OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Seamless Integration: Sampling Strategies in Federated Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) represents a paradigm shift in the field of machine learning, offering an approach for a decentralized training of models across a multitude of devices while maintaining the privacy of local data. However, the dynamic nature of FL systems, characterized by the ongoing incorporation of new clients with potentially diverse data distributions and computational capabilities, poses a significant challenge to the stability and efficiency of these distributed learning networks. The seamless integration of new clients is imperative to sustain and enhance the performance and robustness of FL systems. This paper looks into the complexities of integrating new clients into existing FL systems and explores how data heterogeneity and varying data distribution (not independent and identically distributed) among them can affect model training, system efficiency, scalability and stability. Despite these challenges, the integration of new clients into FL systems presents opportunities to enhance data diversity, improve learning performance, and leverage distributed computational power. In contrast to other fields of application such as the distributed optimization of word predictions on Gboard (where federated learning once originated), there are usually only a few clients in the production environment, which is why information from each new client becomes all the more valuable. This paper outlines strategies for effective client selection strategies and solutions for ensuring system scalability and stability. Using the example of images from optical quality inspection, it offers insights into practical approaches. In conclusion, this paper proposes that addressing the challenges presented by new client integration is crucial to the advancement and efficiency of distributed learning networks, thus paving the way for the adoption of Federated Learning in production environments.
HiAgent: Hierarchical Working Memory Management for Solving Long-Horizon Agent Tasks with Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents exhibit significant potential across various domains, operating as interactive systems that process environmental observations to generate executable actions for target tasks. The effectiveness of these agents is significantly influenced by their memory mechanism, which records historical experiences as sequences of action-observation pairs. We categorize memory into two types: cross-trial memory, accumulated across multiple attempts, and in-trial memory (working memory), accumulated within a single attempt. While considerable research has optimized performance through cross-trial memory, the enhancement of agent performance through improved working memory utilization remains underexplored. Instead, existing approaches often involve directly inputting entire historical action-observation pairs into LLMs, leading to redundancy in long-horizon tasks. Inspired by human problem-solving strategies, this paper introduces HiAgent, a framework that leverages subgoals as memory chunks to manage the working memory of LLM-based agents hierarchically. Specifically, HiAgent prompts LLMs to formulate subgoals before generating executable actions and enables LLMs to decide proactively to replace previous subgoals with summarized observations, retaining only the action-observation pairs relevant to the current subgoal. Experimental results across five long-horizon tasks demonstrate that HiAgent achieves a twofold increase in success rate and reduces the average number of steps required by 3.8. Additionally, our analysis shows that HiAgent consistently improves performance across various steps, highlighting its robustness and generalizability. Project Page: https://github.com/HiAgent2024/HiAgent .
Löb-Safe Logics for Reflective Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Epistemic and doxastic logics are modal logics for knowledge and belief, and serve as foundational models for rational agents in game theory, philosophy, and computer science. We examine the consequences of modeling agents capable of a certain sort of reflection. Such agents face a formal difficulty due to Löb's Theorem, called Löb's Obstacle in the literature. We show how the most popular axiom schemes of epistemic and doxastic logics suffer from Löb's Obstacle, and present two axiom schemes that that avoid Löb's Obstacle, which we call Reasonable Löb-Safe Epistemic Doxastic logic (${LSED}^R$) and Supported Löb-Safe Epistemic Doxastic logic (${LSED}^S$).
Refining Packing and Shuffling Strategies for Enhanced Performance in Generative Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Packing and shuffling tokens is a common practice in training auto-regressive language models (LMs) to prevent overfitting and improve efficiency. Typically documents are concatenated to chunks of maximum sequence length (MSL) and then shuffled. However setting the atom size, the length for each data chunk accompanied by random shuffling, to MSL may lead to contextual incoherence due to tokens from different documents being packed into the same chunk. An alternative approach is to utilize padding, another common data packing strategy, to avoid contextual incoherence by only including one document in each shuffled chunk. To optimize both packing strategies (concatenation vs padding), we investigated the optimal atom size for shuffling and compared their performance and efficiency. We found that matching atom size to MSL optimizes performance for both packing methods (concatenation and padding), and padding yields lower final perplexity (higher performance) than concatenation at the cost of more training steps and lower compute efficiency. This trade-off informs the choice of packing methods in training language models.
Attention is a smoothed cubic spline
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

We highlight a perhaps important but hitherto unobserved insight: The attention module in a transformer is a smoothed cubic spline. Viewed in this manner, this mysterious but critical component of a transformer becomes a natural development of an old notion deeply entrenched in classical approximation theory. More precisely, we show that with ReLU-activation, attention, masked attention, encoder-decoder attention are all cubic splines. As every component in a transformer is constructed out of compositions of various attention modules (= cubic splines) and feed forward neural networks (= linear splines), all its components -- encoder, decoder, and encoder-decoder blocks; multilayered encoders and decoders; the transformer itself -- are cubic or higher-order splines. If we assume the Pierce-Birkhoff conjecture, then the converse also holds, i.e., every spline is a ReLU-activated encoder. Since a spline is generally just $C^2$, one way to obtain a smoothed $C^\infty$-version is by replacing ReLU with a smooth activation; and if this activation is chosen to be SoftMax, we recover the original transformer as proposed by Vaswani et al. This insight sheds light on the nature of the transformer by casting it entirely in terms of splines, one of the best known and thoroughly understood objects in applied mathematics.
An Algorithm for Enhancing Privacy-Utility Tradeoff in the Privacy Funnel and Other Lift-based Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates the privacy funnel, a privacy-utility tradeoff problem in which mutual information quantifies both privacy and utility. The objective is to maximize utility while adhering to a specified privacy budget. However, the privacy funnel represents a non-convex optimization problem, making it challenging to achieve an optimal solution. An existing proposed approach to this problem involves substituting the mutual information with the lift (the exponent of information density) and then solving the optimization. Since mutual information is the expectation of the information density, this substitution overestimates the privacy loss and results in a final smaller bound on the privacy of mutual information than what is allowed in the budget. This significantly compromises the utility. To overcome this limitation, we propose using a privacy measure that is more relaxed than the lift but stricter than mutual information while still allowing the optimization to be efficiently solved. Instead of directly using information density, our proposed measure is the average of information density over the sensitive data distribution for each observed data realization. We then introduce a heuristic algorithm capable of achieving solutions that produce extreme privacy values, which enhances utility. The numerical results confirm improved utility at the same privacy budget compared to existing solutions in the literature. Additionally, we explore two other privacy measures, $\ell_{1}$-norm and strong $χ^2$-divergence, demonstrating the applicability of our algorithm to these lift-based measures. We evaluate the performance of our method by comparing its output with previous works. Finally, we validate our heuristic approach with a theoretical framework that estimates the optimal utility for strong $χ^2$-divergence, numerically showing a perfect match.
An Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning Model for Online 3D Bin Packing Combining Object Rearrangement and Stable Placement
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents an efficient deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for online 3D bin packing (3D-BPP). The 3D-BPP is an NP-hard problem significant in logistics, warehousing, and transportation, involving the optimal arrangement of objects inside a bin. Traditional heuristic algorithms often fail to address dynamic and physical constraints in real-time scenarios. We introduce a novel DRL framework that integrates a reliable physics heuristic algorithm and object rearrangement and stable placement. Our experiment show that the proposed framework achieves higher space utilization rates effectively minimizing the amount of wasted space with fewer training epochs.
Heta: Distributed Training of Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) leverage diverse semantic relationships in Heterogeneous Graphs (HetGs) and have demonstrated remarkable learning performance in various applications. However, current distributed GNN training systems often overlook unique characteristics of HetGs, such as varying feature dimensions and the prevalence of missing features among nodes, leading to suboptimal performance or even incompatibility with distributed HGNN training. We introduce Heta, a framework designed to address the communication bottleneck in distributed HGNN training. Heta leverages the inherent structure of HGNNs - independent relation-specific aggregations for each relation, followed by a cross-relation aggregation - and advocates for a novel Relation-Aggregation-First computation paradigm. It performs relation-specific aggregations within graph partitions and then exchanges partial aggregations. This design, coupled with a new graph partitioning method that divides a HetG based on its graph schema and HGNN computation dependency, substantially reduces communication overhead. Heta further incorporates an innovative GPU feature caching strategy that accounts for the different cache miss-penalties associated with diverse node types. Comprehensive evaluations of various HGNN models and large heterogeneous graph datasets demonstrate that Heta outperforms state-of-the-art systems like DGL and GraphLearn by up to 5.8x and 2.3x in end-to-end epoch time, respectively.
Carbon Footprint Accounting Driven by Large Language Models and Retrieval-augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Carbon footprint accounting is crucial for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions and achieving carbon neutrality.The dynamic nature of processes, accounting rules, carbon-related policies, and energy supply structures necessitates real-time updates of CFA. Traditional life cycle assessment methods rely heavily on human expertise, making near-real-time updates challenging. This paper introduces a novel approach integrating large language models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented generation technology to enhance the real-time, professional, and economical aspects of carbon footprint information retrieval and analysis. By leveraging LLMs' logical and language understanding abilities and RAG's efficient retrieval capabilities, the proposed method LLMs-RAG-CFA can retrieve more relevant professional information to assist LLMs, enhancing the model's generative abilities. This method offers broad professional coverage, efficient real-time carbon footprint information acquisition and accounting, and cost-effective automation without frequent LLMs' parameter updates. Experimental results across five industries(primary aluminum, lithium battery, photovoltaic, new energy vehicles, and transformers)demonstrate that the LLMs-RAG-CFA method outperforms traditional methods and other LLMs, achieving higher information retrieval rates and significantly lower information deviations and carbon footprint accounting deviations. The economically viable design utilizes RAG technology to balance real-time updates with cost-effectiveness, providing an efficient, reliable, and cost-saving solution for real-time carbon emission management, thereby enhancing environmental sustainability practices.
HYDEN: Hyperbolic Density Representations for Medical Images and Reports
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In light of the inherent entailment relations between images and text, hyperbolic point vector embeddings, leveraging the hierarchical modeling advantages of hyperbolic space, have been utilized for visual semantic representation learning. However, point vector embedding approaches fail to address the issue of semantic uncertainty, where an image may have multiple interpretations, and text may refer to different images, a phenomenon particularly prevalent in the medical domain. Therefor, we propose \textbf{HYDEN}, a novel hyperbolic density embedding based image-text representation learning approach tailored for specific medical domain data. This method integrates text-aware local features alongside global features from images, mapping image-text features to density features in hyperbolic space via using hyperbolic pseudo-Gaussian distributions. An encapsulation loss function is employed to model the partial order relations between image-text density distributions. Experimental results demonstrate the interpretability of our approach and its superior performance compared to the baseline methods across various zero-shot tasks and different datasets.
State surveillance in the digital age: Factors associated with citizens' attitudes towards trust registers
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates factors related to the acceptance of trust registers (e.g., the Chinese Social Credit System - SCS) in Western settings. To avoid a negative connotation, we first define the concept of trust register which encompasses surveillance systems in other settings beyond China, such as FICO in the US. Then, we explore which factors are associated with people's attitude towards trust registers leaning on the technology acceptance and privacy concern theories. A cross-sectional survey among Slovenian Facebook and Instagram users (N=147) was conducted. Covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) was used to test the hypothesized associations between the studied constructs. Results indicate that attitude towards trust register is directly associated with perceived general usefulness of the trust register. Additionally, perceived general usefulness is associated with perceived usefulness of the trust register for ensuring national security and fighting crime, its ease of use, and privacy concern regarding data collection. As one of the first studies investigating attitude towards trust registers in a Western country, it provides pioneering insights into factors that may be relevant in case such registers would be implemented in a Western context, and provides some practical implications regarding messaging for would-be implementers of such systems.
Icing on the Cake: Automatic Code Summarization at Ericsson
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents our findings on the automatic summarization of Java methods within Ericsson, a global telecommunications company. We evaluate the performance of an approach called Automatic Semantic Augmentation of Prompts (ASAP), which uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate leading summary comments for Java methods. ASAP enhances the $LLM's$ prompt context by integrating static program analysis and information retrieval techniques to identify similar exemplar methods along with their developer-written Javadocs, and serves as the baseline in our study. In contrast, we explore and compare the performance of four simpler approaches that do not require static program analysis, information retrieval, or the presence of exemplars as in the ASAP method. Our methods rely solely on the Java method body as input, making them lightweight and more suitable for rapid deployment in commercial software development environments. We conducted experiments on an Ericsson software project and replicated the study using two widely-used open-source Java projects, Guava and Elasticsearch, to ensure the reliability of our results. Performance was measured across eight metrics that capture various aspects of similarity. Notably, one of our simpler approaches performed as well as or better than the ASAP method on both the Ericsson project and the open-source projects. Additionally, we performed an ablation study to examine the impact of method names on Javadoc summary generation across our four proposed approaches and the ASAP method. By masking the method names and observing the generated summaries, we found that our approaches were statistically significantly less influenced by the absence of method names compared to the baseline. This suggests that our methods are more robust to variations in method names and may derive summaries more comprehensively from the method body than the ASAP approach.
Strategic Demonstration Selection for Improved Fairness in LLM In-Context Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of using in-context learning (ICL) to steer large language models (LLMs) in processing tabular data, a challenging task given the structured nature of such data. Despite advancements in performance, the fairness implications of these methods are less understood. This study investigates how varying demonstrations within ICL prompts influence the fairness outcomes of LLMs. Our findings reveal that deliberately including minority group samples in prompts significantly boosts fairness without sacrificing predictive accuracy. Further experiments demonstrate that the proportion of minority to majority samples in demonstrations affects the trade-off between fairness and prediction accuracy. Based on these insights, we introduce a mitigation technique that employs clustering and evolutionary strategies to curate a diverse and representative sample set from the training data. This approach aims to enhance both predictive performance and fairness in ICL applications. Experimental results validate that our proposed method dramatically improves fairness across various metrics, showing its efficacy in real-world scenarios.
MalLight: Influence-Aware Coordinated Traffic Signal Control for Traffic Signal Malfunctions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Urban traffic is subject to disruptions that cause extended waiting time and safety issues at signalized intersections. While numerous studies have addressed the issue of intelligent traffic systems in the context of various disturbances, traffic signal malfunction, a common real-world occurrence with significant repercussions, has received comparatively limited attention. The primary objective of this research is to mitigate the adverse effects of traffic signal malfunction, such as traffic congestion and collision, by optimizing the control of neighboring functioning signals. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a novel traffic signal control framework (MalLight), which leverages an Influence-aware State Aggregation Module (ISAM) and an Influence-aware Reward Aggregation Module (IRAM) to achieve coordinated control of surrounding traffic signals. To the best of our knowledge, this study pioneers the application of a Reinforcement Learning(RL)-based approach to address the challenges posed by traffic signal malfunction. Empirical investigations conducted on real-world datasets substantiate the superior performance of our proposed methodology over conventional and deep learning-based alternatives in the presence of signal malfunction, with reduction of throughput alleviated by as much as 48.6$\%$.
AutoML-guided Fusion of Entity and LLM-based Representations for Document Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large semantic knowledge bases are grounded in factual knowledge. However, recent approaches to dense text representations (i.e. embeddings) do not efficiently exploit these resources. Dense and robust representations of documents are essential for effectively solving downstream classification and retrieval tasks. This work demonstrates that injecting embedded information from knowledge bases can augment the performance of contemporary Large Language Model (LLM)-based representations for the task of text classification. Further, by considering automated machine learning (AutoML) with the fused representation space, we demonstrate it is possible to improve classification accuracy even if we use low-dimensional projections of the original representation space obtained via efficient matrix factorization. This result shows that significantly faster classifiers can be achieved with minimal or no loss in predictive performance, as demonstrated using five strong LLM baselines on six diverse real-life datasets. The code is freely available at \url{https://github.com/bkolosk1/bablfusion.git}.
Minor DPO reject penalty to increase training robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Learning from human preference is a paradigm used in large-scale language model (LLM) fine-tuning step to better align pretrained LLM to human preference for downstream task. In the past it uses reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to optimize the LLM policy to align with these preferences and not to draft too far from the original model. Recently, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed to solve the alignment problem with a simplified RL-free method. Using preference pairs of chosen and reject data, DPO models the relative log probability as implicit reward function and optimize LLM policy using a simple binary cross entropy objective directly. DPO is quite straight forward and easy to be understood. It perform efficiently and well in most cases. In this article, we analyze the working mechanism of $β$ in DPO, disclose its syntax difference between RL algorithm and DPO, and understand the potential shortage brought by the DPO simplification. With these insights, we propose MinorDPO, which is better aligned to the original RL algorithm, and increase the stability of preference optimization process.