OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Prototype Analysis in Hopfield Networks with Hebbian Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

We discuss prototype formation in the Hopfield network. Typically, Hebbian learning with highly correlated states leads to degraded memory performance. We show this type of learning can lead to prototype formation, where unlearned states emerge as representatives of large correlated subsets of states, alleviating capacity woes. This process has similarities to prototype learning in human cognition. We provide a substantial literature review of prototype learning in associative memories, covering contributions from psychology, statistical physics, and computer science. We analyze prototype formation from a theoretical perspective and derive a stability condition for these states based on the number of examples of the prototype presented for learning, the noise in those examples, and the number of non-example states presented. The stability condition is used to construct a probability of stability for a prototype state as the factors of stability change. We also note similarities to traditional network analysis, allowing us to find a prototype capacity. We corroborate these expectations of prototype formation with experiments using a simple Hopfield network with standard Hebbian learning. We extend our experiments to a Hopfield network trained on data with multiple prototypes and find the network is capable of stabilizing multiple prototypes concurrently. We measure the basins of attraction of the multiple prototype states, finding attractor strength grows with the number of examples and the agreement of examples. We link the stability and dominance of prototype states to the energy profile of these states, particularly when comparing the profile shape to target states or other spurious states.
ML Updates for OpenStreetMap: Analysis of Research Gaps and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date maps is important in any dynamic urban landscape, supporting various aspects of modern society, such as urban planning, navigation, and emergency response. However, traditional (i.e. largely manual) map production and crowdsourced mapping methods still struggle to keep pace with rapid changes in the built environment. Such manual mapping workflows are time-consuming and prone to human errors, leading to early obsolescence and/or the need for extensive auditing. The current map updating process in OpenStreetMap provides an example of this limitation, relying on numerous manual steps in its online map updating workflow. To address this, there is a need to explore automating the entire end-to-end map up-dating process. Tech giants such as Google and Microsoft have already started investigating Machine Learning (ML) techniques to tackle this contemporary mapping problem. This paper offers an analysis of these ML approaches, focusing on their application to updating Open-StreetMap in particular. By analysing the current state-of-the-art in this field, this study identi-fies some key research gaps and introduces DeepMapper as a practical solution for advancing the automatic online map updating process in the future.
Towards CPU Performance Prediction: New Challenge Benchmark Dataset and Novel Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2024
Year: 2024

The server central processing unit (CPU) market continues to exhibit robust demand due to the rising global need for computing power. Against this backdrop, CPU benchmark performance prediction is crucial for architecture designers. It offers profound insights for optimizing system designs and significantly reduces the time required for benchmark testing. However, the current research suffers from a lack of a unified, standard and a comprehensive dataset covering various CPU benchmark suites on real machines. Additionally, the traditional simulation-based methods suffer from slow simulation speeds. Furthermore, traditional machine learning approaches not only struggle to process complex features across various hardware configurations but also fall short in achieving sufficient accuracy. To bridge these gaps, we firstly perform a streamlined data preprocessing and reorganize our in-house datasets gathered from a variety CPU models of 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors on various benchmark suites. We then propose Nova CPU Performance Predictor (NCPP), a deep learning model with attention mechanisms, specifically designed to predict CPU performance across various benchmarks. Our model effectively captures key hardware configurations affecting performance in across various benchmarks. Moreover, we compare eight mainstream machine learning methods, demonstrating the significant advantages of our model in terms of accuracy and explainability over existing approaches. Finally, our results provide new perspectives and practical strategies for hardware designers. To foster further research and collaboration, we \textit{\textbf{open-source}} the model \url{https://github.com/xiaoman-liu/NCPP}
Visual Robustness Benchmark for Visual Question Answering (VQA)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Can Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems perform just as well when deployed in the real world? Or are they susceptible to realistic corruption effects e.g. image blur, which can be detrimental in sensitive applications, such as medical VQA? While linguistic or textual robustness has been thoroughly explored in the VQA literature, there has yet to be any significant work on the visual robustness of VQA models. We propose the first large-scale benchmark comprising 213,000 augmented images, challenging the visual robustness of multiple VQA models and assessing the strength of realistic visual corruptions. Additionally, we have designed several robustness evaluation metrics that can be aggregated into a unified metric and tailored to fit a variety of use cases. Our experiments reveal several insights into the relationships between model size, performance, and robustness with the visual corruptions. Our benchmark highlights the need for a balanced approach in model development that considers model performance without compromising the robustness.
NEBULA: Neural Empirical Bayes Under Latent Representations for Efficient and Controllable Design of Molecular Libraries
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present NEBULA, the first latent 3D generative model for scalable generation of large molecular libraries around a seed compound of interest. Such libraries are crucial for scientific discovery, but it remains challenging to generate large numbers of high quality samples efficiently. 3D-voxel-based methods have recently shown great promise for generating high quality samples de novo from random noise (Pinheiro et al., 2023). However, sampling in 3D-voxel space is computationally expensive and use in library generation is prohibitively slow. Here, we instead perform neural empirical Bayes sampling (Saremi & Hyvarinen, 2019) in the learned latent space of a vector-quantized variational autoencoder. NEBULA generates large molecular libraries nearly an order of magnitude faster than existing methods without sacrificing sample quality. Moreover, NEBULA generalizes better to unseen drug-like molecules, as demonstrated on two public datasets and multiple recently released drugs. We expect the approach herein to be highly enabling for machine learning-based drug discovery. The code is available at https://github.com/prescient-design/nebula
DACB-Net: Dual Attention Guided Compact Bilinear Convolution Neural Network for Skin Disease Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the three-branch Dual Attention-Guided Compact Bilinear CNN (DACB-Net) by focusing on learning from disease-specific regions to enhance accuracy and alignment. A global branch compensates for lost discriminative features, generating Attention Heat Maps (AHM) for relevant cropped regions. Finally, the last pooling layers of global and local branches are concatenated for fine-tuning, which offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges posed by skin disease diagnosis. Although current CNNs employ Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for discriminative feature learning, using distinct pairs of local image patches to compute gradients and incorporating a modulation factor in the loss for focusing on complex data during training. However, this approach can lead to dataset imbalance, weight adjustments, and vulnerability to overfitting. The proposed solution combines two supervision branches and a novel loss function to address these issues, enhancing performance and interpretability. The framework integrates data augmentation, transfer learning, and fine-tuning to tackle data imbalance to improve classification performance, and reduce computational costs. Simulations on the HAM10000 and ISIC2019 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showcasing a 2.59% increase in accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.
Fisher-aware Quantization for DETR Detectors with Critical-category Objectives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The impact of quantization on the overall performance of deep learning models is a well-studied problem. However, understanding and mitigating its effects on a more fine-grained level is still lacking, especially for harder tasks such as object detection with both classification and regression objectives. This work defines the performance for a subset of task-critical categories, i.e. the critical-category performance, as a crucial yet largely overlooked fine-grained objective for detection tasks. We analyze the impact of quantization at the category-level granularity, and propose methods to improve performance for the critical categories. Specifically, we find that certain critical categories have a higher sensitivity to quantization, and are prone to overfitting after quantization-aware training (QAT). To explain this, we provide theoretical and empirical links between their performance gaps and the corresponding loss landscapes with the Fisher information framework. Using this evidence, we apply a Fisher-aware mixed-precision quantization scheme, and a Fisher-trace regularization for the QAT on the critical-category loss landscape. The proposed methods improve critical-category metrics of the quantized transformer-based DETR detectors. They are even more significant in case of larger models and higher number of classes where the overfitting becomes more severe. For example, our methods lead to 10.4% and 14.5% mAP gains for, correspondingly, 4-bit DETR-R50 and Deformable DETR on the most impacted critical classes in the COCO Panoptic dataset.
Learning Action and Reasoning-Centric Image Editing from Videos and Simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

An image editing model should be able to perform diverse edits, ranging from object replacement, changing attributes or style, to performing actions or movement, which require many forms of reasoning. Current general instruction-guided editing models have significant shortcomings with action and reasoning-centric edits. Object, attribute or stylistic changes can be learned from visually static datasets. On the other hand, high-quality data for action and reasoning-centric edits is scarce and has to come from entirely different sources that cover e.g. physical dynamics, temporality and spatial reasoning. To this end, we meticulously curate the AURORA Dataset (Action-Reasoning-Object-Attribute), a collection of high-quality training data, human-annotated and curated from videos and simulation engines. We focus on a key aspect of quality training data: triplets (source image, prompt, target image) contain a single meaningful visual change described by the prompt, i.e., truly minimal changes between source and target images. To demonstrate the value of our dataset, we evaluate an AURORA-finetuned model on a new expert-curated benchmark (AURORA-Bench) covering 8 diverse editing tasks. Our model significantly outperforms previous editing models as judged by human raters. For automatic evaluations, we find important flaws in previous metrics and caution their use for semantically hard editing tasks. Instead, we propose a new automatic metric that focuses on discriminative understanding. We hope that our efforts : (1) curating a quality training dataset and an evaluation benchmark, (2) developing critical evaluations, and (3) releasing a state-of-the-art model, will fuel further progress on general image editing.
How high-status women promote repeated collaboration among women in male-dominated contexts
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Male-dominated contexts pose a dilemma: they increase the benefits of repeated collaboration among women, yet at the same time, make such collaborations less likely. This paper seeks to understand the conditions that foster repeated collaboration among women versus men in male-dominated settings by examining the critical role of status hierarchies. Using collaboration data on 8,232,769 computer science research teams, we found that when a woman holds the top-ranking position in a steep status hierarchy, other women on that team are more likely than men to collaborate again, as compared to when the hierarchy is flat, and compared to when men occupy the top-ranking position. In steep hierarchies, top-ranking women but not top-ranking men foster conditions in which junior women are more likely to collaborate again than junior men of similar status levels. Our research suggests that whereas status hierarchies are especially detrimental to repeated collaboration among underrepresented individuals, top-ranking women in steep status hierarchies mitigate these negative impacts between women in male-dominated settings.
Domain-Aware Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Foundation models (FMs) have revolutionized computer vision, enabling effective learning across different domains. However, their performance under domain shift is yet underexplored. This paper investigates the zero-shot domain adaptation potential of FMs by comparing different backbone architectures and introducing novel domain-aware components that leverage domain related textual embeddings. We propose domain adaptive normalization, termed as Domino, which explicitly leverages domain embeddings during fine-tuning, thus making the model domain aware. Ultimately, Domino enables more robust computer vision models that can adapt effectively to various unseen domains.
A 95.5Gb/s 29.6ns worst-case latency ORBGRAND decoder for 6G xURLLC
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) in both 5G and 6G demand high throughput and short latency with low error rates. Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) and Ordered Reliability Bits GRAND (ORBGRAND) are powerful universal decoding algorithms that work well with short, high-rate codes. As short forward error correcting codes can help limiting latency, and code unification in 6G calls for flexible, possibly code-agnostic decoders, GRAND and ORBGRAND are well suited to tackle 6G URLLC. This work proposes a ultra-high, constant speed ORBGRAND decoder architecture with very low worst-case and average latency. Compared to a baseline architecture, through out-of-order output, aggressive clock gating, and selective programmability, the decoder reduces area, power, and average latency by 15.5%, 19.4%, and 56%, respectively. In 3nm FinFET technology, it achieves a constant throughput of 95.49Gb/s, with 29.59ns worst-case latency and 13.02ns on average.
AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flows
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Synthetic data is becoming increasingly important for accelerating the development of language models, both large and small. Despite several successful use cases, researchers also raised concerns around model collapse and drawbacks of imitating other models. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that synthetic data varies in quality and diversity. Effective use of synthetic data usually requires significant human effort in curating the data. We focus on using synthetic data for post-training, specifically creating data by powerful models to teach a new skill or behavior to another model, we refer to this setting as Generative Teaching. We introduce AgentInstruct, an extensible agentic framework for automatically creating large amounts of diverse and high-quality synthetic data. AgentInstruct can create both the prompts and responses, using only raw data sources like text documents and code files as seeds. We demonstrate the utility of AgentInstruct by creating a post training dataset of 25M pairs to teach language models different skills, such as text editing, creative writing, tool usage, coding, reading comprehension, etc. The dataset can be used for instruction tuning of any base model. We post-train Mistral-7b with the data. When comparing the resulting model Orca-3 to Mistral-7b-Instruct (which uses the same base model), we observe significant improvements across many benchmarks. For example, 40% improvement on AGIEval, 19% improvement on MMLU, 54% improvement on GSM8K, 38% improvement on BBH and 45% improvement on AlpacaEval. Additionally, it consistently outperforms other models such as LLAMA-8B-instruct and GPT-3.5-turbo.
Asymmetric Mempool DoS Security: Formal Definitions and Provable Secure Designs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The mempool plays a crucial role in blockchain systems as a buffer zone for pending transactions before they are executed and included in a block. However, existing works primarily focus on mitigating defenses against already identified real-world attacks. This paper introduces secure blockchain-mempool designs capable of defending against any form of asymmetric eviction DoS attacks. We establish formal security definitions for mempools under the eviction-based attack vector. Our proposed secure transaction admission algorithm, named \textsc{saferAd-CP}, ensures eviction-security by providing a provable lower bound on the cost of executing eviction DoS attacks. Through evaluation with real transaction trace replays, \textsc{saferAd-CP} demonstrates negligible latency and significantly high lower bounds against any eviction attack, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in securing blockchain mempools.
Decision-Focused Evaluation of Worst-Case Distribution Shift
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Distribution shift is a key challenge for predictive models in practice, creating the need to identify potentially harmful shifts in advance of deployment. Existing work typically defines these worst-case shifts as ones that most degrade the individual-level accuracy of the model. However, when models are used to make a downstream population-level decision like the allocation of a scarce resource, individual-level accuracy may be a poor proxy for performance on the task at hand. We introduce a novel framework that employs a hierarchical model structure to identify worst-case distribution shifts in predictive resource allocation settings by capturing shifts both within and across instances of the decision problem. This task is more difficult than in standard distribution shift settings due to combinatorial interactions, where decisions depend on the joint presence of individuals in the allocation task. We show that the problem can be reformulated as a submodular optimization problem, enabling efficient approximations of worst-case loss. Applying our framework to real data, we find empirical evidence that worst-case shifts identified by one metric often significantly diverge from worst-case distributions identified by other metrics.
FDS: Feedback-guided Domain Synthesis with Multi-Source Conditional Diffusion Models for Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Domain Generalization techniques aim to enhance model robustness by simulating novel data distributions during training, typically through various augmentation or stylization strategies. However, these methods frequently suffer from limited control over the diversity of generated images and lack assurance that these images span distinct distributions. To address these challenges, we propose FDS, Feedback-guided Domain Synthesis, a novel strategy that employs diffusion models to synthesize novel, pseudo-domains by training a single model on all source domains and performing domain mixing based on learned features. By incorporating images that pose classification challenges to models trained on original samples, alongside the original dataset, we ensure the generation of a training set that spans a broad distribution spectrum. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that this methodology sets new benchmarks in domain generalization performance across a range of challenging datasets, effectively managing diverse types of domain shifts. The code can be found at: \url{https://github.com/Mehrdad-Noori/FDS.git}.
Self Adaptive Threshold Pseudo-labeling and Unreliable Sample Contrastive Loss for Semi-supervised Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semi-supervised learning is attracting blooming attention, due to its success in combining unlabeled data. However, pseudo-labeling-based semi-supervised approaches suffer from two problems in image classification: (1) Existing methods might fail to adopt suitable thresholds since they either use a pre-defined/fixed threshold or an ad-hoc threshold adjusting scheme, resulting in inferior performance and slow convergence. (2) Discarding unlabeled data with confidence below the thresholds results in the loss of discriminating information. To solve these issues, we develop an effective method to make sufficient use of unlabeled data. Specifically, we design a self adaptive threshold pseudo-labeling strategy, which thresholds for each class can be dynamically adjusted to increase the number of reliable samples. Meanwhile, in order to effectively utilise unlabeled data with confidence below the thresholds, we propose an unreliable sample contrastive loss to mine the discriminative information in low-confidence samples by learning the similarities and differences between sample features. We evaluate our method on several classification benchmarks under partially labeled settings and demonstrate its superiority over the other approaches.
Chain-of-Thought Augmentation with Logit Contrast for Enhanced Reasoning in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Rapidly increasing model scales coupled with steering methods such as chain-of-thought prompting have led to drastic improvements in language model reasoning. At the same time, models struggle with compositional generalization and are far from human performance on many reasoning-based benchmarks. Leveraging the success of chain-of-thought prompting, and also taking inspiration from context-aware decoding (CAD), we explore input-based contrasting methods to further encourage the type of reasoning induced by chain-of-thought prompting. While work remains to stabilize these results across datasets and models, the improvements we find warrant further investigation into input-based steering methods for context-aware reasoning.