OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Objective Improvement Approach to Solving Discounted Payoff Games
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

While discounted payoff games and classic games that reduce to them, like parity and mean-payoff games, are symmetric, their solutions are not. We have taken a fresh view on the constraints that optimal solutions need to satisfy, and devised a novel way to converge to them, which is entirely symmetric. It also challenges the gospel that methods for solving payoff games are either based on strategy improvement or on value iteration.
The PoW Landscape in the Aftermath of The Merge
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

On 15th September 2022, The Merge marked the Ethereum network's transition from computation-hardness-based consensus (proof-of-work) to a committee-based consensus mechanism (proof-of-stake). As a result, all the specialized hardware and GPUs that were being used by miners ceased to be profitable in the main Ethereum network. Miners were then left with the decision of how to re-purpose their hardware. One such choice was to try and make a profit mining another existing PoW system. In this study, we explore this choice by analyzing the hashrate increase in the top PoW networks following the merge. Our findings reveal that the peak increase in hashrate to other PoW networks following The Merge represents an adoption of at least 41% of the hashrate that was present in Ethereum, with 12% remaining more than 5 months later. Though we measure a drastic decrease in profitability by almost an order of magnitude, the continued presence of miners halts claims that power consumption was instantly addressed by Ethereum's switch to PoS.
A Novel Approach for Machine Learning-based Load Balancing in High-speed Train System using Nested Cross Validation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication networks have recently emerged in various fields, including highspeed trains. However, the dense deployment of 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) base stations (BSs) and the high speed of moving trains lead to frequent handovers (HOs), which can adversely affect the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of mobile users. As a result, HO optimization and resource allocation are essential considerations for managing mobility in high-speed train systems. In this paper, we model system performance of a high-speed train system with a novel machine learning (ML) approach that is nested cross validation scheme that prevents information leakage from model evaluation into the model parameter tuning, thereby avoiding overfitting and resulting in better generalization error. To this end, we employ ML methods for the high-speed train system scenario. Handover Margin (HOM) and Time-to-Trigger (TTT) values are used as features, and several KPIs are used as outputs, and several ML methods including Gradient Boosting Regression (GBR), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), CatBoost Regression (CBR), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and k-Nearest Neighbor Regression (KNNR) are employed for the problem. Finally, performance comparisons of the cross validation schemes with the methods are made in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and mean square error (MSE) metrics are made. As per obtained results, boosting methods, ABR, CBR, GBR, with nested cross validation scheme superiorly outperforms conventional cross validation scheme results with the same methods. On the other hand, SVR, KNRR, KRR, ANN with the nested scheme produce promising results for prediction of some KPIs with respect to their conventional scheme employment.
Back to the Future: Towards Explainable Temporal Reasoning with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal reasoning is a crucial NLP task, providing a nuanced understanding of time-sensitive contexts within textual data. Although recent advancements in LLMs have demonstrated their potential in temporal reasoning, the predominant focus has been on tasks such as temporal expression and temporal relation extraction. These tasks are primarily designed for the extraction of direct and past temporal cues and to engage in simple reasoning processes. A significant gap remains when considering complex reasoning tasks such as event forecasting, which requires multi-step temporal reasoning on events and prediction on the future timestamp. Another notable limitation of existing methods is their incapability to provide an illustration of their reasoning process, hindering explainability. In this paper, we introduce the first task of explainable temporal reasoning, to predict an event's occurrence at a future timestamp based on context which requires multiple reasoning over multiple events, and subsequently provide a clear explanation for their prediction. Our task offers a comprehensive evaluation of both the LLMs' complex temporal reasoning ability, the future event prediction ability, and explainability-a critical attribute for AI applications. To support this task, we present the first multi-source instruction-tuning dataset of explainable temporal reasoning (ExpTime) with 26k derived from the temporal knowledge graph datasets and their temporal reasoning paths, using a novel knowledge-graph-instructed-generation strategy. Based on the dataset, we propose the first open-source LLM series TimeLlaMA based on the foundation LlaMA2, with the ability of instruction following for explainable temporal reasoning. We compare the performance of our method and a variety of LLMs, where our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance of temporal prediction and explanation.
Leveraging Cutting Edge Deep Learning Based Image Matching for Reconstructing a Large Scene from Sparse Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present the top ranked solution for the AISG-SLA Visual Localisation Challenge benchmark (IJCAI 2023), where the task is to estimate relative motion between images taken in sequence by a camera mounted on a car driving through an urban scene. For matching images we use our recent deep learning based matcher RoMa. Matching image pairs sequentially and estimating relative motion from point correspondences sampled by RoMa already gives very competitive results -- third rank on the challenge benchmark. To improve the estimations we extract keypoints in the images, match them using RoMa, and perform structure from motion reconstruction using COLMAP. We choose our recent DeDoDe keypoints for their high repeatability. Further, we address time jumps in the image sequence by matching specific non-consecutive image pairs based on image retrieval with DINOv2. These improvements yield a solution beating all competitors. We further present a loose upper bound on the accuracy obtainable by the image retrieval approach by also matching hand-picked non-consecutive pairs.
Thou Shalt Not Reject: Analyzing Accept-Or-Pay Cookie Banners on the Web
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold on the Web, giving users the option to either accept cookies (and consequently user tracking) or buy a paid subscription for a tracking-free website experience. In this paper, we perform the first completely automated analysis of cookiewalls, i.e., cookie banners acting as a paywall. We find cookiewalls on 0.6% of all queried 45k websites. Moreover, cookiewalls are deployed to a large degree on European websites, e.g., for Germany we see cookiewalls on 8.5% of top 1k websites. Additionally, websites using cookiewalls send 6.4 times more third-party cookies and 42 times more tracking cookies to visitors, compared to regular cookie banner websites. We also uncover two large Subscription Management Platforms used on hundreds of websites, which provide website operators with easy-to-setup cookiewall solutions. Finally, we publish tools, data, and code to foster reproducibility and further studies.
Prompt-tuning latent diffusion models for inverse problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a new method for solving imaging inverse problems using text-to-image latent diffusion models as general priors. Existing methods using latent diffusion models for inverse problems typically rely on simple null text prompts, which can lead to suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we introduce a method for prompt tuning, which jointly optimizes the text embedding on-the-fly while running the reverse diffusion process. This allows us to generate images that are more faithful to the diffusion prior. In addition, we propose a method to keep the evolution of latent variables within the range space of the encoder, by projection. This helps to reduce image artifacts, a major problem when using latent diffusion models instead of pixel-based diffusion models. Our combined method, called P2L, outperforms both image- and latent-diffusion model-based inverse problem solvers on a variety of tasks, such as super-resolution, deblurring, and inpainting.
Target-Aware Contextual Political Bias Detection in News
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Media bias detection requires comprehensive integration of information derived from multiple news sources. Sentence-level political bias detection in news is no exception, and has proven to be a challenging task that requires an understanding of bias in consideration of the context. Inspired by the fact that humans exhibit varying degrees of writing styles, resulting in a diverse range of statements with different local and global contexts, previous work in media bias detection has proposed augmentation techniques to exploit this fact. Despite their success, we observe that these techniques introduce noise by over-generalizing bias context boundaries, which hinders performance. To alleviate this issue, we propose techniques to more carefully search for context using a bias-sensitive, target-aware approach for data augmentation. Comprehensive experiments on the well-known BASIL dataset show that when combined with pre-trained models such as BERT, our augmentation techniques lead to state-of-the-art results. Our approach outperforms previous methods significantly, obtaining an F1-score of 58.15 over state-of-the-art bias detection task.
Cryptocurrency Portfolio Optimization by Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Many cryptocurrency brokers nowadays offer a variety of derivative assets that allow traders to perform hedging or speculation. This paper proposes an effective algorithm based on neural networks to take advantage of these investment products. The proposed algorithm constructs a portfolio that contains a pair of negatively correlated assets. A deep neural network, which outputs the allocation weight of each asset at a time interval, is trained to maximize the Sharpe ratio. A novel loss term is proposed to regulate the network's bias towards a specific asset, thus enforcing the network to learn an allocation strategy that is close to a minimum variance strategy. Extensive experiments were conducted using data collected from Binance spanning 19 months to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. The backtest results show that the proposed algorithm can produce neural networks that are able to make profits in different market situations.
Modularity in Deep Learning: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Modularity is a general principle present in many fields. It offers attractive advantages, including, among others, ease of conceptualization, interpretability, scalability, module combinability, and module reusability. The deep learning community has long sought to take inspiration from the modularity principle, either implicitly or explicitly. This interest has been increasing over recent years. We review the notion of modularity in deep learning around three axes: data, task, and model, which characterize the life cycle of deep learning. Data modularity refers to the observation or creation of data groups for various purposes. Task modularity refers to the decomposition of tasks into sub-tasks. Model modularity means that the architecture of a neural network system can be decomposed into identifiable modules. We describe different instantiations of the modularity principle, and we contextualize their advantages in different deep learning sub-fields. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion of the definition of modularity and directions for future research.
Towards guarantees for parameter isolation in continual learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning has proved to be a successful paradigm for solving many challenges in machine learning. However, deep neural networks fail when trained sequentially on multiple tasks, a shortcoming known as catastrophic forgetting in the continual learning literature. Despite a recent flourish of learning algorithms successfully addressing this problem, we find that provable guarantees against catastrophic forgetting are lacking. In this work, we study the relationship between learning and forgetting by looking at the geometry of neural networks' loss landscape. We offer a unifying perspective on a family of continual learning algorithms, namely methods based on parameter isolation, and we establish guarantees on catastrophic forgetting for some of them.
Graph Isomorphic Networks for Assessing Reliability of the Medium-Voltage Grid
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Ensuring electricity grid reliability becomes increasingly challenging with the shift towards renewable energy and declining conventional capacities. Distribution System Operators (DSOs) aim to achieve grid reliability by verifying the n-1 principle, ensuring continuous operation in case of component failure. Electricity networks' complex graph-based data holds crucial information for n-1 assessment: graph structure and data about stations/cables. Unlike traditional machine learning methods, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) directly handle graph-structured data. This paper proposes using Graph Isomorphic Networks (GINs) for n-1 assessments in medium voltage grids. The GIN framework is designed to generalise to unseen grids and utilise graph structure and data about stations/cables. The proposed GIN approach demonstrates faster and more reliable grid assessments than a traditional mathematical optimisation approach, reducing prediction times by approximately a factor of 1000. The findings offer a promising approach to address computational challenges and enhance the reliability and efficiency of energy grid assessments.
Making LLaMA SEE and Draw with SEED Tokenizer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The great success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has expanded the potential of multimodality, contributing to the gradual evolution of General Artificial Intelligence (AGI). A true AGI agent should not only possess the capability to perform predefined multi-tasks but also exhibit emergent abilities in an open-world context. However, despite the considerable advancements made by recent multimodal LLMs, they still fall short in effectively unifying comprehension and generation tasks, let alone open-world emergent abilities. We contend that the key to overcoming the present impasse lies in enabling text and images to be represented and processed interchangeably within a unified autoregressive Transformer. To this end, we introduce SEED, an elaborate image tokenizer that empowers LLMs with the ability to SEE and Draw at the same time. We identify two crucial design principles: (1) Image tokens should be independent of 2D physical patch positions and instead be produced with a 1D causal dependency, exhibiting intrinsic interdependence that aligns with the left-to-right autoregressive prediction mechanism in LLMs. (2) Image tokens should capture high-level semantics consistent with the degree of semantic abstraction in words, and be optimized for both discriminativeness and reconstruction during the tokenizer training phase. With SEED tokens, LLM is able to perform scalable multimodal autoregression under its original training recipe, i.e., next-word prediction. SEED-LLaMA is therefore produced by large-scale pretraining and instruction tuning on the interleaved textual and visual data, demonstrating impressive performance on a broad range of multimodal comprehension and generation tasks. More importantly, SEED-LLaMA has exhibited compositional emergent abilities such as multi-turn in-context multimodal generation, acting like your AI assistant.
The benefits and costs of explainable artificial intelligence in visual quality control: Evidence from fault detection performance and eye movements
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Visual inspection tasks often require humans to cooperate with AI-based image classifiers. To enhance this cooperation, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can highlight those image areas that have contributed to an AI decision. However, the literature on visual cueing suggests that such XAI support might come with costs of its own. To better understand how the benefits and cost of XAI depend on the accuracy of AI classifications and XAI highlights, we conducted two experiments that simulated visual quality control in a chocolate factory. Participants had to decide whether chocolate moulds contained faulty bars or not, and were always informed whether the AI had classified the mould as faulty or not. In half of the experiment, they saw additional XAI highlights that justified this classification. While XAI speeded up performance, its effects on error rates were highly dependent on (X)AI accuracy. XAI benefits were observed when the system correctly detected and highlighted the fault, but XAI costs were evident for misplaced highlights that marked an intact area while the actual fault was located elsewhere. Eye movement analyses indicated that participants spent less time searching the rest of the mould and thus looked at the fault less often. However, we also observed large interindividual differences. Taken together, the results suggest that despite its potentials, XAI can discourage people from investing effort into their own information analysis.
Revisiting Mobility Modeling with Graph: A Graph Transformer Model for Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a crucial role in urban mobility applications. Recently, POI recommendation models based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been extensively studied and achieved, however, the effective incorporation of both spatial and temporal information into such GNN-based models remains challenging. Extracting distinct fine-grained features unique to each piece of information is difficult since temporal information often includes spatial information, as users tend to visit nearby POIs. To address the challenge, we propose \textbf{\underline{Mob}}ility \textbf{\underline{G}}raph \textbf{\underline{T}}ransformer (MobGT) that enables us to fully leverage graphs to capture both the spatial and temporal features in users' mobility patterns. MobGT combines individual spatial and temporal graph encoders to capture unique features and global user-location relations. Additionally, it incorporates a mobility encoder based on Graph Transformer to extract higher-order information between POIs. To address the long-tailed problem in spatial-temporal data, MobGT introduces a novel loss function, Tail Loss. Experimental results demonstrate that MobGT outperforms state-of-the-art models on various datasets and metrics, achieving 24\% improvement on average. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/Yukayo/MobGT}.
Self-supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection in Computational Workflows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Anomaly detection is the task of identifying abnormal behavior of a system. Anomaly detection in computational workflows is of special interest because of its wide implications in various domains such as cybersecurity, finance, and social networks. However, anomaly detection in computational workflows~(often modeled as graphs) is a relatively unexplored problem and poses distinct challenges. For instance, when anomaly detection is performed on graph data, the complex interdependency of nodes and edges, the heterogeneity of node attributes, and edge types must be accounted for. Although the use of graph neural networks can help capture complex inter-dependencies, the scarcity of labeled anomalous examples from workflow executions is still a significant challenge. To address this problem, we introduce an autoencoder-driven self-supervised learning~(SSL) approach that learns a summary statistic from unlabeled workflow data and estimates the normal behavior of the computational workflow in the latent space. In this approach, we combine generative and contrastive learning objectives to detect outliers in the summary statistics. We demonstrate that by estimating the distribution of normal behavior in the latent space, we can outperform state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods on our benchmark datasets.
SPELL: Semantic Prompt Evolution based on a LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Prompt engineering is a new paradigm for enhancing the performance of trained neural network models. For optimizing text-style prompts, existing methods usually individually operate small portions of a text step by step, which either breaks the fluency or could not globally adjust a prompt. Since large language models (LLMs) have powerful ability of generating coherent texts token by token, can we utilize LLMs for improving prompts? Based on this motivation, in this paper, considering a trained LLM as a text generator, we attempt to design a black-box evolution algorithm for automatically optimizing texts, namely SPELL (Semantic Prompt Evolution based on a LLM). The proposed method is evaluated with different LLMs and evolution parameters in different text tasks. Experimental results show that SPELL could rapidly improve the prompts indeed. We further explore the evolution process and discuss on the limitations, potential possibilities and future work.
Grasping AI: experiential exercises for designers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly integrated into the functioning of physical and digital products, creating unprecedented opportunities for interaction and functionality. However, there is a challenge for designers to ideate within this creative landscape, balancing the possibilities of technology with human interactional concerns. We investigate techniques for exploring and reflecting on the interactional affordances, the unique relational possibilities, and the wider social implications of AI systems. We introduced into an interaction design course (n=100) nine 'AI exercises' that draw on more than human design, responsible AI, and speculative enactment to create experiential engagements around AI interaction design. We find that exercises around metaphors and enactments make questions of training and learning, privacy and consent, autonomy and agency more tangible, and thereby help students be more reflective and responsible on how to design with AI and its complex properties in both their design process and outcomes.