OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning to See Through Dazzle
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Machine vision is susceptible to laser dazzle, where intense laser light can blind and distort its perception of the environment through oversaturation or permanent damage to sensor pixels. Here we employ a wavefront-coded phase mask to diffuse the energy of laser light and introduce a sandwich generative adversarial network (SGAN) to restore images from complex image degradations, such as varying laser-induced image saturation, mask-induced image blurring, unknown lighting conditions, and various noise corruptions. The SGAN architecture combines discriminative and generative methods by wrapping two GANs around a learnable image deconvolution module. In addition, we make use of Fourier feature representations to reduce the spectral bias of neural networks and improve its learning of high-frequency image details. End-to-end training includes the realistic physics-based synthesis of a large set of training data from publicly available images. We trained the SGAN to suppress the peak laser irradiance as high as $10^6$ times the sensor saturation threshold - the point at which camera sensors may experience damage without the mask. The trained model was evaluated on both a synthetic data set and data collected from the laboratory. The proposed image restoration model quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms state-of-the-art methods for a wide range of scene contents, laser powers, incident laser angles, ambient illumination strengths, and noise characteristics.
Pretraining Strategy for Neural Potentials
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a mask pretraining method for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to improve their performance on fitting potential energy surfaces, particularly in water systems. GNNs are pretrained by recovering spatial information related to masked-out atoms from molecules, then transferred and finetuned on atomic forcefields. Through such pretraining, GNNs learn meaningful prior about structural and underlying physical information of molecule systems that are useful for downstream tasks. From comprehensive experiments and ablation studies, we show that the proposed method improves the accuracy and convergence speed compared to GNNs trained from scratch or using other pretraining techniques such as denoising. On the other hand, our pretraining method is suitable for both energy-centric and force-centric GNNs. This approach showcases its potential to enhance the performance and data efficiency of GNNs in fitting molecular force fields.
Large Stepsize Gradient Descent for Logistic Loss: Non-Monotonicity of the Loss Improves Optimization Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We consider gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize applied to logistic regression with linearly separable data, where the constant stepsize $η$ is so large that the loss initially oscillates. We show that GD exits this initial oscillatory phase rapidly -- in $\mathcal{O}(η)$ steps -- and subsequently achieves an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1 / (ηt) )$ convergence rate after $t$ additional steps. Our results imply that, given a budget of $T$ steps, GD can achieve an accelerated loss of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/T^2)$ with an aggressive stepsize $η:= Θ( T)$, without any use of momentum or variable stepsize schedulers. Our proof technique is versatile and also handles general classification loss functions (where exponential tails are needed for the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/T^2)$ acceleration), nonlinear predictors in the neural tangent kernel regime, and online stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a large stepsize, under suitable separability conditions.
Generalization or Memorization: Data Contamination and Trustworthy Evaluation for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent statements about the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are usually supported by evaluating on open-access benchmarks. Considering the vast size and wide-ranging sources of LLMs' training data, it could explicitly or implicitly include test data, leading to LLMs being more susceptible to data contamination. However, due to the opacity of training data, the black-box access of models, and the rapid growth of synthetic training data, detecting and mitigating data contamination for LLMs faces significant challenges. In this paper, we propose CDD, which stands for Contamination Detection via output Distribution for LLMs. CDD necessitates only the sampled texts to detect data contamination, by identifying the peakedness of LLM's output distribution. To mitigate the impact of data contamination in evaluation, we also present TED: Trustworthy Evaluation via output Distribution, based on the correction of LLM's output distribution. To facilitate this study, we introduce two benchmarks, i.e., DetCon and ComiEval, for data contamination detection and contamination mitigation evaluation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that CDD achieves the average relative improvements of 21.8\%-30.2\% over other contamination detection approaches in terms of Accuracy, F1 Score, and AUC metrics, and can effectively detect implicit contamination. TED substantially mitigates performance improvements up to 66.9\% attributed to data contamination across various contamination setups. In real-world applications, we reveal that ChatGPT exhibits a high potential to suffer from data contamination on HumanEval benchmark.
On the dynamics of three-layer neural networks: initial condensation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Empirical and theoretical works show that the input weights of two-layer neural networks, when initialized with small values, converge towards isolated orientations. This phenomenon, referred to as condensation, indicates that the gradient descent methods tend to spontaneously reduce the complexity of neural networks during the training process. In this work, we elucidate the mechanisms behind the condensation phenomena occurring in the training of three-layer neural networks and distinguish it from the training of two-layer neural networks. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we establish the blow-up property of effective dynamics and present a sufficient condition for the occurrence of condensation, findings that are substantiated by experimental results. Additionally, we explore the association between condensation and the low-rank bias observed in deep matrix factorization.
Direct Punjabi to English speech translation using discrete units
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Speech-to-speech translation is yet to reach the same level of coverage as text-to-text translation systems. The current speech technology is highly limited in its coverage of over 7000 languages spoken worldwide, leaving more than half of the population deprived of such technology and shared experiences. With voice-assisted technology (such as social robots and speech-to-text apps) and auditory content (such as podcasts and lectures) on the rise, ensuring that the technology is available for all is more important than ever. Speech translation can play a vital role in mitigating technological disparity and creating a more inclusive society. With a motive to contribute towards speech translation research for low-resource languages, our work presents a direct speech-to-speech translation model for one of the Indic languages called Punjabi to English. Additionally, we explore the performance of using a discrete representation of speech called discrete acoustic units as input to the Transformer-based translation model. The model, abbreviated as Unit-to-Unit Translation (U2UT), takes a sequence of discrete units of the source language (the language being translated from) and outputs a sequence of discrete units of the target language (the language being translated to). Our results show that the U2UT model performs better than the Speech-to-Unit Translation (S2UT) model by a 3.69 BLEU score.
Signed Graph Representation Learning: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

With the prevalence of social media, the connectedness between people has been greatly enhanced. Real-world relations between users on social media are often not limited to expressing positive ties such as friendship, trust, and agreement, but they also reflect negative ties such as enmity, mistrust, and disagreement, which can be well modelled by signed graphs. Signed Graph Representation Learning (SGRL) is an effective approach to analyze the complex patterns in real-world signed graphs with the co-existence of positive and negative links. In recent years, SGRL has witnesses fruitful results. SGRL tries to allocate low-dimensional representations to nodes and edges which could preserve the graph structure, attribute and some collective properties, e.g., balance theory and status theory. To the best of knowledge, there is no survey paper about SGRL up to now. In this paper, we present a broad review of SGRL methods and discuss some future research directions.
Phonetic and Lexical Discovery of a Canine Language using HuBERT
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This paper delves into the pioneering exploration of potential communication patterns within dog vocalizations and transcends traditional linguistic analysis barriers, which heavily relies on human priori knowledge on limited datasets to find sound units in dog vocalization. We present a self-supervised approach with HuBERT, enabling the accurate classification of phoneme labels and the identification of vocal patterns that suggest a rudimentary vocabulary within dog vocalizations. Our findings indicate a significant acoustic consistency in these identified canine vocabulary, covering the entirety of observed dog vocalization sequences. We further develop a web-based dog vocalization labeling system. This system can highlight phoneme n-grams, present in the vocabulary, in the dog audio uploaded by users.
Improved Hardness Results for Learning Intersections of Halfspaces
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We show strong (and surprisingly simple) lower bounds for weakly learning intersections of halfspaces in the improper setting. Strikingly little is known about this problem. For instance, it is not even known if there is a polynomial-time algorithm for learning the intersection of only two halfspaces. On the other hand, lower bounds based on well-established assumptions (such as approximating worst-case lattice problems or variants of Feige's 3SAT hypothesis) are only known (or are implied by existing results) for the intersection of super-logarithmically many halfspaces [KS09,KS06,DSS16]. With intersections of fewer halfspaces being only ruled out under less standard assumptions [DV21] (such as the existence of local pseudo-random generators with large stretch). We significantly narrow this gap by showing that even learning $ω(\log \log N)$ halfspaces in dimension $N$ takes super-polynomial time under standard assumptions on worst-case lattice problems (namely that SVP and SIVP are hard to approximate within polynomial factors). Further, we give unconditional hardness results in the statistical query framework. Specifically, we show that for any $k$ (even constant), learning $k$ halfspaces in dimension $N$ requires accuracy $N^{-Ω(k)}$, or exponentially many queries -- in particular ruling out SQ algorithms with polynomial accuracy for $ω(1)$ halfspaces. To the best of our knowledge this is the first unconditional hardness result for learning a super-constant number of halfspaces. Our lower bounds are obtained in a unified way via a novel connection we make between intersections of halfspaces and the so-called parallel pancakes distribution [DKS17,BLPR19,BRST21] that has been at the heart of many lower bound constructions in (robust) high-dimensional statistics in the past few years.
ASETF: A Novel Method for Jailbreak Attack on LLMs through Translate Suffix Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The safety defense methods of Large language models(LLMs) stays limited because the dangerous prompts are manually curated to just few known attack types, which fails to keep pace with emerging varieties. Recent studies found that attaching suffixes to harmful instructions can hack the defense of LLMs and lead to dangerous outputs. However, similar to traditional text adversarial attacks, this approach, while effective, is limited by the challenge of the discrete tokens. This gradient based discrete optimization attack requires over 100,000 LLM calls, and due to the unreadable of adversarial suffixes, it can be relatively easily penetrated by common defense methods such as perplexity filters. To cope with this challenge, in this paper, we proposes an Adversarial Suffix Embedding Translation Framework (ASETF), aimed at transforming continuous adversarial suffix embeddings into coherent and understandable text. This method greatly reduces the computational overhead during the attack process and helps to automatically generate multiple adversarial samples, which can be used as data to strengthen LLMs security defense. Experimental evaluations were conducted on Llama2, Vicuna, and other prominent LLMs, employing harmful directives sourced from the Advbench dataset. The results indicate that our method significantly reduces the computation time of adversarial suffixes and achieves a much better attack success rate to existing techniques, while significantly enhancing the textual fluency of the prompts. In addition, our approach can be generalized into a broader method for generating transferable adversarial suffixes that can successfully attack multiple LLMs, even black-box LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Energy-conserving intermittent-contact motion in complex models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Some mechanical systems, that are modeled to have inelastic collisions, nonetheless possess energy-conserving intermittent-contact solutions, known as collisionless solutions. Such a solution, representing a persistent hopping or walking across a level ground, may be important for understanding animal locomotion or for designing efficient walking machines. So far, collisionless motion has been analytically studied in simple two degrees of freedom (DOF) systems, or in a system that decouples into 2-DOF subsystems in the harmonic approximation. In this paper we extend the consideration to a N-DOF system, recovering the known solutions as a special N = 2 case of the general formulation. We show that in the harmonic approximation the collisionless solution is determined by the spectrum of the system. We formulate a solution existence condition, which requires the presence of at least one oscillating normal mode in the most constrained phase of the motion. An application of the developed general framework is illustrated by finding a collisionless solution for a rocking motion of a biped with an armed standing torso.
A Step-by-step Introduction to the Implementation of Automatic Differentiation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic differentiation is a key component in deep learning. This topic is well studied and excellent surveys such as Baydin et al. (2018) have been available to clearly describe the basic concepts. Further, sophisticated implementations of automatic differentiation are now an important part of popular deep learning frameworks. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to directly teach students the implementation of existing systems due to the complexity. On the other hand, if the teaching stops at the basic concept, students fail to sense the realization of an implementation. For example, we often mention the computational graph in teaching automatic differentiation, but students wonder how to implement and use it. In this document, we partially fill the gap by giving a step by step introduction of implementing a simple automatic differentiation system. We streamline the mathematical concepts and the implementation. Further, we give the motivation behind each implementation detail, so the whole setting becomes very natural.
Emotion Classification in Short English Texts using Deep Learning Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Detecting emotions in limited text datasets from under-resourced languages presents a formidable obstacle, demanding specialized frameworks and computational strategies. This study conducts a thorough examination of deep learning techniques for discerning emotions in short English texts. Deep learning approaches employ transfer learning and word embedding, notably BERT, to attain superior accuracy. To evaluate these methods, we introduce the "SmallEnglishEmotions" dataset, comprising 6372 varied short English texts annotated with five primary emotion categories. Our experiments reveal that transfer learning and BERT-based text embedding outperform alternative methods in accurately categorizing the text in the dataset.
Text Understanding and Generation Using Transformer Models for Intelligent E-commerce Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, Transformer structural pre-training model has become an important tool for large language model (LLM) tasks. In the field of e-commerce, these models are especially widely used, from text understanding to generating recommendation systems, which provide powerful technical support for improving user experience and optimizing service processes. This paper reviews the core application scenarios of Transformer pre-training model in e-commerce text understanding and recommendation generation, including but not limited to automatic generation of product descriptions, sentiment analysis of user comments, construction of personalized recommendation system and automated processing of customer service conversations. Through a detailed analysis of the model's working principle, implementation process, and application effects in specific cases, this paper emphasizes the unique advantages of pre-trained models in understanding complex user intentions and improving the quality of recommendations. In addition, the challenges and improvement directions for the future are also discussed, such as how to further improve the generalization ability of the model, the ability to handle large-scale data sets, and technical strategies to protect user privacy. Ultimately, the paper points out that the application of Transformer structural pre-training models in e-commerce has not only driven technological innovation, but also brought substantial benefits to merchants and consumers, and looking forward, these models will continue to play a key role in e-commerce and beyond.
Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the rise of increasingly powerful and user-facing NLP systems, there is growing interest in assessing whether they have a good representation of uncertainty by evaluating the quality of their predictive distribution over outcomes. We identify two main perspectives that drive starkly different evaluation protocols. The first treats predictive probability as an indication of model confidence; the second as an indication of human label variation. We discuss their merits and limitations, and take the position that both are crucial for trustworthy and fair NLP systems, but that exploiting a single predictive distribution is limiting. We recommend tools and highlight exciting directions towards models with disentangled representations of uncertainty about predictions and uncertainty about human labels.
PeriodicLoRA: Breaking the Low-Rank Bottleneck in LoRA Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Supervised fine-tuning is the most common method to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but full fine-tuning LLMs requires massive computational resources. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been widely studied due to its cost-effectiveness. LoRA is one of the most widely used methods, which assumes that the optimization process is essentially low-dimensional. Although LoRA fine-tuning is effective, there is still a performance gap compared to full fine-tuning, since its weight update is limited to low-rank matrices. In order to break the low-rank bottleneck in LoRA Optimization, we propose PeriodicLoRA (PLoRA), which accumulates low-rank update matrices multiple times to achieve a higher update rank. PLoRA has multiple training stages. During each stage, we still update only the LoRA weights. However, at the end of each stage, we unload the LoRA weights into the backbone parameters and then reinitialize the LoRA states. Experimental results show that PLoRA has stronger learning ability, approximately 1.8 times that of LoRA's learning ability at most, but it does not increase memory usage. Further, we introduce a momentum-based unloading strategy for PLoRA to mitigate the training instability.
Consensus learning: A novel decentralised ensemble learning paradigm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread adoption of large-scale machine learning models in recent years highlights the need for distributed computing for efficiency and scalability. This work introduces a novel distributed machine learning paradigm -- \emph{consensus learning} -- which combines classical ensemble methods with consensus protocols deployed in peer-to-peer systems. These algorithms consist of two phases: first, participants develop their models and submit predictions for any new data inputs; second, the individual predictions are used as inputs for a communication phase, which is governed by a consensus protocol. Consensus learning ensures user data privacy, while also inheriting the safety measures against Byzantine attacks from the underlying consensus mechanism. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis for a particular consensus protocol and compare the performance of the consensus learning ensemble with centralised ensemble learning algorithms. The discussion is supplemented by various numerical simulations, which describe the robustness of the algorithms against Byzantine participants.
Communication Traffic Characteristics Reveal an IoT Devices Identity
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the technological advancements of the twenty-first century which can improve living standards. However, it also imposes new types of security challenges, including device authentication, traffic types classification, and malicious traffic identification, in the network domain. Traditionally, internet protocol (IP) and media access control (MAC) addresses are utilized for identifying network-connected devices in a network, whilst these addressing schemes are prone to be compromised, including spoofing attacks and MAC randomization. Therefore, device identification using only explicit identifiers is a challenging task. Accurate device identification plays a key role in securing a network. In this paper, a supervised machine learning-based device fingerprinting (DFP) model has been proposed for identifying network-connected IoT devices using only communication traffic characteristics (or implicit identifiers). A single transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) packet header features have been utilized for generating unique fingerprints, with the fingerprints represented as a vector of 22 features. Experimental results have shown that the proposed DFP method achieves over 98% in classifying individual IoT devices using the UNSW dataset with 22 smart-home IoT devices. This signifies that the proposed approach is invaluable to network operators in making their networks more secure.