OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Adversarial Example for Direct Logit Attribution: Memory Management in GELU-4L
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Prior work suggests that language models manage the limited bandwidth of the residual stream through a "memory management" mechanism, where certain attention heads and MLP layers clear residual stream directions set by earlier layers. Our study provides concrete evidence for this erasure phenomenon in a 4-layer transformer, identifying heads that consistently remove the output of earlier heads. We further demonstrate that direct logit attribution (DLA), a common technique for interpreting the output of intermediate transformer layers, can show misleading results by not accounting for erasure.
Computing approximate roots of monotone functions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Given a function f: [a,b] -> R, if f(a) < 0 and f(b)> 0 and f is continuous, the Intermediate Value Theorem implies that f has a root in [a,b]. Moreover, given a value-oracle for f, an approximate root of f can be computed using the bisection method, and the number of required evaluations is polynomial in the number of accuracy digits. The goal of this note is to identify conditions under which this polynomiality result extends to a multi-dimensional function that satisfies the conditions of Miranda's theorem -- the natural multi-dimensional extension of the Intermediate Value Theorem. In general, finding an approximate root might require an exponential number of evaluations even for a two-dimensional function. We show that, if f is two-dimensional and satisfies a single monotonicity condition, then the number of required evaluations is polynomial in the accuracy. For any fixed dimension d, if f is a d-dimensional function that satisfies all d^2-d ``ex-diagonal'' monotonicity conditions (that is, component i of f is monotonically decreasing with respect to variable j for all i!=j), then the number of required evaluations is polynomial in the accuracy. But if f satisfies only d^2-d-2 ex-diagonal conditions, then the number of required evaluations may be exponential in the accuracy. The case of d^2-d-1 ex-diagonal conditions remains unsolved. As an example application, we show that computing approximate roots of monotone functions can be used for approximate envy-free cake-cutting.
IMITATE: Clinical Prior Guided Hierarchical Vision-Language Pre-training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of medical Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP), significant efforts have been devoted to deriving text and image features from both clinical reports and associated medical images. However, most existing methods may have overlooked the opportunity in leveraging the inherent hierarchical structure of clinical reports, which are generally split into `findings' for descriptive content and `impressions' for conclusive observation. Instead of utilizing this rich, structured format, current medical VLP approaches often simplify the report into either a unified entity or fragmented tokens. In this work, we propose a novel clinical prior guided VLP framework named IMITATE to learn the structure information from medical reports with hierarchical vision-language alignment. The framework derives multi-level visual features from the chest X-ray (CXR) images and separately aligns these features with the descriptive and the conclusive text encoded in the hierarchical medical report. Furthermore, a new clinical-informed contrastive loss is introduced for cross-modal learning, which accounts for clinical prior knowledge in formulating sample correlations in contrastive learning. The proposed model, IMITATE, outperforms baseline VLP methods across six different datasets, spanning five medical imaging downstream tasks. Comprehensive experimental results highlight the advantages of integrating the hierarchical structure of medical reports for vision-language alignment. The code related to this paper is available at https://github.com/cheliu-computation/IMITATE-TMI2024.
Algorithmic study on liar's vertex-edge domination problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a graph. For an edge $e=xy\in E$, the closed neighbourhood of $e$, denoted by $N_G[e]$ or $N_G[xy]$, is the set $N_G[x]\cup N_G[y]$. A vertex set $L\subseteq V$ is liar's vertex-edge dominating set of a graph $G=(V,E)$ if for every $e_i\in E$, $|N_G[e_i]\cap L|\geq 2$ and for every pair of distinct edges $e_i$ and $e_j$, $|(N_G[e_i]\cup N_G[e_j])\cap L|\geq 3$. This paper introduces the notion of liar's vertex-edge domination which arises naturally from some applications in communication networks. Given a graph $G$, the \textsc{Minimum Liar's Vertex-Edge Domination Problem} (\textsc{MinLVEDP}) asks to find a liar's vertex-edge dominating set of $G$ of minimum cardinality. In this paper, we study this problem from algorithmic point of view. We show that \textsc{MinLVEDP} can be solved in linear time for trees, whereas the decision version of this problem is NP-complete for chordal graphs, bipartite graphs, and $p$-claw free graphs for $p\geq 4$. We further study approximation algorithms for this problem. We propose two approximation algorithms for \textsc{MinLVEDP} in general graphs and $p$-claw free graphs. %We propose an $O(\ln Δ(G))$-approximation algorithm for \textsc{MinLVEDP} in general graphs, where $Δ(G)$ is the maximum degree of the input graph. Also, we design a constant factor approximation algorithm for $p$-claw free graphs. On the negative side, we show that the \textsc{MinLVEDP} cannot be approximated within $\frac{1}{2}(\frac{1}{8}-ε)\ln|V|$ for any $ε>0$, unless $NP\subseteq DTIME(|V|^{O(\log(\log|V|)})$. Finally, we prove that the \textsc{MinLVEDP} is APX-complete for bounded degree graphs and $p$-claw free graphs for $p\geq 6$.
The Implications of Decentralization in Blockchained Federated Learning: Evaluating the Impact of Model Staleness and Inconsistencies
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Blockchain promises to enhance distributed machine learning (ML) approaches such as federated learning (FL) by providing further decentralization, security, immutability, and trust, which are key properties for enabling collaborative intelligence in next-generation applications. Nonetheless, the intrinsic decentralized operation of peer-to-peer (P2P) blockchain nodes leads to an uncharted setting for FL, whereby the concepts of FL round and global model become meaningless, as devices' synchronization is lost without the figure of a central orchestrating server. In this paper, we study the practical implications of outsourcing the orchestration of FL to a democratic setting such as in a blockchain. In particular, we focus on the effects that model staleness and inconsistencies, endorsed by blockchains' modus operandi, have on the training procedure held by FL devices asynchronously. Using simulation, we evaluate the blockchained FL operation by applying two different ML models (ranging from low to high complexity) on the well-known MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, and focus on the accuracy and timeliness of the solutions. Our results show the high impact of model inconsistencies on the accuracy of the models (up to a ~35% decrease in prediction accuracy), which underscores the importance of properly designing blockchain systems based on the characteristics of the underlying FL application.
Feature Learning and Generalization in Deep Networks with Orthogonal Weights
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Fully-connected deep neural networks with weights initialized from independent Gaussian distributions can be tuned to criticality, which prevents the exponential growth or decay of signals propagating through the network. However, such networks still exhibit fluctuations that grow linearly with the depth of the network, which may impair the training of networks with width comparable to depth. We show analytically that rectangular networks with tanh activations and weights initialized from the ensemble of orthogonal matrices have corresponding preactivation fluctuations which are independent of depth, to leading order in inverse width. Moreover, we demonstrate numerically that, at initialization, all correlators involving the neural tangent kernel (NTK) and its descendants at leading order in inverse width -- which govern the evolution of observables during training -- saturate at a depth of $\sim 20$, rather than growing without bound as in the case of Gaussian initializations. We speculate that this structure preserves finite-width feature learning while reducing overall noise, thus improving both generalization and training speed in deep networks with depth comparable to width. We provide some experimental justification by relating empirical measurements of the NTK to the superior performance of deep nonlinear orthogonal networks trained under full-batch gradient descent on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 classification tasks.
On the Relationship between Sentence Analogy Identification and Sentence Structure Encoding in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode syntactic and semantic structures of language is well examined in NLP. Additionally, analogy identification, in the form of word analogies are extensively studied in the last decade of language modeling literature. In this work we specifically look at how LLMs' abilities to capture sentence analogies (sentences that convey analogous meaning to each other) vary with LLMs' abilities to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Through our analysis, we find that LLMs' ability to identify sentence analogies is positively correlated with their ability to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Specifically, we find that the LLMs which capture syntactic structures better, also have higher abilities in identifying sentence analogies.
DAG-aware Synthesis Orchestration
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The key methodologies of modern logic synthesis techniques are conducted on multi-level technology-independent representations such as And-Inverter-Graphs (AIGs) of the digital logic via directed-acyclic-graph (DAGs) traversal based structural rewriting, resubstitution, and refactoring. Existing state-of-the-art DAG-aware logic synthesis algorithms are all designed to perform stand-alone optimizations during a single DAG traversal. However, we empirically identify and demonstrate that these algorithms are limited in quality-of-results and runtime complexity due to this design concept. This work proposes Synthesis Orchestration, which orchestrates stand-alone operations within the single traversal of AIG. Thus, orchestration method explores more optimization opportunities and results in better performance. Our experimental results are comprehensively conducted on all 104 designs collected from ISCAS'85/89/99, VTR, and EPFL benchmark suites, with consistent logic minimization improvements over rewriting, resubstitution, refactoring, leading to an average of 4% more node reduction with improved runtime efficiency for the single optimization. Moreover, we evaluate orchestration as a plug-in algorithm in resyn and resyn3 flows in ABC, which demonstrates consistent logic minimization improvements (3.8% and 10.9% more node reduction on average). The runtime analysis demonstrates the orchestration outperforms stand-alone algorithms in both AIG minimization and runtime efficiency. Finally, we integrate the orchestration into OpenROAD for end-to-end performance evaluation. Our results demonstrate the advantages of the orchestration optimization technique, even after technology mapping and post-routing in the design flow have been conducted.
Semantic-Forward Relaying: A Novel Framework Towards 6G Cooperative Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

This letter proposes a novel relaying framework, semantic-forward (SF), for cooperative communications towards the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. The SF relay extracts and transmits the semantic features, which reduces forwarding payload, and also improves the network robustness against intra-link errors. Based on the theoretical basis for cooperative communications with side information and the turbo principle, we design a joint source-channel coding algorithm to iteratively exchange the extrinsic information for enhancing the decoding gains at the destination. Surprisingly, simulation results indicate that even in bad channel conditions, SF relaying can still effectively improve the recovered information quality.
EC-Depth: Exploring the consistency of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in challenging scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation holds significant importance in the fields of autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing methods are typically trained and tested on standard datasets, overlooking the impact of various adverse conditions prevalent in real-world applications, such as rainy days. As a result, it is commonly observed that these methods struggle to handle these challenging scenarios. To address this issue, we present EC-Depth, a novel self-supervised two-stage framework to achieve a robust depth estimation. In the first stage, we propose depth consistency regularization to propagate reliable supervision from standard to challenging scenes. In the second stage, we adopt the Mean Teacher paradigm and propose a novel consistency-based pseudo-label filtering strategy to improve the quality of pseudo-labels, further improving both the accuracy and robustness of our model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves accurate and consistent depth predictions in both standard and challenging scenarios, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods on KITTI, KITTI-C, DrivingStereo, and NuScenes-Night benchmarks.
STELLA: Continual Audio-Video Pre-training with Spatio-Temporal Localized Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Continuously learning a variety of audio-video semantics over time is crucial for audio-related reasoning tasks in our ever-evolving world. However, this is a nontrivial problem and poses two critical challenges: sparse spatio-temporal correlation between audio-video pairs and multimodal correlation overwriting that forgets audio-video relations. To tackle this problem, we propose a new continual audio-video pre-training method with two novel ideas: (1) Localized Patch Importance Scoring: we introduce a multimodal encoder to determine the importance score for each patch, emphasizing semantically intertwined audio-video patches. (2) Replay-guided Correlation Assessment: to reduce the corruption of previously learned audiovisual knowledge due to drift, we propose to assess the correlation of the current patches on the past steps to identify the patches exhibiting high correlations with the past steps. Based on the results from the two ideas, we perform probabilistic patch selection for effective continual audio-video pre-training. Experimental validation on multiple benchmarks shows that our method achieves a 3.69%p of relative performance gain in zero-shot retrieval tasks compared to strong continual learning baselines, while reducing memory consumption by ~45%.
TTK is Getting MPI-Ready
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

This system paper documents the technical foundations for the extension of the Topology ToolKit (TTK) to distributed-memory parallelism with the Message Passing Interface (MPI). While several recent papers introduced topology-based approaches for distributed-memory environments, these were reporting experiments obtained with tailored, mono-algorithm implementations. In contrast, we describe in this paper a versatile approach (supporting both triangulated domains and regular grids) for the support of topological analysis pipelines, i.e. a sequence of topological algorithms interacting together. While developing this extension, we faced several algorithmic and software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. We describe an MPI extension of TTK's data structure for triangulation representation and traversal, a central component to the global performance and generality of TTK's topological implementations. We also introduce an intermediate interface between TTK and MPI, both at the global pipeline level, and at the fine-grain algorithmic level. We provide a taxonomy for the distributed-memory topological algorithms supported by TTK, depending on their communication needs and provide examples of hybrid MPI+thread parallelizations. Performance analyses show that parallel efficiencies range from 20% to 80% (depending on the algorithms), and that the MPI-specific preconditioning introduced by our framework induces a negligible computation time overhead. We illustrate the new distributed-memory capabilities of TTK with an example of advanced analysis pipeline, combining multiple algorithms, run on the largest publicly available dataset we have found (120 billion vertices) on a cluster with 64 nodes (for a total of 1536 cores). Finally, we provide a roadmap for the completion of TTK's MPI extension, along with generic recommendations for each algorithm communication category.
Visual Self-supervised Learning Scheme for Dense Prediction Tasks on X-ray Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, significant advancements in artificial intelligence have been attributed to the integration of self-supervised learning (SSL) scheme. While SSL has shown impressive achievements in natural language processing (NLP), its progress in computer vision has comparatively lagged behind. However, the incorporation of contrastive learning into existing visual SSL models has led to considerable progress, often surpassing supervised counterparts. Nonetheless, these improvements have been mostly limited to classification tasks. Moreover, few studies have evaluated visual SSL models in real-world scenarios, as most have focused on datasets with class-wise portrait images, notably ImageNet. Here, we focus on dense prediction tasks using security inspection x-ray images to evaluate our proposed model, Segment Localization (SegLoc). Based upon the Instance Localization (InsLoc) model, SegLoc addresses one of the key challenges of contrastive learning, i.e., false negative pairs of query embeddings. Our pre-training dataset is synthesized by cutting, transforming, and pasting labeled segments from an existing labeled dataset (PIDray) as foregrounds onto instances from an unlabeled dataset (SIXray) as backgrounds. Furthermore, we fully leverage the labeled data by incorporating the concept, one queue per class, into the MoCo-v2 memory bank, thereby avoiding false negative pairs. In our experiments, SegLoc outperformed random initialization by 3% to 6% while underperformed supervised initialization, in terms of AR and AP metrics across different IoU values over 20 to 30 pre-training epochs.
Cold Start Latency in Serverless Computing: A Systematic Review, Taxonomy, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, academics and the corporate sector have paid attention to serverless computing, which enables dynamic scalability and an economic model. In serverless computing, users only pay for the time they actually use resources, enabling zero scaling to optimise cost and resource utilisation. However, this approach also introduces the serverless cold start problem. Researchers have developed various solutions to address the cold start problem, yet it remains an unresolved research area. In this article, we propose a systematic literature review on clod start latency in serverless computing. Furthermore, we create a detailed taxonomy of approaches to cold start latency, which we use to investigate existing techniques for reducing the cold start time and frequency. We have classified the current studies on cold start latency into several categories such as caching and application-level optimisation-based solutions, as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML)-based solutions. Moreover, we have analyzed the impact of cold start latency on quality of service, explored current cold start latency mitigation methods, datasets, and implementation platforms, and classified them into categories based on their common characteristics and features. Finally, we outline the open challenges and highlight the possible future directions.
Community Consensus: Converging Locally despite Adversaries and Heterogeneous Connectivity
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce the concept of community consensus in the presence of malicious agents using a well-known median-based consensus algorithm. We consider networks that have multiple well-connected regions that we term communities, characterized by specific robustness and minimum degree properties. Prior work derives conditions on properties that are necessary and sufficient for achieving global consensus in a network. This, however, requires the minimum degree of the network graph to be proportional to the number of malicious agents in the network, which is not very practical in large networks. In this work, we present a natural generalization of this previous result. We characterize cases where, although global consensus is not reached, some subsets of agents $V_i$ will still converge to the same values $M_i$ among themselves. To reach this new type of consensus, we define more relaxed requirements in terms of the number of malicious agents in each community, and the number $k$ of edges connecting an agent in a community to agents external to the community.
MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI, but are constrained by limited context windows, hindering their utility in tasks like extended conversations and document analysis. To enable using context beyond limited context windows, we propose virtual context management, a technique drawing inspiration from hierarchical memory systems in traditional operating systems that provide the appearance of large memory resources through data movement between fast and slow memory. Using this technique, we introduce MemGPT (Memory-GPT), a system that intelligently manages different memory tiers in order to effectively provide extended context within the LLM's limited context window, and utilizes interrupts to manage control flow between itself and the user. We evaluate our OS-inspired design in two domains where the limited context windows of modern LLMs severely handicaps their performance: document analysis, where MemGPT is able to analyze large documents that far exceed the underlying LLM's context window, and multi-session chat, where MemGPT can create conversational agents that remember, reflect, and evolve dynamically through long-term interactions with their users. We release MemGPT code and data for our experiments at https://memgpt.ai.
The Impact of Explanations on Fairness in Human-AI Decision-Making: Protected vs Proxy Features
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

AI systems have been known to amplify biases in real-world data. Explanations may help human-AI teams address these biases for fairer decision-making. Typically, explanations focus on salient input features. If a model is biased against some protected group, explanations may include features that demonstrate this bias, but when biases are realized through proxy features, the relationship between this proxy feature and the protected one may be less clear to a human. In this work, we study the effect of the presence of protected and proxy features on participants' perception of model fairness and their ability to improve demographic parity over an AI alone. Further, we examine how different treatments -- explanations, model bias disclosure and proxy correlation disclosure -- affect fairness perception and parity. We find that explanations help people detect direct but not indirect biases. Additionally, regardless of bias type, explanations tend to increase agreement with model biases. Disclosures can help mitigate this effect for indirect biases, improving both unfairness recognition and decision-making fairness. We hope that our findings can help guide further research into advancing explanations in support of fair human-AI decision-making.