OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Grounded Visual Spatial Reasoning in Multi-Modal Vision Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large vision-and-language models (VLMs) trained to match images with text on large-scale datasets of image-text pairs have shown impressive generalization ability on several vision and language tasks. Several recent works, however, showed that these models lack fine-grained understanding, such as the ability to count and recognize verbs, attributes, or relationships. The focus of this work is to study the understanding of spatial relations. This has been tackled previously using image-text matching (e.g., Visual Spatial Reasoning benchmark) or visual question answering (e.g., GQA or VQAv2), both showing poor performance and a large gap compared to human performance. In this work, we show qualitatively (using explainability tools) and quantitatively (using object detectors) that the poor object localization "grounding" ability of the models is a contributing factor to the poor image-text matching performance. We propose an alternative fine-grained, compositional approach for recognizing and ranking spatial clauses that combines the evidence from grounding noun phrases corresponding to objects and their locations to compute the final rank of the spatial clause. We demonstrate the approach on representative VLMs (such as LXMERT, GPV, and MDETR) and compare and highlight their abilities to reason about spatial relationships.
CUPID: Leveraging ChatGPT for More Accurate Duplicate Bug Report Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Duplicate bug report detection (DBRD) is a long-standing challenge in both academia and industry. Over the past decades, researchers have proposed various approaches to detect duplicate bug reports more accurately. With the recent advancement of deep learning, researchers have also proposed several deep learning-based approaches to address the DBRD task. In the bug repositories with many bug reports, deep learning-based approaches have shown promising performance. However, in the bug repositories with a smaller number of bug reports, i.e., around 10k, the existing deep learning approaches show worse performance than the traditional approaches. Traditional approaches have limitations, too, e.g., they are usually based on the bag-of-words model, which cannot capture the semantics of bug reports. To address these aforementioned challenges, we seek to leverage a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) to improve the performance of the traditional DBRD approach. In this paper, we propose an approach called CUPID, which combines the bestperforming traditional DBRD approach (i.e., REP) with the state-of-the-art LLM (i.e., ChatGPT). We conducted an evaluation by comparing CUPID with three existing approaches on three datasets. The experimental results show that CUPID achieves state-of-theart results, reaching Recall Rate@10 scores ranging from 0.602 to 0.654 across all the datasets analyzed. In particular, CUPID improves over the prior state-ofthe-art approach by 5% - 8% in terms of Recall Rate@10 in the datasets. CUPID also surpassed the state-of-the-art deep learning-based DBRD approach by up to 82%.
PACE: Improving Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing for Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable potential across various tasks by conditioning on prompts. However, the quality of different human-written prompts leads to substantial discrepancies in LLMs' performance, and improving prompts usually necessitates considerable human effort and expertise. To this end, this paper proposes Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing (PACE) for LLMs to enable automatic prompt editing. Drawing inspiration from the actor-critic algorithm in reinforcement learning, PACE leverages LLMs as the dual roles of actors and critics, conceptualizing prompt as a type of policy. PACE refines prompt, taking into account the feedback from both actors performing prompt and critics criticizing response. This process helps LLMs better align prompt to a specific task, thanks to real responses and thinking from LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on 24 instruction induction tasks and 21 big-bench tasks. Experimental results indicate that PACE elevates the relative performance of medium/low-quality human-written prompts by up to 98\%, which has comparable performance to high-quality human-written prompts. Moreover, PACE also exhibits notable efficacy for prompt generation.
ChatEDA: A Large Language Model Powered Autonomous Agent for EDA
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The integration of a complex set of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to enhance interoperability is a critical concern for circuit designers. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased their exceptional capabilities in natural language processing and comprehension, offering a novel approach to interfacing with EDA tools. This research paper introduces ChatEDA, an autonomous agent for EDA empowered by an LLM, AutoMage, complemented by EDA tools serving as executors. ChatEDA streamlines the design flow from the Register-Transfer Level (RTL) to the Graphic Data System Version II (GDSII) by effectively managing task decomposition, script generation, and task execution. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations, ChatEDA has demonstrated its proficiency in handling diverse requirements, and our fine-tuned AutoMage model has exhibited superior performance compared to GPT-4 and other similar LLMs.
Systematic Offensive Stereotyping (SOS) Bias in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose a new metric to measure the SOS bias in language models (LMs). Then, we validate the SOS bias and investigate the effectiveness of removing it. Finally, we investigate the impact of the SOS bias in LMs on their performance and fairness on hate speech detection. Our results suggest that all the inspected LMs are SOS biased. And that the SOS bias is reflective of the online hate experienced by marginalized identities. The results indicate that using debias methods from the literature worsens the SOS bias in LMs for some sensitive attributes and improves it for others. Finally, Our results suggest that the SOS bias in the inspected LMs has an impact on their fairness of hate speech detection. However, there is no strong evidence that the SOS bias has an impact on the performance of hate speech detection.
Jumping through Local Minima: Quantization in the Loss Landscape of Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Quantization scale and bit-width are the most important parameters when considering how to quantize a neural network. Prior work focuses on optimizing quantization scales in a global manner through gradient methods (gradient descent \& Hessian analysis). Yet, when applying perturbations to quantization scales, we observe a very jagged, highly non-smooth test loss landscape. In fact, small perturbations in quantization scale can greatly affect accuracy, yielding a $0.5-0.8\%$ accuracy boost in 4-bit quantized vision transformers (ViTs). In this regime, gradient methods break down, since they cannot reliably reach local minima. In our work, dubbed Evol-Q, we use evolutionary search to effectively traverse the non-smooth landscape. Additionally, we propose using an infoNCE loss, which not only helps combat overfitting on the small calibration dataset ($1,000$ images) but also makes traversing such a highly non-smooth surface easier. Evol-Q improves the top-1 accuracy of a fully quantized ViT-Base by $10.30\%$, $0.78\%$, and $0.15\%$ for $3$-bit, $4$-bit, and $8$-bit weight quantization levels. Extensive experiments on a variety of CNN and ViT architectures further demonstrate its robustness in extreme quantization scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/enyac-group/evol-q
Mapping Election Polarization and Competitiveness using Election Results
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on measuring polarization using ideological-like data from electoral studies-which are limited to economically advantageous countries and are representative mostly to national scales-we argue that, in fact, voting patterns can lead to mapping effective proxies of citizen divisions on election day. This paper perspectives two complementary concepts, Election Polarization (EP) and Election Competitiveness (EC), as a means to understand voting patterns on Election Day. We present an agnostic approach that relies solely on election data and validate it using synthetic and real-world election data across 13 countries in the Eurozone, North America, Latin America, and New Zealand. Overall, we find that we can label and distinguish expectations of polarized and competitive elections in these countries, and we report that EP positively correlates with a metric of political polarization in the U.S., unlocking opportunities for studies of polarization at the regional level and for lower/middle-income countries where electoral studies are available, but surveys are limited.
Applications of Nature-Inspired Metaheuristic Algorithms for Tackling Optimization Problems Across Disciplines
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms are important components of artificial intelligence, and are increasingly used across disciplines to tackle various types of challenging optimization problems. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of such algorithms for solving a variety of challenging optimization problems in statistics using a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm called competitive swarm optimizer with mutated agents (CSO-MA). This algorithm was proposed by one of the authors and its superior performance relative to many of its competitors had been demonstrated in earlier work and again in this paper. The main goal of this paper is to show a typical nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithmi, like CSO-MA, is efficient for tackling many different types of optimization problems in statistics. Our applications are new and include finding maximum likelihood estimates of parameters in a single cell generalized trend model to study pseudotime in bioinformatics, estimating parameters in the commonly used Rasch model in education research, finding M-estimates for a Cox regression in a Markov renewal model, performing matrix completion tasks to impute missing data for a two compartment model, and selecting variables optimally in an ecology problem in China. To further demonstrate the flexibility of metaheuristics, we also find an optimal design for a car refueling experiment in the auto industry using a logistic model with multiple interacting factors. In addition, we show that metaheuristics can sometimes outperform optimization algorithms commonly used in statistics.
Label-based Graph Augmentation with Metapath for Graph Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph anomaly detection has attracted considerable attention from various domain ranging from network security to finance in recent years. Due to the fact that labeling is very costly, existing methods are predominately developed in an unsupervised manner. However, the detected anomalies may be found out uninteresting instances due to the absence of prior knowledge regarding the anomalies looking for. This issue may be solved by using few labeled anomalies as prior knowledge. In real-world scenarios, we can easily obtain few labeled anomalies. Efficiently leveraging labelled anomalies as prior knowledge is crucial for graph anomaly detection; however, this process remains challenging due to the inherently limited number of anomalies available. To address the problem, we propose a novel approach that leverages metapath to embed actual connectivity patterns between anomalous and normal nodes. To further efficiently exploit context information from metapath-based anomaly subgraph, we present a new framework, Metapath-based Graph Anomaly Detection (MGAD), incorporating GCN layers in both the dual-encoders and decoders to efficiently propagate context information between abnormal and normal nodes. Specifically, MGAD employs GNN-based graph autoencoder as its backbone network. Moreover, dual encoders capture the complex interactions and metapath-based context information between labeled and unlabeled nodes both globally and locally. Through a comprehensive set of experiments conducted on seven real-world networks, this paper demonstrates the superiority of the MGAD method compared to state-of-the-art techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/missinghwan/MGAD.
CSM-H-R: A Context Modeling Framework in Supporting Reasoning Automation for Interoperable Intelligent Systems and Privacy Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The automation of High-Level Context (HLC) reasoning across intelligent systems at scale is imperative because of the unceasing accumulation of contextual data, the trend of the fusion of data from multiple sources (e.g., sensors, intelligent systems), and the intrinsic complexity and dynamism of context-based decision-making processes. To mitigate the challenges posed by these issues, we propose a novel Hierarchical Ontology-State Modeling (HOSM) framework CSM-H-R, which programmatically combines ontologies and states at the modeling phase and runtime phase for attaining the ability to recognize meaningful HLC. It builds on the model of our prior work on the Context State Machine (CSM) engine by incorporating the H (Hierarchy) and R (Relationship and tRansition) dimensions to take care of the dynamic aspects of context. The design of the framework supports the sharing and interoperation of context among intelligent systems and the components for handling CSMs and the management of hierarchy, relationship, and transition. Case studies are developed for IntellElevator and IntellRestaurant, two intelligent applications in a smart campus setting. The prototype implementation of the framework experiments on translating the HLC reasoning into vector and matrix computing and presents the potential of using advanced probabilistic models to reach the next level of automation in integrating intelligent systems; meanwhile, privacy protection support is achieved in the application domain by anonymization through indexing and reducing information correlation. An implementation of the framework is available at https://github.com/songhui01/CSM-H-R.
Adversarial Attacks on Code Models with Discriminative Graph Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Pre-trained language models of code are now widely used in various software engineering tasks such as code generation, code completion, vulnerability detection, etc. This, in turn, poses security and reliability risks to these models. One of the important threats is \textit{adversarial attacks}, which can lead to erroneous predictions and largely affect model performance on downstream tasks. Current adversarial attacks on code models usually adopt fixed sets of program transformations, such as variable renaming and dead code insertion, leading to limited attack effectiveness. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel adversarial attack framework, GraphCodeAttack, to better evaluate the robustness of code models. Given a target code model, GraphCodeAttack automatically mines important code patterns, which can influence the model's decisions, to perturb the structure of input code to the model. To do so, GraphCodeAttack uses a set of input source codes to probe the model's outputs and identifies the \textit{discriminative} ASTs patterns that can influence the model decisions. GraphCodeAttack then selects appropriate AST patterns, concretizes the selected patterns as attacks, and inserts them as dead code into the model's input program. To effectively synthesize attacks from AST patterns, GraphCodeAttack uses a separate pre-trained code model to fill in the ASTs with concrete code snippets. We evaluate the robustness of two popular code models (e.g., CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT) against our proposed approach on three tasks: Authorship Attribution, Vulnerability Prediction, and Clone Detection. The experimental results suggest that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in attacking code models such as CARROT and ALERT.
VIO-DualProNet: Visual-Inertial Odometry with Learning Based Process Noise Covariance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is a vital technique used in robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous vehicles. It combines visual and inertial measurements to accurately estimate position and orientation. Existing VIO methods assume a fixed noise covariance for the inertial uncertainty. However, accurately determining in real-time the noise variance of the inertial sensors presents a significant challenge as the uncertainty changes throughout the operation leading to suboptimal performance and reduced accuracy. To circumvent this, we propose VIO-DualProNet, a novel approach that utilizes deep learning methods to dynamically estimate the inertial noise uncertainty in real-time. By designing and training a deep neural network to predict inertial noise uncertainty using only inertial sensor measurements, and integrating it into the VINS-Mono algorithm, we demonstrate a substantial improvement in accuracy and robustness, enhancing VIO performance and potentially benefiting other VIO-based systems for precise localization and mapping across diverse conditions.
PlatoLM: Teaching LLMs in Multi-Round Dialogue via a User Simulator
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The unparalleled performance of closed-sourced ChatGPT has sparked efforts towards its democratization, with notable strides made by leveraging real user and ChatGPT dialogues, as evidenced by Vicuna. However, due to challenges in gathering dialogues involving human participation, current endeavors like Baize and UltraChat rely on ChatGPT conducting roleplay to simulate humans based on instructions, resulting in overdependence on seeds, diminished human-likeness, limited topic diversity, and an absence of genuine multi-round conversational dynamics. To address the above issues, we propose a paradigm to simulate human behavior better and explore the benefits of incorporating more human-like questions in multi-turn conversations. Specifically, we directly target human questions extracted from genuine human-machine conversations as a learning goal and provide a novel user simulator called `Socratic'. The experimental results show our response model, `PlatoLM', achieves SoTA performance among LLaMA-based 7B models in MT-Bench. Our findings further demonstrate that our method introduces highly human-like questioning patterns and rich topic structures, which can teach the response model better than previous works in multi-round conversations.
Bayesian Online Learning for Human-assisted Target Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a human-assisted autonomy sensor fusion for dynamic target localization in a Bayesian framework. Autonomous sensor-based tracking systems can suffer from observability and target detection failure. Humans possess valuable qualitative information derived from their past knowledge and rapid situational awareness that can give them an advantage over machine perception in many scenarios. To compensate for the shortcomings of an autonomous tracking system, we propose to collect spatial sensing information from human operators who visually monitor the target and can provide target localization information in the form of free sketches encircling the area where the target is located. However, human inputs cannot be taken deterministically and trusted absolutely due to their inherent subjectivity and variability. Our focus in this paper is to construct an adaptive probabilistic model for human-provided inputs where the adaptation terms capture the level of reliability of the human inputs. The next contribution of this paper is a novel joint Bayesian learning method to fuse human and autonomous sensor inputs in a manner that the dynamic changes in human detection reliability are also captured and accounted for. Unlike deep learning frameworks, a unique aspect of this Bayesian modeling framework is its analytical closed-form update equations. This feature provides computational efficiency and allows for online learning from limited data sets. Simulations demonstrate our results, underscoring the value of human-machine collaboration in autonomous systems.
Maintaining Plasticity in Continual Learning via Regenerative Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In continual learning, plasticity refers to the ability of an agent to quickly adapt to new information. Neural networks are known to lose plasticity when processing non-stationary data streams. In this paper, we propose L2 Init, a simple approach for maintaining plasticity by incorporating in the loss function L2 regularization toward initial parameters. This is very similar to standard L2 regularization (L2), the only difference being that L2 regularizes toward the origin. L2 Init is simple to implement and requires selecting only a single hyper-parameter. The motivation for this method is the same as that of methods that reset neurons or parameter values. Intuitively, when recent losses are insensitive to particular parameters, these parameters should drift toward their initial values. This prepares parameters to adapt quickly to new tasks. On problems representative of different types of nonstationarity in continual supervised learning, we demonstrate that L2 Init most consistently mitigates plasticity loss compared to previously proposed approaches.
Distribution-Aware Calibration for Object Detection with Noisy Bounding Boxes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large-scale well-annotated datasets are of great importance for training an effective object detector. However, obtaining accurate bounding box annotations is laborious and demanding. Unfortunately, the resultant noisy bounding boxes could cause corrupt supervision signals and thus diminish detection performance. Motivated by the observation that the real ground-truth is usually situated in the aggregation region of the proposals assigned to a noisy ground-truth, we propose DIStribution-aware CalibratiOn (DISCO) to model the spatial distribution of proposals for calibrating supervision signals. In DISCO, spatial distribution modeling is performed to statistically extract the potential locations of objects. Based on the modeled distribution, three distribution-aware techniques, i.e., distribution-aware proposal augmentation (DA-Aug), distribution-aware box refinement (DA-Ref), and distribution-aware confidence estimation (DA-Est), are developed to improve classification, localization, and interpretability, respectively. Extensive experiments on large-scale noisy image datasets (i.e., Pascal VOC and MS-COCO) demonstrate that DISCO can achieve state-of-the-art detection performance, especially at high noise levels. Code is available at https://github.com/Correr-Zhou/DISCO.