OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CAT: Cellular Automata on Tensor cores
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Cellular automata (CA) are simulation models that can produce complex emergent behaviors from simple local rules. Although state-of-the-art GPU solutions are already fast due to their data-parallel nature, their performance can rapidly degrade in CA with a large neighborhood radius. With the inclusion of tensor cores across the entire GPU ecosystem, interest has grown in finding ways to leverage these fast units outside the field of artificial intelligence, which was their original purpose. In this work, we present CAT, a GPU tensor core approach that can accelerate CA in which the cell transition function acts on a weighted summation of its neighborhood. CAT is evaluated theoretically, using an extended PRAM cost model, as well as empirically using the Larger Than Life (LTL) family of CA as case studies. The results confirm that the cost model is accurate, showing that CAT exhibits constant time throughout the entire radius range $1 \le r \le 16$, and its theoretical speedups agree with the empirical results. At low radius $r=1,2$, CAT is competitive and is only surpassed by the fastest state-of-the-art GPU solution. Starting from $r=3$, CAT progressively outperforms all other approaches, reaching speedups of up to $101\times$ over a GPU baseline and up to $\sim 14\times$ over the fastest state-of-the-art GPU approach. In terms of energy efficiency, CAT is competitive in the range $1 \le r \le 4$ and from $r \ge 5$ it is the most energy efficient approach. As for performance scaling across GPU architectures, CAT shows a promising trend that if continues for future generations, it would increase its performance at a higher rate than classical GPU solutions. The results obtained in this work put CAT as an attractive GPU approach for scientists that need to study emerging phenomena on CA with large neighborhood radius.
Prioritized experience replay-based DDQN for Unmanned Vehicle Path Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Path planning module is a key module for autonomous vehicle navigation, which directly affects its operating efficiency and safety. In complex environments with many obstacles, traditional planning algorithms often cannot meet the needs of intelligence, which may lead to problems such as dead zones in unmanned vehicles. This paper proposes a path planning algorithm based on DDQN and combines it with the prioritized experience replay method to solve the problem that traditional path planning algorithms often fall into dead zones. A series of simulation experiment results prove that the path planning algorithm based on DDQN is significantly better than other methods in terms of speed and accuracy, especially the ability to break through dead zones in extreme environments. Research shows that the path planning algorithm based on DDQN performs well in terms of path quality and safety. These research results provide an important reference for the research on automatic navigation of autonomous vehicles.
CausalScore: An Automatic Reference-Free Metric for Assessing Response Relevance in Open-Domain Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Automatically evaluating the quality of responses in open-domain dialogue systems is a challenging but crucial task. Current evaluation metrics often fail to align with human judgments, especially when assessing responses that are grammatically correct. To address this issue, we propose a novel metric, called CausalScore, which assesses the relevance of responses by measuring the causal strength between dialogue histories and responses. The causal strength is estimated by utilizing both unconditional dependence and conditional dependencies from the dialogue history to responses. We compare our metric with the existing competitive metrics in terms of their alignment with human judgements. Our experimental results demonstrate that CausalScore significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art metrics by aligning better with human judgements. Additionally, we collect a new dialogue dataset CGDIALOG+ with human-annotated causal relations and a set of pairwise human judgements to facilitate the development of future automatic metrics.
DMF-Net: Image-Guided Point Cloud Completion with Dual-Channel Modality Fusion and Shape-Aware Upsampling Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper we study the task of a single-view image-guided point cloud completion. Existing methods have got promising results by fusing the information of image into point cloud explicitly or implicitly. However, given that the image has global shape information and the partial point cloud has rich local details, We believe that both modalities need to be given equal attention when performing modality fusion. To this end, we propose a novel dual-channel modality fusion network for image-guided point cloud completion(named DMF-Net), in a coarse-to-fine manner. In the first stage, DMF-Net takes a partial point cloud and corresponding image as input to recover a coarse point cloud. In the second stage, the coarse point cloud will be upsampled twice with shape-aware upsampling transformer to get the dense and complete point cloud. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that DMF-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal point cloud completion works on ShapeNet-ViPC dataset.
Semantic Deep Hiding for Robust Unlearnable Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Ensuring data privacy and protection has become paramount in the era of deep learning. Unlearnable examples are proposed to mislead the deep learning models and prevent data from unauthorized exploration by adding small perturbations to data. However, such perturbations (e.g., noise, texture, color change) predominantly impact low-level features, making them vulnerable to common countermeasures. In contrast, semantic images with intricate shapes have a wealth of high-level features, making them more resilient to countermeasures and potential for producing robust unlearnable examples. In this paper, we propose a Deep Hiding (DH) scheme that adaptively hides semantic images enriched with high-level features. We employ an Invertible Neural Network (INN) to invisibly integrate predefined images, inherently hiding them with deceptive perturbations. To enhance data unlearnability, we introduce a Latent Feature Concentration module, designed to work with the INN, regularizing the intra-class variance of these perturbations. To further boost the robustness of unlearnable examples, we design a Semantic Images Generation module that produces hidden semantic images. By utilizing similar semantic information, this module generates similar semantic images for samples within the same classes, thereby enlarging the inter-class distance and narrowing the intra-class distance. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and an ImageNet subset, against 18 countermeasures, reveal that our proposed method exhibits outstanding robustness for unlearnable examples, demonstrating its efficacy in preventing unauthorized data exploitation.
Non-Orthogonal Reduction for Rendering Fluorescent Materials in Non-Spectral Engines
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a method to accurately handle fluorescence in a non-spectral (\eg, tristimulus) rendering engine, showcasing color-shifting and increased luminance effects. Core to our method is a principled reduction technique that encodes the re-radiation into a low-dimensional matrix working in the space of the renderer's Color Matching Functions (CMFs). Our process is independent of a specific CMF set and allows for the addition of a non-visible ultraviolet band during light transport. Our representation visually matches full spectral light transport for measured fluorescent materials even for challenging illuminants.
A Three-Pronged Approach to Cross-Lingual Adaptation with Multilingual LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Low-resource languages, by its very definition, tend to be under represented in the pre-training corpora of Large Language Models. In this work, we investigate three low-resource cross-lingual approaches that enable an LLM adapt to tasks in previously unseen languages. Llama-2 is an LLM where Indic languages, among many other language families, contribute to less than $0.005\%$ of the total $2$ trillion token pre-training corpora. In this work, we experiment with the English-dominated Llama-2 for cross-lingual transfer to three Indic languages, Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil as target languages. We study three approaches for cross-lingual transfer, under ICL and fine-tuning. One, we find that adding additional supervisory signals via a dominant language in the LLM, leads to improvements, both under in-context learning and fine-tuning. Two, adapting the target languages to word reordering may be beneficial under ICL, but its impact diminishes with fine tuning. Finally, continued pre-training in one low-resource language can improve model performance for other related low-resource languages.
Layer-Wise Quantization: A Pragmatic and Effective Method for Quantizing LLMs Beyond Integer Bit-Levels
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We present a simple meta quantization approach that quantizes different layers of a large language model (LLM) at different bit levels, and is independent of the underlying quantization technique. Specifically, we quantize the most important layers to higher bit precision and less important layers to lower bits. We propose two effective strategies to measure the importance of layers within LLMs: the first measures the importance of a layer based on how different its output embeddings are from the input embeddings (higher is better); the second estimates the importance of a layer using the number of layer weights that are much larger than average (smaller is better). We show that quantizing different layers at varying bits according to our importance scores results in minimal performance drop with a far more compressed model size. Finally, we present several practical key takeaways from our variable layer-wise quantization experiments: (a) LLM performance under variable quantization remains close to the original model until 25-50% of layers are moved in lower quantization using our proposed ordering but only until 5-10% if moved using no specific ordering; (b) Adding layer importance to inherently dynamic quantization techniques can further improve their performance, showing that our approach is complementary to other dynamic quantization methods; (c) Quantizing LLMs to lower bits performs substantially better than pruning unless extreme quantization (2-bit) is used; and (d) Layer-wise quantization to lower bits works better in the case of larger LLMs with more layers compared to smaller LLMs with fewer layers. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RazvanDu/LayerwiseQuant/.
Sparse Outerstring Graphs Have Logarithmic Treewidth
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

An outerstring graph is the intersection graph of curves lying inside a disk with one endpoint on the boundary of the disk. We show that an outerstring graph with $n$ vertices has treewidth $O(α\log n)$, where $α$ denotes the arboricity of the graph, with an almost matching lower bound of $Ω(α\log (n/α))$. As a corollary, we show that a $t$-biclique-free outerstring graph has treewidth $O(t(\log t)\log n)$. This leads to polynomial-time algorithms for most of the central NP-complete problems such as \textsc{Independent Set}, \textsc{Vertex Cover}, \textsc{Dominating Set}, \textsc{Feedback Vertex Set}, \textsc{Coloring} for sparse outerstring graphs. Also, we can obtain subexponential-time (exact, parameterized, and approximation) algorithms for various NP-complete problems such as \textsc{Vertex Cover}, \textsc{Feedback Vertex Set} and \textsc{Cycle Packing} for (not necessarily sparse) outerstring graphs.
CuDA2: An approach for Incorporating Traitor Agents into Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (CMARL) strategies are well known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Previous works on adversarial attacks have primarily focused on white-box attacks that directly perturb the states or actions of victim agents, often in scenarios with a limited number of attacks. However, gaining complete access to victim agents in real-world environments is exceedingly difficult. To create more realistic adversarial attacks, we introduce a novel method that involves injecting traitor agents into the CMARL system. We model this problem as a Traitor Markov Decision Process (TMDP), where traitors cannot directly attack the victim agents but can influence their formation or positioning through collisions. In TMDP, traitors are trained using the same MARL algorithm as the victim agents, with their reward function set as the negative of the victim agents' reward. Despite this, the training efficiency for traitors remains low because it is challenging for them to directly associate their actions with the victim agents' rewards. To address this issue, we propose the Curiosity-Driven Adversarial Attack (CuDA2) framework. CuDA2 enhances the efficiency and aggressiveness of attacks on the specified victim agents' policies while maintaining the optimal policy invariance of the traitors. Specifically, we employ a pre-trained Random Network Distillation (RND) module, where the extra reward generated by the RND module encourages traitors to explore states unencountered by the victim agents. Extensive experiments on various scenarios from SMAC demonstrate that our CuDA2 framework offers comparable or superior adversarial attack capabilities compared to other baselines.
Investigating Self-Supervised Methods for Label-Efficient Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Vision transformers combined with self-supervised learning have enabled the development of models which scale across large datasets for several downstream tasks like classification, segmentation and detection. The low-shot learning capability of these models, across several low-shot downstream tasks, has been largely under explored. We perform a system level study of different self supervised pretext tasks, namely contrastive learning, clustering, and masked image modelling for their low-shot capabilities by comparing the pretrained models. In addition we also study the effects of collapse avoidance methods, namely centring, ME-MAX, sinkhorn, on these downstream tasks. Based on our detailed analysis, we introduce a framework involving both mask image modelling and clustering as pretext tasks, which performs better across all low-shot downstream tasks, including multi-class classification, multi-label classification and semantic segmentation. Furthermore, when testing the model on full scale datasets, we show performance gains in multi-class classification, multi-label classification and semantic segmentation.
Early learning of the optimal constant solution in neural networks and humans
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks learn increasingly complex functions over the course of training. Here, we show both empirically and theoretically that learning of the target function is preceded by an early phase in which networks learn the optimal constant solution (OCS) - that is, initial model responses mirror the distribution of target labels, while entirely ignoring information provided in the input. Using a hierarchical category learning task, we derive exact solutions for learning dynamics in deep linear networks trained with bias terms. Even when initialized to zero, this simple architectural feature induces substantial changes in early dynamics. We identify hallmarks of this early OCS phase and illustrate how these signatures are observed in deep linear networks and larger, more complex (and nonlinear) convolutional neural networks solving a hierarchical learning task based on MNIST and CIFAR10. We explain these observations by proving that deep linear networks necessarily learn the OCS during early learning. To further probe the generality of our results, we train human learners over the course of three days on the category learning task. We then identify qualitative signatures of this early OCS phase in terms of the dynamics of true negative (correct-rejection) rates. Surprisingly, we find the same early reliance on the OCS in the behaviour of human learners. Finally, we show that learning of the OCS can emerge even in the absence of bias terms and is equivalently driven by generic correlations in the input data. Overall, our work suggests the OCS as a universal learning principle in supervised, error-corrective learning, and the mechanistic reasons for its prevalence.
Pre-Decoder Processing Functions for a DMC with Mismatched Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper analyzes the effect of adding a pre-decoder processing function to a receiver that contains a fixed mismatched decoder at the output of a discrete memoryless channel. We study properties of the symbolwise pre-processing function and show that it is a simple yet very powerful tool which enables to obtain reliable transmission at a positive rate for almost every metric. We present lower and upper bounds on the capacity of a channel with mismatched decoding and symbolwise(scalar-to-scalar) pre-processing, and show that the optimal pre-processing function for random coding is deterministic. We also characterize achievable error exponents. Finally, we prove that a separation principle holds for vectorwise(vector-to-vector) pre-processing functions and further, that deterministic functions maximize the reliably transmitted rate in this case.
TRIP: Trainable Region-of-Interest Prediction for Hardware-Efficient Neuromorphic Processing on Event-based Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neuromorphic processors are well-suited for efficiently handling sparse events from event-based cameras. However, they face significant challenges in the growth of computing demand and hardware costs as the input resolution increases. This paper proposes the Trainable Region-of-Interest Prediction (TRIP), the first hardware-efficient hard attention framework for event-based vision processing on a neuromorphic processor. Our TRIP framework actively produces low-resolution Region-of-Interest (ROIs) for efficient and accurate classification. The framework exploits sparse events' inherent low information density to reduce the overhead of ROI prediction. We introduced extensive hardware-aware optimizations for TRIP and implemented the hardware-optimized algorithm on the SENECA neuromorphic processor. We utilized multiple event-based classification datasets for evaluation. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracies in all datasets and produces reasonable ROIs with varying locations and sizes. On the DvsGesture dataset, our solution requires 46x less computation than the state-of-the-art while achieving higher accuracy. Furthermore, TRIP enables more than 2x latency and energy improvements on the SENECA neuromorphic processor compared to the conventional solution.
MedCare: Advancing Medical LLMs through Decoupling Clinical Alignment and Knowledge Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have shown substantial progress in natural language understanding and generation, proving valuable especially in the medical field. Despite advancements, challenges persist due to the complexity and diversity inherent in medical tasks, which can be categorized as knowledge-intensive tasks and alignment-required tasks. Previous approaches either ignore the latter task or focus on a minority of tasks and hence lose generalization. To address these drawbacks, we propose a progressive fine-tuning pipeline. This pipeline employs a Knowledge Aggregator and a Noise aggregator to encode diverse knowledge in the first stage and filter out detrimental information. In the second stage, we drop the Noise Aggregator to avoid the interference of suboptimal representation and leverage an additional alignment module optimized towards an orthogonal direction to the knowledge space to mitigate knowledge forgetting. Based on this two-stage paradigm, we proposed a Medical LLM through decoupling Clinical Alignment and Knowledge Aggregation (MedCare), which is designed to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on over 20 medical tasks, as well as SOTA results on specific medical alignment tasks. Various model sizes of MedCare (1.8B, 7B, 14B) all demonstrate significant improvements over existing models with similar model sizes.
Tell Me Where You Are: Multimodal LLMs Meet Place Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a variety of promising capabilities in robotics, including long-horizon planning and commonsense reasoning. However, their performance in place recognition is still underexplored. In this work, we introduce multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to visual place recognition (VPR), where a robot must localize itself using visual observations. Our key design is to use vision-based retrieval to propose several candidates and then leverage language-based reasoning to carefully inspect each candidate for a final decision. Specifically, we leverage the robust visual features produced by off-the-shelf vision foundation models (VFMs) to obtain several candidate locations. We then prompt an MLLM to describe the differences between the current observation and each candidate in a pairwise manner, and reason about the best candidate based on these descriptions. Our results on three datasets demonstrate that integrating the general-purpose visual features from VFMs with the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs already provides an effective place recognition solution, without any VPR-specific supervised training. We believe our work can inspire new possibilities for applying and designing foundation models, i.e., VFMs, LLMs, and MLLMs, to enhance the localization and navigation of mobile robots.
Can Large Language Models Understand DL-Lite Ontologies? An Empirical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant achievements in solving a wide range of tasks. Recently, LLMs' capability to store, retrieve and infer with symbolic knowledge has drawn a great deal of attention, showing their potential to understand structured information. However, it is not yet known whether LLMs can understand Description Logic (DL) ontologies. In this work, we empirically analyze the LLMs' capability of understanding DL-Lite ontologies covering 6 representative tasks from syntactic and semantic aspects. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate both the effectiveness and limitations of LLMs in understanding DL-Lite ontologies. We find that LLMs can understand formal syntax and model-theoretic semantics of concepts and roles. However, LLMs struggle with understanding TBox NI transitivity and handling ontologies with large ABoxes. We hope that our experiments and analyses provide more insights into LLMs and inspire to build more faithful knowledge engineering solutions.
Principal Component Clustering for Semantic Segmentation in Synthetic Data Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This technical report outlines our method for generating a synthetic dataset for semantic segmentation using a latent diffusion model. Our approach eliminates the need for additional models specifically trained on segmentation data and is part of our submission to the CVPR 2024 workshop challenge, entitled CVPR 2024 workshop challenge "SyntaGen Harnessing Generative Models for Synthetic Visual Datasets". Our methodology uses self-attentions to facilitate a novel head-wise semantic information condensation, thereby enabling the direct acquisition of class-agnostic image segmentation from the Stable Diffusion latents. Furthermore, we employ non-prompt-influencing cross-attentions from text to pixel, thus facilitating the classification of the previously generated masks. Finally, we propose a mask refinement step by using only the output image by Stable Diffusion.