OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
BAD: Bidirectional Auto-regressive Diffusion for Text-to-Motion Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Autoregressive models excel in modeling sequential dependencies by enforcing causal constraints, yet they struggle to capture complex bidirectional patterns due to their unidirectional nature. In contrast, mask-based models leverage bidirectional context, enabling richer dependency modeling. However, they often assume token independence during prediction, which undermines the modeling of sequential dependencies. Additionally, the corruption of sequences through masking or absorption can introduce unnatural distortions, complicating the learning process. To address these issues, we propose Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion (BAD), a novel approach that unifies the strengths of autoregressive and mask-based generative models. BAD utilizes a permutation-based corruption technique that preserves the natural sequence structure while enforcing causal dependencies through randomized ordering, enabling the effective capture of both sequential and bidirectional relationships. Comprehensive experiments show that BAD outperforms autoregressive and mask-based models in text-to-motion generation, suggesting a novel pre-training strategy for sequence modeling. The codebase for BAD is available on https://github.com/RohollahHS/BAD.
Technical Upgrades to and Enhancements of a System Vulnerability Analysis Tool Based on the Blackboard Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

A system vulnerability analysis technique (SVAT) for the analysis of complex mission critical systems (CMCS) that cannot be taken offline or subjected to the risks posed by traditional penetration testing was previously developed. This system uses path-based analysis of vulnerabilities to identify potential threats to system security. Generalization logic building on the Blackboard Architecture's rule-fact paradigm was implemented in this system, the software for operation and network attack results review (SONARR). This paper presents an overview of additional functionality that has been added to this tool and the experimentation that was conducted to analyze their efficacy and the performance benefits of the new in-memory processing capabilities of the SONARR algorithm. The results of the performance tests and their relation to networks' architecture are discussed. The paper concludes with a discussion of avenues of future work, including the implementation of multithreading, additional analysis metrics like confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and improved heuristic development.
Attention-Seeker: Dynamic Self-Attention Scoring for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes Attention-Seeker, an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that leverages self-attention maps from a Large Language Model to estimate the importance of candidate phrases. Our approach identifies specific components - such as layers, heads, and attention vectors - where the model pays significant attention to the key topics of the text. The attention weights provided by these components are then used to score the candidate phrases. Unlike previous models that require manual tuning of parameters (e.g., selection of heads, prompts, hyperparameters), Attention-Seeker dynamically adapts to the input text without any manual adjustments, enhancing its practical applicability. We evaluate Attention-Seeker on four publicly available datasets: Inspec, SemEval2010, SemEval2017, and Krapivin. Our results demonstrate that, even without parameter tuning, Attention-Seeker outperforms most baseline models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three out of four datasets, particularly excelling in extracting keyphrases from long documents.
GenCRF: Generative Clustering and Reformulation Framework for Enhanced Intent-Driven Information Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Query reformulation is a well-known problem in Information Retrieval (IR) aimed at enhancing single search successful completion rate by automatically modifying user's input query. Recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve query reformulation, but often generate limited and redundant expansions, potentially constraining their effectiveness in capturing diverse intents. In this paper, we propose GenCRF: a Generative Clustering and Reformulation Framework to capture diverse intentions adaptively based on multiple differentiated, well-generated queries in the retrieval phase for the first time. GenCRF leverages LLMs to generate variable queries from the initial query using customized prompts, then clusters them into groups to distinctly represent diverse intents. Furthermore, the framework explores to combine diverse intents query with innovative weighted aggregation strategies to optimize retrieval performance and crucially integrates a novel Query Evaluation Rewarding Model (QERM) to refine the process through feedback loops. Empirical experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that GenCRF achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous query reformulation SOTAs by up to 12% on nDCG@10. These techniques can be adapted to various LLMs, significantly boosting retriever performance and advancing the field of Information Retrieval.
FSL-HDnn: A 5.7 TOPS/W End-to-end Few-shot Learning Classifier Accelerator with Feature Extraction and Hyperdimensional Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces FSL-HDnn, an energy-efficient accelerator that implements the end-to-end pipeline of feature extraction, classification, and on-chip few-shot learning (FSL) through gradient-free learning techniques in a 40 nm CMOS process. At its core, FSL-HDnn integrates two low-power modules: Weight clustering feature extractor and Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). Feature extractor utilizes advanced weight clustering and pattern reuse strategies for optimized CNN-based feature extraction. Meanwhile, HDC emerges as a novel approach for lightweight FSL classifier, employing hyperdimensional vectors to improve training accuracy significantly compared to traditional distance-based approaches. This dual-module synergy not only simplifies the learning process by eliminating the need for complex gradients but also dramatically enhances energy efficiency and performance. Specifically, FSL-HDnn achieves an Intensity unprecedented energy efficiency of 5.7 TOPS/W for feature 1 extraction and 0.78 TOPS/W for classification and learning Training Intensity phases, achieving improvements of 2.6X and 6.6X, respectively, Storage over current state-of-the-art CNN and FSL processors.
Propulsion: Steering LLM with Tiny Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and related fields. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains computationally expensive and risks degrading pre-learned features. To address these challenges, we propose Propulsion, a novel parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method designed to optimize task-specific performance while drastically reducing computational overhead. Inspired by the concept of controlled adjustments in physical motion, Propulsion selectively re-scales specific dimensions of a pre-trained model, guiding output predictions toward task objectives without modifying the model's parameters. By introducing lightweight, trainable Propulsion parameters at the pre-trained layer, we minimize the number of parameters updated during fine-tuning, preventing overfitting or overwriting of existing knowledge. Our theoretical analysis, supported by Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory, shows that Propulsion approximates the performance of full fine-tuning with far fewer trainable parameters. Empirically, Propulsion reduces the parameter count from 355.3 million to just 0.086 million, achieving over a 10x reduction compared to standard approaches like LoRA while maintaining competitive performance across benchmarks.
Fair Anomaly Detection For Imbalanced Groups
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Anomaly detection (AD) has been widely studied for decades in many real-world applications, including fraud detection in finance, and intrusion detection for cybersecurity, etc. Due to the imbalanced nature between protected and unprotected groups and the imbalanced distributions of normal examples and anomalies, the learning objectives of most existing anomaly detection methods tend to solely concentrate on the dominating unprotected group. Thus, it has been recognized by many researchers about the significance of ensuring model fairness in anomaly detection. However, the existing fair anomaly detection methods tend to erroneously label most normal examples from the protected group as anomalies in the imbalanced scenario where the unprotected group is more abundant than the protected group. This phenomenon is caused by the improper design of learning objectives, which statistically focus on learning the frequent patterns (i.e., the unprotected group) while overlooking the under-represented patterns (i.e., the protected group). To address these issues, we propose FairAD, a fairness-aware anomaly detection method targeting the imbalanced scenario. It consists of a fairness-aware contrastive learning module and a rebalancing autoencoder module to ensure fairness and handle the imbalanced data issue, respectively. Moreover, we provide the theoretical analysis that shows our proposed contrastive learning regularization guarantees group fairness. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FairAD across multiple real-world datasets.
Control-flow Reconstruction Attacks on Business Process Models
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Process models may be automatically generated from event logs that contain as-is data of a business process. While such models generalize over the control-flow of specific, recorded process executions, they are often also annotated with behavioural statistics, such as execution frequencies.Based thereon, once a model is published, certain insights about the original process executions may be reconstructed, so that an external party may extract confidential information about the business process. This work is the first to empirically investigate such reconstruction attempts based on process models. To this end, we propose different play-out strategies that reconstruct the control-flow from process trees, potentially exploiting frequency annotations. To assess the potential success of such reconstruction attacks on process models, and hence the risks imposed by publishing them, we compare the reconstructed process executions with those of the original log for several real-world datasets.
OneEncoder: A Lightweight Framework for Progressive Alignment of Modalities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-modal alignment Learning integrates information from different modalities like text, image, audio and video to create unified models. This approach develops shared representations and learns correlations between modalities, enabling applications such as visual question answering and audiovisual content analysis. Current techniques rely on large modality-specific encoders, necessitating fine-tuning or training from scratch on vast aligned datasets (e.g., text-image, text-audio, image-audio). This approach has limitations: (i) it is very expensive due to the need for training large encoders on extensive datasets, (ii) acquiring aligned large paired datasets is challenging, and (iii) adding new modalities requires retraining the entire framework to incorporate these modalities. To address these issues, we propose OneEncoder, a lightweight framework that progressively represents and aligns four modalities (image, text, audio, video). Initially, we train a lightweight Universal Projection module (UP) to align image and text modalities. Then, we freeze the pretrained UP and progressively align future modalities to those already aligned. OneEncoder operates efficiently and cost-effectively, even in scenarios where vast aligned datasets are unavailable, due to its lightweight design. Trained on small paired datasets, it shows strong performance in tasks like classification, querying, and visual question answering, surpassing methods that rely on large datasets and specialized encoders.
Online Combinatorial Allocations and Auctions with Few Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining items to maximize the total welfare, defined as the sum of bidder valuations. A long line of work has studied this problem when the bidder valuations come from known independent distributions. In particular, for submodular/XOS valuations, we know 2-competitive algorithms/mechanisms that set a fixed price for each item and the arriving bidders take their favorite subset of the remaining items given these prices. However, these algorithms traditionally presume the availability of the underlying distributions as part of the input to the algorithm. Contrary to this assumption, practical scenarios often require the learning of distributions, a task complicated by limited sample availability. This paper investigates the feasibility of achieving O(1)-competitive algorithms under the realistic constraint of having access to only a limited number of samples from the underlying bidder distributions. Our first main contribution shows that a mere single sample from each bidder distribution is sufficient to yield an O(1)-competitive algorithm for submodular/XOS valuations. This result leverages a novel extension of the secretary-style analysis, employing the sample to have the algorithm compete against itself. Although online, this first approach does not provide an online truthful mechanism. Our second main contribution shows that a polynomial number of samples suffices to yield a $(2+ε)$-competitive online truthful mechanism for submodular/XOS valuations and any constant $ε>0$. This result is based on a generalization of the median-based algorithm for the single-item prophet inequality problem to combinatorial settings with multiple items.
Can Graph Reordering Speed Up Graph Neural Network Training? An Experimental Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of neural network capable of learning on graph-structured data. However, training GNNs on large-scale graphs is challenging due to iterative aggregations of high-dimensional features from neighboring vertices within sparse graph structures combined with neural network operations. The sparsity of graphs frequently results in suboptimal memory access patterns and longer training time. Graph reordering is an optimization strategy aiming to improve the graph data layout. It has shown to be effective to speed up graph analytics workloads, but its effect on the performance of GNN training has not been investigated yet. The generalization of reordering to GNN performance is nontrivial, as multiple aspects must be considered: GNN hyper-parameters such as the number of layers, the number of hidden dimensions, and the feature size used in the GNN model, neural network operations, large intermediate vertex states, and GPU acceleration. In our work, we close this gap by performing an empirical evaluation of 12 reordering strategies in two state-of-the-art GNN systems, PyTorch Geometric and Deep Graph Library. Our results show that graph reordering is effective in reducing training time for CPU- and GPU-based training, respectively. Further, we find that GNN hyper-parameters influence the effectiveness of reordering, that reordering metrics play an important role in selecting a reordering strategy, that lightweight reordering performs better for GPU-based than for CPU-based training, and that invested reordering time can in many cases be amortized.
Use the Force, Bot! -- Force-Aware ProDMP with Event-Based Replanning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Movement Primitives (MPs) are a well-established method for representing and generating modular robot trajectories. This work presents FA-ProDMP, a new approach which introduces force awareness to Probabilistic Dynamic Movement Primitives (ProDMP). FA-ProDMP adapts the trajectory during runtime to account for measured and desired forces. It offers smooth trajectories and captures position and force correlations over multiple trajectories, e.g. a set of human demonstrations. FA-ProDMP supports multiple axes of force and is thus agnostic to cartesian or joint space control. This makes FA-ProDMP a valuable tool for learning contact rich manipulation tasks such as polishing, cutting or industrial assembly from demonstration. In order to reliably evaluate FA-ProDMP, this work additionally introduces a modular, 3D printed task suite called POEMPEL, inspired by the popular Lego Technic pins. POEMPEL mimics industrial peg-in-hole assembly tasks with force requirements. It offers multiple parameters of adjustment, such as position, orientation and plug stiffness level, thus varying the direction and amount of required forces. Our experiments show that FA-ProDMP outperforms other MP formulations on the POEMPEL setup and a electrical power plug insertion task, due to its replanning capabilities based on the measured forces. These findings highlight how FA-ProDMP enhances the performance of robotic systems in contact-rich manipulation tasks.
Reasoning Graph Enhanced Exemplars Retrieval for In-Context Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable few-shot learning capabilities and unified the paradigm of NLP tasks through the in-context learning (ICL) technique. Despite the success of ICL, the quality of the exemplar demonstrations can significantly influence the LLM's performance. Existing exemplar selection methods mainly focus on the semantic similarity between queries and candidate exemplars. On the other hand, the logical connections between reasoning steps can be beneficial to depict the problem-solving process as well. In this paper, we proposes a novel method named Reasoning Graph-enhanced Exemplar Retrieval (RGER). RGER first quires LLM to generate an initial response, then expresses intermediate problem-solving steps to a graph structure. After that, it employs graph kernel to select exemplars with semantic and structural similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the structural relationship is helpful to the alignment of queries and candidate exemplars. The efficacy of RGER on math and logit reasoning tasks showcases its superiority over state-of-the-art retrieval-based approaches. Our code is released at https://github.com/Yukang-Lin/RGER.
Capturing Differences in Character Representations Between Communities: An Initial Study with Fandom
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Sociolinguistic theories have highlighted how narratives are often retold, co-constructed and reconceptualized in collaborative settings. This working paper focuses on the re-interpretation of characters, an integral part of the narrative story-world, and attempts to study how this may be computationally compared between online communities. Using online fandom - a highly communal phenomenon that has been largely studied qualitatively - as data, computational methods were applied to explore shifts in character representations between two communities and the original text. Specifically, text from the Harry Potter novels, r/HarryPotter subreddit, and fanfiction on Archive of Our Own were analyzed for changes in character mentions, centrality measures from co-occurrence networks, and semantic associations. While fandom elevates secondary characters as found in past work, the two fan communities prioritize different subsets of characters. Word embedding tests reveal starkly different associations of the same characters between communities on the gendered concepts of femininity/masculinity, cruelty, and beauty. Furthermore, fanfiction descriptions of a male character analyzed between romance pairings scored higher for feminine-coded characteristics in male-male romance, matching past qualitative theorizing. The results high-light the potential for computational methods to assist in capturing the re-conceptualization of narrative elements across communities and in supporting qualitative research on fandom.
Self-Evolutionary Large Language Models through Uncertainty-Enhanced Preference Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Iterative preference optimization has recently become one of the de-facto training paradigms for large language models (LLMs), but the performance is still underwhelming due to too much noisy preference data yielded in the loop. To combat this issue, we present an \textbf{U}ncertainty-enhanced \textbf{P}reference \textbf{O}ptimization (UPO) framework to make the LLM self-evolve with reliable feedback. The key idea is mitigating the noisy preference data derived from the current policy and reward models by performing pair-wise uncertainty estimation and judiciously reliable feedback sampling. To reach this goal, we thus introduce an estimator model, which incorporates Monte Carlo (MC) dropout in Bayesian neural network (BNN) to perform uncertainty estimation for the preference data derived from the LLM policy. Compared to the existing methods that directly filter generated responses based on the reward score, the estimator focuses on the model uncertainty in a pair-wise manner and effectively bypasses the confirmation bias problem of the reward model. Additionally, we also propose an uncertainty-enhanced self-evolution algorithm to improve the robustness of preference optimization and encourage the LLM to generate responses with both high reward and certainty. Extensive experiments over multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our framework substantially alleviates the noisy problem and improves the performance of iterative preference optimization.
Multimodal Attention-Enhanced Feature Fusion-based Weekly Supervised Anomaly Violence Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WS-VAD) is a crucial area in computer vision for developing intelligent surveillance systems. This system uses three feature streams: RGB video, optical flow, and audio signals, where each stream extracts complementary spatial and temporal features using an enhanced attention module to improve detection accuracy and robustness. In the first stream, we employed an attention-based, multi-stage feature enhancement approach to improve spatial and temporal features from the RGB video where the first stage consists of a ViT-based CLIP module, with top-k features concatenated in parallel with I3D and Temporal Contextual Aggregation (TCA) based rich spatiotemporal features. The second stage effectively captures temporal dependencies using the Uncertainty-Regulated Dual Memory Units (UR-DMU) model, which learns representations of normal and abnormal data simultaneously, and the third stage is employed to select the most relevant spatiotemporal features. The second stream extracted enhanced attention-based spatiotemporal features from the flow data modality-based feature by taking advantage of the integration of the deep learning and attention module. The audio stream captures auditory cues using an attention module integrated with the VGGish model, aiming to detect anomalies based on sound patterns. These streams enrich the model by incorporating motion and audio signals often indicative of abnormal events undetectable through visual analysis alone. The concatenation of the multimodal fusion leverages the strengths of each modality, resulting in a comprehensive feature set that significantly improves anomaly detection accuracy and robustness across three datasets. The extensive experiment and high performance with the three benchmark datasets proved the effectiveness of the proposed system over the existing state-of-the-art system.