OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Safe Reinforcement Learning driven Weights-varying Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Vehicle Motion Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Determining the optimal cost function parameters of Model Predictive Control (MPC) to optimize multiple control objectives is a challenging and time-consuming task. Multiobjective Bayesian Optimization (BO) techniques solve this problem by determining a Pareto optimal parameter set for an MPC with static weights. However, a single parameter set may not deliver the most optimal closed-loop control performance when the context of the MPC operating conditions changes during its operation, urging the need to adapt the cost function weights at runtime. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can automatically learn context-dependent optimal parameter sets and dynamically adapt for a Weightsvarying MPC (WMPC). However, learning cost function weights from scratch in a continuous action space may lead to unsafe operating states. To solve this, we propose a novel approach limiting the RL actions within a safe learning space representing a catalog of pre-optimized BO Pareto-optimal weight sets. We conceive a RL agent not to learn in a continuous space but to proactively anticipate upcoming control tasks and to choose the most optimal discrete actions, each corresponding to a single set of Pareto optimal weights, context-dependent. Hence, even an untrained RL agent guarantees a safe and optimal performance. Experimental results demonstrate that an untrained RL-WMPC shows Pareto-optimal closed-loop behavior and training the RL-WMPC helps exhibit a performance beyond the Pareto-front.
Cryptographically Assured Information Flow: Assured Remote Execution
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Assured Remote Execution on a device is the ability of suitably authorized parties to construct secure channels with known processes -- i.e. processes executing known code -- running on it. Assured Remote Execution requires a hardware basis including cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we show that a simple hardware-level mechanism called Cryptographically Assured Information Flow (CAIF) enables Assured Remote Execution. CAIF is akin to some operations in existing Trusted Execution Environments, but securely implements an ideal functionality defined in terms of logging and confidential escrow. We show how to achieve Assured Remote Execution for a wide variety of processes on a CAIF device. Cryptographic protocol analysis demonstrates our security goals are achieved even against a strong adversary that may modify our programs and execute unauthorized programs on the device. Assured Remote Execution enables useful functionality such as trustworthy remote attestation, and provides some of the support needed for secure remote reprogramming.
GIRT-Model: Automated Generation of Issue Report Templates
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Platforms such as GitHub and GitLab introduce Issue Report Templates (IRTs) to enable more effective issue management and better alignment with developer expectations. However, these templates are not widely adopted in most repositories, and there is currently no tool available to aid developers in generating them. In this work, we introduce GIRT-Model, an assistant language model that automatically generates IRTs based on the developer's instructions regarding the structure and necessary fields. We create GIRT-Instruct, a dataset comprising pairs of instructions and IRTs, with the IRTs sourced from GitHub repositories. We use GIRT-Instruct to instruction-tune a T5-base model to create the GIRT-Model. In our experiments, GIRT-Model outperforms general language models (T5 and Flan-T5 with different parameter sizes) in IRT generation by achieving significantly higher scores in ROUGE, BLEU, METEOR, and human evaluation. Additionally, we analyze the effectiveness of GIRT-Model in a user study in which participants wrote short IRTs with GIRT-Model. Our results show that the participants find GIRT-Model useful in the automated generation of templates. We hope that through the use of GIRT-Model, we can encourage more developers to adopt IRTs in their repositories. We publicly release our code, dataset, and model at https://github.com/ISE-Research/girt-model.
Equivariant Symmetry Breaking Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Equivariant neural networks (ENNs) have been shown to be extremely effective in applications involving underlying symmetries. By construction ENNs cannot produce lower symmetry outputs given a higher symmetry input. However, symmetry breaking occurs in many physical systems and we may obtain a less symmetric stable state from an initial highly symmetric one. Hence, it is imperative that we understand how to systematically break symmetry in ENNs. In this work, we propose a novel symmetry breaking framework that is fully equivariant and is the first which fully addresses spontaneous symmetry breaking. We emphasize that our approach is general and applicable to equivariance under any group. To achieve this, we introduce the idea of symmetry breaking sets (SBS). Rather than redesign existing networks, we design sets of symmetry breaking objects which we feed into our network based on the symmetry of our inputs and outputs. We show there is a natural way to define equivariance on these sets, which gives an additional constraint. Minimizing the size of these sets equates to data efficiency. We prove that minimizing these sets translates to a well studied group theory problem, and tabulate solutions to this problem for the point groups. Finally, we provide some examples of symmetry breaking to demonstrate how our approach works in practice. The code for these examples is available at \url{https://github.com/atomicarchitects/equivariant-SBS}.
Poisson Process for Bayesian Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

BayesianOptimization(BO) is a sample-efficient black-box optimizer, and extensive methods have been proposed to build the absolute function response of the black-box function through a probabilistic surrogate model, including Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE), random forest (SMAC), and Gaussian process (GP). However, few methods have been explored to estimate the relative rankings of candidates, which can be more robust to noise and have better practicality than absolute function responses, especially when the function responses are intractable but preferences can be acquired. To this end, we propose a novel ranking-based surrogate model based on the Poisson process and introduce an efficient BO framework, namely Poisson Process Bayesian Optimization (PoPBO). Two tailored acquisition functions are further derived from classic LCB and EI to accommodate it. Compared to the classic GP-BO method, our PoPBO has lower computation costs and better robustness to noise, which is verified by abundant experiments. The results on both simulated and real-world benchmarks, including hyperparameter optimization (HPO) and neural architecture search (NAS), show the effectiveness of PoPBO.
Statistical Guarantees for Link Prediction using Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper derives statistical guarantees for the performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in link prediction tasks on graphs generated by a graphon. We propose a linear GNN architecture (LG-GNN) that produces consistent estimators for the underlying edge probabilities. We establish a bound on the mean squared error and give guarantees on the ability of LG-GNN to detect high-probability edges. Our guarantees hold for both sparse and dense graphs. Finally, we demonstrate some of the shortcomings of the classical GCN architecture, as well as verify our results on real and synthetic datasets.
Adversarial Data Augmentation for Robust Speaker Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Data augmentation (DA) has gained widespread popularity in deep speaker models due to its ease of implementation and significant effectiveness. It enriches training data by simulating real-life acoustic variations, enabling deep neural networks to learn speaker-related representations while disregarding irrelevant acoustic variations, thereby improving robustness and generalization. However, a potential issue with the vanilla DA is augmentation residual, i.e., unwanted distortion caused by different types of augmentation. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach called adversarial data augmentation (A-DA) which combines DA with adversarial learning. Specifically, it involves an additional augmentation classifier to categorize various augmentation types used in data augmentation. This adversarial learning empowers the network to generate speaker embeddings that can deceive the augmentation classifier, making the learned speaker embeddings more robust in the face of augmentation variations. Experiments conducted on VoxCeleb and CN-Celeb datasets demonstrate that our proposed A-DA outperforms standard DA in both augmentation matched and mismatched test conditions, showcasing its superior robustness and generalization against acoustic variations.
Budget-feasible Egalitarian Allocation of Conflicting Jobs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Allocating conflicting jobs among individuals while respecting a budget constraint for each individual is an optimization problem that arises in various real-world scenarios. In this paper, we consider the situation where each individual derives some satisfaction from each job. We focus on finding a feasible allocation of conflicting jobs that maximize egalitarian cost, i.e. the satisfaction of the \nc{individual who is worst-off}. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to combine egalitarianism, budget-feasibility, and conflict-freeness in allocations. We provide a systematic study of the computational complexity of finding budget-feasible conflict-free egalitarian allocation and show that our problem generalizes a large number of classical optimization problems. Therefore, unsurprisingly, our problem is \NPH even for two individuals and when there is no conflict between any jobs. We show that the problem admits algorithms when studied in the realm of approximation algorithms and parameterized algorithms with a host of natural parameters that match and in some cases improve upon the running time of known algorithms.
How phonemes contribute to deep speaker models?
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Which phonemes convey more speaker traits is a long-standing question, and various perception experiments were conducted with human subjects. For speaker recognition, studies were conducted with the conventional statistical models and the drawn conclusions are more or less consistent with the perception results. However, which phonemes are more important with modern deep neural models is still unexplored, due to the opaqueness of the decision process. This paper conducts a novel study for the attribution of phonemes with two types of deep speaker models that are based on TDNN and CNN respectively, from the perspective of model explanation. Specifically, we conducted the study by two post-explanation methods: LayerCAM and Time Align Occlusion (TAO). Experimental results showed that: (1) At the population level, vowels are more important than consonants, confirming the human perception studies. However, fricatives are among the most unimportant phonemes, which contrasts with previous studies. (2) At the speaker level, a large between-speaker variation is observed regarding phoneme importance, indicating that whether a phoneme is important or not is largely speaker-dependent.
Improving Robustness of LiDAR-Camera Fusion Model against Weather Corruption from Fusion Strategy Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, LiDAR-camera fusion models have markedly advanced 3D object detection tasks in autonomous driving. However, their robustness against common weather corruption such as fog, rain, snow, and sunlight in the intricate physical world remains underexplored. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of fusion models from the perspective of fusion strategies on the corrupted dataset. Based on the evaluation, we further propose a concise yet practical fusion strategy to enhance the robustness of the fusion models, namely flexibly weighted fusing features from LiDAR and camera sources to adapt to varying weather scenarios. Experiments conducted on four types of fusion models, each with two distinct lightweight implementations, confirm the broad applicability and effectiveness of the approach.
Stable and Robust Deep Learning By Hyperbolic Tangent Exponential Linear Unit (TeLU)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce the Hyperbolic Tangent Exponential Linear Unit (TeLU), a novel neural network activation function, represented as $f(x) = x{\cdot}tanh(e^x)$. TeLU is designed to overcome the limitations of conventional activation functions like ReLU, GELU, and Mish by addressing the vanishing and, to an extent, the exploding gradient problems. Our theoretical analysis and empirical assessments reveal that TeLU outperforms existing activation functions in stability and robustness, effectively adjusting activation outputs' mean towards zero for enhanced training stability and convergence. Extensive evaluations against popular activation functions (ReLU, GELU, SiLU, Mish, Logish, Smish) across advanced architectures, including Resnet-50, demonstrate TeLU's lower variance and superior performance, even under hyperparameter conditions optimized for other functions. In large-scale tests with challenging datasets like CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet, encompassing 860 scenarios, TeLU consistently showcased its effectiveness, positioning itself as a potential new standard for neural network activation functions, boosting stability and performance in diverse deep learning applications.
KS-Lottery: Finding Certified Lottery Tickets for Multilingual Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The lottery ticket hypothesis posits the existence of ``winning tickets'' within a randomly initialized neural network. Do winning tickets exist for LLMs in fine-tuning scenarios? How can we find such winning tickets? In this paper, we propose KS-Lottery, a method to identify a small subset of LLM parameters highly effective in multilingual fine-tuning. Our key idea is to use Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test to analyze the distribution shift of parameters before and after fine-tuning. We further theoretically prove that KS-Lottery can find the certified winning tickets in the embedding layer, fine-tuning on the found parameters is guaranteed to perform as well as full fine-tuning. Comparing KS-Lottery with other parameter-efficient tuning algorithms on translation tasks, the experimental results show that KS-Lottery finds a much smaller set of parameters for fine-tuning while achieving the comparable performance as full fine-tuning LLM. Surprisingly, we find that fine-tuning 18 tokens' embedding of LLaMA suffices to reach the fine-tuning translation performance~\footnote{https://github.com/CONE-MT/KS-Lottery.}.
Evading Data Contamination Detection for Language Models is (too) Easy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models are widespread, with their performance on benchmarks frequently guiding user preferences for one model over another. However, the vast amount of data these models are trained on can inadvertently lead to contamination with public benchmarks, thus compromising performance measurements. While recently developed contamination detection methods try to address this issue, they overlook the possibility of deliberate contamination by malicious model providers aiming to evade detection. We argue that this setting is of crucial importance as it casts doubt on the reliability of public benchmarks. To more rigorously study this issue, we propose a categorization of both model providers and contamination detection methods. This reveals vulnerabilities in existing methods that we exploit with EAL, a simple yet effective contamination technique that significantly inflates benchmark performance while completely evading current detection methods.
FAIR-USE4OS: Guidelines for Creating Impactful Open-Source Software
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper extends the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) guidelines to provide criteria for assessing if software conforms to best practices in open source. By adding 'USE' (User-Centered, Sustainable, Equitable), software development can adhere to open source best practice by incorporating user-input early on, ensuring front-end designs are accessible to all possible stakeholders, and planning long-term sustainability alongside software design. The FAIR-USE4OS guidelines will allow funders and researchers to more effectively evaluate and plan open source software projects. There is good evidence of funders increasingly mandating that all funded research software is open source; however, even under the FAIR guidelines, this could simply mean software released on public repositories with a Zenodo DOI. By creating FAIR-USE software, best practice can be demonstrated from the very beginning of the design process and the software has the greatest chance of success by being impactful.
Shortened LLaMA: Depth Pruning for Large Language Models with Comparison of Retraining Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Structured pruning of modern large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a way of decreasing their high computational needs. Width pruning reduces the size of projection weight matrices (e.g., by removing attention heads) while maintaining the number of layers. Depth pruning, in contrast, removes entire layers or blocks, while keeping the size of the remaining weights unchanged. Most current research focuses on either width-only or a blend of width and depth pruning, with little comparative analysis between the two units (width vs. depth) concerning their impact on LLM inference efficiency. In this work, we show that simple depth pruning can effectively compress LLMs while achieving comparable or superior performance to recent width pruning studies. Our pruning method boosts inference speeds, especially under memory-constrained conditions that require limited batch sizes for running LLMs, where width pruning is ineffective. In retraining pruned models for quality recovery, continued pretraining on a large corpus markedly outperforms LoRA-based tuning, particularly at severe pruning ratios. We hope this work can help build compact yet capable LLMs. Code and models can be found at: https://github.com/Nota-NetsPresso/shortened-llm
Enhancing Compositional Generalization via Compositional Feature Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Real-world applications of machine learning models often confront data distribution shifts, wherein discrepancies exist between the training and test data distributions. In the common multi-domain multi-class setup, as the number of classes and domains scales up, it becomes infeasible to gather training data for every domain-class combination. This challenge naturally leads the quest for models with Compositional Generalization (CG) ability, where models can generalize to unseen domain-class combinations. To delve into the CG challenge, we develop CG-Bench, a suite of CG benchmarks derived from existing real-world image datasets, and observe that the prevalent pretraining-finetuning paradigm on foundational models, such as CLIP and DINOv2, struggles with the challenge. To address this challenge, we propose Compositional Feature Alignment (CFA), a simple two-stage finetuning technique that i) learns two orthogonal linear heads on a pretrained encoder with respect to class and domain labels, and ii) fine-tunes the encoder with the newly learned head frozen. We theoretically and empirically justify that CFA encourages compositional feature learning of pretrained models. We further conduct extensive experiments on CG-Bench for CLIP and DINOv2, two powerful pretrained vision foundation models. Experiment results show that CFA outperforms common finetuning techniques in compositional generalization, corroborating CFA's efficacy in compositional feature learning.
Leveraging Noisy Observations in Zero-Sum Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper studies an instance of zero-sum games in which one player (the leader) commits to its opponent (the follower) to choose its actions by sampling a given probability measure (strategy). The actions of the leader are observed by the follower as the output of an arbitrary channel. In response to that, the follower chooses its action based on its current information, that is, the leader's commitment and the corresponding noisy observation of its action. Within this context, the equilibrium of the game with noisy action observability is shown to always exist and the necessary conditions for its uniqueness are identified. Interestingly, the noisy observations have important impact on the cardinality of the follower's set of best responses. Under particular conditions, such a set of best responses is proved to be a singleton almost surely. The proposed model captures any channel noise with a density with respect to the Lebesgue measure. As an example, the case in which the channel is described by a Gaussian probability measure is investigated.
DS-MS-TCN: Otago Exercises Recognition with a Dual-Scale Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The Otago Exercise Program (OEP) represents a crucial rehabilitation initiative tailored for older adults, aimed at enhancing balance and strength. Despite previous efforts utilizing wearable sensors for OEP recognition, existing studies have exhibited limitations in terms of accuracy and robustness. This study addresses these limitations by employing a single waist-mounted Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to recognize OEP exercises among community-dwelling older adults in their daily lives. A cohort of 36 older adults participated in laboratory settings, supplemented by an additional 7 older adults recruited for at-home assessments. The study proposes a Dual-Scale Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network (DS-MS-TCN) designed for two-level sequence-to-sequence classification, incorporating them in one loss function. In the first stage, the model focuses on recognizing each repetition of the exercises (micro labels). Subsequent stages extend the recognition to encompass the complete range of exercises (macro labels). The DS-MS-TCN model surpasses existing state-of-the-art deep learning models, achieving f1-scores exceeding 80% and Intersection over Union (IoU) f1-scores surpassing 60% for all four exercises evaluated. Notably, the model outperforms the prior study utilizing the sliding window technique, eliminating the need for post-processing stages and window size tuning. To our knowledge, we are the first to present a novel perspective on enhancing Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems through the recognition of each repetition of activities.
A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Closely related languages show linguistic similarities that allow speakers of one language to understand speakers of another language without having actively learned it. Mutual intelligibility varies in degree and is typically tested in psycholinguistic experiments. To study mutual intelligibility computationally, we propose a computer-assisted method using the Linear Discriminative Learner, a computational model developed to approximate the cognitive processes by which humans learn languages, which we expand with multilingual semantic vectors and multilingual sound classes. We test the model on cognate data from German, Dutch, and English, three closely related Germanic languages. We find that our model's comprehension accuracy depends on 1) the automatic trimming of inflections and 2) the language pair for which comprehension is tested. Our multilingual modelling approach does not only offer new methodological findings for automatic testing of mutual intelligibility across languages but also extends the use of Linear Discriminative Learning to multilingual settings.