OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mode Connectivity and Data Heterogeneity of Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to train a model while keeping their data private collaboratively. Previous studies have shown that data heterogeneity between clients leads to drifts across client updates. However, there are few studies on the relationship between client and global modes, making it unclear where these updates end up drifting. We perform empirical and theoretical studies on this relationship by utilizing mode connectivity, which measures performance change (i.e., connectivity) along parametric paths between different modes. Empirically, reducing data heterogeneity makes the connectivity on different paths more similar, forming more low-error overlaps between client and global modes. We also find that a barrier to connectivity occurs when linearly connecting two global modes, while it disappears with considering non-linear mode connectivity. Theoretically, we establish a quantitative bound on the global-mode connectivity using mean-field theory or dropout stability. The bound demonstrates that the connectivity improves when reducing data heterogeneity and widening trained models. Numerical results further corroborate our analytical findings.
Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that map noise to data using stochastic processes. However, for many applications such as image editing, the model input comes from a distribution that is not random noise. As such, diffusion models must rely on cumbersome methods like guidance or projected sampling to incorporate this information in the generative process. In our work, we propose Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models (DDBMs), a natural alternative to this paradigm based on diffusion bridges, a family of processes that interpolate between two paired distributions given as endpoints. Our method learns the score of the diffusion bridge from data and maps from one endpoint distribution to the other by solving a (stochastic) differential equation based on the learned score. Our method naturally unifies several classes of generative models, such as score-based diffusion models and OT-Flow-Matching, allowing us to adapt existing design and architectural choices to our more general problem. Empirically, we apply DDBMs to challenging image datasets in both pixel and latent space. On standard image translation problems, DDBMs achieve significant improvement over baseline methods, and, when we reduce the problem to image generation by setting the source distribution to random noise, DDBMs achieve comparable FID scores to state-of-the-art methods despite being built for a more general task.
Deep Representation Learning for Prediction of Temporal Event Sets in the Continuous Time Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal Point Processes (TPP) play an important role in predicting or forecasting events. Although these problems have been studied extensively, predicting multiple simultaneously occurring events can be challenging. For instance, more often than not, a patient gets admitted to a hospital with multiple conditions at a time. Similarly people buy more than one stock and multiple news breaks out at the same time. Moreover, these events do not occur at discrete time intervals, and forecasting event sets in the continuous time domain remains an open problem. Naive approaches for extending the existing TPP models for solving this problem lead to dealing with an exponentially large number of events or ignoring set dependencies among events. In this work, we propose a scalable and efficient approach based on TPPs to solve this problem. Our proposed approach incorporates contextual event embeddings, temporal information, and domain features to model the temporal event sets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments on multiple datasets, showing that our model outperforms existing methods in terms of prediction metrics and computational efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that solves the problem of predicting event set intensities in the continuous time domain by using TPPs.
Cost Reduction on Testing Evolving Cancer Registry System
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The Cancer Registration Support System (CaReSS), built by the Cancer Registry of Norway (CRN), is a complex real-world socio-technical software system that undergoes continuous evolution in its implementation. Consequently, continuous testing of CaReSS with automated testing tools is needed such that its dependability is always ensured. Towards automated testing of a key software subsystem of CaReSS, i.e., GURI, we present a real-world application of an extension to the open-source tool EvoMaster, which automatically generates test cases with evolutionary algorithms. We named the extension EvoClass, which enhances EvoMaster with a machine learning classifier to reduce the overall testing cost. This is imperative since testing with EvoMaster involves sending many requests to GURI deployed in different environments, including the production environment, whose performance and functionality could potentially be affected by many requests. The machine learning classifier of EvoClass can predict whether a request generated by EvoMaster will be executed successfully or not; if not, the classifier filters out such requests, consequently reducing the number of requests to be executed on GURI. We evaluated EvoClass on ten GURI versions over four years in three environments: development, testing, and production. Results showed that EvoClass can significantly reduce the testing cost of evolving GURI without reducing testing effectiveness (measured as rule coverage) across all three environments, as compared to the default EvoMaster. Overall, EvoClass achieved ~31% of overall cost reduction. Finally, we report our experiences and lessons learned that are equally valuable for researchers and practitioners.
Meta-Path Learning for Multi-relational Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Existing multi-relational graph neural networks use one of two strategies for identifying informative relations: either they reduce this problem to low-level weight learning, or they rely on handcrafted chains of relational dependencies, called meta-paths. However, the former approach faces challenges in the presence of many relations (e.g., knowledge graphs), while the latter requires substantial domain expertise to identify relevant meta-paths. In this work we propose a novel approach to learn meta-paths and meta-path GNNs that are highly accurate based on a small number of informative meta-paths. Key element of our approach is a scoring function for measuring the potential informativeness of a relation in the incremental construction of the meta-path. Our experimental evaluation shows that the approach manages to correctly identify relevant meta-paths even with a large number of relations, and substantially outperforms existing multi-relational GNNs on synthetic and real-world experiments.
Style Transfer for Non-differentiable Audio Effects
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Digital audio effects are widely used by audio engineers to alter the acoustic and temporal qualities of audio data. However, these effects can have a large number of parameters which can make them difficult to learn for beginners and hamper creativity for professionals. Recently, there have been a number of efforts to employ progress in deep learning to acquire the low-level parameter configurations of audio effects by minimising an objective function between an input and reference track, commonly referred to as style transfer. However, current approaches use inflexible black-box techniques or require that the effects under consideration are implemented in an auto-differentiation framework. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach to audio production style matching which can be used with effects implemented in some of the most widely used frameworks, requiring only that the parameters under consideration have a continuous domain. Further, our method includes style matching for various classes of effects, many of which are difficult or impossible to be approximated closely using differentiable functions. We show that our audio embedding approach creates logical encodings of timbral information, which can be used for a number of downstream tasks. Further, we perform a listening test which demonstrates that our approach is able to convincingly style match a multi-band compressor effect.
Revisiting Cephalometric Landmark Detection from the view of Human Pose Estimation with Lightweight Super-Resolution Head
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate localization of cephalometric landmarks holds great importance in the fields of orthodontics and orthognathics due to its potential for automating key point labeling. In the context of landmark detection, particularly in cephalometrics, it has been observed that existing methods often lack standardized pipelines and well-designed bias reduction processes, which significantly impact their performance. In this paper, we revisit a related task, human pose estimation (HPE), which shares numerous similarities with cephalometric landmark detection (CLD), and emphasize the potential for transferring techniques from the former field to benefit the latter. Motivated by this insight, we have developed a robust and adaptable benchmark based on the well-established HPE codebase known as MMPose. This benchmark can serve as a dependable baseline for achieving exceptional CLD performance. Furthermore, we introduce an upscaling design within the framework to further enhance performance. This enhancement involves the incorporation of a lightweight and efficient super-resolution module, which generates heatmap predictions on high-resolution features and leads to further performance refinement, benefiting from its ability to reduce quantization bias. In the MICCAI CLDetection2023 challenge, our method achieves 1st place ranking on three metrics and 3rd place on the remaining one. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/5k5000/CLdetection2023.
M-DAB: An Input-Distribution Optimization Algorithm for Composite DNA Storage by the Multinomial Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Recent experiments have shown that the capacity of DNA storage systems may be significantly increased by synthesizing composite DNA letters. In this work, we model a DNA storage channel with composite inputs as a \textit{multinomial channel}, and propose an optimization algorithm for its capacity achieving input distribution, for an arbitrary number of output reads. The algorithm is termed multidimensional dynamic assignment Blahut-Arimoto (M-DAB), and is a generalized version of the DAB algorithm, proposed by Wesel et al. developed for the binomial channel. We also empirically observe a scaling law behavior of the capacity as a function of the support size of the capacity-achieving input distribution.
Robots That Can See: Leveraging Human Pose for Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Anticipating the motion of all humans in dynamic environments such as homes and offices is critical to enable safe and effective robot navigation. Such spaces remain challenging as humans do not follow strict rules of motion and there are often multiple occluded entry points such as corners and doors that create opportunities for sudden encounters. In this work, we present a Transformer based architecture to predict human future trajectories in human-centric environments from input features including human positions, head orientations, and 3D skeletal keypoints from onboard in-the-wild sensory information. The resulting model captures the inherent uncertainty for future human trajectory prediction and achieves state-of-the-art performance on common prediction benchmarks and a human tracking dataset captured from a mobile robot adapted for the prediction task. Furthermore, we identify new agents with limited historical data as a major contributor to error and demonstrate the complementary nature of 3D skeletal poses in reducing prediction error in such challenging scenarios.
Training and inference of large language models using 8-bit floating point
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

FP8 formats are gaining popularity to boost the computational efficiency for training and inference of large deep learning models. Their main challenge is that a careful choice of scaling is needed to prevent degradation due to the reduced dynamic range compared to higher-precision formats. Although there exists ample literature about selecting such scalings for INT formats, this critical aspect has yet to be addressed for FP8. This paper presents a methodology to select the scalings for FP8 linear layers, based on dynamically updating per-tensor scales for the weights, gradients and activations. We apply this methodology to train and validate large language models of the type of GPT and Llama 2 using FP8, for model sizes ranging from 111M to 70B. To facilitate the understanding of the FP8 dynamics, our results are accompanied by plots of the per-tensor scale distribution for weights, activations and gradients during both training and inference.
A Survey on Deep Learning Techniques for Action Anticipation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The ability to anticipate possible future human actions is essential for a wide range of applications, including autonomous driving and human-robot interaction. Consequently, numerous methods have been introduced for action anticipation in recent years, with deep learning-based approaches being particularly popular. In this work, we review the recent advances of action anticipation algorithms with a particular focus on daily-living scenarios. Additionally, we classify these methods according to their primary contributions and summarize them in tabular form, allowing readers to grasp the details at a glance. Furthermore, we delve into the common evaluation metrics and datasets used for action anticipation and provide future directions with systematical discussions.
Toward Robust Recommendation via Real-time Vicinal Defense
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Recommender systems have been shown to be vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious data is injected into the dataset to cause the recommender system to provide biased recommendations. To defend against such attacks, various robust learning methods have been proposed. However, most methods are model-specific or attack-specific, making them lack generality, while other methods, such as adversarial training, are oriented towards evasion attacks and thus have a weak defense strength in poisoning attacks. In this paper, we propose a general method, Real-time Vicinal Defense (RVD), which leverages neighboring training data to fine-tune the model before making a recommendation for each user. RVD works in the inference phase to ensure the robustness of the specific sample in real-time, so there is no need to change the model structure and training process, making it more practical. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RVD effectively mitigates targeted poisoning attacks across various models without sacrificing accuracy. Moreover, the defensive effect can be further amplified when our method is combined with other strategies.
Should you make your decisions on a WhIM? Data-Driven Decision making using a What-If Machine for Evaluation of Hypothetical Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

What-if analysis can be used as a process in data-driven decision making to inspect the behavior of a complex system under some given hypothesis. We propose a What-If Machine that creates hypothetical realities by resampling the data distribution and comparing it to the an alternate baseline to measure the impact on a target metric. Our What-If Machine enables both a method to confirm/reject manually developed intuitions of practitioners as well as give high-impact insights on a target metric automatically. This can support data-informed decision making by using historical data to infer future possibilities. Our method is not bound by a specific use-case and can be used on any tabular data. Compared to previous work, our work enables real-time analysis and gives insights into areas with high impact on the target metric automatically, moving beyond human intuitions to provide data-driven insights.
Parallel Computation of Multi-Slice Clustering of Third-Order Tensors
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Machine Learning approaches like clustering methods deal with massive datasets that present an increasing challenge. We devise parallel algorithms to compute the Multi-Slice Clustering (MSC) for 3rd-order tensors. The MSC method is based on spectral analysis of the tensor slices and works independently on each tensor mode. Such features fit well in the parallel paradigm via a distributed memory system. We show that our parallel scheme outperforms sequential computing and allows for the scalability of the MSC method.
DREAM: Decentralized Reinforcement Learning for Exploration and Efficient Energy Management in Multi-Robot Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Resource-constrained robots often suffer from energy inefficiencies, underutilized computational abilities due to inadequate task allocation, and a lack of robustness in dynamic environments, all of which strongly affect their performance. This paper introduces DREAM - Decentralized Reinforcement Learning for Exploration and Efficient Energy Management in Multi-Robot Systems, a comprehensive framework that optimizes the allocation of resources for efficient exploration. It advances beyond conventional heuristic-based task planning as observed conventionally. The framework incorporates Operational Range Estimation using Reinforcement Learning to perform exploration and obstacle avoidance in unfamiliar terrains. DREAM further introduces an Energy Consumption Model for goal allocation, thereby ensuring mission completion under constrained resources using a Graph Neural Network. This approach also ensures that the entire Multi-Robot System can survive for an extended period of time for further missions compared to the conventional approach of randomly allocating goals, which compromises one or more agents. Our approach adapts to prioritizing agents in real-time, showcasing remarkable resilience against dynamic environments. This robust solution was evaluated in various simulated environments, demonstrating adaptability and applicability across diverse scenarios. We observed a substantial improvement of about 25% over the baseline method, leading the way for future research in resource-constrained robotics.
Semantic Communication with Probability Graph: A Joint Communication and Computation Design
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present a probability graph-based semantic information compression system for scenarios where the base station (BS) and the user share common background knowledge. We employ probability graphs to represent the shared knowledge between the communicating parties. During the transmission of specific text data, the BS first extracts semantic information from the text, which is represented by a knowledge graph. Subsequently, the BS omits certain relational information based on the shared probability graph to reduce the data size. Upon receiving the compressed semantic data, the user can automatically restore missing information using the shared probability graph and predefined rules. This approach brings additional computational resource consumption while effectively reducing communication resource consumption. Considering the limitations of wireless resources, we address the problem of joint communication and computation resource allocation design, aiming at minimizing the total communication and computation energy consumption of the network while adhering to latency, transmit power, and semantic constraints. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.
ILB: Graph Neural Network Enabled Emergency Demand Response Program For Electricity
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Demand Response (DR) programs have become a crucial component of smart electricity grids as they shift the flexibility of electricity consumption from supply to demand in response to the ever-growing demand for electricity. In particular, in times of crisis, an emergency DR program is required to manage unexpected spikes in energy demand. In this paper, we propose the Incentive-Driven Load Balancer (ILB), a program designed to efficiently manage demand and response during crisis situations. By offering incentives to flexible households likely to reduce demand, the ILB facilitates effective demand reduction and prepares them for unexpected events. To enable ILB, we introduce a two-step machine learning-based framework for participant selection, which employs a graph-based approach to identify households capable of easily adjusting their electricity consumption. This framework utilizes two Graph Neural Networks (GNNs): one for pattern recognition and another for household selection. Through extensive experiments on household-level electricity consumption in California, Michigan, and Texas, we demonstrate the ILB program's significant effectiveness in supporting communities during emergencies.
GASS: Generalizing Audio Source Separation with Large-scale Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Universal source separation targets at separating the audio sources of an arbitrary mix, removing the constraint to operate on a specific domain like speech or music. Yet, the potential of universal source separation is limited because most existing works focus on mixes with predominantly sound events, and small training datasets also limit its potential for supervised learning. Here, we study a single general audio source separation (GASS) model trained to separate speech, music, and sound events in a supervised fashion with a large-scale dataset. We assess GASS models on a diverse set of tasks. Our strong in-distribution results show the feasibility of GASS models, and the competitive out-of-distribution performance in sound event and speech separation shows its generalization abilities. Yet, it is challenging for GASS models to generalize for separating out-of-distribution cinematic and music content. We also fine-tune GASS models on each dataset and consistently outperform the ones without pre-training. All fine-tuned models (except the music separation one) obtain state-of-the-art results in their respective benchmarks.
Toward Optimal Tabletop Rearrangement with Multiple Manipulation Primitives
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In practice, many types of manipulation actions (e.g., pick-n-place and push) are needed to accomplish real-world manipulation tasks. Yet, limited research exists that explores the synergistic integration of different manipulation actions for optimally solving long-horizon task-and-motion planning problems. In this study, we propose and investigate planning high-quality action sequences for solving long-horizon tabletop rearrangement tasks in which multiple manipulation primitives are required. Denoting the problem rearrangement with multiple manipulation primitives (REMP), we develop two algorithms, hierarchical best-first search (HBFS) and parallel Monte Carlo tree search for multi-primitive rearrangement (PMMR) toward optimally resolving the challenge. Extensive simulation and real robot experiments demonstrate that both methods effectively tackle REMP, with HBFS excelling in planning speed and PMMR producing human-like, high-quality solutions with a nearly 100% success rate.