OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Discrete Prompt Optimization via Constrained Generation for Zero-shot Re-ranker
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Re-rankers, which order retrieved documents with respect to the relevance score on the given query, have gained attention for the information retrieval (IR) task. Rather than fine-tuning the pre-trained language model (PLM), the large-scale language model (LLM) is utilized as a zero-shot re-ranker with excellent results. While LLM is highly dependent on the prompts, the impact and the optimization of the prompts for the zero-shot re-ranker are not explored yet. Along with highlighting the impact of optimization on the zero-shot re-ranker, we propose a novel discrete prompt optimization method, Constrained Prompt generation (Co-Prompt), with the metric estimating the optimum for re-ranking. Co-Prompt guides the generated texts from PLM toward optimal prompts based on the metric without parameter update. The experimental results demonstrate that Co-Prompt leads to outstanding re-ranking performance against the baselines. Also, Co-Prompt generates more interpretable prompts for humans against other prompt optimization methods.
Mixup-Privacy: A simple yet effective approach for privacy-preserving segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Privacy protection in medical data is a legitimate obstacle for centralized machine learning applications. Here, we propose a client-server image segmentation system which allows for the analysis of multi-centric medical images while preserving patient privacy. In this approach, the client protects the to-be-segmented patient image by mixing it to a reference image. As shown in our work, it is challenging to separate the image mixture to exact original content, thus making the data unworkable and unrecognizable for an unauthorized person. This proxy image is sent to a server for processing. The server then returns the mixture of segmentation maps, which the client can revert to a correct target segmentation. Our system has two components: 1) a segmentation network on the server side which processes the image mixture, and 2) a segmentation unmixing network which recovers the correct segmentation map from the segmentation mixture. Furthermore, the whole system is trained end-to-end. The proposed method is validated on the task of MRI brain segmentation using images from two different datasets. Results show that the segmentation accuracy of our method is comparable to a system trained on raw images, and outperforms other privacy-preserving methods with little computational overhead.
XRoute Environment: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Environment for Routing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Routing is a crucial and time-consuming stage in modern design automation flow for advanced technology nodes. Great progress in the field of reinforcement learning makes it possible to use those approaches to improve the routing quality and efficiency. However, the scale of the routing problems solved by reinforcement learning-based methods in recent studies is too small for these methods to be used in commercial EDA tools. We introduce the XRoute Environment, a new reinforcement learning environment where agents are trained to select and route nets in an advanced, end-to-end routing framework. Novel algorithms and ideas can be quickly tested in a safe and reproducible manner in it. The resulting environment is challenging, easy to use, customize and add additional scenarios, and it is available under a permissive open-source license. In addition, it provides support for distributed deployment and multi-instance experiments. We propose two tasks for learning and build a full-chip test bed with routing benchmarks of various region sizes. We also pre-define several static routing regions with different pin density and number of nets for easier learning and testing. For net ordering task, we report baseline results for two widely used reinforcement learning algorithms (PPO and DQN) and one searching-based algorithm (TritonRoute). The XRoute Environment will be available at https://github.com/xplanlab/xroute_env.
"Is the Pope Catholic?" Applying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Understanding Conversational Implicatures
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Conversational implicatures are pragmatic inferences that require listeners to deduce the intended meaning conveyed by a speaker from their explicit utterances. Although such inferential reasoning is fundamental to human communication, recent research indicates that large language models struggle to comprehend these implicatures as effectively as the average human. This paper demonstrates that by incorporating Grice's Four Maxims into the model through chain-of-thought prompting, we can significantly enhance its performance, surpassing even the average human performance on this task.
Probing Brain Context-Sensitivity with Masked-Attention Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Two fundamental questions in neurolinguistics concerns the brain regions that integrate information beyond the lexical level, and the size of their window of integration. To address these questions we introduce a new approach named masked-attention generation. It uses GPT-2 transformers to generate word embeddings that capture a fixed amount of contextual information. We then tested whether these embeddings could predict fMRI brain activity in humans listening to naturalistic text. The results showed that most of the cortex within the language network is sensitive to contextual information, and that the right hemisphere is more sensitive to longer contexts than the left. Masked-attention generation supports previous analyses of context-sensitivity in the brain, and complements them by quantifying the window size of context integration per voxel.
Unsafe Diffusion: On the Generation of Unsafe Images and Hateful Memes From Text-To-Image Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

State-of-the-art Text-to-Image models like Stable Diffusion and DALLE$\cdot$2 are revolutionizing how people generate visual content. At the same time, society has serious concerns about how adversaries can exploit such models to generate unsafe images. In this work, we focus on demystifying the generation of unsafe images and hateful memes from Text-to-Image models. We first construct a typology of unsafe images consisting of five categories (sexually explicit, violent, disturbing, hateful, and political). Then, we assess the proportion of unsafe images generated by four advanced Text-to-Image models using four prompt datasets. We find that these models can generate a substantial percentage of unsafe images; across four models and four prompt datasets, 14.56% of all generated images are unsafe. When comparing the four models, we find different risk levels, with Stable Diffusion being the most prone to generating unsafe content (18.92% of all generated images are unsafe). Given Stable Diffusion's tendency to generate more unsafe content, we evaluate its potential to generate hateful meme variants if exploited by an adversary to attack a specific individual or community. We employ three image editing methods, DreamBooth, Textual Inversion, and SDEdit, which are supported by Stable Diffusion. Our evaluation result shows that 24% of the generated images using DreamBooth are hateful meme variants that present the features of the original hateful meme and the target individual/community; these generated images are comparable to hateful meme variants collected from the real world. Overall, our results demonstrate that the danger of large-scale generation of unsafe images is imminent. We discuss several mitigating measures, such as curating training data, regulating prompts, and implementing safety filters, and encourage better safeguard tools to be developed to prevent unsafe generation.
Deep Transductive Transfer Learning for Automatic Target Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

One of the major obstacles in designing an automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithm, is that there are often labeled images in one domain (i.e., infrared source domain) but no annotated images in the other target domains (i.e., visible, SAR, LIDAR). Therefore, automatically annotating these images is essential to build a robust classifier in the target domain based on the labeled images of the source domain. Transductive transfer learning is an effective way to adapt a network to a new target domain by utilizing a pretrained ATR network in the source domain. We propose an unpaired transductive transfer learning framework where a CycleGAN model and a well-trained ATR classifier in the source domain are used to construct an ATR classifier in the target domain without having any labeled data in the target domain. We employ a CycleGAN model to transfer the mid-wave infrared (MWIR) images to visible (VIS) domain images (or visible to MWIR domain). To train the transductive CycleGAN, we optimize a cost function consisting of the adversarial, identity, cycle-consistency, and categorical cross-entropy loss for both the source and target classifiers. In this paper, we perform a detailed experimental analysis on the challenging DSIAC ATR dataset. The dataset consists of ten classes of vehicles at different poses and distances ranging from 1-5 kilometers on both the MWIR and VIS domains. In our experiment, we assume that the images in the VIS domain are the unlabeled target dataset. We first detect and crop the vehicles from the raw images and then project them into a common distance of 2 kilometers. Our proposed transductive CycleGAN achieves 71.56% accuracy in classifying the visible domain vehicles in the DSIAC ATR dataset.
Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Map Control of Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models show outstanding performance in generating high-quality images conditioned on textual prompts. However, they fail to semantically align the generated images with the prompts due to their limited compositional capabilities, leading to attribute leakage, entity leakage, and missing entities. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mask control strategy based on predicted object boxes to address these issues. In particular, we first train a BoxNet to predict a box for each entity that possesses the attribute specified in the prompt. Then, depending on the predicted boxes, a unique mask control is applied to the cross- and self-attention maps. Our approach produces a more semantically accurate synthesis by constraining the attention regions of each token in the prompt to the image. In addition, the proposed method is straightforward and effective and can be readily integrated into existing cross-attention-based T2I generators. We compare our approach to competing methods and demonstrate that it can faithfully convey the semantics of the original text to the generated content and achieve high availability as a ready-to-use plugin. Please refer to https://github.com/OPPOMente-Lab/attention-mask-control.
Sparse4D v2: Recurrent Temporal Fusion with Sparse Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Sparse algorithms offer great flexibility for multi-view temporal perception tasks. In this paper, we present an enhanced version of Sparse4D, in which we improve the temporal fusion module by implementing a recursive form of multi-frame feature sampling. By effectively decoupling image features and structured anchor features, Sparse4D enables a highly efficient transformation of temporal features, thereby facilitating temporal fusion solely through the frame-by-frame transmission of sparse features. The recurrent temporal fusion approach provides two main benefits. Firstly, it reduces the computational complexity of temporal fusion from $O(T)$ to $O(1)$, resulting in significant improvements in inference speed and memory usage. Secondly, it enables the fusion of long-term information, leading to more pronounced performance improvements due to temporal fusion. Our proposed approach, Sparse4Dv2, further enhances the performance of the sparse perception algorithm and achieves state-of-the-art results on the nuScenes 3D detection benchmark. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/linxuewu/Sparse4D}.
Synthesizing Permissive Winning Strategy Templates for Parity Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We present a novel method to compute \emph{permissive winning strategies} in two-player games over finite graphs with $ ω$-regular winning conditions. Given a game graph $G$ and a parity winning condition $Φ$, we compute a \emph{winning strategy template} $Ψ$ that collects an infinite number of winning strategies for objective $Φ$ in a concise data structure. We use this new representation of sets of winning strategies to tackle two problems arising from applications of two-player games in the context of cyber-physical system design -- (i) \emph{incremental synthesis}, i.e., adapting strategies to newly arriving, \emph{additional} $ω$-regular objectives $Φ'$, and (ii) \emph{fault-tolerant control}, i.e., adapting strategies to the occasional or persistent unavailability of actuators. The main features of our strategy templates -- which we utilize for solving these challenges -- are their easy computability, adaptability, and compositionality. For \emph{incremental synthesis}, we empirically show on a large set of benchmarks that our technique vastly outperforms existing approaches if the number of added specifications increases. While our method is not complete, our prototype implementation returns the full winning region in all 1400 benchmark instances, i.e., handling a large problem class efficiently in practice.
One-stop Training of Multiple Capacity Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Training models with varying capacities can be advantageous for deploying them in different scenarios. While high-capacity models offer better performance, low-capacity models require fewer computing resources for training and inference. In this work, we propose a novel one-stop training framework to jointly train high-capacity and low-capactiy models. This framework consists of two composite model architectures and a joint training algorithm called Two-Stage Joint-Training (TSJT). Unlike knowledge distillation, where multiple capacity models are trained from scratch separately, our approach integrates supervisions from different capacity models simultaneously, leading to faster and more efficient convergence. Extensive experiments on the multilingual machine translation benchmark WMT10 show that our method outperforms low-capacity baseline models and achieves comparable or better performance on high-capacity models. Notably, the analysis demonstrates that our method significantly influences the initial training process, leading to more efficient convergence and superior solutions.
QFA2SR: Query-Free Adversarial Transfer Attacks to Speaker Recognition Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Current adversarial attacks against speaker recognition systems (SRSs) require either white-box access or heavy black-box queries to the target SRS, thus still falling behind practical attacks against proprietary commercial APIs and voice-controlled devices. To fill this gap, we propose QFA2SR, an effective and imperceptible query-free black-box attack, by leveraging the transferability of adversarial voices. To improve transferability, we present three novel methods, tailored loss functions, SRS ensemble, and time-freq corrosion. The first one tailors loss functions to different attack scenarios. The latter two augment surrogate SRSs in two different ways. SRS ensemble combines diverse surrogate SRSs with new strategies, amenable to the unique scoring characteristics of SRSs. Time-freq corrosion augments surrogate SRSs by incorporating well-designed time-/frequency-domain modification functions, which simulate and approximate the decision boundary of the target SRS and distortions introduced during over-the-air attacks. QFA2SR boosts the targeted transferability by 20.9%-70.7% on four popular commercial APIs (Microsoft Azure, iFlytek, Jingdong, and TalentedSoft), significantly outperforming existing attacks in query-free setting, with negligible effect on the imperceptibility. QFA2SR is also highly effective when launched over the air against three wide-spread voice assistants (Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and TMall Genie) with 60%, 46%, and 70% targeted transferability, respectively.
Masked Path Modeling for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents are trained to navigate in real-world environments by following natural language instructions. A major challenge in VLN is the limited availability of training data, which hinders the models' ability to generalize effectively. Previous approaches have attempted to address this issue by introducing additional supervision during training, often requiring costly human-annotated data that restricts scalability. In this paper, we introduce a masked path modeling (MPM) objective, which pretrains an agent using self-collected data for downstream navigation tasks. Our proposed method involves allowing the agent to actively explore navigation environments without a specific goal and collect the paths it traverses. Subsequently, we train the agent on this collected data to reconstruct the original path given a randomly masked subpath. This way, the agent can actively accumulate a diverse and substantial amount of data while learning conditional action generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our technique, we conduct experiments on various VLN datasets and demonstrate the versatility of MPM across different levels of instruction complexity. Our results exhibit significant improvements in success rates, with enhancements of 1.32\%, 1.05\%, and 1.19\% on the val-unseen split of the Room-to-Room, Room-for-Room, and Room-across-Room datasets, respectively. Furthermore, we conduct an analysis that highlights the potential for additional improvements when the agent is allowed to explore unseen environments prior to testing.
Results of the 2023 Census of Beat Saber Users: Virtual Reality Gaming Population Insights and Factors Affecting Virtual Reality E-Sports Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The emergence of affordable standalone virtual reality (VR) devices has allowed VR technology to reach mass-market adoption in recent years, driven primarily by the popularity of VR gaming applications such as Beat Saber. However, despite being the top-grossing VR application to date and the most popular VR e-sport, the population of over 6 million Beat Saber users has not yet been widely studied. In this report, we present a large-scale comprehensive survey of Beat Saber players (N=1,006) that sheds light on several important aspects of this population, including their background, biometrics, demographics, health information, behavioral patterns, and technical device specifications. We further provide insights into the emerging field of VR e-sports by analyzing correlations between responses and an authoritative measure of in-game performance.
Inferring Attracting Basins of Power System with Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Power systems dominated by renewable energy encounter frequently large, random disturbances, and a critical challenge faced in power-system management is how to anticipate accurately whether the perturbed systems will return to the functional state after the transient or collapse. Whereas model-based studies show that the key to addressing the challenge lies in the attracting basins of the functional and dysfunctional states in the phase space, the finding of the attracting basins for realistic power systems remains a challenge, as accurate models describing the system dynamics are generally unavailable. Here we propose a new machine learning technique, namely balanced reservoir computing, to infer the attracting basins of a typical power system based on measured data. Specifically, trained by the time series of a handful of perturbation events, we demonstrate that the trained machine can predict accurately whether the system will return to the functional state in response to a large, random perturbation, thereby reconstructing the attracting basin of the functional state. The working mechanism of the new machine is analyzed, and it is revealed that the success of the new machine is attributed to the good balance between the echo and fading properties of the reservoir network; the effect of noisy signals on the prediction performance is also investigated, and a stochastic-resonance-like phenomenon is observed. Finally, we demonstrate that the new technique can be also utilized to infer the attracting basins of coexisting attractors in typical chaotic systems.
Let GPT be a Math Tutor: Teaching Math Word Problem Solvers with Customized Exercise Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present a novel approach for distilling math word problem solving capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Our approach is designed to consider the student model's weaknesses and foster a tailored learning experience by generating targeted exercises aligned with educational science principles, such as knowledge tracing and personalized learning. Concretely, we let GPT-3 be a math tutor and run two steps iteratively: 1) assessing the student model's current learning status on a GPT-generated exercise book, and 2) improving the student model by training it with tailored exercise samples generated by GPT-3. Experimental results reveal that our approach outperforms LLMs (e.g., GPT-3 and PaLM) in accuracy across three distinct benchmarks while employing significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the various components within our methodology to substantiate their efficacy.
Unsupervised Spiking Neural Network Model of Prefrontal Cortex to study Task Switching with Synaptic deficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, we build a computational model of Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) using Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) to understand how neurons adapt and respond to tasks switched under short and longer duration of stimulus changes. We also explore behavioral deficits arising out of the PFC lesions by simulating lesioned states in our Spiking architecture model. Although there are some computational models of the PFC, SNN's have not been used to model them. In this study, we use SNN's having parameters close to biologically plausible values and train the model using unsupervised Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) learning rule. Our model is based on connectionist architectures and exhibits neural phenomena like sustained activity which helps in generating short-term or working memory. We use these features to simulate lesions by deactivating synaptic pathways and record the weight adjustments of learned patterns and capture the accuracy of learning tasks in such conditions. All our experiments are trained and recorded using a real-world Fashion MNIST (FMNIST) dataset and through this work, we bridge the gap between bio-realistic models and those that perform well in pattern recognition tasks