OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DiDOTS: Knowledge Distillation from Large-Language-Models for Dementia Obfuscation in Transcribed Speech
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Dementia is a sensitive neurocognitive disorder affecting tens of millions of people worldwide and its cases are expected to triple by 2050. Alarmingly, recent advancements in dementia classification make it possible for adversaries to violate affected individuals' privacy and infer their sensitive condition from speech transcriptions. Existing obfuscation methods in text have never been applied for dementia and depend on the availability of large labeled datasets which are challenging to collect for sensitive medical attributes. In this work, we bridge this research gap and tackle the above issues by leveraging Large-Language-Models (LLMs) with diverse prompt designs (zero-shot, few-shot, and knowledge-based) to obfuscate dementia in speech transcripts. Our evaluation shows that LLMs are more effective dementia obfuscators compared to competing methods. However, they have billions of parameters which renders them hard to train, store and share, and they are also fragile suffering from hallucination, refusal and contradiction effects among others. To further mitigate these, we propose a novel method, DiDOTS. DiDOTS distills knowledge from LLMs using a teacher-student paradigm and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. DiDOTS has one order of magnitude fewer parameters compared to its teacher LLM and can be fine-tuned using three orders of magnitude less parameters compared to full fine-tuning. Our evaluation shows that compared to prior work DiDOTS retains the performance of LLMs achieving 1.3x and 2.2x improvement in privacy performance on two datasets, while humans rate it as better in preserving utility even when compared to state-of-the-art paraphrasing models.
CS4: Measuring the Creativity of Large Language Models Automatically by Controlling the Number of Story-Writing Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Evaluating the creativity of large language models (LLMs) in story writing is difficult because LLM-generated stories could seemingly look creative but be very similar to some existing stories in their huge and proprietary training corpus. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel benchmark dataset with varying levels of prompt specificity: CS4 ($\mathbf{C}$omparing the $\mathbf{S}$kill of $\mathbf{C}$reating $\mathbf{S}$tories by $\mathbf{C}$ontrolling the $\mathbf{S}$ynthesized $\mathbf{C}$onstraint $\mathbf{S}$pecificity). By increasing the number of requirements/constraints in the prompt, we can increase the prompt specificity and hinder LLMs from retelling high-quality narratives in their training data. Consequently, CS4 empowers us to indirectly measure the LLMs' creativity without human annotations. Our experiments on LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral not only highlight the creativity challenges LLMs face when dealing with highly specific prompts but also reveal that different LLMs perform very differently under different numbers of constraints and achieve different balances between the model's instruction-following ability and narrative coherence. Additionally, our experiments on OLMo suggest that Learning from Human Feedback (LHF) can help LLMs select better stories from their training data but has limited influence in boosting LLMs' ability to produce creative stories that are unseen in the training corpora. The benchmark is released at https://github.com/anirudhlakkaraju/cs4_benchmark.
Assessing the Impact of Disorganized Background Noise on Timed Stress Task Performance Through Attention Using Machine-Learning Based Eye-Tracking Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Noise pollution has been rising alongside urbanization. Literature shows that disorganized background noise decreases attention. Timed testing, an attention-demanding stress task, has become increasingly important in assessing students' academic performance. However, there is insufficient research on how background noise affects performance in timed stress tasks by impacting attention, which this study aims to address. The paper-based SAT math test under increased time pressure was administered twice: once in silence and once with conversational and traffic background noise. Attention is negatively attributed to increasing blink rate, measured using eye landmarks from dLib's machine-learning facial-detection model. First, the study affirms that background noise detriments attention and performance. Attention, through blink rate, is established as an indicator of stress task performance. Second, the study finds that participants whose blink rates increased due to background noise differed in performance compared to those whose blink rates decreased, possibly correlating with their self-perception of noise's impact on attention. Third, using a case study, the study finds that a student with ADHD had enhanced performance and attention from background noise. Fourth, the study finds that although both groups began with similar blink rates, the group exposed to noise had significantly increased blink rate near the end, indicating that noise reduces attention over time. While schools can generally provide quiet settings for timed stress tasks, the study recommends personalized treatments for students based on how noise affects them. Future research can use different attention indices to consolidate this study's findings or conduct this study with different background noises.
Multimodal Large Language Models for Inverse Molecular Design with Retrosynthetic Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

While large language models (LLMs) have integrated images, adapting them to graphs remains challenging, limiting their applications in materials and drug design. This difficulty stems from the need for coherent autoregressive generation across texts and graphs. To address this, we introduce Llamole, the first multimodal LLM capable of interleaved text and graph generation, enabling molecular inverse design with retrosynthetic planning. Llamole integrates a base LLM with the Graph Diffusion Transformer and Graph Neural Networks for multi-conditional molecular generation and reaction inference within texts, while the LLM, with enhanced molecular understanding, flexibly controls activation among the different graph modules. Additionally, Llamole integrates A* search with LLM-based cost functions for efficient retrosynthetic planning. We create benchmarking datasets and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate Llamole against in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Llamole significantly outperforms 14 adapted LLMs across 12 metrics for controllable molecular design and retrosynthetic planning.
Overview of Factify5WQA: Fact Verification through 5W Question-Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Researchers have found that fake news spreads much times faster than real news. This is a major problem, especially in today's world where social media is the key source of news for many among the younger population. Fact verification, thus, becomes an important task and many media sites contribute to the cause. Manual fact verification is a tedious task, given the volume of fake news online. The Factify5WQA shared task aims to increase research towards automated fake news detection by providing a dataset with an aspect-based question answering based fact verification method. Each claim and its supporting document is associated with 5W questions that help compare the two information sources. The objective performance measure in the task is done by comparing answers using BLEU score to measure the accuracy of the answers, followed by an accuracy measure of the classification. The task had submissions using custom training setup and pre-trained language-models among others. The best performing team posted an accuracy of 69.56%, which is a near 35% improvement over the baseline.
Persona Knowledge-Aligned Prompt Tuning Method for Online Debate
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Debate is the process of exchanging viewpoints or convincing others on a particular issue. Recent research has provided empirical evidence that the persuasiveness of an argument is determined not only by language usage but also by communicator characteristics. Researchers have paid much attention to aspects of languages, such as linguistic features and discourse structures, but combining argument persuasiveness and impact with the social personae of the audience has not been explored due to the difficulty and complexity. We have observed the impressive simulation and personification capability of ChatGPT, indicating a giant pre-trained language model may function as an individual to provide personae and exert unique influences based on diverse background knowledge. Therefore, we propose a persona knowledge-aligned framework for argument quality assessment tasks from the audience side. This is the first work that leverages the emergence of ChatGPT and injects such audience personae knowledge into smaller language models via prompt tuning. The performance of our pipeline demonstrates significant and consistent improvement compared to competitive architectures.
Enhancing Future Link Prediction in Quantum Computing Semantic Networks through LLM-Initiated Node Features
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Quantum computing is rapidly evolving in both physics and computer science, offering the potential to solve complex problems and accelerate computational processes. The development of quantum chips necessitates understanding the correlations among diverse experimental conditions. Semantic networks built on scientific literature, representing meaningful relationships between concepts, have been used across various domains to identify knowledge gaps and novel concept combinations. Neural network-based approaches have shown promise in link prediction within these networks. This study proposes initializing node features using LLMs to enhance node representations for link prediction tasks in graph neural networks. LLMs can provide rich descriptions, reducing the need for manual feature creation and lowering costs. Our method, evaluated using various link prediction models on a quantum computing semantic network, demonstrated efficacy compared to traditional node embedding techniques.
Implicit to Explicit Entropy Regularization: Benchmarking ViT Fine-tuning under Noisy Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic annotation of large-scale datasets can introduce noisy training data labels, which adversely affect the learning process of deep neural networks (DNNs). Consequently, Noisy Labels Learning (NLL) has become a critical research field for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), though it remains less explored for Vision Transformers (ViTs). In this study, we evaluate the vulnerability of ViT fine-tuning to noisy labels and compare its robustness with CNNs. We also investigate whether NLL methods developed for CNNs are equally effective for ViTs. Using linear probing and MLP-K fine-tuning, we benchmark two ViT backbones (ViT-B/16 and ViT-L/16) using three commonly used classification losses: Cross Entropy (CE), Focal Loss (FL), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE), alongside six robust NLL methods: GCE, SCE, NLNL, APL, NCE+AGCE, and ANL-CE. The evaluation is conducted across six datasets including MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, WebVision, Clothing1M, and Food-101N. Furthermore, we explore whether implicit prediction entropy minimization contributes to ViT robustness against noisy labels, noting a general trend of prediction entropy reduction across most NLL methods. Building on this observation, we examine whether explicit entropy minimization could enhance ViT resilience to noisy labels. Our findings indicate that incorporating entropy regularization enhances the performance of established loss functions such as CE and FL, as well as the robustness of the six studied NLL methods across both ViT backbones.
Compositional Diffusion Models for Powered Descent Trajectory Generation with Flexible Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This work introduces TrajDiffuser, a compositional diffusion-based flexible and concurrent trajectory generator for 6 degrees of freedom powered descent guidance. TrajDiffuser is a statistical model that learns the multi-modal distributions of a dataset of simulated optimal trajectories, each subject to only one or few constraints that may vary for different trajectories. During inference, the trajectory is generated simultaneously over time, providing stable long-horizon planning, and constraints can be composed together, increasing the model's generalizability and decreasing the training data required. The generated trajectory is then used to initialize an optimizer, increasing its robustness and speed.
Evaluating Language Model Character Traits
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models (LMs) can exhibit human-like behaviour, but it is unclear how to describe this behaviour without undue anthropomorphism. We formalise a behaviourist view of LM character traits: qualities such as truthfulness, sycophancy, or coherent beliefs and intentions, which may manifest as consistent patterns of behaviour. Our theory is grounded in empirical demonstrations of LMs exhibiting different character traits, such as accurate and logically coherent beliefs, and helpful and harmless intentions. We find that the consistency with which LMs exhibit certain character traits varies with model size, fine-tuning, and prompting. In addition to characterising LM character traits, we evaluate how these traits develop over the course of an interaction. We find that traits such as truthfulness and harmfulness can be stationary, i.e., consistent over an interaction, in certain contexts, but may be reflective in different contexts, meaning they mirror the LM's behavior in the preceding interaction. Our formalism enables us to describe LM behaviour precisely in intuitive language, without undue anthropomorphism.
The Visualization JUDGE : Can Multimodal Foundation Models Guide Visualization Design Through Visual Perception?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Foundation models for vision and language are the basis of AI applications across numerous sectors of society. The success of these models stems from their ability to mimic human capabilities, namely visual perception in vision models, and analytical reasoning in large language models. As visual perception and analysis are fundamental to data visualization, in this position paper we ask: how can we harness foundation models to advance progress in visualization design? Specifically, how can multimodal foundation models (MFMs) guide visualization design through visual perception? We approach these questions by investigating the effectiveness of MFMs for perceiving visualization, and formalizing the overall visualization design and optimization space. Specifically, we think that MFMs can best be viewed as judges, equipped with the ability to criticize visualizations, and provide us with actions on how to improve a visualization. We provide a deeper characterization for text-to-image generative models, and multi-modal large language models, organized by what these models provide as output, and how to utilize the output for guiding design decisions. We hope that our perspective can inspire researchers in visualization on how to approach MFMs for visualization design.
Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection in the Wild: Favor Joint Embeddings Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate anomaly detection is critical in vision-based infrastructure inspection, where it helps prevent costly failures and enhances safety. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) offers a promising approach by learning robust representations from unlabeled data. However, its application in anomaly detection remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive evaluation of SSL methods for real-world anomaly detection, focusing on sewer infrastructure. Using the Sewer-ML dataset, we evaluate lightweight models such as ViT-Tiny and ResNet-18 across SSL frameworks, including BYOL, Barlow Twins, SimCLR, DINO, and MAE, under varying class imbalance levels. Through 250 experiments, we rigorously assess the performance of these SSL methods to ensure a robust and comprehensive evaluation. Our findings highlight the superiority of joint-embedding methods like SimCLR and Barlow Twins over reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE, which struggle to maintain performance under class imbalance. Furthermore, we find that the SSL model choice is more critical than the backbone architecture. Additionally, we emphasize the need for better label-free assessments of SSL representations, as current methods like RankMe fail to adequately evaluate representation quality, making cross-validation without labels infeasible. Despite the remaining performance gap between SSL and supervised models, these findings highlight the potential of SSL to enhance anomaly detection, paving the way for further research in this underexplored area of SSL applications.
Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment Method for ADAS and Connected and Automated Driving Function Development/Demonstration/Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The current approach for new Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) and Connected and Automated Driving (CAD) function development involves a significant amount of public road testing which is inefficient due to the number miles that need to be driven for rare and extreme events to take place, thereby being very costly also, and unsafe as the rest of the road users become involuntary test subjects. A new development, evaluation and demonstration method for safe, efficient, and repeatable development, demonstration and evaluation of ADAS and CAD functions called VehicleInVirtualEnvironment (VVE) was recently introduced as a solution to this problem. The vehicle is operated in a large, empty, and flat area during VVE while its localization and perception sensor data is fed from the virtual environment with other traffic and rare and extreme events being generated as needed. The virtual environment can be easily configured and modified to construct different testing scenarios on demand. This paper focuses on the VVE approach and introduces the coordinate transformations needed to sync pose (location and orientation) in the virtual and physical worlds and handling of localization and perception sensor data using the highly realistic 3D simulation model of a recent autonomous shuttle deployment site in Columbus, Ohio as the virtual world. As a further example that uses multiple actors, the use of VVE for VehicleToVRU communication based Vulnerable Road User (VRU) safety is presented in the paper using VVE experiments and real pedestrian(s) in a safe and repeatable manner. VVE experiments are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the method.
Gradient Routing: Masking Gradients to Localize Computation in Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks are trained primarily based on their inputs and outputs, without regard for their internal mechanisms. These neglected mechanisms determine properties that are critical for safety, like (i) transparency; (ii) the absence of sensitive information or harmful capabilities; and (iii) reliable generalization of goals beyond the training distribution. To address this shortcoming, we introduce gradient routing, a training method that isolates capabilities to specific subregions of a neural network. Gradient routing applies data-dependent, weighted masks to gradients during backpropagation. These masks are supplied by the user in order to configure which parameters are updated by which data points. We show that gradient routing can be used to (1) learn representations which are partitioned in an interpretable way; (2) enable robust unlearning via ablation of a pre-specified network subregion; and (3) achieve scalable oversight of a reinforcement learner by localizing modules responsible for different behaviors. Throughout, we find that gradient routing localizes capabilities even when applied to a limited, ad-hoc subset of the data. We conclude that the approach holds promise for challenging, real-world applications where quality data are scarce.
Accelerating Inference of Networks in the Frequency Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

It has been demonstrated that networks' parameters can be significantly reduced in the frequency domain with a very small decrease in accuracy. However, given the cost of frequency transforms, the computational complexity is not significantly decreased. In this work, we propose performing network inference in the frequency domain to speed up networks whose frequency parameters are sparse. In particular, we propose a frequency inference chain that is dual to the network inference in the spatial domain. In order to handle the non-linear layers, we make a compromise to apply non-linear operations on frequency data directly, which works effectively. Enabled by the frequency inference chain and the strategy for non-linear layers, the proposed approach completes the entire inference in the frequency domain. Unlike previous approaches which require extra frequency or inverse transforms for all layers, the proposed approach only needs the frequency transform and its inverse once at the beginning and once at the end of a network. Comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves accuracy in the case of a high speedup ratio (over 100x). The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/guanfangdong/FreqNet-Infer}.
Latent Feature Mining for Predictive Model Enhancement with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Predictive modeling often faces challenges due to limited data availability and quality, especially in domains where collected features are weakly correlated with outcomes and where additional feature collection is constrained by ethical or practical difficulties. Traditional machine learning (ML) models struggle to incorporate unobserved yet critical factors. In this work, we introduce an effective approach to formulate latent feature mining as text-to-text propositional logical reasoning. We propose FLAME (Faithful Latent Feature Mining for Predictive Model Enhancement), a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to augment observed features with latent features and enhance the predictive power of ML models in downstream tasks. Our framework is generalizable across various domains with necessary domain-specific adaptation, as it is designed to incorporate contextual information unique to each area, ensuring effective transfer to different areas facing similar data availability challenges. We validate our framework with two case studies: (1) the criminal justice system, a domain characterized by limited and ethically challenging data collection; (2) the healthcare domain, where patient privacy concerns and the complexity of medical data limit comprehensive feature collection. Our results show that inferred latent features align well with ground truth labels and significantly enhance the downstream classifier.
HyperBlocker: Accelerating Rule-based Blocking in Entity Resolution using GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

This paper studies rule-based blocking in Entity Resolution (ER). We propose HyperBlocker, a GPU-accelerated system for blocking in ER. As opposed to previous blocking algorithms and parallel blocking solvers, HyperBlocker employs a pipelined architecture to overlap data transfer and GPU operations. It generates a dataaware and rule-aware execution plan on CPUs, for specifying how rules are evaluated, and develops a number of hardware-aware optimizations to achieve massive parallelism on GPUs. Using reallife datasets, we show that HyperBlocker is at least 6.8x and 9.1x faster than prior CPU-powered distributed systems and GPU-based ER solvers, respectively. Better still, by combining HyperBlocker with the state-of-the-art ER matcher, we can speed up the overall ER process by at least 30% with comparable accuracy.