OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
WarpAdam: A new Adam optimizer based on Meta-Learning approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Optimal selection of optimization algorithms is crucial for training deep learning models. The Adam optimizer has gained significant attention due to its efficiency and wide applicability. However, to enhance the adaptability of optimizers across diverse datasets, we propose an innovative optimization strategy by integrating the 'warped gradient descend'concept from Meta Learning into the Adam optimizer. In the conventional Adam optimizer, gradients are utilized to compute estimates of gradient mean and variance, subsequently updating model parameters. Our approach introduces a learnable distortion matrix, denoted as P, which is employed for linearly transforming gradients. This transformation slightly adjusts gradients during each iteration, enabling the optimizer to better adapt to distinct dataset characteristics. By learning an appropriate distortion matrix P, our method aims to adaptively adjust gradient information across different data distributions, thereby enhancing optimization performance. Our research showcases the potential of this novel approach through theoretical insights and empirical evaluations. Experimental results across various tasks and datasets validate the superiority of our optimizer that integrates the 'warped gradient descend' concept in terms of adaptability. Furthermore, we explore effective strategies for training the adaptation matrix P and identify scenarios where this method can yield optimal results. In summary, this study introduces an innovative approach that merges the 'warped gradient descend' concept from Meta Learning with the Adam optimizer. By introducing a learnable distortion matrix P within the optimizer, we aim to enhance the model's generalization capability across diverse data distributions, thus opening up new possibilities in the field of deep learning optimization.
Hermes: Memory-Efficient Pipeline Inference for Large Models on Edge Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The application of Transformer-based large models has achieved numerous success in recent years. However, the exponential growth in the parameters of large models introduces formidable memory challenge for edge deployment. Prior works to address this challenge mainly focus on optimizing the model structure and adopting memory swapping methods. However, the former reduces the inference accuracy, and the latter raises the inference latency. This paper introduces PIPELOAD, a novel memory-efficient pipeline execution mechanism. It reduces memory usage by incorporating dynamic memory management and minimizes inference latency by employing parallel model loading. Based on PIPELOAD mechanism, we present Hermes, a framework optimized for large model inference on edge devices. We evaluate Hermes on Transformer-based models of different sizes. Our experiments illustrate that Hermes achieves up to 4.24 X increase in inference speed and 86.7% lower memory consumption than the state-of-the-art pipeline mechanism for BERT and ViT models, 2.58 X increase in inference speed and 90.3% lower memory consumption for GPT-style models.
Advancing Automated Knowledge Transfer in Evolutionary Multitasking via Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Evolutionary Multi-task Optimization (EMTO) is a paradigm that leverages knowledge transfer across simultaneously optimized tasks for enhanced search performance. To facilitate EMTO's performance, various knowledge transfer models have been developed for specific optimization tasks. However, designing these models often requires substantial expert knowledge. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in autonomous programming, aiming to produce effective solvers for specific problems. In this work, a LLM-based optimization paradigm is introduced to establish an autonomous model factory for generating knowledge transfer models, ensuring effective and efficient knowledge transfer across various optimization tasks. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we conducted comprehensive empirical studies comparing the knowledge transfer model generated by the LLM with existing state-of-the-art knowledge transfer methods. The results demonstrate that the generated model is able to achieve superior or competitive performance against hand-crafted knowledge transfer models in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.
Towards Fine-Grained Webpage Fingerprinting at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Website Fingerprinting (WF) attacks can effectively identify the websites visited by Tor clients via analyzing encrypted traffic patterns. Existing attacks focus on identifying different websites, but their accuracy dramatically decreases when applied to identify fine-grained webpages, especially when distinguishing among different subpages of the same website. WebPage Fingerprinting (WPF) attacks face the challenges of highly similar traffic patterns and a much larger scale of webpages. Furthermore, clients often visit multiple webpages concurrently, increasing the difficulty of extracting the traffic patterns of each webpage from the obfuscated traffic. In this paper, we propose Oscar, a WPF attack based on multi-label metric learning that identifies different webpages from obfuscated traffic by transforming the feature space. Oscar can extract the subtle differences among various webpages, even those with similar traffic patterns. In particular, Oscar combines proxy-based and sample-based metric learning losses to extract webpage features from obfuscated traffic and identify multiple webpages. We prototype Oscar and evaluate its performance using traffic collected from 1,000 monitored webpages and over 9,000 unmonitored webpages in the real world. Oscar demonstrates an 88.6% improvement in the multi-label metric Recall@5 compared to the state-of-the-art attacks.
Empirical Bayesian image restoration by Langevin sampling with a denoising diffusion implicit prior
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Score-based diffusion methods provide a powerful strategy to solve image restoration tasks by flexibly combining a pre-trained foundational prior model with a likelihood function specified during test time. Such methods are predominantly derived from two stochastic processes: reversing Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, which underpins the celebrated denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) and denoising diffusion implicit models (DDIM), and the Langevin diffusion process. The solutions delivered by DDPM and DDIM are often remarkably realistic, but they are not always consistent with measurements because of likelihood intractability issues and the associated required approximations. Alternatively, using a Langevin process circumvents the intractable likelihood issue, but usually leads to restoration results of inferior quality and longer computing times. This paper presents a novel and highly computationally efficient image restoration method that carefully embeds a foundational DDPM denoiser within an empirical Bayesian Langevin algorithm, which jointly calibrates key model hyper-parameters as it estimates the model's posterior mean. Extensive experimental results on three canonical tasks (image deblurring, super-resolution, and inpainting) demonstrate that the proposed approach improves on state-of-the-art strategies both in image estimation accuracy and computing time.
BPE Gets Picky: Efficient Vocabulary Refinement During Tokenizer Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal compression that may affect the downstream performance. We introduce Picky BPE, a modified BPE algorithm that carries out vocabulary refinement during tokenizer training. Our method improves vocabulary efficiency, eliminates under-trained tokens, and does not compromise text compression. Our experiments show that our method does not reduce the downstream performance, and in several cases improves it.
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLM) as a tool in literature reviews: an LLM automated systematic review
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: This study aims to summarize the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the process of creating a scientific review. We look at the range of stages in a review that can be automated and assess the current state-of-the-art research projects in the field. Materials and Methods: The search was conducted in June 2024 in PubMed, Scopus, Dimensions, and Google Scholar databases by human reviewers. Screening and extraction process took place in Covidence with the help of LLM add-on which uses OpenAI gpt-4o model. ChatGPT was used to clean extracted data and generate code for figures in this manuscript, ChatGPT and Scite.ai were used in drafting all components of the manuscript, except the methods and discussion sections. Results: 3,788 articles were retrieved, and 172 studies were deemed eligible for the final review. ChatGPT and GPT-based LLM emerged as the most dominant architecture for review automation (n=126, 73.2%). A significant number of review automation projects were found, but only a limited number of papers (n=26, 15.1%) were actual reviews that used LLM during their creation. Most citations focused on automation of a particular stage of review, such as Searching for publications (n=60, 34.9%), and Data extraction (n=54, 31.4%). When comparing pooled performance of GPT-based and BERT-based models, the former were better in data extraction with mean precision 83.0% (SD=10.4), and recall 86.0% (SD=9.8), while being slightly less accurate in title and abstract screening stage (Maccuracy=77.3%, SD=13.0). Discussion/Conclusion: Our LLM-assisted systematic review revealed a significant number of research projects related to review automation using LLMs. The results looked promising, and we anticipate that LLMs will change in the near future the way the scientific reviews are conducted.
PAIGE: Examining Learning Outcomes and Experiences with Personalized AI-Generated Educational Podcasts
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Generative AI is revolutionizing content creation and has the potential to enable real-time, personalized educational experiences. We investigated the effectiveness of converting textbook chapters into AI-generated podcasts and explored the impact of personalizing these podcasts for individual learner profiles. We conducted a 3x3 user study with 180 college students in the United States, comparing traditional textbook reading with both generalized and personalized AI-generated podcasts across three textbook subjects. The personalized podcasts were tailored to students' majors, interests, and learning styles. Our findings show that students found the AI-generated podcast format to be more enjoyable than textbooks and that personalized podcasts led to significantly improved learning outcomes, although this was subject-specific. These results highlight that AI-generated podcasts can offer an engaging and effective modality transformation of textbook material, with personalization enhancing content relevance. We conclude with design recommendations for leveraging AI in education, informed by student feedback.
The Kubernetes Security Landscape: AI-Driven Insights from Developer Discussions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Kubernetes, the go-to container orchestration solution, has swiftly become the industry standard for managing containers at scale in production environments. Its widespread adoption, particularly in large organizations, has elevated its profile and made it a prime target for security concerns. This study aims to understand how prevalent security concerns are among Kubernetes practitioners by analyzing all Kubernetes posts made on Stack Overflow over the past four years. We gathered security insights from Kubernetes practitioners and transformed the data through machine learning algorithms for cleaning and topic clustering. Subsequently, we used advanced AI tools to automatically generate topic descriptions, thereby reducing the analysis process. In our analysis, security-related posts ranked as the fourth most prevalent topic in these forums, comprising 12.3% of the overall discussions. Furthermore, the findings indicated that although the frequency of security discussions has remained constant, their popularity and influence have experienced significant growth. Kubernetes users consistently prioritize security topics, and the rising popularity of security posts reflects a growing interest and concern for maintaining secure Kubernetes clusters. The findings underscore key security issues that warrant further research and the development of additional tools to resolve them.
Privacy-Preserving Race/Ethnicity Estimation for Algorithmic Bias Measurement in the U.S
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

AI fairness measurements, including tests for equal treatment, often take the form of disaggregated evaluations of AI systems. Such measurements are an important part of Responsible AI operations. These measurements compare system performance across demographic groups or sub-populations and typically require member-level demographic signals such as gender, race, ethnicity, and location. However, sensitive member-level demographic attributes like race and ethnicity can be challenging to obtain and use due to platform choices, legal constraints, and cultural norms. In this paper, we focus on the task of enabling AI fairness measurements on race/ethnicity for \emph{U.S. LinkedIn members} in a privacy-preserving manner. We present the Privacy-Preserving Probabilistic Race/Ethnicity Estimation (PPRE) method for performing this task. PPRE combines the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) model, a sparse LinkedIn survey sample of self-reported demographics, and privacy-enhancing technologies like secure two-party computation and differential privacy to enable meaningful fairness measurements while preserving member privacy. We provide details of the PPRE method and its privacy guarantees. We then illustrate sample measurement operations. We conclude with a review of open research and engineering challenges for expanding our privacy-preserving fairness measurement capabilities.
Algorithmic Scenario Generation as Quality Diversity Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing complexity of robots and autonomous agents that interact with people highlights the critical need for approaches that systematically test them before deployment. This review paper presents a general framework for solving this problem, describes the insights that we have gained from working on each component of the framework, and shows how integrating these components leads to the discovery of a diverse range of realistic and challenging scenarios that reveal previously unknown failures in deployed robotic systems interacting with people.
A Comprehensive Survey on Evidential Deep Learning and Its Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reliable uncertainty estimation has become a crucial requirement for the industrial deployment of deep learning algorithms, particularly in high-risk applications such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. However, mainstream uncertainty estimation methods, based on deep ensembling or Bayesian neural networks, generally impose substantial computational overhead. To address this challenge, a novel paradigm called Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) has emerged, providing reliable uncertainty estimation with minimal additional computation in a single forward pass. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current research on EDL, designed to offer readers a broad introduction to the field without assuming prior knowledge. Specifically, we first delve into the theoretical foundation of EDL, the subjective logic theory, and discuss its distinctions from other uncertainty estimation frameworks. We further present existing theoretical advancements in EDL from four perspectives: reformulating the evidence collection process, improving uncertainty estimation via OOD samples, delving into various training strategies, and evidential regression networks. Thereafter, we elaborate on its extensive applications across various machine learning paradigms and downstream tasks. In the end, an outlook on future directions for better performances and broader adoption of EDL is provided, highlighting potential research avenues.
Maximization of Communication Network Throughput using Dynamic Traffic Allocation Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Optimizing network throughput in real-world dynamic systems is critical, especially for diverse and delay-sensitive multimedia data types such as VoIP and video streaming. Traditional routing protocols, which rely on static metrics and single shortest-path algorithms, were unable in managing this complex information. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that enhances resource utilization while maintaining Quality of Service (QoS). Our dynamic traffic allocation model prioritizes different data types based on their delay sensitivity and allocates traffic by considering factors such as bandwidth, latency, and network failures. This approach is shown to significantly improve network throughput compared to static load balancing, especially for multimedia applications. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of this dynamic method in maximizing network throughput and maintaining QoS across various data types.
Up-sampling-only and Adaptive Mesh-based GNN for Simulating Physical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional simulation of complex mechanical systems relies on numerical solvers of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), e.g., using the Finite Element Method (FEM). The FEM solvers frequently suffer from intensive computation cost and high running time. Recent graph neural network (GNN)-based simulation models can improve running time meanwhile with acceptable accuracy. Unfortunately, they are hard to tailor GNNs for complex mechanical systems, including such disadvantages as ineffective representation and inefficient message propagation (MP). To tackle these issues, in this paper, with the proposed Up-sampling-only and Adaptive MP techniques, we develop a novel hierarchical Mesh Graph Network, namely UA-MGN, for efficient and effective mechanical simulation. Evaluation on two synthetic and one real datasets demonstrates the superiority of the UA-MGN. For example, on the Beam dataset, compared to the state-of-the-art MS-MGN, UA-MGN leads to 40.99% lower errors but using only 43.48% fewer network parameters and 4.49% fewer floating point operations (FLOPs).
Training-Free Style Consistent Image Synthesis with Condition and Mask Guidance in E-Commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generating style-consistent images is a common task in the e-commerce field, and current methods are largely based on diffusion models, which have achieved excellent results. This paper introduces the concept of the QKV (query/key/value) level, referring to modifications in the attention maps (self-attention and cross-attention) when integrating UNet with image conditions. Without disrupting the product's main composition in e-commerce images, we aim to use a train-free method guided by pre-set conditions. This involves using shared KV to enhance similarity in cross-attention and generating mask guidance from the attention map to cleverly direct the generation of style-consistent images. Our method has shown promising results in practical applications.
Untie the Knots: An Efficient Data Augmentation Strategy for Long-Context Pre-Training in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLM) have prioritized expanding the context window from which models can incorporate more information. However, training models to handle long contexts presents significant challenges. These include the scarcity of high-quality natural long-context data, the potential for performance degradation on short-context tasks, and the reduced training efficiency associated with attention mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce Untie the Knots (\textbf{UtK}), a novel data augmentation strategy employed during the continue pre-training phase, designed to efficiently enable LLMs to gain long-context capabilities without the need to modify the existing data mixture. In particular, we chunk the documents, shuffle the chunks, and create a complex and knotted structure of long texts; LLMs are then trained to untie these knots and identify relevant segments within seemingly chaotic token sequences. This approach greatly improves the model's performance by accurately attending to relevant information in long context and the training efficiency is also largely increased. We conduct extensive experiments on models with 7B and 72B parameters, trained on 20 billion tokens, demonstrating that UtK achieves 75\% and 84.5\% accurracy on RULER at 128K context length, significantly outperforming other long context strategies. The trained models will open-source for further research.
HULLMI: Human vs LLM identification with explainability
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

As LLMs become increasingly proficient at producing human-like responses, there has been a rise of academic and industrial pursuits dedicated to flagging a given piece of text as "human" or "AI". Most of these pursuits involve modern NLP detectors like T5-Sentinel and RoBERTa-Sentinel, without paying too much attention to issues of interpretability and explainability of these models. In our study, we provide a comprehensive analysis that shows that traditional ML models (Naive-Bayes,MLP, Random Forests, XGBoost) perform as well as modern NLP detectors, in human vs AI text detection. We achieve this by implementing a robust testing procedure on diverse datasets, including curated corpora and real-world samples. Subsequently, by employing the explainable AI technique LIME, we uncover parts of the input that contribute most to the prediction of each model, providing insights into the detection process. Our study contributes to the growing need for developing production-level LLM detection tools, which can leverage a wide range of traditional as well as modern NLP detectors we propose. Finally, the LIME techniques we demonstrate also have the potential to equip these detection tools with interpretability analysis features, making them more reliable and trustworthy in various domains like education, healthcare, and media.