OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lazy-k: Decoding for Constrained Token Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We explore the possibility of improving probabilistic models in structured prediction. Specifically, we combine the models with constrained decoding approaches in the context of token classification for information extraction. The decoding methods search for constraint-satisfying label-assignments while maximizing the total probability. To do this, we evaluate several existing approaches, as well as propose a novel decoding method called Lazy-$k$. Our findings demonstrate that constrained decoding approaches can significantly improve the models' performances, especially when using smaller models. The Lazy-$k$ approach allows for more flexibility between decoding time and accuracy. The code for using Lazy-$k$ decoding can be found here: https://github.com/ArthurDevNL/lazyk.
Riemannian Complex Matrix Convolution Network for PolSAR Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, deep learning methods have achieved superior performance for Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar(PolSAR) image classification. Existing deep learning methods learn PolSAR data by converting the covariance matrix into a feature vector or complex-valued vector as the input. However, all these methods cannot learn the structure of complex matrix directly and destroy the channel correlation. To learn geometric structure of complex matrix, we propose a Riemannian complex matrix convolution network for PolSAR image classification in Riemannian space for the first time, which directly utilizes the complex matrix as the network input and defines the Riemannian operations to learn complex matrix's features. The proposed Riemannian complex matrix convolution network considers PolSAR complex matrix endowed in Riemannian manifold, and defines a series of new Riemannian convolution, ReLu and LogEig operations in Riemannian space, which breaks through the Euclidean constraint of conventional networks. Then, a CNN module is appended to enhance contextual Riemannian features. Besides, a fast kernel learning method is developed for the proposed method to learn class-specific features and reduce the computation time effectively. Experiments are conducted on three sets of real PolSAR data with different bands and sensors. Experiments results demonstrates the proposed method can obtain superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods.
Extremal Fitting CQs do not Generalize
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

A fitting algorithm for conjunctive queries (CQs) produces, given a set of positively and negatively labeled data examples, a CQ that fits these examples. In general, there may be many non-equivalent fitting CQs and thus the algorithm has some freedom in producing its output. Additional desirable properties of the produced CQ are that it generalizes well to unseen examples in the sense of PAC learning and that it is most general or most specific in the set of all fitting CQs. In this research note, we show that these desiderata are incompatible when we require PAC-style generalization from a polynomial sample: we prove that any fitting algorithm that produces a most-specific fitting CQ cannot be a sample-efficient PAC learning algorithm, and the same is true for fitting algorithms that produce a most-general fitting CQ (when it exists). Our proofs rely on a polynomial construction of relativized homomorphism dualities for path-shaped structures.
Approximating Solutions to the Knapsack Problem using the Lagrangian Dual Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The Knapsack Problem is a classic problem in combinatorial optimisation. Solving these problems may be computationally expensive. Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of deep learning methods to approximate the solutions to such problems. A core problem is how to enforce or encourage constraint satisfaction in predicted solutions. A promising approach for predicting solutions to constrained optimisation problems is the Lagrangian Dual Framework which builds on the method of Lagrangian Relaxation. In this paper we develop neural network models to approximate Knapsack Problem solutions using the Lagrangian Dual Framework while improving constraint satisfaction. We explore the problems of output interpretation and model selection within this context. Experimental results show strong constraint satisfaction with a minor reduction of optimality as compared to a baseline neural network which does not explicitly model the constraints.
High-Quality Facial Geometry and Appearance Capture at Home
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Facial geometry and appearance capture have demonstrated tremendous success in 3D scanning real humans in studios. Recent works propose to democratize this technique while keeping the results high quality. However, they are still inconvenient for daily usage. In addition, they focus on an easier problem of only capturing facial skin. This paper proposes a novel method for high-quality face capture, featuring an easy-to-use system and the capability to model the complete face with skin, mouth interior, hair, and eyes. We reconstruct facial geometry and appearance from a single co-located smartphone flashlight sequence captured in a dim room where the flashlight is the dominant light source (e.g. rooms with curtains or at night). To model the complete face, we propose a novel hybrid representation to effectively model both eyes and other facial regions, along with novel techniques to learn it from images. We apply a combined lighting model to compactly represent real illuminations and exploit a morphable face albedo model as a reflectance prior to disentangle diffuse and specular. Experiments show that our method can capture high-quality 3D relightable scans.
Data-driven Crop Growth Simulation on Time-varying Generated Images using Multi-conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image-based crop growth modeling can substantially contribute to precision agriculture by revealing spatial crop development over time, which allows an early and location-specific estimation of relevant future plant traits, such as leaf area or biomass. A prerequisite for realistic and sharp crop image generation is the integration of multiple growth-influencing conditions in a model, such as an image of an initial growth stage, the associated growth time, and further information about the field treatment. We present a two-stage framework consisting first of an image prediction model and second of a growth estimation model, which both are independently trained. The image prediction model is a conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial network (CWGAN). In the generator of this model, conditional batch normalization (CBN) is used to integrate different conditions along with the input image. This allows the model to generate time-varying artificial images dependent on multiple influencing factors of different kinds. These images are used by the second part of the framework for plant phenotyping by deriving plant-specific traits and comparing them with those of non-artificial (real) reference images. For various crop datasets, the framework allows realistic, sharp image predictions with a slight loss of quality from short-term to long-term predictions. Simulations of varying growth-influencing conditions performed with the trained framework provide valuable insights into how such factors relate to crop appearances, which is particularly useful in complex, less explored crop mixture systems. Further results show that adding process-based simulated biomass as a condition increases the accuracy of the derived phenotypic traits from the predicted images. This demonstrates the potential of our framework to serve as an interface between an image- and process-based crop growth model.
Think from Words(TFW): Initiating Human-Like Cognition in Large Language Models Through Think from Words for Japanese Text-level Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred extensive research into LLM-related Prompt investigations, such as Instruction Learning (IL), In-context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). These approaches aim to improve LLMs' responses by enabling them to provide concise statements or examples for deeper contemplation when addressing questions. However, independent thinking by LLMs can introduce variability in their thought processes, leading to potential inaccuracies. In response, our study seeks to bridge the gap between LLM and human-like thinking processes, recognizing that text comprehension begins with understanding individual words. To tackle this challenge, we have expanded the CoT method to cater to a specific domain. Our approach, known as "Think from Words" (TFW), initiates the comprehension process at the word level and then extends it to encompass the entire text. We also propose "TFW with Extra word-level information" (TFW Extra), augmenting comprehension with additional word-level data. To assess our methods, we employ text classification on six Japanese datasets comprising text-level and word-level elements. Our findings not only validate the effectiveness of TFW but also shed light on the impact of various word-level information types on LLMs' text comprehension, offering insights into their potential to cause misinterpretations and errors in the overall comprehension of the final text.
Search Strategies for Self-driving Laboratories with Pending Experiments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) consist of multiple stations that perform material synthesis and characterisation tasks. To minimize station downtime and maximize experimental throughput, it is practical to run experiments in asynchronous parallel, in which multiple experiments are being performed at once in different stages. Asynchronous parallelization of experiments, however, introduces delayed feedback (i.e. "pending experiments"), which is known to reduce Bayesian optimiser performance. Here, we build a simulator for a multi-stage SDL and compare optimisation strategies for dealing with delayed feedback and asynchronous parallelized operation. Using data from a real SDL, we build a ground truth Bayesian optimisation simulator from 177 previously run experiments for maximizing the conductivity of functional coatings. We then compare search strategies such as expected improvement, noisy expected improvement, 4-mode exploration and random sampling. We evaluate their performance in terms of amount of delay and problem dimensionality. Our simulation results showcase the trade-off between the asynchronous parallel operation and delayed feedback.
Schrodinger Bridges Beat Diffusion Models on Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, diffusion models have achieved promising generation quality. However, because of the pre-defined data-to-noise diffusion process, their prior distribution is restricted to a noisy representation, which provides little information of the generation target. In this work, we present a novel TTS system, Bridge-TTS, making the first attempt to substitute the noisy Gaussian prior in established diffusion-based TTS methods with a clean and deterministic one, which provides strong structural information of the target. Specifically, we leverage the latent representation obtained from text input as our prior, and build a fully tractable Schrodinger bridge between it and the ground-truth mel-spectrogram, leading to a data-to-data process. Moreover, the tractability and flexibility of our formulation allow us to empirically study the design spaces such as noise schedules, as well as to develop stochastic and deterministic samplers. Experimental results on the LJ-Speech dataset illustrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of both synthesis quality and sampling efficiency, significantly outperforming our diffusion counterpart Grad-TTS in 50-step/1000-step synthesis and strong fast TTS models in few-step scenarios. Project page: https://bridge-tts.github.io/
Boosting legal case retrieval by query content selection with large language models
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Legal case retrieval, which aims to retrieve relevant cases to a given query case, benefits judgment justice and attracts increasing attention. Unlike generic retrieval queries, legal case queries are typically long and the definition of relevance is closely related to legal-specific elements. Therefore, legal case queries may suffer from noise and sparsity of salient content, which hinders retrieval models from perceiving correct information in a query. While previous studies have paid attention to improving retrieval models and understanding relevance judgments, we focus on enhancing legal case retrieval by utilizing the salient content in legal case queries. We first annotate the salient content in queries manually and investigate how sparse and dense retrieval models attend to those content. Then we experiment with various query content selection methods utilizing large language models (LLMs) to extract or summarize salient content and incorporate it into the retrieval models. Experimental results show that reformulating long queries using LLMs improves the performance of both sparse and dense models in legal case retrieval.
Speculative Exploration on the Concept of Artificial Agents Conducting Autonomous Research
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

This paper engages in a speculative exploration of the concept of an artificial agent capable of conducting research. Initially, it examines how the act of research can be conceptually characterized, aiming to provide a starting point for discussions about what it means to create such agents. The focus then shifts to the core components of research: question formulation, hypothesis generation, and hypothesis verification. This discussion includes a consideration of the potential and challenges associated with enabling machines to autonomously perform these tasks. Subsequently, this paper briefly considers the overlapping themes and interconnections that underlie them. Finally, the paper presents preliminary thoughts on prototyping as an initial step towards uncovering the challenges involved in developing these research-capable agents.
GPT-4 Enhanced Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Driving: Leveraging Cross-Modal Attention with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In the field of autonomous vehicles (AVs), accurately discerning commander intent and executing linguistic commands within a visual context presents a significant challenge. This paper introduces a sophisticated encoder-decoder framework, developed to address visual grounding in AVs.Our Context-Aware Visual Grounding (CAVG) model is an advanced system that integrates five core encoders-Text, Image, Context, and Cross-Modal-with a Multimodal decoder. This integration enables the CAVG model to adeptly capture contextual semantics and to learn human emotional features, augmented by state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) including GPT-4. The architecture of CAVG is reinforced by the implementation of multi-head cross-modal attention mechanisms and a Region-Specific Dynamic (RSD) layer for attention modulation. This architectural design enables the model to efficiently process and interpret a range of cross-modal inputs, yielding a comprehensive understanding of the correlation between verbal commands and corresponding visual scenes. Empirical evaluations on the Talk2Car dataset, a real-world benchmark, demonstrate that CAVG establishes new standards in prediction accuracy and operational efficiency. Notably, the model exhibits exceptional performance even with limited training data, ranging from 50% to 75% of the full dataset. This feature highlights its effectiveness and potential for deployment in practical AV applications. Moreover, CAVG has shown remarkable robustness and adaptability in challenging scenarios, including long-text command interpretation, low-light conditions, ambiguous command contexts, inclement weather conditions, and densely populated urban environments. The code for the proposed model is available at our Github.
An Irredundant Decomposition of Data Flow with Affine Dependences
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Optimization pipelines targeting polyhedral programs try to maximize the compute throughput. Traditional approaches favor reuse and temporal locality; while the communicated volume can be low, failure to optimize spatial locality may cause a low I/O performance. Memory allocation schemes using data partitioning such as data tiling can improve the spatial locality, but they are domain-specific and rarely applied by compilers when an existing allocation is supplied. In this paper, we propose to derive a partitioned memory allocation for tiled polyhedral programs using their data flow information. We extend the existing MARS partitioning to handle affine dependences, and determine which dependences can lead to a regular, simple control flow for communications. While this paper consists in a theoretical study, previous work on data partitioning in inter-node scenarios has shown performance improvements due to better bandwidth utilization.
Don't Overlook the Grammatical Gender: Bias Evaluation for Hindi-English Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, though state-of-the-art for translation, often reflect social biases, particularly gender bias. Existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on English as the source language of translation. For source languages other than English, studies often employ gender-neutral sentences for bias evaluation, whereas real-world sentences frequently contain gender information in different forms. Therefore, it makes more sense to evaluate for bias using such source sentences to determine if NMT models can discern gender from the grammatical gender cues rather than relying on biased associations. To illustrate this, we create two gender-specific sentence sets in Hindi to automatically evaluate gender bias in various Hindi-English (HI-EN) NMT systems. We emphasise the significance of tailoring bias evaluation test sets to account for grammatical gender markers in the source language.
Co-guiding for Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent graph-based models for multi-intent SLU have obtained promising results through modeling the guidance from the prediction of intents to the decoding of slot filling. However, existing methods (1) only model the unidirectional guidance from intent to slot, while there are bidirectional inter-correlations between intent and slot; (2) adopt homogeneous graphs to model the interactions between the slot semantics nodes and intent label nodes, which limit the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model termed Co-guiding Net, which implements a two-stage framework achieving the mutual guidances between the two tasks. In the first stage, the initial estimated labels of both tasks are produced, and then they are leveraged in the second stage to model the mutual guidances. Specifically, we propose two heterogeneous graph attention networks working on the proposed two heterogeneous semantics label graphs, which effectively represent the relations among the semantics nodes and label nodes. Besides, we further propose Co-guiding-SCL Net, which exploits the single-task and dual-task semantics contrastive relations. For the first stage, we propose single-task supervised contrastive learning, and for the second stage, we propose co-guiding supervised contrastive learning, which considers the two tasks' mutual guidances in the contrastive learning procedure. Experiment results on multi-intent SLU show that our model outperforms existing models by a large margin, obtaining a relative improvement of 21.3% over the previous best model on MixATIS dataset in overall accuracy. We also evaluate our model on the zero-shot cross-lingual scenario and the results show that our model can relatively improve the state-of-the-art model by 33.5% on average in terms of overall accuracy for the total 9 languages.
Leveraging AI-derived Data for Carbon Accounting: Information Extraction from Alternative Sources
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Carbon accounting is a fundamental building block in our global path to emissions reduction and decarbonization, yet many challenges exist in achieving reliable and trusted carbon accounting measures. We motivate that carbon accounting not only needs to be more data-driven, but also more methodologically sound. We discuss the need for alternative, more diverse data sources that can play a significant role on our path to trusted carbon accounting procedures and elaborate on not only why, but how Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in particular can unlock reasonable access to a treasure trove of alternative data sets in light of the recent advances in the field that better enable the utilization of unstructured data in this process. We present a case study of the recent developments on real-world data via an NLP-powered analysis using OpenAI's GPT API on financial and shipping data. We conclude the paper with a discussion on how these methods and approaches can be integrated into a broader framework for AI-enabled integrative carbon accounting.
Real Customization or Just Marketing: Are Customized Versions of Chat GPT Useful?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs), as the case of OpenAI ChatGPT-4 Turbo, are revolutionizing several industries, including higher education. In this context, LLMs can be personalized through a fine-tuning process to meet the student demands on every particular subject, like statistics. Recently, OpenAI has launched the possibility to fine-tune their model with a natural language web interface, enabling the possibility to create customized GPT version deliberately conditioned to meet the demands of a specific task. The objective of this research is to assess the potential of the customized GPTs that have recently been launched by OpenAI. After developing a Business Statistics Virtual Professor (BSVP), tailored for students at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, its behavior was evaluated and compared with that of ChatGPT-4 Turbo. The results lead to several conclusions. Firstly, a substantial modification in the style of communication was observed. Following the instructions it was trained with, BSVP provided responses in a more relatable and friendly tone, even incorporating a few minor jokes. Secondly, and this is a matter of relevance, when explicitly asked for something like, "I would like to practice a programming exercise similar to those in R practice 4," BSVP was capable of providing a far superior response: having access to contextual documentation, it could fulfill the request, something beyond ChatGPT-4 Turbo's capabilities. On the downside, the response times were generally higher. Lastly, regarding overall performance, quality, depth, and alignment with the specific content of the course, no statistically significant differences were observed in the responses between BSVP and ChatGPT-4 Turbo. It appears that customized assistants trained with prompts present advantages as virtual aids for students, yet they do not constitute a substantial improvement over ChatGPT-4 Turbo.