OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AMRFact: Enhancing Summarization Factuality Evaluation with AMR-Driven Negative Samples Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Ensuring factual consistency is crucial for natural language generation tasks, particularly in abstractive summarization, where preserving the integrity of information is paramount. Prior works on evaluating factual consistency of summarization often take the entailment-based approaches that first generate perturbed (factual inconsistent) summaries and then train a classifier on the generated data to detect the factually inconsistencies during testing time. However, previous approaches generating perturbed summaries are either of low coherence or lack error-type coverage. To address these issues, we propose AMRFact, a framework that generates perturbed summaries using Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs). Our approach parses factually consistent summaries into AMR graphs and injects controlled factual inconsistencies to create negative examples, allowing for coherent factually inconsistent summaries to be generated with high error-type coverage. Additionally, we present a data selection module NegFilter based on natural language inference and BARTScore to ensure the quality of the generated negative samples. Experimental results demonstrate our approach significantly outperforms previous systems on the AggreFact-SOTA benchmark, showcasing its efficacy in evaluating factuality of abstractive summarization.
Reversed Indexes $\approx$ Values in Wavelet Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This work presents a discovery to advance the wisdom in a particular Succinct Data Structure: Wavelet Tree (Grossi, Gupta, and Vitter 2003). The discovery is first made by showing the feasibility of Reversed Indexes = Values: for integers within $[0,2^{N})$, there exists a Wavelet Tree that its compressed indexes can be equivalent to the Leibniz Binary system (Leibniz 1703), with only the bit reversal. Then we show how to strengthen the discovery by generalizing it into Reversed Indexes $\approx$ Values, by applying a longest common subsequence in bits and its patterns. Finally, we conjuncture potential implications of the above ideas by discussing its benefits, and modifications to the RAM model. The discovery reveals that: (1) the usability of Succinct Data Structure can be significantly expanded, by enabling Computation Directly on Compression; and (2) near-optimal lossless compression can still yield close connections with the Leibniz Binary System (Leibniz 1703), which breeds polymorphic functionalities within a single piece of the information. This work also provides an initial analysis of the benefits from the method (and potentially other extensions), and suggests potential modifications.
Crafting In-context Examples according to LMs' Parametric Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In-context learning can improve the performances of knowledge-rich tasks such as question answering. In such scenarios, in-context examples trigger a language model (LM) to surface information stored in its parametric knowledge. We study how to better construct in-context example sets, based on whether the model is aware of the in-context examples. We identify 'known' examples, where models can correctly answer from their parametric knowledge, and 'unknown' ones. Our experiments show that prompting with 'unknown' examples decreases the performance, potentially as it encourages hallucination rather than searching for its parametric knowledge. Constructing an in-context example set that presents both known and unknown information performs the best across diverse settings. We perform analysis on three multi-answer question answering datasets, which allows us to further study answer set ordering strategies based on the LM's knowledge of each answer. Together, our study sheds light on how to best construct in-context example sets for knowledge-rich tasks.
Multi-Step Dialogue Workflow Action Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In task-oriented dialogue, a system often needs to follow a sequence of actions, called a workflow, that complies with a set of guidelines in order to complete a task. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of multi-step workflow action prediction, in which the system predicts multiple future workflow actions. Accurate prediction of multiple steps allows for multi-turn automation, which can free up time to focus on more complex tasks. We propose three modeling approaches that are simple to implement yet lead to more action automation: 1) fine-tuning on a training dataset, 2) few-shot in-context learning leveraging retrieval and large language model prompting, and 3) zero-shot graph traversal, which aggregates historical action sequences into a graph for prediction. We show that multi-step action prediction produces features that improve accuracy on downstream dialogue tasks like predicting task success, and can increase automation of steps by 20% without requiring as much feedback from a human overseeing the system.
Self-Contradictory Reasoning Evaluation and Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In a plethora of recent work, large language models (LLMs) demonstrated impressive reasoning ability, but many proposed downstream reasoning tasks only focus on final answers. Two fundamental questions persist: 1) how consistent is the reasoning, and 2) can models detect unreliable reasoning? In this paper, we investigate self-contradictory (Self-Contra) reasoning, where the model reasoning does not support its answers. To answer 1), we define and assess the Self-Contra rate across three datasets and delve into finer-grained categories of Self-Contra reasoning. We find that LLMs often contradict themselves in reasoning tasks involving contextual information understanding or commonsense. The model may generate correct answers by taking shortcuts in reasoning or overlooking contextual evidence, leading to compromised reasoning. For 2), we task the state-of-the-art model GPT-4 with identifying Self-Contra reasoning and finer-grained fallacies. We find that finer-grained categories enhanced detection can improve GPT-4's ability to detect Self-Contra. However, it is only able to detect Self-Contra with a 52.2% F1 score, much lower compared to 66.7% for humans. Our results indicate that current LLMs lack the robustness necessary for reliable reasoning and we emphasize the urgent need for establishing best practices in comprehensive reasoning evaluations beyond pure performance-based metrics.
The Wisdom of Partisan Crowds: Comparing Collective Intelligence in Humans and LLM-based Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Human groups are able to converge on more accurate beliefs through deliberation, even in the presence of polarization and partisan bias -- a phenomenon known as the "wisdom of partisan crowds." Generated agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human collective behavior, yet few benchmarks exist for evaluating their dynamics against the behavior of human groups. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the wisdom of partisan crowds emerges in groups of LLM-based agents that are prompted to role-play as partisan personas (e.g., Democrat or Republican). We find that they not only display human-like partisan biases, but also converge to more accurate beliefs through deliberation as humans do. We then identify several factors that interfere with convergence, including the use of chain-of-thought prompt and lack of details in personas. Conversely, fine-tuning on human data appears to enhance convergence. These findings show the potential and limitations of LLM-based agents as a model of human collective intelligence.
Graph Elicitation for Guiding Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting along with sub-question generation and answering has enhanced multi-step reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prompting the LLMs to directly generate sub-questions is suboptimal since they sometimes generate redundant or irrelevant questions. To deal with them, we propose a GE-Reasoning method, which directs LLMs to generate proper sub-questions and corresponding answers. Concretely, given an input question, we first prompt the LLM to generate knowledge triplets, forming a graph representation of the question. Unlike conventional knowledge triplets, our approach allows variables as head or tail entities, effectively representing a question as knowledge triplets. Second, for each triplet, the LLM generates a corresponding sub-question and answer along with using knowledge retrieval. If the prediction confidence exceeds a threshold, the sub-question and prediction are incorporated into the prompt for subsequent processing. This approach encourages that sub-questions are grounded in the extracted knowledge triplets, reducing redundancy and irrelevance. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous CoT prompting methods and their variants on multi-hop question answering benchmark datasets.
LLMs as Narcissistic Evaluators: When Ego Inflates Evaluation Scores
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic evaluation of generated textual content presents an ongoing challenge within the field of NLP. Given the impressive capabilities of modern language models (LMs) across diverse NLP tasks, there is a growing trend to employ these models in creating innovative evaluation metrics for automated assessment of generation tasks. This paper investigates a pivotal question: Do language model-driven evaluation metrics inherently exhibit bias favoring texts generated by the same underlying language model? Specifically, we assess whether prominent LM-based evaluation metrics (e.g. BARTScore, T5Score, and GPTScore) demonstrate a favorable bias toward their respective underlying LMs in the context of summarization tasks. Our findings unveil a latent bias, particularly pronounced when such evaluation metrics are used in a reference-free manner without leveraging gold summaries. These results underscore that assessments provided by generative evaluation models can be influenced by factors beyond the inherent text quality, highlighting the necessity of developing more reliable evaluation protocols in the future.
Large Language Models for Propaganda Span Annotation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The use of propagandistic techniques in online content has increased in recent years aiming to manipulate online audiences. Fine-grained propaganda detection and extraction of textual spans where propaganda techniques are used, are essential for more informed content consumption. Automatic systems targeting the task over lower resourced languages are limited, usually obstructed by lack of large scale training datasets. Our study investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, can effectively extract propagandistic spans. We further study the potential of employing the model to collect more cost-effective annotations. Finally, we examine the effectiveness of labels provided by GPT-4 in training smaller language models for the task. The experiments are performed over a large-scale in-house manually annotated dataset. The results suggest that providing more annotation context to GPT-4 within prompts improves its performance compared to human annotators. Moreover, when serving as an expert annotator (consolidator), the model provides labels that have higher agreement with expert annotators, and lead to specialized models that achieve state-of-the-art over an unseen Arabic testing set. Finally, our work is the first to show the potential of utilizing LLMs to develop annotated datasets for propagandistic spans detection task prompting it with annotations from human annotators with limited expertise. All scripts and annotations will be shared with the community.
Capacitated Network Bargaining Games: Stability and Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2024
Year: 2024

Capacitated network bargaining games are popular combinatorial games that involve the structure of matchings in graphs. We show that it is always possible to stabilize unit-weight instances of this problem (that is, ensure that they admit a stable outcome) via capacity-reduction and edge-removal operations, without decreasing the total value that the players can get. Furthermore, for general weighted instances, we show that computing a minimum amount of vertex-capacity to reduce to make an instance stable is a polynomial-time solvable problem. We then exploit this to give approximation results for the NP-hard problem of stabilizing a graph via edge-removal operations. Our work extends and generalizes previous results in the literature that dealt with a unit-capacity version of the problem, using several new arguments. In particular, while previous results mainly used combinatorial techniques, we here rely on polyhedral arguments and, more specifically, on the notion of circuits of a polytope.
Version Age of Information Minimization over Fading Broadcast Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a base station (BS) that receives version update packets from multiple exogenous streams and broadcasts them to corresponding users over a fading broadcast channel using a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. Sequentially indexed packets arrive randomly in each stream, with new packets making the previous ones obsolete. In this case, we consider the version age of information (VAoI) at a user, defined as the difference in the version index of the latest available packet at the BS and that at the user, as a metric of freshness of information. Our objective is to minimize a weighted sum of average VAoI across users subject to an average power constraint at the BS by optimally scheduling the update packets from various streams for transmission and transmitting them with sufficient powers to guarantee their successful delivery. We consider the class of channel-only stationary randomized policies (CO-SRP), which rely solely on channel power gains for transmission decisions. We solve the resulting non-convex problem optimally and show that the VAoI achieved under the optimal CO-SRP is within twice the optimal achievable VAoI. We also obtained a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP)-based solution and its structural properties. Numerical simulations show a close performance between the optimal CO-SRP and CMDP-based solutions. Additionally, a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, which allows transmission to at most one user at a time, matches NOMA's performance under tight average power constraints. However, NOMA outperforms TDMA as the constraint is relaxed.
PINE: Efficient Norm-Bound Verification for Secret-Shared Vectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Secure aggregation of high-dimensional vectors is a fundamental primitive in federated statistics and learning. A two-server system such as PRIO allows for scalable aggregation of secret-shared vectors. Adversarial clients might try to manipulate the aggregate, so it is important to ensure that each (secret-shared) contribution is well-formed. In this work, we focus on the important and well-studied goal of ensuring that each contribution vector has bounded Euclidean norm. Existing protocols for ensuring bounded-norm contributions either incur a large communication overhead, or only allow for approximate verification of the norm bound. We propose Private Inexpensive Norm Enforcement (PINE): a new protocol that allows exact norm verification with little communication overhead. For high-dimensional vectors, our approach has a communication overhead of a few percent, compared to the 16-32x overhead of previous approaches.
Shifting to Machine Supervision: Annotation-Efficient Semi and Self-Supervised Learning for Automatic Medical Image Segmentation and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Advancements in clinical treatment are increasingly constrained by the limitations of supervised learning techniques, which depend heavily on large volumes of annotated data. The annotation process is not only costly but also demands substantial time from clinical specialists. Addressing this issue, we introduce the S4MI (Self-Supervision and Semi-Supervision for Medical Imaging) pipeline, a novel approach that leverages advancements in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning. These techniques engage in auxiliary tasks that do not require labeling, thus simplifying the scaling of machine supervision compared to fully-supervised methods. Our study benchmarks these techniques on three distinct medical imaging datasets to evaluate their effectiveness in classification and segmentation tasks. Notably, we observed that self supervised learning significantly surpassed the performance of supervised methods in the classification of all evaluated datasets. Remarkably, the semi-supervised approach demonstrated superior outcomes in segmentation, outperforming fully-supervised methods while using 50% fewer labels across all datasets. In line with our commitment to contributing to the scientific community, we have made the S4MI code openly accessible, allowing for broader application and further development of these methods.
Dates Fruit Disease Recognition using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Tunisia are among the top exporters and consumers of palm date fruits. Date fruit production plays a major role in the economies of the date fruit exporting countries. Date fruits are susceptible to disease just like any fruit and early detection and intervention can end up saving the produce. However, with the vast farming lands, it is nearly impossible for farmers to observe date trees on a frequent basis for early disease detection. In addition, even with human observation the process is prone to human error and increases the date fruit cost. With the recent advances in computer vision, machine learning, drone technology, and other technologies; an integrated solution can be proposed for the automatic detection of date fruit disease. In this paper, a hybrid features based method with the standard classifiers is proposed based on the extraction of L*a*b color features, statistical features, and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) texture features for the early detection and classification of date fruit disease. A dataset was developed for this work consisting of 871 images divided into the following classes; Healthy date, Initial stage of disease, Malnourished date, and Parasite infected. The extracted features were input to common classifiers such as the Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Fuzzy Decision Trees (FDT). The highest average accuracy was achieved when combining the L*a*b, Statistical, and DWT Features.
A Survey of Large Language Models for Code: Evolution, Benchmarking, and Future Trends
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

General large language models (LLMs), represented by ChatGPT, have demonstrated significant potential in tasks such as code generation in software engineering. This has led to the development of specialized LLMs for software engineering, known as Code LLMs. A considerable portion of Code LLMs is derived from general LLMs through model fine-tuning. As a result, Code LLMs are often updated frequently and their performance can be influenced by the base LLMs. However, there is currently a lack of systematic investigation into Code LLMs and their performance. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of the types of Code LLMs and their differences in performance compared to general LLMs. We aim to address three questions: (1) What LLMs are specifically designed for software engineering tasks, and what is the relationship between these Code LLMs? (2) Do Code LLMs really outperform general LLMs in software engineering tasks? (3) Which LLMs are more proficient in different software engineering tasks? To answer these questions, we first collect relevant literature and work from five major databases and open-source communities, resulting in 134 works for analysis. Next, we categorize the Code LLMs based on their publishers and examine their relationships with general LLMs and among themselves. Furthermore, we investigate the performance differences between general LLMs and Code LLMs in various software engineering tasks to demonstrate the impact of base models and Code LLMs. Finally, we comprehensively maintained the performance of LLMs across multiple mainstream benchmarks to identify the best-performing LLMs for each software engineering task. Our research not only assists developers of Code LLMs in choosing base models for the development of more advanced LLMs but also provides insights for practitioners to better understand key improvement directions for Code LLMs.
DeepClean: Machine Unlearning on the Cheap by Resetting Privacy Sensitive Weights using the Fisher Diagonal
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning models trained on sensitive or private data can inadvertently memorize and leak that information. Machine unlearning seeks to retroactively remove such details from model weights to protect privacy. We contribute a lightweight unlearning algorithm that leverages the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) for selective forgetting. Prior work in this area requires full retraining or large matrix inversions, which are computationally expensive. Our key insight is that the diagonal elements of the FIM, which measure the sensitivity of log-likelihood to changes in weights, contain sufficient information for effective forgetting. Specifically, we compute the FIM diagonal over two subsets -- the data to retain and forget -- for all trainable weights. This diagonal representation approximates the complete FIM while dramatically reducing computation. We then use it to selectively update weights to maximize forgetting of the sensitive subset while minimizing impact on the retained subset. Experiments show that our algorithm can successfully forget any randomly selected subsets of training data across neural network architectures. By leveraging the FIM diagonal, our approach provides an interpretable, lightweight, and efficient solution for machine unlearning with practical privacy benefits.
Emu Video: Factorizing Text-to-Video Generation by Explicit Image Conditioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present Emu Video, a text-to-video generation model that factorizes the generation into two steps: first generating an image conditioned on the text, and then generating a video conditioned on the text and the generated image. We identify critical design decisions--adjusted noise schedules for diffusion, and multi-stage training that enable us to directly generate high quality and high resolution videos, without requiring a deep cascade of models as in prior work. In human evaluations, our generated videos are strongly preferred in quality compared to all prior work--81% vs. Google's Imagen Video, 90% vs. Nvidia's PYOCO, and 96% vs. Meta's Make-A-Video. Our model outperforms commercial solutions such as RunwayML's Gen2 and Pika Labs. Finally, our factorizing approach naturally lends itself to animating images based on a user's text prompt, where our generations are preferred 96% over prior work.
Robotic Pollination of Apples in Commercial Orchards
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This research presents a novel, robotic pollination system designed for targeted pollination of apple flowers in modern fruiting wall orchards. Developed in response to the challenges of global colony collapse disorder, climate change, and the need for sustainable alternatives to traditional pollinators, the system utilizes a commercial manipulator, a vision system, and a spray nozzle for pollen application. Initial tests in April 2022 pollinated 56% of the target flower clusters with at least one fruit with a cycle time of 6.5 s. Significant improvements were made in 2023, with the system accurately detecting 91% of available flowers and pollinating 84% of target flowers with a reduced cycle time of 4.8 s. This system showed potential for precision artificial pollination that can also minimize the need for labor-intensive field operations such as flower and fruitlet thinning.