Our experiments demonstrated that fine-tuning the Whisper ASR model achieved a CER of 0.8% and WER of 1.5%, while the BanglaT5 model attained a BLEU score of 41.6% for dialect-to-standard text translation.
Authors: Ansh Shah, K Madhava Krishna
Abstract: Recovering metric depth from a single image remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision, requiring both scene understanding and accurate scaling. While deep learning has advanced monocular depth estimation, current models often struggle with unfamiliar scenes and layouts, particularly in zero-shot scenarios and when predicting scale-ergodic metric depth. We present MetricGold, a novel approach that harnesses generative diffusion model's rich priors to improve metric depth estimation. Building upon recent advances in MariGold, DDVM and Depth Anything V2 respectively, our method combines latent diffusion, log-scaled metric depth representation, and synthetic data training. MetricGold achieves efficient training on a single RTX 3090 within two days using photo-realistic synthetic data from HyperSIM, VirtualKitti, and TartanAir. Our experiments demonstrate robust generalization across diverse datasets, producing sharper and higher quality metric depth estimates compared to existing approaches.
Authors: Xu Cao, Wenqian Ye, Kenny Moise, Megan Coffee
Abstract: In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid accelerating climate change, emerging infectious diseases, particularly those arising from zoonotic spillover, remain a global threat. Mpox (caused by the monkeypox virus) is a notable example of a zoonotic infection that often goes undiagnosed, especially as its rash progresses through stages, complicating detection across diverse populations with different presentations. In August 2024, the WHO Director-General declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern for a second time. Despite the deployment of deep learning techniques for detecting diseases from skin lesion images, a robust and publicly accessible foundation model for mpox diagnosis is still lacking due to the unavailability of open-source mpox skin lesion images, multimodal clinical data, and specialized training pipelines. To address this gap, we propose MpoxVLM, a vision-language model (VLM) designed to detect mpox by analyzing both skin lesion images and patient clinical information. MpoxVLM integrates the CLIP visual encoder, an enhanced Vision Transformer (ViT) classifier for skin lesions, and LLaMA-2-7B models, pre-trained and fine-tuned on visual instruction-following question-answer pairs from our newly released mpox skin lesion dataset. Our work achieves 90.38% accuracy for mpox detection, offering a promising pathway to improve early diagnostic accuracy in combating mpox.
Authors: Khushbu Mehboob Shaikh, Georgios Giannakopoulos
Abstract: Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have undergone significant transformation in recent years, moving from traditional code-based development to more user-friendly approaches leveraging widgets and, most recently, harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for automated IVR flow creation. This paper explores the evolution of IVR building techniques, highlighting the industry's revolution and shaping the future of IVR systems. The authors delve into the historical context, current trends, and future prospects of IVR development, elucidating the impact of AI on simplifying IVR creation processes and enhancing customer experiences.
Authors: Danial Abshari, Chenglong Fu, Meera Sridhar
Abstract: Modern industrial infrastructures rely heavily on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), but these are vulnerable to cyber-attacks with potentially catastrophic effects. To reduce these risks, anomaly detection methods based on physical invariants have been developed. However, these methods often require domain-specific expertise to manually define invariants, making them costly and difficult to scale. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach to extract physical invariants from CPS testbeds for anomaly detection. Our insight is that CPS design documentation often contains semantically rich descriptions of physical procedures, which can profile inter-correlated dynamics among system components. Leveraging the built-in physics and engineering knowledge of recent generative AI models, we aim to automate this traditionally manual process, improving scalability and reducing costs. This work focuses on designing and optimizing a Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (RAG) workflow with a customized prompting system tailored for CPS documentation, enabling accurate extraction of semantic information and inference of physical invariants from complex, multimodal content. Then, rather than directly applying the inferred invariants for anomaly detection, we introduce an innovative statistics-based learning approach that integrates these invariants into the training dataset. This method addresses limitations such as hallucination and concept drift, enhancing the reliability of the model. We evaluate our approach on real-world public CPS security dataset which contains 86 data points and 58 attacking cases. The results show that our approach achieves a high precision of 0.923, accurately detecting anomalies while minimizing false alarms.
Authors: Arushi Gupta, Rafal Kocielnik, Jiayun Wang, Firdavs Nasriddinov, Cherine Yang, Elyssa Wong, Anima Anandkumar, Andrew Hung
Abstract: During surgical training, real-time feedback from trainers to trainees is important for preventing errors and enhancing long-term skill acquisition. Accurately predicting the effectiveness of this feedback, specifically whether it leads to a change in trainee behavior, is crucial for developing methods for improving surgical training and education. However, relying on human annotations to assess feedback effectiveness is laborious and prone to biases, underscoring the need for an automated, scalable, and objective method. Creating such an automated system poses challenges, as it requires an understanding of both the verbal feedback delivered by the trainer and the visual context of the real-time surgical scene. To address this, we propose a method that integrates information from transcribed verbal feedback and corresponding surgical video to predict feedback effectiveness. Our findings show that both transcribed feedback and surgical video are individually predictive of trainee behavior changes, and their combination achieves an AUROC of 0.70+/-0.02, improving prediction accuracy by up to 6.6%. Additionally, we introduce self-supervised fine-tuning as a strategy for enhancing surgical video representation learning, which is scalable and further enhances prediction performance. Our results demonstrate the potential of multi-modal learning to advance the automated assessment of surgical feedback.
Authors: Priyabrata Karmakar, Manzur Murshed, Shyh Wei Teng
Abstract: Recently hyperspectral imaging (HSI)-based grain quality assessment has gained research attention. However, unlike other imaging modalities, HSI data lacks sufficient labelled samples required to effectively train deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based classifiers. In this paper, we present a novel approach to grain quality assessment using HSI combined with few-shot learning (FSL) techniques. Traditional methods for grain quality evaluation, while reliable, are invasive, time-consuming, and costly. HSI offers a non-invasive, real-time alternative by capturing both spatial and spectral information. However, a significant challenge in applying DCNNs for HSI-based grain classification is the need for large labelled databases, which are often difficult to obtain. To address this, we explore the use of FSL, which enables models to perform well with limited labelled data, making it a practical solution for real-world applications where rapid deployment is required. We also explored the application of FSL for the classification of hyperspectral images of bulk grains to enable rapid quality assessment at various receival points in the grain supply chain. We evaluated the performance of few-shot classifiers in two scenarios: first, classification of grain types seen during training, and second, generalisation to unseen grain types, a crucial feature for real-world applications. In the first scenario, we introduce a novel approach using pre-computed collective class prototypes (CCPs) to enhance inference efficiency and robustness. In the second scenario, we assess the model's ability to classify novel grain types using limited support examples. Our experimental results show that despite using very limited labelled data for training, our FSL classifiers accuracy is comparable to that of a fully trained classifier trained using a significantly larger labelled database.
Authors: Wenke Huang, Jian Liang, Zekun Shi, Didi Zhu, Guancheng Wan, He Li, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao, Mang Ye
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse distributions and tasks, largely due to extensive pre-training datasets. Fine-tuning MLLM has become a common practice to improve performance on specific downstream tasks. However, during fine-tuning, MLLM often faces the risk of forgetting knowledge acquired during pre-training, which can result in a decline in generalization abilities. To balance the trade-off between generalization and specialization, we propose measuring the parameter importance for both pre-trained and fine-tuning distributions, based on frozen pre-trained weight magnitude and accumulated fine-tuning gradient values. We further apply an importance-aware weight allocation strategy, selectively updating relatively important parameters for downstream tasks. We conduct empirical evaluations on both image captioning and visual question-answering tasks using various MLLM architectures. The comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed solution, highlighting the efficiency of the crucial modules in enhancing downstream specialization performance while mitigating generalization degradation in MLLM Fine-Tuning.
Authors: Sejun Park, Joo Young Park, Hyunwoo Park
Abstract: This paper addresses domain adaptation challenges in graph data resulting from chronological splits. In a transductive graph learning setting, where each node is associated with a timestamp, we focus on the task of Semi-Supervised Node Classification (SSNC), aiming to classify recent nodes using labels of past nodes. Temporal dependencies in node connections create domain shifts, causing significant performance degradation when applying models trained on historical data into recent data. Given the practical relevance of this scenario, addressing domain adaptation in chronological split data is crucial, yet underexplored. We propose Imposing invariance with Message Passing in Chronological split Temporal Graphs (IMPaCT), a method that imposes invariant properties based on realistic assumptions derived from temporal graph structures. Unlike traditional domain adaptation approaches which rely on unverifiable assumptions, IMPaCT explicitly accounts for the characteristics of chronological splits. The IMPaCT is further supported by rigorous mathematical analysis, including a derivation of an upper bound of the generalization error. Experimentally, IMPaCT achieves a 3.8% performance improvement over current SOTA method on the ogbn-mag graph dataset. Additionally, we introduce the Temporal Stochastic Block Model (TSBM), which replicates temporal graphs under varying conditions, demonstrating the applicability of our methods to general spatial GNNs.
Authors: Jintao Zhang, Haofeng Huang, Pengle Zhang, Jia Wei, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen
Abstract: Although quantization for linear layers has been widely used, its application to accelerate the attention process remains limited. SageAttention utilizes 8-bit matrix multiplication, 16-bit matrix multiplication with 16-bit accumulator, and precision-enhancing methods, implementing an accurate and 2x speedup kernel compared to FlashAttention2. To further enhance the efficiency of attention computation while maintaining precision, we propose SageAttention2, which utilizes significantly faster 4-bit matrix multiplication (Matmul) alongside additional precision-enhancing techniques. First, we propose to quantize matrixes $(Q, K)$ to INT4 in a warp-level granularity and quantize matrixes $(\widetilde P, V)$ to FP8. Second, we propose a method to smooth $Q$ and $V$, enhancing the accuracy of attention with INT4 $QK$ and FP8 $PV$. Third, we analyze the quantization accuracy across timesteps and layers, then propose an adaptive quantization method to ensure the end-to-end metrics over various models. The operations per second (OPS) of SageAttention2 surpass FlashAttention2 and xformers by about 3x and 5x on RTX4090, respectively. Comprehensive experiments confirm that our approach incurs negligible end-to-end metrics loss across diverse models, including those for large language processing, image generation, and video generation. The codes are available at https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention.
Authors: Yunlong Tang, Junjia Guo, Hang Hua, Susan Liang, Mingqian Feng, Xinyang Li, Rui Mao, Chao Huang, Jing Bi, Zeliang Zhang, Pooyan Fazli, Chenliang Xu
Abstract: The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled significant progress in multimodal understanding, expanding their capacity to analyze video content. However, existing evaluation benchmarks for MLLMs primarily focus on abstract video comprehension, lacking a detailed assessment of their ability to understand video compositions, the nuanced interpretation of how visual elements combine and interact within highly compiled video contexts. We introduce VidComposition, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the video composition understanding capabilities of MLLMs using carefully curated compiled videos and cinematic-level annotations. VidComposition includes 982 videos with 1706 multiple-choice questions, covering various compositional aspects such as camera movement, angle, shot size, narrative structure, character actions and emotions, etc. Our comprehensive evaluation of 33 open-source and proprietary MLLMs reveals a significant performance gap between human and model capabilities. This highlights the limitations of current MLLMs in understanding complex, compiled video compositions and offers insights into areas for further improvement. The leaderboard and evaluation code are available at https://yunlong10.github.io/VidComposition/.
Authors: Zahra Koulaeizadeh, Erhan Oztop
Abstract: A random recurrent neural network, called a reservoir, can be used to learn robot movements conditioned on context inputs that encode task goals. The Learning is achieved by mapping the random dynamics of the reservoir modulated by context to desired trajectories via linear regression. This makes the reservoir computing (RC) approach computationally efficient as no iterative gradient descent learning is needed. In this work, we propose a novel RC-based Learning from Demonstration (LfD) framework that not only learns to generate the demonstrated movements but also allows online modulation of the reservoir dynamics to generate movement trajectories that are not covered by the initial demonstration set. This is made possible by using a Reinforcement Learning (RL) module that learns a policy to output context as its actions based on the robot state. Considering that the context dimension is typically low, learning with the RL module is very efficient. We show the validity of the proposed model with systematic experiments on a 2 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) simulated robot that is taught to reach targets, encoded as context, with and without obstacle avoidance constraint. The initial data set includes a set of reaching demonstrations which are learned by the reservoir system. To enable reaching out-of-distribution targets, the RL module is engaged in learning a policy to generate dynamic contexts so that the generated trajectory achieves the desired goal without any learning in the reservoir system. Overall, the proposed model uses an initial learned motor primitive set to efficiently generate diverse motor behaviors guided by the designed reward function. Thus the model can be used as a flexible and effective LfD system where the action repertoire can be extended without new data collection.
Authors: Nayeon Kim, Hongje Seong, Daehyun Ji, Sujin Jang
Abstract: Predicting and constructing road geometric information (e.g., lane lines, road markers) is a crucial task for safe autonomous driving, while such static map elements can be repeatedly occluded by various dynamic objects on the road. Recent studies have shown significantly improved vectorized high-definition (HD) map construction performance, but there has been insufficient investigation of temporal information across adjacent input frames (i.e., clips), which may lead to inconsistent and suboptimal prediction results. To tackle this, we introduce a novel paradigm of clip-level vectorized HD map construction, MapUnveiler, which explicitly unveils the occluded map elements within a clip input by relating dense image representations with efficient clip tokens. Additionally, MapUnveiler associates inter-clip information through clip token propagation, effectively utilizing long-term temporal map information. MapUnveiler runs efficiently with the proposed clip-level pipeline by avoiding redundant computation with temporal stride while building a global map relationship. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that MapUnveiler achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmark datasets. We also showcase that MapUnveiler significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in a challenging setting, achieving +10.7% mAP improvement in heavily occluded driving road scenes. The project page can be found at https://mapunveiler.github.io.
Authors: Haiyang Yu, Tian Xie, Jiaping Gui, Pengyang Wang, Ping Yi, Yue Wu
Abstract: We introduce BackdoorMBTI, the first backdoor learning toolkit and benchmark designed for multimodal evaluation across three representative modalities from eleven commonly used datasets. BackdoorMBTI provides a systematic backdoor learning pipeline, encompassing data processing, data poisoning, backdoor training, and evaluation. The generated poison datasets and backdoor models enable detailed evaluation of backdoor defense methods. Given the diversity of modalities, BackdoorMBTI facilitates systematic evaluation across different data types. Furthermore, BackdoorMBTI offers a standardized approach to handling practical factors in backdoor learning, such as issues related to data quality and erroneous labels. We anticipate that BackdoorMBTI will expedite future research in backdoor defense methods within a multimodal context. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BackdoorMBTI-D6A1/README.md.
URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BackdoorMBTI-D6A1/README.md.
Authors: Ziyue Zeng, Haoyuan Liu, Dingjie Peng, Luoxu Jing, Hiroshi Watanabe
Abstract: Currently, high-fidelity text-to-image models are developed in an accelerating pace. Among them, Diffusion Models have led to a remarkable improvement in the quality of image generation, making it vary challenging to distinguish between real and synthesized images. It simultaneously raises serious concerns regarding privacy and security. Some methods are proposed to distinguish the diffusion model generated images through reconstructing. However, the inversion and denoising processes are time-consuming and heavily reliant on the pre-trained generative model. Consequently, if the pre-trained generative model meet the problem of out-of-domain, the detection performance declines. To address this issue, we propose a universal synthetic image detector Time Step Generating (TSG), which does not rely on pre-trained models' reconstructing ability, specific datasets, or sampling algorithms. Our method utilizes a pre-trained diffusion model's network as a feature extractor to capture fine-grained details, focusing on the subtle differences between real and synthetic images. By controlling the time step t of the network input, we can effectively extract these distinguishing detail features. Then, those features can be passed through a classifier (i.e. Resnet), which efficiently detects whether an image is synthetic or real. We test the proposed TSG on the large-scale GenImage benchmark and it achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and generalizability.
Authors: Sibo Wei, Xueping Peng, Yi-fei Wang, Jiasheng Si, Weiyu Zhang, Wenpeng Lu, Xiaoming Wu, Yinglong Wang
Abstract: The rise of large language models (LLMs) has driven significant progress in medical applications, including traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). However, current medical LLMs struggle with TCM diagnosis and syndrome differentiation due to substantial differences between TCM and modern medical theory, and the scarcity of specialized, high-quality corpora. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing BianCang, a TCM-specific LLM, using a two-stage training process that first injects domain-specific knowledge and then aligns it through targeted stimulation. To enhance diagnostic and differentiation capabilities, we constructed pre-training corpora, instruction-aligned datasets based on real hospital records, and the ChP-TCM dataset derived from the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China. We compiled extensive TCM and medical corpora for continuous pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, building a comprehensive dataset to refine the model's understanding of TCM. Evaluations across 11 test sets involving 29 models and 4 tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of BianCang, offering valuable insights for future research. Code, datasets, and models are available at https://github.com/QLU-NLP/BianCang.
Authors: Yin-Yin Bao, Er-Chao Li, Hong-Qiang Yang, Bin-Bin Jia
Abstract: In semiconductor manufacturing, wafer defect maps (WDMs) play a crucial role in diagnosing issues and enhancing process yields by revealing critical defect patterns. However, accurately categorizing WDM defects presents significant challenges due to noisy data, unbalanced defect classes, and the complexity of failure modes. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel method combining a self-encoder-based data augmentation technique with a convolutional neural network (CNN). By introducing noise into the latent space, the self-encoder enhances data diversity and mitigates class imbalance, thereby improving the model's generalization capabilities. The augmented dataset is subsequently used to train the CNN, enabling it to deliver precise classification of both common and rare defect patterns. Experimental results on the WM-811K dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a classification accuracy of 98.56%, surpassing Random Forest, SVM, and Logistic Regression by 19%, 21%, and 27%, respectively. These findings highlight the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach, offering a reliable solution for wafer defect detection and classification.
Authors: Shubham Tanaji Kakde, Rony Mitra, Jasashwi Mandal, Manoj Kumar Tiwari
Abstract: Multivariate Long Sequence Time-series Forecasting (LSTF) has been a critical task across various real-world applications. Recent advancements focus on the application of transformer architectures attributable to their ability to capture temporal patterns effectively over extended periods. However, these approaches often overlook the inherent relationships and interactions between the input variables that could be drawn from their characteristic properties. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by integrating information-rich Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE) with state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures. We introduce a novel approach that encapsulates conceptual relationships among variables within a well-defined knowledge graph, forming dynamic and learnable KGEs for seamless integration into the transformer architecture. We investigate the influence of this integration into seminal architectures such as PatchTST, Autoformer, Informer, and Vanilla Transformer. Furthermore, we thoroughly investigate the performance of these knowledge-enhanced architectures along with their original implementations for long forecasting horizons and demonstrate significant improvement in the benchmark results. This enhancement empowers transformer-based architectures to address the inherent structural relation between variables. Our knowledge-enhanced approach improves the accuracy of multivariate LSTF by capturing complex temporal and relational dynamics across multiple domains. To substantiate the validity of our model, we conduct comprehensive experiments using Weather and Electric Transformer Temperature (ETT) datasets.
Authors: Bin Xu, Yiguan Lin, Yinghao Li, YangGao
Abstract: Large language models demonstrate exceptional performance in simple code generation tasks but still face challenges in tackling complex problems. These challenges may stem from insufficient reasoning and problem decomposition capabilities. To address this issue, we propose a reasoning-augmented data generation process, SRA-MCTS, which guides the model to autonomously generate high-quality intermediate reasoning paths. This creates a positive feedback loop, enabling continuous improvement. Our method operates entirely through the model itself without requiring additional supervision. By synthesizing natural language reasoning paths and translating them into executable code, the approach ensures analytical accuracy and enhances the success rate in solving complex tasks. Experimental results show that, even without additional supervisory signals, our method achieves performance improvements across different model scales, demonstrating the significant potential of self-improvement in small models. Furthermore, the method remains robust when traditional Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches exhibit performance degradation, with notable improvements observed in diversity metrics such as pass@10. We encourage further exploration of reasoning processes within training data to enhance the ability of language models to address complex problems.
Authors: Ting Zhu, Yue Jin, Jeremie Houssineau, Giovanni Montana
Abstract: In decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning, agents learning in isolation can lead to relative over-generalization (RO), where optimal joint actions are undervalued in favor of suboptimal ones. This hinders effective coordination in cooperative tasks, as agents tend to choose actions that are individually rational but collectively suboptimal. To address this issue, we introduce MaxMax Q-Learning (MMQ), which employs an iterative process of sampling and evaluating potential next states, selecting those with maximal Q-values for learning. This approach refines approximations of ideal state transitions, aligning more closely with the optimal joint policy of collaborating agents. We provide theoretical analysis supporting MMQ's potential and present empirical evaluations across various environments susceptible to RO. Our results demonstrate that MMQ frequently outperforms existing baselines, exhibiting enhanced convergence and sample efficiency.
Authors: Prakhar Ganeesh, Usman Gohar, Lu Cheng, Golnoosh Farnadi
Abstract: With fairness concerns gaining significant attention in Machine Learning (ML), several bias mitigation techniques have been proposed, often compared against each other to find the best method. These benchmarking efforts tend to use a common setup for evaluation under the assumption that providing a uniform environment ensures a fair comparison. However, bias mitigation techniques are sensitive to hyperparameter choices, random seeds, feature selection, etc., meaning that comparison on just one setting can unfairly favour certain algorithms. In this work, we show significant variance in fairness achieved by several algorithms and the influence of the learning pipeline on fairness scores. We highlight that most bias mitigation techniques can achieve comparable performance, given the freedom to perform hyperparameter optimization, suggesting that the choice of the evaluation parameters-rather than the mitigation technique itself-can sometimes create the perceived superiority of one method over another. We hope our work encourages future research on how various choices in the lifecycle of developing an algorithm impact fairness, and trends that guide the selection of appropriate algorithms.
Authors: Deepa Anand, Bipul Das, Vyshnav Dangeti, Antony Jerald, Rakesh Mullick, Uday Patil, Pakhi Sharma, Prasad Sudhakar
Abstract: In a setting where segmentation models have to be built for multiple datasets, each with its own corresponding label set, a straightforward way is to learn one model for every dataset and its labels. Alternatively, multi-task architectures with shared encoders and multiple segmentation heads or shared weights with compound labels can also be made use of. This work proposes a novel label sharing framework where a shared common label space is constructed and each of the individual label sets are systematically mapped to the common labels. This transforms multiple datasets with disparate label sets into a single large dataset with shared labels, and therefore all the segmentation tasks can be addressed by learning a single model. This eliminates the need for task specific adaptations in network architectures and also results in parameter and data efficient models. Furthermore, label sharing framework is naturally amenable for incremental learning where segmentations for new datasets can be easily learnt. We experimentally validate our method on various medical image segmentation datasets, each involving multi-label segmentation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in terms of performance and incremental learning ability vis-a-vis alternative methods.
Authors: Depeng Chen (School of Computer Science,Technology, Anhui University), Xiao Liu (School of Computer Science,Technology, Anhui University), Jie Cui (School of Computer Science,Technology, Anhui University), Hong Zhong (School of Computer Science,Technology, Anhui University)
Abstract: Since machine learning model is often trained on a limited data set, the model is trained multiple times on the same data sample, which causes the model to memorize most of the training set data. Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) exploit this feature to determine whether a data sample is used for training a machine learning model. However, in realistic scenarios, it is difficult for the adversary to obtain enough qualified samples that mark accurate identity information, especially since most samples are non-members in real world applications. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a new attack method called CLMIA, which uses unsupervised contrastive learning to train an attack model without using extra membership status information. Meanwhile, in CLMIA, we require only a small amount of data with known membership status to fine-tune the attack model. Experimental results demonstrate that CLMIA performs better than existing attack methods for different datasets and model structures, especially with data with less marked identity information. In addition, we experimentally find that the attack performs differently for different proportions of labeled identity information for member and non-member data. More analysis proves that our attack method performs better with less labeled identity information, which applies to more realistic scenarios.
Authors: Suiyao Chen, Jing Wu, Yunxiao Wang, Cheng Ji, Tianpei Xie, Daniel Cociorva, Michael Sharps, Cecile Levasseur, Hakan Brunzell
Abstract: Representation learning is a fundamental aspect of modern artificial intelligence, driving substantial improvements across diverse applications. While selfsupervised contrastive learning has led to significant advancements in fields like computer vision and natural language processing, its adaptation to tabular data presents unique challenges. Traditional approaches often prioritize optimizing model architecture and loss functions but may overlook the crucial task of constructing meaningful positive and negative sample pairs from various perspectives like feature interactions, instance-level patterns and batch-specific contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce TabDeco, a novel method that leverages attention-based encoding strategies across both rows and columns and employs contrastive learning framework to effectively disentangle feature representations at multiple levels, including features, instances and data batches. With the innovative feature decoupling hierarchies, TabDeco consistently surpasses existing deep learning methods and leading gradient boosting algorithms, including XG-Boost, CatBoost, and LightGBM, across various benchmark tasks, underscoring its effectiveness in advancing tabular data representation learning.
Authors: Eric Yang, Pengfei Hu, Xiaoxue Han, Yue Ning
Abstract: The adoption of digital systems in healthcare has resulted in the accumulation of vast electronic health records (EHRs), offering valuable data for machine learning methods to predict patient health outcomes. However, single-visit records of patients are often neglected in the training process due to the lack of annotations of next-visit information, thereby limiting the predictive and expressive power of machine learning models. In this paper, we present a novel framework MPLite that utilizes Multi-aspect Pretraining with Lab results through a light-weight neural network to enhance medical concept representation and predict future health outcomes of individuals. By incorporating both structured medical data and additional information from lab results, our approach fully leverages patient admission records. We design a pretraining module that predicts medical codes based on lab results, ensuring robust prediction by fusing multiple aspects of features. Our experimental evaluation using both MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrates improvements over existing models in diagnosis prediction and heart failure prediction tasks, achieving a higher weighted-F1 and recall with MPLite. This work reveals the potential of integrating diverse aspects of data to advance predictive modeling in healthcare.
Authors: Jiawei Zhang
Abstract: This paper builds upon our previous work on the Reconciled Polynomial Network (RPN). The original RPN model was designed under the assumption of input data independence, presuming the independence among both individual instances within data batches and attributes in each data instance. However, this assumption often proves invalid for function learning tasks involving complex, interdependent data such as language, images, time series, and graphs. Ignoring such data interdependence may inevitably lead to significant performance degradation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the new Reconciled Polynomial Network (version 2), namely RPN 2, in this paper. By incorporating data and structural interdependence functions, RPN 2 explicitly models data interdependence via new component functions in its architecture. This enhancement not only significantly improves RPN 2's learning performance but also substantially expands its unifying potential, enabling it to encompass a broader range of contemporary dominant backbone models within its canonical representation. These backbones include, but are not limited to, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), graph neural networks (GNNs), and Transformers. Our analysis reveals that the fundamental distinctions among these backbone models primarily stem from their diverse approaches to defining the interdependence functions. Furthermore, this unified representation opens up new opportunities for designing innovative architectures with the potential to surpass the performance of these dominant backbones.
Authors: Jan Pfister, Julia Wunderle, Andreas Hotho
Abstract: We create two German-only decoder models, LL\"aMmlein 120M and 1B, transparently from scratch and publish them, along with the training data, for the German NLP research community to use. The model training involved several key steps, including extensive data preprocessing, the creation of a custom German tokenizer, the training itself, as well as the evaluation of the final models on various benchmarks. Throughout the training process, multiple checkpoints were saved and analyzed using the SuperGLEBer benchmark to monitor the models' learning dynamics. Compared to state-of-the-art models on the SuperGLEBer benchmark, both LL\"aMmlein models performed competitively, consistently matching or surpassing models with similar parameter sizes. The results show that the models' quality scales with size as expected, but performance improvements on some tasks plateaued early, offering valuable insights into resource allocation for future model development.
Authors: J. Lu
Abstract: With the growing popularity of ACG (Anime, Comics, and Games) culture, generating high-quality anime character images has become an important research topic. This paper introduces a novel Generative Adversarial Network model, USE-CMHSA-GAN, designed to produce high-quality anime character images. The model builds upon the traditional DCGAN framework, incorporating USE and CMHSA modules to enhance feature extraction capabilities for anime character images. Experiments were conducted on the anime-face-dataset, and the results demonstrate that USE-CMHSA-GAN outperforms other benchmark models, including DCGAN, VAE-GAN, and WGAN, in terms of FID and IS scores, indicating superior image quality. These findings suggest that USE-CMHSA-GAN is highly effective for anime character image generation and provides new insights for further improving the quality of generative models.
Authors: Nathaniel Dennler, Zhonghao Shi, Stefanos Nikolaidis, Maja Matari\'c
Abstract: Assistive robots interact with humans and must adapt to different users' preferences to be effective. An easy and effective technique to learn non-expert users' preferences is through rankings of robot behaviors, for example, robot movement trajectories or gestures. Existing techniques focus on generating trajectories for users to rank that maximize the outcome of the preference learning process. However, the generated trajectories do not appear to reflect the user's preference over repeated interactions. In this work, we design an algorithm to generate trajectories for users to rank that we call Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies with Information Gain (CMA-ES-IG). CMA-ES-IG prioritizes the user's experience of the preference learning process. We show that users find our algorithm more intuitive and easier to use than previous approaches across both physical and social robot tasks. This project's code is hosted at github.com/interaction-lab/CMA-ES-IG
Authors: Vincent van der Brugge, Marc Pollefeys, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Ayush Tewari, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula
Abstract: Reconstructing compositional 3D representations of scenes, where each object is represented with its own 3D model, is a highly desirable capability in robotics and augmented reality. However, most existing methods rely heavily on strong appearance priors for object discovery, therefore only working on those classes of objects on which the method has been trained, or do not allow for object manipulation, which is necessary to scan objects fully and to guide object discovery in challenging scenarios. We address these limitations with a novel interaction-guided and class-agnostic method based on object displacements that allows a user to move around a scene with an RGB-D camera, hold up objects, and finally outputs one 3D model per held-up object. Our main contribution to this end is a novel approach to detecting user-object interactions and extracting the masks of manipulated objects. On a custom-captured dataset, our pipeline discovers manipulated objects with 78.3% precision at 100% recall and reconstructs them with a mean chamfer distance of 0.90cm. Compared to Co-Fusion, the only comparable interaction-based and class-agnostic baseline, this corresponds to a reduction in chamfer distance of 73% while detecting 99% fewer false positives.
Authors: Martin Andrews
Abstract: Excellent progress has been made recently in solving ARC Challenge problems. However, it seems that new techniques may be required to push beyond 60% accuracy. Even commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to 'understand' many of the problems (when given the input and output grids), which makes discovering solutions by LLM-lead program search somewhat futile. In this work, LLM 'understanding' is attempted from a stronger starting position : An LLM is given complete solutions to tasks in code, and then asked to explain how the task is being solved at various levels of abstraction. Specifically, the LLM was given code solutions implemented in arc-dsl-llm (an LLM-legible version of Hodel's arc-dsl to obtain: (a) commented code; (b) code refactored into reusable functional chunks; (c) problem solution steps; and (d) high-level problem-solving tactics. We demonstrate that 'Sparks of Abstraction' can be extracted from the LLM output - in a form that could be used in downstream tasks with Local LLMs eligible to enter the ARC Prize. Both the arc-dsl-llm DSL framework (with the re-engineered solutions) and the Gemini LLM-generated data (along with the generation code) are made Open Source.
Authors: Kanishka Tyagi, Chinmay Rane, Ketaki Vaidya, Jeshwanth Challgundla, Soumitro Swapan Auddy, Michael Manry
Abstract: This study presents a comparative analysis of two objective functions, Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Softmax Cross-Entropy (SCE) for neural network classification tasks. While SCE combined with softmax activation is the conventional choice for transforming network outputs into class probabilities, we explore an alternative approach using MSE with sigmoid activation. We introduce the Output Reset algorithm, which reduces inconsistent errors and enhances classifier robustness. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Fashion-MNIST), we demonstrate that MSE with sigmoid activation achieves comparable accuracy and convergence rates to SCE, while exhibiting superior performance in scenarios with noisy data. Our findings indicate that MSE, despite its traditional association with regression tasks, serves as a viable alternative for classification problems, challenging conventional wisdom about neural network training strategies.
Authors: Shiyi Cao, Shu Liu, Tyler Griggs, Peter Schafhalter, Xiaoxuan Liu, Ying Sheng, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica
Abstract: Efficient deployment of large language models, particularly Mixture of Experts (MoE), on resource-constrained platforms presents significant challenges, especially in terms of computational efficiency and memory utilization. The MoE architecture, renowned for its ability to increase model capacity without a proportional increase in inference cost, greatly reduces the token generation latency compared with dense models. However, the large model size makes MoE models inaccessible to individuals without high-end GPUs. In this paper, we propose a high-throughput MoE batch inference system, that significantly outperforms past work. MoE-Lightning introduces a novel CPU-GPU-I/O pipelining schedule, CGOPipe, with paged weights to achieve high resource utilization, and a performance model, HRM, based on a Hierarchical Roofline Model we introduce to help find policies with higher throughput than existing systems. MoE-Lightning can achieve up to 10.3x higher throughput than state-of-the-art offloading-enabled LLM inference systems for Mixtral 8x7B on a single T4 GPU (16GB). When the theoretical system throughput is bounded by the GPU memory, MoE-Lightning can reach the throughput upper bound with 2-3x less CPU memory, significantly increasing resource utilization. MoE-Lightning also supports efficient batch inference for much larger MoEs (e.g., Mixtral 8x22B and DBRX) on multiple low-cost GPUs (e.g., 2-4 T4).
Authors: Yingjie Zhou, Zicheng Zhang, Jiezhang Cao, Jun Jia, Yanwei Jiang, Farong Wen, Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has demonstrated significant capabilities in various fields, and in areas such as human-computer interaction (HCI), embodied intelligence, and the design and animation of virtual digital humans, both practitioners and users are increasingly concerned with AI's ability to understand and express emotion. Consequently, the question of whether AI can accurately interpret human emotions remains a critical challenge. To date, two primary classes of AI models have been involved in human emotion analysis: generative models and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). To assess the emotional capabilities of these two classes of models, this study introduces MEMO-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 7,145 portraits, each depicting one of six different emotions, generated by 12 Text-to-Image (T2I) models. Unlike previous works, MEMO-Bench provides a framework for evaluating both T2I models and MLLMs in the context of sentiment analysis. Additionally, a progressive evaluation approach is employed, moving from coarse-grained to fine-grained metrics, to offer a more detailed and comprehensive assessment of the sentiment analysis capabilities of MLLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that existing T2I models are more effective at generating positive emotions than negative ones. Meanwhile, although MLLMs show a certain degree of effectiveness in distinguishing and recognizing human emotions, they fall short of human-level accuracy, particularly in fine-grained emotion analysis. The MEMO-Bench will be made publicly available to support further research in this area.
Authors: Son T. Luu, Hiep Nguyen, Trung Vo, Le-Minh Nguyen
Abstract: In this paper, we propose ZeFaV - a zero-shot based fact-checking verification framework to enhance the performance on fact verification task of large language models by leveraging the in-context learning ability of large language models to extract the relations among the entities within a claim, re-organized the information from the evidence in a relationally logical form, and combine the above information with the original evidence to generate the context from which our fact-checking model provide verdicts for the input claims. We conducted empirical experiments to evaluate our approach on two multi-hop fact-checking datasets including HoVer and FEVEROUS, and achieved potential results results comparable to other state-of-the-art fact verification task methods.
Authors: Onur Vural, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi
Abstract: In heliophysics research, predicting solar flares is crucial due to their potential to impact both space-based systems and Earth's infrastructure substantially. Magnetic field data from solar active regions, recorded by solar imaging observatories, are transformed into multivariate time series to enable solar flare prediction using temporal window-based analysis. In the realm of multivariate time series-driven solar flare prediction, addressing severe class imbalance with effective strategies for multivariate time series representation learning is key to developing robust predictive models. Traditional methods often struggle with overfitting to the majority class in prediction tasks where major solar flares are infrequent. This work presents EXCON, a contrastive representation learning framework designed to enhance classification performance amidst such imbalances. EXCON operates through four stages: obtaining core features from multivariate time series data; selecting distinctive contrastive representations for each class to maximize inter-class separation; training a temporal feature embedding module with a custom extreme reconstruction loss to minimize intra-class variation; and applying a classifier to the learned embeddings for robust classification. The proposed method leverages contrastive learning principles to map similar instances closer in the feature space while distancing dissimilar ones, a strategy not extensively explored in solar flare prediction tasks. This approach not only addresses class imbalance but also offers a versatile solution applicable to univariate and multivariate time series across binary and multiclass classification problems. Experimental results, including evaluations on the benchmark solar flare dataset and multiple time series archive datasets with binary and multiclass labels, demonstrate EXCON's efficacy in enhancing classification performance.
Authors: Yonghuang Wu, Xuan Xie, Xinyuan Niu, Chengqian Zhao, Jinhua Yu
Abstract: Pathology computing has dramatically improved pathologists' workflow and diagnostic decision-making processes. Although computer-aided diagnostic systems have shown considerable value in whole slide image (WSI) analysis, the problem of multi-classification under sample imbalance remains an intractable challenge. To address this, we propose learning fine-grained information by generating sub-bags with feature distributions similar to the original WSIs. Additionally, we utilize a pseudo-bag generation algorithm to further leverage the abundant and redundant information in WSIs, allowing efficient training in unbalanced-sample multi-classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce an affinity-based sample selection and curriculum contrastive learning strategy to enhance the stability of model representation learning. Unlike previous approaches, our framework transitions from learning bag-level representations to understanding and exploiting the feature distribution of multi-instance bags. Our method demonstrates significant performance improvements on three datasets, including tumor classification and lymph node metastasis. On average, it achieves a 4.39-point improvement in F1 score compared to the second-best method across the three tasks, underscoring its superior performance.
Authors: Yucong Meng, Zhiwei Yang, Minghong Duan, Yonghong Shi, Zhijian Song
Abstract: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a crucial tool for clinical diagnosis while facing the challenge of long scanning time. To reduce the acquisition time, fast MRI reconstruction aims to restore high-quality images from the undersampled k-space. Existing methods typically train deep learning models to map the undersampled data to artifact-free MRI images. However, these studies often overlook the unique properties of k-space and directly apply general networks designed for image processing to k-space recovery, leaving the precise learning of k-space largely underexplored. In this work, we propose a continuous k-space recovery network from a new perspective of implicit neural representation with image domain guidance, which boosts the performance of MRI reconstruction. Specifically, (1) an implicit neural representation based encoder-decoder structure is customized to continuously query unsampled k-values. (2) an image guidance module is designed to mine the semantic information from the low-quality MRI images to further guide the k-space recovery. (3) a multi-stage training strategy is proposed to recover dense k-space progressively. Extensive experiments conducted on CC359, fastMRI, and IXI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and its superiority over other competitors.
Authors: Jongmin Park, Seunghoon Han, Jong-Ryul Lee, Sungsu Lim
Abstract: To leverage the complex structures within heterogeneous graphs, recent studies on heterogeneous graph embedding use a hyperbolic space, characterized by a constant negative curvature and exponentially increasing space, which aligns with the structural properties of heterogeneous graphs. However, despite heterogeneous graphs inherently possessing diverse power-law structures, most hyperbolic heterogeneous graph embedding models use a single hyperbolic space for the entire heterogeneous graph, which may not effectively capture the diverse power-law structures within the heterogeneous graph. To address this limitation, we propose Multi-hyperbolic Space-based heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (MSGAT), which uses multiple hyperbolic spaces to effectively capture diverse power-law structures within heterogeneous graphs. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of MSGAT. The experimental results demonstrate that MSGAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in various graph machine learning tasks, effectively capturing the complex structures of heterogeneous graphs.
Authors: Ranjan Sapkota, Achyut Paudel, Manoj Karkee
Abstract: Currently, deep learning-based instance segmentation for various applications (e.g., Agriculture) is predominantly performed using a labor-intensive process involving extensive field data collection using sophisticated sensors, followed by careful manual annotation of images, presenting significant logistical and financial challenges to researchers and organizations. The process also slows down the model development and training process. In this study, we presented a novel method for deep learning-based instance segmentation of apples in commercial orchards that eliminates the need for labor-intensive field data collection and manual annotation. Utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM), we synthetically generated orchard images and automatically annotated them using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) integrated with a YOLO11 base model. This method significantly reduces reliance on physical sensors and manual data processing, presenting a major advancement in "Agricultural AI". The synthetic, auto-annotated dataset was used to train the YOLO11 model for Apple instance segmentation, which was then validated on real orchard images. The results showed that the automatically generated annotations achieved a Dice Coefficient of 0.9513 and an IoU of 0.9303, validating the accuracy and overlap of the mask annotations. All YOLO11 configurations, trained solely on these synthetic datasets with automated annotations, accurately recognized and delineated apples, highlighting the method's efficacy. Specifically, the YOLO11m-seg configuration achieved a mask precision of 0.902 and a mask mAP@50 of 0.833 on test images collected from a commercial orchard. Additionally, the YOLO11l-seg configuration outperformed other models in validation on 40 LLM-generated images, achieving the highest mask precision and mAP@50 metrics. Keywords: YOLO, SAM, SAMv2, YOLO11, YOLOv11, Segment Anything, YOLO-SAM
Authors: Yungi Kim, Hyunsoo Ha, Seonghoon Yang, Sukyung Lee, Jihoo Kim, Chanjun Park
Abstract: Creating high-quality, large-scale datasets for large language models (LLMs) often relies on resource-intensive, GPU-accelerated models for quality filtering, making the process time-consuming and costly. This dependence on GPUs limits accessibility for organizations lacking significant computational infrastructure. To address this issue, we introduce the Lightweight, Purpose-driven (LP) Data Pipeline, a framework that operates entirely on CPUs to streamline the processes of dataset extraction, filtering, and curation. Based on our four core principles, the LP Data Pipeline significantly reduces preparation time and cost while maintaining high data quality. Importantly, our pipeline enables the creation of purpose-driven datasets tailored to specific domains and languages, enhancing the applicability of LLMs in specialized contexts. We anticipate that our pipeline will lower the barriers to LLM development, enabling a wide range of organizations to access LLMs more easily.
Authors: Peng Shu, Junhao Chen, Zhengliang Liu, Hui Wang, Zihao Wu, Tianyang Zhong, Yiwei Li, Huaqin Zhao, Hanqi Jiang, Yi Pan, Yifan Zhou, Constance Owl, Xiaoming Zhai, Ninghao Liu, Claudio Saunt, Tianming Liu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks and domains. However, their performance in low-resource language translation, particularly when translating into these languages, remains underexplored. This gap poses significant challenges, as linguistic barriers hinder the cultural preservation and development of minority communities. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel retrieval-based method that enhances translation quality for low-resource languages by focusing on key terms, which involves translating keywords and retrieving corresponding examples from existing data. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, we conducted experiments translating from English into three low-resource languages: Cherokee, a critically endangered indigenous language of North America; Tibetan, a historically and culturally significant language in Asia; and Manchu, a language with few remaining speakers. Our comparison with the zero-shot performance of GPT-4o and LLaMA 3.1 405B, highlights the significant challenges these models face when translating into low-resource languages. In contrast, our retrieval-based method shows promise in improving both word-level accuracy and overall semantic understanding by leveraging existing resources more effectively.
Authors: Heon-Gyu Kwak, Gi-Hwan Shin, Yeon-Woo Choi, Dong-Hoon Lee, Yoo-In Jeon, Jun-Su Kang, Seong-Whan Lee
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for personalized brain-computer interface (BCI) applications, which can offer an enhanced user experience by customizing services to individual preferences and needs, based on endogenous electroencephalography (EEG) paradigms including motor imagery (MI), speech imagery (SI), and visual imagery. The framework includes two essential components: user identification and intention classification, which enable personalized services by identifying individual users and recognizing their intended actions through EEG signals. We validate the feasibility of our framework using a private EEG dataset collected from eight subjects, employing the ShallowConvNet architecture to decode EEG features. The experimental results demonstrate that user identification achieved an average classification accuracy of 0.995, while intention classification achieved 0.47 accuracy across all paradigms, with MI demonstrating the best performance. These findings indicate that EEG signals can effectively support personalized BCI applications, offering robust identification and reliable intention decoding, especially for MI and SI.
Authors: Gang Dang, Dainhui Wang
Abstract: Recurrent stochastic configuration networks (RSCNs) have shown promise in modelling nonlinear dynamic systems with order uncertainty due to their advantages of easy implementation, less human intervention, and strong approximation capability. This paper develops the original RSCNs with block increments, termed block RSCNs (BRSCNs), to further enhance the learning capacity and efficiency of the network. BRSCNs can simultaneously add multiple reservoir nodes (subreservoirs) during the construction. Each subreservoir is configured with a unique structure in the light of a supervisory mechanism, ensuring the universal approximation property. The reservoir feedback matrix is appropriately scaled to guarantee the echo state property of the network. Furthermore, the output weights are updated online using a projection algorithm, and the persistent excitation conditions that facilitate parameter convergence are also established. Numerical results over a time series prediction, a nonlinear system identification task, and two industrial data predictive analyses demonstrate that the proposed BRSCN performs favourably in terms of modelling efficiency, learning, and generalization performance, highlighting their significant potential for coping with complex dynamics.
Authors: Ranmin Wang, Limin Zhuang, Hongkun Chen, Boyan Xu, Ruichu Cai
Abstract: The advancement of medical image segmentation techniques has been propelled by the adoption of deep learning techniques, particularly UNet-based approaches, which exploit semantic information to improve the accuracy of segmentations. However, the order of organs in scanned images has been disregarded by current medical image segmentation approaches based on UNet. Furthermore, the inherent network structure of UNet does not provide direct capabilities for integrating temporal information. To efficiently integrate temporal information, we propose TP-UNet that utilizes temporal prompts, encompassing organ-construction relationships, to guide the segmentation UNet model. Specifically, our framework is featured with cross-attention and semantic alignment based on unsupervised contrastive learning to combine temporal prompts and image features effectively. Extensive evaluations on two medical image segmentation datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of TP-UNet. Our implementation will be open-sourced after acceptance.
Authors: Rawad Melhem, Riad Hamadeh, Assef Jafar
Abstract: The CEEMDAN algorithm is one of the modern methods used in the analysis of non-stationary signals. This research presents a study of the effectiveness of this method in audio source separation to know the limits of its work. It concluded two conditions related to frequencies and amplitudes of mixed signals to be separated by CEEMDAN. The performance of the algorithm in separating noise from speech and separating speech signals from each other is studied. The research reached a conclusion that CEEMDAN can remove some types of noise from speech (speech improvement), and it cannot separate speech signals from each other (cocktail party). Simulation is done using Matlab environment and Noizeus database.
Authors: Han Cao, Zhaoyang Zhang, Xiangtian Li, Chufan Wu, Hansong Zhang, Wenqing Zhang
Abstract: Knowledge-aware sequence to sequence generation tasks such as document question answering and abstract summarization typically requires two types of knowledge: encoded parametric knowledge and retrieved contextual information. Previous work show improper correlation between parametric knowledge and answers in the training set could cause the model ignore input information at test time, resulting in un-desirable model behaviour such as over-stability and hallucination. In this work, we argue that hallucination could be mitigated via explicit correlation between input source and generated content. We focus on a typical example of hallucination, entity-based knowledge conflicts in question answering, where correlation of entities and their description at training time hinders model behaviour during inference.
Authors: Jing Li, Xueke Chi, Qiufeng Wang, Dahan Wang, Kaizhu Huang, Yongge Liu, Cheng-lin Liu
Abstract: Oracle character recognition-an analysis of ancient Chinese inscriptions found on oracle bones-has become a pivotal field intersecting archaeology, paleography, and historical cultural studies. Traditional methods of oracle character recognition have relied heavily on manual interpretation by experts, which is not only labor-intensive but also limits broader accessibility to the general public. With recent breakthroughs in pattern recognition and deep learning, there is a growing movement towards the automation of oracle character recognition (OrCR), showing considerable promise in tackling the challenges inherent to these ancient scripts. However, a comprehensive understanding of OrCR still remains elusive. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic and structured survey of the current landscape of OrCR research. We commence by identifying and analyzing the key challenges of OrCR. Then, we provide an overview of the primary benchmark datasets and digital resources available for OrCR. A review of contemporary research methodologies follows, in which their respective efficacies, limitations, and applicability to the complex nature of oracle characters are critically highlighted and examined. Additionally, our review extends to ancillary tasks associated with OrCR across diverse disciplines, providing a broad-spectrum analysis of its applications. We conclude with a forward-looking perspective, proposing potential avenues for future investigations that could yield significant advancements in the field.
Authors: Shengchao Hu, Yuhang Zhou, Ziqing Fan, Jifeng Hu, Li Shen, Ya Zhang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Training a generalizable agent to continually learn a sequence of tasks from offline trajectories is a natural requirement for long-lived agents, yet remains a significant challenge for current offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Specifically, an agent must be able to rapidly adapt to new tasks using newly collected trajectories (plasticity), while retaining knowledge from previously learned tasks (stability). However, systematic analyses of this setting are scarce, and it remains unclear whether conventional continual learning (CL) methods are effective in continual offline RL (CORL) scenarios. In this study, we develop the Offline Continual World benchmark and demonstrate that traditional CL methods struggle with catastrophic forgetting, primarily due to the unique distribution shifts inherent to CORL scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce CompoFormer, a structure-based continual transformer model that adaptively composes previous policies via a meta-policy network. Upon encountering a new task, CompoFormer leverages semantic correlations to selectively integrate relevant prior policies alongside newly trained parameters, thereby enhancing knowledge sharing and accelerating the learning process. Our experiments reveal that CompoFormer outperforms conventional CL methods, particularly in longer task sequences, showcasing a promising balance between plasticity and stability.
Authors: Salvatore Calderaro, Domenico Amato, Giosu\`e Lo Bosco, Riccardo Rizzo, Filippo Vella
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful models that can manage complex data sources and their interconnection links. One of GNNs' main drawbacks is their lack of interpretability, which limits their application in sensitive fields. In this paper, we introduce a new methodology involving graph communities to address the interpretability of graph classification problems. The proposed method, called GECo, exploits the idea that if a community is a subset of graph nodes densely connected, this property should play a role in graph classification. This is reasonable, especially if we consider the message-passing mechanism, which is the basic mechanism of GNNs. GECo analyzes the contribution to the classification result of the communities in the graph, building a mask that highlights graph-relevant structures. GECo is tested for Graph Convolutional Networks on six artificial and four real-world graph datasets and is compared to the main explainability methods such as PGMExplainer, PGExplainer, GNNExplainer, and SubgraphX using four different metrics. The obtained results outperform the other methods for artificial graph datasets and most real-world datasets.
Authors: Yunong Liu, Cristobal Eyzaguirre, Manling Li, Shubh Khanna, Juan Carlos Niebles, Vineeth Ravi, Saumitra Mishra, Weiyu Liu, Jiajun Wu
Abstract: Shape assembly is a ubiquitous task in daily life, integral for constructing complex 3D structures like IKEA furniture. While significant progress has been made in developing autonomous agents for shape assembly, existing datasets have not yet tackled the 4D grounding of assembly instructions in videos, essential for a holistic understanding of assembly in 3D space over time. We introduce IKEA Video Manuals, a dataset that features 3D models of furniture parts, instructional manuals, assembly videos from the Internet, and most importantly, annotations of dense spatio-temporal alignments between these data modalities. To demonstrate the utility of IKEA Video Manuals, we present five applications essential for shape assembly: assembly plan generation, part-conditioned segmentation, part-conditioned pose estimation, video object segmentation, and furniture assembly based on instructional video manuals. For each application, we provide evaluation metrics and baseline methods. Through experiments on our annotated data, we highlight many challenges in grounding assembly instructions in videos to improve shape assembly, including handling occlusions, varying viewpoints, and extended assembly sequences.
Authors: Dou El Kefel Mansouri, Khalid Benabdeslem, Seif-Eddine Benkabou
Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of feature selection in the context of multi-label learning, by using a new estimator based on implicit regularization and label embedding. Unlike the sparse feature selection methods that use a penalized estimator with explicit regularization terms such as $l_{2,1}$-norm, MCP or SCAD, we propose a simple alternative method via Hadamard product parameterization. In order to guide the feature selection process, a latent semantic of multi-label information method is adopted, as a label embedding. Experimental results on some known benchmark datasets suggest that the proposed estimator suffers much less from extra bias, and may lead to benign overfitting.
Authors: Hongjun Wang, Jiyuan Chen, Lingyu Zhang, Renhe Jiang, Xuan Song
Abstract: Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (ST-GNNs) and Transformers have shown significant promise in traffic forecasting by effectively modeling temporal and spatial correlations. However, rapid urbanization in recent years has led to dynamic shifts in traffic patterns and travel demand, posing major challenges for accurate long-term traffic prediction. The generalization capability of ST-GNNs in extended temporal scenarios and cross-city applications remains largely unexplored. In this study, we evaluate state-of-the-art models on an extended traffic benchmark and observe substantial performance degradation in existing ST-GNNs over time, which we attribute to their limited inductive capabilities. Our analysis reveals that this degradation stems from an inability to adapt to evolving spatial relationships within urban environments. To address this limitation, we reconsider the design of adaptive embeddings and propose a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) embedding approach that enables models to adapt to new scenarios without retraining. We incorporate PCA embeddings into existing ST-GNN and Transformer architectures, achieving marked improvements in performance. Notably, PCA embeddings allow for flexibility in graph structures between training and testing, enabling models trained on one city to perform zero-shot predictions on other cities. This adaptability demonstrates the potential of PCA embeddings in enhancing the robustness and generalization of spatiotemporal models.
Authors: Joona Pohjonen, Abderrahim-Oussama Batouche, Antti Rannikko, Kevin Sandeman, Andrew Erickson, Esa Pitkanen, Tuomas Mirtti
Abstract: Foundation models are trained on massive amounts of data to distinguish complex patterns and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks with minimal computational resources. Here, we develop a foundation model for prostate cancer digital pathology called HistoEncoder by pre-training on 48 million prostate tissue tile images. We demonstrate that HistoEncoder features extracted from tile images with similar histological patterns map closely together in the feature space. HistoEncoder outperforms models pre-trained with natural images, even without fine-tuning or with 1000 times less training data. We describe two use cases that leverage the capabilities of HistoEncoder by fine-tuning the model with a limited amount of data and computational resources. First, we show how HistoEncoder can be used to automatically annotate large-scale datasets with high accuracy. Second, we combine histomics with commonly used clinical nomograms, significantly improving prostate cancer-specific death survival models. Foundation models such as HistoEncoder can allow organizations with limited resources to build effective clinical software tools without needing extensive datasets or significant amounts of computing.
Authors: Giulia Lafratta, Bernd Porr, Christopher Chandler, Alice Miller
Abstract: We present a hierarchical framework to solve robot planning as an input control problem. At the lowest level are temporary closed control loops, ("tasks"), each representing a behaviour, contingent on a specific sensory input and therefore temporary. At the highest level, a supervising "Configurator" directs task creation and termination. Here resides "core" knowledge as a physics engine, where sequences of tasks can be simulated. The Configurator encodes and interprets simulation results,based on which it can choose a sequence of tasks as a plan. We implement this framework on a real robot and test it in an overtaking scenario as proof-of-concept.
Authors: Th\'eophile Champion, Marek Grze\'s, Howard Bowman
Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning refers to a set of approaches capable of sample-efficient decision making, which create an explicit model of the environment. This model can subsequently be used for learning optimal policies. In this paper, we propose a temporal Gaussian Mixture Model composed of a perception model and a transition model. The perception model extracts discrete (latent) states from continuous observations using a variational Gaussian mixture likelihood. Importantly, our model constantly monitors the collected data searching for new Gaussian components, i.e., the perception model performs a form of structure learning (Smith et al., 2020; Friston et al., 2018; Neacsu et al., 2022) as it learns the number of Gaussian components in the mixture. Additionally, the transition model learns the temporal transition between consecutive time steps by taking advantage of the Dirichlet-categorical conjugacy. Both the perception and transition models are able to forget part of the data points, while integrating the information they provide within the prior, which ensure fast variational inference. Finally, decision making is performed with a variant of Q-learning which is able to learn Q-values from beliefs over states. Empirically, we have demonstrated the model's ability to learn the structure of several mazes: the model discovered the number of states and the transition probabilities between these states. Moreover, using its learned Q-values, the agent was able to successfully navigate from the starting position to the maze's exit.
Authors: Viktoriia Chekalina, Anton Razzigaev, Elizaveta Goncharova, Andrey Kuznetsov
Abstract: In this paper we present an approach to reduce hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating Knowledge Graphs (KGs) as an additional modality. Our method involves transforming input text into a set of KG embeddings and using an adapter to integrate these embeddings into the language model space, without relying on external retrieval processes. To facilitate this, we created WikiEntities, a dataset containing over 3 million Wikipedia texts annotated with entities from Wikidata and their corresponding embeddings from PyTorch-BigGraph. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for training Entity Linking models and adapting the described method to various LLMs using specialized adapters. Our method does not require fine-tuning of the language models themselves; instead, we only train the adapter. This ensures that the model's performance on other tasks is not affected. We trained an adapter for the Mistral 7B, LLaMA 2-7B (chat), and LLaMA 3-8B (instruct) models using this dataset and demonstrated that our approach improves performance on the HaluEval, True-False benchmarks and FEVER dataset. The results indicate that incorporating KGs as a new modality can effectively reduce hallucinations and improve the factual accuracy of language models, all without the need for external retrieval.
Authors: Zhendong Liu, Yuanbi Nie, Yingshui Tan, Xiangyu Yue, Qiushi Cui, Chongjun Wang, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
Abstract: Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), pre-trained visual encoder models connected to LLMs form Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, recent research shows that the visual modality in VLMs is highly vulnerable, allowing attackers to bypass safety alignment in LLMs through visually transmitted content, launching harmful attacks. To address this challenge, we propose a progressive concept-based alignment strategy, PSA-VLM, which incorporates safety modules as concept bottlenecks to enhance visual modality safety alignment. By aligning model predictions with specific safety concepts, we improve defenses against risky images, enhancing explainability and controllability while minimally impacting general performance. Our method is obtained through two-stage training. The low computational cost of the first stage brings very effective performance improvement, and the fine-tuning of the language model in the second stage further improves the safety performance. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on popular VLM safety benchmark.
Authors: Riccardo Riccio
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel method for real-time exercise classification using a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural network. Existing exercise recognition approaches often rely on synthetic datasets, raw coordinate inputs sensitive to user and camera variations, and fail to fully exploit the temporal dependencies in exercise movements. These issues limit their generalizability and robustness in real-world conditions, where lighting, camera angles, and user body types vary. To address these challenges, we propose a BiLSTM-based model that leverages invariant features, such as joint angles, alongside raw coordinates. By using both angles and (x, y, z) coordinates, the model adapts to changes in perspective, user positioning, and body differences, improving generalization. Training on 30-frame sequences enables the BiLSTM to capture the temporal context of exercises and recognize patterns evolving over time. We compiled a dataset combining synthetic data from the InfiniteRep dataset and real-world videos from Kaggle and other sources. This dataset includes four common exercises: squat, push-up, shoulder press, and bicep curl. The model was trained and validated on these diverse datasets, achieving an accuracy of over 99% on the test set. To assess generalizability, the model was tested on 2 separate test sets representative of typical usage conditions. Comparisons with the previous approach from the literature are present in the result section showing that the proposed model is the best-performing one. The classifier is integrated into a web application providing real-time exercise classification and repetition counting without manual exercise selection. Demo and datasets are available at the following GitHub Repository: https://github.com/RiccardoRiccio/Fitness-AI-Trainer-With-Automatic-Exercise-Recognition-and-Counting.
Authors: Ping Zhang, Lei Su, Jinjie Yang, Xin Chen
Abstract: Hosting diverse large language model workloads in a unified resource pool through co-location is cost-effective. For example, long-running chat services generally follow diurnal traffic patterns, which inspire co-location of batch jobs to fulfill resource valleys between successive peaks, and thus to saturate resource allocation in cluster-wide scope. These heterogeneous workloads often have different business priorities, and therefore preemption can be leveraged for resource elasticity. However, workloads often have distinct topology preferences as well. The resources released by lower-priority instances may fail to meet the requirements of high-priority online services which are usually latency-sensitive. The root cause behind such mis-match is a lack of topology awareness of resource scheduler, especially during preemption. To bridge this gap, we develop a fine-grained topology-aware method for preemptive scheduling of hybrid workloads. The method ensures that the resources freed by preempted tasks adhere to the topological affinity needs of high-priority preemptors in a guaranteed or best-effort manner. This dynamic alignment significantly increases the efficiency of preemption and improves overall scheduled performance for LLM workloads by $55\%$.
Authors: Yiyong Sun, Jiajun He, Zhidi Lin, Wenqiang Pu, Feng Yin, Hing Cheung So
Abstract: Accurate prediction of mmWave time-varying channels is essential for mitigating the issue of channel aging in complex scenarios owing to high user mobility. Existing channel prediction methods have limitations: classical model-based methods often struggle to track highly nonlinear channel dynamics due to limited expert knowledge, while emerging data-driven methods typically require substantial labeled data for effective training and often lack interpretability. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel hybrid method that integrates a data-driven neural network into a conventional model-based workflow based on a state-space model (SSM), implicitly tracking complex channel dynamics from data without requiring precise expert knowledge. Additionally, a novel unsupervised learning strategy is developed to train the embedded neural network solely with unlabeled data. Theoretical analyses and ablation studies are conducted to interpret the enhanced benefits gained from the hybrid integration. Numerical simulations based on the 3GPP mmWave channel model corroborate the superior prediction accuracy of the proposed method, compared to state-of-the-art methods that are either purely model-based or data-driven. Furthermore, extensive experiments validate its robustness against various challenging factors, including among others severe channel variations and high noise levels.
Authors: Leo Cazenille, Maxime Toquebiau, Nicolas Lobato-Dauzier, Alessia Loi, Loona Macabre, Nathanael Aubert-Kato, Anthony Genot, Nicolas Bredeche
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of communication in improving coordination within robot swarms, focusing on a paradigm where learning and execution occur simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We highlight the role communication can play in addressing the credit assignment problem (individual contribution to the overall performance), and how it can be influenced by it. We propose a taxonomy of existing and future works on communication, focusing on information selection and physical abstraction as principal axes for classification: from low-level lossless compression with raw signal extraction and processing to high-level lossy compression with structured communication models. The paper reviews current research from evolutionary robotics, multi-agent (deep) reinforcement learning, language models, and biophysics models to outline the challenges and opportunities of communication in a collective of robots that continuously learn from one another through local message exchanges, illustrating a form of social learning.
Authors: Mingsen Du, Yanxuan Wei, Yingxia Tang, Xiangwei Zheng, Shoushui Wei, Cun Ji
Abstract: Multivariate time series classification is of great importance in practical applications and is a challenging task. However, deep neural network models such as Transformers exhibit high accuracy in multivariate time series classification but lack interpretability and fail to provide insights into the decision-making process. On the other hand, traditional approaches based on decision tree classifiers offer clear decision processes but relatively lower accuracy. Swin Transformer (ST) addresses these issues by leveraging self-attention mechanisms to capture both fine-grained local patterns and global patterns. It can also model multi-scale feature representation learning, thereby providing a more comprehensive representation of time series features. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose ST-Tree with interpretability for multivariate time series classification. Specifically, the ST-Tree model combines ST as the backbone network with an additional neural tree model. This integration allows us to fully leverage the advantages of ST in learning time series context while providing interpretable decision processes through the neural tree. This enables researchers to gain clear insights into the model's decision-making process and extract meaningful interpretations. Through experimental evaluations on 10 UEA datasets, we demonstrate that the ST-Tree model improves accuracy in multivariate time series classification tasks and provides interpretability through visualizing the decision-making process across different datasets.
Authors: Leon Kopitar, Primoz Kocbek, Lucija Gosak, Gregor Stiglic
Abstract: This review examines the development of abstractive NLP-based text summarization approaches and compares them to existing techniques for extractive summarization. A brief history of text summarization from the 1950s to the introduction of pre-trained language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) and Generative Pre-training Transformers (GPT) are presented. In total, 60 studies were identified in PubMed and Web of Science, of which 29 were excluded and 24 were read and evaluated for eligibility, resulting in the use of seven studies for further analysis. This chapter also includes a section with examples including an example of a comparison between GPT-3 and state-of-the-art GPT-4 solutions in scientific text summarisation. Natural language processing has not yet reached its full potential in the generation of brief textual summaries. As there are acknowledged concerns that must be addressed, we can expect gradual introduction of such models in practise.
Authors: Shiman Li, Jiayue Zhao, Shaolei Liu, Xiaokun Dai, Chenxi Zhang, Zhijian Song
Abstract: Deep learning-based medical image segmentation helps assist diagnosis and accelerate the treatment process while the model training usually requires large-scale dense annotation datasets. Weakly semi-supervised medical image segmentation is an essential application because it only requires a small amount of scribbles and a large number of unlabeled data to train the model, which greatly reduces the clinician's effort to fully annotate images. To handle the inadequate supervisory information challenge in weakly semi-supervised segmentation (WSSS), a SuperPixel-Propagated Pseudo-label (SP${}^3$) learning method is proposed, using the structural information contained in superpixel for supplemental information. Specifically, the annotation of scribbles is propagated to superpixels and thus obtains a dense annotation for supervised training. Since the quality of pseudo-labels is limited by the low-quality annotation, the beneficial superpixels selected by dynamic thresholding are used to refine pseudo-labels. Furthermore, aiming to alleviate the negative impact of noise in pseudo-label, superpixel-level uncertainty is incorporated to guide the pseudo-label supervision for stable learning. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tumor and organ segmentation datasets under the WSSS setting, using only 3\% of the annotation workload compared to fully supervised methods and attaining approximately 80\% Dice score. Additionally, our method outperforms eight weakly and semi-supervised methods under both weakly supervised and semi-supervised settings. Results of extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and annotation efficiency of our weakly semi-supervised segmentation, which can assist clinicians in achieving automated segmentation for organs or tumors quickly and ultimately benefit patients.
Authors: Mengxuan Li, Ke Liu, Hongyang Chen, Jiajun Bu, Hongwei Wang, Haishuai Wang
Abstract: Time series anomaly detection aims to identify unusual patterns in data or deviations from systems' expected behavior. The reconstruction-based methods are the mainstream in this task, which learn point-wise representation via unsupervised learning. However, the unlabeled anomaly points in training data may cause these reconstruction-based methods to learn and reconstruct anomalous data, resulting in the challenge of capturing normal patterns. In this paper, we propose a time series anomaly detection method based on implicit neural representation (INR) reconstruction, named TSINR, to address this challenge. Due to the property of spectral bias, TSINR enables prioritizing low-frequency signals and exhibiting poorer performance on high-frequency abnormal data. Specifically, we adopt INR to parameterize time series data as a continuous function and employ a transformer-based architecture to predict the INR of given data. As a result, the proposed TSINR method achieves the advantage of capturing the temporal continuity and thus is more sensitive to discontinuous anomaly data. In addition, we further design a novel form of INR continuous function to learn inter- and intra-channel information, and leverage a pre-trained large language model to amplify the intense fluctuations in anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSINR achieves superior overall performance on both univariate and multivariate time series anomaly detection benchmarks compared to other state-of-the-art reconstruction-based methods. Our codes are available.
Authors: Shaojie Bai, Mohammad Sadegh Talebi, Chengcheng Zhao, Peng Cheng, Jiming Chen
Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has recently been introduced into episodic reinforcement learning (RL) to formally address user privacy concerns in personalized services. Previous work mainly focuses on two trust models of DP: the central model, where a central agent is responsible for protecting users' sensitive data, and the (stronger) local model, where the protection occurs directly on the user side. However, they either require a trusted central agent or incur a significantly higher privacy cost, making it unsuitable for many scenarios. This work introduces a trust model stronger than the central model but with a lower privacy cost than the local model, leveraging the emerging \emph{shuffle} model of privacy. We present the first generic algorithm for episodic RL under the shuffle model, where a trusted shuffler randomly permutes a batch of users' data before sending it to the central agent. We then instantiate the algorithm using our proposed shuffle Privatizer, relying on a shuffle private binary summation mechanism. Our analysis shows that the algorithm achieves a near-optimal regret bound comparable to that of the centralized model and significantly outperforms the local model in terms of privacy cost.
Authors: Lijie Hu, Chenyang Ren, Huanyi Xie, Khouloud Saadi, Shu Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Di Wang
Abstract: Multi-modal Large Language models (MLLMs) are always trained on data from diverse and unreliable sources, which may contain misaligned or mislabeled text-image pairs. This frequently causes robustness issues and hallucinations, leading to performance degradation. Data valuation is an efficient way to detect and trace these misalignments. Nevertheless, existing methods are computationally expensive for MLLMs. While computationally efficient, the classical influence functions are inadequate for contrastive learning models because they were originally designed for pointwise loss. Additionally, contrastive learning involves minimizing the distance between the modalities of positive samples and maximizing the distance between the modalities of negative samples. This requires us to evaluate the influence of samples from both perspectives. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Extended Influence Function for Contrastive Loss (ECIF), an influence function crafted for contrastive loss. ECIF considers both positive and negative samples and provides a closed-form approximation of contrastive learning models, eliminating the need for retraining. Building upon ECIF, we develop a series of algorithms for data evaluation in MLLM, misalignment detection, and misprediction trace-back tasks. Experimental results demonstrate our ECIF advances the transparency and interpretability of MLLMs by offering a more accurate assessment of data impact and model alignment compared to traditional baseline methods.
Authors: Xianlong Wang, Hewen Pan, Hangtao Zhang, Minghui Li, Shengshan Hu, Ziqi Zhou, Lulu Xue, Peijin Guo, Yichen Wang, Wei Wan, Aishan Liu, Leo Yu Zhang
Abstract: Robotic manipulation refers to the autonomous handling and interaction of robots with objects using advanced techniques in robotics and artificial intelligence. The advent of powerful tools such as large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of these robots in environmental perception and decision-making. However, the introduction of these intelligent agents has led to security threats such as jailbreak attacks and adversarial attacks. In this research, we take a further step by proposing a backdoor attack specifically targeting robotic manipulation and, for the first time, implementing backdoor attack in the physical world. By embedding a backdoor visual language model into the visual perception module within the robotic system, we successfully mislead the robotic arm's operation in the physical world, given the presence of common items as triggers. Experimental evaluations in the physical world demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed backdoor attack.
Authors: Liangqi Lei, Keke Gai, Jing Yu, Liehuang Zhu, Qi Wu
Abstract: The personalization techniques of diffusion models succeed in generating specific concepts but also pose threats to copyright protection and illegal use. Model Watermarking is an effective method to prevent the unauthorized use of subject-driven or style-driven image generation, safeguarding concept copyrights. However, under the goal of concept-oriented protection, current watermarking schemes typically add watermarks to all images rather than applying them in a refined manner targeted at specific concepts. Additionally, the personalization techniques of diffusion models can easily remove watermarks. Existing watermarking methods struggle to achieve fine-grained watermark embedding with a few images of specific concept and prevent removal of watermarks through personalized fine-tuning. Therefore, we introduce a novel concept-oriented watermarking framework that seamlessly embeds imperceptible watermarks into the concept of diffusion models. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies to verify our framework. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Conceptwm-4EB3/.
Authors: Jinhao Jiang, Zhipeng Chen, Yingqian Min, Jie Chen, Xiaoxue Cheng, Jiapeng Wang, Yiru Tang, Haoxiang Sun, Jia Deng, Wayne Xin Zhao, Zheng Liu, Dong Yan, Jian Xie, Zhongyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract: Recently, test-time scaling has garnered significant attention from the research community, largely due to the substantial advancements of the o1 model released by OpenAI. By allocating more computational resources during the inference phase, large language models~(LLMs) can extensively explore the solution space by generating more thought tokens or diverse solutions, thereby producing more accurate responses. However, developing an o1-like reasoning approach is challenging, and researchers have been making various attempts to advance this open area of research. In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration into enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs through reward-guided tree search algorithms. This framework is implemented by integrating the policy model, reward model, and search algorithm. It is primarily constructed around a tree search algorithm, where the policy model navigates a dynamically expanding tree guided by a specially trained reward model. We thoroughly explore various design considerations necessary for implementing this framework and provide a detailed report of the technical aspects. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we focus on mathematical reasoning tasks and conduct extensive evaluations on four challenging datasets, significantly enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs.
Authors: Ruichuan An, Sihan Yang, Ming Lu, Kai Zeng, Yulin Luo, Ying Chen, Jiajun Cao, Hao Liang, Qi She, Shanghang Zhang, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: Current vision-language models (VLMs) show exceptional abilities across diverse tasks including visual question answering. To enhance user experience in practical applications, recent studies investigate VLM personalization to understand user-provided concepts. However, existing studies mainly focus on single-concept personalization, neglecting the existence and interplay of multiple concepts, which limits the real-world applicability of personalized VLMs. In this paper, we propose the first multi-concept personalization method named MC-LLaVA along with a high-quality multi-concept personalization dataset. Specifically, MC-LLaVA uses a joint training strategy incorporating multiple concepts in a single training step, allowing VLMs to perform accurately in multi-concept personalization. To reduce the cost of joint training, MC-LLaVA leverages visual token information for concept token initialization, yielding improved concept representation and accelerating joint training. To advance multi-concept personalization research, we further contribute a high-quality dataset. We carefully collect images from various movies that contain multiple characters and manually generate the multi-concept question-answer samples. Our dataset features diverse movie types and question-answer types. We conduct comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate that MC-LLaVA can achieve impressive multi-concept personalized responses, paving the way for VLMs to become better user-specific assistants. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/arctanxarc/MC-LLaVA.
Authors: Tao Fan, Yan Kang, Guoqiang Ma, Lixin Fan, Kai Chen, Qiang Yang
Abstract: By adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to domain-specific tasks or enriching them with domain-specific knowledge, we can fully harness the capabilities of LLMs. Nonetheless, a gap persists in achieving simultaneous mutual enhancement between the server's LLM and the downstream clients' Small Language Models (SLMs). To address this, we propose FedCoLLM, a novel and parameter-efficient federated framework designed for co-tuning LLMs and SLMs. This approach is aimed at adaptively transferring server-side LLMs knowledge to clients' SLMs while simultaneously enriching the LLMs with domain insights from the clients. To accomplish this, FedCoLLM utilizes lightweight adapters in conjunction with SLMs, facilitating knowledge exchange between server and clients in a manner that respects data privacy while also minimizing computational and communication overhead. Our evaluation of FedCoLLM, utilizing various public LLMs and SLMs across a range of NLP text generation tasks, reveals that the performance of clients' SLMs experiences notable improvements with the assistance of the LLMs. Simultaneously, the LLMs enhanced via FedCoLLM achieves comparable performance to that obtained through direct fine-tuning on clients' data.
Authors: Mingchao Qi, Yuanjin Li, Xing Liu, Zhengxiong Liu, Panfeng Huang
Abstract: Deploying robots in open-world environments involves complex tasks characterized by long sequences and rich interactions, necessitating efficient transfer of robotic skills across diverse and complex scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a skill library framework based on knowledge graphs, which endows robots with high-level skill awareness and spatial semantic understanding. The framework hierarchically organizes operational knowledge by constructing a "task graph" and a "scene graph" to represent task and scene semantic information, respectively. We introduce a "state graph" to facilitate interaction between high-level task planning and low-level scene information. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical transfer framework for operational skills. At the task level, the framework integrates contextual learning and chain-of-thought prompting within a four-stage prompt paradigm, leveraging large language models' (LLMs) reasoning and generalization capabilities to achieve task-level subtask sequence transfer. At the motion level, an adaptive trajectory transfer method is developed using the A* algorithm and the skill library, enabling motion-level adaptive trajectory transfer. At the physical level, we introduce an adaptive contour extraction and posture perception method based on tactile perception. This method dynamically obtains high-precision contour and posture information from visual-tactile texture data and adjusts transferred skills, such as contact positions and postures, to ensure effectiveness in new environments. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Project website:https://github.com/MingchaoQi/skill_transfer
Authors: Allison Huang, Yulu Niki Pi, Carlos Mougan
Abstract: We explore how large language models (LLMs) can be influenced by prompting them to alter their initial decisions and align them with established ethical frameworks. Our study is based on two experiments designed to assess the susceptibility of LLMs to moral persuasion. In the first experiment, we examine the susceptibility to moral ambiguity by evaluating a Base Agent LLM on morally ambiguous scenarios and observing how a Persuader Agent attempts to modify the Base Agent's initial decisions. The second experiment evaluates the susceptibility of LLMs to align with predefined ethical frameworks by prompting them to adopt specific value alignments rooted in established philosophical theories. The results demonstrate that LLMs can indeed be persuaded in morally charged scenarios, with the success of persuasion depending on factors such as the model used, the complexity of the scenario, and the conversation length. Notably, LLMs of distinct sizes but from the same company produced markedly different outcomes, highlighting the variability in their susceptibility to ethical persuasion.
Authors: Lars Nieradzik, Henrike Stephani, J\"ordis Sieburg-Rockel, Stephanie Helmling, Andrea Olbrich, Stephanie Wrage, Janis Keuper
Abstract: Wood species identification plays a crucial role in various industries, from ensuring the legality of timber products to advancing ecological conservation efforts. This paper introduces WoodYOLO, a novel object detection algorithm specifically designed for microscopic wood fiber analysis. Our approach adapts the YOLO architecture to address the challenges posed by large, high-resolution microscopy images and the need for high recall in localization of the cell type of interest (vessel elements). Our results show that WoodYOLO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving performance gains of 12.9% and 6.5% in F2 score over YOLOv10 and YOLOv7, respectively. This improvement in automated wood cell type localization capabilities contributes to enhancing regulatory compliance, supporting sustainable forestry practices, and promoting biodiversity conservation efforts globally.
Authors: Xinchen Luo, Jiangxia Cao, Tianyu Sun, Jinkai Yu, Rui Huang, Wei Yuan, Hezheng Lin, Yichen Zheng, Shiyao Wang, Qigen Hu, Changqing Qiu, Jiaqi Zhang, Xu Zhang, Zhiheng Yan, Jingming Zhang, Simin Zhang, Mingxing Wen, Zhaojie Liu, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
Abstract: In recent years, with the significant evolution of multi-modal large models, many recommender researchers realized the potential of multi-modal information for user interest modeling. In industry, a wide-used modeling architecture is a cascading paradigm: (1) first pre-training a multi-modal model to provide omnipotent representations for downstream services; (2) The downstream recommendation model takes the multi-modal representation as additional input to fit real user-item behaviours. Although such paradigm achieves remarkable improvements, however, there still exist two problems that limit model performance: (1) Representation Unmatching: The pre-trained multi-modal model is always supervised by the classic NLP/CV tasks, while the recommendation models are supervised by real user-item interaction. As a result, the two fundamentally different tasks' goals were relatively separate, and there was a lack of consistent objective on their representations; (2) Representation Unlearning: The generated multi-modal representations are always stored in cache store and serve as extra fixed input of recommendation model, thus could not be updated by recommendation model gradient, further unfriendly for downstream training. Inspired by the two difficulties challenges in downstream tasks usage, we introduce a quantitative multi-modal framework to customize the specialized and trainable multi-modal information for different downstream models.
Authors: Longju Bai, Angana Borah, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive performance across various multimodal tasks. However, their effectiveness in cross-cultural contexts remains limited due to the predominantly Western-centric nature of most data and models. Conversely, multi-agent models have shown significant capability in solving complex tasks. Our study evaluates the collective performance of LMMs in a multi-agent interaction setting for the novel task of cultural image captioning. Our contributions are as follows: (1) We introduce MosAIC, a Multi-Agent framework to enhance cross-cultural Image Captioning using LMMs with distinct cultural personas; (2) We provide a dataset of culturally enriched image captions in English for images from China, India, and Romania across three datasets: GeoDE, GD-VCR, CVQA; (3) We propose a culture-adaptable metric for evaluating cultural information within image captions; and (4) We show that the multi-agent interaction outperforms single-agent models across different metrics, and offer valuable insights for future research. Our dataset and models can be accessed at https://github.com/MichiganNLP/MosAIC.
Authors: Nicholas Chow, Bo Fu
Abstract: This paper showcases AdaptLIL, a real-time adaptive link-indented list ontology mapping visualization that uses eye gaze as the primary input source. Through a multimodal combination of real-time systems, deep learning, and web development applications, this system uniquely curtails graphical overlays (adaptations) to pairwise mappings of link-indented list ontology visualizations for individual users based solely on their eye gaze.
Authors: Zishuo Feng, Feng Cao
Abstract: The task of converting Hanyu Pinyin abbreviations to Chinese characters represents a significant branch within the domain of Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC). This task is typically one of text-length alignment, however, due to the limited informational content in pinyin abbreviations, achieving accurate conversion is challenging. In this paper, we propose CNMBert which stands for zh-CN Pinyin Multi-mask Bert Model as a solution to this issue. CNMBert surpasses few-shot GPT models, achieving a 59.63% MRR on a 10,424-sample Hanyu Pinyin abbreviation test dataset.
Authors: Jeffrey N. Clark, Matthew Wragg, Emily Nielsen, Miquel Perello-Nieto, Nawid Keshtmand, Michael Ambler, Shiv Sharma, Christopher P. Bourdeaux, Amberly Brigden, Raul Santos-Rodriguez
Abstract: There is a growing need to understand how digital systems can support clinical decision-making, particularly as artificial intelligence (AI) models become increasingly complex and less human-interpretable. This complexity raises concerns about trustworthiness, impacting safe and effective adoption of such technologies. Improved understanding of decision-making processes and requirements for explanations coming from decision support tools is a vital component in providing effective explainable solutions. This is particularly relevant in the data-intensive, fast-paced environments of intensive care units (ICUs). To explore these issues, group interviews were conducted with seven ICU clinicians, representing various roles and experience levels. Thematic analysis revealed three core themes: (T1) ICU decision-making relies on a wide range of factors, (T2) the complexity of patient state is challenging for shared decision-making, and (T3) requirements and capabilities of AI decision support systems. We include design recommendations from clinical input, providing insights to inform future AI systems for intensive care.
Authors: Egor Kovalev, Georgii Bychkov, Khaled Abud, Aleksandr Gushchin, Anna Chistyakova, Sergey Lavrushkin, Dmitriy Vatolin, Anastasia Antsiferova
Abstract: Adversarial robustness of neural networks is an increasingly important area of research, combining studies on computer vision models, large language models (LLMs), and others. With the release of JPEG AI - the first standard for end-to-end neural image compression (NIC) methods - the question of its robustness has become critically significant. JPEG AI is among the first international, real-world applications of neural-network-based models to be embedded in consumer devices. However, research on NIC robustness has been limited to open-source codecs and a narrow range of attacks. This paper proposes a new methodology for measuring NIC robustness to adversarial attacks. We present the first large-scale evaluation of JPEG AI's robustness, comparing it with other NIC models. Our evaluation results and code are publicly available online (link is hidden for a blind review).
Authors: Ruisi He, Nicola D. Cicco, Bo Ai, Mi Yang, Yang Miao, Mate Boban
Abstract: Accurate channel models are the prerequisite for communication-theoretic investigations as well as system design. Channel modeling generally relies on statistical and deterministic approaches. However, there are still significant limits for the traditional modeling methods in terms of accuracy, generalization ability, and computational complexity. The fundamental reason is that establishing a quantified and accurate mapping between physical environment and channel characteristics becomes increasing challenging for modern communication systems. Here, in the context of COST CA20120 Action, we evaluate and discuss the feasibility and implementation of using artificial intelligence (AI) for channel modeling, and explore where the future of this field lies. Firstly, we present a framework of AI-based channel modeling to characterize complex wireless channels. Then, we highlight in detail some major challenges and present the possible solutions: i) estimating the uncertainty of AI-based channel predictions, ii) integrating prior knowledge of propagation to improve generalization capabilities, and iii) interpretable AI for channel modeling. We present and discuss illustrative numerical results to showcase the capabilities of AI-based channel modeling.
Authors: Meng Zhou, Yuxuan Zhang, Xiaolan Xu, Jiayi Wang, Farzad Khalvati
Abstract: Multimodal medical image fusion is a crucial task that combines complementary information from different imaging modalities into a unified representation, thereby enhancing diagnostic accuracy and treatment planning. While deep learning methods, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers, have significantly advanced fusion performance, some of the existing CNN-based methods fall short in capturing fine-grained multiscale and edge features, leading to suboptimal feature integration. Transformer-based models, on the other hand, are computationally intensive in both the training and fusion stages, making them impractical for real-time clinical use. Moreover, the clinical application of fused images remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN-based architecture that addresses these limitations by introducing a Dilated Residual Attention Network Module for effective multiscale feature extraction, coupled with a gradient operator to enhance edge detail learning. To ensure fast and efficient fusion, we present a parameter-free fusion strategy based on the weighted nuclear norm of softmax, which requires no additional computations during training or inference. Extensive experiments, including a downstream brain tumor classification task, demonstrate that our approach outperforms various baseline methods in terms of visual quality, texture preservation, and fusion speed, making it a possible practical solution for real-world clinical applications. The code will be released at https://github.com/simonZhou86/en_dran.
Authors: Adri\'an Morales-Pastor, Raquel V\'azquez-Reza, Mi{\l}osz Wiecz\'or, Cl\`audia Valverde, Manel Gil-Sorribes, Bertran Miquel-Oliver, \'Alvaro Ciudad, Alexis Molina
Abstract: RNA is a vital biomolecule with numerous roles and functions within cells, and interest in targeting it for therapeutic purposes has grown significantly in recent years. However, fully understanding and predicting RNA behavior, particularly for applications in drug discovery, remains a challenge due to the complexity of RNA structures and interactions. While foundational models in biology have demonstrated success in modeling several biomolecules, especially proteins, achieving similar breakthroughs for RNA has proven more difficult. Current RNA models have yet to match the performance observed in the protein domain, leaving an important gap in computational biology. In this work, we present ChaRNABERT, a suite of sample and parameter-efficient RNA foundational models, that through a learnable tokenization process, are able to reach state-of-the-art performance on several tasks in established benchmarks. We extend its testing in relevant downstream tasks such as RNA-protein and aptamer-protein interaction prediction. Weights and inference code for ChaRNABERT-8M will be provided for academic research use. The other models will be available upon request.
Authors: G\"unel Jabbarl{\i}, Murat Kurt
Abstract: Accurate and fast recognition of forgeries is an issue of great importance in the fields of artificial intelligence, image processing and object detection. Recognition of forgeries of facial imagery is the process of classifying and defining the faces in it by analyzing real-world facial images. This process is usually accomplished by extracting features from an image, using classifier algorithms, and correctly interpreting the results. Recognizing forgeries of facial imagery correctly can encounter many different challenges. For example, factors such as changing lighting conditions, viewing faces from different angles can affect recognition performance, and background complexity and perspective changes in facial images can make accurate recognition difficult. Despite these difficulties, significant progress has been made in the field of forgery detection. Deep learning algorithms, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have significantly improved forgery detection performance. This study focuses on image processing-based forgery detection using Fake-Vs-Real-Faces (Hard) [10] and 140k Real and Fake Faces [61] data sets. Both data sets consist of two classes containing real and fake facial images. In our study, two lightweight deep learning models are proposed to conduct forgery detection using these images. Additionally, 8 different pretrained CNN architectures were tested on both data sets and the results were compared with newly developed lightweight CNN models. It's shown that the proposed lightweight deep learning models have minimum number of layers. It's also shown that the proposed lightweight deep learning models detect forgeries of facial imagery accurately, and computationally efficiently. Although the data set consists only of face images, the developed models can also be used in other two-class object recognition problems.
Authors: Shengkun Tang, Liqun Ma, Haonan Li, Mingjie Sun, Zhiqiang Shen
Abstract: The typical selective state-space model (SSM) of Mamba addresses several limitations of Transformers, such as quadratic computational complexity with sequence length and significant inference-time memory requirements due to the key-value cache. However, the growing size of Mamba models continues to pose training and deployment challenges and raises environmental concerns due to considerable energy consumption. In this work, we introduce Bi-Mamba, a scalable and powerful 1-bit Mamba architecture designed for more efficient large language models with multiple sizes across 780M, 1.3B, and 2.7B. Bi-Mamba models are trained from scratch on data volume as regular LLM pertaining using an autoregressive distillation loss. Extensive experimental results on language modeling demonstrate that Bi-Mamba achieves performance comparable to its full-precision counterparts (e.g., FP16 or BF16) and much better accuracy than post-training-binarization (PTB) Mamba baselines, while significantly reducing memory footprint and energy consumption compared to the original Mamba model. Our study pioneers a new linear computational complexity LLM framework under low-bit representation and facilitates the future design of specialized hardware tailored for efficient 1-bit Mamba-based LLMs.
Authors: J. Middelhuis, R. Lo Bianco, E. Scherzer, Z. A. Bukhsh, I. J. B. F. Adan, R. M. Dijkman
Abstract: Efficient allocation of resources to activities is pivotal in executing business processes but remains challenging. While resource allocation methodologies are well-established in domains like manufacturing, their application within business process management remains limited. Existing methods often do not scale well to large processes with numerous activities or optimize across multiple cases. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing two learning-based methods for resource allocation in business processes to minimize the average cycle time of cases. The first method leverages Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to learn policies by allocating resources to activities. The second method is a score-based value function approximation approach, which learns the weights of a set of curated features to prioritize resource assignments. We evaluated the proposed approaches on six distinct business processes with archetypal process flows, referred to as scenarios, and three realistically sized business processes, referred to as composite business processes, which are a combination of the scenarios. We benchmarked our methods against traditional heuristics and existing resource allocation methods. The results show that our methods learn adaptive resource allocation policies that outperform or are competitive with the benchmarks in five out of six scenarios. The DRL approach outperforms all benchmarks in all three composite business processes and finds a policy that is, on average, 12.7% better than the best-performing benchmark.
Authors: Chuyue Sun, Ying Sheng, Oded Padon, Clark Barrett
Abstract: The use of large language models for code generation is a rapidly growing trend in software development. However, without effective methods for ensuring the correctness of generated code, this trend could lead to undesirable outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for addressing this challenge: the Clover paradigm, short for Closed-Loop Verifiable Code Generation, which uses consistency checking to provide a strong filter for incorrect code. Clover performs consistency checks among code, docstrings, and formal annotations. The checker is implemented using a novel integration of formal verification tools and large language models. We provide a theoretical analysis to support our thesis that Clover should be effective at consistency checking. We also empirically investigate its performance on a hand-designed dataset (CloverBench) featuring annotated Dafny programs at a textbook level of difficulty. Experimental results show that for this dataset: (i) LLMs are reasonably successful at automatically generating formal specifications; and (ii) our consistency checker achieves a promising acceptance rate (up to 87%) for correct instances while maintaining zero tolerance for adversarial incorrect ones (no false positives). Clover also discovered 6 incorrect programs in the existing human-written dataset MBPP-DFY-50.
Authors: Juan-Ni Wu, Tong Wang, Li-Juan Tang, Hai-Long Wu, Ru-Qin Yu
Abstract: Language models demonstrate fundamental abilities in syntax, semantics, and reasoning, though their performance often depends significantly on the inputs they process. This study introduces TSIS (Simplified TSID) and its variants:TSISD (TSIS with Depth-First Search), TSISO (TSIS in Order), and TSISR (TSIS in Random), as integral components of the t-SMILES framework. These additions complete the framework's design, providing diverse approaches to molecular representation. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments employing deep generative models, including GPT, diffusion models, and reinforcement learning, the findings reveal that the hierarchical structure of t-SMILES is more straightforward to parse than initially anticipated. Furthermore, t-SMILES consistently outperforms other linear representations such as SMILES, SELFIES, and SAFE, demonstrating superior convergence speed and enhanced generalization capabilities.
Authors: Trilok Padhi, Ugur Kursuncu, Yaman Kumar, Valerie L. Shalin, Lane Peterson Fronczek
Abstract: The digital landscape continually evolves with multimodality, enriching the online experience for users. Creators and marketers aim to weave subtle contextual cues from various modalities into congruent content to engage users with a harmonious message. This interplay of multimodal cues is often a crucial factor in attracting users' attention. However, this richness of multimodality presents a challenge to computational modeling, as the semantic contextual cues spanning across modalities need to be unified to capture the true holistic meaning of the multimodal content. This contextual meaning is critical in attracting user engagement as it conveys the intended message of the brand or the organization. In this work, we incorporate external commonsense knowledge from knowledge graphs to enhance the representation of multimodal data using compact Visual Language Models (VLMs) and predict the success of multi-modal crowdfunding campaigns. Our results show that external knowledge commonsense bridges the semantic gap between text and image modalities, and the enhanced knowledge-infused representations improve the predictive performance of models for campaign success upon the baselines without knowledge. Our findings highlight the significance of contextual congruence in online multimodal content for engaging and successful crowdfunding campaigns.
Authors: Benjamin Roth, Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo, Yuxi Xia, Saskia Kaltenbrunner, Christoph Korab
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are often criticized for their inherent bias and for their lack of control, accountability, and transparency. Consequently, regulatory bodies struggle with containing this technology's potential negative side effects. High-level requirements such as fairness and robustness need to be formalized into concrete specification metrics, imperfect proxies that capture isolated aspects of the underlying requirements. Given possible trade-offs between different metrics and their vulnerability to over-optimization, integrating specification metrics in system development processes is not trivial. This paper defines specification overfitting, a scenario where systems focus excessively on specified metrics to the detriment of high-level requirements and task performance. We present an extensive literature survey to categorize how researchers propose, measure, and optimize specification metrics in several AI fields (e.g., natural language processing, computer vision, reinforcement learning). Using a keyword-based search on papers from major AI conferences and journals between 2018 and mid-2023, we identify and analyze 74 papers that propose or optimize specification metrics. We find that although most papers implicitly address specification overfitting (e.g., by reporting more than one specification metric), they rarely discuss which role specification metrics should play in system development or explicitly define the scope and assumptions behind metric formulations.
Authors: Rui Xu, Xintao Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Siyu Yuan, Xinfeng Yuan, Jiaqing Liang, Zulong Chen, Xiaoqing Dong, Yanghua Xiao
Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) simulate humans in making important decisions? Recent research has unveiled the potential of using LLMs to develop role-playing language agents (RPLAs), mimicking mainly the knowledge and tones of various characters. However, imitative decision-making necessitates a more nuanced understanding of personas. In this paper, we benchmark the ability of LLMs in persona-driven decision-making. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can predict characters' decisions provided by the preceding stories in high-quality novels. Leveraging character analyses written by literary experts, we construct a dataset LIFECHOICE comprising 1,462 characters' decision points from 388 books. Then, we conduct comprehensive experiments on LIFECHOICE, with various LLMs and RPLA methodologies. The results demonstrate that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit promising capabilities in this task, yet substantial room for improvement remains. Hence, we further propose the CHARMAP method, which adopts persona-based memory retrieval and significantly advances RPLAs on this task, achieving 5.03% increase in accuracy.
Authors: Yanggyu Lee, Suchae Jeong, Jihie Kim
Abstract: LLMs trained in the understanding of programming syntax are now providing effective assistance to developers and are being used in programming education such as in generation of coding problem examples or providing code explanations. A key aspect of programming education is understanding and dealing with error message. However, 'logical errors' in which the program operates against the programmer's intentions do not receive error messages from the compiler. In this study, building on existing research on programming errors, we first define the types of logical errors that can occur in programming in general. Based on the definition, we propose an effective approach for detecting logical errors with LLMs that makes use of relations among error types in the Chain-of-Thought and Tree-of-Thought prompts. The experimental results indicate that when such logical error descriptions in the prompt are used, the average classifition performance is about 21% higher than the ones without them. We also conducted an experiment for exploiting the relations among errors in generating a new logical error dataset using LLMs. As there is very limited dataset for logical errors such benchmark dataset can be very useful for various programming related applications. We expect that our work can assist novice programmers in identifying the causes of code errors and correct them more effectively.
Authors: Sohini Roychowdhury, Marko Krema, Anvar Mahammad, Brian Moore, Arijit Mukherjee, Punit Prakashchandra
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with retrieval augmented-generation (RAG) have been the optimal choice for scalable generative AI solutions in the recent past. Although RAG implemented with AI agents (agentic-RAG) has been recently popularized, its suffers from unstable cost and unreliable performances for Enterprise-level data-practices. Most existing use-cases that incorporate RAG with LLMs have been either generic or extremely domain specific, thereby questioning the scalability and generalizability of RAG-LLM approaches. In this work, we propose a unique LLM-based system where multiple LLMs can be invoked to enable data authentication, user-query routing, data-retrieval and custom prompting for question-answering capabilities from Enterprise-data tables. The source tables here are highly fluctuating and large in size and the proposed framework enables structured responses in under 10 seconds per query. Additionally, we propose a five metric scoring module that detects and reports hallucinations in the LLM responses. Our proposed system and scoring metrics achieve >90% confidence scores across hundreds of user queries in the sustainability, financial health and social media domains. Extensions to the proposed extreme RAG architectures can enable heterogeneous source querying using LLMs.
Authors: Qian Niu, Junyu Liu, Ziqian Bi, Pohsun Feng, Benji Peng, Keyu Chen, Ming Li, Lawrence KQ Yan, Yichao Zhang, Caitlyn Heqi Yin, Cheng Fei, Tianyang Wang, Yunze Wang, Silin Chen
Abstract: This comprehensive review explores the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs) and cognitive science, examining similarities and differences between LLMs and human cognitive processes. We analyze methods for evaluating LLMs cognitive abilities and discuss their potential as cognitive models. The review covers applications of LLMs in various cognitive fields, highlighting insights gained for cognitive science research. We assess cognitive biases and limitations of LLMs, along with proposed methods for improving their performance. The integration of LLMs with cognitive architectures is examined, revealing promising avenues for enhancing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Key challenges and future research directions are identified, emphasizing the need for continued refinement of LLMs to better align with human cognition. This review provides a balanced perspective on the current state and future potential of LLMs in advancing our understanding of both artificial and human intelligence.
Authors: 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 the 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. To address the intra-user generalization challenge, this work introduces CRoP, a novel static personalization approach. CRoP leverages off-the-shelf pre-trained models as generic starting points and captures user-specific traits through adaptive pruning on a minimal sub-network while preserving generic knowledge in the remaining parameters. CRoP demonstrates superior personalization effectiveness and intra-user robustness across four human-sensing datasets, including two from real-world health domains, underscoring 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: Mingde Zhao, Tristan Sylvain, Doina Precup, Yoshua Bengio
Abstract: Target-directed agents utilize self-generated targets, to guide their behaviors for better generalization. These agents are prone to blindly chasing problematic targets, resulting in worse generalization and safety catastrophes. We show that these behaviors can be results of delusions, stemming from improper designs around training: the agent may naturally come to hold false beliefs about certain targets. We identify delusions via intuitive examples in controlled environments, and investigate their causes and mitigations. With the insights, we demonstrate how we can make agents address delusions preemptively and autonomously. We validate empirically the effectiveness of the proposed strategies in correcting delusional behaviors and improving out-of-distribution generalization.
Authors: Antonio A. Chaves, Mauricio G. C. Resende, Martin J. A. Schuetz, J. Kyle Brubaker, Helmut G. Katzgraber, Edilson F. de Arruda, Ricardo M. A. Silva
Abstract: This paper presents the Random-Key Optimizer (RKO), a versatile and efficient stochastic local search method tailored for combinatorial optimization problems. Using the random-key concept, RKO encodes solutions as vectors of random keys that are subsequently decoded into feasible solutions via problem-specific decoders. The RKO framework is able to combine a plethora of classic metaheuristics, each capable of operating independently or in parallel, with solution sharing facilitated through an elite solution pool. This modular approach allows for the adaptation of various metaheuristics, including simulated annealing, iterated local search, and greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, among others. The efficacy of the RKO framework, implemented in C++, is demonstrated through its application to three NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems: the alpha-neighborhood p-median problem, the tree of hubs location problem, and the node-capacitated graph partitioning problem. The results highlight the framework's ability to produce high-quality solutions across diverse problem domains, underscoring its potential as a robust tool for combinatorial optimization.
Authors: Jun-hao (Leo), Xu
Abstract: Numerous studies have been proposed to detect fake news focusing on multi-modalities based on machine and/or deep learning. However, studies focusing on graph-based structures using geometric deep learning are lacking. To address this challenge, we introduce the Multimodal Adaptive Graph-based Intelligent Classification (aptly referred to as MAGIC) for fake news detection. Specifically, the Encoder Representations from Transformers was used for text vectorization whilst ResNet50 was used for images. A comprehensive information interaction graph was built using the adaptive Graph Attention Network before classifying the multimodal input through the Softmax function. MAGIC was trained and tested on two fake news datasets, that is, Fakeddit (English) and Multimodal Fake News Detection (Chinese), with the model achieving an accuracy of 98.8\% and 86.3\%, respectively. Ablation experiments also revealed MAGIC to yield superior performance across both the datasets. Findings show that a graph-based deep learning adaptive model is effective in detecting multimodal fake news, surpassing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Uttamasha Monjoree, Wei Yan
Abstract: Spatial intelligence is important in Architecture, Construction, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and Medicine. Understanding three-dimensional (3D) spatial rotations can involve verbal descriptions and visual or interactive examples, illustrating how objects change orientation in 3D space. Recent studies show Artificial Intelligence (AI) with language and vision capabilities still face limitations in spatial reasoning. In this paper, we have studied generative AI's spatial capabilities of understanding rotations of objects utilizing its image and language processing features. We examined the spatial intelligence of the GPT-4 model with vision in understanding spatial rotation process with diagrams based on the Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Visualization of Rotations (Revised PSVT:R). Next, we incorporated a layer of coordinate system axes on Revised PSVT:R to study the variations in GPT-4's performance. We also examined GPT-4's understanding of 3D rotations in Augmented Reality (AR) scenes that visualize spatial rotations of an object in 3D space and observed increased accuracy of GPT-4's understanding of the rotations by adding supplementary textual information depicting the rotation process or mathematical representations of the rotation (e.g., matrices). The results indicate that while GPT-4 as a major current Generative AI model lacks the understanding of a spatial rotation process, it has the potential to understand the rotation process with additional information that can be provided by methods such as AR. By combining the potentials in spatial intelligence of AI with AR's interactive visualization abilities, we expect to offer enhanced guidance for students' spatial learning activities. Such spatial guidance can benefit understanding spatial transformations and additionally support processes like assembly, fabrication, and manufacturing.
Authors: Bo Wang, Dingwei Tan, Yen-Ling Kuo, Zhaowei Sun, Jeremy M. Wolfe, Tat-Jen Cham, Mengmi Zhang
Abstract: Imagine searching a collection of coins for quarters ($0.25$), dimes ($0.10$), nickels ($0.05$), and pennies ($0.01$)-a hybrid foraging task where observers look for multiple instances of multiple target types. In such tasks, how do target values and their prevalence influence foraging and eye movement behaviors (e.g., should you prioritize rare quarters or common nickels)? To explore this, we conducted human psychophysics experiments, revealing that humans are proficient reward foragers. Their eye fixations are drawn to regions with higher average rewards, fixation durations are longer on more valuable targets, and their cumulative rewards exceed chance, approaching the upper bound of optimal foragers. To probe these decision-making processes of humans, we developed a transformer-based Visual Forager (VF) model trained via reinforcement learning. Our VF model takes a series of targets, their corresponding values, and the search image as inputs, processes the images using foveated vision, and produces a sequence of eye movements along with decisions on whether to collect each fixated item. Our model outperforms all baselines, achieves cumulative rewards comparable to those of humans, and approximates human foraging behavior in eye movements and foraging biases within time-limited environments. Furthermore, stress tests on out-of-distribution tasks with novel targets, unseen values, and varying set sizes demonstrate the VF model's effective generalization. Our work offers valuable insights into the relationship between eye movements and decision-making, with our model serving as a powerful tool for further exploration of this connection. All data, code, and models will be made publicly available.
Authors: Liwei Ni, Rui Wang, Miao Liu, Xingyu Meng, Xiaoze Lin, Junfeng Liu, Guojie Luo, Zhufei Chu, Weikang Qian, Xiaoyan Yang, Biwei Xie, Xingquan Li, Huawei Li
Abstract: This paper introduces OpenLS-DGF, an adaptive logic synthesis dataset generation framework, to enhance machine learning~(ML) applications within the logic synthesis process. Previous dataset generation flows were tailored for specific tasks or lacked integrated machine learning capabilities. While OpenLS-DGF supports various machine learning tasks by encapsulating the three fundamental steps of logic synthesis: Boolean representation, logic optimization, and technology mapping. It preserves the original information in both Verilog and machine-learning-friendly GraphML formats. The verilog files offer semi-customizable capabilities, enabling researchers to insert additional steps and incrementally refine the generated dataset. Furthermore, OpenLS-DGF includes an adaptive circuit engine that facilitates the final dataset management and downstream tasks. The generated OpenLS-D-v1 dataset comprises 46 combinational designs from established benchmarks, totaling over 966,000 Boolean circuits. OpenLS-D-v1 supports integrating new data features, making it more versatile for new challenges. This paper demonstrates the versatility of OpenLS-D-v1 through four distinct downstream tasks: circuit classification, circuit ranking, quality of results (QoR) prediction, and probability prediction. Each task is chosen to represent essential steps of logic synthesis, and the experimental results show the generated dataset from OpenLS-DGF achieves prominent diversity and applicability. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Logic-Factory/ACE/blob/master/OpenLS-DGF/readme.md.
URLs: https://github.com/Logic-Factory/ACE/blob/master/OpenLS-DGF/readme.md.
Authors: Xinrui Yan, Jiangyan Yi, Jianhua Tao, Jie Chen
Abstract: The rapid progress of deep speech synthesis models has posed significant threats to society such as malicious manipulation of content. This has led to an increase in studies aimed at detecting so-called deepfake audio. However, existing works focus on the binary detection of real audio and fake audio. In real-world scenarios such as model copyright protection and digital evidence forensics, binary classification alone is insufficient. It is essential to identify the source of deepfake audio. Therefore, audio deepfake attribution has emerged as a new challenge. To this end, we designed the first deepfake audio dataset for the attribution of audio generation tools, called Audio Deepfake Attribution (ADA), and conducted a comprehensive investigation on system fingerprints. To address the challenges of attribution of continuously emerging unknown audio generation tools in the real world, we propose the Class-Representation Multi-Center Learning (CRML) method for open-set audio deepfake attribution (OSADA). CRML enhances the global directional variation of representations, ensuring the learning of discriminative representations with strong intra-class similarity and inter-class discrepancy among known classes. Finally, the strong class discrimination capability learned from known classes is extended to both known and unknown classes. Experimental results demonstrate that the CRML method effectively addresses open-set risks in real-world scenarios. The dataset is publicly available at: https://zenodo.org/records/13318702, and https://zenodo.org/records/13340666.
URLs: https://zenodo.org/records/13318702,, https://zenodo.org/records/13340666.
Authors: Xutong Liu, Jinhang Zuo, Siwei Wang, Carlee Joe-Wong, John C. S. Lui, Wei Chen
Abstract: In this paper, we study the combinatorial semi-bandits (CMAB) and focus on reducing the dependency of the batch-size $K$ in the regret bound, where $K$ is the total number of arms that can be pulled or triggered in each round. First, for the setting of CMAB with probabilistically triggered arms (CMAB-T), we discover a novel (directional) triggering probability and variance modulated (TPVM) condition that can replace the previously-used smoothness condition for various applications, such as cascading bandits, online network exploration and online influence maximization. Under this new condition, we propose a BCUCB-T algorithm with variance-aware confidence intervals and conduct regret analysis which reduces the $O(K)$ factor to $O(\log K)$ or $O(\log^2 K)$ in the regret bound, significantly improving the regret bounds for the above applications. Second, for the setting of non-triggering CMAB with independent arms, we propose a SESCB algorithm which leverages on the non-triggering version of the TPVM condition and completely removes the dependency on $K$ in the leading regret. As a valuable by-product, the regret analysis used in this paper can improve several existing results by a factor of $O(\log K)$. Finally, experimental evaluations show our superior performance compared with benchmark algorithms in different applications.
Authors: Su Jia, Qian Xie, Nathan Kallus, Peter I. Frazier
Abstract: In many applications of online decision making, the environment is non-stationary and it is therefore crucial to use bandit algorithms that handle changes. Most existing approaches are designed to protect against non-smooth changes, constrained only by total variation or Lipschitzness over time. However, in practice, environments often change {\em smoothly}, so such algorithms may incur higher-than-necessary regret. We study a non-stationary bandits problem where each arm's mean reward sequence can be embedded into a $\beta$-H\"older function, i.e., a function that is $(\beta-1)$-times Lipschitz-continuously differentiable. The non-stationarity becomes more smooth as $\beta$ increases. When $\beta=1$, this corresponds to the non-smooth regime, where \cite{besbes2014stochastic} established a minimax regret of $\tilde \Theta(T^{2/3})$. We show the first separation between the smooth (i.e., $\beta\ge 2$) and non-smooth (i.e., $\beta=1$) regimes by presenting a policy with $\tilde O(k^{4/5} T^{3/5})$ regret on any $k$-armed, $2$-H\"older instance. We complement this result by showing that the minimax regret on the $\beta$-H\"older family of instances is $\Omega(T^{(\beta+1)/(2\beta+1)})$ for any integer $\beta\ge 1$. This matches our upper bound for $\beta=2$ up to logarithmic factors. Furthermore, we validated the effectiveness of our policy through a comprehensive numerical study using real-world click-through rate data.
Authors: Zhenyi Wang, Enneng Yang, Li Shen, Heng Huang
Abstract: Forgetting refers to the loss or deterioration of previously acquired knowledge. While existing surveys on forgetting have primarily focused on continual learning, forgetting is a prevalent phenomenon observed in various other research domains within deep learning. Forgetting manifests in research fields such as generative models due to generator shifts, and federated learning due to heterogeneous data distributions across clients. Addressing forgetting encompasses several challenges, including balancing the retention of old task knowledge with fast learning of new task, managing task interference with conflicting goals, and preventing privacy leakage, etc. Moreover, most existing surveys on continual learning implicitly assume that forgetting is always harmful. In contrast, our survey argues that forgetting is a double-edged sword and can be beneficial and desirable in certain cases, such as privacy-preserving scenarios. By exploring forgetting in a broader context, we present a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon and highlight its potential advantages. Through this comprehensive survey, we aspire to uncover potential solutions by drawing upon ideas and approaches from various fields that have dealt with forgetting. By examining forgetting beyond its conventional boundaries, we hope to encourage the development of novel strategies for mitigating, harnessing, or even embracing forgetting in real applications. A comprehensive list of papers about forgetting in various research fields is available at \url{https://github.com/EnnengYang/Awesome-Forgetting-in-Deep-Learning}.
URLs: https://github.com/EnnengYang/Awesome-Forgetting-in-Deep-Learning
Authors: Qiao Jin, Zifeng Wang, Charalampos S. Floudas, Fangyuan Chen, Changlin Gong, Dara Bracken-Clarke, Elisabetta Xue, Yifan Yang, Jimeng Sun, Zhiyong Lu
Abstract: Patient recruitment is challenging for clinical trials. We introduce TrialGPT, an end-to-end framework for zero-shot patient-to-trial matching with large language models. TrialGPT comprises three modules: it first performs large-scale filtering to retrieve candidate trials (TrialGPT-Retrieval); then predicts criterion-level patient eligibility (TrialGPT-Matching); and finally generates trial-level scores (TrialGPT-Ranking). We evaluate TrialGPT on three cohorts of 183 synthetic patients with over 75,000 trial annotations. TrialGPT-Retrieval can recall over 90% of relevant trials using less than 6% of the initial collection. Manual evaluations on 1,015 patient-criterion pairs show that TrialGPT-Matching achieves an accuracy of 87.3% with faithful explanations, close to the expert performance. The TrialGPT-Ranking scores are highly correlated with human judgments and outperform the best-competing models by 43.8% in ranking and excluding trials. Furthermore, our user study reveals that TrialGPT can reduce the screening time by 42.6% in patient recruitment. Overall, these results have demonstrated promising opportunities for patient-to-trial matching with TrialGPT.
Authors: Wenzhuo Zhou, Annie Qu, Keiland W. Cooper, Norbert Fortin, Babak Shahbaba
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved promising performance in a variety of graph-focused tasks. Despite their success, however, existing GNNs suffer from two significant limitations: a lack of interpretability in their results due to their black-box nature, and an inability to learn representations of varying orders. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Model-agnostic Graph Neural Network (MaGNet) framework, which is able to effectively integrate information of various orders, extract knowledge from high-order neighbors, and provide meaningful and interpretable results by identifying influential compact graph structures. In particular, MaGNet consists of two components: an estimation model for the latent representation of complex relationships under graph topology, and an interpretation model that identifies influential nodes, edges, and node features. Theoretically, we establish the generalization error bound for MaGNet via empirical Rademacher complexity, and demonstrate its power to represent layer-wise neighborhood mixing. We conduct comprehensive numerical studies using simulated data to demonstrate the superior performance of MaGNet in comparison to several state-of-the-art alternatives. Furthermore, we apply MaGNet to a real-world case study aimed at extracting task-critical information from brain activity data, thereby highlighting its effectiveness in advancing scientific research.
Authors: Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Yaowei Wang, Da Cao, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie
Abstract: In contrast to conventional visual question answering, video-grounded dialog necessitates a profound understanding of both dialog history and video content for accurate response generation. Despite commendable progress made by existing approaches, they still face the challenges of incrementally understanding complex dialog history and assimilating video information. In response to these challenges, we present an iterative search and reasoning framework, which consists of a textual encoder, a visual encoder, and a generator. Specifically, we devise a path search and aggregation strategy in the textual encoder, mining core cues from dialog history that are pivotal to understanding the posed questions. Concurrently, our visual encoder harnesses an iterative reasoning network to extract and emphasize critical visual markers from videos, enhancing the depth of visual comprehension. Finally, we utilize the pre-trained GPT-2 model as our answer generator to decode the mined hidden clues into coherent and contextualized answers. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed framework.
Authors: Deqing Fu, Tian-Qi Chen, Robin Jia, Vatsal Sharan
Abstract: Transformers excel at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a first-order optimization method, to perform ICL. In this paper, we instead demonstrate that Transformers learn to approximate second-order optimization methods for ICL. For in-context linear regression, Transformers share a similar convergence rate as Iterative Newton's Method, both exponentially faster than GD. Empirically, predictions from successive Transformer layers closely match different iterations of Newton's Method linearly, with each middle layer roughly computing 3 iterations; thus, Transformers and Newton's method converge at roughly the same rate. In contrast, Gradient Descent converges exponentially more slowly. We also show that Transformers can learn in-context on ill-conditioned data, a setting where Gradient Descent struggles but Iterative Newton succeeds. Finally, to corroborate our empirical findings, we prove that Transformers can implement $k$ iterations of Newton's method with $k + \mathcal{O}(1)$ layers.
Authors: Dawen Zhang, Boming Xia, Yue Liu, Xiwei Xu, Thong Hoang, Zhenchang Xing, Mark Staples, Qinghua Lu, Liming Zhu
Abstract: The advent of Generative AI has marked a significant milestone in artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in generating realistic images, texts, and data patterns. However, these advancements come with heightened concerns over data privacy and copyright infringement, primarily due to the reliance on vast datasets for model training. Traditional approaches like differential privacy, machine unlearning, and data poisoning only offer fragmented solutions to these complex issues. Our paper delves into the multifaceted challenges of privacy and copyright protection within the data lifecycle. We advocate for integrated approaches that combines technical innovation with ethical foresight, holistically addressing these concerns by investigating and devising solutions that are informed by the lifecycle perspective. This work aims to catalyze a broader discussion and inspire concerted efforts towards data privacy and copyright integrity in Generative AI.
Authors: Ningyu Zhang, Yunzhi Yao, Bozhong Tian, Peng Wang, Shumin Deng, Mengru Wang, Zekun Xi, Shengyu Mao, Jintian Zhang, Yuansheng Ni, Siyuan Cheng, Ziwen Xu, Xin Xu, Jia-Chen Gu, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Xiaowei Zhu, Jun Zhou, Huajun Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary capabilities in understanding and generating text that closely mirrors human communication. However, a primary limitation lies in the significant computational demands during training, arising from their extensive parameterization. This challenge is further intensified by the dynamic nature of the world, necessitating frequent updates to LLMs to correct outdated information or integrate new knowledge, thereby ensuring their continued relevance. Note that many applications demand continual model adjustments post-training to address deficiencies or undesirable behaviors. There is an increasing interest in efficient, lightweight methods for on-the-fly model modifications. To this end, recent years have seen a burgeoning in the techniques of knowledge editing for LLMs, which aim to efficiently modify LLMs' behaviors within specific domains while preserving overall performance across various inputs. In this paper, we first define the knowledge editing problem and then provide a comprehensive review of cutting-edge approaches. Drawing inspiration from educational and cognitive research theories, we propose a unified categorization criterion that classifies knowledge editing methods into three groups: resorting to external knowledge, merging knowledge into the model, and editing intrinsic knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce a new benchmark, KnowEdit, for a comprehensive empirical evaluation of representative knowledge editing approaches. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of knowledge location, which can give a deeper understanding of the knowledge structures inherent within LLMs. Finally, we discuss several potential applications of knowledge editing, outlining its broad and impactful implications.
Authors: Pittawat Taveekitworachai, Febri Abdullah, Ruck Thawonmas
Abstract: This paper presents null-shot prompting. Null-shot prompting exploits hallucination in large language models (LLMs) by instructing LLMs to utilize information from the "Examples" section that never exists within the provided context to perform a task. While reducing hallucination is crucial and non-negligible for daily and critical uses of LLMs, we propose that in the current landscape in which these LLMs still hallucinate, it is possible, in fact, to exploit hallucination to increase performance in performing tasks compared to standard zero-shot prompting. Experiments with eight LLMs show improvements in performance across the majority of eight datasets, including reading comprehension, arithmetic reasoning, and closed-book question answering. The observed inconsistency in increased relative performance across the LLMs also potentially indicates a different degree of inherent hallucination in each model. These differences show that it is possible to utilize null-shot prompting as a way to detect degrees of hallucination in LLMs using existing benchmarking datasets. We also perform ablation studies, including experimenting with a modified version of null-shot prompting that incorporates ideas from zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, which shows different trends of results.
Authors: Azmine Toushik Wasi, MD Shafikul Islam, Adipto Raihan Akib
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained traction across different domains such as transportation, bio-informatics, language processing, and computer vision. However, there is a noticeable absence of research on applying GNNs to supply chain networks. Supply chain networks are inherently graph-like in structure, making them prime candidates for applying GNN methodologies. This opens up a world of possibilities for optimizing, predicting, and solving even the most complex supply chain problems. A major setback in this approach lies in the absence of real-world benchmark datasets to facilitate the research and resolution of supply chain problems using GNNs. To address the issue, we present a real-world benchmark dataset for temporal tasks, obtained from one of the leading FMCG companies in Bangladesh, focusing on supply chain planning for production purposes. The dataset includes temporal data as node features to enable sales predictions, production planning, and the identification of factory issues. By utilizing this dataset, researchers can employ GNNs to address numerous supply chain problems, thereby advancing the field of supply chain analytics and planning. Source: https://github.com/CIOL-SUST/SupplyGraph
Authors: Yuyuan Feng, Guosheng Hu, Xiaodong Li, Zhihong Zhang
Abstract: Health modeling of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) is crucial for safe and efficient energy management and carries significant socio-economic implications. Although Machine Learning (ML)-based State of Health (SOH) estimation methods have made significant progress in accuracy, the scarcity of high-quality LIB data remains a major obstacle. Existing transfer learning methods for cross-domain LIB SOH estimation have significantly alleviated the labeling burden of target LIB data, however, they still require sufficient unlabeled target data (UTD) for effective adaptation to the target domain. Collecting this UTD is challenging due to the time-consuming nature of degradation experiments. To address this issue, we introduce a practical Test-Time Training framework, BatteryTTT, which adapts the model continually using each UTD collected amidst degradation, thereby significantly reducing data collection time. To fully utilize each UTD, BatteryTTT integrates the inherent physical laws of modern LIBs into self-supervised learning, termed Physcics-Guided Test-Time Training. Additionally, we explore the potential of large language models (LLMs) in battery sequence modeling by evaluating their performance in SOH estimation through model reprogramming and prefix prompt adaptation. The combination of BatteryTTT and LLM modeling, termed GPT4Battery, achieves state-of-the-art generalization results across current LIB benchmarks. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical value and scalability of our approach by deploying it in our real-world battery management system (BMS) for 300Ah large-scale energy storage LIBs.
Authors: Daniel Beaglehole, Ioannis Mitliagkas, Atish Agarwala
Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms through which neural networks extract statistics from input-label pairs through feature learning is one of the most important unsolved problems in supervised learning. Prior works demonstrated that the gram matrices of the weights (the neural feature matrices, NFM) and the average gradient outer products (AGOP) become correlated during training, in a statement known as the neural feature ansatz (NFA). Through the NFA, the authors introduce mapping with the AGOP as a general mechanism for neural feature learning. However, these works do not provide a theoretical explanation for this correlation or its origins. In this work, we further clarify the nature of this correlation, and explain its emergence. We show that this correlation is equivalent to alignment between the left singular structure of the weight matrices and the newly defined pre-activation tangent features at each layer. We further establish that the alignment is driven by the interaction of weight changes induced by SGD with the pre-activation features, and analyze the resulting dynamics analytically at early times in terms of simple statistics of the inputs and labels. We prove the derivative alignment occurs almost surely in specific high dimensional settings. Finally, we introduce a simple optimization rule motivated by our analysis of the centered correlation which dramatically increases the NFA correlations at any given layer and improves the quality of features learned.
Authors: Zhiyuan Wang, Jinhao Duan, Chenxi Yuan, Qingyu Chen, Tianlong Chen, Yue Zhang, Ren Wang, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu
Abstract: Uncertainty estimation is crucial for the reliability of safety-critical human and artificial intelligence (AI) interaction systems, particularly in the domain of healthcare engineering. However, a robust and general uncertainty measure for free-form answers has not been well-established in open-ended medical question-answering (QA) tasks, where generative inequality introduces a large number of irrelevant words and sequences within the generated set for uncertainty quantification (UQ), which can lead to biases. This paper introduces Word-Sequence Entropy (WSE), a method that calibrates uncertainty at both the word and sequence levels, considering semantic relevance. WSE quantifies uncertainty in a way that is more closely aligned with the reliability of LLMs during uncertainty quantification (UQ). We compare WSE with six baseline methods on five free-form medical QA datasets, utilizing seven popular large language models (LLMs). Experimental results demonstrate that WSE exhibits superior performance in UQ under two standard criteria for correctness evaluation. Additionally, in terms of real-world medical QA applications, the performance of LLMs is significantly enhanced (e.g., a 6.36% improvement in model accuracy on the COVID-QA dataset) by employing responses with lower uncertainty that are identified by WSE as final answers, without any additional task-specific fine-tuning or architectural modifications.
Authors: Hiroki Furuta, Gouki Minegishi, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
Abstract: Grokking has been actively explored to reveal the mystery of delayed generalization and identifying interpretable representations and algorithms inside the grokked models is a suggestive hint to understanding its mechanism. Grokking on modular addition has been known to implement Fourier representation and its calculation circuits with trigonometric identities in Transformers. Considering the periodicity in modular arithmetic, the natural question is to what extent these explanations and interpretations hold for the grokking on other modular operations beyond addition. For a closer look, we first hypothesize that any modular operations can be characterized with distinctive Fourier representation or internal circuits, grokked models obtain common features transferable among similar operations, and mixing datasets with similar operations promotes grokking. Then, we extensively examine them by learning Transformers on complex modular arithmetic tasks, including polynomials. Our Fourier analysis and novel progress measure for modular arithmetic, Fourier Frequency Density and Fourier Coefficient Ratio, characterize distinctive internal representations of grokked models per modular operation; for instance, polynomials often result in the superposition of the Fourier components seen in elementary arithmetic, but clear patterns do not emerge in challenging non-factorizable polynomials. In contrast, our ablation study on the pre-grokked models reveals that the transferability among the models grokked with each operation can be only limited to specific combinations, such as from elementary arithmetic to linear expressions. Moreover, some multi-task mixtures may lead to co-grokking -- where grokking simultaneously happens for all the tasks -- and accelerate generalization, while others may not find optimal solutions. We provide empirical steps towards the interpretability of internal circuits.
Authors: Leon Lang, Davis Foote, Stuart Russell, Anca Dragan, Erik Jenner, Scott Emmons
Abstract: Past analyses of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) assume that the human evaluators fully observe the environment. What happens when human feedback is based only on partial observations? We formally define two failure cases: deceptive inflation and overjustification. Modeling the human as Boltzmann-rational w.r.t. a belief over trajectories, we prove conditions under which RLHF is guaranteed to result in policies that deceptively inflate their performance, overjustify their behavior to make an impression, or both. Under the new assumption that the human's partial observability is known and accounted for, we then analyze how much information the feedback process provides about the return function. We show that sometimes, the human's feedback determines the return function uniquely up to an additive constant, but in other realistic cases, there is irreducible ambiguity. We propose exploratory research directions to help tackle these challenges, experimentally validate both the theoretical concerns and potential mitigations, and caution against blindly applying RLHF in partially observable settings.
Authors: Ziting Wen, Oscar Pizarro, Stefan Williams
Abstract: Fine-tuning the pre-trained model with active learning holds promise for reducing annotation costs. However, this combination introduces significant computational costs, particularly with the growing scale of pre-trained models. Recent research has proposed proxy-based active learning, which pre-computes features to reduce computational costs. Yet, this approach often incurs a significant loss in active learning performance, sometimes outweighing the computational cost savings. This paper demonstrates that not all sample selection differences result in performance degradation. Furthermore, we show that suitable training methods can mitigate the decline of active learning performance caused by certain selection discrepancies. Building upon detailed analysis, we propose a novel method, aligned selection via proxy, which improves proxy-based active learning performance by updating pre-computed features and selecting a proper training method. Extensive experiments validate that our method improves the total cost of efficient active learning while maintaining computational efficiency. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZiTingW/asvp}.
Authors: Salim Rukhsar, Anil Kumar Tiwari
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely used tool for diagnosing brain disorders due to its high temporal resolution, non-invasive nature, and affordability. Manual analysis of EEG is labor-intensive and requires expertise, making automatic EEG interpretation crucial for reducing workload and accurately assessing seizures. In epilepsy diagnosis, prolonged EEG monitoring generates extensive data, often spanning hours, days, or even weeks. While machine learning techniques for automatic EEG interpretation have advanced significantly in recent decades, there remains a gap in its ability to efficiently analyze large datasets with a balance of accuracy and computational efficiency. To address the challenges mentioned above, an Attention Recurrent Neural Network (ARNN) is proposed that can process a large amount of data efficiently and accurately. This ARNN cell recurrently applies attention layers along a sequence and has linear complexity with the sequence length and leverages parallel computation by processing multi-channel EEG signals rather than single-channel signals. In this architecture, the attention layer is a computational unit that efficiently applies self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms to compute a recurrent function over a wide number of state vectors and input signals. This framework is inspired in part by the attention layer and long short-term memory (LSTM) cells, but it scales this typical cell up by several orders to parallelize for multi-channel EEG signals. It inherits the advantages of attention layers and LSTM gate while avoiding their respective drawbacks. The model's effectiveness is evaluated through extensive experiments with heterogeneous datasets, including the CHB-MIT and UPenn and Mayo's Clinic datasets.
Authors: Ping Guo, Cheng Gong, Xi Lin, Zhiyuan Yang, Qingfu Zhang
Abstract: The escalating threat of adversarial attacks on deep learning models, particularly in security-critical fields, has underscored the need for robust deep learning systems. Conventional robustness evaluations have relied on adversarial accuracy, which measures a model's performance under a specific perturbation intensity. However, this singular metric does not fully encapsulate the overall resilience of a model against varying degrees of perturbation. To address this gap, we propose a new metric termed adversarial hypervolume, assessing the robustness of deep learning models comprehensively over a range of perturbation intensities from a multi-objective optimization standpoint. This metric allows for an in-depth comparison of defense mechanisms and recognizes the trivial improvements in robustness afforded by less potent defensive strategies. Additionally, we adopt a novel training algorithm that enhances adversarial robustness uniformly across various perturbation intensities, in contrast to methods narrowly focused on optimizing adversarial accuracy. Our extensive empirical studies validate the effectiveness of the adversarial hypervolume metric, demonstrating its ability to reveal subtle differences in robustness that adversarial accuracy overlooks. This research contributes a new measure of robustness and establishes a standard for assessing and benchmarking the resilience of current and future defensive models against adversarial threats.
Authors: Ruihua Han, Shuai Wang, Shuaijun Wang, Zeqing Zhang, Jianjun Chen, Shijie Lin, Chengyang Li, Chengzhong Xu, Yonina C. Eldar, Qi Hao, Jia Pan
Abstract: Navigating a nonholonomic robot in a cluttered environment requires extremely accurate perception and locomotion for collision avoidance. This paper presents NeuPAN: a real-time, highly-accurate, map-free, robot-agnostic, and environment-invariant robot navigation solution. Leveraging a tightly-coupled perception-locomotion framework, NeuPAN has two key innovations compared to existing approaches: 1) it directly maps raw points to a learned multi-frame distance space, avoiding error propagation from perception to control; 2) it is interpretable from an end-to-end model-based learning perspective, enabling provable convergence. The crux of NeuPAN is to solve a high-dimensional end-to-end mathematical model with various point-level constraints using the plug-and-play (PnP) proximal alternating-minimization network (PAN) with neurons in the loop. This allows NeuPAN to generate real-time, end-to-end, physically-interpretable motions directly from point clouds, which seamlessly integrates data- and knowledge-engines, where its network parameters are adjusted via back propagation. We evaluate NeuPAN on car-like robot, wheel-legged robot, and passenger autonomous vehicle, in both simulated and real-world environments. Experiments demonstrate that NeuPAN outperforms various benchmarks, in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and generalization capability across various environments, including the cluttered sandbox, office, corridor, and parking lot. We show that NeuPAN works well in unstructured environments with arbitrary-shape undetectable objects, making impassable ways passable.
Authors: Sravan Kumar Ankireddy, Krishna Narayanan, Hyeji Kim
Abstract: The design of reliable and efficient codes for channels with feedback remains a longstanding challenge in communication theory. While significant improvements have been achieved by leveraging deep learning techniques, neural codes often suffer from high computational costs, a lack of interpretability, and limited practicality in resource-constrained settings. We focus on designing low-complexity coding schemes that are interpretable and more suitable for communication systems. We advance both analytical and neural codes. First, we demonstrate that PowerBlast, an analytical coding scheme inspired by Schalkwijk-Kailath (SK) and Gallager-Nakibo\u{g}lu (GN) schemes, achieves notable reliability improvements over both SK and GN schemes, outperforming neural codes in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. Next, to enhance reliability in low-SNR regions, we propose LightCode, a lightweight neural code that achieves state-of-the-art reliability while using a fraction of memory and compute compared to existing deeplearning-based codes. Finally, we systematically analyze the learned codes, establishing connections between LightCode and PowerBlast, identifying components crucial for performance, and providing interpretation aided by linear regression analysis.
Authors: Jiazhen Liu, Yuhan Fu, Ruobing Xie, Runquan Xie, Xingwu Sun, Fengzong Lian, Zhanhui Kang, Xirong Li
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hallucinate, resulting in an emerging topic of visual hallucination evaluation (VHE). This paper contributes a ChatGPT-Prompted visual hallucination evaluation Dataset (PhD) for objective VHE at a large scale. The essence of VHE is to ask an MLLM questions about specific images to assess its susceptibility to hallucination. Depending on what to ask (objects, attributes, sentiment, etc.) and how the questions are asked, we structure PhD along two dimensions, i.e., task and mode. Five visual recognition tasks, ranging from low-level (object / attribute recognition) to middle-level (sentiment / position recognition and counting), are considered. Besides a normal visual QA mode, which we term PhD-base, PhD also asks questions with inaccurate context (PhD-iac) or with incorrect context (PhD-icc), or with AI-generated counter common sense images (PhD-ccs). We construct PhD by a ChatGPT-assisted semi-automated pipeline, encompassing four pivotal modules: task-specific hallucinatory item (hitem) selection, hitem-embedded question generation, inaccurate / incorrect context generation, and counter-common-sense (CCS) image generation. With over 14k daily images, 750 CCS images and 102k VQA triplets in total, PhD reveals considerable variability in MLLMs' performance across various modes and tasks, offering valuable insights into the nature of hallucination. As such, PhD stands as a potent tool not only for VHE but may also play a significant role in the refinement of MLLMs.
Authors: Md. Simul Hasan Talukder, Sharmin Akter, Abdullah Hafez Nur, Mohammad Aljaidi, Rejwan Bin Sulaiman, Ali Fayez Alkoradees
Abstract: Sugarcane, a key crop for the world's sugar industry, is prone to several diseases that have a substantial negative influence on both its yield and quality. To effectively manage and implement preventative initiatives, diseases must be detected promptly and accurately. In this study, we present a unique model called sugarcaneNet2024 that outperforms previous methods for automatically and quickly detecting sugarcane disease through leaf image processing. Our proposed model consolidates an optimized weighted average ensemble of seven customized and LASSO-regularized pre-trained models, particularly InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, DenseNet201, DenseNet169, Xception, and ResNet152V2. Initially, we added three more dense layers with 0.0001 LASSO regularization, three 30% dropout layers, and three batch normalizations with renorm enabled at the bottom of these pre-trained models to improve the performance. The accuracy of sugarcane leaf disease classification was greatly increased by this addition. Following this, several comparative studies between the average ensemble and individual models were carried out, indicating that the ensemble technique performed better. The average ensemble of all modified pre-trained models produced outstanding outcomes: 100%, 99%, 99%, and 99.45% for f1 score, precision, recall, and accuracy, respectively. Performance was further enhanced by the implementation of an optimized weighted average ensemble technique incorporated with grid search. This optimized sugarcaneNet2024 model performed the best for detecting sugarcane diseases, having achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 99.67%, 100%, 100%, and 100% , respectively.
Authors: Zekun Wu, Sahan Bulathwela, Maria Perez-Ortiz, Adriano Soares Koshiyama
Abstract: Stereotype detection is a challenging and subjective task, as certain statements, such as "Black people like to play basketball," may not appear overtly toxic but still reinforce racial stereotypes. With the increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) in human-facing artificial intelligence (AI) applications, detecting these types of biases is essential. However, LLMs risk perpetuating and amplifying stereotypical outputs derived from their training data. A reliable stereotype detector is crucial for benchmarking bias, monitoring model input and output, filtering training data, and ensuring fairer model behavior in downstream applications. This paper introduces the Multi-Grain Stereotype (MGS) dataset, consisting of 51,867 instances across gender, race, profession, religion, and other stereotypes, curated from multiple existing datasets. We evaluate various machine learning approaches to establish baselines and fine-tune language models of different architectures and sizes, presenting a suite of stereotype multiclass classifiers trained on the MGS dataset. Given the subjectivity of stereotypes, explainability is essential to align model learning with human understanding of stereotypes. We employ explainable AI (XAI) tools, including SHAP, LIME, and BertViz, to assess whether the model's learned patterns align with human intuitions about stereotypes.Additionally, we develop stereotype elicitation prompts and benchmark the presence of stereotypes in text generation tasks using popular LLMs, employing the best-performing stereotype classifiers.
Authors: Zhengyuan Jiang, Moyang Guo, Yuepeng Hu, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Abstract: Several companies have deployed watermark-based detection to identify AI-generated content. However, attribution--the ability to trace back to the user of a generative AI (GenAI) service who created a given piece of AI-generated content--remains largely unexplored despite its growing importance. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by conducting the first systematic study on watermark-based, user-level attribution of AI-generated content. Our key idea is to assign a unique watermark to each user of the GenAI service and embed this watermark into the AI-generated content created by that user. Attribution is then performed by identifying the user whose watermark best matches the one extracted from the given content. This approach, however, faces a key challenge: How should watermarks be selected for users to maximize attribution performance? To address the challenge, we first theoretically derive lower bounds on detection and attribution performance through rigorous probabilistic analysis for any given set of user watermarks. Then, we select watermarks for users to maximize these lower bounds, thereby optimizing detection and attribution performance. Our theoretical and empirical results show that watermark-based attribution inherits both the accuracy and (non-)robustness properties of the underlying watermark. Specifically, attribution remains highly accurate when the watermarked AI-generated content is either not post-processed or subjected to common post-processing such as JPEG compression, as well as black-box adversarial post-processing with limited query budgets.
Authors: Ming Li, Taojiannan Yang, Huafeng Kuang, Jie Wu, Zhaoning Wang, Xuefeng Xiao, Chen Chen
Abstract: To enhance the controllability of text-to-image diffusion models, existing efforts like ControlNet incorporated image-based conditional controls. In this paper, we reveal that existing methods still face significant challenges in generating images that align with the image conditional controls. To this end, we propose ControlNet++, a novel approach that improves controllable generation by explicitly optimizing pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images and conditional controls. Specifically, for an input conditional control, we use a pre-trained discriminative reward model to extract the corresponding condition of the generated images, and then optimize the consistency loss between the input conditional control and extracted condition. A straightforward implementation would be generating images from random noises and then calculating the consistency loss, but such an approach requires storing gradients for multiple sampling timesteps, leading to considerable time and memory costs. To address this, we introduce an efficient reward strategy that deliberately disturbs the input images by adding noise, and then uses the single-step denoised images for reward fine-tuning. This avoids the extensive costs associated with image sampling, allowing for more efficient reward fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that ControlNet++ significantly improves controllability under various conditional controls. For example, it achieves improvements over ControlNet by 11.1% mIoU, 13.4% SSIM, and 7.6% RMSE, respectively, for segmentation mask, line-art edge, and depth conditions. All the code, models, demo and organized data have been open sourced on our Github Repo.
Authors: Danqing Ma, Meng Wang, Ao Xiang, Zongqing Qi, Qin Yang
Abstract: This study proposes a multi-modal fusion framework Multitrans based on the Transformer architecture and self-attention mechanism. This architecture combines the study of non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) images and discharge diagnosis reports of patients undergoing stroke treatment, using a variety of methods based on Transformer architecture approach to predicting functional outcomes of stroke treatment. The results show that the performance of single-modal text classification is significantly better than single-modal image classification, but the effect of multi-modal combination is better than any single modality. Although the Transformer model only performs worse on imaging data, when combined with clinical meta-diagnostic information, both can learn better complementary information and make good contributions to accurately predicting stroke treatment effects..
Authors: Hongbo Li, Lingjie Duan
Abstract: Today mobile users learn and share their traffic observations via crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Waze). Yet such platforms simply cater to selfish users' myopic interests to recommend the shortest path, and do not encourage enough users to travel and learn other paths for future others. Prior studies focus on one-shot congestion games without considering users' information learning, while our work studies how users learn and alter traffic conditions on stochastic paths in a human-in-the-loop manner. Our analysis shows that the myopic routing policy leads to severe under-exploration of stochastic paths. This results in a price of anarchy (PoA) greater than $2$, as compared to the socially optimal policy in minimizing the long-term social cost. Besides, the myopic policy fails to ensure the correct learning convergence about users' traffic hazard beliefs. To address this, we focus on informational (non-monetary) mechanisms as they are easier to implement than pricing. We first show that existing information-hiding mechanisms and deterministic path-recommendation mechanisms in Bayesian persuasion literature do not work with even (\text{PoA}=\infty). Accordingly, we propose a new combined hiding and probabilistic recommendation (CHAR) mechanism to hide all information from a selected user group and provide state-dependent probabilistic recommendations to the other user group. Our CHAR successfully ensures PoA less than (\frac{5}{4}), which cannot be further reduced by any other informational (non-monetary) mechanism. Besides the parallel network, we further extend our analysis and CHAR to more general linear path graphs with multiple intermediate nodes, and we prove that the PoA results remain unchanged. Additionally, we carry out experiments with real-world datasets to further extend our routing graphs and verify the close-to-optimal performance of our CHAR.
Authors: Lydia Uhler, Verena Jordan, J\"urgen Buder, Markus Huff, Frank Papenmeier
Abstract: Generative artificial intelligences, particularly large language models (LLMs), play an increasingly prominent role in human decision-making contexts, necessitating transparency about their capabilities. While prior studies have shown addition biases in humans (Adams et al., 2021) and OpenAI's GPT-3 (Winter et al., 2023), this study extends the research by comparing human and GPT-4 problem-solving across both spatial and linguistic tasks, with variations in solution efficiency and valence of task instruction. Four preregistered experiments with 588 participants from the U.S. and 680 GPT-4 iterations revealed a stronger tendency towards additive transformations in GPT-4 than in humans. Human participants were less likely to use additive strategies when subtraction was relatively more efficient than when addition and subtraction were equally efficient. GPT-4 exhibited the opposite behavior, with a strong addition bias when subtraction was more efficient. In terms of valence of task instruction, GPT-4's use of additive strategies increased when instructed to "improve" (positive) rather than "edit" (neutral). These findings demonstrate that biases in human problem-solving are amplified in GPT-4, and that LLM behavior differs from human efficiency-based strategies. This highlights the limitations of LLMs and the need for caution when using them in real-world applications.
Authors: Bo Yan, Sihao He, Cheng Yang, Shang Liu, Yang Cao, Chuan Shi
Abstract: Graph condensation, which reduces the size of a large-scale graph by synthesizing a small-scale condensed graph as its substitution, has immediately benefited various graph learning tasks. However, existing graph condensation methods rely on centralized data storage, which is unfeasible for real-world decentralized data distribution, and overlook data holders' privacy-preserving requirements. To bridge the gap, we propose and study the novel problem of federated graph condensation for graph neural networks (GNNs). Specifically, we first propose a general framework for federated graph condensation, in which we decouple the typical gradient matching process for graph condensation into client-side gradient calculation and server-side gradient matching. In this way, the burdensome computation cost in client-side is largely alleviated. Besides, our empirical studies show that under the federated setting, the condensed graph will consistently leak data membership privacy, i.e., the condensed graph during the federated training can be utilized to steal the training data under the membership inference attacks (MIA). To tackle this issue, we innovatively incorporate information bottleneck principles into the federated graph condensation, which only needs to extract partial node features in one local pre-training step and utilize the features during federated training. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework can consistently protect membership privacy during training. Meanwhile, it also achieves comparable and even superior performance against existing centralized graph condensation and federated graph learning methods.
Authors: D. Subhalingam, Keshav Kolluru, Mausam, Saurabh Singal
Abstract: In the e-commerce domain, the accurate extraction of attribute-value pairs (e.g., Brand: Apple) from product titles and user search queries is crucial for enhancing search and recommendation systems. A major challenge with neural models for this task is the lack of high-quality training data, as the annotations for attribute-value pairs in the available datasets are often incomplete. To address this, we introduce GenToC, a model designed for training directly with partially-labeled data, eliminating the necessity for a fully annotated dataset. GenToC employs a marker-augmented generative model to identify potential attributes, followed by a token classification model that determines the associated values for each attribute. GenToC outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, exhibiting upto 56.3% increase in the number of accurate extractions. Furthermore, we utilize GenToC to regenerate the training dataset to expand attribute-value annotations. This bootstrapping substantially improves the data quality for training other standard NER models, which are typically faster but less capable in handling partially-labeled data, enabling them to achieve comparable performance to GenToC. Our results demonstrate GenToC's unique ability to learn from a limited set of partially-labeled data and improve the training of more efficient models, advancing the automated extraction of attribute-value pairs. Finally, our model has been successfully integrated into IndiaMART, India's largest B2B e-commerce platform, achieving a significant increase of 20.2% in the number of correctly identified attribute-value pairs over the existing deployed system while achieving a high precision of 89.5%.
Authors: Jingyi Chen, Ju-Seung Byun, Micha Elsner, Andrew Perrault
Abstract: Recent advancements in generative models have sparked a significant interest within the machine learning community. Particularly, diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing images and speech. Studies such as those by Lee et al. (2023), Black et al. (2023), Wang et al. (2023), and Fan et al. (2024) illustrate that Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can enhance diffusion models for image synthesis. However, due to architectural differences between these models and those employed in speech synthesis, it remains uncertain whether RLHF could similarly benefit speech synthesis models. In this paper, we explore the practical application of RLHF to diffusion-based text-to-speech synthesis, leveraging the mean opinion score (MOS) as predicted by UTokyo-SaruLab MOS prediction system (Saeki et al., 2022) as a proxy loss. We introduce diffusion model loss-guided RL policy optimization (DLPO) and compare it against other RLHF approaches, employing the NISQA speech quality and naturalness assessment model (Mittag et al., 2021) and human preference experiments for further evaluation. Our results show that RLHF can enhance diffusion-based text-to-speech synthesis models, and, moreover, DLPO can better improve diffusion models in generating natural and high quality speech audios.
Authors: Yibin Wang, Weizhong Zhang, Cheng Jin
Abstract: Scene text synthesis involves rendering specified texts onto arbitrary images. Current methods typically formulate this task in an end-to-end manner but lack effective character-level guidance during training. Besides, their text encoders, pre-trained on a single font type, struggle to adapt to the diverse font styles encountered in practical applications. Consequently, these methods suffer from character distortion, repetition, and absence, particularly in polystylistic scenarios. To this end, this paper proposes DreamText for high-fidelity scene text synthesis. Our key idea is to reconstruct the diffusion training process, introducing more refined guidance tailored to this task, to expose and rectify the model's attention at the character level and strengthen its learning of text regions. This transformation poses a hybrid optimization challenge, involving both discrete and continuous variables. To effectively tackle this challenge, we employ a heuristic alternate optimization strategy. Meanwhile, we jointly train the text encoder and generator to comprehensively learn and utilize the diverse font present in the training dataset. This joint training is seamlessly integrated into the alternate optimization process, fostering a synergistic relationship between learning character embedding and re-estimating character attention. Specifically, in each step, we first encode potential character-generated position information from cross-attention maps into latent character masks. These masks are then utilized to update the representation of specific characters in the current step, which, in turn, enables the generator to correct the character's attention in the subsequent steps. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of our method to the state of the art.
Authors: Junlin Wu, Huan Zhang, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Abstract: Learning reliably safe autonomous control is one of the core problems in trustworthy autonomy. However, training a controller that can be formally verified to be safe remains a major challenge. We introduce a novel approach for learning verified safe control policies in nonlinear neural dynamical systems while maximizing overall performance. Our approach aims to achieve safety in the sense of finite-horizon reachability proofs, and is comprised of three key parts. The first is a novel curriculum learning scheme that iteratively increases the verified safe horizon. The second leverages the iterative nature of gradient-based learning to leverage incremental verification, reusing information from prior verification runs. Finally, we learn multiple verified initial-state-dependent controllers, an idea that is especially valuable for more complex domains where learning a single universal verified safe controller is extremely challenging. Our experiments on five safe control problems demonstrate that our trained controllers can achieve verified safety over horizons that are as much as an order of magnitude longer than state-of-the-art baselines, while maintaining high reward, as well as a perfect safety record over entire episodes. Our code is available at https://github.com/jlwu002/VSRL.
Authors: Felix B Mueller, Rebekka G\"orge, Anna K Bernzen, Janna C Pirk, Maximilian Poretschkin
Abstract: Memorization in large language models (LLMs) is a growing concern. LLMs have been shown to easily reproduce parts of their training data, including copyrighted work. This is an important problem to solve, as it may violate existing copyright laws as well as the European AI Act. In this work, we propose a systematic analysis to quantify the extent of potential copyright infringements in LLMs using European law as an example. Unlike previous work, we evaluate instruction-finetuned models in a realistic end-user scenario. Our analysis builds on a proposed threshold of 160 characters, which we borrow from the German Copyright Service Provider Act and a fuzzy text matching algorithm to identify potentially copyright-infringing textual reproductions. The specificity of countermeasures against copyright infringement is analyzed by comparing model behavior on copyrighted and public domain data. We investigate what behaviors models show instead of producing protected text (such as refusal or hallucination) and provide a first legal assessment of these behaviors. We find that there are huge differences in copyright compliance, specificity, and appropriate refusal among popular LLMs. Alpaca, GPT 4, GPT 3.5, and Luminous perform best in our comparison, with OpenGPT-X, Alpaca, and Luminous producing a particularly low absolute number of potential copyright violations. Code can be found at https://github.com/felixbmuller/llms-memorization-copyright.
URLs: https://github.com/felixbmuller/llms-memorization-copyright.
Authors: Linus Jeary, Tom Kuipers, Mehran Hosseini, Nicola Paoletti
Abstract: Conformal Prediction (CP) is a popular uncertainty quantification method that provides distribution-free, statistically valid prediction sets, assuming that training and test data are exchangeable. In such a case, CP's prediction sets are guaranteed to cover the (unknown) true test output with a user-specified probability. Nevertheless, this guarantee is violated when the data is subjected to adversarial attacks, which often result in a significant loss of coverage. Recently, several approaches have been put forward to recover CP guarantees in this setting. These approaches leverage variations of randomised smoothing to produce conservative sets which account for the effect of the adversarial perturbations. They are, however, limited in that they only support $\ell^2$-bounded perturbations and classification tasks. This paper introduces VRCP (Verifiably Robust Conformal Prediction), a new framework that leverages recent neural network verification methods to recover coverage guarantees under adversarial attacks. Our VRCP method is the first to support perturbations bounded by arbitrary norms including $\ell^1$, $\ell^2$, and $\ell^\infty$, as well as regression tasks. We evaluate and compare our approach on image classification tasks (CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and TinyImageNet) and regression tasks for deep reinforcement learning environments. In every case, VRCP achieves above nominal coverage and yields significantly more efficient and informative prediction regions than the SotA.
Authors: Charles Westphal, Stephen Hailes, Mirco Musolesi
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Partial Information Decomposition of Features (PIDF), a new paradigm for simultaneous data interpretability and feature selection. Contrary to traditional methods that assign a single importance value, our approach is based on three metrics per feature: the mutual information shared with the target variable, the feature's contribution to synergistic information, and the amount of this information that is redundant. In particular, we develop a novel procedure based on these three metrics, which reveals not only how features are correlated with the target but also the additional and overlapping information provided by considering them in combination with other features. We extensively evaluate PIDF using both synthetic and real-world data, demonstrating its potential applications and effectiveness, by considering case studies from genetics and neuroscience.
Authors: Jung H. Lee, Sujith Vijayan
Abstract: Deep learning (DL) enables deep neural networks (DNNs) to automatically learn complex tasks or rules from given examples without instructions or guiding principles. As we do not engineer DNNs' functions, it is extremely difficult to diagnose their decisions, and multiple lines of studies proposed to explain the principles of their operations. Notably, one line of studies suggests that DNNs may learn concepts, the high level features that are recognizable to humans. In this study, we extend this line of studies and hypothesize that DNNs can develop abstract codes that can be used to augment DNNs' decision-making. To address this hypothesis, we combine foundation segmentation models and unsupervised learning to extract internal codes and identify potential use of abstract codes to make DL's decision-making more reliable and safer.
Authors: Ziyad Benomar, Christian Coester
Abstract: Priority queues are one of the most fundamental and widely used data structures in computer science. Their primary objective is to efficiently support the insertion of new elements with assigned priorities and the extraction of the highest priority element. In this study, we investigate the design of priority queues within the learning-augmented framework, where algorithms use potentially inaccurate predictions to enhance their worst-case performance. We examine three prediction models spanning different use cases, and show how the predictions can be leveraged to enhance the performance of priority queue operations. Moreover, we demonstrate the optimality of our solution and discuss some possible applications.
Authors: Jee-weon Jung, Xin Wang, Nicholas Evans, Shinji Watanabe, Hye-jin Shim, Hemlata Tak, Sidhhant Arora, Junichi Yamagishi, Joon Son Chung
Abstract: The current automatic speaker verification (ASV) task involves making binary decisions on two types of trials: target and non-target. However, emerging advancements in speech generation technology pose significant threats to the reliability of ASV systems. This study investigates whether ASV effortlessly acquires robustness against spoofing attacks (i.e., zero-shot capability) by systematically exploring diverse ASV systems and spoofing attacks, ranging from traditional to cutting-edge techniques. Through extensive analyses conducted on eight distinct ASV systems and 29 spoofing attack systems, we demonstrate that the evolution of ASV inherently incorporates defense mechanisms against spoofing attacks. Nevertheless, our findings also underscore that the advancement of spoofing attacks far outpaces that of ASV systems, hence necessitating further research on spoofing-robust ASV methodologies.
Authors: Denis Tarasov, Kirill Brilliantov, Dmitrii Kharlapenko
Abstract: In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), value functions are typically approximated using deep neural networks and trained via mean squared error regression objectives to fit the true value functions. Recent research has proposed an alternative approach, utilizing the cross-entropy classification objective, which has demonstrated improved performance and scalability of RL algorithms. However, existing study have not extensively benchmarked the effects of this replacement across various domains, as the primary objective was to demonstrate the efficacy of the concept across a broad spectrum of tasks, without delving into in-depth analysis. Our work seeks to empirically investigate the impact of such a replacement in an offline RL setup and analyze the effects of different aspects on performance. Through large-scale experiments conducted across a diverse range of tasks using different algorithms, we aim to gain deeper insights into the implications of this approach. Our results reveal that incorporating this change can lead to superior performance over state-of-the-art solutions for some algorithms in certain tasks, while maintaining comparable performance levels in other tasks, however for other algorithms this modification might lead to the dramatic performance drop. This findings are crucial for further application of classification approach in research and practical tasks.
Authors: Julen Etxaniz, Gorka Azkune, Aitor Soroa, Oier Lopez de Lacalle, Mikel Artetxe
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit extensive knowledge about the world, but most evaluations have been limited to global or anglocentric subjects. This raises the question of how well these models perform on topics relevant to other cultures, whose presence on the web is not that prominent. To address this gap, we introduce BertaQA, a multiple-choice trivia dataset that is parallel in English and Basque. The dataset consists of a local subset with questions pertinent to the Basque culture, and a global subset with questions of broader interest. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with local cultural knowledge, even as they excel on global topics. However, we show that continued pre-training in Basque significantly improves the models' performance on Basque culture, even when queried in English. To our knowledge, this is the first solid evidence of knowledge transfer from a low-resource to a high-resource language. Our analysis sheds light on the complex interplay between language and knowledge, and reveals that some prior findings do not fully hold when reassessed on local topics. Our dataset and evaluation code are available under open licenses at https://github.com/juletx/BertaQA.
Authors: Maxime Darrin, Philippe Formont, Ismail Ben Ayed, Jackie CK Cheung, Pablo Piantanida
Abstract: Embedders play a central role in machine learning, projecting any object into numerical representations that can, in turn, be leveraged to perform various downstream tasks. The evaluation of embedding models typically depends on domain-specific empirical approaches utilizing downstream tasks, primarily because of the lack of a standardized framework for comparison. However, acquiring adequately large and representative datasets for conducting these assessments is not always viable and can prove to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a unified approach to evaluate embedders. First, we establish theoretical foundations for comparing embedding models, drawing upon the concepts of sufficiency and informativeness. We then leverage these concepts to devise a tractable comparison criterion (information sufficiency), leading to a task-agnostic and self-supervised ranking procedure. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach aligns closely with the capability of embedding models to facilitate various downstream tasks in both natural language processing and molecular biology. This effectively offers practitioners a valuable tool for prioritizing model trials.
Authors: Jaehyun Nam, Kyuyoung Kim, Seunghyuk Oh, Jihoon Tack, Jaehyung Kim, Jinwoo Shin
Abstract: In tabular prediction tasks, tree-based models combined with automated feature engineering methods often outperform deep learning approaches that rely on learned representations. While these feature engineering techniques are effective, they typically depend on a pre-defined search space and primarily use validation scores for feature selection, thereby missing valuable insights from previous experiments. To address these limitations, we propose a novel tabular learning framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs), termed Optimizing Column feature generator with decision Tree reasoning (OCTree). Our key idea is to leverage the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to identify effective feature generation rules without manually specifying the search space and provide language-based reasoning information highlighting past experiments as feedback for iterative rule improvements. We use decision trees to convey this reasoning information, as they can be easily represented in natural language, effectively providing knowledge from prior experiments (i.e., the impact of the generated features on performance) to the LLMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that OCTree consistently enhances the performance of various prediction models across diverse benchmarks, outperforming competing automated feature engineering methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jaehyun513/OCTree.
Authors: Marcos Piau, Roberto Lotufo, Rodrigo Nogueira
Abstract: Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the growing availability of pretrained models, the English language remains the primary focus of model development. Continued pretraining on language-specific corpora provides a practical solution for adapting models to other languages. However, the impact of different pretraining settings on downstream tasks remains underexplored. This work introduces $\texttt{ptt5-v2}$, investigating the continued pretraining of T5 models for Portuguese. We first develop a baseline set of settings and pretrain models with sizes up to 3B parameters. Finetuning on three Portuguese downstream tasks (assin2 STS, assin2 RTE, and TweetSentBR) yields SOTA results on the latter two. We then explore the effects of different pretraining configurations, including pretraining data quality, optimization strategies, and multi-epoch pretraining. Perhaps surprisingly, their impact remains subtle compared to our baseline. We release $\texttt{ptt5-v2}$ pretrained checkpoints and their MonoT5-based finetuned $\texttt{MonoPTT5}$ rerankers on HuggingFace in their respective collections at \url{https://huggingface.co/unicamp-dl}.
Authors: Amit Das, Zheng Zhang, Najib Hasan, Souvika Sarkar, Fatemeh Jamshidi, Tathagata Bhattacharya, Mostafa Rahgouy, Nilanjana Raychawdhary, Dongji Feng, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Mary Sandage, Lauramarie Pope, Gerry Dozier, Cheryl Seals
Abstract: Data annotation, the practice of assigning descriptive labels to raw data, is pivotal in optimizing the performance of machine learning models. However, it is a resource-intensive process susceptible to biases introduced by annotators. The emergence of sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a unique opportunity to modernize and streamline this complex procedure. While existing research extensively evaluates the efficacy of LLMs, as annotators, this paper delves into the biases present in LLMs when annotating hate speech data. Our research contributes to understanding biases in four key categories: gender, race, religion, and disability with four LLMs: GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, Llama-3.1 and Gemma-2. Specifically targeting highly vulnerable groups within these categories, we analyze annotator biases. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive examination of potential factors contributing to these biases by scrutinizing the annotated data. We introduce our custom hate speech detection dataset, HateBiasNet, to conduct this research. Additionally, we perform the same experiments on the ETHOS (Mollas et al. 2022) dataset also for comparative analysis. This paper serves as a crucial resource, guiding researchers and practitioners in harnessing the potential of LLMs for data annotation, thereby fostering advancements in this critical field.
Authors: Niels M\"undler, Mark Niklas M\"uller, Jingxuan He, Martin Vechev
Abstract: Rigorous software testing is crucial for developing and maintaining high-quality code, making automated test generation a promising avenue for both improving software quality and boosting the effectiveness of code generation methods. However, while code generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) is an extraordinarily active research area, test generation remains relatively unexplored. We address this gap and investigate the capability of LLM-based Code Agents to formalize user issues into test cases. To this end, we propose a novel benchmark based on popular GitHub repositories, containing real-world issues, ground-truth bug-fixes, and golden tests. We find that LLMs generally perform surprisingly well at generating relevant test cases, with Code Agents designed for code repair exceeding the performance of systems designed specifically for test generation. Further, as test generation is a similar but more structured task than code generation, it allows for a more fine-grained analysis using issue reproduction rate and coverage changes, providing a dual metric for analyzing systems designed for code repair. Finally, we find that generated tests are an effective filter for proposed code fixes, doubling the precision of SWE-Agent. We release all data and code at https://github.com/logic-star-ai/SWT-Bench
Authors: Yisen Feng, Haoyu Zhang, Yuquan Xie, Zaijing Li, Meng Liu, Liqiang Nie
Abstract: In this report, we present our approach for the Natural Language Query track and Goal Step track of the Ego4D Episodic Memory Benchmark at CVPR 2024. Both challenges require the localization of actions within long video sequences using textual queries. To enhance localization accuracy, our method not only processes the temporal information of videos but also identifies fine-grained objects spatially within the frames. To this end, we introduce a novel approach, termed ObjectNLQ, which incorporates an object branch to augment the video representation with detailed object information, thereby improving grounding efficiency. ObjectNLQ achieves a mean R@1 of 23.15, ranking 2nd in the Natural Language Queries Challenge, and gains 33.00 in terms of the metric R@1, IoU=0.3, ranking 3rd in the Goal Step Challenge. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Yisen-Feng/ObjectNLQ.
Authors: Sumit Kumar Dam, Choong Seon Hong, Yu Qiao, Chaoning Zhang
Abstract: The past few decades have witnessed an upsurge in data, forming the foundation for data-hungry, learning-based AI technology. Conversational agents, often referred to as AI chatbots, rely heavily on such data to train large language models (LLMs) and generate new content (knowledge) in response to user prompts. With the advent of OpenAI's ChatGPT, LLM-based chatbots have set new standards in the AI community. This paper presents a complete survey of the evolution and deployment of LLM-based chatbots in various sectors. We first summarize the development of foundational chatbots, followed by the evolution of LLMs, and then provide an overview of LLM-based chatbots currently in use and those in the development phase. Recognizing AI chatbots as tools for generating new knowledge, we explore their diverse applications across various industries. We then discuss the open challenges, considering how the data used to train the LLMs and the misuse of the generated knowledge can cause several issues. Finally, we explore the future outlook to augment their efficiency and reliability in numerous applications. By addressing key milestones and the present-day context of LLM-based chatbots, our survey invites readers to delve deeper into this realm, reflecting on how their next generation will reshape conversational AI.
Authors: Sukmin Yun, Haokun Lin, Rusiru Thushara, Mohammad Qazim Bhat, Yongxin Wang, Zutao Jiang, Mingkai Deng, Jinhong Wang, Tianhua Tao, Junbo Li, Haonan Li, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric P. Xing, Xiaodan Liang, Zhiqiang Shen
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive success across modalities such as image, video, and audio in a variety of understanding and generation tasks. However, current MLLMs are surprisingly poor at understanding webpage screenshots and generating their corresponding HTML code. To address this problem, we propose $\texttt{Web2Code}$, a benchmark consisting of a new large-scale webpage-to-code dataset for instruction tuning and an evaluation framework for the webpage understanding and HTML code translation abilities of MLLMs. For dataset construction, we leverage pretrained LLMs to enhance existing webpage-to-code datasets as well as generate a diverse pool of new webpages rendered into images. Specifically, the inputs are webpage images and instructions, while the responses are the webpage's HTML code. We further include diverse natural language QA pairs about the webpage content in the responses to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the web content. To evaluate model performance in these tasks, we develop an evaluation framework for testing MLLMs' abilities in webpage understanding and web-to-code generation. Extensive experiments show that our proposed dataset is beneficial not only to our proposed tasks but also in the general visual domain. We hope our work will contribute to the development of general MLLMs suitable for web-based content generation and task automation. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/MBZUAI-LLM/web2code.
Authors: Zhiyuan Wang, Jinhao Duan, Lu Cheng, Yue Zhang, Qingni Wang, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu, Hengtao Shen, Xiaofeng Zhu
Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in natural language generation (NLG) tasks remains an open challenge, exacerbated by the closed-source nature of the latest large language models (LLMs). This study investigates applying conformal prediction (CP), which can transform any heuristic uncertainty notion into rigorous prediction sets, to black-box LLMs in open-ended NLG tasks. We introduce a novel uncertainty measure based on self-consistency theory, and then develop a conformal uncertainty criterion by integrating the uncertainty condition aligned with correctness into the CP algorithm. Empirical evaluations indicate that our uncertainty measure outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we achieve strict control over the correctness coverage rate utilizing 7 popular LLMs on 4 free-form NLG datasets, spanning general-purpose and medical scenarios. Additionally, the calibrated prediction sets with small size further highlights the efficiency of our method in providing trustworthy guarantees for practical open-ended NLG applications.
Authors: Jithendaraa Subramanian, Shivakanth Sujit, Niloy Irtisam, Umong Sain, Riashat Islam, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Abstract: Protein sequence design, determined by amino acid sequences, are essential to protein engineering problems in drug discovery. Prior approaches have resorted to evolutionary strategies or Monte-Carlo methods for protein design, but often fail to exploit the structure of the combinatorial search space, to generalize to unseen sequences. In the context of discrete black box optimization over large search spaces, learning a mutation policy to generate novel sequences with reinforcement learning is appealing. Recent advances in protein language models (PLMs) trained on large corpora of protein sequences offer a potential solution to this problem by scoring proteins according to their biological plausibility (such as the TM-score). In this work, we propose to use PLMs as a reward function to generate new sequences. Yet the PLM can be computationally expensive to query due to its large size. To this end, we propose an alternative paradigm where optimization can be performed on scores from a smaller proxy model that is periodically finetuned, jointly while learning the mutation policy. We perform extensive experiments on various sequence lengths to benchmark RL-based approaches, and provide comprehensive evaluations along biological plausibility and diversity of the protein. Our experimental results include favorable evaluations of the proposed sequences, along with high diversity scores, demonstrating that RL is a strong candidate for biological sequence design. Finally, we provide a modular open source implementation can be easily integrated in most RL training loops, with support for replacing the reward model with other PLMs, to spur further research in this domain. The code for all experiments is provided in the supplementary material.
Authors: Minghao Xiao, Zhengxi Zhu, Kang Xie, Bin Jiang
Abstract: We present the MEEG dataset, a multi-modal collection of music-induced electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings designed to capture emotional responses to various musical stimuli across different valence and arousal levels. This public dataset facilitates an in-depth examination of brainwave patterns within musical contexts, providing a robust foundation for studying brain network topology during emotional processing. Leveraging the MEEG dataset, we introduce the Attention-based Temporal Learner with Dynamic Graph Neural Network (AT-DGNN), a novel framework for EEG-based emotion recognition. This model combines an attention mechanism with a dynamic graph neural network (DGNN) to capture intricate EEG dynamics. The AT-DGNN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with an accuracy of 83.74% in arousal recognition and 86.01% in valence recognition, outperforming existing SOTA methods. Comparative analysis with traditional datasets, such as DEAP, further validates the model's effectiveness and underscores the potency of music as an emotional stimulus. This study advances graph-based learning methodology in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), significantly improving the accuracy of EEG-based emotion recognition. The MEEG dataset and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/xmh1011/AT-DGNN.
Authors: Hanjun Dai, Bethany Yixin Wang, Xingchen Wan, Bo Dai, Sherry Yang, Azade Nova, Pengcheng Yin, Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, Charles Sutton, Dale Schuurmans
Abstract: Analytics on structured data is a mature field with many successful methods. However, most real world data exists in unstructured form, such as images and conversations. We investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable unstructured data analytics. In particular, we propose a new Universal Query Engine (UQE) that directly interrogates and draws insights from unstructured data collections. This engine accepts queries in a Universal Query Language (UQL), a dialect of SQL that provides full natural language flexibility in specifying conditions and operators. The new engine leverages the ability of LLMs to conduct analysis of unstructured data, while also allowing us to exploit advances in sampling and optimization techniques to achieve efficient and accurate query execution. In addition, we borrow techniques from classical compiler theory to better orchestrate the workflow between sampling methods and foundation model calls. We demonstrate the efficiency of UQE on data analytics across different modalities, including images, dialogs and reviews, across a range of useful query types, including conditional aggregation, semantic retrieval and abstraction aggregation.
Authors: Philipp Allgeuer, Kyra Ahrens, Stefan Wermter
Abstract: We introduce NOVIC, an innovative real-time uNconstrained Open Vocabulary Image Classifier that uses an autoregressive transformer to generatively output classification labels as language. Leveraging the extensive knowledge of CLIP models, NOVIC harnesses the embedding space to enable zero-shot transfer from pure text to images. Traditional CLIP models, despite their ability for open vocabulary classification, require an exhaustive prompt of potential class labels, restricting their application to images of known content or context. To address this, we propose an "object decoder" model that is trained on a large-scale 92M-target dataset of templated object noun sets and LLM-generated captions to always output the object noun in question. This effectively inverts the CLIP text encoder and allows textual object labels from essentially the entire English language to be generated directly from image-derived embedding vectors, without requiring any a priori knowledge of the potential content of an image, and without any label biases. The trained decoders are tested on a mix of manually and web-curated datasets, as well as standard image classification benchmarks, and achieve fine-grained prompt-free prediction scores of up to 87.5%, a strong result considering the model must work for any conceivable image and without any contextual clues.
Authors: Liana Patel, Siddharth Jha, Parth Asawa, Melissa Pan, Carlos Guestrin, Matei Zaharia
Abstract: The semantic capabilities of language models (LMs) have the potential to enable rich analytics and reasoning over vast knowledge corpora. Unfortunately, existing systems lack high-level abstractions to perform bulk semantic queries across large corpora. We introduce semantic operators, a declarative programming interface that extends the relational model with composable AI-based operations for bulk semantic queries (e.g., filtering, sorting, joining or aggregating records using natural language criteria). Each operator can be implemented and optimized in multiple ways, opening a rich space for execution plans similar to relational operators. We implement our operators in LOTUS, an open source query engine with a DataFrame API. Furthermore, we develop several novel optimizations that take advantage of the declarative nature of semantic operators to accelerate semantic filtering, clustering and join operators by up to $400\times$ while offering statistical accuracy guarantees. We demonstrate LOTUS' effectiveness on real AI applications including fact-checking, extreme multi-label classification, and search. We show that the semantic operator model is expressive, capturing state-of-the-art AI pipelines in a few operator calls, and making it easy to express new pipelines that achieve up to $180\%$ higher quality. Overall, LOTUS queries match or exceed the accuracy of state-of-the-art AI pipelines for each task while running up to 28$\times$ faster. LOTUS is publicly available at https://github.com/stanford-futuredata/lotus.
Authors: Katherine M. Collins, Valerie Chen, Ilia Sucholutsky, Hannah Rose Kirk, Malak Sadek, Holli Sargeant, Ameet Talwalkar, Adrian Weller, Umang Bhatt
Abstract: Language models are transforming the ways that their users engage with the world. Despite impressive capabilities, over-consumption of language model outputs risks propagating unchecked errors in the short-term and damaging human capabilities for critical thinking in the long-term. How can we develop scaffolding around language models to curate more appropriate use? We propose selective frictions for language model experiences, inspired by behavioral science interventions, to dampen misuse. Frictions involve small modifications to a user's experience, e.g., the addition of a button impeding model access and reminding a user of their expertise relative to the model. Through a user study with real humans, we observe shifts in user behavior from the imposition of a friction over LLMs in the context of a multi-topic question-answering task as a representative task that people may use LLMs for, e.g., in education and information retrieval. We find that frictions modulate over-reliance by driving down users' click rates while minimally affecting accuracy for those topics. Yet, frictions may have unintended effects. We find marked differences in users' click behaviors even on topics where frictions were not provisioned. Our contributions motivate further study of human-AI behavioral interaction to inform more effective and appropriate LLM use.
Authors: Md Zarif Hossain, Ahmed Imteaj
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved significant strides in recent times specially in multimodal tasks, yet they remain susceptible to adversarial attacks on their vision components. To address this, we propose Sim-CLIP, an unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning method that enhances the robustness of the widely-used CLIP vision encoder against such attacks while maintaining semantic richness and specificity. By employing a Siamese architecture with cosine similarity loss, Sim-CLIP learns semantically meaningful and attack-resilient visual representations without requiring large batch sizes or momentum encoders. Our results demonstrate that VLMs enhanced with Sim-CLIP's fine-tuned CLIP encoder exhibit significantly enhanced robustness against adversarial attacks, while preserving semantic meaning of the perturbed images. Notably, Sim-CLIP does not require additional training or fine-tuning of the VLM itself; replacing the original vision encoder with our fine-tuned Sim-CLIP suffices to provide robustness. This work underscores the significance of reinforcing foundational models like CLIP to safeguard the reliability of downstream VLM applications, paving the way for more secure and effective multimodal systems.
Authors: Caleb Geren, Amanda Board, Gaby G. Dagher, Tim Andersen, Jun Zhuang
Abstract: With the growing development and deployment of large language models (LLMs) in both industrial and academic fields, their security and safety concerns have become increasingly critical. However, recent studies indicate that LLMs face numerous vulnerabilities, including data poisoning, prompt injections, and unauthorized data exposure, which conventional methods have struggled to address fully. In parallel, blockchain technology, known for its data immutability and decentralized structure, offers a promising foundation for safeguarding LLMs. In this survey, we aim to comprehensively assess how to leverage blockchain technology to enhance LLMs' security and safety. Besides, we propose a new taxonomy of blockchain for large language models (BC4LLMs) to systematically categorize related works in this emerging field. Our analysis includes novel frameworks and definitions to delineate security and safety in the context of BC4LLMs, highlighting potential research directions and challenges at this intersection. Through this study, we aim to stimulate targeted advancements in blockchain-integrated LLM security.
Authors: Adrian Celaya, Evan Lim, Rachel Glenn, Brayden Mi, Alex Balsells, Dawid Schellingerhout, Tucker Netherton, Caroline Chung, Beatrice Riviere, David Fuentes
Abstract: Medical imaging segmentation is a highly active area of research, with deep learning-based methods achieving state-of-the-art results in several benchmarks. However, the lack of standardized tools for training, testing, and evaluating new methods makes the comparison of methods difficult. To address this, we introduce the Medical Imaging Segmentation Toolkit (MIST), a simple, modular, and end-to-end medical imaging segmentation framework designed to facilitate consistent training, testing, and evaluation of deep learning-based medical imaging segmentation methods. MIST standardizes data analysis, preprocessing, and evaluation pipelines, accommodating multiple architectures and loss functions. This standardization ensures reproducible and fair comparisons across different methods. We detail MIST's data format requirements, pipelines, and auxiliary features and demonstrate its efficacy using the BraTS Adult Glioma Post-Treatment Challenge dataset. Our results highlight MIST's ability to produce accurate segmentation masks and its scalability across multiple GPUs, showcasing its potential as a powerful tool for future medical imaging research and development.
Authors: Zeyang Ma, Dong Jae Kim, Tse-Hsun Chen
Abstract: Log parsing is a critical step that transforms unstructured log data into structured formats, facilitating subsequent log-based analysis. Traditional syntax-based log parsers are efficient and effective, but they often experience decreased accuracy when processing logs that deviate from the predefined rules. Recently, large language models (LLM) based log parsers have shown superior parsing accuracy. However, existing LLM-based parsers face three main challenges: 1)time-consuming and labor-intensive manual labeling for fine-tuning or in-context learning, 2)increased parsing costs due to the vast volume of log data and limited context size of LLMs, and 3)privacy risks from using commercial models like ChatGPT with sensitive log information. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces LibreLog, an unsupervised log parsing approach that leverages open-source LLMs (i.e., Llama3-8B) to enhance privacy and reduce operational costs while achieving state-of-the-art parsing accuracy. LibreLog first groups logs with similar static text but varying dynamic variables using a fixed-depth grouping tree. It then parses logs within these groups using three components: i)similarity scoring-based retrieval augmented generation: selects diverse logs within each group based on Jaccard similarity, helping the LLM distinguish between static text and dynamic variables; ii)self-reflection: iteratively query LLMs to refine log templates to improve parsing accuracy; and iii) log template memory: stores parsed templates to reduce LLM queries for improved parsing efficiency. Our evaluation on LogHub-2.0 shows that LibreLog achieves 25% higher parsing accuracy and processes logs 2.7 times faster compared to state-of-the-art LLM-based parsers. In short, LibreLog addresses privacy and cost concerns of using commercial LLMs while achieving state-of-the-arts parsing efficiency and accuracy.
Authors: Taeyoung Kim, Myungjoo Kang
Abstract: The Rectified Power Unit (RePU) activation functions, unlike the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU), have the advantage of being a differentiable function when constructing neural networks. However, it can be experimentally observed when deep layers are stacked, neural networks constructed with RePU encounter critical issues. These issues include the values exploding or vanishing and failure of training. And these happen regardless of the hyperparameter initialization. From the perspective of effective theory, we aim to identify the causes of this phenomenon and propose a new activation function that retains the advantages of RePU while overcoming its drawbacks.
Authors: Qiang Sun, Yuanyi Luo, Sirui Li, Wenxiao Zhang, Wei Liu
Abstract: Multimodal conversational agents are highly desirable because they offer natural and human-like interaction. However, there is a lack of comprehensive end-to-end solutions to support collaborative development and benchmarking. While proprietary systems like GPT-4o and Gemini demonstrating impressive integration of audio, video, and text with response times of 200-250ms, challenges remain in balancing latency, accuracy, cost, and data privacy. To better understand and quantify these issues, we developed OpenOmni, an open-source, end-to-end pipeline benchmarking tool that integrates advanced technologies such as Speech-to-Text, Emotion Detection, Retrieval Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, along with the ability to integrate customized models. OpenOmni supports local and cloud deployment, ensuring data privacy and supporting latency and accuracy benchmarking. This flexible framework allows researchers to customize the pipeline, focusing on real bottlenecks and facilitating rapid proof-of-concept development. OpenOmni can significantly enhance applications like indoor assistance for visually impaired individuals, advancing human-computer interaction. Our demonstration video is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaSiT3clWqY, demo is available via https://openomni.ai4wa.com, code is available via https://github.com/AI4WA/OpenOmniFramework.
URLs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaSiT3clWqY,, https://openomni.ai4wa.com,, https://github.com/AI4WA/OpenOmniFramework.
Authors: Sohini Roychowdhury, Marko Krema, Brian Moore, Xingjian Lai, Dike Effedua, Bharat Jethwani
Abstract: Recent trends in Generative AI have emerged towards fine-tuning foundational large language models (LLMs) to create domain-specific LLMs for automation and chatbot-like applications. Specialized applications for analytics-heavy domains such as Financial report generation require specific writing styles that comprise compound and creative sentences with minimized hallucinations. In this work, we explore the self-corrective auto-regressive qualities of LLMs to learn creativity in writing styles with minimal prompting. We propose a novel two-stage fine-tuning (FT) strategy wherein in the first stage public domain financial reports are used to train for writing styles while allowing the LLM to hallucinate. In the second stage the examples of hallucinations are manually corrected and further used to fine-tune the LLM. The finally trained LLM learns to generate specific financial report sections using minimal instructions and tabular data inputs while ensuring low fine-tuning costs. Our proposed two-stage fine-tuning boosts the accuracy of financial questions answering by two-folds while reducing hallucinations by over 50%. Also, the fine-tuned model has lower perplexity, improved ROUGE, TER and BLEU scores, higher creativity and knowledge density with lower uncertainty and cross entropy than base LLMs. Thus, the proposed framework can be generalized to train creativity in LLMs by first allowing them to hallucinate.
Authors: Yibin Wang, Weizhong Zhang, Cheng Jin
Abstract: Current human image customization methods leverage Stable Diffusion (SD) for its rich semantic prior. However, since SD is not specifically designed for human-oriented generation, these methods often require extensive fine-tuning on large-scale datasets, which renders them susceptible to overfitting and hinders their ability to personalize individuals with previously unseen styles. Moreover, these methods extensively focus on single-concept human image synthesis and lack the flexibility to customize individuals using multiple given concepts, thereby impeding their broader practical application. This paper proposes MagicFace, a novel training-free method for multi-concept universal-style human image personalized synthesis. Our core idea is to simulate how humans create images given specific concepts, i.e., first establish a semantic layout considering factors such as concepts' shape and posture, then optimize details by comparing with concepts at the pixel level. To implement this process, we introduce a coarse-to-fine generation pipeline, involving two sequential stages: semantic layout construction and concept feature injection. This is achieved by our Reference-aware Self-Attention (RSA) and Region-grouped Blend Attention (RBA) mechanisms. In the first stage, RSA enables the latent image to query features from all reference concepts simultaneously, extracting the overall semantic understanding to facilitate the initial semantic layout establishment. In the second stage, we employ an attention-based semantic segmentation method to pinpoint the latent generated regions of all concepts at each step. Following this, RBA divides the pixels of the latent image into semantic groups, with each group querying fine-grained features from the corresponding reference concept. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our MagicFace.
Authors: Yi Zhao, Le Chen, Jan Schneider, Quankai Gao, Juho Kannala, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Joni Pajarinen, Dieter B\"uchler
Abstract: It has been a long-standing research goal to endow robot hands with human-level dexterity. Bi-manual robot piano playing constitutes a task that combines challenges from dynamic tasks, such as generating fast while precise motions, with slower but contact-rich manipulation problems. Although reinforcement learning based approaches have shown promising results in single-task performance, these methods struggle in a multi-song setting. Our work aims to close this gap and, thereby, enable imitation learning approaches for robot piano playing at scale. To this end, we introduce the Robot Piano 1 Million (RP1M) dataset, containing bi-manual robot piano playing motion data of more than one million trajectories. We formulate finger placements as an optimal transport problem, thus, enabling automatic annotation of vast amounts of unlabeled songs. Benchmarking existing imitation learning approaches shows that such approaches reach state-of-the-art robot piano playing performance by leveraging RP1M.
Authors: Xiongkun Linghu, Jiangyong Huang, Xuesong Niu, Xiaojian Ma, Baoxiong Jia, Siyuan Huang
Abstract: Situation awareness is essential for understanding and reasoning about 3D scenes in embodied AI agents. However, existing datasets and benchmarks for situated understanding are limited in data modality, diversity, scale, and task scope. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-modal Situated Question Answering (MSQA), a large-scale multi-modal situated reasoning dataset, scalably collected leveraging 3D scene graphs and vision-language models (VLMs) across a diverse range of real-world 3D scenes. MSQA includes 251K situated question-answering pairs across 9 distinct question categories, covering complex scenarios within 3D scenes. We introduce a novel interleaved multi-modal input setting in our benchmark to provide text, image, and point cloud for situation and question description, resolving ambiguity in previous single-modality convention (e.g., text). Additionally, we devise the Multi-modal Situated Next-step Navigation (MSNN) benchmark to evaluate models' situated reasoning for navigation. Comprehensive evaluations on MSQA and MSNN highlight the limitations of existing vision-language models and underscore the importance of handling multi-modal interleaved inputs and situation modeling. Experiments on data scaling and cross-domain transfer further demonstrate the efficacy of leveraging MSQA as a pre-training dataset for developing more powerful situated reasoning models.
Authors: Paul Christiano, Jacob Hilton, Victor Lecomte, Mark Xu
Abstract: We introduce a formal notion of defendability against backdoors using a game between an attacker and a defender. In this game, the attacker modifies a function to behave differently on a particular input known as the "trigger", while behaving the same almost everywhere else. The defender then attempts to detect the trigger at evaluation time. If the defender succeeds with high enough probability, then the function class is said to be defendable. The key constraint on the attacker that makes defense possible is that the attacker's strategy must work for a randomly-chosen trigger. Our definition is simple and does not explicitly mention learning, yet we demonstrate that it is closely connected to learnability. In the computationally unbounded setting, we use a voting algorithm of Hanneke et al. (2022) to show that defendability is essentially determined by the VC dimension of the function class, in much the same way as PAC learnability. In the computationally bounded setting, we use a similar argument to show that efficient PAC learnability implies efficient defendability, but not conversely. On the other hand, we use indistinguishability obfuscation to show that the class of polynomial size circuits is not efficiently defendable. Finally, we present polynomial size decision trees as a natural example for which defense is strictly easier than learning. Thus, we identify efficient defendability as a notable intermediate concept in between efficient learnability and obfuscation.
Authors: Rashik Shahriar Akash, Radiful Islam, S. M. Saiful Islam Badhon, K. S. M. Tozammel Hossain
Abstract: Cervical cancer is a major cause of cancer-related mortality among women worldwide, and its survival rate improves significantly with early detection. Traditional diagnostic methods such as Pap smears and cervical biopsies rely heavily on cytologist expertise, making the process prone to human error. This study introduces CerviXpert, a multi-structural convolutional neural network model designed to efficiently classify cervix types and detect cervical cell abnormalities. CerviXpert is built as a computationally efficient model that classifies cervical cancer using images from the publicly available SiPaKMeD dataset. The model architecture emphasizes simplicity, using a limited number of convolutional layers followed by max pooling and dense layers, trained from scratch. We assessed the performance of CerviXpert against other state of the art convolutional neural network models including ResNet50, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and InceptionV3, evaluating them on accuracy, computational efficiency, and robustness using five fold cross validation. CerviXpert achieved an accuracy of 98.04 percent in classifying cervical cell abnormalities into three classes and 98.60 percent for five class cervix type classification, outperforming MobileNetV2 and InceptionV3 in both accuracy and computational requirements. It showed comparable results to ResNet50 and VGG16 while reducing computational complexity and resource needs. CerviXpert provides an effective solution for cervical cancer screening and diagnosis, balancing accuracy with computational efficiency. Its streamlined design enables deployment in resource constrained environments, potentially enhancing early detection and management of cervical cancer.
Authors: Dongyu Gong, Hantao Zhang
Abstract: Recent work on Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has revealed striking limits in their working memory capacity, similar to what has been found in human behavioral studies. Specifically, these models' performance drops significantly on N-back tasks as N increases. However, there is still a lack of mechanistic interpretability as to why this phenomenon would arise. Inspired by the executive attention theory from behavioral sciences, we hypothesize that the self-attention mechanism within Transformer-based models might be responsible for their working memory capacity limits. To test this hypothesis, we train vanilla decoder-only transformers to perform N-back tasks and find that attention scores gradually aggregate to the N-back positions over training, suggesting that the model masters the task by learning a strategy to pay attention to the relationship between the current position and the N-back position. Critically, we find that the total entropy of the attention score matrix increases as N increases, suggesting that the dispersion of attention scores might be the cause of the capacity limit observed in N-back tasks. Our findings thus offer insights into the shared role of attention in both human and artificial intelligence. Moreover, the limitations of the self-attention mechanism revealed in the current study could inform future efforts to design more powerful model architectures with enhanced working memory capacity and cognitive capabilities.
Authors: Eric Cullhed
Abstract: This article presents an experiment in fine-tuning a pretrained causal language model (Meta's Llama 3.1 8B Instruct) to assist with restoring missing or illegible characters in ancient Greek inscriptions and documentary papyri. Utilizing a straightforward instruction-based approach and a 95%/5% train/test split, the papyrus restoration model achieved a character error rate (CER) of 14.9%, a top-1 accuracy of 73.5%, and a top-20 accuracy of 86.0% for sequences up to 10 characters. A model was also fine-tuned for geographic attribution, reaching a top-1 accuracy of 66.4% and a top-3 accuracy of 79.9%. In chronological attribution, it demonstrated an average deviation of 21.7 years from the actual terminus post/ante quem, with a median deviation of 0 years. For inscriptions, the restoration model achieved a CER of 20.5%, a top-1 accuracy of 63.7%, and a top-20 accuracy of 83.0% for sequences up to 10 characters. In geographic attribution, it attained a top-1 accuracy of 75.0% and a top-3 accuracy of 83.7%, while in dating, it had an average deviation of 37.1 years and a median deviation of 3 years from the actual date range. Benchmarked against the state-of-the-art model (Ithaca) on a shared test set and on recently edited inscriptions, the instruction-tuned models excelled in text restoration, while also offering the practical advantage of ignoring spaces during reconstruction, which aligns with the scriptio continua of ancient textual artifacts. However, their performance in geographic and chronological attribution was lower than Ithaca's. To evaluate the approach in a more even setup, the instruction model was retrained with an 80%/10%/10% train-validation-test split, and still outperformed Ithaca in text restoration. The results suggest that fine-tuning larger pretrained causal language models using instruction templates for emendations and conjectures to ancient texts holds promise.
Authors: Andrei Chernov
Abstract: Inspired by recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) for Natural Language Processing (NLP), there has been a surge in research focused on developing foundational models for time series forecasting. One approach involves training LLM architectures on tokenized time series data using cross-entropy loss. Although this method has demonstrated promising results, cross-entropy loss is primarily designed for classification tasks and does not account for the distance between classes. To address this limitation, we propose using the Wasserstein loss for such architectures. To validate our approach, we fine-tuned a foundational time series model on $22$ zero-shot datasets, comparing the performance of cross-entropy loss with that of Wasserstein loss. Our results demonstrate that replacing cross-entropy loss with Wasserstein loss significantly improves point estimation.
Authors: Emanuela Boros, Maud Ehrmann
Abstract: This paper investigates the presence of OCR-sensitive neurons within the Transformer architecture and their influence on named entity recognition (NER) performance on historical documents. By analysing neuron activation patterns in response to clean and noisy text inputs, we identify and then neutralise OCR-sensitive neurons to improve model performance. Based on two open access large language models (Llama2 and Mistral), experiments demonstrate the existence of OCR-sensitive regions and show improvements in NER performance on historical newspapers and classical commentaries, highlighting the potential of targeted neuron modulation to improve models' performance on noisy text.
Authors: Tonghe Zhuang, Zhicheng Lin
Abstract: Computer programming (coding) is indispensable for researchers across disciplines, yet it remains challenging to learn and time-consuming to carry out. Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has the potential to transform coding into intuitive conversations, but best practices and effective workflows are only emerging. We dissect AI-based coding through three key lenses: the nature and role of LLMs in coding (why), six types of coding assistance they provide (what), and a five-step workflow in action with practical implementation strategies (how). Additionally, we address the limitations and future outlook of AI in coding. By offering actionable insights, this framework helps to guide researchers in effectively leveraging AI to enhance coding practices and education, accelerating scientific progress.
Authors: Xinyu Zhang, Yuhan Liu, Haonan Chang, Liam Schramm, Abdeslam Boularias
Abstract: Designing a universal policy architecture that performs well across diverse robots and task configurations remains a key challenge. In this work, we address this by representing robot actions as sequential data and generating actions through autoregressive sequence modeling. Existing autoregressive architectures generate end-effector waypoints sequentially as word tokens in language modeling, which are limited to low-frequency control tasks. Unlike language, robot actions are heterogeneous and often include continuous values -- such as joint positions, 2D pixel coordinates, and end-effector poses -- which are not easily suited for language-based modeling. Based on this insight, we introduce a straightforward enhancement: we extend causal transformers' single-token prediction to support predicting a variable number of tokens in a single step through our Chunking Causal Transformer (CCT). This enhancement enables robust performance across diverse tasks of various control frequencies, greater efficiency by having fewer autoregression steps, and lead to a hybrid action sequence design by mixing different types of actions and using a different chunk size for each action type. Based on CCT, we propose the Autoregressive Policy (ARP) architecture, which solves manipulation tasks by generating hybrid action sequences. We evaluate ARP across diverse robotic manipulation environments, including Push-T, ALOHA, and RLBench, and show that ARP, as a universal architecture, outperforms the environment-specific state-of-the-art in all tested benchmarks, while being more efficient in computation and parameter sizes. Videos of our real robot demonstrations, all source code and the pretrained models of ARP can be found at http://github.com/mlzxy/arp.
Authors: Xinliang Frederick Zhang, Nick Beauchamp, Lu Wang
Abstract: Reasoning about time and temporal relations is an integral aspect of human cognition, essential for perceiving the world and navigating our experiences. Though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in many reasoning tasks, temporal reasoning remains challenging due to its intrinsic complexity. In this work, we first study an essential task of temporal reasoning -- temporal graph generation, to unveil LLMs' inherent, global reasoning capabilities. We show that this task presents great challenges even for the most powerful LLMs, such as GPT-3.5/4. We also notice a significant performance gap by small models (<10B) that lag behind LLMs by 50%. Next, we study how to close this gap with a budget constraint, e.g., not using model finetuning. We propose a new prompting technique tailored for temporal reasoning, Narrative-of-Thought (NoT), that first converts the events set to a Python class, then prompts a small model to generate a temporally grounded narrative, guiding the final generation of a temporal graph. Extensive experiments showcase the efficacy of NoT in improving various metrics. Notably, NoT attains the highest F1 on the Schema-11 evaluation set, while securing an overall F1 on par with GPT-3.5. NoT also achieves the best structural similarity across the board, even compared with GPT-3.5/4. Our code is available at https://github.com/launchnlp/NoT.
Authors: Sam Gunn, Xuandong Zhao, Dawn Song
Abstract: We present the first undetectable watermarking scheme for generative image models. Undetectability ensures that no efficient adversary can distinguish between watermarked and un-watermarked images, even after making many adaptive queries. In particular, an undetectable watermark does not degrade image quality under any efficiently computable metric. Our scheme works by selecting the initial latents of a diffusion model using a pseudorandom error-correcting code (Christ and Gunn, 2024), a strategy which guarantees undetectability and robustness. We experimentally demonstrate that our watermarks are quality-preserving and robust using Stable Diffusion 2.1. Our experiments verify that, in contrast to every prior scheme we tested, our watermark does not degrade image quality. Our experiments also demonstrate robustness: existing watermark removal attacks fail to remove our watermark from images without significantly degrading the quality of the images. Finally, we find that we can robustly encode 512 bits in our watermark, and up to 2500 bits when the images are not subjected to watermark removal attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/PRC-Watermark.
Authors: Jiaqing Yuan, Ruijie Xi, Munindar P. Singh
Abstract: Argumentative stance classification plays a key role in identifying authors' viewpoints on specific topics. However, generating diverse pairs of argumentative sentences across various domains is challenging. Existing benchmarks often come from a single domain or focus on a limited set of topics. Additionally, manual annotation for accurate labeling is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address these challenges, we propose leveraging platform rules, readily available expert-curated content, and large language models to bypass the need for human annotation. Our approach produces a multidomain benchmark comprising 4,498 topical claims and 30,961 arguments from three sources, spanning 21 domains. We benchmark the dataset in fully supervised, zero-shot, and few-shot settings, shedding light on the strengths and limitations of different methodologies. We release the dataset and code in this study at hidden for anonymity.
Authors: Nandan Kumar Jha, Brandon Reagen
Abstract: LayerNorm is a critical component in modern large language models (LLMs) for stabilizing training and ensuring smooth optimization. However, it introduces significant challenges in mechanistic interpretability, outlier feature suppression, faithful signal propagation, and computational and communication complexity of private inference. This work explores desirable activation functions in normalization-free decoder-only LLMs. Contrary to the conventional preference for the GELU in transformer-based models, our empirical findings demonstrate an {\em opposite trend} -- ReLU significantly outperforms GELU in LayerNorm-free models, leading to an {\bf 8.2\%} perplexity improvement. We discover a key issue with GELU, where early layers experience entropic overload, leading to the under-utilization of the representational capacity of attention heads. This highlights that smoother activations like GELU are {\em ill-suited} for LayerNorm-free architectures, whereas ReLU's geometrical properties -- specialization in input space and intra-class selectivity -- lead to improved learning dynamics and better information retention in the absence of LayerNorm. This study offers key insights for optimizing transformer architectures where LayerNorm introduces significant challenges. The code and implementation are available at https://github.com/Nandan91/relu-revival-normfree
Authors: Rui Sherry Shen, Yusuf Osmanl{\i}o\u{g}lu, Drew Parker, Darien Aunapu, Benjamin E. Yerys, Birkan Tun\c{c}, Ragini Verma
Abstract: Divergent brain connectivity is thought to underlie the behavioral and cognitive symptoms observed in many neurodevelopmental disorders. Quantifying divergence from neurotypical connectivity patterns offers a promising pathway to inform diagnosis and therapeutic interventions. While advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as diffusion MRI (dMRI), have facilitated the mapping of brain's structural connectome, the challenge lies in accurately modeling developmental trajectories within these complex networked structures to create robust neurodivergence markers. In this work, we present the Brain Representation via Individualized Deep Generative Embedding (BRIDGE) framework, which integrates normative modeling with a bio-inspired deep generative model to create a reference trajectory of connectivity transformation as part of neurotypical development. This will enable the assessment of neurodivergence by comparing individuals to the established neurotypical trajectory. BRIDGE provides a global neurodivergence score based on the difference between connectivity-based brain age and chronological age, along with region-wise neurodivergence maps that highlight localized connectivity differences. Application of BRIDGE to a large cohort of children with autism spectrum disorder demonstrates that the global neurodivergence score correlates with clinical assessments in autism, and the regional map offers insights into the heterogeneity at the individual level in neurodevelopmental disorders. Together, the neurodivergence score and map form powerful tools for quantifying developmental divergence in connectivity patterns, advancing the development of imaging markers for personalized diagnosis and intervention in various clinical contexts.
Authors: Sheng Yan, Cunhang fan, Hongyu Zhang, Xiaoke Yang, Jianhua Tao, Zhao Lv
Abstract: At a cocktail party, humans exhibit an impressive ability to direct their attention. The auditory attention detection (AAD) approach seeks to identify the attended speaker by analyzing brain signals, such as EEG signals. However, current AAD algorithms overlook the spatial distribution information within EEG signals and lack the ability to capture long-range latent dependencies, limiting the model's ability to decode brain activity. To address these issues, this paper proposes a dual attention refinement network with spatiotemporal construction for AAD, named DARNet, which consists of the spatiotemporal construction module, dual attention refinement module, and feature fusion \& classifier module. Specifically, the spatiotemporal construction module aims to construct more expressive spatiotemporal feature representations, by capturing the spatial distribution characteristics of EEG signals. The dual attention refinement module aims to extract different levels of temporal patterns in EEG signals and enhance the model's ability to capture long-range latent dependencies. The feature fusion \& classifier module aims to aggregate temporal patterns and dependencies from different levels and obtain the final classification results. The experimental results indicate that compared to the state-of-the-art models, DARNet achieves an average classification accuracy improvement of 5.9\% for 0.1s, 4.6\% for 1s, and 3.9\% for 2s on the DTU dataset. While maintaining excellent classification performance, DARNet significantly reduces the number of required parameters. Compared to the state-of-the-art models, DARNet reduces the parameter count by 91\%. Code is available at: https://github.com/fchest/DARNet.git.
Authors: Siyi Liu, Qiang Ning, Kishaloy Halder, Wei Xiao, Zheng Qi, Phu Mon Htut, Yi Zhang, Neha Anna John, Bonan Min, Yassine Benajiba, Dan Roth
Abstract: Open domain question answering systems frequently rely on information retrieved from large collections of text (such as the Web) to answer questions. However, such collections of text often contain conflicting information, and indiscriminately depending on this information may result in untruthful and inaccurate answers. To understand the gravity of this problem, we collect a human-annotated dataset, Question Answering with Conflicting Contexts (QACC), and find that as much as 25% of unambiguous, open domain questions can lead to conflicting contexts when retrieved using Google Search. We evaluate and benchmark three powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) with our dataset QACC and demonstrate their limitations in effectively addressing questions with conflicting information. To explore how humans reason through conflicting contexts, we request our annotators to provide explanations for their selections of correct answers. We demonstrate that by finetuning LLMs to explain their answers, we can introduce richer information into their training that guide them through the process of reasoning with conflicting contexts.
Authors: Xiaohang Xu, Renhe Jiang, Chuang Yang, Zipei Fan, Kaoru Sezaki
Abstract: With the popularity of location-based services, human mobility prediction plays a key role in enhancing personalized navigation, optimizing recommendation systems, and facilitating urban mobility and planning. This involves predicting a user's next POI (point-of-interest) visit using their past visit history. However, the uneven distribution of visitations over time and space, namely the long-tail problem in spatial distribution, makes it difficult for AI models to predict those POIs that are less visited by humans. In light of this issue, we propose the Long-Tail Adjusted Next POI Prediction (LoTNext) framework for mobility prediction, combining a Long-Tailed Graph Adjustment module to reduce the impact of the long-tailed nodes in the user-POI interaction graph and a novel Long-Tailed Loss Adjustment module to adjust loss by logit score and sample weight adjustment strategy. Also, we employ the auxiliary prediction task to enhance generalization and accuracy. Our experiments with two real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate that LoTNext significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art works. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yukayo/LoTNext.
Authors: Jing Yang Lee, Seokhwan Kim, Kartik Mehta, Jiun-Yu Kao, Yu-Hsiang Lin, Arpit Gupta
Abstract: Information-Seeking Dialogue (ISD) agents aim to provide accurate responses to user queries. While proficient in directly addressing user queries, these agents, as well as LLMs in general, predominantly exhibit reactive behavior, lacking the ability to generate proactive responses that actively engage users in sustained conversations. However, existing definitions of proactive dialogue in this context do not focus on how each response actively engages the user and sustains the conversation. Hence, we present a new definition of proactivity that focuses on enhancing the `proactiveness' of each generated response via the introduction of new information related to the initial query. To this end, we construct a proactive dialogue dataset comprising 2,000 single-turn conversations, and introduce several automatic metrics to evaluate response `proactiveness' which achieved high correlation with human annotation. Additionally, we introduce two innovative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts, the 3-step CoT and the 3-in-1 CoT prompts, which consistently outperform standard prompts by up to 90% in the zero-shot setting.
Authors: Yuan Gao, Dokyun Lee, Gordon Burtch, Sina Fazelpour
Abstract: Recent studies suggest large language models (LLMs) can exhibit human-like reasoning, aligning with human behavior in economic experiments, surveys, and political discourse. This has led many to propose that LLMs can be used as surrogates or simulations for humans in social science research. However, LLMs differ fundamentally from humans, relying on probabilistic patterns, absent the embodied experiences or survival objectives that shape human cognition. We assess the reasoning depth of LLMs using the 11-20 money request game. Nearly all advanced approaches fail to replicate human behavior distributions across many models. Causes of failure are diverse and unpredictable, relating to input language, roles, and safeguarding. These results advise caution when using LLMs to study human behavior or as surrogates or simulations.
Authors: Bong Gyun Kang, Dongjun Lee, HyunGi Kim, DoHyun Chung, Sungroh Yoon
Abstract: Sequence modeling faces challenges in capturing long-range dependencies across diverse tasks. Recent linear and transformer-based forecasters have shown superior performance in time series forecasting. However, they are constrained by their inherent inability to effectively address long-range dependencies in time series data, primarily due to using fixed-size inputs for prediction. Furthermore, they typically sacrifice essential temporal correlation among consecutive training samples by shuffling them into mini-batches. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a fast and effective Spectral Attention mechanism, which preserves temporal correlations among samples and facilitates the handling of long-range information while maintaining the base model structure. Spectral Attention preserves long-period trends through a low-pass filter and facilitates gradient to flow between samples. Spectral Attention can be seamlessly integrated into most sequence models, allowing models with fixed-sized look-back windows to capture long-range dependencies over thousands of steps. Through extensive experiments on 11 real-world time series datasets using 7 recent forecasting models, we consistently demonstrate the efficacy of our Spectral Attention mechanism, achieving state-of-the-art results.
Authors: Dario Pasquini, Evgenios M. Kornaropoulos, Giuseppe Ateniese
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defense strategy tailored to counter LLM-driven cyberattacks. We introduce Mantis, a defensive framework that exploits LLMs' susceptibility to adversarial inputs to undermine malicious operations. Upon detecting an automated cyberattack, Mantis plants carefully crafted inputs into system responses, leading the attacker's LLM to disrupt their own operations (passive defense) or even compromise the attacker's machine (active defense). By deploying purposefully vulnerable decoy services to attract the attacker and using dynamic prompt injections for the attacker's LLM, Mantis can autonomously hack back the attacker. In our experiments, Mantis consistently achieved over 95% effectiveness against automated LLM-driven attacks. To foster further research and collaboration, Mantis is available as an open-source tool: https://github.com/pasquini-dario/project_mantis
Authors: Xin Xiang, Wenhui Zhou, Guojun Dai
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG)-based visual perception reconstruction has become an important area of research. Neuroscientific studies indicate that humans can decode imagined 3D objects by perceiving or imagining various visual information, such as color, shape, and rotation. Existing EEG-based visual decoding methods typically focus only on the reconstruction of 2D visual stimulus images and face various challenges in generation quality, including inconsistencies in texture, shape, and color between the visual stimuli and the reconstructed images. This paper proposes an EEG-based 3D object reconstruction method with style consistency and diffusion priors. The method consists of an EEG-driven multi-task joint learning stage and an EEG-to-3D diffusion stage. The first stage uses a neural EEG encoder based on regional semantic learning, employing a multi-task joint learning scheme that includes a masked EEG signal recovery task and an EEG based visual classification task. The second stage introduces a latent diffusion model (LDM) fine-tuning strategy with style-conditioned constraints and a neural radiance field (NeRF) optimization strategy. This strategy explicitly embeds semantic- and location-aware latent EEG codes and combines them with visual stimulus maps to fine-tune the LDM. The fine-tuned LDM serves as a diffusion prior, which, combined with the style loss of visual stimuli, is used to optimize NeRF for generating 3D objects. Finally, through experimental validation, we demonstrate that this method can effectively use EEG data to reconstruct 3D objects with style consistency.
Authors: Seongmin Lee, Ali Payani, Duen Horng Chau
Abstract: Modern deep learning models often make predictions by focusing on irrelevant areas, leading to biased performance and limited generalization. Existing methods aimed at rectifying model attention require explicit labels for irrelevant areas or complex pixel-wise ground truth attention maps. We present CRAYON (Correcting Reasoning with Annotations of Yes Or No), offering effective, scalable, and practical solutions to rectify model attention using simple yes-no annotations. CRAYON empowers classical and modern model interpretation techniques to identify and guide model reasoning: CRAYON-ATTENTION directs classic interpretations based on saliency maps to focus on relevant image regions, while CRAYON-PRUNING removes irrelevant neurons identified by modern concept-based methods to mitigate their influence. Through extensive experiments with both quantitative and human evaluation, we showcase CRAYON's effectiveness, scalability, and practicality in refining model attention. CRAYON achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming 12 methods across 3 benchmark datasets, surpassing approaches that require more complex annotations.
Authors: Zahra Aminiranjbar, Jianan Tang, Qiudan Wang, Shubha Pant, Mahesh Viswanathan
Abstract: The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed them from basic conversational tools into sophisticated entities capable of complex reasoning and decision-making. These advancements have led to the development of specialized LLM-based agents designed for diverse tasks such as coding and web browsing. As these agents become more capable, the need for a robust framework that facilitates global communication and collaboration among them towards advanced objectives has become increasingly critical. Distributed Agents in a Worldwide Network (DAWN) addresses this need by offering a versatile framework that integrates LLM-based agents with traditional software systems, enabling the creation of agentic applications suited for a wide range of use cases. DAWN enables distributed agents worldwide to register and be easily discovered through Gateway Agents. Collaborations among these agents are coordinated by a Principal Agent equipped with reasoning strategies. DAWN offers three operational modes: No-LLM Mode for deterministic tasks, Copilot for augmented decision-making, and LLM Agent for autonomous operations. Additionally, DAWN ensures the safety and security of agent collaborations globally through a dedicated safety, security, and compliance layer, protecting the network against attackers and adhering to stringent security and compliance standards. These features make DAWN a robust network for deploying agent-based applications across various industries.
Authors: Carl Allen
Abstract: Disentanglement, or identifying salient statistically independent factors of the data, is of interest in many areas of machine learning and statistics, with relevance to synthetic data generation with controlled properties, robust classification of features, parsimonious encoding, and a greater understanding of the generative process underlying the data. Disentanglement arises in several generative paradigms, including Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks and diffusion models. Particular progress has recently been made in understanding disentanglement in VAEs, where the choice of diagonal posterior covariance matrices is suggested to promote mutual orthogonality between columns of the decoder's Jacobian. We continue this thread to show how this linear independence translates to statistical independence, completing the chain in understanding how the VAE's objective identifies independent components of, or disentangles, the data.
Authors: Imad Ali Shah, Fahad Mumtaz Malik, Muhammad Waqas Ashraf
Abstract: Computer vision researchers have extensively worked on fundamental infrared visual recognition for the past few decades. Among various approaches, deep learning has emerged as the most promising candidate. However, Infrared Small Object Segmentation (ISOS) remains a major focus due to several challenges including: 1) the lack of effective utilization of local contrast and global contextual information; 2) the potential loss of small objects in deep models; and 3) the struggling to capture fine-grained details and ignore noise. To address these challenges, we propose a modified U-Net architecture, named SFA-UNet, by combining Scharr Convolution (SC) and Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC) in addition to vertical and horizontal Attention gates (AG) into UNet. SFA-UNet utilizes double convolution layers with the addition of SC and FFC in its encoder and decoder layers. SC helps to learn the foreground-to-background contrast information whereas FFC provide multi-scale contextual information while mitigating the small objects vanishing problem. Additionally, the introduction of vertical AGs in encoder layers enhances the model's focus on the targeted object by ignoring irrelevant regions. We evaluated the proposed approach on publicly available, SIRST and IRSTD datasets, and achieved superior performance by an average 0.75% with variance of 0.025 of all combined metrics in multiple runs as compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods
Authors: Haowen Xiao, Guanghui Liu, Xinyi Gao, Yang Li, Fengmao Lv, Jielei Chu
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown remarkable data representation capabilities across a wide range of datasets. However, when applied to real-world datasets with long-tailed distributions, performance on multiple downstream tasks degrades significantly. Recently, the community has begun to focus more on self-supervised long-tailed learning. Some works attempt to transfer temperature mechanisms to self-supervised learning or use category-space uniformity constraints to balance the representation of different categories in the embedding space to fight against long-tail distributions. However, most of these approaches focus on the joint optimization of all samples in the dataset or on constraining the category distribution, with little attention given to whether each individual sample is optimally guided during training. To address this issue, we propose Temperature Auxiliary Sample-level Encouragement (TASE). We introduce pseudo-labels into self-supervised long-tailed learning, utilizing pseudo-label information to drive a dynamic temperature and re-weighting strategy. Specifically, We assign an optimal temperature parameter to each sample. Additionally, we analyze the lack of quantity awareness in the temperature parameter and use re-weighting to compensate for this deficiency, thereby achieving optimal training patterns at the sample level. Comprehensive experimental results on six benchmarks across three datasets demonstrate that our method achieves outstanding performance in improving long-tail recognition, while also exhibiting high robustness.
Authors: Zifeng Wang, Hanyin Wang, Benjamin Danek, Ying Li, Christina Mack, Hoifung Poon, Yajuan Wang, Pranav Rajpurkar, Jimeng Sun
Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into medical applications has sparked widespread interest across the healthcare industry, from drug discovery and development to clinical decision support, assisting telemedicine, medical devices, and healthcare insurance applications. This perspective paper aims to discuss the inner workings of building LLM-powered medical AI applications and introduces a comprehensive framework for their development. We review existing literature and outline the unique challenges of applying LLMs in specialized medical contexts. Additionally, we introduce a three-step framework to organize medical LLM research activities: 1) Modeling: breaking down complex medical workflows into manageable steps for developing medical-specific models; 2) Optimization: optimizing the model performance with crafted prompts and integrating external knowledge and tools, and 3) System engineering: decomposing complex tasks into subtasks and leveraging human expertise for building medical AI applications. Furthermore, we offer a detailed use case playbook that describes various LLM-powered medical AI applications, such as optimizing clinical trial design, enhancing clinical decision support, and advancing medical imaging analysis. Finally, we discuss various challenges and considerations for building medical AI applications with LLMs, such as handling hallucination issues, data ownership and compliance, privacy, intellectual property considerations, compute cost, sustainability issues, and responsible AI requirements.
Authors: Hongjun An, Yiliang Song, Xuelong Li
Abstract: We discovered the underlying physics in Next-token Prediction (NTP). We identified the law of information conservation within NTP and proposed the First Law of Information Capacity (IC-1), demonstrating that the essence of intelligence emergence in auto-regressive models is fundamentally a process of information transfer. We also introduced Landauer's Principle into NTP, formulating the Second Law of Information Capacity (IC-2), which establishes the relationship between auto-regressive model training and energy consumption. Additionally, we presented several corollaries, which hold practical significance for production practices. Finally, we demonstrate the consistency between the Law of Information Capacity and the Scaling Law for Neural Language Models, the Knowledge Capacity Scaling Laws, and the Scaling Laws for Precision.
Authors: Ruofan Wang, Bo Wang, Xiaosen Wang, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: As large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) grow in prominence, ensuring their safe deployment has become critical. Recent studies have explored VLM robustness against jailbreak attacks--techniques that exploit model vulnerabilities to elicit harmful outputs. However, the limited availability of diverse multi-modal data has led current approaches to rely heavily on adversarial or manually crafted images derived from harmful text datasets, which may lack effectiveness and diversity across different contexts. In this paper, we propose a novel jailbreak method named IDEATOR, which autonomously generates malicious image-text pairs for black-box jailbreak attacks. IDEATOR is based on the insight that VLMs themselves could serve as powerful red team models for generating multimodal jailbreak prompts. Specifically, IDEATOR uses a VLM to create targeted jailbreak texts and pairs them with jailbreak images generated by a state-of-the-art diffusion model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate IDEATOR's high effectiveness and transferability. Notably, it achieves a 94% success rate in jailbreaking MiniGPT-4 with an average of only 5.34 queries, and high success rates of 82%, 88%, and 75% when transferred to LLaVA, InstructBLIP, and Meta's Chameleon, respectively. IDEATOR uncovers specific vulnerabilities in VLMs under black-box conditions, underscoring the need for improved safety mechanisms.
Authors: Dan Hendrycks
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence is rapidly embedding itself within militaries, economies, and societies, reshaping their very foundations. Given the depth and breadth of its consequences, it has never been more pressing to understand how to ensure that AI systems are safe, ethical, and have a positive societal impact. This book aims to provide a comprehensive approach to understanding AI risk. Our primary goals include consolidating fragmented knowledge on AI risk, increasing the precision of core ideas, and reducing barriers to entry by making content simpler and more comprehensible. The book has been designed to be accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds. You do not need to have studied AI, philosophy, or other such topics. The content is skimmable and somewhat modular, so that you can choose which chapters to read. We introduce mathematical formulas in a few places to specify claims more precisely, but readers should be able to understand the main points without these.
Authors: Runjia Zeng, Cheng Han, Qifan Wang, Chunshu Wu, Tong Geng, Lifu Huang, Ying Nian Wu, Dongfang Liu
Abstract: With the scale of vision Transformer-based models continuing to grow, finetuning these large-scale pretrained models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Visual prompt tuning is introduced as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) method to this trend. Despite its successes, a notable research challenge persists within almost all PEFT approaches: significant performance degradation is observed when there is a substantial disparity between the datasets applied in pretraining and finetuning phases. To address this challenge, we draw inspiration from human visual cognition, and propose the Visual Fourier Prompt Tuning (VFPT) method as a general and effective solution for adapting large-scale transformer-based models. Our approach innovatively incorporates the Fast Fourier Transform into prompt embeddings and harmoniously considers both spatial and frequency domain information. Apart from its inherent simplicity and intuitiveness, VFPT exhibits superior performance across all datasets, offering a general solution to dataset challenges, irrespective of data disparities. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks, with low parameter usage (e.g., 0.57% of model parameters on VTAB-1k) and notable performance enhancements (e.g., 73.20% of mean accuracy on VTAB-1k). Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/runtsang/VFPT.
Authors: Wen-Ding Li, Keya Hu, Carter Larsen, Yuqing Wu, Simon Alford, Caleb Woo, Spencer M. Dunn, Hao Tang, Michelangelo Naim, Dat Nguyen, Wei-Long Zheng, Zenna Tavares, Yewen Pu, Kevin Ellis
Abstract: When learning an input-output mapping from very few examples, is it better to first infer a latent function that explains the examples, or is it better to directly predict new test outputs, e.g. using a neural network? We study this question on ARC, a highly diverse dataset of abstract reasoning tasks. We train neural models for induction (inferring latent functions) and transduction (directly predicting the test output for a given test input). Our models are trained on synthetic data generated by prompting LLMs to produce Python code specifying a function to be inferred, plus a stochastic subroutine for generating inputs to that function. We find inductive and transductive models solve very different problems, despite training on the same problems, and despite sharing the same neural architecture.
Authors: Johannes Himmelreich, Arbie Hsu, Kristian Lum, Ellen Veomett
Abstract: A yet unmet challenge in algorithmic fairness is the problem of intersectionality, that is, achieving fairness across the intersection of multiple groups -- and verifying that such fairness has been attained. Because intersectional groups tend to be small, verifying whether a model is fair raises statistical as well as moral-methodological challenges. This paper (1) elucidates the problem of intersectionality in algorithmic fairness, (2) develops desiderata to clarify the challenges underlying the problem and guide the search for potential solutions, (3) illustrates the desiderata and potential solutions by sketching a proposal using simple hypothesis testing, and (4) evaluates, partly empirically, this proposal against the proposed desiderata.
Authors: Yuanshao Zhu, James Jianqiao Yu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xuetao Wei, Yuxuan Liang
Abstract: Human trajectory modeling is essential for deciphering movement patterns and supporting advanced applications across various domains. However, existing methods are often tailored to specific tasks and regions, resulting in limitations related to task specificity, regional dependency, and data quality sensitivity. Addressing these challenges requires a universal human trajectory foundation model capable of generalizing and scaling across diverse tasks and geographic contexts. To this end, we propose UniTraj, a Universal human Trajectory foundation model that is task-adaptive, region-independent, and highly generalizable. To further enhance performance, we construct WorldTrace, the first large-scale, high-quality, globally distributed dataset sourced from open web platforms, encompassing 2.45 million trajectories with billions of points across 70 countries. Through multiple resampling and masking strategies designed for pre-training, UniTraj effectively overcomes geographic and task constraints, adapting to heterogeneous data quality. Extensive experiments across multiple trajectory analysis tasks and real-world datasets demonstrate that UniTraj consistently outperforms existing approaches in terms of scalability and adaptability. These results underscore the potential of UniTraj as a versatile, robust solution for a wide range of trajectory analysis applications, with WorldTrace serving as an ideal but non-exclusive foundation for training.
Authors: Zijian Hu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Shanshan Han, Han Jin, Alay Dilipbhai Shah, Dimitris Stripelis, Yuhang Yao, Salman Avestimehr, Chaoyang He, Tong Zhang
Abstract: We present Fox-1, a series of small language models (SLMs) consisting of Fox-1-1.6B and Fox-1-1.6B-Instruct-v0.1. These models are pre-trained on 3 trillion tokens of web-scraped document data and fine-tuned with 5 billion tokens of instruction-following and multi-turn conversation data. Aiming to improve the pre-training efficiency, Fox-1-1.6B model introduces a novel 3-stage data curriculum across all the training data with 2K-8K sequence length. In architecture design, Fox-1 features a deeper layer structure, an expanded vocabulary, and utilizes Grouped Query Attention (GQA), offering a performant and efficient architecture compared to other SLMs. Fox-1 achieves better or on-par performance in various benchmarks compared to StableLM-2-1.6B, Gemma-2B, Qwen1.5-1.8B, and OpenELM1.1B, with competitive inference speed and throughput. The model weights have been released under the Apache 2.0 license, where we aim to promote the democratization of LLMs and make them fully accessible to the whole open-source community.
Authors: Abigail Yongping Huang, Ashwin Nair, Zhen Rong Goh, Tianrui Liu
Abstract: Current metadata creation for web archives is time consuming and costly due to reliance on human effort. This paper explores the use of gpt-4o for metadata generation within the Web Archive Singapore, focusing on scalability, efficiency, and cost effectiveness. We processed 112 Web ARChive (WARC) files using data reduction techniques, achieving a notable 99.9% reduction in metadata generation costs. By prompt engineering, we generated titles and abstracts, which were evaluated both intrinsically using Levenshtein Distance and BERTScore, and extrinsically with human cataloguers using McNemar's test. Results indicate that while our method offers significant cost savings and efficiency gains, human curated metadata maintains an edge in quality. The study identifies key challenges including content inaccuracies, hallucinations, and translation issues, suggesting that Large Language Models (LLMs) should serve as complements rather than replacements for human cataloguers. Future work will focus on refining prompts, improving content filtering, and addressing privacy concerns through experimentation with smaller models. This research advances the integration of LLMs in web archiving, offering valuable insights into their current capabilities and outlining directions for future enhancements. The code is available at https://github.com/masamune-prog/warc2summary for further development and use by institutions facing similar challenges.
Authors: Mahmut S. Gokmen, Cody Bumgardner, Caner Ozcan
Abstract: Coronary artery disease (CAD), one of the most common cause of mortality in the world. Coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring using computed tomography (CT) is key for risk assessment to prevent coronary disease. Previous studies on risk assessment and calcification detection in CT scans primarily use approaches based on UNET architecture, frequently implemented on pre-built models. However, these models are limited by the availability of annotated CT scans containing CAC and suffering from imbalanced dataset, decreasing performance of CAC segmentation and scoring. In this study, we extend this approach by incorporating the self-supervised learning (SSL) technique of DINO (self-distillation with no labels) to eliminate limitations of scarce annotated data in CT scans. The DINO model's ability to train without requiring CAC area annotations enhances its robustness in generating distinct features. The DINO model is trained on to focus specifically on calcified areas by using labels, aiming to generate features that effectively capture and highlight key characteristics. The label-guided DINO (DINO-LG) enhances classification by distinguishing CT slices that contain calcification from those that do not, performing 57% better than the standard DINO model in this task. CAC scoring and segmentation tasks are performed by a basic U-NET architecture, fed specifically with CT slices containing calcified areas as identified by the DINO-LG model. This targeted identification performed by DINO-LG model improves CAC segmentation performance by approximately 10% and significant increase in CAC scoring accuracy.
Authors: Rahul Ravishankar, Zeeshan Patel, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Jitendra Malik
Abstract: In this paper, we argue that iterative computation with diffusion models offers a powerful paradigm for not only generation but also visual perception tasks. We unify tasks such as depth estimation, optical flow, and amodal segmentation under the framework of image-to-image translation, and show how diffusion models benefit from scaling training and test-time compute for these perceptual tasks. Through a careful analysis of these scaling properties, we formulate compute-optimal training and inference recipes to scale diffusion models for visual perception tasks. Our models achieve competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods using significantly less data and compute. To access our code and models, see https://scaling-diffusion-perception.github.io .
Authors: Abhinav Java, Simra Shahid, Chirag Agarwal
Abstract: The widespread practice of indiscriminate data scraping to fine-tune language models (LMs) raises significant legal and ethical concerns, particularly regarding compliance with data protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This practice often results in the unauthorized use of personal information, prompting growing debate within the academic and regulatory communities. Recent works have introduced the concept of generating unlearnable datasets (by adding imperceptible noise to the clean data), such that the underlying model achieves lower loss during training but fails to generalize to the unseen test setting. Though somewhat effective, these approaches are predominantly designed for images and are limited by several practical constraints like requiring knowledge of the target model. To this end, we introduce RegText, a framework that injects imperceptible spurious correlations into natural language datasets, effectively rendering them unlearnable without affecting semantic content. We demonstrate RegText's utility through rigorous empirical analysis of small and large LMs. Notably, RegText can restrict newer models like GPT-4o and Llama from learning on our generated data, resulting in a drop in their test accuracy compared to their zero-shot performance and paving the way for generating unlearnable text to protect public data.
Authors: Han-Guang Wang, Hui-Rang Hou, Li-Cheng Jin, Chen-Yang Xu, Zhong-Yi Zhang, Qing-Hao Meng
Abstract: Background and Objective: Depression is a severe mental disorder, and accurate diagnosis is pivotal to the cure and rehabilitation of people with depression. However, the current questionnaire-based diagnostic methods could bring subjective biases and may be denied by subjects. In search of a more objective means of diagnosis, researchers have begun to experiment with deep learning-based methods for identifying depressive disorders in recent years. Methods: In this study, a novel Spatiotemporal-fused network with Automated multi-scale Depth-wise and TIME-interval-related common feature extractor (SAD-TIME) is proposed. SAD-TIME incorporates an automated nodes' common features extractor (CFE), a spatial sector (SpS), a modified temporal sector (TeS), and a domain adversarial learner (DAL). The CFE includes a multi-scale depth-wise 1D-convolutional neural network and a time-interval embedding generator, where the unique information of each channel is preserved. The SpS fuses the functional connectivity with the distance-based connectivity containing spatial position of EEG electrodes. A multi-head-attention graph convolutional network is also applied in the SpS to fuse the features from different EEG channels. The TeS is based on long short-term memory and graph transformer networks, where the temporal information of different time-windows is fused. Moreover, the DAL is used after the SpS to obtain the domain-invariant feature. Results: Experimental results under tenfold cross-validation show that the proposed SAD-TIME method achieves 92.00% and 94.00% depression classification accuracies on two datasets, respectively, in cross-subject mode. Conclusion: SAD-TIME is a robust depression detection model, where the automatedly-generated features, the SpS and the TeS assist the classification performance with the fusion of the innate spatiotemporal information in the EEG signals.
Authors: Kai Jiang, Jiaxing Huang
Abstract: Autoregressive models have demonstrated great performance in natural language processing (NLP) with impressive scalability, adaptability and generalizability. Inspired by their notable success in NLP field, autoregressive models have been intensively investigated recently for computer vision, which perform next-token predictions by representing visual data as visual tokens and enables autoregressive modelling for a wide range of vision tasks, ranging from visual generation and visual understanding to the very recent multimodal generation that unifies visual generation and understanding with a single autoregressive model. This paper provides a systematic review of vision autoregressive models, including the development of a taxonomy of existing methods and highlighting their major contributions, strengths, and limitations, covering various vision tasks such as image generation, video generation, image editing, motion generation, medical image analysis, 3D generation, robotic manipulation, unified multimodal generation, etc. Besides, we investigate and analyze the latest advancements in autoregressive models, including thorough benchmarking and discussion of existing methods across various evaluation datasets. Finally, we outline key challenges and promising directions for future research, offering a roadmap to guide further advancements in vision autoregressive models.
Authors: Cl\'ement Dumas, Chris Wendler, Veniamin Veselovsky, Giovanni Monea, Robert West
Abstract: A central question in multilingual language modeling is whether large language models (LLMs) develop a universal concept representation, disentangled from specific languages. In this paper, we address this question by analyzing latent representations (latents) during a word translation task in transformer-based LLMs. We strategically extract latents from a source translation prompt and insert them into the forward pass on a target translation prompt. By doing so, we find that the output language is encoded in the latent at an earlier layer than the concept to be translated. Building on this insight, we conduct two key experiments. First, we demonstrate that we can change the concept without changing the language and vice versa through activation patching alone. Second, we show that patching with the mean over latents across different languages does not impair and instead improves the models' performance in translating the concept. Our results provide evidence for the existence of language-agnostic concept representations within the investigated models.
Authors: Umar Alkafaween, Ibrahim Albluwi, Paul Denny
Abstract: Automatically graded programming assignments provide instant feedback to students and significantly reduce manual grading time for instructors. However, creating comprehensive suites of test cases for programming problems within automatic graders can be time-consuming and complex. The effort needed to define test suites may deter some instructors from creating additional problems or lead to inadequate test coverage, potentially resulting in misleading feedback on student solutions. Such limitations may reduce student access to the well-documented benefits of timely feedback when learning programming. In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of using Large Language Models (LLMs), as part of a larger workflow, to automatically generate test suites for CS1-level programming problems. Each problem's statement and reference solution are provided to GPT-4 to produce a test suite that can be used by an autograder. We evaluate our proposed approach using a sample of 26 problems, and more than 25,000 attempted solutions to those problems, submitted by students in an introductory programming course. We compare the performance of the LLM-generated test suites against the instructor-created test suites for each problem. Our findings reveal that LLM-generated test suites can correctly identify most valid solutions, and for most problems are at least as comprehensive as the instructor test suites. Additionally, the LLM-generated test suites exposed ambiguities in some problem statements, underscoring their potential to improve both autograding and instructional design.