OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
KGExplainer: Towards Exploring Connected Subgraph Explanations for Knowledge Graph Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to alleviate the inherent incompleteness of knowledge graphs (KGs), which is a critical task for various applications, such as recommendations on the web. Although knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models have demonstrated superior predictive performance on KGC tasks, these models infer missing links in a black-box manner that lacks transparency and accountability, preventing researchers from developing accountable models. Existing KGE-based explanation methods focus on exploring key paths or isolated edges as explanations, which is information-less to reason target prediction. Additionally, the missing ground truth leads to these explanation methods being ineffective in quantitatively evaluating explored explanations. To overcome these limitations, we propose KGExplainer, a model-agnostic method that identifies connected subgraph explanations and distills an evaluator to assess them quantitatively. KGExplainer employs a perturbation-based greedy search algorithm to find key connected subgraphs as explanations within the local structure of target predictions. To evaluate the quality of the explored explanations, KGExplainer distills an evaluator from the target KGE model. By forwarding the explanations to the evaluator, our method can examine the fidelity of them. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that KGExplainer yields promising improvement and achieves an optimal ratio of 83.3% in human evaluation.
Simple Techniques for Enhancing Sentence Embeddings in Generative Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Sentence Embedding stands as a fundamental task within the realm of Natural Language Processing, finding extensive application in search engines, expert systems, and question-and-answer platforms. With the continuous evolution of large language models such as LLaMA and Mistral, research on sentence embedding has recently achieved notable breakthroughs. However, these advancements mainly pertain to fine-tuning scenarios, leaving explorations into computationally efficient direct inference methods for sentence representation in a nascent stage. This paper endeavors to bridge this research gap. Through comprehensive experimentation, we challenge the widely held belief in the necessity of an Explicit One-word Limitation for deriving sentence embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). We demonstrate that this approach, while beneficial for generative models under direct inference scenario, is not imperative for discriminative models or the fine-tuning of generative PLMs. This discovery sheds new light on the design of manual templates in future studies. Building upon this insight, we propose two innovative prompt engineering techniques capable of further enhancing the expressive power of PLMs' raw embeddings: Pretended Chain of Thought and Knowledge Enhancement. We confirm their effectiveness across various PLM types and provide a detailed exploration of the underlying factors contributing to their success.
Data Augmentation with In-Context Learning and Comparative Evaluation in Math Word Problem Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Math Word Problem (MWP) solving presents a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This study aims to provide MWP solvers with a more diverse training set, ultimately improving their ability to solve various math problems. We propose several methods for data augmentation by modifying the problem texts and equations, such as synonym replacement, rule-based: question replacement, and rule based: reversing question methodologies over two English MWP datasets. This study extends by introducing a new in-context learning augmentation method, employing the Llama-7b language model. This approach involves instruction-based prompting for rephrasing the math problem texts. Performance evaluations are conducted on 9 baseline models, revealing that augmentation methods outperform baseline models. Moreover, concatenating examples generated by various augmentation methods further improves performance.
SEME at SemEval-2024 Task 2: Comparing Masked and Generative Language Models on Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper describes our submission to Task 2 of SemEval-2024: Safe Biomedical Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trials. The Multi-evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Data (NLI4CT) consists of a Textual Entailment (TE) task focused on the evaluation of the consistency and faithfulness of Natural Language Inference (NLI) models applied to Clinical Trial Reports (CTR). We test 2 distinct approaches, one based on finetuning and ensembling Masked Language Models and the other based on prompting Large Language Models using templates, in particular, using Chain-Of-Thought and Contrastive Chain-Of-Thought. Prompting Flan-T5-large in a 2-shot setting leads to our best system that achieves 0.57 F1 score, 0.64 Faithfulness, and 0.56 Consistency.
Stability in Graphs with Matroid Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study the following Independent Stable Set problem. Let G be an undirected graph and M = (V(G),I) be a matroid whose elements are the vertices of G. For an integer k\geq 1, the task is to decide whether G contains a set S\subseteq V(G) of size at least k which is independent (stable) in G and independent in M. This problem generalizes several well-studied algorithmic problems, including Rainbow Independent Set, Rainbow Matching, and Bipartite Matching with Separation. We show that - When the matroid M is represented by the independence oracle, then for any computable function f, no algorithm can solve Independent Stable Set using f(k)n^{o(k)} calls to the oracle. - On the other hand, when the graph G is of degeneracy d, then the problem is solvable in time O((d+1)^kn), and hence is FPT parameterized by d+k. Moreover, when the degeneracy d is a constant (which is not a part of the input), the problem admits a kernel polynomial in k. More precisely, we prove that for every integer d\geq 0, the problem admits a kernelization algorithm that in time n^{O(d)} outputs an equivalent framework with a graph on dk^{O(d)} vertices. A lower bound complements this when d is part of the input: Independent Stable Set does not admit a polynomial kernel when parameterized by k+d unless NP \subseteq coNP/poly. This lower bound holds even when M is a partition matroid. - Another set of results concerns the scenario when the graph G is chordal. In this case, our computational lower bound excludes an FPT algorithm when the input matroid is given by its independence oracle. However, we demonstrate that Independent Stable Set can be solved in 2^{O(k)}||M||^{O(1)} time when M is a linear matroid given by its representation. In the same setting, Independent Stable Set does not have a polynomial kernel when parameterized by k unless NP\subseteq coNP/poly.
Superior Genetic Algorithms for the Target Set Selection Problem Based on Power-Law Parameter Choices and Simple Greedy Heuristics
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The target set selection problem (TSS) asks for a set of vertices such that an influence spreading process started in these vertices reaches the whole graph. The current state of the art for this NP-hard problem are three recently proposed randomized search heuristics, namely a biased random-key genetic algorithm (BRKGA) obtained from extensive parameter tuning, a max-min ant system (MMAS), and a MMAS using Q-learning with a graph convolutional network. We show that the BRKGA with two simple modifications and without the costly parameter tuning obtains significantly better results. Our first modification is to simply choose all parameters of the BRKGA in each iteration randomly from a power-law distribution. The resulting parameterless BRKGA is already competitive with the tuned BRKGA, as our experiments on the previously used benchmarks show. We then add a natural greedy heuristic, namely to repeatedly discard small-degree vertices that are not necessary for reaching the whole graph. The resulting algorithm consistently outperforms all of the state-of-the-art algorithms. Besides providing a superior algorithm for the TSS problem, this work shows that randomized parameter choices and elementary greedy heuristics can give better results than complex algorithms and costly parameter tuning.
Teaching Llama a New Language Through Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores cost-efficient methods to adapt pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to new lower-resource languages, with a specific focus on Estonian. Leveraging the Llama 2 model, we investigate the impact of combining cross-lingual instruction-tuning with additional monolingual pretraining. Our results demonstrate that even a relatively small amount of additional monolingual pretraining followed by cross-lingual instruction-tuning significantly enhances results on Estonian. Furthermore, we showcase cross-lingual knowledge transfer from high-quality English instructions to Estonian, resulting in improvements in commonsense reasoning and multi-turn conversation capabilities. Our best model, named \textsc{Llammas}, represents the first open-source instruction-following LLM for Estonian. Additionally, we publish Alpaca-est, the first general task instruction dataset for Estonia. These contributions mark the initial progress in the direction of developing open-source LLMs for Estonian.
Derivative-free tree optimization for complex systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A tremendous range of design tasks in materials, physics, and biology can be formulated as finding the optimum of an objective function depending on many parameters without knowing its closed-form expression or the derivative. Traditional derivative-free optimization techniques often rely on strong assumptions about objective functions, thereby failing at optimizing non-convex systems beyond 100 dimensions. Here, we present a tree search method for derivative-free optimization that enables accelerated optimal design of high-dimensional complex systems. Specifically, we introduce stochastic tree expansion, dynamic upper confidence bound, and short-range backpropagation mechanism to evade local optimum, iteratively approximating the global optimum using machine learning models. This development effectively confronts the dimensionally challenging problems, achieving convergence to global optima across various benchmark functions up to 2,000 dimensions, surpassing the existing methods by 10- to 20-fold. Our method demonstrates wide applicability to a wide range of real-world complex systems spanning materials, physics, and biology, considerably outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms. This enables efficient autonomous knowledge discovery and facilitates self-driving virtual laboratories. Although we focus on problems within the realm of natural science, the advancements in optimization techniques achieved herein are applicable to a broader spectrum of challenges across all quantitative disciplines.
Machine Learning-Aided Cooperative Localization under Dense Urban Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Future wireless network technology provides automobiles with the connectivity feature to consolidate the concept of vehicular networks that collaborate on conducting cooperative driving tasks. The full potential of connected vehicles, which promises road safety and quality driving experience, can be leveraged if machine learning models guarantee the robustness in performing core functions including localization and controls. Location awareness, in particular, lends itself to the deployment of location-specific services and the improvement of the operation performance. The localization entails direct communication to the network infrastructure, and the resulting centralized positioning solutions readily become intractable as the network scales up. As an alternative to the centralized solutions, this article addresses decentralized principle of vehicular localization reinforced by machine learning techniques in dense urban environments with frequent inaccessibility to reliable measurement. As such, the collaboration of multiple vehicles enhances the positioning performance of machine learning approaches. A virtual testbed is developed to validate this machine learning model for real-map vehicular networks. Numerical results demonstrate universal feasibility of cooperative localization, in particular, for dense urban area configurations.
Large language models as oracles for instantiating ontologies with domain-specific knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Background. Endowing intelligent systems with semantic data commonly requires designing and instantiating ontologies with domain-specific knowledge. Especially in the early phases, those activities are typically performed manually by human experts possibly leveraging on their own experience. The resulting process is therefore time-consuming, error-prone, and often biased by the personal background of the ontology designer. Objective. To mitigate that issue, we propose a novel domain-independent approach to automatically instantiate ontologies with domain-specific knowledge, by leveraging on large language models (LLMs) as oracles. Method. Starting from (i) an initial schema composed by inter-related classes and properties and (ii) a set of query templates, our method queries the LLM multiple times, and generates instances for both classes and properties from its replies. Thus, the ontology is automatically filled with domain-specific knowledge, compliant to the initial schema. As a result, the ontology is quickly and automatically enriched with manifold instances, which experts may consider to keep, adjust, discard, or complement according to their own needs and expertise. Contribution. We formalise our method in general way and instantiate it over various LLMs, as well as on a concrete case study. We report experiments rooted in the nutritional domain where an ontology of food meals and their ingredients is automatically instantiated from scratch, starting from a categorisation of meals and their relationships. There, we analyse the quality of the generated ontologies and compare ontologies attained by exploiting different LLMs. Experimentally, our approach achieves a quality metric that is up to five times higher than the state-of-the-art, while reducing erroneous entities and relations by up to ten times. Finally, we provide a SWOT analysis of the proposed method.
MarsSeg: Mars Surface Semantic Segmentation with Multi-level Extractor and Connector
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The segmentation and interpretation of the Martian surface play a pivotal role in Mars exploration, providing essential data for the trajectory planning and obstacle avoidance of rovers. However, the complex topography, similar surface features, and the lack of extensive annotated data pose significant challenges to the high-precision semantic segmentation of the Martian surface. To address these challenges, we propose a novel encoder-decoder based Mars segmentation network, termed MarsSeg. Specifically, we employ an encoder-decoder structure with a minimized number of down-sampling layers to preserve local details. To facilitate a high-level semantic understanding across the shadow multi-level feature maps, we introduce a feature enhancement connection layer situated between the encoder and decoder. This layer incorporates Mini Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (Mini-ASPP), Polarized Self-Attention (PSA), and Strip Pyramid Pooling Module (SPPM). The Mini-ASPP and PSA are specifically designed for shadow feature enhancement, thereby enabling the expression of local details and small objects. Conversely, the SPPM is employed for deep feature enhancement, facilitating the extraction of high-level semantic category-related information. Experimental results derived from the Mars-Seg and AI4Mars datasets substantiate that the proposed MarsSeg outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in segmentation performance, validating the efficacy of each proposed component.
Wireless Resource Optimization in Hybrid Semantic/Bit Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, semantic communication (SemCom) has shown great potential in significant resource savings and efficient information exchanges, thus naturally introducing a novel and practical cellular network paradigm where two modes of SemCom and conventional bit communication (BitCom) coexist. Nevertheless, the involved wireless resource management becomes rather complicated and challenging, given the unique background knowledge matching and time-consuming semantic coding requirements in SemCom. To this end, this paper jointly investigates user association (UA), mode selection (MS), and bandwidth allocation (BA) problems in a hybrid semantic/bit communication network (HSB-Net). Concretely, we first identify a unified performance metric of message throughput for both SemCom and BitCom links. Next, we specially develop a knowledge matching-aware two-stage tandem packet queuing model and theoretically derive the average packet loss ratio and queuing latency. Combined with practical constraints, we then formulate a joint optimization problem for UA, MS, and BA to maximize the overall message throughput of HSB-Net. Afterward, we propose an optimal resource management strategy by utilizing a Lagrange primal-dual transformation method and a preference list-based heuristic algorithm with polynomial-time complexity. Numerical results not only demonstrate the accuracy of our analytical queuing model, but also validate the performance superiority of our proposed strategy compared with different benchmarks.
Probabilistically Informed Robot Object Search with Multiple Regions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing use of autonomous robot systems in hazardous environments underscores the need for efficient search and rescue operations. Despite significant advancements, existing literature on object search often falls short in overcoming the difficulty of long planning horizons and dealing with sensor limitations, such as noise. This study introduces a novel approach that formulates the search problem as a belief Markov decision processes with options (BMDP-O) to make Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) a viable tool for overcoming these challenges in large scale environments. The proposed formulation incorporates sequences of actions (options) to move between regions of interest, enabling the algorithm to efficiently scale to large environments. This approach also enables the use of customizable fields of view, for use with multiple types of sensors. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of this approach in large environments when compared to the problem without options and alternative tools such as receding horizon planners. Given compute time for the proposed formulation is relatively high, a further approximated "lite" formulation is proposed. The lite formulation finds objects in a comparable number of steps with faster computation.
Robust Gaussian Splatting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we address common error sources for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) including blur, imperfect camera poses, and color inconsistencies, with the goal of improving its robustness for practical applications like reconstructions from handheld phone captures. Our main contribution involves modeling motion blur as a Gaussian distribution over camera poses, allowing us to address both camera pose refinement and motion blur correction in a unified way. Additionally, we propose mechanisms for defocus blur compensation and for addressing color in-consistencies caused by ambient light, shadows, or due to camera-related factors like varying white balancing settings. Our proposed solutions integrate in a seamless way with the 3DGS formulation while maintaining its benefits in terms of training efficiency and rendering speed. We experimentally validate our contributions on relevant benchmark datasets including Scannet++ and Deblur-NeRF, obtaining state-of-the-art results and thus consistent improvements over relevant baselines.
A Novel BERT-based Classifier to Detect Political Leaning of YouTube Videos based on their Titles
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

A quarter of US adults regularly get their news from YouTube. Yet, despite the massive political content available on the platform, to date no classifier has been proposed to identify the political leaning of YouTube videos. To fill this gap, we propose a novel classifier based on Bert -- a language model from Google -- to classify YouTube videos merely based on their titles into six categories, namely: Far Left, Left, Center, Anti-Woke, Right, and Far Right. We used a public dataset of 10 million YouTube video titles (under various categories) to train and validate the proposed classifier. We compare the classifier against several alternatives that we trained on the same dataset, revealing that our classifier achieves the highest accuracy (75%) and the highest F1 score (77%). To further validate the classification performance, we collect videos from YouTube channels of numerous prominent news agencies, such as Fox News and New York Times, which have widely known political leanings, and apply our classifier to their video titles. For the vast majority of cases, the predicted political leaning matches that of the news agency.
Translation-based Video-to-Video Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Translation-based Video Synthesis (TVS) has emerged as a vital research area in computer vision, aiming to facilitate the transformation of videos between distinct domains while preserving both temporal continuity and underlying content features. This technique has found wide-ranging applications, encompassing video super-resolution, colorization, segmentation, and more, by extending the capabilities of traditional image-to-image translation to the temporal domain. One of the principal challenges faced in TVS is the inherent risk of introducing flickering artifacts and inconsistencies between frames during the synthesis process. This is particularly challenging due to the necessity of ensuring smooth and coherent transitions between video frames. Efforts to tackle this challenge have induced the creation of diverse strategies and algorithms aimed at mitigating these unwanted consequences. This comprehensive review extensively examines the latest progress in the realm of TVS. It thoroughly investigates emerging methodologies, shedding light on the fundamental concepts and mechanisms utilized for proficient video synthesis. This survey also illuminates their inherent strengths, limitations, appropriate applications, and potential avenues for future development.
Investigating Regularization of Self-Play Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the effects of various forms of regularization in the context of language model alignment via self-play. While both reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) require to collect costly human-annotated pairwise preferences, the self-play fine-tuning (SPIN) approach replaces the rejected answers by data generated from the previous iterate. However, the SPIN method presents a performance instability issue in the learning phase, which can be mitigated by playing against a mixture of the two previous iterates. In the same vein, we propose in this work to address this issue from two perspectives: first, by incorporating an additional Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization to stay at the proximity of the reference policy; second, by using the idea of fictitious play which smoothens the opponent policy across all previous iterations. In particular, we show that the KL-based regularizer boils down to replacing the previous policy by its geometric mixture with the base policy inside of the SPIN loss function. We finally discuss empirical results on MT-Bench as well as on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard.