OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Improving Quantization-aware Training of Low-Precision Network via Block Replacement on Full-Precision Counterpart
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a common paradigm for network quantization, in which the training phase incorporates the simulation of the low-precision computation to optimize the quantization parameters in alignment with the task goals. However, direct training of low-precision networks generally faces two obstacles: 1. The low-precision model exhibits limited representation capabilities and cannot directly replicate full-precision calculations, which constitutes a deficiency compared to full-precision alternatives; 2. Non-ideal deviations during gradient propagation are a common consequence of employing pseudo-gradients as approximations in derived quantized functions. In this paper, we propose a general QAT framework for alleviating the aforementioned concerns by permitting the forward and backward processes of the low-precision network to be guided by the full-precision partner during training. In conjunction with the direct training of the quantization model, intermediate mixed-precision models are generated through the block-by-block replacement on the full-precision model and working simultaneously with the low-precision backbone, which enables the integration of quantized low-precision blocks into full-precision networks throughout the training phase. Consequently, each quantized block is capable of: 1. simulating full-precision representation during forward passes; 2. obtaining gradients with improved estimation during backward passes. We demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results for 4-, 3-, and 2-bit quantization on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. The proposed framework provides a compatible extension for most QAT methods and only requires a concise wrapper for existing codes.
Vulnerability Detection in Popular Programming Languages with Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Vulnerability detection is crucial for maintaining software security, and recent research has explored the use of Language Models (LMs) for this task. While LMs have shown promising results, their performance has been inconsistent across datasets, particularly when generalizing to unseen code. Moreover, most studies have focused on the C/C++ programming language, with limited attention given to other popular languages. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the effectiveness of LMs for vulnerability detection in JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, and Go, in addition to C/C++ for comparison. We utilize the CVEFixes dataset to create a diverse collection of language-specific vulnerabilities and preprocess the data to ensure quality and integrity. We fine-tune and evaluate state-of-the-art LMs across the selected languages and find that the performance of vulnerability detection varies significantly. JavaScript exhibits the best performance, with considerably better and more practical detection capabilities compared to C/C++. We also examine the relationship between code complexity and detection performance across the six languages and find only a weak correlation between code complexity metrics and the models' F1 scores.
Watertox: The Art of Simplicity in Universal Attacks A Cross-Model Framework for Robust Adversarial Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Contemporary adversarial attack methods face significant limitations in cross-model transferability and practical applicability. We present Watertox, an elegant adversarial attack framework achieving remarkable effectiveness through architectural diversity and precision-controlled perturbations. Our two-stage Fast Gradient Sign Method combines uniform baseline perturbations ($ε_1 = 0.1$) with targeted enhancements ($ε_2 = 0.4$). The framework leverages an ensemble of complementary architectures, from VGG to ConvNeXt, synthesizing diverse perspectives through an innovative voting mechanism. Against state-of-the-art architectures, Watertox reduces model accuracy from 70.6% to 16.0%, with zero-shot attacks achieving up to 98.8% accuracy reduction against unseen architectures. These results establish Watertox as a significant advancement in adversarial methodologies, with promising applications in visual security systems and CAPTCHA generation.
From General to Specific: Tailoring Large Language Models for Personalized Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has transformed many industries, including healthcare. However, previous medical LLMs have largely focused on leveraging general medical knowledge to provide responses, without accounting for patient variability and lacking true personalization at the individual level. To address this, we propose a novel method called personalized medical language model (PMLM), which explores and optimizes personalized LLMs through recommendation systems and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, by utilizing self-informed and peer-informed personalization, PMLM captures changes in behaviors and preferences to design initial personalized prompts tailored to individual needs. We further refine these initial personalized prompts through RL, ultimately enhancing the precision of LLM guidance. Notably, the personalized prompt are hard prompt, which grants PMLM high adaptability and reusability, allowing it to directly leverage high-quality proprietary LLMs. We evaluate PMLM using real-world obstetrics and gynecology data, and the experimental results demonstrate that PMLM achieves personalized responses, and it provides more refined and individualized services, offering a potential way for personalized medical LLMs.
Self-Supervised Radiograph Anatomical Region Classification -- How Clean Is Your Real-World Data?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Modern deep learning-based clinical imaging workflows rely on accurate labels of the examined anatomical region. Knowing the anatomical region is required to select applicable downstream models and to effectively generate cohorts of high quality data for future medical and machine learning research efforts. However, this information may not be available in externally sourced data or generally contain data entry errors. To address this problem, we show the effectiveness of self-supervised methods such as SimCLR and BYOL as well as supervised contrastive deep learning methods in assigning one of 14 anatomical region classes in our in-house dataset of 48,434 skeletal radiographs. We achieve a strong linear evaluation accuracy of 96.6% with a single model and 97.7% using an ensemble approach. Furthermore, only a few labeled instances (1% of the training set) suffice to achieve an accuracy of 92.2%, enabling usage in low-label and thus low-resource scenarios. Our model can be used to correct data entry mistakes: a follow-up analysis of the test set errors of our best-performing single model by an expert radiologist identified 35% incorrect labels and 11% out-of-domain images. When accounted for, the radiograph anatomical region labelling performance increased -- without and with an ensemble, respectively -- to a theoretical accuracy of 98.0% and 98.8%.
BabyHGRN: Exploring RNNs for Sample-Efficient Training of Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the potential of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and other subquadratic architectures as competitive alternatives to transformer-based models in low-resource language modeling scenarios. We utilize HGRN2 (Qin et al., 2024), a recently proposed RNN-based architecture, and comparatively evaluate its effectiveness against transformer-based baselines and other subquadratic architectures (LSTM, xLSTM, Mamba). Our experimental results show that BABYHGRN, our HGRN2 language model, outperforms transformer-based models in both the 10M and 100M word tracks of the challenge, as measured by their performance on the BLiMP, EWoK, GLUE and BEAR benchmarks. Further, we show the positive impact of knowledge distillation. Our findings challenge the prevailing focus on transformer architectures and indicate the viability of RNN-based models, particularly in resource-constrained environments.
CNN-LSTM Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Remaining Useful Life Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a component or a system is defined as the length from the current time to the end of the useful life. Accurate RUL estimation plays a crucial role in Predictive Maintenance applications. Traditional regression methods, both linear and non-linear, have struggled to achieve high accuracy in this domain. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown improved accuracy, they often overlook the sequential nature of the data, relying instead on features derived from sliding windows. Since RUL prediction inherently involves multivariate time series analysis, robust sequence learning is essential. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach combining Convolutional Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for RUL estimation. Although CNN-based LSTM models have been applied to sequence prediction tasks in financial forecasting, this is the first attempt to adopt this approach for RUL estimation in prognostics. In this approach, CNN is first employed to efficiently extract features from the data, followed by LSTM, which uses these extracted features to predict RUL. This method effectively leverages sensor sequence information, uncovering hidden patterns within the data, even under multiple operating conditions and fault scenarios. Our results demonstrate that the hybrid CNN-LSTM model achieves the highest accuracy, offering a superior score compared to the other methods.
Fair Distributed Machine Learning with Imbalanced Data as a Stackelberg Evolutionary Game
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Decentralised learning enables the training of deep learning algorithms without centralising data sets, resulting in benefits such as improved data privacy, operational efficiency and the fostering of data ownership policies. However, significant data imbalances pose a challenge in this framework. Participants with smaller datasets in distributed learning environments often achieve poorer results than participants with larger datasets. Data imbalances are particularly pronounced in medical fields and are caused by different patient populations, technological inequalities and divergent data collection practices. In this paper, we consider distributed learning as an Stackelberg evolutionary game. We present two algorithms for setting the weights of each node's contribution to the global model in each training round: the Deterministic Stackelberg Weighting Model (DSWM) and the Adaptive Stackelberg Weighting Model (ASWM). We use three medical datasets to highlight the impact of dynamic weighting on underrepresented nodes in distributed learning. Our results show that the ASWM significantly favours underrepresented nodes by improving their performance by 2.713% in AUC. Meanwhile, nodes with larger datasets experience only a modest average performance decrease of 0.441%.
Explainable AI for Multivariate Time Series Pattern Exploration: Latent Space Visual Analytics with Temporal Fusion Transformer and Variational Autoencoders in Power Grid Event Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Detecting and analyzing complex patterns in multivariate time-series data is crucial for decision-making in urban and environmental system operations. However, challenges arise from the high dimensionality, intricate complexity, and interconnected nature of complex patterns, which hinder the understanding of their underlying physical processes. Existing AI methods often face limitations in interpretability, computational efficiency, and scalability, reducing their applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a novel visual analytics framework that integrates two generative AI models, Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), to reduce complex patterns into lower-dimensional latent spaces and visualize them in 2D using dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP with DBSCAN. These visualizations, presented through coordinated and interactive views and tailored glyphs, enable intuitive exploration of complex multivariate temporal patterns, identifying patterns' similarities and uncover their potential correlations for a better interpretability of the AI outputs. The framework is demonstrated through a case study on power grid signal data, where it identifies multi-label grid event signatures, including faults and anomalies with diverse root causes. Additionally, novel metrics and visualizations are introduced to validate the models and evaluate the performance, efficiency, and consistency of latent maps generated by TFT and VAE under different configurations. These analyses provide actionable insights for model parameter tuning and reliability improvements. Comparative results highlight that TFT achieves shorter run times and superior scalability to diverse time-series data shapes compared to VAE. This work advances fault diagnosis in multivariate time series, fostering explainable AI to support critical system operations.
Superposition through Active Learning lens
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Superposition or Neuron Polysemanticity are important concepts in the field of interpretability and one might say they are these most intricately beautiful blockers in our path of decoding the Machine Learning black-box. The idea behind this paper is to examine whether it is possible to decode Superposition using Active Learning methods. While it seems that Superposition is an attempt to arrange more features in smaller space to better utilize the limited resources, it might be worth inspecting if Superposition is dependent on any other factors. This paper uses CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet image datasets and the ResNet18 model and compares Baseline and Active Learning models and the presence of Superposition in them is inspected across multiple criteria, including t-SNE visualizations, cosine similarity histograms, Silhouette Scores, and Davies-Bouldin Indexes. Contrary to our expectations, the active learning model did not significantly outperform the baseline in terms of feature separation and overall accuracy. This suggests that non-informative sample selection and potential overfitting to uncertain samples may have hindered the active learning model's ability to generalize better suggesting more sophisticated approaches might be needed to decode superposition and potentially reduce it.
Real-valued continued fraction of straight lines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In an unbounded plane, straight lines are used extensively for mathematical analysis. They are tools of convenience. However, those with high slope values become unbounded at a faster rate than the independent variable. So, straight lines, in this work, are made to be bounded by introducing a parametric nonlinear term that is positive. The straight lines are transformed into bounded nonlinear curves that become unbounded at a much slower rate than the independent variable. This transforming equation can be expressed as a continued fraction of straight lines. The continued fraction is real-valued and converges to the solutions of the transforming equation. Following Euler's method, the continued fraction has been reduced into an infinite series. The usefulness of the bounding nature of continued fraction is demonstrated by solving the problem of image classification. Parameters estimated on the Fashion-MNIST dataset of greyscale images using continued fraction of regression lines have less variance, converge quickly and are more accurate than the linear counterpart. Moreover, this multi-dimensional parametric estimation problem can be expressed on $xy-$ plane using the parameters of the continued fraction and patterns emerge on planar plots.
Aspect-Based Few-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We generalize the formulation of few-shot learning by introducing the concept of an aspect. In the traditional formulation of few-shot learning, there is an underlying assumption that a single "true" label defines the content of each data point. This label serves as a basis for the comparison between the query object and the objects in the support set. However, when a human expert is asked to execute the same task without a predefined set of labels, they typically consider the rest of the data points in the support set as context. This context specifies the level of abstraction and the aspect from which the comparison can be made. In this work, we introduce a novel architecture and training procedure that develops a context given the query and support set and implements aspect-based few-shot learning that is not limited to a predetermined set of classes. We demonstrate that our method is capable of forming and using an aspect for few-shot learning on the Geometric Shapes and Sprites dataset. The results validate the feasibility of our approach compared to traditional few-shot learning.
Is Your World Simulator a Good Story Presenter? A Consecutive Events-Based Benchmark for Future Long Video Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The current state-of-the-art video generative models can produce commercial-grade videos with highly realistic details. However, they still struggle to coherently present multiple sequential events in the stories specified by the prompts, which is foreseeable an essential capability for future long video generation scenarios. For example, top T2V generative models still fail to generate a video of the short simple story 'how to put an elephant into a refrigerator.' While existing detail-oriented benchmarks primarily focus on fine-grained metrics like aesthetic quality and spatial-temporal consistency, they fall short of evaluating models' abilities to handle event-level story presentation. To address this gap, we introduce StoryEval, a story-oriented benchmark specifically designed to assess text-to-video (T2V) models' story-completion capabilities. StoryEval features 423 prompts spanning 7 classes, each representing short stories composed of 2-4 consecutive events. We employ advanced vision-language models, such as GPT-4V and LLaVA-OV-Chat-72B, to verify the completion of each event in the generated videos, applying a unanimous voting method to enhance reliability. Our methods ensure high alignment with human evaluations, and the evaluation of 11 models reveals its challenge, with none exceeding an average story-completion rate of 50%. StoryEval provides a new benchmark for advancing T2V models and highlights the challenges and opportunities in developing next-generation solutions for coherent story-driven video generation.
Quantified Linear and Polynomial Arithmetic Satisfiability via Template-based Skolemization
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

The problem of checking satisfiability of linear real arithmetic (LRA) and non-linear real arithmetic (NRA) formulas has broad applications, in particular, they are at the heart of logic-related applications such as logic for artificial intelligence, program analysis, etc. While there has been much work on checking satisfiability of unquantified LRA and NRA formulas, the problem of checking satisfiability of quantified LRA and NRA formulas remains a significant challenge. The main bottleneck in the existing methods is a computationally expensive quantifier elimination step. In this work, we propose a novel method for efficient quantifier elimination in quantified LRA and NRA formulas. We propose a template-based Skolemization approach, where we automatically synthesize linear/polynomial Skolem functions in order to eliminate quantifiers in the formula. The key technical ingredients in our approach are Positivstellensätze theorems from algebraic geometry, which allow for an efficient manipulation of polynomial inequalities. Our method offers a range of appealing theoretical properties combined with a strong practical performance. On the theory side, our method is sound, semi-complete, and runs in subexponential time and polynomial space, as opposed to existing sound and complete quantifier elimination methods that run in doubly-exponential time and at least exponential space. On the practical side, our experiments show superior performance compared to state-of-the-art SMT solvers in terms of the number of solved instances and runtime, both on LRA and on NRA benchmarks.
TAACKIT: Track Annotation and Analytics with Continuous Knowledge Integration Tool
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) is a powerful tool for efficiently analyzing data, detecting patterns, and forecasting trends across various domains such as text, audio, and images. The availability of annotation tools to generate reliably annotated data is crucial for advances in ML applications. In the domain of geospatial tracks, the lack of such tools to annotate and validate data impedes rapid and accessible ML application development. This paper presents Track Annotation and Analytics with Continuous Knowledge Integration Tool (TAACKIT) to serve the critically important functions of annotating geospatial track data and validating ML models. We demonstrate an ML application use case in the air traffic domain to illustrate its data annotation and model evaluation power and quantify the annotation effort reduction.
Modeling Battery Electric Vehicle Users' Charging Decisions in Scenarios with Both Time-Related and Distance-Related Anxiety
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

As one of the most promising alternatives to internal combustion engine vehicles, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. However, range anxiety is still a major concern among BEV users or potential users in recent years. The social-psychological factors were found to be associated with range anxiety, but how the charging decisions are affected by range anxiety is still unclear. Thus, in our study, through an online questionnaire issued in mainland China, we collected 230 participants' charging decisions in 60 range-anxiety-inducing scenarios in which both distance-related, and time-related anxiety co-existed. Then, an interpretable machine learning (ML) approach with the Shapley Additive Explanations method was used to model BEV users' charging decisions in these scenarios. To further explore users' decision-making mechanisms, a Bayesian-Network-regression mixed approach was used to model the inner topological structure among the factors influencing users' decisions. We find that both time-related and distance-related factors can affect users' charging decisions, but the influence of waiting time is softer compared to the BEV range. Users' charging decisions can also be moderated by users' psychological states (i.e., range anxiety level and trust in range estimation system), individual differences (i.e., age and personality), and BEV using experience (i.e., driving mileage, display mileage and range estimation cycle of range estimation system), of which, the range anxiety level is more directly related with users' charging decisions. Findings from this study can provide insights into the optimization of charge station distribution and customization of the charging recommendation system.