OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Leaving the barn door open for Clever Hans: Simple features predict LLM benchmark answers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The integrity of AI benchmarks is fundamental to accurately assess the capabilities of AI systems. The internal validity of these benchmarks - i.e., making sure they are free from confounding factors - is crucial for ensuring that they are measuring what they are designed to measure. In this paper, we explore a key issue related to internal validity: the possibility that AI systems can solve benchmarks in unintended ways, bypassing the capability being tested. This phenomenon, widely known in human and animal experiments, is often referred to as the 'Clever Hans' effect, where tasks are solved using spurious cues, often involving much simpler processes than those putatively assessed. Previous research suggests that language models can exhibit this behaviour as well. In several older Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks, individual $n$-grams like "not" have been found to be highly predictive of the correct labels, and supervised NLP models have been shown to exploit these patterns. In this work, we investigate the extent to which simple $n$-grams extracted from benchmark instances can be combined to predict labels in modern multiple-choice benchmarks designed for LLMs, and whether LLMs might be using such $n$-gram patterns to solve these benchmarks. We show how simple classifiers trained on these $n$-grams can achieve high scores on several benchmarks, despite lacking the capabilities being tested. Additionally, we provide evidence that modern LLMs might be using these superficial patterns to solve benchmarks. This suggests that the internal validity of these benchmarks may be compromised and caution should be exercised when interpreting LLM performance results on them.
Generalizable Spacecraft Trajectory Generation via Multimodal Learning with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Effective trajectory generation is essential for reliable on-board spacecraft autonomy. Among other approaches, learning-based warm-starting represents an appealing paradigm for solving the trajectory generation problem, effectively combining the benefits of optimization- and data-driven methods. Current approaches for learning-based trajectory generation often focus on fixed, single-scenario environments, where key scene characteristics, such as obstacle positions or final-time requirements, remain constant across problem instances. However, practical trajectory generation requires the scenario to be frequently reconfigured, making the single-scenario approach a potentially impractical solution. To address this challenge, we present a novel trajectory generation framework that generalizes across diverse problem configurations, by leveraging high-capacity transformer neural networks capable of learning from multimodal data sources. Specifically, our approach integrates transformer-based neural network models into the trajectory optimization process, encoding both scene-level information (e.g., obstacle locations, initial and goal states) and trajectory-level constraints (e.g., time bounds, fuel consumption targets) via multimodal representations. The transformer network then generates near-optimal initial guesses for non-convex optimization problems, significantly enhancing convergence speed and performance. The framework is validated through extensive simulations and real-world experiments on a free-flyer platform, achieving up to 30% cost improvement and 80% reduction in infeasible cases with respect to traditional approaches, and demonstrating robust generalization across diverse scenario variations.
MMFuser: Multimodal Multi-Layer Feature Fuser for Fine-Grained Vision-Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite significant advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for understanding complex human intentions through cross-modal interactions, capturing intricate image details remains challenging. Previous methods integrating multiple vision encoders to enhance visual detail introduce redundancy and computational overhead. We observe that most MLLMs utilize only the last-layer feature map of the vision encoder for visual representation, neglecting the rich fine-grained information in shallow feature maps. To address this issue, we propose \modelname, a simple yet effective multi-layer feature fuser that efficiently integrates deep and shallow features from Vision Transformers (ViTs). Specifically, it leverages semantically aligned deep features as queries to dynamically extract missing details from shallow features, thus preserving semantic alignment while enriching the representation with fine-grained information. Applied to the LLaVA-1.5 model, \modelname~achieves significant improvements in visual representation and benchmark performance, providing a more flexible and lightweight solution compared to multi-encoder ensemble methods. The code and model have been released at https://github.com/yuecao0119/MMFuser.
A Robust Multisource Remote Sensing Image Matching Method Utilizing Attention and Feature Enhancement Against Noise Interference
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image matching is a fundamental and critical task of multisource remote sensing image applications. However, remote sensing images are susceptible to various noises. Accordingly, how to effectively achieve accurate matching in noise images is a challenging problem. To solve this issue, we propose a robust multisource remote sensing image matching method utilizing attention and feature enhancement against noise interference. In the first stage, we combine deep convolution with the attention mechanism of transformer to perform dense feature extraction, constructing feature descriptors with higher discriminability and robustness. Subsequently, we employ a coarse-to-fine matching strategy to achieve dense matches. In the second stage, we introduce an outlier removal network based on a binary classification mechanism, which can establish effective and geometrically consistent correspondences between images; through weighting for each correspondence, inliers vs. outliers classification are performed, as well as removing outliers from dense matches. Ultimately, we can accomplish more efficient and accurate matches. To validate the performance of the proposed method, we conduct experiments using multisource remote sensing image datasets for comparison with other state-of-the-art methods under different scenarios, including noise-free, additive random noise, and periodic stripe noise. Comparative results indicate that the proposed method has a more well-balanced performance and robustness. The proposed method contributes a valuable reference for solving the difficult problem of noise image matching.
Investigating Role of Big Five Personality Traits in Audio-Visual Rapport Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic rapport estimation in social interactions is a central component of affective computing. Recent reports have shown that the estimation performance of rapport in initial interactions can be improved by using the participant's personality traits as the model's input. In this study, we investigate whether this findings applies to interactions between friends by developing rapport estimation models that utilize nonverbal cues (audio and facial expressions) as inputs. Our experimental results show that adding Big Five features (BFFs) to nonverbal features can improve the estimation performance of self-reported rapport in dyadic interactions between friends. Next, we demystify how BFFs improve the estimation performance of rapport through a comparative analysis between models with and without BFFs. We decompose rapport ratings into perceiver effects (people's tendency to rate other people), target effects (people's tendency to be rated by other people), and relationship effects (people's unique ratings for a specific person) using the social relations model. We then analyze the extent to which BFFs contribute to capturing each effect. Our analysis demonstrates that the perceiver's and the target's BFFs lead estimation models to capture the perceiver and the target effects, respectively. Furthermore, our experimental results indicate that the combinations of facial expression features and BFFs achieve best estimation performances not only in estimating rapport ratings, but also in estimating three effects. Our study is the first step toward understanding why personality-aware estimation models of interpersonal perception accomplish high estimation performance.
Towards using Reinforcement Learning for Scaling and Data Replication in Cloud Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Given its intuitive nature, many Cloud providers opt for threshold-based data replication to enable automatic resource scaling. However, setting thresholds effectively needs human intervention to calibrate thresholds for each metric and requires a deep knowledge of current workload trends, which can be challenging to achieve. Reinforcement learning is used in many areas related to the Cloud Computing, and it is a promising field to get automatic data replication strategies. In this work, we survey data replication strategies and data scaling based on reinforcement learning (RL).
ChatVis: Automating Scientific Visualization with a Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

We develop an iterative assistant we call ChatVis that can synthetically generate Python scripts for data analysis and visualization using a large language model (LLM). The assistant allows a user to specify the operations in natural language, attempting to generate a Python script for the desired operations, prompting the LLM to revise the script as needed until it executes correctly. The iterations include an error detection and correction mechanism that extracts error messages from the execution of the script and subsequently prompts LLM to correct the error. Our method demonstrates correct execution on five canonical visualization scenarios, comparing results with ground truth. We also compared our results with scripts generated by several other LLMs without any assistance. In every instance, ChatVis successfully generated the correct script, whereas the unassisted LLMs failed to do so. The code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/tanwimallick/ChatVis/.
Shifting the Human-AI Relationship: Toward a Dynamic Relational Learning-Partner Model
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, the current paradigm of treating AI as a passive tool no longer suffices. As a human-AI team, we together advocate for a shift toward viewing AI as a learning partner, akin to a student who learns from interactions with humans. Drawing from interdisciplinary concepts such as ecorithms, order from chaos, and cooperation, we explore how AI can evolve and adapt in unpredictable environments. Arising from these brief explorations, we present two key recommendations: (1) foster ethical, cooperative treatment of AI to benefit both humans and AI, and (2) leverage the inherent heterogeneity between human and AI minds to create a synergistic hybrid intelligence. By reframing AI as a dynamic partner, a model emerges in which AI systems develop alongside humans, learning from human interactions and feedback loops including reflections on team conversations. Drawing from a transpersonal and interdependent approach to consciousness, we suggest that a "third mind" emerges through collaborative human-AI relationships. Through design interventions such as interactive learning and conversational debriefing and foundational interventions allowing AI to model multiple types of minds, we hope to provide a path toward more adaptive, ethical, and emotionally healthy human-AI relationships. We believe this dynamic relational learning-partner (DRLP) model for human-AI teaming, if enacted carefully, will improve our capacity to address powerful solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
A Scalable Communication Protocol for Networks of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Communication is a prerequisite for collaboration. When scaling networks of AI-powered agents, communication must be versatile, efficient, and portable. These requisites, which we refer to as the Agent Communication Trilemma, are hard to achieve in large networks of agents. We introduce Agora, a meta protocol that leverages existing communication standards to make LLM-powered agents solve complex problems efficiently. In Agora, agents typically use standardised routines for frequent communications, natural language for rare communications, and LLM-written routines for everything in between. Agora sidesteps the Agent Communication Trilemma and robustly handles changes in interfaces and members, allowing unprecedented scalability with full decentralisation and minimal involvement of human beings. On large Agora networks, we observe the emergence of self-organising, fully automated protocols that achieve complex goals without human intervention.
The Fair Language Model Paradox
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet little is known about their training dynamics at the token level. Evaluation typically relies on aggregated training loss, measured at the batch level, which overlooks subtle per-token biases arising from (i) varying token-level dynamics and (ii) structural biases introduced by hyperparameters. While weight decay is commonly used to stabilize training, we reveal that it silently introduces performance biases detectable only at the token level. In fact, we empirically show across different dataset sizes, model architectures and sizes ranging from 270M to 3B parameters that as weight decay increases, low-frequency tokens are disproportionately depreciated. This is particularly concerning, as these neglected low-frequency tokens represent the vast majority of the token distribution in most languages, calling for novel regularization techniques that ensure fairness across all available tokens.
From promise to practice: realizing high-performance decentralized training
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Decentralized training of deep neural networks has attracted significant attention for its theoretically superior scalability over synchronous data-parallel methods like All-Reduce. However, realizing this potential in multi-node training is challenging due to the complex design space that involves communication topologies, computation patterns, and optimization algorithms. This paper identifies three key factors that can lead to speedups over All-Reduce training and constructs a runtime model to determine when, how, and to what degree decentralization can yield shorter per-iteration runtimes. Furthermore, to support the decentralized training of transformer-based models, we study a decentralized Adam algorithm that allows for overlapping communications and computations, prove its convergence, and propose an accumulation technique to mitigate the high variance caused by small local batch sizes. We deploy the proposed approach in clusters with up to 64 GPUs and demonstrate its practicality and advantages in both runtime and generalization performance under a fixed iteration budget.
On Classification with Large Language Models in Cultural Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we survey the way in which classification is used as a sensemaking practice in cultural analytics, and assess where large language models can fit into this landscape. We identify ten tasks supported by publicly available datasets on which we empirically assess the performance of LLMs compared to traditional supervised methods, and explore the ways in which LLMs can be employed for sensemaking goals beyond mere accuracy. We find that prompt-based LLMs are competitive with traditional supervised models for established tasks, but perform less well on de novo tasks. In addition, LLMs can assist sensemaking by acting as an intermediary input to formal theory testing.
A Survey on Deep Tabular Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Tabular data, widely used in industries like healthcare, finance, and transportation, presents unique challenges for deep learning due to its heterogeneous nature and lack of spatial structure. This survey reviews the evolution of deep learning models for tabular data, from early fully connected networks (FCNs) to advanced architectures like TabNet, SAINT, TabTranSELU, and MambaNet. These models incorporate attention mechanisms, feature embeddings, and hybrid architectures to address tabular data complexities. TabNet uses sequential attention for instance-wise feature selection, improving interpretability, while SAINT combines self-attention and intersample attention to capture complex interactions across features and data points, both advancing scalability and reducing computational overhead. Hybrid architectures such as TabTransformer and FT-Transformer integrate attention mechanisms with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to handle categorical and numerical data, with FT-Transformer adapting transformers for tabular datasets. Research continues to balance performance and efficiency for large datasets. Graph-based models like GNN4TDL and GANDALF combine neural networks with decision trees or graph structures, enhancing feature representation and mitigating overfitting in small datasets through advanced regularization techniques. Diffusion-based models like the Tabular Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (TabDDPM) generate synthetic data to address data scarcity, improving model robustness. Similarly, models like TabPFN and Ptab leverage pre-trained language models, incorporating transfer learning and self-supervised techniques into tabular tasks. This survey highlights key advancements and outlines future research directions on scalability, generalization, and interpretability in diverse tabular data applications.
Skill-LLM: Repurposing General-Purpose LLMs for Skill Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate skill extraction from job descriptions is crucial in the hiring process but remains challenging. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a common approach used to address this issue. With the demonstrated success of large language models (LLMs) in various NLP tasks, including NER, we propose fine-tuning a specialized Skill-LLM and a light weight model to improve the precision and quality of skill extraction. In our study, we evaluated the fine-tuned Skill-LLM and the light weight model using a benchmark dataset and compared its performance against state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our results show that this approach outperforms existing SOTA techniques.
SOE: SO(3)-Equivariant 3D MRI Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Representation learning has become increasingly important, especially as powerful models have shifted towards learning latent representations before fine-tuning for downstream tasks. This approach is particularly valuable in leveraging the structural information within brain anatomy. However, a common limitation of recent models developed for MRIs is their tendency to ignore or remove geometric information, such as translation and rotation, thereby creating invariance with respect to geometric operations. We contend that incorporating knowledge about these geometric transformations into the model can significantly enhance its ability to learn more detailed anatomical information within brain structures. As a result, we propose a novel method for encoding 3D MRIs that enforces equivariance with respect to all rotations in 3D space, in other words, SO(3)-equivariance (SOE). By explicitly modeling this geometric equivariance in the representation space, we ensure that any rotational operation applied to the input image space is also reflected in the embedding representation space. This approach requires moving beyond traditional representation learning methods, as we need a representation vector space that allows for the application of the same SO(3) operation in that space. To facilitate this, we leverage the concept of vector neurons. The representation space formed by our method captures the brain's structural and anatomical information more effectively. We evaluate SOE pretrained on the structural MRIs of two public data sets with respect to the downstream task of predicting age and diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease from T1-weighted brain scans of the ADNI data set. We demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms other methods but is also robust against various degrees of rotation along different axes. The code is available at https://github.com/shizhehe/SOE-representation-learning.
Utilizing Spatiotemporal Data Analytics to Pinpoint Outage Location
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding the exact fault location in the post-event analysis is the key to improving the accuracy of outage management. Unfortunately, the fault location is not generally well documented during the restoration process, creating a big challenge for post-event analysis. By utilizing various data source systems, including outage management system (OMS) data, asset geospatial information system (GIS) data, and vehicle location data, this paper creates a novel method to pinpoint the outage location accurately to create additional insights for distribution operations and performance teams during the post-event analysis.
Drawing Planar Graphs and 1-Planar Graphs Using Cubic Bézier Curves with Bounded Curvature
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

We study algorithms for drawing planar graphs and 1-planar graphs using cubic Bézier curves with bounded curvature. We show that any n-vertex 1-planar graph has a 1-planar RAC drawing using a single cubic Bézier curve per edge, and this drawing can be computed in $O(n)$ time given a combinatorial 1-planar drawing. We also show that any n-vertex planar graph G can be drawn in $O(n)$ time with a single cubic Bézier curve per edge, in an $O(n)\times O(n)$ bounding box, such that the edges have $Θ(1/degree(v))$ angular resolution, for each $v \in G$, and $O(\sqrt{n})$ curvature.
A Software Engineering Capstone Course Facilitated By GitHub Templates
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

How can instructors facilitate spreading out the work in a software engineering or computer science capstone course across time and among team members? Currently teams often compromise the quality of their learning experience by frantically working before each deliverable. Some team members further compromise their own learning, and that of their colleagues, by not contributing their fair share to the team effort. To mitigate these problems, we propose using a GitHub template that contains all the initial infrastructure a team needs, including the folder structure, text-based template documents and template issues. In addition, we propose each team begins the year by identifying specific quantifiable individual productivity metrics for monitoring, such as the count of meetings attended, issues closed and number of commits. Initial data suggests that these steps may have an impact. In 2022/23 we observed 24% of commits happening on the due dates. After partially introducing the above ideas in 2023/24, this number improved to 18%. To measure the fairness we introduce a fairness measure based on the disparity between number of commits between all pairs of teammates. Going forward we propose an experiment where commit data and interview data is compared between teams that use the proposed interventions and those that do not.