OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Survey of Knowledge-Intensive NLP with Pre-Trained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

With the increasing of model capacity brought by pre-trained language models, there emerges boosting needs for more knowledgeable natural language processing (NLP) models with advanced functionalities including providing and making flexible use of encyclopedic and commonsense knowledge. The mere pre-trained language models, however, lack the capacity of handling such knowledge-intensive NLP tasks alone. To address this challenge, large numbers of pre-trained language models augmented with external knowledge sources are proposed and in rapid development. In this paper, we aim to summarize the current progress of pre-trained language model-based knowledge-enhanced models (PLMKEs) by dissecting their three vital elements: knowledge sources, knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, and knowledge fusion methods. Finally, we present the challenges of PLMKEs based on the discussion regarding the three elements and attempt to provide NLP practitioners with potential directions for further research.
Multi-stage Ensemble Model for Cross-market Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes the solution of our team PolimiRank for the WSDM Cup 2022 on cross-market recommendation. The goal of the competition is to effectively exploit the information extracted from different markets to improve the ranking accuracy of recommendations on two target markets. Our model consists in a multi-stage approach based on the combination of data belonging to different markets. In the first stage, state-of-the-art recommenders are used to predict scores for user-item couples, which are ensembled in the following 2 stages, employing a simple linear combination and more powerful Gradient Boosting Decision Tree techniques. Our team ranked 4th in the final leaderboard.
A recommender system for automatic picking of subsurface formation tops
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Geoscience domain experts traditionally correlate formation tops in the subsurface using geophysical well logs (known as well-log correlation) by-hand. Based on individual well log interpretation and well-to-well comparisons, these correlations are done in the context of depositional models within a stratigraphic framework. Recently, many researchers have focused on automatic well-log correlation using a variety of warping algorithms that measure well similarity, and both unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods that assign categorical labels based on known tops in many other wells. These methods require a standardized suite of digital well logs (i.e. gamma ray logs for every well) along with the depth to the top of the formations, which might not be available in many cases. Herein, we propose a method that does not use geophysical well logs for correlation, but rather uses already picked tops in multiple wells to recommend the depth to the remaining unpicked tops in the wells. This recommender system calculates the depth to all formation tops in all the wells for two different datasets in two different basins. The Teapot Dome dataset is composed of lithostratigraphic formation tops, and the Mannville Group dataset is composed of sequence-stratigraphic (representing multiple lithologic groups within a stratigraphic unit) formation tops. For the demonstration, mean absolute error and root mean squared error of four-fold cross-validation compares the recommender system predictions to the ground truth human interpretations. The recommender system is competitive and often outperforms state of the art spline interpolation methods. Lastly, increasing the size of the training dataset decreases the prediction error, and that variance in error decreases with increasing formation tops picked in each formation and well for the lithostratigraphic top picks.
BADDr: Bayes-Adaptive Deep Dropout RL for POMDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

While reinforcement learning (RL) has made great advances in scalability, exploration and partial observability are still active research topics. In contrast, Bayesian RL (BRL) provides a principled answer to both state estimation and the exploration-exploitation trade-off, but struggles to scale. To tackle this challenge, BRL frameworks with various prior assumptions have been proposed, with varied success. This work presents a representation-agnostic formulation of BRL under partially observability, unifying the previous models under one theoretical umbrella. To demonstrate its practical significance we also propose a novel derivation, Bayes-Adaptive Deep Dropout rl (BADDr), based on dropout networks. Under this parameterization, in contrast to previous work, the belief over the state and dynamics is a more scalable inference problem. We choose actions through Monte-Carlo tree search and empirically show that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art BRL methods on small domains while being able to solve much larger ones.
Word Embeddings for Automatic Equalization in Audio Mixing
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, machine learning has been widely adopted to automate the audio mixing process. Automatic mixing systems have been applied to various audio effects such as gain-adjustment, equalization, and reverberation. These systems can be controlled through visual interfaces, providing audio examples, using knobs, and semantic descriptors. Using semantic descriptors or textual information to control these systems is an effective way for artists to communicate their creative goals. In this paper, we explore the novel idea of using word embeddings to represent semantic descriptors. Word embeddings are generally obtained by training neural networks on large corpora of written text. These embeddings serve as the input layer of the neural network to create a translation from words to EQ settings. Using this technique, the machine learning model can also generate EQ settings for semantic descriptors that it has not seen before. We compare the EQ settings of humans with the predictions of the neural network to evaluate the quality of predictions. The results showed that the embedding layer enables the neural network to understand semantic descriptors. We observed that the models with embedding layers perform better than those without embedding layers, but still not as good as human labels.
ST-MoE: Designing Stable and Transferable Sparse Expert Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Scale has opened new frontiers in natural language processing -- but at a high cost. In response, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and Switch Transformers have been proposed as an energy efficient path to even larger and more capable language models. But advancing the state-of-the-art across a broad set of natural language tasks has been hindered by training instabilities and uncertain quality during fine-tuning. Our work focuses on these issues and acts as a design guide. We conclude by scaling a sparse model to 269B parameters, with a computational cost comparable to a 32B dense encoder-decoder Transformer (Stable and Transferable Mixture-of-Experts or ST-MoE-32B). For the first time, a sparse model achieves state-of-the-art performance in transfer learning, across a diverse set of tasks including reasoning (SuperGLUE, ARC Easy, ARC Challenge), summarization (XSum, CNN-DM), closed book question answering (WebQA, Natural Questions), and adversarially constructed tasks (Winogrande, ANLI R3).
Sampling Approximately Low-Rank Ising Models: MCMC meets Variational Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We consider Ising models on the hypercube with a general interaction matrix $J$, and give a polynomial time sampling algorithm when all but $O(1)$ eigenvalues of $J$ lie in an interval of length one, a situation which occurs in many models of interest. This was previously known for the Glauber dynamics when *all* eigenvalues fit in an interval of length one; however, a single outlier can force the Glauber dynamics to mix torpidly. Our general result implies the first polynomial time sampling algorithms for low-rank Ising models such as Hopfield networks with a fixed number of patterns and Bayesian clustering models with low-dimensional contexts, and greatly improves the polynomial time sampling regime for the antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic Ising model with inconsistent field on expander graphs. It also improves on previous approximation algorithm results based on the naive mean-field approximation in variational methods and statistical physics. Our approach is based on a new fusion of ideas from the MCMC and variational inference worlds. As part of our algorithm, we define a new nonconvex variational problem which allows us to sample from an exponential reweighting of a distribution by a negative definite quadratic form, and show how to make this procedure provably efficient using stochastic gradient descent. On top of this, we construct a new simulated tempering chain (on an extended state space arising from the Hubbard-Stratonovich transform) which overcomes the obstacle posed by large positive eigenvalues, and combine it with the SGD-based sampler to solve the full problem.
Discovering Fine-Grained Semantics in Knowledge Graph Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

When it comes to comprehending and analyzing multi-relational data, the semantics of relations are crucial. Polysemous relations between different types of entities, that represent multiple semantics, are common in real-world relational datasets represented by knowledge graphs. For numerous use cases, such as entity type classification, question answering and knowledge graph completion, the correct semantic interpretation of these relations is necessary. In this work, we provide a strategy for discovering the different semantics associated with abstract relations and deriving many sub-relations with fine-grained meaning. To do this, we leverage the types of the entities associated with the relations and cluster the vector representations of entities and relations. The suggested method is able to automatically discover the best number of sub-relations for a polysemous relation and determine their semantic interpretation, according to our empirical evaluation.
FLAME: Federated Learning Across Multi-device Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed training of machine learning models while keeping personal data on user devices private. While we witness increasing applications of FL in the area of mobile sensing, such as human activity recognition (HAR), FL has not been studied in the context of a multi-device environment (MDE), wherein each user owns multiple data-producing devices. With the proliferation of mobile and wearable devices, MDEs are increasingly becoming popular in ubicomp settings, therefore necessitating the study of FL in them. FL in MDEs is characterized by being not independent and identically distributed (non-IID) across clients, complicated by the presence of both user and device heterogeneities. Further, ensuring efficient utilization of system resources on FL clients in a MDE remains an important challenge. In this paper, we propose FLAME, a user-centered FL training approach to counter statistical and system heterogeneity in MDEs, and bring consistency in inference performance across devices. FLAME features (i) user-centered FL training utilizing the time alignment across devices from the same user; (ii) accuracy- and efficiency-aware device selection; and (iii) model personalization to devices. We also present an FL evaluation testbed with realistic energy drain and network bandwidth profiles, and a novel class-based data partitioning scheme to extend existing HAR datasets to a federated setup. Our experiment results on three multi-device HAR datasets show that FLAME outperforms various baselines by 4.3-25.8% higher F1 score, 1.02-2.86x greater energy efficiency, and up to 2.06x speedup in convergence to target accuracy through fair distribution of the FL workload.
SKaMPI-OpenSHMEM: Measuring OpenSHMEM Communication Routines
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Benchmarking is an important challenge in HPC, in particular, to be able to tune the basic blocks of the software environment used by applications. The communication library and distributed run-time environment are among the most critical ones. In particular, many of the routines provided by communication libraries can be adjusted using parameters such as buffer sizes and communication algorithm. As a consequence, being able to measure accurately the time taken by these routines is crucial in order to optimize them and achieve the best performance. For instance, the SKaMPI library was designed to measure the time taken by MPI routines, relying on MPI's two-sided communication model to measure one-sided and two-sided peer-to-peer communication and collective routines. In this paper, we discuss the benchmarking challenges specific to OpenSHMEM's communication model, mainly to avoid inter-call pipelining and overlapping when measuring the time taken by its routines. We extend SKaMPI for OpenSHMEM for this purpose and demonstrate measurement algorithms that address OpenSHMEM's communication model in practice. Scaling experiments are run on the Summit platform to compare different benchmarking approaches on the SKaMPI benchmark operations. These show the advantages of our techniques for more accurate performance characterization.
High-performance automatic categorization and attribution of inventory catalogs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Techniques of machine learning for automatic text categorization are applied and adapted for the problem of inventory catalog data attribution, with different approaches explored and optimal solution addressing the tradeoff between accuracy and performance is selected.
Effective Urban Region Representation Learning Using Heterogeneous Urban Graph Attention Network (HUGAT)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Revealing the hidden patterns shaping the urban environment is essential to understand its dynamics and to make cities smarter. Recent studies have demonstrated that learning the representations of urban regions can be an effective strategy to uncover the intrinsic characteristics of urban areas. However, existing studies lack in incorporating diversity in urban data sources. In this work, we propose heterogeneous urban graph attention network (HUGAT), which incorporates heterogeneity of diverse urban datasets. In HUGAT, heterogeneous urban graph (HUG) incorporates both the geo-spatial and temporal people movement variations in a single graph structure. Given a HUG, a set of meta-paths are designed to capture the rich urban semantics as composite relations between nodes. Region embedding is carried out using heterogeneous graph attention network (HAN). HUGAT is designed to consider multiple learning objectives of city's geo-spatial and mobility variations simultaneously. In our extensive experiments on NYC data, HUGAT outperformed all the state-of-the-art models. Moreover, it demonstrated a robust generalization capability across the various prediction tasks of crime, average personal income, and bike flow as well as the spatial clustering task.
Private Information Retrieval from Colluding and Byzantine Servers with Binary Reed-Muller Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, a flexible and robust private information retrieval (PIR) scheme based on binary non-maximum distance separable (non-MDS) codes is considered. This combines previous works on PIR schemes based on transitive non-MDS codes on one hand, and PIR from MDS-coded Byzantine and non-responsive servers on the other hand. More specifically, a PIR scheme employing binary Reed-Muller (RM) codes tolerant to colluding, Byzantine, and non-responsive servers is constructed, and bounds for the achievable rates are derived under certain conditions. The construction of such schemes turns out to be much more involved than for MDS codes. Namely, the binary query vectors have to be selected with great care to hit the desired information sets, which is technically challenging as will be shown.
A Free Lunch with Influence Functions? Improving Neural Network Estimates with Concepts from Semiparametric Statistics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Parameter estimation in empirical fields is usually undertaken using parametric models, and such models readily facilitate statistical inference. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to be sufficiently flexible to be able to adequately model real-world phenomena, and may yield biased estimates. Conversely, non-parametric approaches are flexible but do not readily facilitate statistical inference and may still exhibit residual bias. We explore the potential for Influence Functions (IFs) to (a) improve initial estimators without needing more data (b) increase model robustness and (c) facilitate statistical inference. We begin with a broad introduction to IFs, and propose a neural network method 'MultiNet', which seeks the diversity of an ensemble using a single architecture. We also introduce variants on the IF update step which we call 'MultiStep', and provide a comprehensive evaluation of different approaches. The improvements are found to be dataset dependent, indicating an interaction between the methods used and nature of the data generating process. Our experiments highlight the need for practitioners to check the consistency of their findings, potentially by undertaking multiple analyses with different combinations of estimators. We also show that it is possible to improve existing neural networks for `free', without needing more data, and without needing to retrain them.
Generalizing Aggregation Functions in GNNs:High-Capacity GNNs via Nonlinear Neighborhood Aggregators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in many graph learning tasks. The main aspect powering existing GNNs is the multi-layer network architecture to learn the nonlinear graph representations for the specific learning tasks. The core operation in GNNs is message propagation in which each node updates its representation by aggregating its neighbors' representations. Existing GNNs mainly adopt either linear neighborhood aggregation (mean,sum) or max aggregator in their message propagation. (1) For linear aggregators, the whole nonlinearity and network's capacity of GNNs are generally limited due to deeper GNNs usually suffer from over-smoothing issue. (2) For max aggregator, it usually fails to be aware of the detailed information of node representations within neighborhood. To overcome these issues, we re-think the message propagation mechanism in GNNs and aim to develop the general nonlinear aggregators for neighborhood information aggregation in GNNs. One main aspect of our proposed nonlinear aggregators is that they provide the optimally balanced aggregators between max and mean/sum aggregations. Thus, our aggregators can inherit both (i) high nonlinearity that increases network's capacity and (ii) detail-sensitivity that preserves the detailed information of representations together in GNNs' message propagation. Promising experiments on several datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed nonlinear aggregators.
MultiRes-NetVLAD: Augmenting Place Recognition Training with Low-Resolution Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a crucial component of 6-DoF localization, visual SLAM and structure-from-motion pipelines, tasked to generate an initial list of place match hypotheses by matching global place descriptors. However, commonly-used CNN-based methods either process multiple image resolutions after training or use a single resolution and limit multi-scale feature extraction to the last convolutional layer during training. In this paper, we augment NetVLAD representation learning with low-resolution image pyramid encoding which leads to richer place representations. The resultant multi-resolution feature pyramid can be conveniently aggregated through VLAD into a single compact representation, avoiding the need for concatenation or summation of multiple patches in recent multi-scale approaches. Furthermore, we show that the underlying learnt feature tensor can be combined with existing multi-scale approaches to improve their baseline performance. Evaluation on 15 viewpoint-varying and viewpoint-consistent benchmarking datasets confirm that the proposed MultiRes-NetVLAD leads to state-of-the-art Recall@N performance for global descriptor based retrieval, compared against 11 existing techniques. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ahmedest61/MultiRes-NetVLAD.
Gaussian Mixture Convolution Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper proposes a novel method for deep learning based on the analytical convolution of multidimensional Gaussian mixtures. In contrast to tensors, these do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality and allow for a compact representation, as data is only stored where details exist. Convolution kernels and data are Gaussian mixtures with unconstrained weights, positions, and covariance matrices. Similar to discrete convolutional networks, each convolution step produces several feature channels, represented by independent Gaussian mixtures. Since traditional transfer functions like ReLUs do not produce Gaussian mixtures, we propose using a fitting of these functions instead. This fitting step also acts as a pooling layer if the number of Gaussian components is reduced appropriately. We demonstrate that networks based on this architecture reach competitive accuracy on Gaussian mixtures fitted to the MNIST and ModelNet data sets.
PerFED-GAN: Personalized Federated Learning via Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning is gaining popularity as a distributed machine learning method that can be used to deploy AI-dependent IoT applications while protecting client data privacy and security. Due to the differences of clients, a single global model may not perform well on all clients, so the personalized federated learning method, which trains a personalized model for each client that better suits its individual needs, becomes a research hotspot. Most personalized federated learning research, however, focuses on data heterogeneity while ignoring the need for model architecture heterogeneity. Most existing federated learning methods uniformly set the model architecture of all clients participating in federated learning, which is inconvenient for each client's individual model and local data distribution requirements, and also increases the risk of client model leakage. This paper proposes a federated learning method based on co-training and generative adversarial networks(GANs) that allows each client to design its own model to participate in federated learning training independently without sharing any model architecture or parameter information with other clients or a center. In our experiments, the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in mean test accuracy by 42% when the client's model architecture and data distribution vary significantly.