OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Otov2: Automatic, generic, user-friendly
Authors: Tianyi Chen, Luming Liang, Tianyu Ding, Zhihui Zhu, Ilya Zharkov
Venue: Conference ICLR 2023
Year: 2023

The existing model compression methods via structured pruning typically require complicated multi-stage procedures. Each individual stage necessitates numerous engineering efforts and domain-knowledge from the end-users which prevent their wider applications onto broader scenarios. We propose the second generation of Only-Train-Once (OTOv2), which first automatically trains and compresses a general DNN only once from scratch to produce a more compact model with competitive performance without fine-tuning. OTOv2 is automatic and pluggable into various deep learning applications, and requires almost minimal engineering efforts from the users. Methodologically, OTOv2 proposes two major improvements: (i) Autonomy: automatically exploits the dependency of general DNNs, partitions the trainable variables into Zero-Invariant Groups (ZIGs), and constructs the compressed model; and (ii) Dual Half-Space Projected Gradient (DHSPG): a novel optimizer to more reliably solve structured-sparsity problems. Numerically, we demonstrate the generality and autonomy of OTOv2 on a variety of model architectures such as VGG, ResNet, CARN, ConvNeXt, DenseNet and StackedUnets, the majority of which cannot be handled by other methods without extensive handcrafting efforts. Together with benchmark datasets including CIFAR10/100, DIV2K, Fashion-MNIST, SVNH and ImageNet, its effectiveness is validated by performing competitively or even better than the state-of-the-arts. The source code is available at https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once.
Quaser: Question answering with scalable extractive rationalization
Authors: Asish Ghoshal, Srinivasan Iyer, Bhargavi Paranjape, Kushal Lakhotia, Scott Wen-tau Yih, Yashar Mehdad
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

Designing natural language processing (NLP) models that produce predictions by first extracting a set of relevant input sentences, i.e., rationales, is gaining importance for improving model interpretability and producing supporting evidence for users. Current unsupervised approaches are designed to extract rationales that maximize prediction accuracy, which is invariably obtained by exploiting spurious correlations in datasets, and leads to unconvincing rationales. In this paper, we introduce unsupervised generative models to extract dual-purpose rationales, which must not only be able to support a subsequent answer prediction, but also support a reproduction of the input query. We show that such models can produce more meaningful rationales, that are less influenced by dataset artifacts, and as a result, also achieve the state-of-the-art on rationale extraction metrics on four datasets from the ERASER benchmark, significantly improving upon previous unsupervised methods. Our multi-task model is scalable and enables using state-of-the-art pretrained language models to design explainable question answering systems.
Friendly conditional text generator
Authors: Noriaki Kawamae
Venue: Conference WSDM 2023
Year: 2023

Our goal is to control text generation with more fine-grained conditions at lower computational cost than is possible with current alternatives; these conditions are attributes (i.e., multiple codes and free-text). As large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) offer excellent performance in free-form text generation, we explore efficient architectures and training schemes that can best leverage PLMs. Our framework, Friendly Conditional Text Generator (FCTG), introduces a multi-view attention (MVA) mechanism and two training tasks, Masked Attribute Modeling (MAM) and Attribute Linguistic Matching (ALM), to direct various PLMs via modalities between the text and its attributes. The motivation of FCTG is to map texts and attributes into a shared space, and bridge their modality gaps, as the texts and attributes reside in different regions of semantic space. To avoid catastrophic forgetting, modality-free embedded representations are learnt, and used to direct PLMs in this space, FCTG applies MAM to learn attribute representations, maps them in the same space as text through MVA, and optimizes their alignment in this space via ALM. Experiments on publicly available datasets show that FCTG outperforms baselines over higher level conditions at lower computation cost.
FlexiFed: Personalized Federated Learning for Edge Clients with Heterogeneous Model Architectures
Authors: Kaibin Wang, Qiang He, Feifei Chen, Chunyang Chen, Faliang Huang, Hai Jin, Yun Yang
Venue: Conference WWW 2023
Year: 2023

Mobile and Web-of-Things (WoT) devices at the network edge account for more than half of the world’s web traffic, making a great data source for various machine learning (ML) applications, particularly federated learning (FL) which offers a promising solution to privacy-preserving ML feeding on these data. FL allows edge mobile and WoT devices to train a shared global ML model under the orchestration of a central parameter server. In the real world, due to resource heterogeneity, these edge devices often train different versions of models (e.g., VGG-16 and VGG-19) or different ML models (e.g., VGG and ResNet) for the same ML task (e.g., computer vision and speech recognition). Existing FL schemes have assumed that participating edge devices share a common model architecture, and thus cannot facilitate FL across edge devices with heterogeneous ML model architectures. We explored this architecture heterogeneity challenge and found that FL can and should accommodate these edge devices to improve model accuracy and accelerate model training. This paper presents our findings and FlexiFed, a novel scheme for FL across edge devices with heterogeneous model architectures, and three model aggregation strategies for accommodating architecture heterogeneity under FlexiFed. Experiments with four widely-used ML models on four public datasets demonstrate 1) the usefulness of FlexiFed; and 2) that compared with the state-of-the-art FL scheme, FlexiFed improves model accuracy by 2.6%-9.7% and accelerates model convergence by 1.24 × -4.04 ×.
Efficient bi-level optimization for recommendation denoising
Authors: Zongwei Wang 0002, Min Gao 0001, Wentao Li 0001, Junliang Yu, Linxin Guo, Hongzhi Yin
Venue: Conference KDD 2023
Year: 2023

The acquisition of explicit user feedback (e.g., ratings) in real-world recommender systems is often hindered by the need for active user involvement. To mitigate this issue, implicit feedback (e.g., clicks) generated during user browsing is exploited as a viable substitute. However, implicit feedback possesses a high degree of noise, which significantly undermines recommendation quality. While many methods have been proposed to address this issue by assigning varying weights to implicit feedback, two shortcomings persist: (1) the weight calculation in these methods is iteration-independent, without considering the influence of weights in previous iterations, and (2) the weight calculation often relies on prior knowledge, which may not always be readily available or universally applicable. To overcome these two limitations, we model recommendation denoising as a bi-level optimization problem. The inner optimization aims to derive an effective model for the recommendation, as well as guiding the weight determination, thereby eliminating the need for prior knowledge. The outer optimization leverages gradients of the inner optimization and adjusts the weights in a manner considering the impact of previous weights. To efficiently solve this bi-level optimization problem, we employ a weight generator to avoid the storage of weights and a one-step gradient-matching-based loss to significantly reduce computational time. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms both state-of-the-art general and denoising recommendation models. The code is available at https://github.com/CoderWZW/BOD.
Autowebglm: A large language model-based web navigating agent
Authors: Hanyu Lai, Xiao Liu 0036, Iat Long Iong, Shuntian Yao, Yuxuan Chen, Pengbo Shen, Hao Yu 0030, Hanchen Zhang, Xiaohan Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
Venue: Conference KDD 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have fueled many intelligent web agents, but most existing ones perform far from satisfying in real-world web navigation tasks due to three factors: (1) the complexity of HTML text data (2) versatility of actions on webpages, and (3) task difficulty due to the open-domain nature of the web. In light of these challenges, we develop the open AutoWebGLM based on ChatGLM3-6B. AutoWebGLM can serve as a powerful automated web navigation agent that outperform GPT-4. Inspired by human browsing patterns, we first design an HTML simplification algorithm to represent webpages with vital information preserved succinctly. We then employ a hybrid human-AI method to build web browsing data for curriculum training. Finally, we bootstrap the model by reinforcement learning and rejection sampling to further facilitate webpage comprehension, browser operations, and efficient task decomposition by itself. For comprehensive evaluation, we establish a bilingual benchmark -- AutoWebBench -- for real-world web navigation tasks. We evaluate AutoWebGLM across diverse web navigation benchmarks, demonstrating its potential to tackle challenging tasks in real environments. Related code, model, and data are released at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/AutoWebGLM}.
Enhancing the Completeness of Rationales for Multi-Step Question Answering
Authors: Shangzi Xue, Zhenya Huang, Xin Lin, Jiayu Liu, Longhu Qin, Tianhuang Su, Haifeng Liu, Qi Liu
Venue: Conference CIKM 2024
Year: 2024

Learning to answer multi-step complex questions requires machines to perform like a human to think and reason step by step, which is one of the core abilities of a question answering system. Recent advancements have revealed that large language models exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities by generating intermediate chain-of-thought rationales. However, the completeness of their rationales lacks assurance as they are susceptible to omitting steps and making factual errors. In this paper, drawing inspiration from human-like reasoning processes in answering multi-step questions, we explicitly plan the rationales to ensure their completeness. We propose a two-stage Decomposition-Evaluation (Dec-Eval) framework including a step decomposition stage and a rationale generation stage. Specifically, in the first stage, we decompose the complex question into simpler sub-ones and simulate a human's ability to grasp logical clues to ensure the integrity of step planning. Then, in the second stage, based on the sub-questions, we generate and evaluate rationales step by step. Both stages work together organically, improving the completeness of rationales and the accuracy of the answer. To further control the question answering process, we propose a novel knowledge injection mechanism that incorporates external knowledge to guide both stages. Extensive experiments on three challenging multi-step QA datasets demonstrate that Dec-Eval can explicitly generate more logical rationales, and significantly improve the reasoning performances of different backbone models.
Optimal marketing strategies over social networks
Authors: Jason D. Hartline, Vahab S. Mirrokni, Mukund Sundararajan
Venue: Conference WWW 2008
Year: 2008

We discuss the use of social networks in implementing viral marketing strategies. While influence maximization has been studied in this context (see Chapter 24 of [10]), we study revenue maximization, arguably, a more natural objective. In our model, a buyer's decision to buy an item is influenced by the set of other buyers that own the item and the price at which the item is offered.
Difftaichi: Differentiable programming for physical simulation
Authors: Yuanming Hu, Luke Anderson 0001, Tzu-Mao Li, Qi Sun 0003, Nathan Carr 0001, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Frédo Durand
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

We present DiffTaichi, a new differentiable programming language tailored for building high-performance differentiable physical simulators. Based on an imperative programming language, DiffTaichi generates gradients of simulation steps using source code transformations that preserve arithmetic intensity and parallelism. A light-weight tape is used to record the whole simulation program structure and replay the gradient kernels in a reversed order, for end-to-end backpropagation. We demonstrate the performance and productivity of our language in gradient-based learning and optimization tasks on 10 different physical simulators. For example, a differentiable elastic object simulator written in our language is 4.2x shorter than the hand-engineered CUDA version yet runs as fast, and is 188x faster than the TensorFlow implementation. Using our differentiable programs, neural network controllers are typically optimized within only tens of iterations.
Fabind+: Enhancing molecular docking through improved pocket prediction and pose generation
Authors: Kaiyuan Gao, Qizhi Pei, Gongbo Zhang, Jinhua Zhu, Kun He, Lijun Wu
Venue: Conference KDD 2025
Year: 2025

Molecular docking is a pivotal process in drug discovery. While traditional techniques rely on extensive sampling and simulation governed by physical principles, deep learning has emerged as a promising alternative, offering improvements in both accuracy and efficiency. Building upon the foundational work of FABind, a model focused on speed and accuracy, we introduce FABind+, an enhanced iteration that significantly elevates the performance of its predecessor. We identify pocket prediction as a critical bottleneck in molecular docking and introduce an enhanced approach. In addition to the pocket prediction module, the docking module has also been upgraded with permutation loss and a more refined model design. These designs enable the regression-based FABind+ to surpass most of the generative models. In contrast, while sampling-based models often struggle with inefficiency, they excel in capturing a wide range of potential docking poses, leading to better overall performance. To bridge the gap between sampling and regression docking models, we incorporate a simple yet effective sampling technique coupled with a lightweight confidence model, transforming the regression-based FABind+ into a sampling version without requiring additional training. This involves the introduction of pocket clustering to capture multiple binding sites and dropout sampling for various conformations. The combination of a classification loss and a ranking loss enables the lightweight confidence model to select the most accurate prediction. Experimental results and analysis demonstrate that FABind+ (both the regression and sampling versions) not only significantly outperforms the original FABind, but also achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/QizhiPei/FABind.
Causal mediation analysis with hidden confounders
Authors: Lu Cheng, Ruocheng Guo, Huan Liu
Venue: Conference WSDM 2022
Year: 2022

An important problem in causal inference is to break down the total effect of a treatment on an outcome into different causal pathways and to quantify the causal effect in each pathway. For instance, in causal fairness, the total effect of being a male employee (i.e., treatment) constitutes its direct effect on annual income (i.e., outcome) and the indirect effect via the employee's occupation (i.e., mediator). Causal mediation analysis (CMA) is a formal statistical framework commonly used to reveal such underlying causal mechanisms. One major challenge of CMA in observational studies is handling confounders, variables that cause spurious causal relationships among treatment, mediator, and outcome. Conventional methods assume sequential ignorability that implies all confounders can be measured, which is often unverifiable in practice. This work aims to circumvent the stringent sequential ignorability assumptions and consider hidden confounders. Drawing upon proxy strategies and recent advances in deep learning, we propose to simultaneously uncover the latent variables that characterize hidden confounders and estimate the causal effects. Empirical evaluations using both synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We further show the potentials of our approach for causal fairness analysis.
Shield: Fast, practical defense and vaccination for deep learning using JPEG compression
Authors: Nilaksh Das, Madhuri Shanbhogue, Shang-Tse Chen, Fred Hohman, Siwei Li, Li Chen, Michael E. Kounavis, Duen Horng Chau
Venue: Conference KDD 2018
Year: 2018

The rapidly growing body of research in adversarial machine learning has demonstrated that deep neural networks (DNNs) are highly vulnerable to adversarially generated images. This underscores the urgent need for practical defense that can be readily deployed to combat attacks in real-time. Observing that many attack strategies aim to perturb image pixels in ways that are visually imperceptible, we place JPEG compression at the core of our proposed Shield defense framework, utilizing its capability to effectively "compress away" such pixel manipulation. To immunize a DNN model from artifacts introduced by compression, Shield "vaccinates" a model by re-training it with compressed images, where different compression levels are applied to generate multiple vaccinated models that are ultimately used together in an ensemble defense. On top of that, Shield adds an additional layer of protection by employing randomization at test time that compresses different regions of an image using random compression levels, making it harder for an adversary to estimate the transformation performed. This novel combination of vaccination, ensembling, and randomization makes Shield a fortified multi-pronged protection. We conducted extensive, large-scale experiments using the ImageNet dataset, and show that our approaches eliminate up to 94% of black-box attacks and 98% of gray-box attacks delivered by the recent, strongest attacks, such as Carlini-Wagner's L2 and DeepFool. Our approaches are fast and work without requiring knowledge about the model.
Codegeex: A pre-trained model for code generation with multilingual benchmarking on humaneval-x
Authors: Qinkai Zheng, Xiao Xia, Xu Zou 0001, Yuxiao Dong, Shan Wang, Yufei Xue, Lei Shen 0002, Zihan Wang, Andi Wang 0003, Yang Li 0074, Teng Su, Zhilin Yang 0001, Jie Tang 0001
Venue: Conference KDD 2023
Year: 2023

Large pre-trained code generation models, such as OpenAI Codex, can generate syntax-and function-correct code, making the coding of programmers more productive. In this paper, we introduce CodeGeeX, a multilingual model with 13 billion parameters for code generation. CodeGeeX is pre-trained on 850 billion tokens of 23 programming languages as of June 2022. Our extensive experiments suggest that CodeGeeX outperforms multilingual code models of similar scale for both the tasks of code generation and translation on HumanEval-X. Building upon HumanEval (Python only), we develop the HumanEval-X benchmark for evaluating multilingual models by hand-writing the solutions in C++, Java, JavaScript, and Go. In addition, we build CodeGeeX-based extensions on Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Cloud Studio, generating 8 billion tokens for tens of thousands of active users per week. Our user study demonstrates that CodeGeeX can help to increase coding efficiency for 83.4% of its users. Finally, CodeGeeX is publicly accessible since Sep. 2022, we open-sourced its code, model weights, API, extensions, and HumanEval-X at https://github.com/THUDM/CodeGeeX.
Towards understanding the data dependency of mixup-style training
Authors: Muthu Chidambaram, Xiang Wang 0011, Yuzheng Hu, Chenwei Wu 0002, Rong Ge 0001
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

In the Mixup training paradigm, a model is trained using convex combinations of data points and their associated labels. Despite seeing very few true data points during training, models trained using Mixup seem to still minimize the original empirical risk and exhibit better generalization and robustness on various tasks when compared to standard training. In this paper, we investigate how these benefits of Mixup training rely on properties of the data in the context of classification. For minimizing the original empirical risk, we compute a closed form for the Mixup-optimal classification, which allows us to construct a simple dataset on which minimizing the Mixup loss can provably lead to learning a classifier that does not minimize the empirical loss on the data. On the other hand, we also give sufficient conditions for Mixup training to also minimize the original empirical risk. For generalization, we characterize the margin of a Mixup classifier, and use this to understand why the decision boundary of a Mixup classifier can adapt better to the full structure of the training data when compared to standard training. In contrast, we also show that, for a large class of linear models and linearly separable datasets, Mixup training leads to learning the same classifier as standard training.
Filtration Curves for Graph Representation
Authors: Leslie O&apos, Bray, Bastian Rieck, Karsten M. Borgwardt
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

The two predominant approaches to graph comparison in recent years are based on (i) enumerating matching subgraphs or (ii) comparing neighborhoods of nodes. In this work, we complement these two perspectives with a third way of representing graphs: using filtration curves from topological data analysis that capture both edge weight information and global graph structure. Filtration curves are highly efficient to compute and lead to expressive representations of graphs, which we demonstrate on graph classification benchmark datasets. Our work opens the door to a new form of graph representation in data mining.
Quantifying uncertainty in deep spatiotemporal forecasting
Authors: Dongxia Wu, Liyao Gao, Matteo Chinazzi, Xinyue Xiong, Alessandro Vespignani, Yi-An Ma, Rose Yu
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning is gaining increasing popularity for spatiotemporal forecasting. However, prior works have mostly focused on point estimates without quantifying the uncertainty of the predictions. In high stakes domains, being able to generate probabilistic forecasts with confidence intervals is critical to risk assessment and decision making. Hence, a systematic study of uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for spatiotemporal forecasting is missing in the community. In this paper, we describe two types of spatiotemporal forecasting problems: regular grid-based and graph-based. Then we analyze UQ methods from both the Bayesian and the frequentist point of view, casting in a unified framework via statistical decision theory. Through extensive experiments on real-world road network traffic, epidemics, and air quality forecasting tasks, we reveal the statistical and computational trade-offs for different UQ methods: Bayesian methods are typically more robust in mean prediction, while confidence levels obtained from frequentist methods provide more extensive coverage over data variations. Computationally, quantile regression type methods are cheaper for a single confidence interval but require re-training for different intervals. Sampling based methods generate samples that can form multiple confidence intervals, albeit at a higher computational cost.