OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Environment Responsive Online Meta-Learning with Fairness Awareness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The fairness-aware online learning framework has emerged as a potent tool within the context of continuous lifelong learning. In this scenario, the learner's objective is to progressively acquire new tasks as they arrive over time, while also guaranteeing statistical parity among various protected sub-populations, such as race and gender, when it comes to the newly introduced tasks. A significant limitation of current approaches lies in their heavy reliance on the i.i.d (independent and identically distributed) assumption concerning data, leading to a static regret analysis of the framework. Nevertheless, it's crucial to note that achieving low static regret does not necessarily translate to strong performance in dynamic environments characterized by tasks sampled from diverse distributions. In this paper, to tackle the fairness-aware online learning challenge in evolving settings, we introduce a unique regret measure, FairSAR, by incorporating long-term fairness constraints into a strongly adapted loss regret framework. Moreover, to determine an optimal model parameter at each time step, we introduce an innovative adaptive fairness-aware online meta-learning algorithm, referred to as FairSAOML. This algorithm possesses the ability to adjust to dynamic environments by effectively managing bias control and model accuracy. The problem is framed as a bi-level convex-concave optimization, considering both the model's primal and dual parameters, which pertain to its accuracy and fairness attributes, respectively. Theoretical analysis yields sub-linear upper bounds for both loss regret and the cumulative violation of fairness constraints. Our experimental evaluation on various real-world datasets in dynamic environments demonstrates that our proposed FairSAOML algorithm consistently outperforms alternative approaches rooted in the most advanced prior online learning methods.
Generating Survival Interpretable Trajectories and Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A new model for generating survival trajectories and data based on applying an autoencoder of a specific structure is proposed. It solves three tasks. First, it provides predictions in the form of the expected event time and the survival function for a new generated feature vector on the basis of the Beran estimator. Second, the model generates additional data based on a given training set that would supplement the original dataset. Third, the most important, it generates a prototype time-dependent trajectory for an object, which characterizes how features of the object could be changed to achieve a different time to an event. The trajectory can be viewed as a type of the counterfactual explanation. The proposed model is robust during training and inference due to a specific weighting scheme incorporating into the variational autoencoder. The model also determines the censored indicators of new generated data by solving a classification task. The paper demonstrates the efficiency and properties of the proposed model using numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets. The code of the algorithm implementing the proposed model is publicly available.
Graph-Based Retriever Captures the Long Tail of Biomedical Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming the way information is retrieved with vast amounts of knowledge being summarized and presented via natural language conversations. Yet, LLMs are prone to highlight the most frequently seen pieces of information from the training set and to neglect the rare ones. In the field of biomedical research, latest discoveries are key to academic and industrial actors and are obscured by the abundance of an ever-increasing literature corpus (the information overload problem). Surfacing new associations between biomedical entities, e.g., drugs, genes, diseases, with LLMs becomes a challenge of capturing the long-tail knowledge of the biomedical scientific production. To overcome this challenge, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to alleviate some of the shortcomings of LLMs by augmenting the prompts with context retrieved from external datasets. RAG methods typically select the context via maximum similarity search over text embeddings. In this study, we show that RAG methods leave out a significant proportion of relevant information due to clusters of over-represented concepts in the biomedical literature. We introduce a novel information-retrieval method that leverages a knowledge graph to downsample these clusters and mitigate the information overload problem. Its retrieval performance is about twice better than embedding similarity alternatives on both precision and recall. Finally, we demonstrate that both embedding similarity and knowledge graph retrieval methods can be advantageously combined into a hybrid model that outperforms both, enabling potential improvements to biomedical question-answering models.
A synthetic data approach for domain generalization of NLI models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Natural Language Inference (NLI) remains an important benchmark task for LLMs. NLI datasets are a springboard for transfer learning to other semantic tasks, and NLI models are standard tools for identifying the faithfulness of model-generated text. There are several large scale NLI datasets today, and models have improved greatly by hill-climbing on these collections. Yet their realistic performance on out-of-distribution/domain data is less well-understood. We explore the opportunity for synthetic high-quality datasets to adapt NLI models for zero-shot use in downstream applications across new and unseen text domains. We demonstrate a new approach for generating NLI data in diverse domains and lengths, so far not covered by existing training sets. The resulting examples have meaningful premises, the hypotheses are formed in creative ways rather than simple edits to a few premise tokens, and the labels have high accuracy. We show that models trained on this data ($685$K synthetic examples) have the best generalization to completely new downstream test settings. On the TRUE benchmark, a T5-small model trained with our data improves around $7\%$ on average compared to training on the best alternative dataset. The improvements are more pronounced for smaller models, while still meaningful on a T5 XXL model. We also demonstrate gains on test sets when in-domain training data is augmented with our domain-general synthetic data.
EyeEcho: Continuous and Low-power Facial Expression Tracking on Glasses
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce EyeEcho, a minimally-obtrusive acoustic sensing system designed to enable glasses to continuously monitor facial expressions. It utilizes two pairs of speakers and microphones mounted on glasses, to emit encoded inaudible acoustic signals directed towards the face, capturing subtle skin deformations associated with facial expressions. The reflected signals are processed through a customized machine-learning pipeline to estimate full facial movements. EyeEcho samples at 83.3 Hz with a relatively low power consumption of 167 mW. Our user study involving 12 participants demonstrates that, with just four minutes of training data, EyeEcho achieves highly accurate tracking performance across different real-world scenarios, including sitting, walking, and after remounting the devices. Additionally, a semi-in-the-wild study involving 10 participants further validates EyeEcho's performance in naturalistic scenarios while participants engage in various daily activities. Finally, we showcase EyeEcho's potential to be deployed on a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) smartphone, offering real-time facial expression tracking.
Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-$k$ Router of MoE
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are popular for training large language models due to their computational efficiency. However, the commonly used top-$k$ routing mechanism suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to the unbalanced routing. Some experts are overflow, where the exceeding tokens are dropped. While some experts are vacant, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. To address the dropped tokens and padding, we propose the Rectify-Router, comprising the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification. The Intra-GPU Rectification handles dropped tokens, efficiently routing them to experts within the GPU where they are located to avoid inter-GPU communication. The Fill-in Rectification addresses padding by replacing padding tokens with the tokens that have high routing scores. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification effectively handle dropped tokens and padding, respectively. Furthermore, the combination of them achieves superior performance, surpassing the accuracy of the vanilla top-1 router by 4.7%.
Predicting trucking accidents with truck drivers 'safety climate perception across companies: A transfer learning approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

There is a rising interest in using artificial intelligence (AI)-powered safety analytics to predict accidents in the trucking industry. Companies may face the practical challenge, however, of not having enough data to develop good safety analytics models. Although pretrained models may offer a solution for such companies, existing safety research using transfer learning has mostly focused on computer vision and natural language processing, rather than accident analytics. To fill the above gap, we propose a pretrain-then-fine-tune transfer learning approach to help any company leverage other companies' data to develop AI models for a more accurate prediction of accident risk. We also develop SafeNet, a deep neural network algorithm for classification tasks suitable for accident prediction. Using the safety climate survey data from seven trucking companies with different data sizes, we show that our proposed approach results in better model performance compared to training the model from scratch using only the target company's data. We also show that for the transfer learning model to be effective, the pretrained model should be developed with larger datasets from diverse sources. The trucking industry may, thus, consider pooling safety analytics data from a wide range of companies to develop pretrained models and share them within the industry for better knowledge and resource transfer. The above contributions point to the promise of advanced safety analytics to make the industry safer and more sustainable.
EBFT: Effective and Block-Wise Fine-Tuning for Sparse LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Existing methods for fine-tuning sparse LLMs often suffer from resource-intensive requirements and high retraining costs. Additionally, many fine-tuning methods often rely on approximations or heuristic optimization strategies, which may lead to suboptimal solutions. To address these issues, we propose an efficient and fast framework for fine-tuning sparse LLMs based on minimizing reconstruction error. Our approach involves sampling a small dataset for calibration and utilizing backpropagation to iteratively optimize block-wise reconstruction error, on a block-by-block basis, aiming for optimal solutions. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superiority of our method over other baselines. For instance, on the Wikitext2 dataset with LlamaV1-7B at 70% sparsity, our proposed EBFT achieves a perplexity of 16.88, surpassing the state-of-the-art DSnoT with a perplexity of 75.14. Moreover, with a structured sparsity ratio of 26\%, EBFT achieves a perplexity of 16.27, outperforming LoRA (perplexity 16.44). Furthermore, the fine-tuning process of EBFT for LlamaV1-7B only takes approximately 30 minutes, and the entire framework can be executed on a single 16GB GPU. The source code is available at https://github.com/sunggo/EBFT.
Simulacra as Conscious Exotica
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The advent of conversational agents with increasingly human-like behaviour throws old philosophical questions into new light. Does it, or could it, ever make sense to speak of AI agents built out of generative language models in terms of consciousness, given that they are "mere" simulacra of human behaviour, and that what they do can be seen as "merely" role play? Drawing on the later writings of Wittgenstein, this paper attempts to tackle this question while avoiding the pitfalls of dualistic thinking.
Understanding Fine-grained Distortions in Reports of Scientific Findings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Distorted science communication harms individuals and society as it can lead to unhealthy behavior change and decrease trust in scientific institutions. Given the rapidly increasing volume of science communication in recent years, a fine-grained understanding of how findings from scientific publications are reported to the general public, and methods to detect distortions from the original work automatically, are crucial. Prior work focused on individual aspects of distortions or worked with unpaired data. In this work, we make three foundational contributions towards addressing this problem: (1) annotating 1,600 instances of scientific findings from academic papers paired with corresponding findings as reported in news articles and tweets wrt. four characteristics: causality, certainty, generality and sensationalism; (2) establishing baselines for automatically detecting these characteristics; and (3) analyzing the prevalence of changes in these characteristics in both human-annotated and large-scale unlabeled data. Our results show that scientific findings frequently undergo subtle distortions when reported. Tweets distort findings more often than science news reports. Detecting fine-grained distortions automatically poses a challenging task. In our experiments, fine-tuned task-specific models consistently outperform few-shot LLM prompting.
Integrating kNN with Foundation Models for Adaptable and Privacy-Aware Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional deep learning models implicity encode knowledge limiting their transparency and ability to adapt to data changes. Yet, this adaptability is vital for addressing user data privacy concerns. We address this limitation by storing embeddings of the underlying training data independently of the model weights, enabling dynamic data modifications without retraining. Specifically, our approach integrates the $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$-NN) classifier with a vision-based foundation model, pre-trained self-supervised on natural images, enhancing interpretability and adaptability. We share open-source implementations of a previously unpublished baseline method as well as our performance-improving contributions. Quantitative experiments confirm improved classification across established benchmark datasets and the method's applicability to distinct medical image classification tasks. Additionally, we assess the method's robustness in continual learning and data removal scenarios. The approach exhibits great promise for bridging the gap between foundation models' performance and challenges tied to data privacy. The source code is available at https://github.com/TobArc/privacy-aware-image-classification-with-kNN.
TrustScore: Reference-Free Evaluation of LLM Response Trustworthiness
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains, prompting a surge in their practical applications. However, concerns have arisen regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs outputs, particularly in closed-book question-answering tasks, where non-experts may struggle to identify inaccuracies due to the absence of contextual or ground truth information. This paper introduces TrustScore, a framework based on the concept of Behavioral Consistency, which evaluates whether an LLMs response aligns with its intrinsic knowledge. Additionally, TrustScore can seamlessly integrate with fact-checking methods, which assesses alignment with external knowledge sources. The experimental results show that TrustScore achieves strong correlations with human judgments, surpassing existing reference-free metrics, and achieving results on par with reference-based metrics.
A System Development Kit for Big Data Applications on FPGA-based Clusters: The EVEREST Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Modern big data workflows are characterized by computationally intensive kernels. The simulated results are often combined with knowledge extracted from AI models to ultimately support decision-making. These energy-hungry workflows are increasingly executed in data centers with energy-efficient hardware accelerators since FPGAs are well-suited for this task due to their inherent parallelism. We present the H2020 project EVEREST, which has developed a system development kit (SDK) to simplify the creation of FPGA-accelerated kernels and manage the execution at runtime through a virtualization environment. This paper describes the main components of the EVEREST SDK and the benefits that can be achieved in our use cases.
Are Large Language Models (LLMs) Good Social Predictors?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The prediction has served as a crucial scientific method in modern social studies. With the recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), efforts have been made to leverage LLMs to predict the human features in social life, such as presidential voting. These works suggest that LLMs are capable of generating human-like responses. However, we find that the promising performance achieved by previous studies is because of the existence of input shortcut features to the response. In fact, by removing these shortcuts, the performance is reduced dramatically. To further revisit the ability of LLMs, we introduce a novel social prediction task, Soc-PRF Prediction, which utilizes general features as input and simulates real-world social study settings. With the comprehensive investigations on various LLMs, we reveal that LLMs cannot work as expected on social prediction when given general input features without shortcuts. We further investigate possible reasons for this phenomenon that suggest potential ways to enhance LLMs for social prediction.
YOLO-Ant: A Lightweight Detector via Depthwise Separable Convolutional and Large Kernel Design for Antenna Interference Source Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the era of 5G communication, removing interference sources that affect communication is a resource-intensive task. The rapid development of computer vision has enabled unmanned aerial vehicles to perform various high-altitude detection tasks. Because the field of object detection for antenna interference sources has not been fully explored, this industry lacks dedicated learning samples and detection models for this specific task. In this article, an antenna dataset is created to address important antenna interference source detection issues and serves as the basis for subsequent research. We introduce YOLO-Ant, a lightweight CNN and transformer hybrid detector specifically designed for antenna interference source detection. Specifically, we initially formulated a lightweight design for the network depth and width, ensuring that subsequent investigations were conducted within a lightweight framework. Then, we propose a DSLK-Block module based on depthwise separable convolution and large convolution kernels to enhance the network's feature extraction ability, effectively improving small object detection. To address challenges such as complex backgrounds and large interclass differences in antenna detection, we construct DSLKVit-Block, a powerful feature extraction module that combines DSLK-Block and transformer structures. Considering both its lightweight design and accuracy, our method not only achieves optimal performance on the antenna dataset but also yields competitive results on public datasets.
Visual Reasoning in Object-Centric Deep Neural Networks: A Comparative Cognition Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Achieving visual reasoning is a long-term goal of artificial intelligence. In the last decade, several studies have applied deep neural networks (DNNs) to the task of learning visual relations from images, with modest results in terms of generalization of the relations learned. However, in recent years, object-centric representation learning has been put forward as a way to achieve visual reasoning within the deep learning framework. Object-centric models attempt to model input scenes as compositions of objects and relations between them. To this end, these models use several kinds of attention mechanisms to segregate the individual objects in a scene from the background and from other objects. In this work we tested relation learning and generalization in several object-centric models, as well as a ResNet-50 baseline. In contrast to previous research, which has focused heavily in the same-different task in order to asses relational reasoning in DNNs, we use a set of tasks -- with varying degrees of difficulty -- derived from the comparative cognition literature. Our results show that object-centric models are able to segregate the different objects in a scene, even in many out-of-distribution cases. In our simpler tasks, this improves their capacity to learn and generalize visual relations in comparison to the ResNet-50 baseline. However, object-centric models still struggle in our more difficult tasks and conditions. We conclude that abstract visual reasoning remains an open challenge for DNNs, including object-centric models.
Learning on manifolds without manifold learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Function approximation based on data drawn randomly from an unknown distribution is an important problem in machine learning. The manifold hypothesis assumes that the data is sampled from an unknown submanifold of a high dimensional Euclidean space. A great deal of research deals with obtaining information about this manifold, such as the eigendecomposition of the Laplace-Beltrami operator or coordinate charts, and using this information for function approximation. This two-step approach implies some extra errors in the approximation stemming from estimating the basic quantities of the data manifold in addition to the errors inherent in function approximation. In this paper, we project the unknown manifold as a submanifold of an ambient hypersphere and study the question of constructing a one-shot approximation using a specially designed sequence of localized spherical polynomial kernels on the hypersphere. Our approach does not require preprocessing of the data to obtain information about the manifold other than its dimension. We give optimal rates of approximation for relatively ``rough'' functions.