OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Order-based Structure Learning with Normalizing Flows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Estimating the causal structure of observational data is a challenging combinatorial search problem that scales super-exponentially with graph size. Existing methods use continuous relaxations to make this problem computationally tractable but often restrict the data-generating process to additive noise models (ANMs) through explicit or implicit assumptions. We present Order-based Structure Learning with Normalizing Flows (OSLow), a framework that relaxes these assumptions using autoregressive normalizing flows. We leverage the insight that searching over topological orderings is a natural way to enforce acyclicity in structure discovery and propose a novel, differentiable permutation learning method to find such orderings. Through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate that OSLow outperforms prior baselines and improves performance on the observational Sachs and SynTReN datasets as measured by structural hamming distance and structural intervention distance, highlighting the importance of relaxing the ANM assumption made by existing methods.
BSED: Baseline Shapley-Based Explainable Detector
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has witnessed significant advances in the field of object recognition, with saliency maps being used to highlight image features relevant to the predictions of learned models. Although these advances have made AI-based technology more interpretable to humans, several issues have come to light. Some approaches present explanations irrelevant to predictions, and cannot guarantee the validity of XAI (axioms). In this study, we propose the Baseline Shapley-based Explainable Detector (BSED), which extends the Shapley value to object detection, thereby enhancing the validity of interpretation. The Shapley value can attribute the prediction of a learned model to a baseline feature while satisfying the explainability axioms. The processing cost for the BSED is within the reasonable range, while the original Shapley value is prohibitively computationally expensive. Furthermore, BSED is a generalizable method that can be applied to various detectors in a model-agnostic manner, and interpret various detection targets without fine-grained parameter tuning. These strengths can enable the practical applicability of XAI. We present quantitative and qualitative comparisons with existing methods to demonstrate the superior performance of our method in terms of explanation validity. Moreover, we present some applications, such as correcting detection based on explanations from our method.
Interpretable Online Log Analysis Using Large Language Models with Prompt Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Automated log analysis is crucial in modern software-intensive systems for facilitating program comprehension throughout software maintenance and engineering life cycles. Existing methods perform tasks such as log parsing and log anomaly detection by providing a single prediction value without interpretation. However, given the increasing volume of system events, the limited interpretability of analysis results hinders analysts' comprehension of program status and their ability to take appropriate actions. Moreover, these methods require substantial in-domain training data, and their performance declines sharply (by up to 62.5%) in online scenarios involving unseen logs from new domains, a common occurrence due to rapid software updates. In this paper, we propose LogPrompt, a novel interpretable log analysis approach for online scenarios. LogPrompt employs large language models (LLMs) to perform online log analysis tasks via a suite of advanced prompt strategies tailored for log tasks, which enhances LLMs' performance by up to 380.7% compared with simple prompts. Experiments on nine publicly available evaluation datasets across two tasks demonstrate that LogPrompt, despite requiring no in-domain training, outperforms existing approaches trained on thousands of logs by up to 55.9%. We also conduct a human evaluation of LogPrompt's interpretability, with six practitioners possessing over 10 years of experience, who highly rated the generated content in terms of usefulness and readability (averagely 4.42/5). LogPrompt also exhibits remarkable compatibility with open-source and smaller-scale LLMs, making it flexible for practical deployment. Code of LogPrompt is available at https://github.com/lunyiliu/LogPrompt.
Leveraging Codebook Knowledge with NLI and ChatGPT for Zero-Shot Political Relation Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Is it possible accurately classify political relations within evolving event ontologies without extensive annotations? This study investigates zero-shot learning methods that use expert knowledge from existing annotation codebook, and evaluates the performance of advanced ChatGPT (GPT-3.5/4) and a natural language inference (NLI)-based model called ZSP. ChatGPT uses codebook's labeled summaries as prompts, whereas ZSP breaks down the classification task into context, event mode, and class disambiguation to refine task-specific hypotheses. This decomposition enhances interpretability, efficiency, and adaptability to schema changes. The experiments reveal ChatGPT's strengths and limitations, and crucially show ZSP's outperformance of dictionary-based methods and its competitive edge over some supervised models. These findings affirm the value of ZSP for validating event records and advancing ontology development. Our study underscores the efficacy of leveraging transfer learning and existing domain expertise to enhance research efficiency and scalability.
Domain Adaptation for Code Model-based Unit Test Case Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, deep learning-based test case generation approaches have been proposed to automate the generation of unit test cases. In this study, we leverage Transformer-based code models to generate unit tests with the help of Domain Adaptation (DA) at a project level. Specifically, we use CodeT5, a relatively small language model trained on source code data, and fine-tune it on the test generation task. Then, we apply domain adaptation to each target project data to learn project-specific knowledge (project-level DA). We use the Methods2test dataset to fine-tune CodeT5 for the test generation task and the Defects4j dataset for project-level domain adaptation and evaluation. We compare our approach with (a) CodeT5 fine-tuned on the test generation without DA, (b) the A3Test tool, and (c) GPT-4 on five projects from the Defects4j dataset. The results show that tests generated using DA can increase the line coverage by 18.62%, 19.88%, and 18.02% and mutation score by 16.45%, 16.01%, and 12.99% compared to the above (a), (b), and (c) baselines, respectively. The overall results show consistent improvements in metrics such as parse rate, compile rate, BLEU, and CodeBLEU. In addition, we show that our approach can be seen as a complementary solution alongside existing search-based test generation tools such as EvoSuite, to increase the overall coverage and mutation scores with an average of 34.42% and 6.8%, for line coverage and mutation score, respectively.
Contrastive Learning for Lane Detection via cross-similarity
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Detecting lane markings in road scenes poses a challenge due to their intricate nature, which is susceptible to unfavorable conditions. While lane markings have strong shape priors, their visibility is easily compromised by lighting conditions, occlusions by other vehicles or pedestrians, and fading of colors over time. The detection process is further complicated by the presence of several lane shapes and natural variations, necessitating large amounts of data to train a robust lane detection model capable of handling various scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning method termed Contrastive Learning for Lane Detection via cross-similarity (CLLD) to enhance the resilience of lane detection models in real-world scenarios, particularly when the visibility of lanes is compromised. CLLD introduces a contrastive learning (CL) method that assesses the similarity of local features within the global context of the input image. It uses the surrounding information to predict lane markings. This is achieved by integrating local feature contrastive learning with our proposed cross-similar operation. The local feature CL concentrates on extracting features from small patches, a necessity for accurately localizing lane segments. Meanwhile, cross-similarity captures global features, enabling the detection of obscured lane segments based on their surroundings. We enhance cross-similarity by randomly masking portions of input images in the process of augmentation. Extensive experiments on TuSimple and CuLane benchmarks demonstrate that CLLD outperforms SOTA contrastive learning methods, particularly in visibility-impairing conditions like shadows, while it also delivers comparable results under normal conditions. Compared to supervised learning, CLLD still excels in challenging scenarios such as shadows and crowded scenes, which are common in real-world driving.
High-Fidelity Lake Extraction via Two-Stage Prompt Enhancement: Establishing a Novel Baseline and Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Lake extraction from remote sensing imagery is a complex challenge due to the varied lake shapes and data noise. Current methods rely on multispectral image datasets, making it challenging to learn lake features accurately from pixel arrangements. This, in turn, affects model learning and the creation of accurate segmentation masks. This paper introduces a prompt-based dataset construction approach that provides approximate lake locations using point, box, and mask prompts. We also propose a two-stage prompt enhancement framework, LEPrompter, with prompt-based and prompt-free stages during training. The prompt-based stage employs a prompt encoder to extract prior information, integrating prompt tokens and image embedding through self- and cross-attention in the prompt decoder. Prompts are deactivated to ensure independence during inference, enabling automated lake extraction without introducing additional parameters and GFlops. Extensive experiments showcase performance improvements of our proposed approach compared to the previous state-of-the-art method. The source code is available at https://github.com/BastianChen/LEPrompter.
Proprioceptive Learning with Soft Polyhedral Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Proprioception is the "sixth sense" that detects limb postures with motor neurons. It requires a natural integration between the musculoskeletal systems and sensory receptors, which is challenging among modern robots that aim for lightweight, adaptive, and sensitive designs at a low cost. Here, we present the Soft Polyhedral Network with an embedded vision for physical interactions, capable of adaptive kinesthesia and viscoelastic proprioception by learning kinetic features. This design enables passive adaptations to omni-directional interactions, visually captured by a miniature high-speed motion tracking system embedded inside for proprioceptive learning. The results show that the soft network can infer real-time 6D forces and torques with accuracies of 0.25/0.24/0.35 N and 0.025/0.034/0.006 Nm in dynamic interactions. We also incorporate viscoelasticity in proprioception during static adaptation by adding a creep and relaxation modifier to refine the predicted results. The proposed soft network combines simplicity in design, omni-adaptation, and proprioceptive sensing with high accuracy, making it a versatile solution for robotics at a low cost with more than 1 million use cycles for tasks such as sensitive and competitive grasping, and touch-based geometry reconstruction. This study offers new insights into vision-based proprioception for soft robots in adaptive grasping, soft manipulation, and human-robot interaction.
FedPop: Federated Population-based Hyperparameter Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning (ML) paradigm, in which multiple clients collaboratively train ML models without centralizing their local data. Similar to conventional ML pipelines, the client local optimization and server aggregation procedure in FL are sensitive to the hyperparameter (HP) selection. Despite extensive research on tuning HPs for centralized ML, these methods yield suboptimal results when employed in FL. This is mainly because their "training-after-tuning" framework is unsuitable for FL with limited client computation power. While some approaches have been proposed for HP-Tuning in FL, they are limited to the HPs for client local updates. In this work, we propose a novel HP-tuning algorithm, called Federated Population-based Hyperparameter Tuning (FedPop), to address this vital yet challenging problem. FedPop employs population-based evolutionary algorithms to optimize the HPs, which accommodates various HP types at both the client and server sides. Compared with prior tuning methods, FedPop employs an online "tuning-while-training" framework, offering computational efficiency and enabling the exploration of a broader HP search space. Our empirical validation on the common FL benchmarks and complex real-world FL datasets, including full-sized Non-IID ImageNet-1K, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method, which substantially outperforms the concurrent state-of-the-art HP-tuning methods in FL.
Approximation Algorithms for Steiner Connectivity Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We consider connectivity augmentation problems in the Steiner setting, where the goal is to augment the edge-connectivity between a specified subset of terminal nodes. In the Steiner Augmentation of a Graph problem ($k$-SAG), we are given a $k$-edge-connected subgraph $H$ of a graph $G$. The goal is to augment $H$ by including links from $G$ of minimum cost so that the edge-connectivity between nodes of $H$ increases by 1. This is a generalization of the Weighted Connectivity Augmentation Problem, in which only links between pairs of nodes in $H$ are available for the augmentation. In the Steiner Connectivity Augmentation Problem ($k$-SCAP), we are given a Steiner $k$-edge-connected graph connecting terminals $R$, and we seek to add links of minimum cost to create a Steiner $(k+1)$-edge-connected graph for $R$. Note that $k$-SAG is a special case of $k$-SCAP. The results of Ravi, Zhang and Zlatin for the Steiner Tree Augmentation problem yield a $(1.5+\varepsilon)$-approximation for $1$-SCAP and for $k$-SAG when $k$ is odd (SODA'23). In this work, we give a $(1 + \ln{2} +\varepsilon)$-approximation for the Steiner Ring Augmentation Problem (SRAP). This yields a polynomial time algorithm with approximation ratio $(1 + \ln{2} + \varepsilon)$ for $2$-SCAP. We obtain an improved approximation guarantee for SRAP when the ring consists of only terminals, yielding a $(1.5+\varepsilon)$-approximation for $k$-SAG for any $k$.
CodeCoT: Tackling Code Syntax Errors in CoT Reasoning for Code Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a groundbreaking tool in NLP, notably for its efficacy in complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical proofs. However, its application in code generation faces a distinct challenge, i.e., although the code generated with CoT reasoning is logically correct, it faces the problem of syntax error (e.g., invalid syntax error report) during code execution, which causes the CoT result's pass@1 in HumanEval even lower than the zero-shot result. In this paper, we present Code Chain-of-Thought (CodeCoT) that integrates CoT with a self-examination process for code generation. CodeCoT begins with the LLMs using CoT for initial code development to ensure the generated code follows the correct logic flow. Then, CodeCoT will generate test cases to validate whether the code has syntax errors during the execution. CodeCoT then employs a self-examination phase, in which the generated code is executed against these test cases in the local environment. If the local environment raises error information (e.g., invalid syntax error), CodeCoT will iteratively refine the code based on the feedback information. Within this loop, CodeCoT can make sure their generated codes not only follow the logic flow of the code description, but the syntax error will also be addressed with the self-examination process. Our evaluation results reveal that CodeCoT improves the effectiveness of code generation. For example, CodeCoT increases pass@1 from 75.6% to 79.3% for the HumanEval dataset.
A Dual-Perspective Approach to Evaluating Feature Attribution Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Feature attribution methods attempt to explain neural network predictions by identifying relevant features. However, establishing a cohesive framework for assessing feature attribution remains a challenge. There are several views through which we can evaluate attributions. One principal lens is to observe the effect of perturbing attributed features on the model's behavior (i.e., faithfulness). While providing useful insights, existing faithfulness evaluations suffer from shortcomings that we reveal in this paper. In this work, we propose two new perspectives within the faithfulness paradigm that reveal intuitive properties: soundness and completeness. Soundness assesses the degree to which attributed features are truly predictive features, while completeness examines how well the resulting attribution reveals all the predictive features. The two perspectives are based on a firm mathematical foundation and provide quantitative metrics that are computable through efficient algorithms. We apply these metrics to mainstream attribution methods, offering a novel lens through which to analyze and compare feature attribution methods.
Active and Passive Causal Inference Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper serves as a starting point for machine learning researchers, engineers and students who are interested in but not yet familiar with causal inference. We start by laying out an important set of assumptions that are collectively needed for causal identification, such as exchangeability, positivity, consistency and the absence of interference. From these assumptions, we build out a set of important causal inference techniques, which we do so by categorizing them into two buckets; active and passive approaches. We describe and discuss randomized controlled trials and bandit-based approaches from the active category. We then describe classical approaches, such as matching and inverse probability weighting, in the passive category, followed by more recent deep learning based algorithms. By finishing the paper with some of the missing aspects of causal inference from this paper, such as collider biases, we expect this paper to provide readers with a diverse set of starting points for further reading and research in causal inference and discovery.
GraphReason: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models through A Graph-Based Verification Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive reasoning capabilities, particularly when guided by specifically designed prompts in complex reasoning tasks such as math word problems. These models typically solve tasks using a chain-of-thought approach, which not only bolsters their reasoning abilities but also provides valuable insights into their problem-solving process. However, there is still significant room for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Some studies suggest that the integration of an LLM output verifier can boost reasoning accuracy without necessitating additional model training. In this paper, we follow these studies and introduce a novel graph-based method to further augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We posit that multiple solutions to a reasoning task, generated by an LLM, can be represented as a reasoning graph due to the logical connections between intermediate steps from different reasoning paths. Therefore, we propose the Reasoning Graph Verifier (GraphReason) to analyze and verify the solutions generated by LLMs. By evaluating these graphs, models can yield more accurate and reliable results.Our experimental results show that our graph-based verification method not only significantly enhances the reasoning abilities of LLMs but also outperforms existing verifier methods in terms of improving these models' reasoning performance.
Evolving Scientific Discovery by Unifying Data and Background Knowledge with AI Hilbert
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The discovery of scientific formulae that parsimoniously explain natural phenomena and align with existing background theory is a key goal in science. Historically, scientists have derived natural laws by manipulating equations based on existing knowledge, forming new equations, and verifying them experimentally. In recent years, data-driven scientific discovery has emerged as a viable competitor in settings with large amounts of experimental data. Unfortunately, data-driven methods often fail to discover valid laws when data is noisy or scarce. Accordingly, recent works combine regression and reasoning to eliminate formulae inconsistent with background theory. However, the problem of searching over the space of formulae consistent with background theory to find one that best fits the data is not well-solved. We propose a solution to this problem when all axioms and scientific laws are expressible via polynomial equalities and inequalities and argue that our approach is widely applicable. We model notions of minimal complexity using binary variables and logical constraints, solve polynomial optimization problems via mixed-integer linear or semidefinite optimization, and prove the validity of our scientific discoveries in a principled manner using Positivstellensatz certificates. The optimization techniques leveraged in this paper allow our approach to run in polynomial time with fully correct background theory under an assumption that the complexity of our derivation is bounded), or non-deterministic polynomial (NP) time with partially correct background theory. We demonstrate that some famous scientific laws, including Kepler's Third Law of Planetary Motion, the Hagen-Poiseuille Equation, and the Radiated Gravitational Wave Power equation, can be derived in a principled manner from axioms and experimental data.
Attesting Distributional Properties of Training Data for Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The success of machine learning (ML) has been accompanied by increased concerns about its trustworthiness. Several jurisdictions are preparing ML regulatory frameworks. One such concern is ensuring that model training data has desirable distributional properties for certain sensitive attributes. For example, draft regulations indicate that model trainers are required to show that training datasets have specific distributional properties, such as reflecting diversity of the population. We propose the notion of property attestation allowing a prover (e.g., model trainer) to demonstrate relevant distributional properties of training data to a verifier (e.g., a customer) without revealing the data. We present an effective hybrid property attestation combining property inference with cryptographic mechanisms.