OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Teaching-Inspired Integrated Prompting Framework: A Novel Approach for Enhancing Reasoning in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across various domains but still struggle with arithmetic reasoning tasks. Recent work shows the effectiveness of prompt design methods in enhancing reasoning capabilities. However, these approaches overlook crucial requirements for prior knowledge of specific concepts, theorems, and tricks to tackle most arithmetic reasoning problems successfully. To address this issue, we propose a novel and effective Teaching-Inspired Integrated Framework, which emulates the instructional process of a teacher guiding students. This method equips LLMs with essential concepts, relevant theorems, and similar problems with analogous solution approaches, facilitating the enhancement of reasoning abilities. Additionally, we introduce two new Chinese datasets, MathMC and MathToF, both with detailed explanations and answers. Experiments are conducted on nine benchmarks which demonstrates that our approach improves the reasoning accuracy of LLMs. With GPT-4 and our framework, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on four math benchmarks (AddSub, SVAMP, Math23K and AQuA) with accuracies of 98.2% (+3.3%), 93.9% (+0.2%), 94.3% (+7.2%) and 81.1% (+1.2%). Our data and code are available at https://github.com/SallyTan13/Teaching-Inspired-Prompting.
Gaussian Process Thompson Sampling via Rootfinding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Thompson sampling (TS) is a simple, effective stochastic policy in Bayesian decision making. It samples the posterior belief about the reward profile and optimizes the sample to obtain a candidate decision. In continuous optimization, the posterior of the objective function is often a Gaussian process (GP), whose sample paths have numerous local optima, making their global optimization challenging. In this work, we introduce an efficient global optimization strategy for GP-TS that carefully selects starting points for gradient-based multi-start optimizers. It identifies all local optima of the prior sample via univariate global rootfinding, and optimizes the posterior sample using a differentiable, decoupled representation. We demonstrate remarkable improvement in the global optimization of GP posterior samples, especially in high dimensions. This leads to dramatic improvements in the overall performance of Bayesian optimization using GP-TS acquisition functions, surprisingly outperforming alternatives like GP-UCB and EI.
On the Second-Order Achievabilities of Indirect Quadratic Lossy Source Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper studies the second-order achievabilities of indirect quadratic lossy source coding for a specific class of source models, where the term "quadratic" denotes that the reconstruction fidelity of the hidden source is quantified by a squared error distortion measure. Specifically, it is assumed that the hidden source $S$ can be expressed as $S = φ(X) + W$, where $X$ is the observable source with alphabet $\mathcal{X}$, $φ(\cdot)$ is a deterministic function, and $W$ is a random variable independent of $X$, satisfying $\mathbb{E}[W] = 0$, $\mathbb{E}[W^2] > 0$, $\mathbb{E}[W^3] = 0$, and $\mathbb{E}[W^6] < \infty$. Additionally, both the set $\{φ(x):\ x \in \mathcal{X} \}$ and the reconstruction alphabet for $S$ are assumed to be bounded. Under the above settings, a second-order achievability bound is established using techniques based on distortion-tilted information. This result is then generalized to the case of indirect quadratic lossy source coding with observed source reconstruction, where reconstruction is required for both the hidden source $S$ and the observable source $X$, and the distortion measure for $X$ is not necessarily quadratic. These obtained bounds are consistent in form with their finite-alphabet counterparts, which have been proven to be second-order tight.
On Barycenter Computation: Semi-Unbalanced Optimal Transport-based Method on Gaussians
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We explore a robust version of the barycenter problem among $n$ centered Gaussian probability measures, termed Semi-Unbalanced Optimal Transport (SUOT)-based Barycenter, wherein the barycenter remains fixed while the others are relaxed using Kullback-Leibler divergence. We develop optimization algorithms on Bures-Wasserstein manifold, named the Exact Geodesic Gradient Descent and Hybrid Gradient Descent algorithms. While the Exact Geodesic Gradient Descent method is based on computing the exact closed form of the first-order derivative of the objective function of the barycenter along a geodesic on the Bures manifold, the Hybrid Gradient Descent method utilizes optimizer components when solving the SUOT problem to replace outlier measures before applying the Riemannian Gradient Descent. We establish the theoretical convergence guarantees for both methods and demonstrate that the Exact Geodesic Gradient Descent algorithm attains a dimension-free convergence rate. Finally, we conduct experiments to compare the normal Wasserstein Barycenter with ours and perform an ablation study.
PointOBB-v2: Towards Simpler, Faster, and Stronger Single Point Supervised Oriented Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Single point supervised oriented object detection has gained attention and made initial progress within the community. Diverse from those approaches relying on one-shot samples or powerful pretrained models (e.g. SAM), PointOBB has shown promise due to its prior-free feature. In this paper, we propose PointOBB-v2, a simpler, faster, and stronger method to generate pseudo rotated boxes from points without relying on any other prior. Specifically, we first generate a Class Probability Map (CPM) by training the network with non-uniform positive and negative sampling. We show that the CPM is able to learn the approximate object regions and their contours. Then, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to accurately estimate the orientation and the boundary of objects. By further incorporating a separation mechanism, we resolve the confusion caused by the overlapping on the CPM, enabling its operation in high-density scenarios. Extensive comparisons demonstrate that our method achieves a training speed 15.58x faster and an accuracy improvement of 11.60%/25.15%/21.19% on the DOTA-v1.0/v1.5/v2.0 datasets compared to the previous state-of-the-art, PointOBB. This significantly advances the cutting edge of single point supervised oriented detection in the modular track.
Neural Material Adaptor for Visual Grounding of Intrinsic Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

While humans effortlessly discern intrinsic dynamics and adapt to new scenarios, modern AI systems often struggle. Current methods for visual grounding of dynamics either use pure neural-network-based simulators (black box), which may violate physical laws, or traditional physical simulators (white box), which rely on expert-defined equations that may not fully capture actual dynamics. We propose the Neural Material Adaptor (NeuMA), which integrates existing physical laws with learned corrections, facilitating accurate learning of actual dynamics while maintaining the generalizability and interpretability of physical priors. Additionally, we propose Particle-GS, a particle-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting variant that bridges simulation and observed images, allowing back-propagate image gradients to optimize the simulator. Comprehensive experiments on various dynamics in terms of grounded particle accuracy, dynamic rendering quality, and generalization ability demonstrate that NeuMA can accurately capture intrinsic dynamics.
Modular Adaptive Aerial Manipulation under Unknown Dynamic Coupling Forces
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Successful aerial manipulation largely depends on how effectively a controller can tackle the coupling dynamic forces between the aerial vehicle and the manipulator. However, this control problem has remained largely unsolved as the existing control approaches either require precise knowledge of the aerial vehicle/manipulator inertial couplings, or neglect the state-dependent uncertainties especially arising during the interaction phase. This work proposes an adaptive control solution to overcome this long standing control challenge without any a priori knowledge of the coupling dynamic terms. Additionally, in contrast to the existing adaptive control solutions, the proposed control framework is modular, that is, it allows independent tuning of the adaptive gains for the vehicle position sub-dynamics, the vehicle attitude sub-dynamics, and the manipulator sub-dynamics. Stability of the closed loop under the proposed scheme is derived analytically, and real-time experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme over the state-of-the-art approaches.
Randomized Asymmetric Chain of LoRA: The First Meaningful Theoretical Framework for Low-Rank Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Fine-tuning has become a popular approach to adapting large foundational models to specific tasks. As the size of models and datasets grows, parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques are increasingly important. One of the most widely used methods is Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), with adaptation update expressed as the product of two low-rank matrices. While LoRA was shown to possess strong performance in fine-tuning, it often under-performs when compared to full-parameter fine-tuning (FPFT). Although many variants of LoRA have been extensively studied empirically, their theoretical optimization analysis is heavily under-explored. The starting point of our work is a demonstration that LoRA and its two extensions, Asymmetric LoRA and Chain of LoRA, indeed encounter convergence issues. To address these issues, we propose Randomized Asymmetric Chain of LoRA (RAC-LoRA) -- a general optimization framework that rigorously analyzes the convergence rates of LoRA-based methods. Our approach inherits the empirical benefits of LoRA-style heuristics, but introduces several small but important algorithmic modifications which turn it into a provably convergent method. Our framework serves as a bridge between FPFT and low-rank adaptation. We provide provable guarantees of convergence to the same solution as FPFT, along with the rate of convergence. Additionally, we present a convergence analysis for smooth, non-convex loss functions, covering gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent, and federated learning settings. Our theoretical findings are supported by experimental results.
Music Genre Classification using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This paper exploits the zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for music genre classification. The proposed approach splits audio signals into 20 ms chunks and processes them through convolutional feature encoders, a transformer encoder, and additional layers for coding audio units and generating feature vectors. The extracted feature vectors are used to train a classification head. During inference, predictions on individual chunks are aggregated for a final genre classification. We conducted a comprehensive comparison of LLMs, including WavLM, HuBERT, and wav2vec 2.0, with traditional deep learning architectures like 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the audio spectrogram transformer (AST). Our findings demonstrate the superior performance of the AST model, achieving an overall accuracy of 85.5%, surpassing all other models evaluated. These results highlight the potential of LLMs and transformer-based architectures for advancing music information retrieval tasks, even in zero-shot scenarios.
Agents Thinking Fast and Slow: A Talker-Reasoner Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models have enabled agents of all kinds to interact with users through natural conversation. Consequently, agents now have two jobs: conversing and planning/reasoning. Their conversational responses must be informed by all available information, and their actions must help to achieve goals. This dichotomy between conversing with the user and doing multi-step reasoning and planning can be seen as analogous to the human systems of "thinking fast and slow" as introduced by Kahneman. Our approach is comprised of a "Talker" agent (System 1) that is fast and intuitive, and tasked with synthesizing the conversational response; and a "Reasoner" agent (System 2) that is slower, more deliberative, and more logical, and is tasked with multi-step reasoning and planning, calling tools, performing actions in the world, and thereby producing the new agent state. We describe the new Talker-Reasoner architecture and discuss its advantages, including modularity and decreased latency. We ground the discussion in the context of a sleep coaching agent, in order to demonstrate real-world relevance.
Level of agreement between emotions generated by Artificial Intelligence and human evaluation: a methodological proposal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Images are capable of conveying emotions, but emotional experience is highly subjective. Advances in artificial intelligence have enabled the generation of images based on emotional descriptions. However, the level of agreement between the generative images and human emotional responses has not yet been evaluated. To address this, 20 artistic landscapes were generated using StyleGAN2-ADA. Four variants evoking positive emotions (contentment, amusement) and negative emotions (fear, sadness) were created for each image, resulting in 80 pictures. An online questionnaire was designed using this material, in which 61 observers classified the generated images. Statistical analyses were performed on the collected data to determine the level of agreement among participants, between the observer's responses, and the AI-generated emotions. A generally good level of agreement was found, with better results for negative emotions. However, the study confirms the subjectivity inherent in emotional evaluation.
Exploring Natural Language-Based Strategies for Efficient Number Learning in Children through Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates how children learn numbers using the framework of reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on the impact of language instructions. The motivation for using reinforcement learning stems from its parallels with psychological learning theories in controlled environments. By using state of the art deep reinforcement learning models, we simulate and analyze the effects of various forms of language instructions on number acquisition. Our findings indicate that certain linguistic structures more effectively improve numerical comprehension in RL agents. Additionally, our model predicts optimal sequences for presenting numbers to RL agents which enhance their speed of learning. This research provides valuable insights into the interplay between language and numerical cognition, with implications for both educational strategies and the development of artificial intelligence systems designed to support early childhood learning.
Simultaneous Weight and Architecture Optimization for Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks are trained by choosing an architecture and training the parameters. The choice of architecture is often by trial and error or with Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods. While NAS provides some automation, it often relies on discrete steps that optimize the architecture and then train the parameters. We introduce a novel neural network training framework that fundamentally transforms the process by learning architecture and parameters simultaneously with gradient descent. With the appropriate setting of the loss function, it can discover sparse and compact neural networks for given datasets. Central to our approach is a multi-scale encoder-decoder, in which the encoder embeds pairs of neural networks with similar functionalities close to each other (irrespective of their architectures and weights). To train a neural network with a given dataset, we randomly sample a neural network embedding in the embedding space and then perform gradient descent using our custom loss function, which incorporates a sparsity penalty to encourage compactness. The decoder generates a neural network corresponding to the embedding. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can discover sparse and compact neural networks maintaining a high performance.
SummAct: Uncovering User Intentions Through Interactive Behaviour Summarisation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Recent work has highlighted the potential of modelling interactive behaviour analogously to natural language. We propose interactive behaviour summarisation as a novel computational task and demonstrate its usefulness for automatically uncovering latent user intentions while interacting with graphical user interfaces. To tackle this task, we introduce SummAct, a novel hierarchical method to summarise low-level input actions into high-level intentions. SummAct first identifies sub-goals from user actions using a large language model and in-context learning. High-level intentions are then obtained by fine-tuning the model using a novel UI element attention to preserve detailed context information embedded within UI elements during summarisation. Through a series of evaluations, we demonstrate that SummAct significantly outperforms baselines across desktop and mobile interfaces as well as interactive tasks by up to 21.9%. We further show three exciting interactive applications benefited from SummAct: interactive behaviour forecasting, automatic behaviour synonym identification, and language-based behaviour retrieval.
Heating Up Quasi-Monte Carlo Graph Random Features: A Diffusion Kernel Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We build upon a recently introduced class of quasi-graph random features (q-GRFs), which have demonstrated the ability to yield lower variance estimators of the 2-regularized Laplacian kernel (Choromanski 2023). Our research investigates whether similar results can be achieved with alternative kernel functions, specifically the Diffusion (or Heat), Matérn, and Inverse Cosine kernels. We find that the Diffusion kernel performs most similarly to the 2-regularized Laplacian, and we further explore graph types that benefit from the previously established antithetic termination procedure. Specifically, we explore Erdős-Rényi and Barabási-Albert random graph models, Binary Trees, and Ladder graphs, with the goal of identifying combinations of specific kernel and graph type that benefit from antithetic termination. We assert that q-GRFs achieve lower variance estimators of the Diffusion (or Heat) kernel on Ladder graphs. However, the number of rungs on the Ladder graphs impacts the algorithm's performance; further theoretical results supporting our experimentation are forthcoming. This work builds upon some of the earliest Quasi-Monte Carlo methods for kernels defined on combinatorial objects, paving the way for kernel-based learning algorithms and future real-world applications in various domains.
Human Stone Toolmaking Action Grammar (HSTAG): A Challenging Benchmark for Fine-grained Motor Behavior Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Action recognition has witnessed the development of a growing number of novel algorithms and datasets in the past decade. However, the majority of public benchmarks were constructed around activities of daily living and annotated at a rather coarse-grained level, which lacks diversity in domain-specific datasets, especially for rarely seen domains. In this paper, we introduced Human Stone Toolmaking Action Grammar (HSTAG), a meticulously annotated video dataset showcasing previously undocumented stone toolmaking behaviors, which can be used for investigating the applications of advanced artificial intelligence techniques in understanding a rapid succession of complex interactions between two hand-held objects. HSTAG consists of 18,739 video clips that record 4.5 hours of experts' activities in stone toolmaking. Its unique features include (i) brief action durations and frequent transitions, mirroring the rapid changes inherent in many motor behaviors; (ii) multiple angles of view and switches among multiple tools, increasing intra-class variability; (iii) unbalanced class distributions and high similarity among different action sequences, adding difficulty in capturing distinct patterns for each action. Several mainstream action recognition models are used to conduct experimental analysis, which showcases the challenges and uniqueness of HSTAG https://nyu.databrary.org/volume/1697.
Understanding the Interplay between Parametric and Contextual Knowledge for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of knowledge during pre-training (parametric knowledge, or PK) and can further be enhanced by incorporating contextual knowledge (CK). Can LLMs effectively integrate their internal PK with external CK to solve complex problems? In this paper, we investigate the dynamic interaction between PK and CK, categorizing their relationships into four types: Supportive, Complementary, Conflicting, and Irrelevant. To support this investigation, we introduce ECHOQA, a benchmark spanning scientific, factual, and commonsense knowledge. Our results show that LLMs tend to suppress their PK when contextual information is available, even when it is complementary or irrelevant. While tailored instructions can encourage LLMs to rely more on their PK, they still struggle to fully leverage it. These findings reveal a key vulnerability in LLMs, raising concerns about their reliability in knowledge-intensive tasks. Resources are available at https://github.com/sitaocheng/Knowledge_Interplay
Generalizable autoregressive modeling of time series through functional narratives
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Time series data are inherently functions of time, yet current transformers often learn time series by modeling them as mere concatenations of time periods, overlooking their functional properties. In this work, we propose a novel objective for transformers that learn time series by re-interpreting them as temporal functions. We build an alternative sequence of time series by constructing degradation operators of different intensity in the functional space, creating augmented variants of the original sample that are abstracted or simplified to different degrees. Based on the new set of generated sequence, we train an autoregressive transformer that progressively recovers the original sample from the most simplified variant. Analogous to the next word prediction task in languages that learns narratives by connecting different words, our autoregressive transformer aims to learn the Narratives of Time Series (NoTS) by connecting different functions in time. Theoretically, we justify the construction of the alternative sequence through its advantages in approximating functions. When learning time series data with transformers, constructing sequences of temporal functions allows for a broader class of approximable functions (e.g., differentiation) compared to sequences of time periods, leading to a 26\% performance improvement in synthetic feature regression experiments. Experimentally, we validate NoTS in 3 different tasks across 22 real-world datasets, where we show that NoTS significantly outperforms other pre-training methods by up to 6\%. Additionally, combining NoTS on top of existing transformer architectures can consistently boost the performance. Our results demonstrate the potential of NoTS as a general-purpose dynamic learner, offering a viable alternative for developing foundation models for time series analysis.