OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Non-Stationary Policy Learning for Multi-Timescale Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In multi-timescale multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents interact across different timescales. In general, policies for time-dependent behaviors, such as those induced by multiple timescales, are non-stationary. Learning non-stationary policies is challenging and typically requires sophisticated or inefficient algorithms. Motivated by the prevalence of this control problem in real-world complex systems, we introduce a simple framework for learning non-stationary policies for multi-timescale MARL. Our approach uses available information about agent timescales to define a periodic time encoding. In detail, we theoretically demonstrate that the effects of non-stationarity introduced by multiple timescales can be learned by a periodic multi-agent policy. To learn such policies, we propose a policy gradient algorithm that parameterizes the actor and critic with phase-functioned neural networks, which provide an inductive bias for periodicity. The framework's ability to effectively learn multi-timescale policies is validated on a gridworld and building energy management environment.
Classification with Incoherent Kernel Dictionary Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we present a new classification method based on Dictionary Learning (DL). The main contribution consists of a kernel version of incoherent DL, derived from its standard linear counterpart. We also propose an improvement of the AK-SVD algorithm concerning the representation update. Our algorithms are tested on several popular databases of classification problems.
Meta-Value Learning: a General Framework for Learning with Learning Awareness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Gradient-based learning in multi-agent systems is difficult because the gradient derives from a first-order model which does not account for the interaction between agents' learning processes. LOLA (arXiv:1709.04326) accounts for this by differentiating through one step of optimization. We propose to judge joint policies by their long-term prospects as measured by the meta-value, a discounted sum over the returns of future optimization iterates. We apply a form of Q-learning to the meta-game of optimization, in a way that avoids the need to explicitly represent the continuous action space of policy updates. The resulting method, MeVa, is consistent and far-sighted, and does not require REINFORCE estimators. We analyze the behavior of our method on a toy game and compare to prior work on repeated matrix games.
CaMP-INC: Components-aware Microservices Placement for In-Network Computing Cloud-Edge Continuum
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Microservices are a promising technology for future networks, and many research efforts have been devoted to optimally placing microservices in cloud data centers. However, microservices deployment in edge and in-network devices is more expensive than the cloud. Additionally, several works do not consider the main requirements of microservice architecture, such as service registry, failure detection, and each microservice's specific database. This paper investigates the problem of placing components (i.e. microservices and their corresponding databases) while considering physical nodes' failure and the distance to service registries. We propose a Components-aware Microservices Placement for In-Network Computing Cloud-Edge Continuum (CaMP-INC). We formulate an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem with the objective of cost minimization. Due to the problem's NP-hardness, we propose a heuristic solution. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed solution CaMP-INC reduces the total cost by 15.8 % on average and has a superior performance in terms of latency minimization compared to benchmarks.
Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Content Migration for Edge Content Delivery Networks with Vehicular Nodes
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

With the explosive demands for data, content delivery networks are facing ever-increasing challenges to meet end-users quality-of-experience requirements, especially in terms of delay. Content can be migrated from surrogate servers to local caches closer to end-users to address delay challenges. Unfortunately, these local caches have limited capacities, and when they are fully occupied, it may sometimes be necessary to remove their lower-priority content to accommodate higher-priority content. At other times, it may be necessary to return previously removed content to local caches. Downloading this content from surrogate servers is costly from the perspective of network usage, and potentially detrimental to the end-user QoE in terms of delay. In this paper, we consider an edge content delivery network with vehicular nodes and propose a content migration strategy in which local caches offload their contents to neighboring edge caches whenever feasible, instead of removing their contents when they are fully occupied. This process ensures that more contents remain in the vicinity of end-users. However, selecting which contents to migrate and to which neighboring cache to migrate is a complicated problem. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning approach to minimize the cost. Our simulation scenarios realized up to a 70% reduction of content access delay cost compared to conventional strategies with and without content migration.
Optimistic Estimate Uncovers the Potential of Nonlinear Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose an optimistic estimate to evaluate the best possible fitting performance of nonlinear models. It yields an optimistic sample size that quantifies the smallest possible sample size to fit/recover a target function using a nonlinear model. We estimate the optimistic sample sizes for matrix factorization models, deep models, and deep neural networks (DNNs) with fully-connected or convolutional architecture. For each nonlinear model, our estimates predict a specific subset of targets that can be fitted at overparameterization, which are confirmed by our experiments. Our optimistic estimate reveals two special properties of the DNN models -- free expressiveness in width and costly expressiveness in connection. These properties suggest the following architecture design principles of DNNs: (i) feel free to add neurons/kernels; (ii) restrain from connecting neurons. Overall, our optimistic estimate theoretically unveils the vast potential of nonlinear models in fitting at overparameterization. Based on this framework, we anticipate gaining a deeper understanding of how and why numerous nonlinear models such as DNNs can effectively realize their potential in practice in the near future.
IxDRL: A Novel Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning Toolkit based on Analyses of Interestingness
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, advances in deep learning have resulted in a plethora of successes in the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to solve complex sequential decision tasks with high-dimensional inputs. However, existing systems lack the necessary mechanisms to provide humans with a holistic view of their competence, presenting an impediment to their adoption, particularly in critical applications where the decisions an agent makes can have significant consequences. Yet, existing RL-based systems are essentially competency-unaware in that they lack the necessary interpretation mechanisms to allow human operators to have an insightful, holistic view of their competency. Towards more explainable Deep RL (xDRL), we propose a new framework based on analyses of interestingness. Our tool provides various measures of RL agent competence stemming from interestingness analysis and is applicable to a wide range of RL algorithms, natively supporting the popular RLLib toolkit. We showcase the use of our framework by applying the proposed pipeline in a set of scenarios of varying complexity. We empirically assess the capability of the approach in identifying agent behavior patterns and competency-controlling conditions, and the task elements mostly responsible for an agent's competence, based on global and local analyses of interestingness. Overall, we show that our framework can provide agent designers with insights about RL agent competence, both their capabilities and limitations, enabling more informed decisions about interventions, additional training, and other interactions in collaborative human-machine settings.
Multi-stage Neural Networks: Function Approximator of Machine Precision
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning techniques are increasingly applied to scientific problems, where the precision of networks is crucial. Despite being deemed as universal function approximators, neural networks, in practice, struggle to reduce the prediction errors below $O(10^{-5})$ even with large network size and extended training iterations. To address this issue, we developed the multi-stage neural networks that divides the training process into different stages, with each stage using a new network that is optimized to fit the residue from the previous stage. Across successive stages, the residue magnitudes decreases substantially and follows an inverse power-law relationship with the residue frequencies. The multi-stage neural networks effectively mitigate the spectral biases associated with regular neural networks, enabling them to capture the high frequency feature of target functions. We demonstrate that the prediction error from the multi-stage training for both regression problems and physics-informed neural networks can nearly reach the machine-precision $O(10^{-16})$ of double-floating point within a finite number of iterations. Such levels of accuracy are rarely attainable using single neural networks alone.
Mitigating Label Bias via Decoupled Confident Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Growing concerns regarding algorithmic fairness have led to a surge in methodologies to mitigate algorithmic bias. However, such methodologies largely assume that observed labels in training data are correct. This is problematic because bias in labels is pervasive across important domains, including healthcare, hiring, and content moderation. In particular, human-generated labels are prone to encoding societal biases. While the presence of labeling bias has been discussed conceptually, there is a lack of methodologies to address this problem. We propose a pruning method -- Decoupled Confident Learning (DeCoLe) -- specifically designed to mitigate label bias. After illustrating its performance on a synthetic dataset, we apply DeCoLe in the context of hate speech detection, where label bias has been recognized as an important challenge, and show that it successfully identifies biased labels and outperforms competing approaches.
Deep Physics-Guided Unrolling Generalization for Compressed Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

By absorbing the merits of both the model- and data-driven methods, deep physics-engaged learning scheme achieves high-accuracy and interpretable image reconstruction. It has attracted growing attention and become the mainstream for inverse imaging tasks. Focusing on the image compressed sensing (CS) problem, we find the intrinsic defect of this emerging paradigm, widely implemented by deep algorithm-unrolled networks, in which more plain iterations involving real physics will bring enormous computation cost and long inference time, hindering their practical application. A novel deep $\textbf{P}$hysics-guided un$\textbf{R}$olled recovery $\textbf{L}$earning ($\textbf{PRL}$) framework is proposed by generalizing the traditional iterative recovery model from image domain (ID) to the high-dimensional feature domain (FD). A compact multiscale unrolling architecture is then developed to enhance the network capacity and keep real-time inference speeds. Taking two different perspectives of optimization and range-nullspace decomposition, instead of building an algorithm-specific unrolled network, we provide two implementations: $\textbf{PRL-PGD}$ and $\textbf{PRL-RND}$. Experiments exhibit the significant performance and efficiency leading of PRL networks over other state-of-the-art methods with a large potential for further improvement and real application to other inverse imaging problems or optimization models.
Data sharing and ontology use among agricultural genetics, genomics, and breeding databases and resources of the AgBioData Consortium
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Over the last several decades, there has been rapid growth in the number and scope of agricultural genetics, genomics and breeding (GGB) databases and resources. The AgBioData Consortium (https://www.agbiodata.org/) currently represents 44 databases and resources covering model or crop plant and animal GGB data, ontologies, pathways, genetic variation and breeding platforms (referred to as 'databases' throughout). One of the goals of the Consortium is to facilitate FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data management and the integration of datasets which requires data sharing, along with structured vocabularies and/or ontologies. Two AgBioData working groups, focused on Data Sharing and Ontologies, conducted a survey to assess the status and future needs of the members in those areas. A total of 33 researchers responded to the survey, representing 37 databases. Results suggest that data sharing practices by AgBioData databases are in a healthy state, but it is not clear whether this is true for all metadata and data types across all databases; and that ontology use has not substantially changed since a similar survey was conducted in 2017. We recommend 1) providing training for database personnel in specific data sharing techniques, as well as in ontology use; 2) further study on what metadata is shared, and how well it is shared among databases; 3) promoting an understanding of data sharing and ontologies in the stakeholder community; 4) improving data sharing and ontologies for specific phenotypic data types and formats; and 5) lowering specific barriers to data sharing and ontology use, by identifying sustainability solutions, and the identification, promotion, or development of data standards. Combined, these improvements are likely to help AgBioData databases increase development efforts towards improved ontology use, and data sharing via programmatic means.
Development of the ChatGPT, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Natural Large Language Models for Accountable Reporting and Use (CANGARU) Guidelines
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The swift progress and ubiquitous adoption of Generative AI (GAI), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs), and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, have spurred queries about their ethical application, use, and disclosure in scholarly research and scientific productions. A few publishers and journals have recently created their own sets of rules; however, the absence of a unified approach may lead to a 'Babel Tower Effect,' potentially resulting in confusion rather than desired standardization. In response to this, we present the ChatGPT, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Large Language Models for Accountable Reporting and Use Guidelines (CANGARU) initiative, with the aim of fostering a cross-disciplinary global inclusive consensus on the ethical use, disclosure, and proper reporting of GAI/GPT/LLM technologies in academia. The present protocol consists of four distinct parts: a) an ongoing systematic review of GAI/GPT/LLM applications to understand the linked ideas, findings, and reporting standards in scholarly research, and to formulate guidelines for its use and disclosure, b) a bibliometric analysis of existing author guidelines in journals that mention GAI/GPT/LLM, with the goal of evaluating existing guidelines, analyzing the disparity in their recommendations, and identifying common rules that can be brought into the Delphi consensus process, c) a Delphi survey to establish agreement on the items for the guidelines, ensuring principled GAI/GPT/LLM use, disclosure, and reporting in academia, and d) the subsequent development and dissemination of the finalized guidelines and their supplementary explanation and elaboration documents.
On the (In)Effectiveness of Large Language Models for Chinese Text Correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, the development and progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) have amazed the entire Artificial Intelligence community. Benefiting from their emergent abilities, LLMs have attracted more and more researchers to study their capabilities and performance on various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. While marveling at LLMs' incredible performance on all kinds of tasks, we notice that they also have excellent multilingual processing capabilities, such as Chinese. To explore the Chinese processing ability of LLMs, we focus on Chinese Text Correction, a fundamental and challenging Chinese NLP task. Specifically, we evaluate various representative LLMs on the Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) and Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) tasks, which are two main Chinese Text Correction scenarios. Additionally, we also fine-tune LLMs for Chinese Text Correction to better observe the potential capabilities of LLMs. From extensive analyses and comparisons with previous state-of-the-art small models, we empirically find that the LLMs currently have both amazing performance and unsatisfactory behavior for Chinese Text Correction. We believe our findings will promote the landing and application of LLMs in the Chinese NLP community.
ActionPrompt: Action-Guided 3D Human Pose Estimation With Text and Pose Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent 2D-to-3D human pose estimation (HPE) utilizes temporal consistency across sequences to alleviate the depth ambiguity problem but ignore the action related prior knowledge hidden in the pose sequence. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play module named Action Prompt Module (APM) that effectively mines different kinds of action clues for 3D HPE. The highlight is that, the mining scheme of APM can be widely adapted to different frameworks and bring consistent benefits. Specifically, we first present a novel Action-related Text Prompt module (ATP) that directly embeds action labels and transfers the rich language information in the label to the pose sequence. Besides, we further introduce Action-specific Pose Prompt module (APP) to mine the position-aware pose pattern of each action, and exploit the correlation between the mined patterns and input pose sequence for further pose refinement. Experiments show that APM can improve the performance of most video-based 2D-to-3D HPE frameworks by a large margin.
PixelHuman: Animatable Neural Radiance Fields from Few Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose PixelHuman, a novel human rendering model that generates animatable human scenes from a few images of a person with unseen identity, views, and poses. Previous work have demonstrated reasonable performance in novel view and pose synthesis, but they rely on a large number of images to train and are trained per scene from videos, which requires significant amount of time to produce animatable scenes from unseen human images. Our method differs from existing methods in that it can generalize to any input image for animatable human synthesis. Given a random pose sequence, our method synthesizes each target scene using a neural radiance field that is conditioned on a canonical representation and pose-aware pixel-aligned features, both of which can be obtained through deformation fields learned in a data-driven manner. Our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiview and novel pose synthesis from few-shot images.
A Survey on Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, the expert-crafted neural architectures is increasing overtaken by the utilization of neural architecture search (NAS) and automatic generation (and tuning) of network structures which has a close relation to the Hyperparameter Optimization and Auto Machine Learning (AutoML). After the earlier NAS attempts to optimize only the prediction accuracy, Multi-Objective Neural architecture Search (MONAS) has been attracting attentions which considers more goals such as computational complexity, power consumption, and size of the network for optimization, reaching a trade-off between the accuracy and other features like the computational cost. In this paper, we present an overview of principal and state-of-the-art works in the field of MONAS. Starting from a well-categorized taxonomy and formulation for the NAS, we address and correct some miscategorizations in previous surveys of the NAS field. We also provide a list of all known objectives used and add a number of new ones and elaborate their specifications. We have provides analyses about the most important objectives and shown that the stochastic properties of some the them should be differed from deterministic ones in the multi-objective optimization procedure of NAS. We finalize this paper with a number of future directions and topics in the field of MONAS.
Light-Weight Vision Transformer with Parallel Local and Global Self-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

While transformer architectures have dominated computer vision in recent years, these models cannot easily be deployed on hardware with limited resources for autonomous driving tasks that require real-time-performance. Their computational complexity and memory requirements limits their use, especially for applications with high-resolution inputs. In our work, we redesign the powerful state-of-the-art Vision Transformer PLG-ViT to a much more compact and efficient architecture that is suitable for such tasks. We identify computationally expensive blocks in the original PLG-ViT architecture and propose several redesigns aimed at reducing the number of parameters and floating-point operations. As a result of our redesign, we are able to reduce PLG-ViT in size by a factor of 5, with a moderate drop in performance. We propose two variants, optimized for the best trade-off between parameter count to runtime as well as parameter count to accuracy. With only 5 million parameters, we achieve 79.5$\%$ top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-1K classification benchmark. Our networks demonstrate great performance on general vision benchmarks like COCO instance segmentation. In addition, we conduct a series of experiments, demonstrating the potential of our approach in solving various tasks specifically tailored to the challenges of autonomous driving and transportation.