OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Alternatives to the Scaled Dot Product for Attention in the Transformer Neural Network Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The transformer neural network architecture uses a form of attention in which the dot product of query and key is divided by the square root of the key dimension before applying softmax. This scaling of the dot product is designed to avoid the absolute value of the dot products becoming so large that applying softmax leads to vanishing gradients. In this paper, we propose some alternative scalings, including dividing the dot product instead by the sum of the key lengths before applying softmax. We use simulated keys and queries to show that in many situations this appears to be more effective at avoiding regions where applying softmax leads to vanishing gradients.
Lexical Repetitions Lead to Rote Learning: Unveiling the Impact of Lexical Overlap in Train and Test Reference Summaries
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Ideal summarization models should generalize to novel summary-worthy content without remembering reference training summaries by rote. However, a single average performance score on the entire test set is inadequate in determining such model competencies. We propose a fine-grained evaluation protocol by partitioning a test set based on the lexical similarity of reference test summaries with training summaries. We observe up to a 5x (1.2x) difference in ROUGE-2 (entity recall) scores between the subsets with the lowest and highest similarity. Next, we show that such training repetitions also make a model vulnerable to rote learning, reproducing data artifacts such as factual errors, especially when reference test summaries are lexically close to training summaries. Consequently, we propose to limit lexical repetitions in training summaries during both supervised fine-tuning and likelihood calibration stages to improve the performance on novel test cases while retaining average performance. Our automatic and human evaluations on novel test subsets and recent news articles show that limiting lexical repetitions in training summaries can prevent rote learning and improve generalization.
Towards Serverless Optimization with In-place Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Serverless computing has gained popularity due to its cost efficiency, ease of deployment, and enhanced scalability. However, in serverless environments, servers are initiated only after receiving a request, leading to increased response times. This delay is commonly known as the cold start problem. In this study, we explore the in-place scaling feature released in Kubernetes v1.27 and examine its impact on serverless computing. Our experimental results reveal improvements in request latency, with reductions ranging from 1.16 to 18.15 times across various workloads when compared to traditional cold policy.
A Knowledge Distillation Approach for Sepsis Outcome Prediction from Multivariate Clinical Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition triggered by an extreme infection response. Our objective is to forecast sepsis patient outcomes using their medical history and treatments, while learning interpretable state representations to assess patients' risks in developing various adverse outcomes. While neural networks excel in outcome prediction, their limited interpretability remains a key issue. In this work, we use knowledge distillation via constrained variational inference to distill the knowledge of a powerful "teacher" neural network model with high predictive power to train a "student" latent variable model to learn interpretable hidden state representations to achieve high predictive performance for sepsis outcome prediction. Using real-world data from the MIMIC-IV database, we trained an LSTM as the "teacher" model to predict mortality for sepsis patients, given information about their recent history of vital signs, lab values and treatments. For our student model, we use an autoregressive hidden Markov model (AR-HMM) to learn interpretable hidden states from patients' clinical time series, and use the posterior distribution of the learned state representations to predict various downstream outcomes, including hospital mortality, pulmonary edema, need for diuretics, dialysis, and mechanical ventilation. Our results show that our approach successfully incorporates the constraint to achieve high predictive power similar to the teacher model, while maintaining the generative performance.
Gradual Source Domain Expansion for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) tries to overcome the need for a large labeled dataset by transferring knowledge from a source dataset, with lots of labeled data, to a target dataset, that has no labeled data. Since there are no labels in the target domain, early misalignment might propagate into the later stages and lead to an error build-up. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a gradual source domain expansion (GSDE) algorithm. GSDE trains the UDA task several times from scratch, each time reinitializing the network weights, but each time expands the source dataset with target data. In particular, the highest-scoring target data of the previous run are employed as pseudo-source samples with their respective pseudo-label. Using this strategy, the pseudo-source samples induce knowledge extracted from the previous run directly from the start of the new training. This helps align the two domains better, especially in the early training epochs. In this study, we first introduce a strong baseline network and apply our GSDE strategy to it. We conduct experiments and ablation studies on three benchmarks (Office-31, OfficeHome, and DomainNet) and outperform state-of-the-art methods. We further show that the proposed GSDE strategy can improve the accuracy of a variety of different state-of-the-art UDA approaches.
AI Recommendation System for Enhanced Customer Experience: A Novel Image-to-Text Method
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Existing fashion recommendation systems encounter difficulties in using visual data for accurate and personalized recommendations. This research describes an innovative end-to-end pipeline that uses artificial intelligence to provide fine-grained visual interpretation for fashion recommendations. When customers upload images of desired products or outfits, the system automatically generates meaningful descriptions emphasizing stylistic elements. These captions guide retrieval from a global fashion product catalogue to offer similar alternatives that fit the visual characteristics of the original image. On a dataset of over 100,000 categorized fashion photos, the pipeline was trained and evaluated. The F1-score for the object detection model was 0.97, exhibiting exact fashion object recognition capabilities optimized for recommendation. This visually aware system represents a key advancement in customer engagement through personalized fashion recommendations
DECDM: Document Enhancement using Cycle-Consistent Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The performance of optical character recognition (OCR) heavily relies on document image quality, which is crucial for automatic document processing and document intelligence. However, most existing document enhancement methods require supervised data pairs, which raises concerns about data separation and privacy protection, and makes it challenging to adapt these methods to new domain pairs. To address these issues, we propose DECDM, an end-to-end document-level image translation method inspired by recent advances in diffusion models. Our method overcomes the limitations of paired training by independently training the source (noisy input) and target (clean output) models, making it possible to apply domain-specific diffusion models to other pairs. DECDM trains on one dataset at a time, eliminating the need to scan both datasets concurrently, and effectively preserving data privacy from the source or target domain. We also introduce simple data augmentation strategies to improve character-glyph conservation during translation. We compare DECDM with state-of-the-art methods on multiple synthetic data and benchmark datasets, such as document denoising and {\color{black}shadow} removal, and demonstrate the superiority of performance quantitatively and qualitatively.
Open Access in Ukraine: characteristics and evolution from 2012 to 2021
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

This study investigates development of open access (OA) to publications produced by authors affiliated with Ukrainian universities and research organisations in the period 2012-2021. In order to get a comprehensive overview we assembled data from three popular databases: Dimensions, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Our final dataset consisted of 187,135 records. To determine the OA status of each article, this study utilised Unpaywall data which was obtained via API. It was determined that 71.5% of all considered articles during the observed period were openly available at the time of analysis. Our findings show that gold OA was the most prevalent type of OA through a 10 years studied period. We also took a look at how OA varies by research fields, how dominant large commercial publishers are in disseminating national research and the preferences of authors regarding where to self-archive articles versions. We concluded that Ukraine needs to be thoughtful with engagement with large publishers and make sure academics control publishing, not for profit companies, which would monopolise research output distribution, leaving national publishers behind. Beyond that we put a special emphasis on the importance of FAIRness of national scholarly communication infrastructure in monitoring OA uptake.
Enhancing Deformable Object Manipulation By Using Interactive Perception and Assistive Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In the field of robotic manipulation, the proficiency of deformable object manipulation lags behind human capabilities due to the inherent characteristics of deformable objects. These objects have infinite degrees of freedom, resulting in non-trivial perception and state estimation, and complex dynamics, complicating the prediction of future configurations. Although recent research has focused on deformable object manipulation, most approaches rely on static vision and simple manipulation techniques, limiting the performance level. This paper proposes two solutions to enhance the performance: interactive perception and the use of assistive tools. The first solution posits that optimal perspectives exist during deformable object manipulation, facilitating easier state estimation. By exploring the action-perception regularity, interactive perception facilitates better manipulation and perception. The second solution advocates for the use of assistive tools, a hallmark of human intelligence, to improve manipulation performance. For instance, a folding board can aid in garment folding tasks by reducing object deformation and managing complex dynamics. Hence, this research aims to address the deformable object manipulation problem by incorporating interactive perception and assistive tools to augment manipulation performance.
Augmenting Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning with Self-Reference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Humans possess the ability to draw on past experiences explicitly when learning new tasks and applying them accordingly. We believe this capacity for self-referencing is especially advantageous for reinforcement learning agents in the unsupervised pretrain-then-finetune setting. During pretraining, an agent's past experiences can be explicitly utilized to mitigate the nonstationarity of intrinsic rewards. In the finetuning phase, referencing historical trajectories prevents the unlearning of valuable exploratory behaviors. Motivated by these benefits, we propose the Self-Reference (SR) approach, an add-on module explicitly designed to leverage historical information and enhance agent performance within the pretrain-finetune paradigm. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of Interquartile Mean (IQM) performance and Optimality Gap reduction on the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for model-free methods, recording an 86% IQM and a 16% Optimality Gap. Additionally, it improves current algorithms by up to 17% IQM and reduces the Optimality Gap by 31%. Beyond performance enhancement, the Self-Reference add-on also increases sample efficiency, a crucial attribute for real-world applications.
GenCodeSearchNet: A Benchmark Test Suite for Evaluating Generalization in Programming Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Language models can serve as a valuable tool for software developers to increase productivity. Large generative models can be used for code generation and code completion, while smaller encoder-only models are capable of performing code search tasks using natural language queries.These capabilities are heavily influenced by the quality and diversity of the available training data. Source code datasets used for training usually focus on the most popular languages and testing is mostly conducted on the same distributions, often overlooking low-resource programming languages. Motivated by the NLP generalization taxonomy proposed by Hupkes et.\,al., we propose a new benchmark dataset called GenCodeSearchNet (GeCS) which builds upon existing natural language code search datasets to systemically evaluate the programming language understanding generalization capabilities of language models. As part of the full dataset, we introduce a new, manually curated subset StatCodeSearch that focuses on R, a popular but so far underrepresented programming language that is often used by researchers outside the field of computer science. For evaluation and comparison, we collect several baseline results using fine-tuned BERT-style models and GPT-style large language models in a zero-shot setting.
Regularized Conventions: Equilibrium Computation as a Model of Pragmatic Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We present a model of pragmatic language understanding, where utterances are produced and understood by searching for regularized equilibria of signaling games. In this model (which we call ReCo, for Regularized Conventions), speakers and listeners search for contextually appropriate utterance--meaning mappings that are both close to game-theoretically optimal conventions and close to a shared, ''default'' semantics. By characterizing pragmatic communication as equilibrium search, we obtain principled sampling algorithms and formal guarantees about the trade-off between communicative success and naturalness. Across several datasets capturing real and idealized human judgments about pragmatic implicatures, ReCo matches or improves upon predictions made by best response and rational speech act models of language understanding.
Tracking the Newsworthiness of Public Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Journalists must find stories in huge amounts of textual data (e.g. leaks, bills, press releases) as part of their jobs: determining when and why text becomes news can help us understand coverage patterns and help us build assistive tools. Yet, this is challenging because very few labelled links exist, language use between corpora is very different, and text may be covered for a variety of reasons. In this work we focus on news coverage of local public policy in the San Francisco Bay Area by the San Francisco Chronicle. First, we gather news articles, public policy documents and meeting recordings and link them using probabilistic relational modeling, which we show is a low-annotation linking methodology that outperforms other retrieval-based baselines. Second, we define a new task: newsworthiness prediction, to predict if a policy item will get covered. We show that different aspects of public policy discussion yield different newsworthiness signals. Finally we perform human evaluation with expert journalists and show our systems identify policies they consider newsworthy with 68% F1 and our coverage recommendations are helpful with an 84% win-rate.
Gradient-Map-Guided Adaptive Domain Generalization for Cross Modality MRI Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Cross-modal MRI segmentation is of great value for computer-aided medical diagnosis, enabling flexible data acquisition and model generalization. However, most existing methods have difficulty in handling local variations in domain shift and typically require a significant amount of data for training, which hinders their usage in practice. To address these problems, we propose a novel adaptive domain generalization framework, which integrates a learning-free cross-domain representation based on image gradient maps and a class prior-informed test-time adaptation strategy for mitigating local domain shift. We validate our approach on two multi-modal MRI datasets with six cross-modal segmentation tasks. Across all the task settings, our method consistently outperforms competing approaches and shows a stable performance even with limited training data.
Translation Aligned Sentence Embeddings for Turkish Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the limited availability of high quality datasets for training sentence embeddings in Turkish, we propose a training methodology and a regimen to develop a sentence embedding model. The central idea is simple but effective : is to fine-tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model in two consecutive stages, where the first stage involves aligning the embedding space with translation pairs. Thanks to this alignment, the prowess of the main model can be better projected onto the target language in a sentence embedding setting where it can be fine-tuned with high accuracy in short duration with limited target language dataset.
MEGA: A Memory-Efficient GNN Accelerator Exploiting Degree-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are becoming a promising technique in various domains due to their excellent capabilities in modeling non-Euclidean data. Although a spectrum of accelerators has been proposed to accelerate the inference of GNNs, our analysis demonstrates that the latency and energy consumption induced by DRAM access still significantly impedes the improvement of performance and energy efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a Memory-Efficient GNN Accelerator (MEGA) through algorithm and hardware co-design in this work. Specifically, at the algorithm level, through an in-depth analysis of the node property, we observe that the data-independent quantization in previous works is not optimal in terms of accuracy and memory efficiency. This motivates us to propose the Degree-Aware mixed-precision quantization method, in which a proper bitwidth is learned and allocated to a node according to its in-degree to compress GNNs as much as possible while maintaining accuracy. At the hardware level, we employ a heterogeneous architecture design in which the aggregation and combination phases are implemented separately with different dataflows. In order to boost the performance and energy efficiency, we also present an Adaptive-Package format to alleviate the storage overhead caused by the fine-grained bitwidth and diverse sparsity, and a Condense-Edge scheduling method to enhance the data locality and further alleviate the access irregularity induced by the extremely sparse adjacency matrix in the graph. We implement our MEGA accelerator in a 28nm technology node. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEGA can achieve an average speedup of 38.3x, 7.1x, 4.0x, 3.6x and 47.6x, 7.2x, 5.4x, 4.5x energy savings over four state-of-the-art GNN accelerators, HyGCN, GCNAX, GROW, and SGCN, respectively, while retaining task accuracy.
What to tell when? -- Information Provision as a Game
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

Constantly informing systems (CIS), that is technical systems that provide us with information over a long period of time, face the challenge of providing us with helpful information. The information base of a human model changes over time but also his mood and his ability to accept information. An information provision strategy should hence take such aspects into account. In this paper, we describe our vision of an approach to aid the design of CIS. We envision using psychological models of the human mind and emotions in an information provision game. Its analysis gives comparative insights into design variants.
Enforcing Timing Properties in Motorway Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

In previous work, we proposed a Runtime Enforcement Approach to deal with timing properties in motorway traffic, which are present in form of Timed Multi-Lane Spatial Logic (TMLSL) formulae, a logic tailored to express both spatial and timing properties. Employing communication between the cars, we utilised a nondeterministic controller guessing which actions to execute next for each car, before asking the local monitors of the cars for permission to execute the announced actions. In this contribution, we consider a more reasonable controller that only considers sequences that satisfy its own properties. This is done utilising region automata that one can generate from the cars' specifications. In the approach, we also came along a minor decidability result for TMLSL.
Breaking Boundaries: Balancing Performance and Robustness in Deep Wireless Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Balancing the trade-off between accuracy and robustness is a long-standing challenge in time series forecasting. While most of existing robust algorithms have achieved certain suboptimal performance on clean data, sustaining the same performance level in the presence of data perturbations remains extremely hard. In this paper, we study a wide array of perturbation scenarios and propose novel defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks using real-world telecom data. We compare our strategy against two existing adversarial training algorithms under a range of maximal allowed perturbations, defined using $\ell_{\infty}$-norm, $\in [0.1,0.4]$. Our findings reveal that our hybrid strategy, which is composed of a classifier to detect adversarial examples, a denoiser to eliminate noise from the perturbed data samples, and a standard forecaster, achieves the best performance on both clean and perturbed data. Our optimal model can retain up to $92.02\%$ the performance of the original forecasting model in terms of Mean Squared Error (MSE) on clean data, while being more robust than the standard adversarially trained models on perturbed data. Its MSE is 2.71$\times$ and 2.51$\times$ lower than those of comparing methods on normal and perturbed data, respectively. In addition, the components of our models can be trained in parallel, resulting in better computational efficiency. Our results indicate that we can optimally balance the trade-off between the performance and robustness of forecasting models by improving the classifier and denoiser, even in the presence of sophisticated and destructive poisoning attacks.