OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Denoising Diffusion Semantic Segmentation with Mask Prior Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The evolution of semantic segmentation has long been dominated by learning more discriminative image representations for classifying each pixel. Despite the prominent advancements, the priors of segmentation masks themselves, e.g., geometric and semantic constraints, are still under-explored. In this paper, we propose to ameliorate the semantic segmentation quality of existing discriminative approaches with a mask prior modeled by a recently-developed denoising diffusion generative model. Beginning with a unified architecture that adapts diffusion models for mask prior modeling, we focus this work on a specific instantiation with discrete diffusion and identify a variety of key design choices for its successful application. Our exploratory analysis revealed several important findings, including: (1) a simple integration of diffusion models into semantic segmentation is not sufficient, and a poorly-designed diffusion process might lead to degradation in segmentation performance; (2) during the training, the object to which noise is added is more important than the type of noise; (3) during the inference, the strict diffusion denoising scheme may not be essential and can be relaxed to a simpler scheme that even works better. We evaluate the proposed prior modeling with several off-the-shelf segmentors, and our experimental results on ADE20K and Cityscapes demonstrate that our approach could achieve competitively quantitative performance and more appealing visual quality.
OCBEV: Object-Centric BEV Transformer for Multi-View 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-view 3D object detection is becoming popular in autonomous driving due to its high effectiveness and low cost. Most of the current state-of-the-art detectors follow the query-based bird's-eye-view (BEV) paradigm, which benefits from both BEV's strong perception power and end-to-end pipeline. Despite achieving substantial progress, existing works model objects via globally leveraging temporal and spatial information of BEV features, resulting in problems when handling the challenging complex and dynamic autonomous driving scenarios. In this paper, we proposed an Object-Centric query-BEV detector OCBEV, which can carve the temporal and spatial cues of moving targets more effectively. OCBEV comprises three designs: Object Aligned Temporal Fusion aligns the BEV feature based on ego-motion and estimated current locations of moving objects, leading to a precise instance-level feature fusion. Object Focused Multi-View Sampling samples more 3D features from an adaptive local height ranges of objects for each scene to enrich foreground information. Object Informed Query Enhancement replaces part of pre-defined decoder queries in common DETR-style decoders with positional features of objects on high-confidence locations, introducing more direct object positional priors. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted on the challenging nuScenes dataset. Our approach achieves a state-of-the-art result, surpassing the traditional BEVFormer by 1.5 NDS points. Moreover, we have a faster convergence speed and only need half of the training iterations to get comparable performance, which further demonstrates its effectiveness.
Disproving XAI Myths with Formal Methods -- Initial Results
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The advances in Machine Learning (ML) in recent years have been both impressive and far-reaching. However, the deployment of ML models is still impaired by a lack of trust in how the best-performing ML models make predictions. The issue of lack of trust is even more acute in the uses of ML models in high-risk or safety-critical domains. eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is at the core of ongoing efforts for delivering trustworthy AI. Unfortunately, XAI is riddled with critical misconceptions, that foster distrust instead of building trust. This paper details some of the most visible misconceptions in XAI, and shows how formal methods have been used, both to disprove those misconceptions, but also to devise practically effective alternatives.
Training Priors Predict Text-To-Image Model Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Text-to-image models can often generate some relations, i.e., "astronaut riding horse", but fail to generate other relations composed of the same basic parts, i.e., "horse riding astronaut". These failures are often taken as evidence that models rely on training priors rather than constructing novel images compositionally. This paper tests this intuition on the stablediffusion 2.1 text-to-image model. By looking at the subject-verb-object (SVO) triads that underlie these prompts (e.g., "astronaut", "ride", "horse"), we find that the more often an SVO triad appears in the training data, the better the model can generate an image aligned with that triad. Here, by aligned we mean that each of the terms appears in the generated image in the proper relation to each other. Surprisingly, this increased frequency also diminishes how well the model can generate an image aligned with the flipped triad. For example, if "astronaut riding horse" appears frequently in the training data, the image for "horse riding astronaut" will tend to be poorly aligned. Our results thus show that current models are biased to generate images with relations seen in training, and provide new data to the ongoing debate on whether these text-to-image models employ abstract compositional structure in a traditional sense, or rather, interpolate between relations explicitly seen in the training data.
Message in a Bottle -- An Update to the Golden Record
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

In this first part of our series, we delve into the foundational aspects of the "Message in a Bottle" (henceforth referred to as MIAB). This study stands as a continuation of the legacy set by the Voyager Golden Records launched aboard Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977, which aimed to communicate with intelligent species beyond our world. These Records continue to serve not only as a snapshot of Earth and humanity but also carry forth our desire for establishing contact with advanced alien civilizations. Given the absence of mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic conventions, MIAB, like its predecessor, seeks to use scientific methods to design an innovative means of communication encapsulating the story of humanity. Our aim is to convey our collective knowledge, feelings, innovations, and aspirations in a manner that offers a universal, yet contextual understanding of human society, the evolution of life on Earth, and our hopes and concerns for the future. Through this time and space traveling capsule, we also strive to inspire and unify current and future generations to celebrate and safeguard our shared human experience.
A Quantitative Review on Language Model Efficiency Research
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Language models (LMs) are being scaled and becoming powerful. Improving their efficiency is one of the core research topics in neural information processing systems. Tay et al. (2022) provided a comprehensive overview of efficient Transformers that have become an indispensable staple in the field of NLP. However, in the section of "On Evaluation", they left an open question "which fundamental efficient Transformer one should consider," answered by "still a mystery" because "many research papers select their own benchmarks." Unfortunately, there was not quantitative analysis about the performances of Transformers on any benchmarks. Moreover, state space models (SSMs) have demonstrated their abilities of modeling long-range sequences with non-attention mechanisms, which were not discussed in the prior review. This article makes a meta analysis on the results from a set of papers on efficient Transformers as well as those on SSMs. It provides a quantitative review on LM efficiency research and gives suggestions for future research.
Evaluating GPT's Programming Capability through CodeWars' Katas
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the capabilities and limitations of programming-oriented models is crucial. This paper presents a novel evaluation of the programming proficiency of Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models, specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, against coding problems of varying difficulty levels drawn from Codewars. The experiments reveal a distinct boundary at the 3kyu level, beyond which these GPT models struggle to provide solutions. These findings led to the proposal of a measure for coding problem complexity that incorporates both problem difficulty and the time required for solution. The research emphasizes the need for validation and creative thinking capabilities in AI models to better emulate human problem-solving techniques. Future work aims to refine this proposed complexity measure, enhance AI models with these suggested capabilities, and develop an objective measure for programming problem difficulty. The results of this research offer invaluable insights for improving AI programming capabilities and advancing the frontier of AI problem-solving abilities.
The ethical ambiguity of AI data enrichment: Measuring gaps in research ethics norms and practices
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The technical progression of artificial intelligence (AI) research has been built on breakthroughs in fields such as computer science, statistics, and mathematics. However, in the past decade AI researchers have increasingly looked to the social sciences, turning to human interactions to solve the challenges of model development. Paying crowdsourcing workers to generate or curate data, or data enrichment, has become indispensable for many areas of AI research, from natural language processing to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Other fields that routinely interact with crowdsourcing workers, such as Psychology, have developed common governance requirements and norms to ensure research is undertaken ethically. This study explores how, and to what extent, comparable research ethics requirements and norms have developed for AI research and data enrichment. We focus on the approach taken by two leading conferences: ICLR and NeurIPS, and journal publisher Springer. In a longitudinal study of accepted papers, and via a comparison with Psychology and CHI papers, this work finds that leading AI venues have begun to establish protocols for human data collection, but these are are inconsistently followed by authors. Whilst Psychology papers engaging with crowdsourcing workers frequently disclose ethics reviews, payment data, demographic data and other information, similar disclosures are far less common in leading AI venues despite similar guidance. The work concludes with hypotheses to explain these gaps in research ethics practices and considerations for its implications.
DVFO: Learning-Based DVFS for Energy-Efficient Edge-Cloud Collaborative Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Due to limited resources on edge and different characteristics of deep neural network (DNN) models, it is a big challenge to optimize DNN inference performance in terms of energy consumption and end-to-end latency on edge devices. In addition to the dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) technique, the edge-cloud architecture provides a collaborative approach for efficient DNN inference. However, current edge-cloud collaborative inference methods have not optimized various compute resources on edge devices. Thus, we propose DVFO, a novel DVFS-enabled edge-cloud collaborative inference framework, which co-optimizes DVFS and offloading parameters via deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Specifically, DVFO automatically co-optimizes 1) the CPU, GPU and memory frequencies of edge devices, and 2) the feature maps to be offloaded to cloud servers. In addition, it leverages a thinking-while-moving concurrent mechanism to accelerate the DRL learning process, and a spatial-channel attention mechanism to extract DNN feature maps of secondary importance for workload offloading. This approach improves inference performance for different DNN models under various edge-cloud network conditions. Extensive evaluations using two datasets and six widely-deployed DNN models on three heterogeneous edge devices show that DVFO significantly reduces the energy consumption by 33% on average, compared to state-of-the-art schemes. Moreover, DVFO achieves up to 28.6%-59.1% end-to-end latency reduction, while maintaining accuracy within 1% loss on average.
Learning the effective order of a hypergraph dynamical system
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Dynamical systems on hypergraphs can display a rich set of behaviours not observable for systems with pairwise interactions. Given a distributed dynamical system with a putative hypergraph structure, an interesting question is thus how much of this hypergraph structure is actually necessary to faithfully replicate the observed dynamical behaviour. To answer this question, we propose a method to determine the minimum order of a hypergraph necessary to approximate the corresponding dynamics accurately. Specifically, we develop an analytical framework that allows us to determine this order when the type of dynamics is known. We utilize these ideas in conjunction with a hypergraph neural network to directly learn the dynamics itself and the resulting order of the hypergraph from both synthetic and real data sets consisting of observed system trajectories.
No Bidding, No Regret: Pairwise-Feedback Mechanisms for Digital Goods and Data Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

The growing demand for data and AI-generated digital goods, such as personalized written content and artwork, necessitates effective pricing and feedback mechanisms that account for uncertain utility and costly production. Motivated by these developments, this study presents a novel mechanism design addressing a general repeated-auction setting where the utility derived from a sold good is revealed post-sale. The mechanism's novelty lies in using pairwise comparisons for eliciting information from the bidder, arguably easier for humans than assigning a numerical value. Our mechanism chooses allocations using an epsilon-greedy strategy and relies on pairwise comparisons between realized utility from allocated goods and an arbitrary value, avoiding the learning-to-bid problem explored in previous work. We prove this mechanism to be asymptotically truthful, individually rational, and welfare and revenue maximizing. The mechanism's relevance is broad, applying to any setting with made-to-order goods of variable quality. Experimental results on multi-label toxicity annotation data, an example of negative utilities, highlight how our proposed mechanism could enhance social welfare in data auctions. Overall, our focus on human factors contributes to the development of more human-aware and efficient mechanism design.
Embedding Security into Ferroelectric FET Array via In-Situ Memory Operation
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2023
Year: 2023

Non-volatile memories (NVMs) have the potential to reshape next-generation memory systems because of their promising properties of near-zero leakage power consumption, high density and non-volatility. However, NVMs also face critical security threats that exploit the non-volatile property. Compared to volatile memory, the capability of retaining data even after power down makes NVM more vulnerable. Existing solutions to address the security issues of NVMs are mainly based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which incurs significant performance and power overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight memory encryption/decryption scheme by exploiting in-situ memory operations with negligible overhead. To validate the feasibility of the encryption/decryption scheme, device-level and array-level experiments are performed using ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET) as an example NVM without loss of generality. Besides, a comprehensive evaluation is performed on a 128x128 FeFET AND-type memory array in terms of area, latency, power and throughput. Compared with the AES-based scheme, our scheme shows around 22.6x/14.1x increase in encryption/decryption throughput with negligible power penalty. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of our scheme over the AES-based scheme when deploying different neural network workloads. Our scheme yields significant latency reduction by 90% on average for encryption and decryption processes.
Optimizing Irregular Communication with Neighborhood Collectives and Locality-Aware Parallelism
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Irregular communication often limits both the performance and scalability of parallel applications. Typically, applications individually implement irregular messages using point-to-point communications, and any optimizations are added directly into the application. As a result, these optimizations lack portability. There is no easy way to optimize point-to-point messages within MPI, as the interface for single messages provides no information on the collection of all communication to be performed. However, the persistent neighbor collective API, released in the MPI 4 standard, provides an interface for portable optimizations of irregular communication within MPI libraries. This paper presents methods for optimizing irregular communication within neighborhood collectives, analyzes the impact of replacing point-to-point communication in existing codebases such as Hypre BoomerAMG with neighborhood collectives, and finally shows an up to 1.32x speedup on sparse matrix-vector multiplication within a BoomerAMG solve through the use of our optimized neighbor collectives. The authors analyze multiple implementations of neighborhood collectives, including a standard implementation, which simply wraps standard point-to-point communication, as well as multiple implementations of locality-aware aggregation. All optimizations are available in an open-source codebase, MPI Advance, which sits on top of MPI, allowing for optimizations to be added into existing codebases regardless of the system MPI install.
PDT: Pretrained Dual Transformers for Time-aware Bipartite Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Pre-training on large models is prevalent and emerging with the ever-growing user-generated content in many machine learning application categories. It has been recognized that learning contextual knowledge from the datasets depicting user-content interaction plays a vital role in downstream tasks. Despite several studies attempting to learn contextual knowledge via pre-training methods, finding an optimal training objective and strategy for this type of task remains a challenging problem. In this work, we contend that there are two distinct aspects of contextual knowledge, namely the user-side and the content-side, for datasets where user-content interaction can be represented as a bipartite graph. To learn contextual knowledge, we propose a pre-training method that learns a bi-directional mapping between the spaces of the user-side and the content-side. We formulate the training goal as a contrastive learning task and propose a dual-Transformer architecture to encode the contextual knowledge. We evaluate the proposed method for the recommendation task. The empirical studies have demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed all the baselines with significant gains.
Improving the generalizability and robustness of large-scale traffic signal control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

A number of deep reinforcement-learning (RL) approaches propose to control traffic signals. In this work, we study the robustness of such methods along two axes. First, sensor failures and GPS occlusions create missing-data challenges and we show that recent methods remain brittle in the face of these missing data. Second, we provide a more systematic study of the generalization ability of RL methods to new networks with different traffic regimes. Again, we identify the limitations of recent approaches. We then propose using a combination of distributional and vanilla reinforcement learning through a policy ensemble. Building upon the state-of-the-art previous model which uses a decentralized approach for large-scale traffic signal control with graph convolutional networks (GCNs), we first learn models using a distributional reinforcement learning (DisRL) approach. In particular, we use implicit quantile networks (IQN) to model the state-action return distribution with quantile regression. For traffic signal control problems, an ensemble of standard RL and DisRL yields superior performance across different scenarios, including different levels of missing sensor data and traffic flow patterns. Furthermore, the learning scheme of the resulting model can improve zero-shot transferability to different road network structures, including both synthetic networks and real-world networks (e.g., Luxembourg, Manhattan). We conduct extensive experiments to compare our approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning and traditional transportation approaches. Results show that the proposed method improves robustness and generalizability in the face of missing data, varying road networks, and traffic flows.
LIC-GAN: Language Information Conditioned Graph Generative GAN Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep generative models for Natural Language data offer a new angle on the problem of graph synthesis: by optimizing differentiable models that directly generate graphs, it is possible to side-step expensive search procedures in the discrete and vast space of possible graphs. We introduce LIC-GAN, an implicit, likelihood-free generative model for small graphs that circumvents the need for expensive graph matching procedures. Our method takes as input a natural language query and using a combination of language modelling and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and returns a graph that closely matches the description of the query. We combine our approach with a reward network to further enhance the graph generation with desired properties. Our experiments, show that LIC-GAN does well on metrics such as PropMatch and Closeness getting scores of 0.36 and 0.48. We also show that LIC-GAN performs as good as ChatGPT, with ChatGPT getting scores of 0.40 and 0.42. We also conduct a few experiments to demonstrate the robustness of our method, while also highlighting a few interesting caveats of the model.
GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We present GENTLE, a new mixed-genre English challenge corpus totaling 17K tokens and consisting of 8 unusual text types for out-of domain evaluation: dictionary entries, esports commentaries, legal documents, medical notes, poetry, mathematical proofs, syllabuses, and threat letters. GENTLE is manually annotated for a variety of popular NLP tasks, including syntactic dependency parsing, entity recognition, coreference resolution, and discourse parsing. We evaluate state-of-the-art NLP systems on GENTLE and find severe degradation for at least some genres in their performance on all tasks, which indicates GENTLE's utility as an evaluation dataset for NLP systems.