OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ZeRO++: Extremely Efficient Collective Communication for Giant Model Training
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) has been used to train a wide range of large language models on massive GPUs clusters due to its ease of use, efficiency, and good scalability. However, when training on low-bandwidth clusters, or at scale which forces batch size per GPU to be small, ZeRO's effective throughput is limited because of high communication volume from gathering weights in forward pass, backward pass, and averaging gradients. This paper introduces three communication volume reduction techniques, which we collectively refer to as ZeRO++, targeting each of the communication collectives in ZeRO. First is block-quantization based all-gather. Second is data remapping that trades-off communication for more memory. Third is a novel all-to-all based quantized gradient averaging paradigm as replacement of reduce-scatter collective, which preserves accuracy despite communicating low precision data. Collectively, ZeRO++ reduces communication volume of ZeRO by 4x, enabling up to 2.16x better throughput at 384 GPU scale.
Vanishing Bias Heuristic-guided Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Reinforcement Learning has achieved tremendous success in the many Atari games. In this paper we explored with the lunar lander environment and implemented classical methods including Q-Learning, SARSA, MC as well as tiling coding. We also implemented Neural Network based methods including DQN, Double DQN, Clipped DQN. On top of these, we proposed a new algorithm called Heuristic RL which utilizes heuristic to guide the early stage training while alleviating the introduced human bias. Our experiments showed promising results for our proposed methods in the lunar lander environment.
Federated Few-shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively learn a machine learning model without exchanging their own local data. In this way, the server can exploit the computational power of all clients and train the model on a larger set of data samples among all clients. Although such a mechanism is proven to be effective in various fields, existing works generally assume that each client preserves sufficient data for training. In practice, however, certain clients may only contain a limited number of samples (i.e., few-shot samples). For example, the available photo data taken by a specific user with a new mobile device is relatively rare. In this scenario, existing FL efforts typically encounter a significant performance drop on these clients. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a few-shot model that can generalize to clients with limited data under the FL scenario. In this paper, we refer to this novel problem as federated few-shot learning. Nevertheless, the problem remains challenging due to two major reasons: the global data variance among clients (i.e., the difference in data distributions among clients) and the local data insufficiency in each client (i.e., the lack of adequate local data for training). To overcome these two challenges, we propose a novel federated few-shot learning framework with two separately updated models and dedicated training strategies to reduce the adverse impact of global data variance and local data insufficiency. Extensive experiments on four prevalent datasets that cover news articles and images validate the effectiveness of our framework compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is provided at https://github.com/SongW-SW/F2L.
Multi-scale Spatial-temporal Interaction Network for Video Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) is an essential yet challenging task in signal processing. Since certain anomalies cannot be detected by isolated analysis of either temporal or spatial information, the interaction between these two types of data is considered crucial for VAD. However, current dual-stream architectures either confine this integral interaction to the bottleneck of the autoencoder or introduce anomaly-irrelevant background pixels into the interactive process, hindering the accuracy of VAD. To address these deficiencies, we propose a Multi-scale Spatial-Temporal Interaction Network (MSTI-Net) for VAD. First, to prioritize the detection of moving objects in the scene and harmonize the substantial semantic discrepancies between the two types of data, we propose an Attention-based Spatial-Temporal Fusion Module (ASTFM) as a substitute for the conventional direct fusion. Furthermore, we inject multi-ASTFM-based connections that bridge the appearance and motion streams of the dual-stream network, thus fostering multi-scale spatial-temporal interaction. Finally, to bolster the delineation between normal and abnormal activities, our system records the regular information in a memory module. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves AUCs of 96.8%, 87.6%, and 73.9% on the UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and ShanghaiTech datasets, respectively.
Large Generative AI Models for Telecom: The Next Big Thing?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) constitutes a turning point in reshaping the future of technology in different aspects. Wireless networks in particular, with the blooming of self-evolving networks, represent a rich field for exploiting GenAI and reaping several benefits that can fundamentally change the way how wireless networks are designed and operated nowadays. To be specific, large GenAI models are envisioned to open up a new era of autonomous wireless networks, in which multi-modal GenAI models trained over various Telecom data, can be fine-tuned to perform several downstream tasks, eliminating the need for building and training dedicated AI models for each specific task and paving the way for the realization of artificial general intelligence (AGI)-empowered wireless networks. In this article, we aim to unfold the opportunities that can be reaped from integrating large GenAI models into the Telecom domain. In particular, we first highlight the applications of large GenAI models in future wireless networks, defining potential use-cases and revealing insights on the associated theoretical and practical challenges. Furthermore, we unveil how 6G can open up new opportunities through connecting multiple on-device large GenAI models, and hence, paves the way to the collective intelligence paradigm. Finally, we put a forward-looking vision on how large GenAI models will be the key to realize self-evolving networks.
Edge Intelligence Over the Air: Two Faces of Interference in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated edge learning is envisioned as the bedrock of enabling intelligence in next-generation wireless networks, but the limited spectral resources often constrain its scalability. In light of this challenge, a line of recent research suggested integrating analog over-the-air computations into federated edge learning systems, to exploit the superposition property of electromagnetic waves for fast aggregation of intermediate parameters and achieve (almost) unlimited scalability. Over-the-air computations also benefit the system in other aspects, such as low hardware cost, reduced access latency, and enhanced privacy protection. Despite these advantages, the interference introduced by wireless communications also influences various aspects of the model training process, while its importance is not well recognized yet. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the positive and negative effects of interference on over-the-air computation-based edge learning systems. The potential open issues and research trends are also discussed.
Achilles' Heels: Vulnerable Record Identification in Synthetic Data Publishing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Synthetic data is seen as the most promising solution to share individual-level data while preserving privacy. Shadow modeling-based Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) have become the standard approach to evaluate the privacy risk of synthetic data. While very effective, they require a large number of datasets to be created and models trained to evaluate the risk posed by a single record. The privacy risk of a dataset is thus currently evaluated by running MIAs on a handful of records selected using ad-hoc methods. We here propose what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first principled vulnerable record identification technique for synthetic data publishing, leveraging the distance to a record's closest neighbors. We show our method to strongly outperform previous ad-hoc methods across datasets and generators. We also show evidence of our method to be robust to the choice of MIA and to specific choice of parameters. Finally, we show it to accurately identify vulnerable records when synthetic data generators are made differentially private. The choice of vulnerable records is as important as more accurate MIAs when evaluating the privacy of synthetic data releases, including from a legal perspective. We here propose a simple yet highly effective method to do so. We hope our method will enable practitioners to better estimate the risk posed by synthetic data publishing and researchers to fairly compare ever improving MIAs on synthetic data.
Fair Causal Feature Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Fair feature selection for classification decision tasks has recently garnered significant attention from researchers. However, existing fair feature selection algorithms fall short of providing a full explanation of the causal relationship between features and sensitive attributes, potentially impacting the accuracy of fair feature identification. To address this issue, we propose a Fair Causal Feature Selection algorithm, called FairCFS. Specifically, FairCFS constructs a localized causal graph that identifies the Markov blankets of class and sensitive variables, to block the transmission of sensitive information for selecting fair causal features. Extensive experiments on seven public real-world datasets validate that FairCFS has comparable accuracy compared to eight state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms, while presenting more superior fairness.
Persian Semantic Role Labeling Using Transfer Learning and BERT-Based Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is the process of detecting the predicate-argument structure of each predicate in a sentence. SRL plays a crucial role as a pre-processing step in many NLP applications such as topic and concept extraction, question answering, summarization, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and text mining. Recently, in many languages, unified SRL dragged lots of attention due to its outstanding performance, which is the result of overcoming the error propagation problem. However, regarding the Persian language, all previous works have focused on traditional methods of SRL leading to a drop in accuracy and imposing expensive feature extraction steps in terms of financial resources, time and energy consumption. In this work, we present an end-to-end SRL method that not only eliminates the need for feature extraction but also outperforms existing methods in facing new samples in practical situations. The proposed method does not employ any auxiliary features and shows more than 16 (83.16) percent improvement in accuracy against previous methods in similar circumstances.
Breaking On-device Training Memory Wall: A Systematic Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

On-device training has become an increasingly popular approach to machine learning, enabling models to be trained directly on mobile and edge devices. However, a major challenge in this area is the limited memory available on these devices, which can severely restrict the size and complexity of the models that can be trained. In this systematic survey, we aim to explore the current state-of-the-art techniques for breaking on-device training memory walls, focusing on methods that can enable larger and more complex models to be trained on resource-constrained devices. Specifically, we first analyze the key factors that contribute to the phenomenon of memory walls encountered during on-device training. Then, we present a comprehensive literature review of on-device training, which addresses the issue of memory limitations. Finally, we summarize on-device training and highlight the open problems for future research. By providing a comprehensive overview of these techniques and their effectiveness in breaking memory walls, we hope to help researchers and practitioners in this field navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of on-device training.
GlyphNet: Homoglyph domains dataset and detection using attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Cyber attacks deceive machines into believing something that does not exist in the first place. However, there are some to which even humans fall prey. One such famous attack that attackers have used over the years to exploit the vulnerability of vision is known to be a Homoglyph attack. It employs a primary yet effective mechanism to create illegitimate domains that are hard to differentiate from legit ones. Moreover, as the difference is pretty indistinguishable for a user to notice, they cannot stop themselves from clicking on these homoglyph domain names. In many cases, that results in either information theft or malware attack on their systems. Existing approaches use simple, string-based comparison techniques applied in primary language-based tasks. Although they are impactful to some extent, they usually fail because they are not robust to different types of homoglyphs and are computationally not feasible because of their time requirement proportional to the string length. Similarly, neural network-based approaches are employed to determine real domain strings from fake ones. Nevertheless, the problem with both methods is that they require paired sequences of real and fake domain strings to work with, which is often not the case in the real world, as the attacker only sends the illegitimate or homoglyph domain to the vulnerable user. Therefore, existing approaches are not suitable for practical scenarios in the real world. In our work, we created GlyphNet, an image dataset that contains 4M domains, both real and homoglyphs. Additionally, we introduce a baseline method for a homoglyph attack detection system using an attention-based convolutional Neural Network. We show that our model can reach state-of-the-art accuracy in detecting homoglyph attacks with a 0.93 AUC on our dataset.
A Universal Semantic-Geometric Representation for Robotic Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Robots rely heavily on sensors, especially RGB and depth cameras, to perceive and interact with the world. RGB cameras record 2D images with rich semantic information while missing precise spatial information. On the other side, depth cameras offer critical 3D geometry data but capture limited semantics. Therefore, integrating both modalities is crucial for learning representations for robotic perception and control. However, current research predominantly focuses on only one of these modalities, neglecting the benefits of incorporating both. To this end, we present $\textbf{Semantic-Geometric Representation} (\textbf{SGR})$, a universal perception module for robotics that leverages the rich semantic information of large-scale pre-trained 2D models and inherits the merits of 3D spatial reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that SGR empowers the agent to successfully complete a diverse range of simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods significantly in both single-task and multi-task settings. Furthermore, SGR possesses the capability to generalize to novel semantic attributes, setting it apart from the other methods. Project website: https://semantic-geometric-representation.github.io.
"Is Reporting Worth the Sacrifice of Revealing What I Have Sent?": Privacy Considerations When Reporting on End-to-End Encrypted Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

User reporting is an essential component of content moderation on many online platforms -- in particular, on end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging platforms where platform operators cannot proactively inspect message contents. However, users' privacy concerns when considering reporting may impede the effectiveness of this strategy in regulating online harassment. In this paper, we conduct interviews with 16 users of E2EE platforms to understand users' mental models of how reporting works and their resultant privacy concerns and considerations surrounding reporting. We find that users expect platforms to store rich longitudinal reporting datasets, recognizing both their promise for better abuse mitigation and the privacy risk that platforms may exploit or fail to protect them. We also find that users have preconceptions about the respective capabilities and risks of moderators at the platform versus community level -- for instance, users trust platform moderators more to not abuse their power but think community moderators have more time to attend to reports. These considerations, along with perceived effectiveness of reporting and how to provide sufficient evidence while maintaining privacy, shape how users decide whether, to whom, and how much to report. We conclude with design implications for a more privacy-preserving reporting system on E2EE messaging platforms.
A Study on Quantifying Sim2Real Image Gap in Autonomous Driving Simulations Using Lane Segmentation Attention Map Similarity
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous driving simulations require highly realistic images. Our preliminary study found that when the CARLA Simulator image was made more like reality by using DCLGAN, the performance of the lane recognition model improved to levels comparable to real-world driving. It was also confirmed that the vehicle's ability to return to the center of the lane after deviating from it improved significantly. However, there is currently no agreed-upon metric for quantitatively evaluating the realism of simulation images. To address this issue, based on the idea that FID (Fréchet Inception Distance) measures the feature vector distribution distance using a pre-trained model, this paper proposes a metric that measures the similarity of simulation road images using the attention map from the self-attention distillation process of ENet-SAD. Finally, this paper verified the suitability of the measurement method by applying it to the image of the CARLA map that implemented a realworld autonomous driving test road.
Evolutionary Verbalizer Search for Prompt-based Few Shot Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances for few-shot text classification aim to wrap textual inputs with task-specific prompts to cloze questions. By processing them with a masked language model to predict the masked tokens and using a verbalizer that constructs the mapping between predicted words and target labels. This approach of using pre-trained language models is called prompt-based tuning, which could remarkably outperform conventional fine-tuning approach in the low-data scenario. As the core of prompt-based tuning, the verbalizer is usually handcrafted with human efforts or suboptimally searched by gradient descent. In this paper, we focus on automatically constructing the optimal verbalizer and propose a novel evolutionary verbalizer search (EVS) algorithm, to improve prompt-based tuning with the high-performance verbalizer. Specifically, inspired by evolutionary algorithm (EA), we utilize it to automatically evolve various verbalizers during the evolutionary procedure and select the best one after several iterations. Extensive few-shot experiments on five text classification datasets show the effectiveness of our method.
On Refactoring Quantum Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Refactoring is a crucial technique for improving the efficiency and maintainability of software by restructuring its internal design while preserving its external behavior. While classical programs have benefited from various refactoring methods, the field of quantum programming lacks dedicated refactoring techniques. The distinct properties of quantum computing, such as quantum superposition, entanglement, and the no-cloning principle, necessitate specialized refactoring techniques. This paper bridges this gap by presenting a comprehensive set of refactorings specifically designed for quantum programs. Each refactoring is carefully designed and explained to ensure the effective restructuring of quantum programs. Additionally, we highlight the importance of tool support in automating the refactoring process for quantum programs. Although our study focuses on the quantum programming language Q\#, our approach is applicable to other quantum programming languages, offering a general solution for enhancing the maintainability and efficiency of quantum software.
Towards Stability of Autoregressive Neural Operators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Neural operators have proven to be a promising approach for modeling spatiotemporal systems in the physical sciences. However, training these models for large systems can be quite challenging as they incur significant computational and memory expense -- these systems are often forced to rely on autoregressive time-stepping of the neural network to predict future temporal states. While this is effective in managing costs, it can lead to uncontrolled error growth over time and eventual instability. We analyze the sources of this autoregressive error growth using prototypical neural operator models for physical systems and explore ways to mitigate it. We introduce architectural and application-specific improvements that allow for careful control of instability-inducing operations within these models without inflating the compute/memory expense. We present results on several scientific systems that include Navier-Stokes fluid flow, rotating shallow water, and a high-resolution global weather forecasting system. We demonstrate that applying our design principles to neural operators leads to significantly lower errors for long-term forecasts as well as longer time horizons without qualitative signs of divergence compared to the original models for these systems. We open-source our \href{https://github.com/mikemccabe210/stabilizing_neural_operators}{code} for reproducibility.