OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Guiding Word Equation Solving using Graph Neural Networks (Extended Technical Report)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes a Graph Neural Network-guided algorithm for solving word equations, based on the well-known Nielsen transformation for splitting equations. The algorithm iteratively rewrites the first terms of each side of an equation, giving rise to a tree-like search space. The choice of path at each split point of the tree significantly impacts solving time, motivating the use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for efficient split decision-making. Split decisions are encoded as multi-classification tasks, and five graph representations of word equations are introduced to encode their structural information for GNNs. The algorithm is implemented as a solver named DragonLi. Experiments are conducted on artificial and real-world benchmarks. The algorithm performs particularly well on satisfiable problems. For single word \mbox{equations}, DragonLi can solve significantly more problems than well-established string solvers. For the conjunction of multiple word equations, DragonLi is competitive with state-of-the-art string solvers.
Beyond Visual Understanding: Introducing PARROT-360V for Vision Language Model Benchmarking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Current benchmarks for evaluating Vision Language Models (VLMs) often fall short in thoroughly assessing model abilities to understand and process complex visual and textual content. They typically focus on simple tasks that do not require deep reasoning or the integration of multiple data modalities to solve an original problem. To address this gap, we introduce the PARROT-360V Benchmark, a novel and comprehensive benchmark featuring 2487 challenging visual puzzles designed to test VLMs on complex visual reasoning tasks. We evaluated leading models: GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro, using PARROT-360V to assess their capabilities in combining visual clues with language skills to solve tasks in a manner akin to human problem-solving. Our findings reveal a notable performance gap: state-of-the-art models scored between 28 to 56 percentage on our benchmark, significantly lower than their performance on popular benchmarks. This underscores the limitations of current VLMs in handling complex, multi-step reasoning tasks and highlights the need for more robust evaluation frameworks to advance the field.
LightLLM: A Versatile Large Language Model for Predictive Light Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We propose LightLLM, a model that fine tunes pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for light-based sensing tasks. It integrates a sensor data encoder to extract key features, a contextual prompt to provide environmental information, and a fusion layer to combine these inputs into a unified representation. This combined input is then processed by the pre-trained LLM, which remains frozen while being fine-tuned through the addition of lightweight, trainable components, allowing the model to adapt to new tasks without altering its original parameters. This approach enables flexible adaptation of LLM to specialized light sensing tasks with minimal computational overhead and retraining effort. We have implemented LightLLM for three light sensing tasks: light-based localization, outdoor solar forecasting, and indoor solar estimation. Using real-world experimental datasets, we demonstrate that LightLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 4.4x improvement in localization accuracy and 3.4x improvement in indoor solar estimation when tested in previously unseen environments. We further demonstrate that LightLLM outperforms ChatGPT-4 with direct prompting, highlighting the advantages of LightLLM's specialized architecture for sensor data fusion with textual prompts.
Effective Analog ICs Floorplanning with Relational Graph Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Analog integrated circuit (IC) floorplanning is typically a manual process with the placement of components (devices and modules) planned by a layout engineer. This process is further complicated by the interdependence of floorplanning and routing steps, numerous electric and layout-dependent constraints, as well as the high level of customization expected in analog design. This paper presents a novel automatic floorplanning algorithm based on reinforcement learning. It is augmented by a relational graph convolutional neural network model for encoding circuit features and positional constraints. The combination of these two machine learning methods enables knowledge transfer across different circuit designs with distinct topologies and constraints, increasing the \emph{generalization ability} of the solution. Applied to $6$ industrial circuits, our approach surpassed established floorplanning techniques in terms of speed, area and half-perimeter wire length. When integrated into a \emph{procedural generator} for layout completion, overall layout time was reduced by $67.3\%$ with a $8.3\%$ mean area reduction compared to manual layout.
Rethinking the Intermediate Features in Adversarial Attacks: Misleading Robotic Models via Adversarial Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Language-conditioned robotic learning has significantly enhanced robot adaptability by enabling a single model to execute diverse tasks in response to verbal commands. Despite these advancements, security vulnerabilities within this domain remain largely unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel adversarial prompt attack tailored to language-conditioned robotic models. Our approach involves crafting a universal adversarial prefix that induces the model to perform unintended actions when added to any original prompt. We demonstrate that existing adversarial techniques exhibit limited effectiveness when directly transferred to the robotic domain due to the inherent robustness of discretized robotic action spaces. To overcome this challenge, we propose to optimize adversarial prefixes based on continuous action representations, circumventing the discretization process. Additionally, we identify the beneficial impact of intermediate features on adversarial attacks and leverage the negative gradient of intermediate self-attention features to further enhance attack efficacy. Extensive experiments on VIMA models across 13 robot manipulation tasks validate the superiority of our method over existing approaches and demonstrate its transferability across different model variants.
ICT: Image-Object Cross-Level Trusted Intervention for Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the recent breakthroughs achieved by Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in understanding and responding to complex visual-textual contexts, their inherent hallucination tendencies limit their practical application in real-world scenarios that demand high levels of precision. Existing methods typically either fine-tune the LVLMs using additional data, which incurs extra costs in manual annotation and computational resources or perform comparisons at the decoding stage, which may eliminate useful language priors for reasoning while introducing inference time overhead. Therefore, we propose ICT, a lightweight, training-free method that calculates an intervention direction to shift the model's focus towards different levels of visual information, enhancing its attention to high-level and fine-grained visual details. During the forward pass stage, the intervention is applied to the attention heads that encode the overall image information and the fine-grained object details, effectively mitigating the phenomenon of overly language priors, and thereby alleviating hallucinations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ICT achieves strong performance with a small amount of data and generalizes well across different datasets and models. Our code will be public.
Event USKT : U-State Space Model in Knowledge Transfer for Event Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Event cameras, as an emerging imaging technology, offer distinct advantages over traditional RGB cameras, including reduced energy consumption and higher frame rates. However, the limited quantity of available event data presents a significant challenge, hindering their broader development. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a tailored U-shaped State Space Model Knowledge Transfer (USKT) framework for Event-to-RGB knowledge transfer. This framework generates inputs compatible with RGB frames, enabling event data to effectively reuse pre-trained RGB models and achieve competitive performance with minimal parameter tuning. Within the USKT architecture, we also propose a bidirectional reverse state space model. Unlike conventional bidirectional scanning mechanisms, the proposed Bidirectional Reverse State Space Model (BiR-SSM) leverages a shared weight strategy, which facilitates efficient modeling while conserving computational resources. In terms of effectiveness, integrating USKT with ResNet50 as the backbone improves model performance by 0.95%, 3.57%, and 2.9% on DVS128 Gesture, N-Caltech101, and CIFAR-10-DVS datasets, respectively, underscoring USKT's adaptability and effectiveness. The code will be made available upon acceptance.
Sycophancy in Large Language Models: Causes and Mitigations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their tendency to exhibit sycophantic behavior - excessively agreeing with or flattering users - poses significant risks to their reliability and ethical deployment. This paper provides a technical survey of sycophancy in LLMs, analyzing its causes, impacts, and potential mitigation strategies. We review recent work on measuring and quantifying sycophantic tendencies, examine the relationship between sycophancy and other challenges like hallucination and bias, and evaluate promising techniques for reducing sycophancy while maintaining model performance. Key approaches explored include improved training data, novel fine-tuning methods, post-deployment control mechanisms, and decoding strategies. We also discuss the broader implications of sycophancy for AI alignment and propose directions for future research. Our analysis suggests that mitigating sycophancy is crucial for developing more robust, reliable, and ethically-aligned language models.
GreenMachine: Automatic Design of Zero-Cost Proxies for Energy-Efficient NAS
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has driven innovations and created new opportunities across various sectors. However, leveraging domain-specific knowledge often requires automated tools to design and configure models effectively. In the case of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), researchers and practitioners usually resort to Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches, which are resource- and time-intensive, requiring the training and evaluation of numerous candidate architectures. This raises sustainability concerns, particularly due to the high energy demands involved, creating a paradox: the pursuit of the most effective model can undermine sustainability goals. To mitigate this issue, zero-cost proxies have emerged as a promising alternative. These proxies estimate a model's performance without the need for full training, offering a more efficient approach. This paper addresses the challenges of model evaluation by automatically designing zero-cost proxies to assess DNNs efficiently. Our method begins with a randomly generated set of zero-cost proxies, which are evolved and tested using the NATS-Bench benchmark. We assess the proxies' effectiveness using both randomly sampled and stratified subsets of the search space, ensuring they can differentiate between low- and high-performing networks and enhance generalizability. Results show our method outperforms existing approaches on the stratified sampling strategy, achieving strong correlations with ground truth performance, including a Kendall correlation of 0.89 on CIFAR-10 and 0.77 on CIFAR-100 with NATS-Bench-SSS and a Kendall correlation of 0.78 on CIFAR-10 and 0.71 on CIFAR-100 with NATS-Bench-TSS.
Gradient-Free Classifier Guidance for Diffusion Model Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image generation using diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding learning capabilities, effectively capturing the full distribution of the training dataset. They are known to generate wide variations in sampled images, albeit with a trade-off in image fidelity. Guided sampling methods, such as classifier guidance (CG) and classifier-free guidance (CFG), focus sampling in well-learned high-probability regions to generate images of high fidelity, but each has its limitations. CG is computationally expensive due to the use of back-propagation for classifier gradient descent, while CFG, being gradient-free, is more efficient but compromises class label alignment compared to CG. In this work, we propose an efficient guidance method that fully utilizes a pre-trained classifier without using gradient descent. By using the classifier solely in inference mode, a time-adaptive reference class label and corresponding guidance scale are determined at each time step for guided sampling. Experiments on both class-conditioned and text-to-image generation diffusion models demonstrate that the proposed Gradient-free Classifier Guidance (GFCG) method consistently improves class prediction accuracy. We also show GFCG to be complementary to other guided sampling methods like CFG. When combined with the state-of-the-art Autoguidance (ATG), without additional computational overhead, it enhances image fidelity while preserving diversity. For ImageNet 512$\times$512, we achieve a record $\text{FD}_{\text{DINOv2}}$ of 23.09, while simultaneously attaining a higher classification Precision (94.3%) compared to ATG (90.2%)
ChatBCI: A P300 Speller BCI Leveraging Large Language Models for Improved Sentence Composition in Realistic Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

P300 speller BCIs allow users to compose sentences by selecting target keys on a GUI through the detection of P300 component in their EEG signals following visual stimuli. Most P300 speller BCIs require users to spell words letter by letter, or the first few initial letters, resulting in high keystroke demands that increase time, cognitive load, and fatigue. This highlights the need for more efficient, user-friendly methods for faster sentence composition. In this work, we introduce ChatBCI, a P300 speller BCI that leverages the zero-shot learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to suggest words from user-spelled initial letters or predict the subsequent word(s), reducing keystrokes and accelerating sentence composition. ChatBCI retrieves word suggestions through remote queries to the GPT-3.5 API. A new GUI, displaying GPT-3.5 word suggestions as extra keys is designed. SWLDA is used for the P300 classification. Seven subjects completed two online spelling tasks: 1) copy-spelling a self-composed sentence using ChatBCI, and 2) improvising a sentence using ChatBCI's word suggestions. Results demonstrate that in Task 1, on average, ChatBCI outperforms letter-by-letter BCI spellers, reducing time and keystrokes by 62.14% and 53.22%, respectively, and increasing information transfer rate by 198.96%. In Task 2, ChatBCI achieves 80.68% keystroke savings and a record 8.53 characters/min for typing speed. Overall, ChatBCI, by employing remote LLM queries, enhances sentence composition in realistic scenarios, significantly outperforming traditional spellers without requiring local model training or storage. ChatBCI's (multi-) word predictions, combined with its new GUI, pave the way for developing next-generation speller BCIs that are efficient and effective for real-time communication, especially for users with communication and motor disabilities.
ML-SPEAK: A Theory-Guided Machine Learning Method for Studying and Predicting Conversational Turn-taking Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Predicting team dynamics from personality traits remains a fundamental challenge for the psychological sciences and team-based organizations. Understanding how team composition generates team processes can significantly advance team-based research along with providing practical guidelines for team staffing and training. Although the Input-Process-Output (IPO) model has been useful for studying these connections, the complex nature of team member interactions demands a more dynamic approach. We develop a computational model of conversational turn-taking within self-organized teams that can provide insight into the relationships between team member personality traits and team communication dynamics. We focus on turn-taking patterns between team members, independent of content, which can significantly influence team emergent states and outcomes while being objectively measurable and quantifiable. As our model is trained on conversational data from teams of given trait compositions, it can learn the relationships between individual traits and speaking behaviors and predict group-wide patterns of communication based on team trait composition alone. We first evaluate the performance of our model using simulated data and then apply it to real-world data collected from self-organized student teams. In comparison to baselines, our model is more accurate at predicting speaking turn sequences and can reveal new relationships between team member traits and their communication patterns. Our approach offers a more data-driven and dynamic understanding of team processes. By bridging the gap between individual personality traits and team communication patterns, our model has the potential to inform theories of team processes and provide powerful insights into optimizing team staffing and training.
Exploring the Sparsity-Quantization Interplay on a Novel Hybrid SNN Event-Driven Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer potential advantages in energy efficiency but currently trail Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in versatility, largely due to challenges in efficient input encoding. Recent work shows that direct coding achieves superior accuracy with fewer timesteps than traditional rate coding. However, there is a lack of specialized hardware to fully exploit the potential of direct-coded SNNs, especially their mix of dense and sparse layers. This work proposes the first hybrid inference architecture for direct-coded SNNs. The proposed hardware architecture comprises a dense core to efficiently process the input layer and sparse cores optimized for event-driven spiking convolutions. Furthermore, for the first time, we investigate and quantify the quantization effect on sparsity. Our experiments on two variations of the VGG9 network and implemented on a Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) reveal two novel findings. Firstly, quantization increases the network sparsity by up to 15.2% with minimal loss of accuracy. Combined with the inherent low power benefits, this leads to a 3.4x improvement in energy compared to the full-precision version. Secondly, direct coding outperforms rate coding, achieving a 10% improvement in accuracy and consuming 26.4x less energy per image. Overall, our accelerator achieves 51x higher throughput and consumes half the power compared to previous work. Our accelerator code is available at: https://github.com/githubofaliyev/SNN-DSE/tree/DATE25
FINECAPTION: Compositional Image Captioning Focusing on Wherever You Want at Any Granularity
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The advent of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal tasks, enabling more sophisticated and accurate reasoning across various applications, including image and video captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite their superior capabilities, VLMs struggle with fine-grained image regional composition information perception. Specifically, they have difficulty accurately aligning the segmentation masks with the corresponding semantics and precisely describing the compositional aspects of the referred regions. However, compositionality - the ability to understand and generate novel combinations of known visual and textual components - is critical for facilitating coherent reasoning and understanding across modalities by VLMs. To address this issue, we propose FINECAPTION, a novel VLM that can recognize arbitrary masks as referential inputs and process high-resolution images for compositional image captioning at different granularity levels. To support this endeavor, we introduce COMPOSITIONCAP, a new dataset for multi-grained region compositional image captioning, which introduces the task of compositional attribute-aware regional image captioning. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to other state-of-the-art VLMs. Additionally, we analyze the capabilities of current VLMs in recognizing various visual prompts for compositional region image captioning, highlighting areas for improvement in VLM design and training.
Communication-Efficient Sparsely-Activated Model Training via Sequence Migration and Token Condensation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is an emerging technique for scaling large models with sparse activation. MoE models are typically trained in a distributed manner with an expert parallelism scheme, where experts in each MoE layer are distributed across multiple GPUs. However, the default expert parallelism suffers from the heavy network burden due to the all-to-all intermediate data exchange among GPUs before and after the expert run. Some existing works have proposed to reduce intermediate data exchanges by transferring experts to reduce the network loads, however, which would decrease parallelism level of expert execution and make computation inefficient. The weaknesses of existing works motivate us to explore whether it is possible to reduce inter-GPU traffic while maintaining a high degree of expert parallelism. This paper gives a positive response by presenting Luffy, a communication-efficient distributed MoE training system with two new techniques. First, Luffy migrates sequences among GPUs to hide heavy token pulling paths within GPUs and avoid copying experts over GPUs. Second, we propose token condensation that identifies similar tokens and then eliminates redundant transmissions. We implement Luffy based on PyTorch and evaluate its performance on a testbed of 16 V100 GPUs. Luffy system can achieve a speedup of up to 2.73x compared to state-of-the-art MoE training systems.
Learning a local trading strategy: deep reinforcement learning for grid-scale renewable energy integration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Variable renewable generation increases the challenge of balancing power supply and demand. Grid-scale batteries co-located with generation can help mitigate this misalignment. This paper explores the use of reinforcement learning (RL) for operating grid-scale batteries co-located with solar power. Our results show RL achieves an average of 61% (and up to 96%) of the approximate theoretical optimal (non-causal) operation, outperforming advanced control methods on average. Our findings suggest RL may be preferred when future signals are hard to predict. Moreover, RL has two significant advantages compared to simpler rules-based control: (1) that solar energy is more effectively shifted towards high demand periods, and (2) increased diversity of battery dispatch across different locations, reducing potential ramping issues caused by super-position of many similar actions.