OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dexterous Robotic Manipulation using Deep Reinforcement Learning and Knowledge Transfer for Complex Sparse Reward-based Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that won Phase 1 of the Real Robot Challenge (RRC) 2021, and then extends this method to a more difficult manipulation task. The RRC consisted of using a TriFinger robot to manipulate a cube along a specified positional trajectory, but with no requirement for the cube to have any specific orientation. We used a relatively simple reward function, a combination of goal-based sparse reward and distance reward, in conjunction with Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) to guide the learning of the DRL agent (Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)). Our approach allowed our agents to acquire dexterous robotic manipulation strategies in simulation. These strategies were then applied to the real robot and outperformed all other competition submissions, including those using more traditional robotic control techniques, in the final evaluation stage of the RRC. Here we extend this method, by modifying the task of Phase 1 of the RRC to require the robot to maintain the cube in a particular orientation, while the cube is moved along the required positional trajectory. The requirement to also orient the cube makes the agent unable to learn the task through blind exploration due to increased problem complexity. To circumvent this issue, we make novel use of a Knowledge Transfer (KT) technique that allows the strategies learned by the agent in the original task (which was agnostic to cube orientation) to be transferred to this task (where orientation matters). KT allowed the agent to learn and perform the extended task in the simulator, which improved the average positional deviation from 0.134 m to 0.02 m, and average orientation deviation from 142° to 76° during evaluation. This KT concept shows good generalisation properties and could be applied to any actor-critic learning algorithm.
Representation Power of Graph Neural Networks: Improved Expressivity via Algebraic Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Despite the remarkable success of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), the common belief is that their representation power is limited and that they are at most as expressive as the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) algorithm. In this paper, we argue the opposite and show that standard GNNs, with anonymous inputs, produce more discriminative representations than the WL algorithm. Our novel analysis employs linear algebraic tools and characterizes the representation power of GNNs with respect to the eigenvalue decomposition of the graph operators. We prove that GNNs are able to generate distinctive outputs from white uninformative inputs, for, at least, all graphs that have different eigenvalues. We also show that simple convolutional architectures with white inputs, produce equivariant features that count the closed paths in the graph and are provably more expressive than the WL representations. Thorough experimental analysis on graph isomorphism and graph classification datasets corroborates our theoretical results and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Translating Hanja Historical Documents to Contemporary Korean and English
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The Annals of Joseon Dynasty (AJD) contain the daily records of the Kings of Joseon, the 500-year kingdom preceding the modern nation of Korea. The Annals were originally written in an archaic Korean writing system, `Hanja', and were translated into Korean from 1968 to 1993. The resulting translation was however too literal and contained many archaic Korean words; thus, a new expert translation effort began in 2012. Since then, the records of only one king have been completed in a decade. In parallel, expert translators are working on English translation, also at a slow pace and produced only one king's records in English so far. Thus, we propose H2KE, a neural machine translation model, that translates historical documents in Hanja to more easily understandable Korean and to English. Built on top of multilingual neural machine translation, H2KE learns to translate a historical document written in Hanja, from both a full dataset of outdated Korean translation and a small dataset of more recently translated contemporary Korean and English. We compare our method against two baselines: a recent model that simultaneously learns to restore and translate Hanja historical document and a Transformer based model trained only on newly translated corpora. The experiments reveal that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of BLEU scores for both contemporary Korean and English translations. We further conduct extensive human evaluation which shows that our translation is preferred over the original expert translations by both experts and non-expert Korean speakers.
What's Behind the Mask: Understanding Masked Graph Modeling for Graph Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The last years have witnessed the emergence of a promising self-supervised learning strategy, referred to as masked autoencoding. However, there is a lack of theoretical understanding of how masking matters on graph autoencoders (GAEs). In this work, we present masked graph autoencoder (MaskGAE), a self-supervised learning framework for graph-structured data. Different from standard GAEs, MaskGAE adopts masked graph modeling (MGM) as a principled pretext task - masking a portion of edges and attempting to reconstruct the missing part with partially visible, unmasked graph structure. To understand whether MGM can help GAEs learn better representations, we provide both theoretical and empirical evidence to comprehensively justify the benefits of this pretext task. Theoretically, we establish close connections between GAEs and contrastive learning, showing that MGM significantly improves the self-supervised learning scheme of GAEs. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of graph benchmarks, demonstrating the superiority of MaskGAE over several state-of-the-arts on both link prediction and node classification tasks.
Random Coordinate Descent for Resource Allocation in Open Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a method for analyzing the distributed random coordinate descent algorithm for solving separable resource allocation problems in the context of an open multiagent system, where agents can be replaced during the process. In particular, we characterize the evolution of the distance to the minimizer in expectation by following a time-varying optimization approach which builds on two components. First, we establish the linear convergence of the algorithm in closed systems, in terms of the estimate towards the minimizer, for general graphs and appropriate step-size. Second, we estimate the change of the optimal solution after a replacement, in order to evaluate its effect on the distance between the current estimate and the minimizer. From these two elements, we derive stability conditions in open systems and establish the linear convergence of the algorithm towards a steady-state expected error. Our results enable to characterize the trade-off between speed of convergence and robustness to agent replacements, under the assumptions that local functions are smooth, strongly convex, and have their minimizers located in a given ball. The approach proposed in this paper can moreover be extended to other algorithms guaranteeing linear convergence in closed system.
FLEX: Feature-Logic Embedding Framework for CompleX Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Current best performing models for knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) introduce geometry objects or probabilistic distributions to embed entities and first-order logical (FOL) queries into low-dimensional vector spaces. They can be summarized as a center-size framework (point/box/cone, Beta/Gaussian distribution, etc.). However, they have limited logical reasoning ability. And it is difficult to generalize to various features, because the center and size are one-to-one constrained, unable to have multiple centers or sizes. To address these challenges, we instead propose a novel KGR framework named Feature-Logic Embedding framework, FLEX, which is the first KGR framework that can not only TRULY handle all FOL operations including conjunction, disjunction, negation and so on, but also support various feature spaces. Specifically, the logic part of feature-logic framework is based on vector logic, which naturally models all FOL operations. Experiments demonstrate that FLEX significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
Fairness in Recommender Systems: Research Landscape and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Recommender systems can strongly influence which information we see online, e.g., on social media, and thus impact our beliefs, decisions, and actions. At the same time, these systems can create substantial business value for different stakeholders. Given the growing potential impact of such AI-based systems on individuals, organizations, and society, questions of fairness have gained increased attention in recent years. However, research on fairness in recommender systems is still a developing area. In this survey, we first review the fundamental concepts and notions of fairness that were put forward in the area in the recent past. Afterward, through a review of more than 160 scholarly publications, we present an overview of how research in this field is currently operationalized, e.g., in terms of general research methodology, fairness measures, and algorithmic approaches. Overall, our analysis of recent works points to certain research gaps. In particular, we find that in many research works in computer science, very abstract problem operationalizations are prevalent and questions of the underlying normative claims and what represents a fair recommendation in the context of a given application are often not discussed in depth. These observations call for more interdisciplinary research to address fairness in recommendation in a more comprehensive and impactful manner.
Continual Barlow Twins: continual self-supervised learning for remote sensing semantic segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In the field of Earth Observation (EO), Continual Learning (CL) algorithms have been proposed to deal with large datasets by decomposing them into several subsets and processing them incrementally. The majority of these algorithms assume that data is (a) coming from a single source, and (b) fully labeled. Real-world EO datasets are instead characterized by a large heterogeneity (e.g., coming from aerial, satellite, or drone scenarios), and for the most part they are unlabeled, meaning they can be fully exploited only through the emerging Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) paradigm. For these reasons, in this paper we propose a new algorithm for merging SSL and CL for remote sensing applications, that we call Continual Barlow Twins (CBT). It combines the advantages of one of the simplest self-supervision techniques, i.e., Barlow Twins, with the Elastic Weight Consolidation method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. In addition, for the first time we evaluate SSL methods on a highly heterogeneous EO dataset, showing the effectiveness of these strategies on a novel combination of three almost non-overlapping domains datasets (airborne Potsdam dataset, satellite US3D dataset, and drone UAVid dataset), on a crucial downstream task in EO, i.e., semantic segmentation. Encouraging results show the superiority of SSL in this setting, and the effectiveness of creating an incremental effective pretrained feature extractor, based on ResNet50, without the need of relying on the complete availability of all the data, with a valuable saving of time and resources.
DOGE-Train: Discrete Optimization on GPU with End-to-end Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present a fast, scalable, data-driven approach for solving relaxations of 0-1 integer linear programs. We use a combination of graph neural networks (GNN) and the Lagrange decomposition based algorithm FastDOG (Abbas and Swoboda 2022b). We make the latter differentiable for end-to-end training and use GNNs to predict its algorithmic parameters. This allows to retain the algorithm's theoretical properties including dual feasibility and guaranteed non-decrease in the lower bound while improving it via training. We overcome suboptimal fixed points of the basic solver by additional non-parametric GNN update steps maintaining dual feasibility. For training we use an unsupervised loss. We train on smaller problems and test on larger ones showing strong generalization performance with a GNN comprising only around $10k$ parameters. Our solver achieves significantly faster performance and better dual objectives than its non-learned version, achieving close to optimal objective values of LP relaxations of very large structured prediction problems and on selected combinatorial ones. In particular, we achieve better objective values than specialized approximate solvers for specific problem classes while retaining their efficiency. Our solver has better any-time performance over a large time period compared to a commercial solver. Code available at https://github.com/LPMP/BDD
Towards a Defense Against Federated Backdoor Attacks Under Continuous Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Backdoor attacks are dangerous and difficult to prevent in federated learning (FL), where training data is sourced from untrusted clients over long periods of time. These difficulties arise because: (a) defenders in FL do not have access to raw training data, and (b) a new phenomenon we identify called backdoor leakage causes models trained continuously to eventually suffer from backdoors due to cumulative errors in defense mechanisms. We propose shadow learning, a framework for defending against backdoor attacks in the FL setting under long-range training. Shadow learning trains two models in parallel: a backbone model and a shadow model. The backbone is trained without any defense mechanism to obtain good performance on the main task. The shadow model combines filtering of malicious clients with early-stopping to control the attack success rate even as the data distribution changes. We theoretically motivate our design and show experimentally that our framework significantly improves upon existing defenses against backdoor attacks.
Comprehensive Privacy Analysis on Federated Recommender System against Attribute Inference Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, recommender systems are crucially important for the delivery of personalized services that satisfy users' preferences. With personalized recommendation services, users can enjoy a variety of recommendations such as movies, books, ads, restaurants, and more. Despite the great benefits, personalized recommendations typically require the collection of personal data for user modelling and analysis, which can make users susceptible to attribute inference attacks. Specifically, the vulnerability of existing centralized recommenders under attribute inference attacks leaves malicious attackers a backdoor to infer users' private attributes, as the systems remember information of their training data (i.e., interaction data and side information). An emerging practice is to implement recommender systems in the federated setting, which enables all user devices to collaboratively learn a shared global recommender while keeping all the training data on device. However, the privacy issues in federated recommender systems have been rarely explored. In this paper, we first design a novel attribute inference attacker to perform a comprehensive privacy analysis of the state-of-the-art federated recommender models. The experimental results show that the vulnerability of each model component against attribute inference attack is varied, highlighting the need for new defense approaches. Therefore, we propose a novel adaptive privacy-preserving approach to protect users' sensitive data in the presence of attribute inference attacks and meanwhile maximize the recommendation accuracy. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our model on both recommendation effectiveness and resistance to inference attacks.
ClaimDiff: Comparing and Contrasting Claims on Contentious Issues
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the growing importance of detecting misinformation, many studies have focused on verifying factual claims by retrieving evidence. However, canonical fact verification tasks do not apply to catching subtle differences in factually consistent claims, which might still bias the readers, especially on contentious political or economic issues. Our underlying assumption is that among the trusted sources, one's argument is not necessarily more true than the other, requiring comparison rather than verification. In this study, we propose ClaimDiff, a novel dataset that primarily focuses on comparing the nuance between claim pairs. In ClaimDiff, we provide 2,941 annotated claim pairs from 268 news articles. We observe that while humans are capable of detecting the nuances between claims, strong baselines struggle to detect them, showing over a 19% absolute gap with the humans. We hope this initial study could help readers to gain an unbiased grasp of contentious issues through machine-aided comparison.
Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a recipe on how to build a general, powerful, scalable (GPS) graph Transformer with linear complexity and state-of-the-art results on a diverse set of benchmarks. Graph Transformers (GTs) have gained popularity in the field of graph representation learning with a variety of recent publications but they lack a common foundation about what constitutes a good positional or structural encoding, and what differentiates them. In this paper, we summarize the different types of encodings with a clearer definition and categorize them as being $\textit{local}$, $\textit{global}$ or $\textit{relative}$. The prior GTs are constrained to small graphs with a few hundred nodes, here we propose the first architecture with a complexity linear in the number of nodes and edges $O(N+E)$ by decoupling the local real-edge aggregation from the fully-connected Transformer. We argue that this decoupling does not negatively affect the expressivity, with our architecture being a universal function approximator on graphs. Our GPS recipe consists of choosing 3 main ingredients: (i) positional/structural encoding, (ii) local message-passing mechanism, and (iii) global attention mechanism. We provide a modular framework $\textit{GraphGPS}$ that supports multiple types of encodings and that provides efficiency and scalability both in small and large graphs. We test our architecture on 16 benchmarks and show highly competitive results in all of them, show-casing the empirical benefits gained by the modularity and the combination of different strategies.
A Zipf's Law-based Text Generation Approach for Addressing Imbalance in Entity Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Entity extraction is critical in the intelligent advancement across diverse domains. Nevertheless, a challenge to its effectiveness arises from the data imbalance. This paper proposes a novel approach by viewing the issue through the quantitative information, recognizing that entities exhibit certain levels of commonality while others are scarce, which can be reflected in the quantifiable distribution of words. The Zipf's Law emerges as a well-suited adoption, and to transition from words to entities, words within the documents are classified as common and rare ones. Subsequently, sentences are classified into common and rare ones, and are further processed by text generation models accordingly. Rare entities within the generated sentences are then labeled using human-designed rules, serving as a supplement to the raw dataset, thereby mitigating the imbalance problem. The study presents a case of extracting entities from technical documents, and experimental results from two datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. Furthermore, the significance of Zipf's law in driving the progress of AI is discussed, broadening the reach and coverage of Informetrics. This paper presents a successful demonstration of extending Informetrics to interface with AI through Zipf's Law.
DPSNN: A Differentially Private Spiking Neural Network with Temporal Enhanced Pooling
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Privacy protection is a crucial issue in machine learning algorithms, and the current privacy protection is combined with traditional artificial neural networks based on real values. Spiking neural network (SNN), the new generation of artificial neural networks, plays a crucial role in many fields. Therefore, research on the privacy protection of SNN is urgently needed. This paper combines the differential privacy(DP) algorithm with SNN and proposes a differentially private spiking neural network (DPSNN). The SNN uses discrete spike sequences to transmit information, combined with the gradient noise introduced by DP so that SNN maintains strong privacy protection. At the same time, to make SNN maintain high performance while obtaining high privacy protection, we propose the temporal enhanced pooling (TEP) method. It fully integrates the temporal information of SNN into the spatial information transfer, which enables SNN to perform better information transfer. We conduct experiments on static and neuromorphic datasets, and the experimental results show that our algorithm still maintains high performance while providing strong privacy protection.
Stochastic Second-Order Methods Improve Best-Known Sample Complexity of SGD for Gradient-Dominated Function
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We study the performance of Stochastic Cubic Regularized Newton (SCRN) on a class of functions satisfying gradient dominance property with $1\leα\le2$ which holds in a wide range of applications in machine learning and signal processing. This condition ensures that any first-order stationary point is a global optimum. We prove that the total sample complexity of SCRN in achieving $ε$-global optimum is $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-7/(2α)+1})$ for $1\leα< 3/2$ and $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}(ε^{-2/(α)})$ for $3/2\leα\le 2$. SCRN improves the best-known sample complexity of stochastic gradient descent. Even under a weak version of gradient dominance property, which is applicable to policy-based reinforcement learning (RL), SCRN achieves the same improvement over stochastic policy gradient methods. Additionally, we show that the average sample complexity of SCRN can be reduced to ${\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-2})$ for $α=1$ using a variance reduction method with time-varying batch sizes. Experimental results in various RL settings showcase the remarkable performance of SCRN compared to first-order methods.