OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Non-Normal Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models generate samples by incrementally reversing a process that turns data into noise. We show that when the step size goes to zero, the reversed process is invariant to the distribution of these increments. This reveals a previously unconsidered parameter in the design of diffusion models: the distribution of the diffusion step $Δx_k := x_{k} - x_{k + 1}$. This parameter is implicitly set by default to be normally distributed in most diffusion models. By lifting this assumption, we generalize the framework for designing diffusion models and establish an expanded class of diffusion processes with greater flexibility in the choice of loss function used during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these models on density estimation and generative modeling tasks on standard image datasets, and show that different choices of the distribution of $Δx_k$ result in qualitatively different generated samples.
Neural Scaling Laws Rooted in the Data Distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks exhibit empirical neural scaling laws, with error decreasing as a power law with increasing model or data size, across a wide variety of architectures, tasks, and datasets. This universality suggests that scaling laws may result from general properties of natural learning tasks. We develop a mathematical model intended to describe natural datasets using percolation theory. Two distinct criticality regimes emerge, each yielding optimal power-law neural scaling laws. These regimes, corresponding to power-law-distributed discrete subtasks and a dominant data manifold, can be associated with previously proposed theories of neural scaling, thereby grounding and unifying prior works. We test the theory by training regression models on toy datasets derived from percolation theory simulations. We suggest directions for quantitatively predicting language model scaling.
HalluCana: Fixing LLM Hallucination with A Canary Lookahead
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present HalluCana, a canary lookahead to detect and correct factuality hallucinations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in long-form generation. HalluCana detects and intervenes as soon as traces of hallucination emerge, during and even before generation. To support timely detection, we exploit the internal factuality representation in the LLM hidden space, where we investigate various proxies to the LLMs' factuality self-assessment, and discuss its relation to the models' context familiarity from their pre-training. On biography generation, our method improves generation quality by up to 2.5x, while consuming over 6 times less compute.
Accurate Prediction of Temperature Indicators in Eastern China Using a Multi-Scale CNN-LSTM-Attention model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the importance of accurate weather forecasting has become increasingly prominent due to the impacts of global climate change and the rapid development of data science. Traditional forecasting methods often struggle to handle the complexity and nonlinearity inherent in climate data. To address these challenges, we propose a weather prediction model based on a multi-scale convolutional CNN-LSTM-Attention architecture, specifically designed for time series forecasting of temperature data in China. The model integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and attention mechanisms to leverage the strengths of spatial feature extraction, temporal sequence modeling, and the ability to focus on important features. The development process of the model includes data collection, preprocessing, feature extraction, and model building. Experimental results show that the model performs excellently in predicting temperature trends with high accuracy. The final computed results indicate that the Mean Squared Error (MSE) is 1.978295 and the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) is 0.8106562. This work marks a significant advancement in applying deep learning techniques to meteorological data, offering a valuable tool for improving weather forecasting accuracy and providing essential support for decision-making in areas such as urban planning, agriculture, and energy management.
RALI@TREC iKAT 2024: Achieving Personalization via Retrieval Fusion in Conversational Search
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The Recherche Appliquee en Linguistique Informatique (RALI) team participated in the 2024 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance (iKAT) Track. In personalized conversational search, effectively capturing a user's complex search intent requires incorporating both contextual information and key elements from the user profile into query reformulation. The user profile often contains many relevant pieces, and each could potentially complement the user's information needs. It is difficult to disregard any of them, whereas introducing an excessive number of these pieces risks drifting from the original query and hinders search performance. This is a challenge we denote as over-personalization. To address this, we propose different strategies by fusing ranking lists generated from the queries with different levels of personalization.
Quantum-Cognitive Neural Networks: Assessing Confidence and Uncertainty with Human Decision-Making Simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Modern machine learning (ML) systems excel in recognising and classifying images with remarkable accuracy. However, like many computer software systems, they can fail by generating confusing or erroneous outputs or by deferring to human operators to interpret the results and make final decisions. In this paper, we employ the recently proposed quantum-tunnelling neural networks (QT-NNs), inspired by human brain processes, alongside quantum cognition theory, to classify image datasets while emulating human perception and judgment. Our findings suggest that the QT-NN model provides compelling evidence of its potential to replicate human-like decision-making and outperform traditional ML algorithms.
Of Dice and Games: A Theory of Generalized Boosting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Cost-sensitive loss functions are crucial in many real-world prediction problems, where different types of errors are penalized differently; for example, in medical diagnosis, a false negative prediction can lead to worse consequences than a false positive prediction. However, traditional PAC learning theory has mostly focused on the symmetric 0-1 loss, leaving cost-sensitive losses largely unaddressed. In this work, we extend the celebrated theory of boosting to incorporate both cost-sensitive and multi-objective losses. Cost-sensitive losses assign costs to the entries of a confusion matrix, and are used to control the sum of prediction errors accounting for the cost of each error type. Multi-objective losses, on the other hand, simultaneously track multiple cost-sensitive losses, and are useful when the goal is to satisfy several criteria at once (e.g., minimizing false positives while keeping false negatives below a critical threshold). We develop a comprehensive theory of cost-sensitive and multi-objective boosting, providing a taxonomy of weak learning guarantees that distinguishes which guarantees are trivial (i.e., can always be achieved), which ones are boostable (i.e., imply strong learning), and which ones are intermediate, implying non-trivial yet not arbitrarily accurate learning. For binary classification, we establish a dichotomy: a weak learning guarantee is either trivial or boostable. In the multiclass setting, we describe a more intricate landscape of intermediate weak learning guarantees. Our characterization relies on a geometric interpretation of boosting, revealing a surprising equivalence between cost-sensitive and multi-objective losses.
Intelligent Control of Robotic X-ray Devices using a Language-promptable Digital Twin
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Natural language offers a convenient, flexible interface for controlling robotic C-arm X-ray systems, making advanced functionality and controls accessible. However, enabling language interfaces requires specialized AI models that interpret X-ray images to create a semantic representation for reasoning. The fixed outputs of such AI models limit the functionality of language controls. Incorporating flexible, language-aligned AI models prompted through language enables more versatile interfaces for diverse tasks and procedures. Using a language-aligned foundation model for X-ray image segmentation, our system continually updates a patient digital twin based on sparse reconstructions of desired anatomical structures. This supports autonomous capabilities such as visualization, patient-specific viewfinding, and automatic collimation from novel viewpoints, enabling commands 'Focus in on the lower lumbar vertebrae.' In a cadaver study, users visualized, localized, and collimated structures across the torso using verbal commands, achieving 84% end-to-end success. Post hoc analysis of randomly oriented images showed our patient digital twin could localize 35 commonly requested structures to within 51.68 mm, enabling localization and isolation from arbitrary orientations. Our results demonstrate how intelligent robotic X-ray systems can incorporate physicians' expressed intent directly. While existing foundation models for intra-operative X-ray analysis exhibit failure modes, as they improve, they can facilitate highly flexible, intelligent robotic C-arms.
Scalable, Validated Code Translation of Entire Projects using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) show promise in code translation due to their ability to generate idiomatic code. However, a significant limitation when using LLMs for code translation is scalability: existing works have shown a drop in translation success rates for code exceeding around 100 lines. We overcome this limitation by developing a modular approach to translation, where we partition the code into small code fragments which can be translated independently and semantically validated (that is, checking I/O equivalence). When this approach is applied naively, we discover that LLMs are unreliable when translating features of the source language that do not have a direct mapping to the target language, and that the LLM often gets stuck in repair loops when attempting to fix errors. To address these issues, we introduce two key concepts: (1) feature mapping, which integrates predefined translation rules with LLM-based translation to guide the LLM in navigating subtle language differences and producing semantically accurate code; and (2) type-compatibility, which facilitates localized checks at the function signature level to detect errors early, thereby narrowing the scope of potential repairs. We apply our approach to translating real-world Go codebases to Rust, demonstrating that we can consistently generate reliable Rust translations for projects up to 6,600 lines of code and 369 functions, with an average of 73% of functions successfully validated for I/O equivalence, considerably higher than any existing work.
Parsl+CWL: Towards Combining the Python and CWL Ecosystems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The Common Workflow Language (CWL) is a widely adopted language for defining and sharing computational workflows. It is designed to be independent of the execution engine on which workflows are executed. In this paper, we describe our experiences integrating CWL with Parsl, a Python-based parallel programming library designed to manage execution of workflows across diverse computing environments. We propose a new method that converts CWL CommandLineTool definitions into Parsl apps, enabling Parsl scripts to easily import and use tools represented in CWL. We describe a Parsl runner that is capable of executing a CWL CommandLineTool directly. We also describe a proof-of-concept extension to support inline Python in a CWL workflow definition, enabling seamless use in the Python ecosystem of Parsl. We demonstrate the benefits of this integration by presenting example CWL CommandLineTool definitions that show how they can be used in Parsl, and comparing performance of executing an image processing workflow using the Parsl integration and other CWL runners.
ContextModule: Improving Code Completion via Repository-level Contextual Information
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code completion tasks, where they assist developers by predicting and generating new code in real-time. However, existing LLM-based code completion systems primarily rely on the immediate context of the file being edited, often missing valuable repository-level information, user behaviour and edit history that could improve suggestion accuracy. Additionally, challenges such as efficiently retrieving relevant code snippets from large repositories, incorporating user behavior, and balancing accuracy with low-latency requirements in production environments remain unresolved. In this paper, we propose ContextModule, a framework designed to enhance LLM-based code completion by retrieving and integrating three types of contextual information from the repository: user behavior-based code, similar code snippets, and critical symbol definitions. By capturing user interactions across files and leveraging repository-wide static analysis, ContextModule improves the relevance and precision of generated code. We implement performance optimizations, such as index caching, to ensure the system meets the latency constraints of real-world coding environments. Experimental results and industrial practise demonstrate that ContextModule significantly improves code completion accuracy and user acceptance rates.
FuzzDistill: Intelligent Fuzzing Target Selection using Compile-Time Analysis and Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Fuzz testing is a fundamental technique employed to identify vulnerabilities within software systems. However, the process can be protracted and resource-intensive, especially when confronted with extensive codebases. In this work, I present FuzzDistill, an approach that harnesses compile-time data and machine learning to refine fuzzing targets. By analyzing compile-time information, such as function call graphs' features, loop information, and memory operations, FuzzDistill identifies high-priority areas of the codebase that are more probable to contain vulnerabilities. I demonstrate the efficacy of my approach through experiments conducted on real-world software, demonstrating substantial reductions in testing time.
Seeing Syntax: Uncovering Syntactic Learning Limitations in Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Vision-language models (VLMs), serve as foundation models for multi-modal applications such as image captioning and text-to-image generation. Recent studies have highlighted limitations in VLM text encoders, particularly in areas like compositionality and semantic understanding, though the underlying reasons for these limitations remain unclear. In this work, we aim to address this gap by analyzing the syntactic information, one of the fundamental linguistic properties, encoded by the text encoders of VLMs. We perform a thorough analysis comparing VLMs with different objective functions, parameter size and training data size, and with uni-modal language models (ULMs) in their ability to encode syntactic knowledge. Our findings suggest that ULM text encoders acquire syntactic information more effectively than those in VLMs. The syntactic information learned by VLM text encoders is shaped primarily by the pre-training objective, which plays a more crucial role than other factors such as model architecture, model size, or the volume of pre-training data. Models exhibit different layer-wise trends where CLIP performance dropped across layers while for other models, middle layers are rich in encoding syntactic knowledge.
Learn How to Query from Unlabeled Data Streams in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative learning among decentralized clients while safeguarding the privacy of their local data. Existing studies on FL typically assume offline labeled data available at each client when the training starts. Nevertheless, the training data in practice often arrive at clients in a streaming fashion without ground-truth labels. Given the expensive annotation cost, it is critical to identify a subset of informative samples for labeling on clients. However, selecting samples locally while accommodating the global training objective presents a challenge unique to FL. In this work, we tackle this conundrum by framing the data querying process in FL as a collaborative decentralized decision-making problem and proposing an effective solution named LeaDQ, which leverages multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms. In particular, under the implicit guidance from global information, LeaDQ effectively learns the local policies for distributed clients and steers them towards selecting samples that can enhance the global model's accuracy. Extensive simulations on image and text tasks show that LeaDQ advances the model performance in various FL scenarios, outperforming the benchmarking algorithms.
ProGDF: Progressive Gaussian Differential Field for Controllable and Flexible 3D Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

3D editing plays a crucial role in editing and reusing existing 3D assets, thereby enhancing productivity. Recently, 3DGS-based methods have gained increasing attention due to their efficient rendering and flexibility. However, achieving desired 3D editing results often requires multiple adjustments in an iterative loop, resulting in tens of minutes of training time cost for each attempt and a cumbersome trial-and-error cycle for users. This in-the-loop training paradigm results in a poor user experience. To address this issue, we introduce the concept of process-oriented modelling for 3D editing and propose the Progressive Gaussian Differential Field (ProGDF), an out-of-loop training approach that requires only a single training session to provide users with controllable editing capability and variable editing results through a user-friendly interface in real-time. ProGDF consists of two key components: Progressive Gaussian Splatting (PGS) and Gaussian Differential Field (GDF). PGS introduces the progressive constraint to extract the diverse intermediate results of the editing process and employs rendering quality regularization to improve the quality of these results. Based on these intermediate results, GDF leverages a lightweight neural network to model the editing process. Extensive results on two novel applications, namely controllable 3D editing and flexible fine-grained 3D manipulation, demonstrate the effectiveness, practicality and flexibility of the proposed ProGDF.
DG-Mamba: Robust and Efficient Dynamic Graph Structure Learning with Selective State Space Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Dynamic graphs exhibit intertwined spatio-temporal evolutionary patterns, widely existing in the real world. Nevertheless, the structure incompleteness, noise, and redundancy result in poor robustness for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs). Dynamic Graph Structure Learning (DGSL) offers a promising way to optimize graph structures. However, aside from encountering unacceptable quadratic complexity, it overly relies on heuristic priors, making it hard to discover underlying predictive patterns. How to efficiently refine the dynamic structures, capture intrinsic dependencies, and learn robust representations, remains under-explored. In this work, we propose the novel DG-Mamba, a robust and efficient Dynamic Graph structure learning framework with the Selective State Space Models (Mamba). To accelerate the spatio-temporal structure learning, we propose a kernelized dynamic message-passing operator that reduces the quadratic time complexity to linear. To capture global intrinsic dynamics, we establish the dynamic graph as a self-contained system with State Space Model. By discretizing the system states with the cross-snapshot graph adjacency, we enable the long-distance dependencies capturing with the selective snapshot scan. To endow learned dynamic structures more expressive with informativeness, we propose the self-supervised Principle of Relevant Information for DGSL to regularize the most relevant yet least redundant information, enhancing global robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the robustness and efficiency of our DG-Mamba compared with the state-of-the-art baselines against adversarial attacks.
Collaborative Hybrid Propagator for Temporal Misalignment in Audio-Visual Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Audio-visual video segmentation (AVVS) aims to generate pixel-level maps of sound-producing objects that accurately align with the corresponding audio. However, existing methods often face temporal misalignment, where audio cues and segmentation results are not temporally coordinated. Audio provides two critical pieces of information: i) target object-level details and ii) the timing of when objects start and stop producing sounds. Current methods focus more on object-level information but neglect the boundaries of audio semantic changes, leading to temporal misalignment. To address this issue, we propose a Collaborative Hybrid Propagator Framework~(Co-Prop). This framework includes two main steps: Preliminary Audio Boundary Anchoring and Frame-by-Frame Audio-Insert Propagation. To Anchor the audio boundary, we employ retrieval-assist prompts with Qwen large language models to identify control points of audio semantic changes. These control points split the audio into semantically consistent audio portions. After obtaining the control point lists, we propose the Audio Insertion Propagator to process each audio portion using a frame-by-frame audio insertion propagation and matching approach. We curated a compact dataset comprising diverse source conversion cases and devised a metric to assess alignment rates. Compared to traditional simultaneous processing methods, our approach reduces memory requirements and facilitates frame alignment. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across three datasets and two backbones. Furthermore, our method can be integrated with existing AVVS approaches, offering plug-and-play functionality to enhance their performance.
Illusory VQA: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal Models on Visual Illusions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has made significant strides, particularly with the advent of multimodal models that integrate vision and language understanding. However, existing VQA datasets often overlook the complexities introduced by image illusions, which pose unique challenges for both human perception and model interpretation. In this study, we introduce a novel task called Illusory VQA, along with four specialized datasets: IllusionMNIST, IllusionFashionMNIST, IllusionAnimals, and IllusionChar. These datasets are designed to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art multimodal models in recognizing and interpreting visual illusions. We assess the zero-shot performance of various models, fine-tune selected models on our datasets, and propose a simple yet effective solution for illusion detection using Gaussian and blur low-pass filters. We show that this method increases the performance of models significantly and in the case of BLIP-2 on IllusionAnimals without any fine-tuning, it outperforms humans. Our findings highlight the disparity between human and model perception of illusions and demonstrate that fine-tuning and specific preprocessing techniques can significantly enhance model robustness. This work contributes to the development of more human-like visual understanding in multimodal models and suggests future directions for adapting filters using learnable parameters.