OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Large Language Models for Node Generation in Few-Shot Learning on Text-Attributed Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Text-attributed graphs have recently garnered significant attention due to their wide range of applications in web domains. Existing methodologies employ word embedding models for acquiring text representations as node features, which are subsequently fed into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for training. Recently, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced their powerful capabilities in information retrieval and text generation, which can greatly enhance the text attributes of graph data. Furthermore, the acquisition and labeling of extensive datasets are both costly and time-consuming endeavors. Consequently, few-shot learning has emerged as a crucial problem in the context of graph learning tasks. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose a lightweight paradigm called LLM4NG, which adopts a plug-and-play approach to empower text-attributed graphs through node generation using LLMs. Specifically, we utilize LLMs to extract semantic information from the labels and generate samples that belong to these categories as exemplars. Subsequently, we employ an edge predictor to capture the structural information inherent in the raw dataset and integrate the newly generated samples into the original graph. This approach harnesses LLMs for enhancing class-level information and seamlessly introduces labeled nodes and edges without modifying the raw dataset, thereby facilitating the node classification task in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed paradigm, particularly in low-shot scenarios. For instance, in the 1-shot setting of the ogbn-arxiv dataset, LLM4NG achieves a 76% improvement over the baseline model.
Statistical inference using machine learning and classical techniques based on accumulated local effects (ALE)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Accumulated Local Effects (ALE) is a model-agnostic approach for global explanations of the results of black-box machine learning (ML) algorithms. There are at least three challenges with conducting statistical inference based on ALE: ensuring the reliability of ALE analyses, especially in the context of small datasets; intuitively characterizing a variable's overall effect in ML; and making robust inferences from ML data analysis. In response, we introduce innovative tools and techniques for statistical inference using ALE, establishing bootstrapped confidence intervals tailored to dataset size and introducing ALE effect size measures that intuitively indicate effects on both the outcome variable scale and a normalized scale. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use these tools to draw reliable statistical inferences, reflecting the flexible patterns ALE adeptly highlights, with implementations available in the 'ale' package in R. This work propels the discourse on ALE and its applicability in ML and statistical analysis forward, offering practical solutions to prevailing challenges in the field.
Active Perception using Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We study active perception from first principles to argue that an autonomous agent performing active perception should maximize the mutual information that past observations posses about future ones. Doing so requires (a) a representation of the scene that summarizes past observations and the ability to update this representation to incorporate new observations (state estimation and mapping), (b) the ability to synthesize new observations of the scene (a generative model), and (c) the ability to select control trajectories that maximize predictive information (planning). This motivates a neural radiance field (NeRF)-like representation which captures photometric, geometric and semantic properties of the scene grounded. This representation is well-suited to synthesizing new observations from different viewpoints. And thereby, a sampling-based planner can be used to calculate the predictive information from synthetic observations along dynamically-feasible trajectories. We use active perception for exploring cluttered indoor environments and employ a notion of semantic uncertainty to check for the successful completion of an exploration task. We demonstrate these ideas via simulation in realistic 3D indoor environments.
Algorithmic Contract Design for Crowdsourced Ranking
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Ranking is fundamental to many areas, such as search engine optimization, human feedback for language models, as well as peer grading. Crowdsourcing, which is often used for these tasks, requires proper incentivization to ensure accurate inputs. In this work, we draw on the field of \emph{contract theory} from Economics to propose a novel mechanism that enables a \emph{principal} to accurately rank a set of items by incentivizing agents to provide pairwise comparisons of the items. Our mechanism implements these incentives by verifying a subset of each agent's comparisons, a task we assume to be costly. The agent is compensated (for example, monetarily or with class credit) based on the accuracy of these comparisons. Our mechanism achieves the following guarantees: (1) it only requires the principal to verify $O(\log s)$ comparisons, where $s$ is the total number of agents, and (2) it provably achieves higher total utility for the principal compared to ranking the items herself with no crowdsourcing.
LLP-Bench: A Large Scale Tabular Benchmark for Learning from Label Proportions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the task of Learning from Label Proportions (LLP), a model is trained on groups (a.k.a bags) of instances and their corresponding label proportions to predict labels for individual instances. LLP has been applied pre-dominantly on two types of datasets - image and tabular. In image LLP, bags of fixed size are created by randomly sampling instances from an underlying dataset. Bags created via this methodology are called random bags. Experimentation on Image LLP has been mostly on random bags on CIFAR-* and MNIST datasets. Despite being a very crucial task in privacy sensitive applications, tabular LLP does not yet have a open, large scale LLP benchmark. One of the unique properties of tabular LLP is the ability to create feature bags where all the instances in a bag have the same value for a given feature. It has been shown in prior research that feature bags are very common in practical, real world applications [Chen et. al '23, Saket et. al. '22]. In this paper, we address the lack of a open, large scale tabular benchmark. First we propose LLP-Bench, a suite of 70 LLP datasets (62 feature bag and 8 random bag datasets) created from the Criteo CTR prediction and the Criteo Sponsored Search Conversion Logs datasets, the former a classification and the latter a regression dataset. These LLP datasets represent diverse ways in which bags can be constructed from underlying tabular data. To the best of our knowledge, LLP-Bench is the first large scale tabular LLP benchmark with an extensive diversity in constituent datasets. Second, we propose four metrics that characterize and quantify the hardness of a LLP dataset. Using these four metrics we present deep analysis of the 62 feature bag datasets in LLP-Bench. Finally we present the performance of 9 SOTA and popular tabular LLP techniques on all the 62 datasets.
Analysis and implementation of nanotargeting on LinkedIn based on publicly available non-PII
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

The literature has shown that combining a few non-Personal Identifiable Information (non-PII) is enough to make a user unique in a dataset including millions of users. This work demonstrates that a combination of a few non-PII items can be activated to nanotarget users. We demonstrate that the combination of the location and {5} rare ({13} random) skills in a LinkedIn profile is enough to become unique in a user base of {$\sim$970M} users with a probability of 75\%. The novelty is that these attributes are publicly accessible to anyone registered on LinkedIn and can be activated through advertising campaigns. We ran an experiment configuring ad campaigns using the location and skills of three of the paper's authors, demonstrating how all the ads using $\geq13$ skills were delivered exclusively to the targeted user. We reported this vulnerability to LinkedIn, which initially ignored the problem, but fixed it as of November 2023.%This nanotargeting may expose LinkedIn users to privacy and security risks such as malvertising or manipulation.
Multi-Body Neural Scene Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The test-time optimization of scene flow - using a coordinate network as a neural prior - has gained popularity due to its simplicity, lack of dataset bias, and state-of-the-art performance. We observe, however, that although coordinate networks capture general motions by implicitly regularizing the scene flow predictions to be spatially smooth, the neural prior by itself is unable to identify the underlying multi-body rigid motions present in real-world data. To address this, we show that multi-body rigidity can be achieved without the cumbersome and brittle strategy of constraining the $SE(3)$ parameters of each rigid body as done in previous works. This is achieved by regularizing the scene flow optimization to encourage isometry in flow predictions for rigid bodies. This strategy enables multi-body rigidity in scene flow while maintaining a continuous flow field, hence allowing dense long-term scene flow integration across a sequence of point clouds. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in 3D scene flow and long-term point-wise 4D trajectory prediction. The code is available at: https://github.com/kavisha725/MBNSF.
Spectral representation of two-sided signals from $\ell_\infty$ and applications to signal processing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The paper studies spectral representation as well as predictability and recoverability problems for non-vanishing discrete time signals from $\ell_\infty$, i.e. for bounded discrete time signals, including signals that do not vanish at $\pm\infty$. The extends the notions of transfer functions, the spectrum gaps, bandlimitness, and filters, on these general type signals. Some frequency conditions of predictability and data recoverability are presented, and some recovery methods and predictors have been suggested.
Self-Pro: A Self-Prompt and Tuning Framework for Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graphs have become an important modeling tool for web applications, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in graph representation learning. However, the performance of traditional GNNs heavily relies on a large amount of supervision. Recently, ``pre-train, fine-tune'' has become the paradigm to address the issues of label dependency and poor generalization. However, the pre-training strategies vary for graphs with homophily and heterophily, and the objectives for various downstream tasks also differ. This leads to a gap between pretexts and downstream tasks, resulting in ``negative transfer'' and poor performance. Inspired by prompt learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP), many studies turn to bridge the gap and fully leverage the pre-trained model. However, existing methods for graph prompting are tailored to homophily, neglecting inherent heterophily on graphs. Meanwhile, most of them rely on the randomly initialized prompts, which negatively impact on the stability. Therefore, we propose Self-Prompt, a prompting framework for graphs based on the model and data itself. We first introduce asymmetric graph contrastive learning for pretext to address heterophily and align the objectives of pretext and downstream tasks. Then we reuse the component from pre-training phase as the self adapter and introduce self-prompts based on graph itself for task adaptation. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets to demonstrate its superiority. We provide our codes at https://github.com/gongchenghua/Self-Pro.
Investigating Threats Posed by SMS Origin Spoofing to IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The short message service (SMS) is a service for exchanging texts via mobile networks that has been developed not only as a means of text communication between subscribers but also as a means to remotely manage Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, the originating number of an SMS can be spoofed. If IoT devices authenticate administrators based on the originating number of an SMS, the authentication is bypassed via SMS origin spoofing. Consequently, IoT devices are at risk of accepting commands from attackers and performing unauthorized actions. Accordingly, in this study, the specifications of major cellular IoT gateways were evaluated by focusing on remote management via SMS, and the authentication bypass hypothesis was verified. The results showed that 25 of the 32 targeted products supported SMS-based remote management, and 20 implemented authentication based on the originating number of the SMS. Furthermore, by spoofing the originating number of the SMS, one product was demonstrated to be remotely exploitable through authentication bypassing. Thus, this study revealed the threats posed by SMS origin spoofing to IoT devices and proved that SMS origin spoofing not only threatens text communication between people but also puts machine communication at risk.
Enhancing Signed Graph Neural Networks through Curriculum-Based Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Signed graphs are powerful models for representing complex relations with both positive and negative connections. Recently, Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) have emerged as potent tools for analyzing such graphs. To our knowledge, no prior research has been conducted on devising a training plan specifically for SGNNs. The prevailing training approach feeds samples (edges) to models in a random order, resulting in equal contributions from each sample during the training process, but fails to account for varying learning difficulties based on the graph's structure. We contend that SGNNs can benefit from a curriculum that progresses from easy to difficult, similar to human learning. The main challenge is evaluating the difficulty of edges in a signed graph. We address this by theoretically analyzing the difficulty of SGNNs in learning adequate representations for edges in unbalanced cycles and propose a lightweight difficulty measurer. This forms the basis for our innovative Curriculum representation learning framework for Signed Graphs, referred to as CSG. The process involves using the measurer to assign difficulty scores to training samples, adjusting their order using a scheduler and training the SGNN model accordingly. We empirically our approach on six real-world signed graph datasets. Our method demonstrates remarkable results, enhancing the accuracy of popular SGNN models by up to 23.7% and showing a reduction of 8.4% in standard deviation, enhancing model stability.
Document-Level In-Context Few-Shot Relation Extraction via Pre-Trained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Document-level relation extraction aims at inferring structured human knowledge from textual documents. State-of-the-art methods for this task use pre-trained language models (LMs) via fine-tuning, yet fine-tuning is computationally expensive and cannot adapt to new relation types or new LMs. As a remedy, we leverage the generalization capabilities of pre-trained LMs and present a novel framework for document-level in-context few-shot relation extraction. Our framework has three strengths: it eliminates the need (1) for named entity recognition and (2) for human annotations of documents, and (3) it can be updated to new LMs without re-training. We evaluate our framework using DocRED, the largest publicly available dataset for document-level relation extraction, and demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. We further show that our framework actually performs much better than the original labels from the development set of DocRED. Finally, we conduct an extensive benchmark demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework, achieving state-of-the-art results across six relation extraction datasets and outperforming more than 30 baseline methods. Unlike our framework, the baseline methods have large computational overhead (e.g., from fine-tuning). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to reformulate the document-level relation extraction task as a tailored in-context few-shot learning paradigm.
A Robust Deep Learning System for Motor Bearing Fault Detection: Leveraging Multiple Learning Strategies and a Novel Double Loss Function
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Motor bearing fault detection (MBFD) is critical for maintaining the reliability and operational efficiency of industrial machinery. Early detection of bearing faults can prevent system failures, reduce operational downtime, and lower maintenance costs. In this paper, we propose a robust deep learning-based system for MBFD that incorporates multiple training strategies, including supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised learning. To enhance the detection performance, we introduce a novel double loss function. Our approach is evaluated using benchmark datasets from the American Society for Mechanical Failure Prevention Technology (MFPT), Case Western Reserve University Bearing Center (CWRU), and Paderborn University's Condition Monitoring of Bearing Damage in Electromechanical Drive Systems (PU). Results demonstrate that deep learning models outperform traditional machine learning techniques, with our novel system achieving superior accuracy across all datasets. These findings highlight the potential of our approach for practical MBFD applications.
On the Distributed Evaluation of Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The evaluation of deep generative models has been extensively studied in the centralized setting, where the reference data are drawn from a single probability distribution. On the other hand, several applications of generative models concern distributed settings, e.g. the federated learning setting, where the reference data for conducting evaluation are provided by several clients in a network. In this paper, we study the evaluation of generative models in such distributed contexts with potentially heterogeneous data distributions across clients. We focus on the widely-used distance-based evaluation metrics, Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and Kernel Inception Distance (KID). In the case of KID metric, we prove that scoring a group of generative models using the clients' averaged KID score will result in the same ranking as that of a centralized KID evaluation over a collective reference set containing all the clients' data. In contrast, we show the same result does not apply to the FID-based evaluation. We provide examples in which two generative models are assigned the same FID score by each client in a distributed setting, while the centralized FID scores of the two models are significantly different. We perform several numerical experiments on standard image datasets and generative models to support our theoretical results on the distributed evaluation of generative models using FID and KID scores.
EchoScan: Scanning Complex Room Geometries via Acoustic Echoes
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate estimation of indoor space geometries is vital for constructing precise digital twins, whose broad industrial applications include navigation in unfamiliar environments and efficient evacuation planning, particularly in low-light conditions. This study introduces EchoScan, a deep neural network model that utilizes acoustic echoes to perform room geometry inference. Conventional sound-based techniques rely on estimating geometry-related room parameters such as wall position and room size, thereby limiting the diversity of inferable room geometries. Contrarily, EchoScan overcomes this limitation by directly inferring room floorplan maps and height maps, thereby enabling it to handle rooms with complex shapes, including curved walls. The segmentation task for predicting floorplan and height maps enables the model to leverage both low- and high-order reflections. The use of high-order reflections further allows EchoScan to infer complex room shapes when some walls of the room are unobservable from the position of an audio device. Herein, EchoScan was trained and evaluated using RIRs synthesized from complex environments, including the Manhattan and Atlanta layouts, employing a practical audio device configuration compatible with commercial, off-the-shelf devices.
ShapeGraFormer: GraFormer-Based Network for Hand-Object Reconstruction from a Single Depth Map
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

3D reconstruction of hand-object manipulations is important for emulating human actions. Most methods dealing with challenging object manipulation scenarios, focus on hands reconstruction in isolation, ignoring physical and kinematic constraints due to object contact. Some approaches produce more realistic results by jointly reconstructing 3D hand-object interactions. However, they focus on coarse pose estimation or rely upon known hand and object shapes. We propose the first approach for realistic 3D hand-object shape and pose reconstruction from a single depth map. Unlike previous work, our voxel-based reconstruction network regresses the vertex coordinates of a hand and an object and reconstructs more realistic interaction. Our pipeline additionally predicts voxelized hand-object shapes, having a one-to-one mapping to the input voxelized depth. Thereafter, we exploit the graph nature of the hand and object shapes, by utilizing the recent GraFormer network with positional embedding to reconstruct shapes from template meshes. In addition, we show the impact of adding another GraFormer component that refines the reconstructed shapes based on the hand-object interactions and its ability to reconstruct more accurate object shapes. We perform an extensive evaluation on the HO-3D and DexYCB datasets and show that our method outperforms existing approaches in hand reconstruction and produces plausible reconstructions for the objects
From Dissonance to Insights: Dissecting Disagreements in Rationale Construction for Case Outcome Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In legal NLP, Case Outcome Classification (COC) must not only be accurate but also trustworthy and explainable. Existing work in explainable COC has been limited to annotations by a single expert. However, it is well-known that lawyers may disagree in their assessment of case facts. We hence collect a novel dataset RAVE: Rationale Variation in ECHR1, which is obtained from two experts in the domain of international human rights law, for whom we observe weak agreement. We study their disagreements and build a two-level task-independent taxonomy, supplemented with COC-specific subcategories. To our knowledge, this is the first work in the legal NLP that focuses on human label variation. We quantitatively assess different taxonomy categories and find that disagreements mainly stem from underspecification of the legal context, which poses challenges given the typically limited granularity and noise in COC metadata. We further assess the explainablility of SOTA COC models on RAVE and observe limited agreement between models and experts. Overall, our case study reveals hitherto underappreciated complexities in creating benchmark datasets in legal NLP that revolve around identifying aspects of a case's facts supposedly relevant to its outcome.