OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Conversational Question Answering with Reformulations over Knowledge Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Conversational question answering (convQA) over knowledge graphs (KGs) involves answering multi-turn natural language questions about information contained in a KG. State-of-the-art methods of ConvQA often struggle with inexplicit question-answer pairs. These inputs are easy for human beings to understand given a conversation history, but hard for a machine to interpret, which can degrade ConvQA performance. To address this problem, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based model, CornNet, which utilizes question reformulations generated by large language models (LLMs) to improve ConvQA performance. CornNet adopts a teacher-student architecture where a teacher model learns question representations using human writing reformulations, and a student model to mimic the teacher model's output via reformulations generated by LLMs. The learned question representation is then used by an RL model to locate the correct answer in a KG. Extensive experimental results show that CornNet outperforms state-of-the-art convQA models.
LEFL: Low Entropy Client Sampling in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm where multiple clients collaborate to optimize a single global model using their private data. The global model is maintained by a central server that orchestrates the FL training process through a series of training rounds. In each round, the server samples clients from a client pool before sending them its latest global model parameters for further optimization. Naive sampling strategies implement random client sampling and fail to factor client data distributions for privacy reasons. Hence we propose LEFL, an alternative sampling strategy by performing a one-time clustering of clients based on their model's learned high-level features while respecting data privacy. This enables the server to perform stratified client sampling across clusters in every round. We show datasets of sampled clients selected with this approach yield a low relative entropy with respect to the global data distribution. Consequently, the FL training becomes less noisy and significantly improves the convergence of the global model by as much as 7.4% in some experiments. Furthermore, it also significantly reduces the communication rounds required to achieve a target accuracy.
HiBid: A Cross-Channel Constrained Bidding System with Budget Allocation by Hierarchical Offline Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Online display advertising platforms service numerous advertisers by providing real-time bidding (RTB) for the scale of billions of ad requests every day. The bidding strategy handles ad requests cross multiple channels to maximize the number of clicks under the set financial constraints, i.e., total budget and cost-per-click (CPC), etc. Different from existing works mainly focusing on single channel bidding, we explicitly consider cross-channel constrained bidding with budget allocation. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical offline deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework called ``HiBid'', consisted of a high-level planner equipped with auxiliary loss for non-competitive budget allocation, and a data augmentation enhanced low-level executor for adaptive bidding strategy in response to allocated budgets. Additionally, a CPC-guided action selection mechanism is introduced to satisfy the cross-channel CPC constraint. Through extensive experiments on both the large-scale log data and online A/B testing, we confirm that HiBid outperforms six baselines in terms of the number of clicks, CPC satisfactory ratio, and return-on-investment (ROI). We also deploy HiBid on Meituan advertising platform to already service tens of thousands of advertisers every day.
Motion State: A New Benchmark Multiple Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the realm of video analysis, the field of multiple object tracking (MOT) assumes paramount importance, with the motion state of objects-whether static or dynamic relative to the ground-holding practical significance across diverse scenarios. However, the extant literature exhibits a notable dearth in the exploration of this aspect. Deep learning methodologies encounter challenges in accurately discerning object motion states, while conventional approaches reliant on comprehensive mathematical modeling may yield suboptimal tracking accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce a Model-Data-Driven Motion State Judgment Object Tracking Method (MoD2T). This innovative architecture adeptly amalgamates traditional mathematical modeling with deep learning-based multi-object tracking frameworks. The integration of mathematical modeling and deep learning within MoD2T enhances the precision of object motion state determination, thereby elevating tracking accuracy. Our empirical investigations comprehensively validate the efficacy of MoD2T across varied scenarios, encompassing unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance and street-level tracking. Furthermore, to gauge the method's adeptness in discerning object motion states, we introduce the Motion State Validation F1 (MVF1) metric. This novel performance metric aims to quantitatively assess the accuracy of motion state classification, furnishing a comprehensive evaluation of MoD2T's performance. Elaborate experimental validations corroborate the rationality of MVF1. In order to holistically appraise MoD2T's performance, we meticulously annotate several renowned datasets and subject MoD2T to stringent testing. Remarkably, under conditions characterized by minimal or moderate camera motion, the achieved MVF1 values are particularly noteworthy, with exemplars including 0.774 for the KITTI dataset, 0.521 for MOT17, and 0.827 for UAVDT.
Normalization of Lithuanian Text Using Regular Expressions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Text Normalization is an integral part of any text-to-speech synthesis system. In a natural language text, there are elements such as numbers, dates, abbreviations, etc. that belong to other semiotic classes. They are called non-standard words (NSW) and need to be expanded into ordinary words. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the semiotic class of each NSW. The taxonomy of semiotic classes adapted to the Lithuanian language is presented in the work. Sets of rules are created for detecting and expanding NSWs based on regular expressions. Experiments with three completely different data sets were performed and the accuracy was assessed. Causes of errors are explained and recommendations are given for the development of text normalization rules.
Shape-IoU: More Accurate Metric considering Bounding Box Shape and Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As an important component of the detector localization branch, bounding box regression loss plays a significant role in object detection tasks. The existing bounding box regression methods usually consider the geometric relationship between the GT box and the predicted box, and calculate the loss by using the relative position and shape of the bounding boxes, while ignoring the influence of inherent properties such as the shape and scale of the bounding boxes on bounding box regression. In order to make up for the shortcomings of existing research, this article proposes a bounding box regression method that focuses on the shape and scale of the bounding box itself. Firstly, we analyzed the regression characteristics of the bounding boxes and found that the shape and scale factors of the bounding boxes themselves will have an impact on the regression results. Based on the above conclusions, we propose the Shape IoU method, which can calculate the loss by focusing on the shape and scale of the bounding box itself, thereby making the bounding box regression more accurate. Finally, we validated our method through a large number of comparative experiments, which showed that our method can effectively improve detection performance and outperform existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in different detection tasks.Code is available at https://github.com/malagoutou/Shape-IoU
Prompt Fuzzing for Fuzz Driver Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Crafting high-quality fuzz drivers not only is time-consuming but also requires a deep understanding of the library. However, the state-of-the-art automatic fuzz driver generation techniques fall short of expectations. While fuzz drivers derived from consumer code can reach deep states, they have limited coverage. Conversely, interpretative fuzzing can explore most API calls but requires numerous attempts within a large search space. We propose PromptFuzz, a coverage-guided fuzzer for prompt fuzzing that iteratively generates fuzz drivers to explore undiscovered library code. To explore API usage in fuzz drivers during prompt fuzzing, we propose several key techniques: instructive program generation, erroneous program validation, coverage-guided prompt mutation, and constrained fuzzer scheduling. We implemented PromptFuzz and evaluated it on 14 real-world libraries. Compared with OSS-Fuzz and Hopper (the state-of-the-art fuzz driver generation tool), fuzz drivers generated by PromptFuzz achieved 1.61 and 1.63 times higher branch coverage than those by OSS-Fuzz and Hopper, respectively. Moreover, the fuzz drivers generated by PromptFuzz detected 33 genuine, new bugs out of a total of 49 crashes, out of which 30 bugs have been confirmed by their respective communities.
An Empirical Study of Scaling Law for OCR
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The laws of model size, data volume, computation and model performance have been extensively studied in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, the scaling laws in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) have not yet been investigated. To address this, we conducted comprehensive studies that involved examining the correlation between performance and the scale of models, data volume and computation in the field of text recognition.Conclusively, the study demonstrates smooth power laws between performance and model size, as well as training data volume, when other influencing factors are held constant. Additionally, we have constructed a large-scale dataset called REBU-Syn, which comprises 6 million real samples and 18 million synthetic samples. Based on our scaling law and new dataset, we have successfully trained a scene text recognition model, achieving a new state-ofthe-art on 6 common test benchmarks with a top-1 average accuracy of 97.42%. The models and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/large-ocr-model/large-ocr-model.github.io.
Causal State Distillation for Explainable Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful technique for training intelligent agents, but understanding why these agents make specific decisions can be quite challenging. This lack of transparency in RL models has been a long-standing problem, making it difficult for users to grasp the reasons behind an agent's behaviour. Various approaches have been explored to address this problem, with one promising avenue being reward decomposition (RD). RD is appealing as it sidesteps some of the concerns associated with other methods that attempt to rationalize an agent's behaviour in a post-hoc manner. RD works by exposing various facets of the rewards that contribute to the agent's objectives during training. However, RD alone has limitations as it primarily offers insights based on sub-rewards and does not delve into the intricate cause-and-effect relationships that occur within an RL agent's neural model. In this paper, we present an extension of RD that goes beyond sub-rewards to provide more informative explanations. Our approach is centred on a causal learning framework that leverages information-theoretic measures for explanation objectives that encourage three crucial properties of causal factors: causal sufficiency, sparseness, and orthogonality. These properties help us distill the cause-and-effect relationships between the agent's states and actions or rewards, allowing for a deeper understanding of its decision-making processes. Our framework is designed to generate local explanations and can be applied to a wide range of RL tasks with multiple reward channels. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our approach offers more meaningful and insightful explanations for the agent's action selections.
Joint symbolic aggregate approximation of time series
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing availability of temporal data poses a challenge to time-series and signal-processing domains due to its high numerosity and complexity. Symbolic representation outperforms raw data in a variety of engineering applications due to its storage efficiency, reduced numerosity, and noise reduction. The most recent symbolic aggregate approximation technique called ABBA demonstrates outstanding performance in preserving essential shape information of time series and enhancing the downstream applications. However, ABBA cannot handle multiple time series with consistent symbols, i.e., the same symbols from distinct time series are not identical. Also, working with appropriate ABBA digitization involves the tedious task of tuning the hyperparameters, such as the number of symbols or tolerance. Therefore, we present a joint symbolic aggregate approximation that has symbolic consistency, and show how the hyperparameter of digitization can itself be optimized alongside the compression tolerance ahead of time. Besides, we propose a novel computing paradigm that enables parallel computing of symbolic approximation. The extensive experiments demonstrate its superb performance and outstanding speed regarding symbolic approximation and reconstruction.
Two-Step Offline Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning with Constrained Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) in the offline setting has succeeded greatly in industrial applications such as chatbots. A two-step learning framework where one applies a reinforcement learning step after a reward modeling step has been widely adopted for the problem. However, such a method faces challenges from the risk of reward hacking and the complexity of reinforcement learning. To overcome the challenge, our insight is that both challenges come from the state-actions not supported in the dataset. Such state-actions are unreliable and increase the complexity of the reinforcement learning problem at the second step. Based on the insight, we develop a novel two-step learning method called PRC: preference-based reinforcement learning with constrained actions. The high-level idea is to limit the reinforcement learning agent to optimize over a constrained action space that excludes the out-of-distribution state-actions. We empirically verify that our method has high learning efficiency on various datasets in robotic control environments.
Horizontal Federated Computer Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the modern world, the amount of visual data recorded has been rapidly increasing. In many cases, data is stored in geographically distinct locations and thus requires a large amount of time and space to consolidate. Sometimes, there are also regulations for privacy protection which prevent data consolidation. In this work, we present federated implementations for object detection and recognition using a federated Faster R-CNN (FRCNN) and image segmentation using a federated Fully Convolutional Network (FCN). Our FRCNN was trained on 5000 examples of the COCO2017 dataset while our FCN was trained on the entire train set of the CamVid dataset. The proposed federated models address the challenges posed by the increasing volume and decentralized nature of visual data, offering efficient solutions in compliance with privacy regulations.
SAR-RARP50: Segmentation of surgical instrumentation and Action Recognition on Robot-Assisted Radical Prostatectomy Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Surgical tool segmentation and action recognition are fundamental building blocks in many computer-assisted intervention applications, ranging from surgical skills assessment to decision support systems. Nowadays, learning-based action recognition and segmentation approaches outperform classical methods, relying, however, on large, annotated datasets. Furthermore, action recognition and tool segmentation algorithms are often trained and make predictions in isolation from each other, without exploiting potential cross-task relationships. With the EndoVis 2022 SAR-RARP50 challenge, we release the first multimodal, publicly available, in-vivo, dataset for surgical action recognition and semantic instrumentation segmentation, containing 50 suturing video segments of Robotic Assisted Radical Prostatectomy (RARP). The aim of the challenge is twofold. First, to enable researchers to leverage the scale of the provided dataset and develop robust and highly accurate single-task action recognition and tool segmentation approaches in the surgical domain. Second, to further explore the potential of multitask-based learning approaches and determine their comparative advantage against their single-task counterparts. A total of 12 teams participated in the challenge, contributing 7 action recognition methods, 9 instrument segmentation techniques, and 4 multitask approaches that integrated both action recognition and instrument segmentation. The complete SAR-RARP50 dataset is available at: https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/projects/SARRARP50_Segmentation_of_surgical_instrumentation_and_Action_Recognition_on_Robot-Assisted_Radical_Prostatectomy_Challenge/191091
Fairness in Serving Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

High-demand LLM inference services (e.g., ChatGPT and BARD) support a wide range of requests from short chat conversations to long document reading. To ensure that all client requests are processed fairly, most major LLM inference services have request rate limits, to ensure that no client can dominate the request queue. However, this rudimentary notion of fairness also results in under-utilization of the resources and poor client experience when there is spare capacity. While there is a rich literature on fair scheduling, serving LLMs presents new challenges due to their unpredictable request lengths and their unique batching characteristics on parallel accelerators. This paper introduces the definition of LLM serving fairness based on a cost function that accounts for the number of input and output tokens processed. To achieve fairness in serving, we propose a novel scheduling algorithm, the Virtual Token Counter (VTC), a fair scheduler based on the continuous batching mechanism. We prove a 2x tight upper bound on the service difference between two backlogged clients, adhering to the requirement of work-conserving. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of VTC in ensuring fairness, especially in contrast to other baseline methods, which exhibit shortcomings under various conditions. The reproducible code is available at https://github.com/Ying1123/VTC-artifact
Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Survey of Resource-Efficient Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by sophisticated models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. These models, however, bring forth substantial challenges in the high consumption of computational, memory, energy, and financial resources, especially in environments with limited resource capabilities. This survey aims to systematically address these challenges by reviewing a broad spectrum of techniques designed to enhance the resource efficiency of LLMs. We categorize methods based on their optimization focus: computational, memory, energy, financial, and network resources and their applicability across various stages of an LLM's lifecycle, including architecture design, pretraining, finetuning, and system design. Additionally, the survey introduces a nuanced categorization of resource efficiency techniques by their specific resource types, which uncovers the intricate relationships and mappings between various resources and corresponding optimization techniques. A standardized set of evaluation metrics and datasets is also presented to facilitate consistent and fair comparisons across different models and techniques. By offering a comprehensive overview of the current sota and identifying open research avenues, this survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, aiding them in developing more sustainable and efficient LLMs in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Automated Invariant Generation for Solidity Smart Contracts
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Smart contracts are computer programs running on blockchains to automate the transaction execution between users. The absence of contract specifications poses a real challenge to the correctness verification of smart contracts. Program invariants are properties that are always preserved throughout the execution, which characterize an important aspect of the program behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel invariant generation framework, INVCON+, for Solidity smart contracts. INVCON+ extends the existing invariant detector, InvCon, to automatically produce verified contract invariants based on both dynamic inference and static verification. Unlike INVCON+, InvCon only produces likely invariants, which have a high probability to hold, yet are still not verified against the contract code. Particularly, INVCON+ is able to infer more expressive invariants that capture richer semantic relations of contract code. We evaluate INVCON+ on 361 ERC20 and 10 ERC721 real-world contracts, as well as common ERC20 vulnerability benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that INVCON+ efficiently produces high-quality invariant specifications, which can be used to secure smart contracts from common vulnerabilities.
Digger: Detecting Copyright Content Mis-usage in Large Language Model Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Pre-training, which utilizes extensive and varied datasets, is a critical factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across numerous applications. However, the detailed makeup of these datasets is often not disclosed, leading to concerns about data security and potential misuse. This is particularly relevant when copyrighted material, still under legal protection, is used inappropriately, either intentionally or unintentionally, infringing on the rights of the authors. In this paper, we introduce a detailed framework designed to detect and assess the presence of content from potentially copyrighted books within the training datasets of LLMs. This framework also provides a confidence estimation for the likelihood of each content sample's inclusion. To validate our approach, we conduct a series of simulated experiments, the results of which affirm the framework's effectiveness in identifying and addressing instances of content misuse in LLM training processes. Furthermore, we investigate the presence of recognizable quotes from famous literary works within these datasets. The outcomes of our study have significant implications for ensuring the ethical use of copyrighted materials in the development of LLMs, highlighting the need for more transparent and responsible data management practices in this field.