OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MOUNTAINEER: Topology-Driven Visual Analytics for Comparing Local Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the increasing use of black-box Machine Learning (ML) techniques in critical applications, there is a growing demand for methods that can provide transparency and accountability for model predictions. As a result, a large number of local explainability methods for black-box models have been developed and popularized. However, machine learning explanations are still hard to evaluate and compare due to the high dimensionality, heterogeneous representations, varying scales, and stochastic nature of some of these methods. Topological Data Analysis (TDA) can be an effective method in this domain since it can be used to transform attributions into uniform graph representations, providing a common ground for comparison across different explanation methods. We present a novel topology-driven visual analytics tool, Mountaineer, that allows ML practitioners to interactively analyze and compare these representations by linking the topological graphs back to the original data distribution, model predictions, and feature attributions. Mountaineer facilitates rapid and iterative exploration of ML explanations, enabling experts to gain deeper insights into the explanation techniques, understand the underlying data distributions, and thus reach well-founded conclusions about model behavior. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of Mountaineer through two case studies using real-world data. In the first, we show how Mountaineer enabled us to compare black-box ML explanations and discern regions of and causes of disagreements between different explanations. In the second, we demonstrate how the tool can be used to compare and understand ML models themselves. Finally, we conducted interviews with three industry experts to help us evaluate our work.
Text-based Transfer Function Design for Semantic Volume Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Transfer function design is crucial in volume rendering, as it directly influences the visual representation and interpretation of volumetric data. However, creating effective transfer functions that align with users' visual objectives is often challenging due to the complex parameter space and the semantic gap between transfer function values and features of interest within the volume. In this work, we propose a novel approach that leverages recent advancements in language-vision models to bridge this semantic gap. By employing a fully differentiable rendering pipeline and an image-based loss function guided by language descriptions, our method generates transfer functions that yield volume-rendered images closely matching the user's intent. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in creating meaningful transfer functions from simple descriptions, empowering users to intuitively express their desired visual outcomes with minimal effort. This advancement streamlines the transfer function design process and makes volume rendering more accessible to a wider range of users.
GenSQL: A Probabilistic Programming System for Querying Generative Models of Database Tables
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

This article presents GenSQL, a probabilistic programming system for querying probabilistic generative models of database tables. By augmenting SQL with only a few key primitives for querying probabilistic models, GenSQL enables complex Bayesian inference workflows to be concisely implemented. GenSQL's query planner rests on a unified programmatic interface for interacting with probabilistic models of tabular data, which makes it possible to use models written in a variety of probabilistic programming languages that are tailored to specific workflows. Probabilistic models may be automatically learned via probabilistic program synthesis, hand-designed, or a combination of both. GenSQL is formalized using a novel type system and denotational semantics, which together enable us to establish proofs that precisely characterize its soundness guarantees. We evaluate our system on two case real-world studies -- an anomaly detection in clinical trials and conditional synthetic data generation for a virtual wet lab -- and show that GenSQL more accurately captures the complexity of the data as compared to common baselines. We also show that the declarative syntax in GenSQL is more concise and less error-prone as compared to several alternatives. Finally, GenSQL delivers a 1.7-6.8x speedup compared to its closest competitor on a representative benchmark set and runs in comparable time to hand-written code, in part due to its reusable optimizations and code specialization.
ProBE: Proportioning Privacy Budget for Complex Exploratory Decision Support
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

This paper studies privacy in the context of complex decision support queries composed of multiple conditions on different aggregate statistics combined using disjunction and conjunction operators. Utility requirements for such queries necessitate the need for private mechanisms that guarantee a bound on the false negative and false positive errors. This paper formally defines complex decision support queries and their accuracy requirements, and provides algorithms that proportion the existing budget to optimally minimize privacy loss while supporting a bounded guarantee on the accuracy. Our experimental results on multiple real-life datasets show that our algorithms successfully maintain such utility guarantees, while also minimizing privacy loss.
Large Language Models have Intrinsic Self-Correction Ability
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for their exceptional abilities in various natural language processing tasks, but they suffer from hallucinations that will cause performance degradation. One promising solution to improve the LLMs' performance is to ask LLMs to revise their answer after generation, a technique known as self-correction. Among the two types of self-correction, intrinsic self-correction is considered a promising direction because it does not utilize external knowledge. However, recent works doubt the validity of LLM's ability to conduct intrinsic self-correction. In this paper, we present a novel perspective on the intrinsic self-correction capabilities of LLMs through theoretical analyses and empirical experiments. In addition, we identify two critical factors for successful self-correction: zero temperature and fair prompts. Leveraging these factors, we demonstrate that intrinsic self-correction ability is exhibited across multiple existing LLMs. Our findings offer insights into the fundamental theories underlying the self-correction behavior of LLMs and remark on the importance of unbiased prompts and zero temperature settings in harnessing their full potential.
Single-Temporal Supervised Learning for Universal Remote Sensing Change Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Bitemporal supervised learning paradigm always dominates remote sensing change detection using numerous labeled bitemporal image pairs, especially for high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing imagery. However, it is very expensive and labor-intensive to label change regions in large-scale bitemporal HSR remote sensing image pairs. In this paper, we propose single-temporal supervised learning (STAR) for universal remote sensing change detection from a new perspective of exploiting changes between unpaired images as supervisory signals. STAR enables us to train a high-accuracy change detector only using unpaired labeled images and can generalize to real-world bitemporal image pairs. To demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of STAR, we design a simple yet unified change detector, termed ChangeStar2, capable of addressing binary change detection, object change detection, and semantic change detection in one architecture. ChangeStar2 achieves state-of-the-art performances on eight public remote sensing change detection datasets, covering above two supervised settings, multiple change types, multiple scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Z-Zheng/pytorch-change-models.
Self-Supervised Alignment Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have been used in pre-training the segmentation models for 2D and 3D medical images. Most of these methods are based on reconstruction, contrastive learning and consistency regularization. However, the spatial correspondence of 2D slices from a 3D medical image has not been fully exploited. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised alignment learning framework to pre-train the neural network for medical image segmentation. The proposed framework consists of a new local alignment loss and a global positional loss. We observe that in the same 3D scan, two close 2D slices usually contain similar anatomic structures. Thus, the local alignment loss is proposed to make the pixel-level features of matched structures close to each other. Experimental results show that the proposed alignment learning is competitive with existing self-supervised pre-training approaches on CT and MRI datasets, under the setting of limited annotations.
Fast, optimal, and dynamic electoral campaign budgeting by a generalized Colonel Blotto game
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

The Colonel Blotto game is a deeply studied theoretical model for competitive allocation environments including elections, advertising, and ecology. However, the original formulation of Colonel Blotto has had few practical implications due to the lack of fast algorithms to compute its optimal strategies and the limited applicability of its winner-take-all reward distribution. We demonstrate that the Colonel Blotto game can be a practical model for competitive allocation environments by implementing the multiplicative weights update algorithm from Beaglehole et al. (2023). In particular, using that this algorithm allows for arbitrary winning-rules, we study strategies for a more realistic model of political campaigning we term Electoral Colonel Blotto. Contrary to existing theory and the implemented allocation strategies from U.S. presidential elections, we find that the optimal response to Democratic and Republican strategies in the 2008 and 2020 presidential elections was to focus allocations on a subset of states and sacrifice winning probability on others. We also found that campaigners should compete for undecided voters even in states where the opponent has significantly many more decided voters.
Rethinking the Diffusion Models for Numerical Tabular Data Imputation from the Perspective of Wasserstein Gradient Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models (DMs) have gained attention in Missing Data Imputation (MDI), but there remain two long-neglected issues to be addressed: (1). Inaccurate Imputation, which arises from inherently sample-diversification-pursuing generative process of DMs. (2). Difficult Training, which stems from intricate design required for the mask matrix in model training stage. To address these concerns within the realm of numerical tabular datasets, we introduce a novel principled approach termed Kernelized Negative Entropy-regularized Wasserstein gradient flow Imputation (KnewImp). Specifically, based on Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF) framework, we first prove that issue (1) stems from the cost functionals implicitly maximized in DM-based MDI are equivalent to the MDI's objective plus diversification-promoting non-negative terms. Based on this, we then design a novel cost functional with diversification-discouraging negative entropy and derive our KnewImp approach within WGF framework and reproducing kernel Hilbert space. After that, we prove that the imputation procedure of KnewImp can be derived from another cost functional related to the joint distribution, eliminating the need for the mask matrix and hence naturally addressing issue (2). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed KnewImp approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
TP-DRSeg: Improving Diabetic Retinopathy Lesion Segmentation with Explicit Text-Prompts Assisted SAM
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in large foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have demonstrated considerable promise across various tasks. Despite their progress, these models still encounter challenges in specialized medical image analysis, especially in recognizing subtle inter-class differences in Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) lesion segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that customizes SAM for text-prompted DR lesion segmentation, termed TP-DRSeg. Our core idea involves exploiting language cues to inject medical prior knowledge into the vision-only segmentation network, thereby combining the advantages of different foundation models and enhancing the credibility of segmentation. Specifically, to unleash the potential of vision-language models in the recognition of medical concepts, we propose an explicit prior encoder that transfers implicit medical concepts into explicit prior knowledge, providing explainable clues to excavate low-level features associated with lesions. Furthermore, we design a prior-aligned injector to inject explicit priors into the segmentation process, which can facilitate knowledge sharing across multi-modality features and allow our framework to be trained in a parameter-efficient fashion. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our framework over other traditional models and foundation model variants.
Injectivity of ReLU-layers: Tools from Frame Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Injectivity is the defining property of a mapping that ensures no information is lost and any input can be perfectly reconstructed from its output. By performing hard thresholding, the ReLU function naturally interferes with this property, making the injectivity analysis of ReLU layers in neural networks a challenging yet intriguing task that has not yet been fully solved. This article establishes a frame theoretic perspective to approach this problem. The main objective is to develop a comprehensive characterization of the injectivity behavior of ReLU layers in terms of all three involved ingredients: (i) the weights, (ii) the bias, and (iii) the domain where the data is drawn from. Maintaining a focus on practical applications, we limit our attention to bounded domains and present two methods for numerically approximating a maximal bias for given weights and data domains. These methods provide sufficient conditions for the injectivity of a ReLU layer on those domains and yield a novel practical methodology for studying the information loss in ReLU layers. Finally, we derive explicit reconstruction formulas based on the duality concept from frame theory.
LLM-Powered Explanations: Unraveling Recommendations Through Subgraph Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Recommender systems are pivotal in enhancing user experiences across various web applications by analyzing the complicated relationships between users and items. Knowledge graphs(KGs) have been widely used to enhance the performance of recommender systems. However, KGs are known to be noisy and incomplete, which are hard to provide reliable explanations for recommendation results. An explainable recommender system is crucial for the product development and subsequent decision-making. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel recommender that synergies Large Language Models (LLMs) and KGs to enhance the recommendation and provide interpretable results. Specifically, we first harness the power of LLMs to augment KG reconstruction. LLMs comprehend and decompose user reviews into new triples that are added into KG. In this way, we can enrich KGs with explainable paths that express user preferences. To enhance the recommendation on augmented KGs, we introduce a novel subgraph reasoning module that effectively measures the importance of nodes and discovers reasoning for recommendation. Finally, these reasoning paths are fed into the LLMs to generate interpretable explanations of the recommendation results. Our approach significantly enhances both the effectiveness and interpretability of recommender systems, especially in cross-selling scenarios where traditional methods falter. The effectiveness of our approach has been rigorously tested on four open real-world datasets, with our methods demonstrating a superior performance over contemporary state-of-the-art techniques by an average improvement of 12%. The application of our model in a multinational engineering and technology company cross-selling recommendation system further underscores its practical utility and potential to redefine recommendation practices through improved accuracy and user trust.
Language Alignment via Nash-learning and Adaptive feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent research has shown the potential of Nash Learning via Human Feedback for large language model alignment by incorporating the notion of a preference model in a minimax game setup. We take this idea further by casting the alignment as a mirror descent algorithm against the adaptive feedback of an improved opponent, thereby removing the need for learning a preference model or the existence of an annotated dataset altogether. The resulting algorithm, which we refer to as Language Alignment via Nash-learning and Adaptive feedback (LANA), is capable of self-alignment without the need for a human-annotated preference dataset. We support this statement with various experiments and mathematical discussion.
Shaping Radio Access to Match Variable Wireless Fronthaul Quality in Next-Generation Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The emergence of Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) has revolutionized mobile network infrastructure, offering streamlined cell-site engineering and enhanced network management capabilities. As C-RAN gains momentum, the focus shifts to optimizing fronthaul links. While fiber fronthaul guarantees performance, wireless alternatives provide cost efficiency and scalability, making them preferable in densely urbanized areas. However, wireless fronthaul often requires expensive over-dimensioning to overcome the challenging atmospheric attenuation typical of high frequencies. We propose a framework designed to continuously align radio access capacity with fronthaul link quality to overcome this rigidity. By gradually adapting radio access capacity to available fronthaul capacity, the framework ensures smooth degradation rather than complete service loss. Various strategies are proposed, considering factors like functional split and beamforming technology and exploring the tradeoff between adaptation strategy complexity and end-to-end system performance. Numerical evaluations using experimental rain attenuation data illustrate the framework's effectiveness in optimizing radio access capacity under realistically variable fronthaul link quality, ultimately proving the importance of adaptive capacity management in maximizing C-RAN efficiency.
PUDD: Towards Robust Multi-modal Prototype-based Deepfake Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deepfake techniques generate highly realistic data, making it challenging for humans to discern between actual and artificially generated images. Recent advancements in deep learning-based deepfake detection methods, particularly with diffusion models, have shown remarkable progress. However, there is a growing demand for real-world applications to detect unseen individuals, deepfake techniques, and scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a Prototype-based Unified Framework for Deepfake Detection (PUDD). PUDD offers a detection system based on similarity, comparing input data against known prototypes for video classification and identifying potential deepfakes or previously unseen classes by analyzing drops in similarity. Our extensive experiments reveal three key findings: (1) PUDD achieves an accuracy of 95.1% on Celeb-DF, outperforming state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods; (2) PUDD leverages image classification as the upstream task during training, demonstrating promising performance in both image classification and deepfake detection tasks during inference; (3) PUDD requires only 2.7 seconds for retraining on new data and emits 10$^{5}$ times less carbon compared to the state-of-the-art model, making it significantly more environmentally friendly.
Federated Adversarial Learning for Robust Autonomous Landing Runway Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As the development of deep learning techniques in autonomous landing systems continues to grow, one of the major challenges is trust and security in the face of possible adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a federated adversarial learning-based framework to detect landing runways using paired data comprising of clean local data and its adversarial version. Firstly, the local model is pre-trained on a large-scale lane detection dataset. Then, instead of exploiting large instance-adaptive models, we resort to a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method known as scale and shift deep features (SSF), upon the pre-trained model. Secondly, in each SSF layer, distributions of clean local data and its adversarial version are disentangled for accurate statistics estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first instance of federated learning work that address the adversarial sample problem in landing runway detection. Our experimental evaluations over both synthesis and real images of Landing Approach Runway Detection (LARD) dataset consistently demonstrate good performance of the proposed federated adversarial learning and robust to adversarial attacks.
Modular Pluralism: Pluralistic Alignment via Multi-LLM Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

While existing alignment paradigms have been integral in developing large language models (LLMs), LLMs often learn an averaged human preference and struggle to model diverse preferences across cultures, demographics, and communities. We propose Modular Pluralism, a modular framework based on multi-LLM collaboration for pluralistic alignment: it "plugs into" a base LLM a pool of smaller but specialized community LMs, where models collaborate in distinct modes to flexibility support three modes of pluralism: Overton, steerable, and distributional. Modular Pluralism is uniquely compatible with black-box LLMs and offers the modular control of adding new community LMs for previously underrepresented communities. We evaluate Modular Pluralism with six tasks and four datasets featuring questions/instructions with value-laden and perspective-informed responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Modular Pluralism advances the three pluralism objectives across six black-box and open-source LLMs. Further analysis reveals that LLMs are generally faithful to the inputs from smaller community LLMs, allowing seamless patching by adding a new community LM to better cover previously underrepresented communities.