Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human-AI Interactions in the Communication Era: Autophagy Makes Large Models Achieving Local Optima

The increasing significance of large language and multimodal models in societal information processing has ignited debates on social safety and ethics. However, few studies have approached the analysis of these limitations from the comprehensive perspective of human and artificial intelligence system interactions. This study investigates biases and preferences when humans and large models are used as key links in communication. To achieve this, we design a multimodal dataset and three different experiments to evaluate generative models in their roles as producers and disseminators of information. Our main findings highlight that synthesized information is more likely to be incorporated into model training datasets and messaging than human-generated information. Additionally, large models, when acting as transmitters of information, tend to modify and lose specific content selectively. Conceptually, we present two realistic models of autophagic ("self-consumption") loops to account for the suppression of human-generated information in the exchange of information between humans and AI systems. We generalize the declining diversity of social information and the bottleneck in model performance caused by the above trends to the local optima of large models.
Aligning Large Language Models by On-Policy Self-Judgment

Existing approaches for aligning large language models with human preferences face a trade-off that requires a separate reward model (RM) for on-policy learning. In this paper, we present a novel alignment framework, \method{} that (1) does on-policy learning and 2) is parameter efficient, as it does not require an additional RM for evaluating the samples for on-policy learning. To this end, we propose Judge-augmented Supervised Fine-Tuning (JSFT) to train a single model to act as both a policy and a judge. Specifically, we view the pairwise judgment task, choosing the better response from a response pair, as a special case of the instruction-following task. The resulting model can judge preferences of on-the-fly responses from current policy initialized from itself. Experimental results show the efficacy of \method{}, outperforming baselines in preference benchmarks. We also show that the rejecting sampling by itself can improve performance further without an additional evaluator.
Pushing Auto-regressive Models for 3D Shape Generation at Capacity and Scalability

Auto-regressive models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in grid space. In this paper, we extend auto-regressive models to 3D domains, and seek a stronger ability of 3D shape generation by improving auto-regressive models at capacity and scalability simultaneously. Firstly, we leverage an ensemble of publicly available 3D datasets to facilitate the training of large-scale models. It consists of a comprehensive collection of approximately 900,000 objects, with multiple properties of meshes, points, voxels, rendered images, and text captions. This diverse labeled dataset, termed Objaverse-Mix, empowers our model to learn from a wide range of object variations. However, directly applying 3D auto-regression encounters critical challenges of high computational demands on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions, resulting in inferior quality of 3D shapes. To this end, we then present a novel framework Argus3D in terms of capacity. Concretely, our approach introduces discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids, which not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distributions in a more tractable order. The capacity of conditional generation can thus be realized by simply concatenating various conditioning inputs to the latent vector, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. In addition, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we naturally scale up our approach to a larger model with an impressive 3.6 billion parameters, further enhancing the quality of versatile 3D generation. Extensive experiments on four generation tasks demonstrate that Argus3D can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes across multiple categories, achieving remarkable performance.
The Effectiveness of Random Forgetting for Robust Generalization

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which can compromise their performance and accuracy. Adversarial Training (AT) has emerged as a popular approach for protecting neural networks against such attacks. However, a key challenge of AT is robust overfitting, where the network's robust performance on test data deteriorates with further training, thus hindering generalization. Motivated by the concept of active forgetting in the brain, we introduce a novel learning paradigm called"Forget to Mitigate Overfitting (FOMO)". FOMO alternates between the forgetting phase, which randomly forgets a subset of weights and regulates the model's information through weight reinitialization, and the relearning phase, which emphasizes learning generalizable features. Our experiments on benchmark datasets and adversarial attacks show that FOMO alleviates robust overfitting by significantly reducing the gap between the best and last robust test accuracy while improving the state-of-the-art robustness. Furthermore, FOMO provides a better trade-off between standard and robust accuracy, outperforming baseline adversarial methods. Finally, our framework is robust to AutoAttacks and increases generalization in many real-world scenarios.
Liquidity Premium, Liquidity-Adjusted Return and Volatility, and Extreme Liquidity

We establish innovative liquidity premium measures, and construct liquidity-adjusted return and volatility to model assets with extreme liquidity, represented by a portfolio of selected crypto assets, and upon which we develop a set of liquidity-adjusted ARMA-GARCH/EGARCH models. We demonstrate that these models produce superior predictability at extreme liquidity to their traditional counterparts. We provide empirical support by comparing the performances of a series of Mean Variance portfolios.
CodeArt: Better Code Models by Attention Regularization When Symbols Are Lacking

Transformer based code models have impressive performance in many software engineering tasks. However, their effectiveness degrades when symbols are missing or not informative. The reason is that the model may not learn to pay attention to the right correlations/contexts without the help of symbols. We propose a new method to pre-train general code models when symbols are lacking. We observe that in such cases, programs degenerate to something written in a very primitive language. We hence propose to use program analysis to extract contexts a priori (instead of relying on symbols and masked language modeling as in vanilla models). We then leverage a novel attention masking method to only allow the model attending to these contexts, e.g., bi-directional program dependence transitive closures and token co-occurrences. In the meantime, the inherent self-attention mechanism is utilized to learn which of the allowed attentions are more important compared to others. To realize the idea, we enhance the vanilla tokenization and model architecture of a BERT model, construct and utilize attention masks, and introduce a new pre-training algorithm. We pre-train this BERT-like model from scratch, using a dataset of 26 million stripped binary functions with explicit program dependence information extracted by our tool. We apply the model in three downstream tasks: binary similarity, type inference, and malware family classification. Our pre-trained model can improve the SOTAs in these tasks from 53% to 64%, 49% to 60%, and 74% to 94%, respectively. It also substantially outperforms other general pre-training techniques of code understanding models.
Evaluating Program Repair with Semantic-Preserving Transformations: A Naturalness Assessment

In this paper, we investigate the naturalness of semantic-preserving transformations and their impacts on the evaluation of NPR. To achieve this, we conduct a two-stage human study, including (1) interviews with senior software developers to establish the first concrete criteria for assessing the naturalness of code transformations and (2) a survey involving 10 developers to assess the naturalness of 1178 transformations, i.e., pairs of original and transformed programs, applied to 225 real-world bugs. Our findings reveal that nearly 60% and 20% of these transformations are considered natural and unnatural with substantially high agreement among human annotators. Furthermore, the unnatural code transformations introduce a 25.2% false alarm rate on robustness of five well-known NPR systems. Additionally, the performance of the NPR systems drops notably when evaluated using natural transformations, i.e., a drop of up to 22.9% and 23.6% in terms of the numbers of correct and plausible patches generated by these systems. These results highlight the importance of robustness testing by considering naturalness of code transformations, which unveils true effectiveness of NPR systems. Finally, we conduct an exploration study on automating the assessment of naturalness of code transformations by deriving a new naturalness metric based on Cross-Entropy. Based on our naturalness metric, we can effectively assess naturalness for code transformations automatically with an AUC of 0.7.
Comments on"Can quantum statistics help distinguish Dirac from Majorana neutrinos?"(arXiv:2402.05172 [hep-ph])

In a recent article arXiv:2402.05172 [hep-ph], the authors discuss the question"whether quantum statistics can help distinguish between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos. "The paper contains, among other things, an unsubstantiated critique of the results derived in our papers arXiv:2106.11785 [hep-ph] and arXiv:2307.05654 [hep-ph]. One of the criticisms is related to our expression for differential decay rate for the back-to-back neutrino-antineutrino configuration in the decay $B^0 \to \mu^- \, \mu^+ \, \nu_\mu \, \overline{\nu}_\mu$. We show that the claim is wrong and point out how the correct result was obtained. The second criticism is related to the implementation of the anti-symmetrization as dictated by quantum statistics for Majorana neutrinos and antineutrinos (which are identical, by definition). Any direct observation of the neutrinos, as done in Ref. \cite{Akhmedov:2024}, would project the neutrinos into distinguishable helicity states, thus nullifying all observable effects of quantum statistics. They have missed the point that our procedure holds when the neutrino and antineutrino remain undetected by the detector. In the back-to-back kinematic configuration, one can infer the neutrino energies without directly detecting their identities. This smartly ensures that the quantum statistical effects are not erased. Their overriding assertion that our papers arXiv:2106.11785 [hep-ph] and arXiv:2307.05654 [hep-ph] are incorrect fails to recognize that in both arXiv:2106.11785 [hep-ph] and arXiv:2307.05654 [hep-ph] we also point out generic conditions under which the practical Dirac-Majorana confusion theorem holds. "Clearly there is no confusion over confusion theorem. "
Dynamical crossovers and correlations in a harmonic chain of active particles

We explore the dynamics of a tracer in an active particle harmonic chain, investigating the influence of interactions. Our analysis involves calculating mean-squared displacements (MSD) and space-time correlations through Green's function techniques and numerical simulations. Depending on chain characteristics, i.e., different time scales determined by interaction stiffness and persistence of activity, tagged-particle MSD exhibit ballistic, diffusive, and single-file diffusion (SFD) scaling over time, with crossovers explained by our analytic expressions. Our results reveal transitions in bulk particle displacement distributions from an early-time bimodal to late-time Gaussian, passing through regimes of unimodal distributions with finite support and negative excess kurtosis and longer-tailed distributions with positive excess kurtosis. The distributions exhibit data collapse, aligning with ballistic, diffusive, and SFD scaling in the appropriate time regimes. However, at much longer times, the distributions become Gaussian. Finally, we derive expressions for steady-state static and dynamic two-point displacement correlations, consistent with simulations and converging to equilibrium results for small persistence. Additionally, the two-time stretch correlation extends to longer separation at later times, while the autocorrelation for the bulk particle shows diffusive scaling beyond the persistence time.
Number of homogeneous components of counterexamples to the Dixmier conjecture

Assume that $P$ and $Q$ are elements of $A_1$ satisfying $[P,Q] = 1$. The Dixmier Conjecture for $A_1$ says that they always generate $A_1$. We show that if $P$ is a sum of not more than~$4$ homogeneous elements of $A_1$ then $P$ and $Q$ generate $A_1$, which generalizes the main result in arXiv:2210.00257.
Penetration Vision through Virtual Reality Headsets: Identifying 360-degree Videos from Head Movements

In this paper, we present the first contactless side-channel attack for identifying 360 videos being viewed in a Virtual Reality (VR) Head Mounted Display (HMD). Although the video content is displayed inside the HMD without any external exposure, we observe that user head movements are driven by the video content, which creates a unique side channel that does not exist in traditional 2D videos. By recording the user whose vision is blocked by the HMD via a malicious camera, an attacker can analyze the correlation between the user's head movements and the victim video to infer the video title. To exploit this new vulnerability, we present INTRUDE, a system for identifying 360 videos from recordings of user head movements. INTRUDE is empowered by an HMD-based head movement estimation scheme to extract a head movement trace from the recording and a video saliency-based trace-fingerprint matching framework to infer the video title. Evaluation results show that INTRUDE achieves over 96% of accuracy for video identification and is robust under different recording environments. Moreover, INTRUDE maintains its effectiveness in the open-world identification scenario.
Uncertainty quantification in fine-tuned LLMs using LoRA ensembles

Fine-tuning large language models can improve task specific performance, although a general understanding of what the fine-tuned model has learned, forgotten and how to trust its predictions is still missing. We derive principled uncertainty quantification for fine-tuned LLMs with posterior approximations using computationally efficient low-rank adaptation ensembles. We analyze three common multiple-choice datasets using low-rank adaptation ensembles based on Mistral-7b, and draw quantitative and qualitative conclusions on their perceived complexity and model efficacy on the different target domains during and after fine-tuning. In particular, backed by the numerical experiments, we hypothesise about signals from entropic uncertainty measures for data domains that are inherently difficult for a given architecture to learn.
One Prompt To Rule Them All: LLMs for Opinion Summary Evaluation

Evaluation of opinion summaries using conventional reference-based metrics rarely provides a holistic evaluation and has been shown to have a relatively low correlation with human judgments. Recent studies suggest using Large Language Models (LLMs) as reference-free metrics for NLG evaluation, however, they remain unexplored for opinion summary evaluation. Moreover, limited opinion summary evaluation datasets inhibit progress. To address this, we release the SUMMEVAL-OP dataset covering 7 dimensions related to the evaluation of opinion summaries: fluency, coherence, relevance, faithfulness, aspect coverage, sentiment consistency, and specificity. We investigate Op-I-Prompt a dimension-independent prompt, and Op-Prompts, a dimension-dependent set of prompts for opinion summary evaluation. Experiments indicate that Op-I-Prompt emerges as a good alternative for evaluating opinion summaries achieving an average Spearman correlation of 0.70 with humans, outperforming all previous approaches. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate LLMs as evaluators on both closed-source and open-source models in the opinion summarization domain.
The Colorful Future of LLMs: Evaluating and Improving LLMs as Emotional Supporters for Queer Youth

Queer youth face increased mental health risks, such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Hindered by negative stigma, they often avoid seeking help and rely on online resources, which may provide incompatible information. Although access to a supportive environment and reliable information is invaluable, many queer youth worldwide have no access to such support. However, this could soon change due to the rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. This paper aims to comprehensively explore the potential of LLMs to revolutionize emotional support for queers. To this end, we conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of LLM's interactions with queer-related content. To evaluate response quality, we develop a novel ten-question scale that is inspired by psychological standards and expert input. We apply this scale to score several LLMs and human comments to posts where queer youth seek advice and share experiences. We find that LLM responses are supportive and inclusive, outscoring humans. However, they tend to be generic, not empathetic enough, and lack personalization, resulting in nonreliable and potentially harmful advice. We discuss these challenges, demonstrate that a dedicated prompt can improve the performance, and propose a blueprint of an LLM-supporter that actively (but sensitively) seeks user context to provide personalized, empathetic, and reliable responses. Our annotated dataset is available for further research.
Discrete Morse theory for open complexes

We develop a discrete Morse theory for open simplicial complexes $K=X\setminus T$ where $X$ is a simplicial complex and $T$ a subcomplex of $X$. A discrete Morse function $f$ on $K$ gives rise to a discrete Morse function on the order complex $S_K$ of $K$, and the topology change determined by $f$ on $K$ can be understood by analyzing the the topology change determined by the discrete Morse function on $S_K$. This topology change is given by a structure theorem on the level subcomplexes of $S_K$. Finally, we show that the Borel-Moore homology of $K$, a homology theory for locally compact spaces, is isomorphic to the homology induced by a gradient vector field on $K$ and deduce corresponding weak Morse inequalities.
Syntactic Language Change in English and German: Metrics, Parsers, and Convergences

Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key indicator of language processing difficulty and working memory load. The current paper looks at diachronic trends in syntactic language change in both English and German, using corpora of parliamentary debates from the last c. 160 years. We base our observations on five dependency parsers, including the widely used Stanford CoreNLP as well as 4 newer alternatives. Our analysis of syntactic language change goes beyond linear dependency distance and explores 15 metrics relevant to dependency distance minimization (DDM) and/or based on tree graph properties, such as the tree height and degree variance. Even though we have evidence that recent parsers trained on modern treebanks are not heavily affected by data 'noise' such as spelling changes and OCR errors in our historic data, we find that results of syntactic language change are sensitive to the parsers involved, which is a caution against using a single parser for evaluating syntactic language change as done in previous work. We also show that syntactic language change over the time period investigated is largely similar between English and German for the different metrics explored: only 4% of cases we examine yield opposite conclusions regarding upwards and downtrends of syntactic metrics across German and English. We also show that changes in syntactic measures seem to be more frequent at the tails of sentence length distributions. To our best knowledge, ours is the most comprehensive analysis of syntactic language change using modern NLP technology in recent corpora of English and German.
DualView: Data Attribution from the Dual Perspective

Local data attribution (or influence estimation) techniques aim at estimating the impact that individual data points seen during training have on particular predictions of an already trained Machine Learning model during test time. Previous methods either do not perform well consistently across different evaluation criteria from literature, are characterized by a high computational demand, or suffer from both. In this work we present DualView, a novel method for post-hoc data attribution based on surrogate modelling, demonstrating both high computational efficiency, as well as good evaluation results. With a focus on neural networks, we evaluate our proposed technique using suitable quantitative evaluation strategies from the literature against related principal local data attribution methods. We find that DualView requires considerably lower computational resources than other methods, while demonstrating comparable performance to competing approaches across evaluation metrics. Futhermore, our proposed method produces sparse explanations, where sparseness can be tuned via a hyperparameter. Finally, we showcase that with DualView, we can now render explanations from local data attributions compatible with established local feature attribution methods: For each prediction on (test) data points explained in terms of impactful samples from the training set, we are able to compute and visualize how the prediction on (test) sample relates to each influential training sample in terms of features recognized and by the model. We provide an Open Source implementation of DualView online, together with implementations for all other local data attribution methods we compare against, as well as the metrics reported here, for full reproducibility.
Two Online Map Matching Algorithms Based on Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Logic

Our aim of this paper is to develop new map matching algorithms and to improve upon previous work. We address two key approaches: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) map matching and fuzzy logic map matching. AHP is a decision-making method that combines mathematical analysis with human judgment, and fuzzy logic is an approach to computing based on the degree of truth and aims at modeling the imprecise modes of reasoning from 0 to 1 rather than the usual boolean logic. Of these algorithms, the way of our applying AHP to map matching is newly developed in this paper, meanwhile, our application of fuzzy logic to map matching is mostly the same as existing research except for some small changes. Because of the common characteristic that both methods are designed to handle imprecise information and simplicity for implementation, we decided to use these methods.