OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Paying More Attention to Image: A Training-Free Method for Alleviating Hallucination in LVLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) primarily align image features of vision encoder with Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage their superior text generation capabilities. However, the scale disparity between vision encoder and language model may led to LLMs assuming a predominant role in multi-modal comprehension. This imbalance in LVLMs may result in the instances of hallucinatory. Concretely, LVLMs may generate consistent descriptions with or without visual input, indicating that certain outputs are influenced solely by context text. We refer to this phenomenon as "text inertia." To counteract this issue, we introduce a training-free algorithm to find an equilibrium point between image comprehension and language inference. Specifically, we adaptively involve adjusting and amplifying the attention weights assigned to image tokens, thereby granting greater prominence to visual elements. Meanwhile, we subtract the logits of multi-modal inputs from ones of pure text input, which can help LVLMs be not biased towards LLMs. By enhancing images tokens and reducing the stubborn output of LLM, we can let LVLM pay more attention to images, towards alleviating text inertia and reducing the hallucination in LVLMs. Our extensive experiments shows that this method substantially reduces the frequency of hallucinatory outputs in various LVLMs in terms of different metrics. Project page is available at https://lalbj.github.io/projects/PAI/.
ShieldGemma: Generative AI Content Moderation Based on Gemma
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We present ShieldGemma, a comprehensive suite of LLM-based safety content moderation models built upon Gemma2. These models provide robust, state-of-the-art predictions of safety risks across key harm types (sexually explicit, dangerous content, harassment, hate speech) in both user input and LLM-generated output. By evaluating on both public and internal benchmarks, we demonstrate superior performance compared to existing models, such as Llama Guard (+10.8\% AU-PRC on public benchmarks) and WildCard (+4.3\%). Additionally, we present a novel LLM-based data curation pipeline, adaptable to a variety of safety-related tasks and beyond. We have shown strong generalization performance for model trained mainly on synthetic data. By releasing ShieldGemma, we provide a valuable resource to the research community, advancing LLM safety and enabling the creation of more effective content moderation solutions for developers.
An efficient implementation of parallel simulated annealing algorithm in GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In this work we propose a highly optimized version of a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm adapted to the more recently developed Graphic Processor Units (GPUs). The programming has been carried out with CUDA toolkit, specially designed for Nvidia GPUs. For this purpose, efficient versions of SA have been first analyzed and adapted to GPUs. Thus, an appropriate sequential SA algorithm has been developed as a starting point. Next, a straightforward asynchronous parallel version has been implemented and then a specific and more efficient synchronous version has been developed. A wide appropriate benchmark to illustrate the performance properties of the implementation has been considered. Among all tests, a classical sample problem provided by the minimization of the normalized Schwefel function has been selected to compare the behavior of the sequential, asynchronous, and synchronous versions, the last one being more advantageous in terms of balance between convergence, accuracy, and computational cost. Also, the implementation of a hybrid method combining SA with a local minimizer method has been developed. Note that the generic feature of the SA algorithm allows its application in a wide set of real problems arising in a large variety of fields, such as biology, physics, engineering, finance, and industrial processes.
On the Perturbed States for Transformed Input-robust Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents demonstrating proficiency in a training environment exhibit vulnerability to adversarial perturbations in input observations during deployment. This underscores the importance of building a robust agent before its real-world deployment. To alleviate the challenging point, prior works focus on developing robust training-based procedures, encompassing efforts to fortify the deep neural network component's robustness or subject the agent to adversarial training against potent attacks. In this work, we propose a novel method referred to as Transformed Input-robust RL (TIRL), which explores another avenue to mitigate the impact of adversaries by employing input transformation-based defenses. Specifically, we introduce two principles for applying transformation-based defenses in learning robust RL agents: (1) autoencoder-styled denoising to reconstruct the original state and (2) bounded transformations (bit-depth reduction and vector quantization (VQ)) to achieve close transformed inputs. The transformations are applied to the state before feeding it into the policy network. Extensive experiments on multiple MuJoCo environments demonstrate that input transformation-based defenses, i.e., VQ, defend against several adversaries in the state observations. The official code is available at https://github.com/tunglm2203/tirl
Enhanced Fault Detection and Cause Identification Using Integrated Attention Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This study introduces a novel methodology for fault detection and cause identification within the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) by integrating a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural network with an Integrated Attention Mechanism (IAM). The IAM combines the strengths of scaled dot product attention, residual attention, and dynamic attention to capture intricate patterns and dependencies crucial for TEP fault detection. Initially, the attention mechanism extracts important features from the input data, enhancing the model's interpretability and relevance. The BiLSTM network processes these features bidirectionally to capture long-range dependencies, and the IAM further refines the output, leading to improved fault detection results. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, showcasing superior performance in accuracy, false alarm rate, and misclassification rate compared to existing methods. This methodology provides a robust and interpretable solution for fault detection and diagnosis in the TEP, highlighting its potential for industrial applications.
MIMNet: Multi-Interest Meta Network with Multi-Granularity Target-Guided Attention for Cross-domain Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) plays a critical role in alleviating the sparsity and cold-start problem and substantially boosting the performance of recommender systems. Existing CDR methods prefer to either learn a common preference bridge shared by all users or a personalized preference bridge tailored for each user to transfer user preference from the source domain to the target domain. Although these methods significantly improve the recommendation performance, there are still some limitations. First, these methods usually assume a user only has a unique interest, while ignoring the fact that a user may interact with items with different interest preferences. Second, they learn transformed preference representation mainly relies on the source domain signals, while neglecting the rich information available in the target domain. To handle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method named Multi-interest Meta Network with Multi-granularity Target-guided Attention (MIMNet) for cross-domain recommendation. To be specific, we employ the capsule network to learn user multiple interests in the source domain, which will be fed into a meta network to generate multiple interest-level preference bridges. Then, we transfer user representations from the source domain to the target domain based on these multi-interest bridges. In addition, we introduce both fine-grained and coarse-grained target signals to aggregate user transformed interest-level representations by incorporating a novel multi-granularity target-guided attention network. We conduct extensive experimental results on three real-world CDR tasks, and the results show that our proposed approach MIMNet consistently outperforms all baseline methods. The source code of MIMNet is released at https://github.com/marqu22/MIMNet.
A Prior Embedding-Driven Architecture for Long Distance Blind Iris Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Blind iris images, which result from unknown degradation during the process of iris recognition at long distances, often lead to decreased iris recognition rates. Currently, little existing literature offers a solution to this problem. In response, we propose a prior embedding-driven architecture for long distance blind iris recognition. We first proposed a blind iris image restoration network called Iris-PPRGAN. To effectively restore the texture of the blind iris, Iris-PPRGAN includes a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) used as a Prior Decoder, and a DNN used as the encoder. To extract iris features more efficiently, we then proposed a robust iris classifier by modifying the bottleneck module of InsightFace, which called Insight-Iris. A low-quality blind iris image is first restored by Iris-PPRGAN, then the restored iris image undergoes recognition via Insight-Iris. Experimental results on the public CASIA-Iris-distance dataset demonstrate that our proposed method significantly superior results to state-of-the-art blind iris restoration methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, Specifically, the recognition rate for long-distance blind iris images reaches 90% after processing with our methods, representing an improvement of approximately ten percentage points compared to images without restoration.
Enhanced Structured State Space Models via Grouped FIR Filtering and Attention Sink Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Structured State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as compelling alternatives to Transformer architectures, offering linear-time complexity and superior performance in various sequence modeling tasks. Despite their advantages, SSMs like the original Mamba-2 face training difficulties due to the sensitivities introduced by the extended series of recurrent matrix multiplications. In this paper, we propose an advanced architecture that mitigates these challenges by decomposing A-multiplications into multiple groups and optimizing positional encoding through Grouped Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filtering. This new structure, denoted as Grouped FIR-enhanced SSM (GFSSM), employs semiseparable matrices for efficient computation. Furthermore, inspired by the "attention sink" phenomenon identified in streaming language models, we incorporate a similar mechanism to enhance the stability and performance of our model over extended sequences. Our approach further bridges the gap between SSMs and Transformer architectures, offering a viable path forward for scalable and high-performing sequence modeling.
Simple but Efficient: A Multi-Scenario Nearline Retrieval Framework for Recommendation on Taobao
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In recommendation systems, the matching stage is becoming increasingly critical, serving as the upper limit for the entire recommendation process. Recently, some studies have started to explore the use of multi-scenario information for recommendations, such as model-based and data-based approaches. However, the matching stage faces significant challenges due to the need for ultra-large-scale retrieval and meeting low latency requirements. As a result, the methods applied at this stage (collaborative filtering and two-tower models) are often designed to be lightweight, hindering the full utilization of extensive information. On the other hand, the ranking stage features the most sophisticated models with the strongest scoring capabilities, but due to the limited screen size of mobile devices, most of the ranked results may not gain exposure or be displayed. In this paper, we introduce an innovative multi-scenario nearline retrieval framework. It operates by harnessing ranking logs from various scenarios through Flink, allowing us to incorporate finely ranked results from other scenarios into our matching stage in near real-time. Besides, we propose a streaming scoring module, which selects a crucial subset from the candidate pool. Implemented on the "Guess You Like" (homepage of the Taobao APP), China's premier e-commerce platform, our method has shown substantial improvements-most notably, a 5% uptick in product transactions. Furthermore, the proposed approach is not only model-free but also highly efficient, suggesting it can be quickly implemented in diverse scenarios and demonstrate promising performance.
Discovering Car-following Dynamics from Trajectory Data through Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This study aims to discover the governing mathematical expressions of car-following dynamics from trajectory data directly using deep learning techniques. We propose an expression exploration framework based on deep symbolic regression (DSR) integrated with a variable intersection selection (VIS) method to find variable combinations that encourage interpretable and parsimonious mathematical expressions. In the exploration learning process, two penalty terms are added to improve the reward function: (i) a complexity penalty to regulate the complexity of the explored expressions to be parsimonious, and (ii) a variable interaction penalty to encourage the expression exploration to focus on variable combinations that can best describe the data. We show the performance of the proposed method to learn several car-following dynamics models and discuss its limitations and future research directions.
Towards Scalable GPU-Accelerated SNN Training via Temporal Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Drawing on the intricate structures of the brain, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) emerge as a transformative development in artificial intelligence, closely emulating the complex dynamics of biological neural networks. While SNNs show promising efficiency on specialized sparse-computational hardware, their practical training often relies on conventional GPUs. This reliance frequently leads to extended computation times when contrasted with traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), presenting significant hurdles for advancing SNN research. To navigate this challenge, we present a novel temporal fusion method, specifically designed to expedite the propagation dynamics of SNNs on GPU platforms, which serves as an enhancement to the current significant approaches for handling deep learning tasks with SNNs. This method underwent thorough validation through extensive experiments in both authentic training scenarios and idealized conditions, confirming its efficacy and adaptability for single and multi-GPU systems. Benchmarked against various existing SNN libraries/implementations, our method achieved accelerations ranging from $5\times$ to $40\times$ on NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Publicly available experimental codes can be found at https://github.com/EMI-Group/snn-temporal-fusion.
Towards Flexible Evaluation for Generative Visual Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Throughout rapid development of multimodal large language models, a crucial ingredient is a fair and accurate evaluation of their multimodal comprehension abilities. Although Visual Question Answering (VQA) could serve as a developed test field, limitations of VQA evaluation, like the inflexible pattern of Exact Match, have hindered MLLMs from demonstrating their real capability and discourage rich responses. Therefore, this paper proposes the use of semantics-based evaluators for assessing unconstrained open-ended responses on VQA datasets. As characteristics of VQA have made such evaluation significantly different than the traditional Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task, to systematically analyze the behaviour and compare the performance of various evaluators including LLM-based ones, we proposes three key properties, i.e., Alignment, Consistency and Generalization, and a corresponding dataset Assessing VQA Evaluators (AVE) to facilitate analysis. In addition, this paper proposes a Semantically Flexible VQA Evaluator (SFVE) with meticulous design based on the unique features of VQA evaluation. Experimental results verify the feasibility of model-based VQA evaluation and effectiveness of the proposed evaluator that surpasses existing semantic evaluators by a large margin. The proposed training scheme generalizes to both the BERT-like encoders and decoder-only LLM.
Neural Graph Matching for Video Retrieval in Large-Scale Video-driven E-commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid development of the short video industry, traditional e-commerce has encountered a new paradigm, video-driven e-commerce, which leverages attractive videos for product showcases and provides both video and item services for users. Benefitting from the dynamic and visualized introduction of items,video-driven e-commerce has shown huge potential in stimulating consumer confidence and promoting sales. In this paper, we focus on the video retrieval task, facing the following challenges: (1) Howto handle the heterogeneities among users, items, and videos? (2)How to mine the complementarity between items and videos for better user understanding? In this paper, we first leverage the dual graph to model the co-existing of user-video and user-item interactions in video-driven e-commerce and innovatively reduce user preference understanding to a graph matching problem. To solve it, we further propose a novel bi-level Graph Matching Network(GMN), which mainly consists of node- and preference-level graph matching. Given a user, node-level graph matching aims to match videos and items, while preference-level graph matching aims to match multiple user preferences extracted from both videos and items. Then the proposed GMN can generate and improve user embedding by aggregating matched nodes or preferences from the dual graph in a bi-level manner. Comprehensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed GMN with significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches (e.g., AUC+1.9% and CTR+7.15%). We have developed it on a well-known video-driven e-commerce platform, serving hundreds of millions of users every day
Multimodal Fusion and Coherence Modeling for Video Topic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The video topic segmentation (VTS) task segments videos into intelligible, non-overlapping topics, facilitating efficient comprehension of video content and quick access to specific content. VTS is also critical to various downstream video understanding tasks. Traditional VTS methods using shallow features or unsupervised approaches struggle to accurately discern the nuances of topical transitions. Recently, supervised approaches have achieved superior performance on video action or scene segmentation over unsupervised approaches. In this work, we improve supervised VTS by thoroughly exploring multimodal fusion and multimodal coherence modeling. Specifically, (1) we enhance multimodal fusion by exploring different architectures using cross-attention and mixture of experts. (2) To generally strengthen multimodality alignment and fusion, we pre-train and fine-tune the model with multimodal contrastive learning. (3) We propose a new pre-training task tailored for the VTS task, and a novel fine-tuning task for enhancing multimodal coherence modeling for VTS. We evaluate the proposed approaches on educational videos, in the form of lectures, due to the vital role of topic segmentation of educational videos in boosting learning experiences. Additionally, we introduce a large-scale Chinese lecture video dataset to augment the existing English corpus, promoting further research in VTS. Experiments on both English and Chinese lecture datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior VTS performance compared to competitive unsupervised and supervised baselines.
A Zero-Knowledge Proof of Knowledge for Subgroup Distance Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we introduce a novel zero-knowledge identification scheme based on the hardness of the subgroup distance problem in the Hamming metric. The proposed protocol, named Subgroup Distance Zero Knowledge Proof (SDZKP), employs a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator to mask secrets and utilizes a Stern-type algorithm to ensure robust security properties.
Log Diameter Rounds MST Verification and Sensitivity in MPC
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We consider two natural variants of the problem of minimum spanning tree (MST) of a graph in the parallel setting: MST verification (verifying if a given tree is an MST) and the sensitivity analysis of an MST (finding the lowest cost replacement edge for each edge of the MST). These two problems have been studied extensively for sequential algorithms and for parallel algorithms in the PRAM model of computation. In this paper, we extend the study to the standard model of Massive Parallel Computation (MPC). It is known that for graphs of diameter $D$, the connectivity problem can be solved in $O(\log D + \log\log n)$ rounds on an MPC with low local memory (each machine can store only $O(n^δ)$ words for an arbitrary constant $δ> 0$) and with linear global memory, that is, with optimal utilization. However, for the related task of finding an MST, we need $Ω(\log D_{\text{MST}})$ rounds, where $D_{\text{MST}}$ denotes the diameter of the minimum spanning tree. The state of the art upper bound for MST is $O(\log n)$ rounds; the result follows by simulating existing PRAM algorithms. While this bound may be optimal for general graphs, the benchmark of connectivity and lower bound for MST suggest the target bound of $O(\log D_{\text{MST}})$ rounds, or possibly $O(\log D_{\text{MST}} + \log\log n)$ rounds. As for now, we do not know if this bound is achievable for the MST problem on an MPC with low local memory and linear global memory. In this paper, we show that two natural variants of the MST problem: MST verification and sensitivity analysis of an MST, can be completed in $O(\log D_T)$ rounds on an MPC with low local memory and with linear global memory; here $D_T$ is the diameter of the input ``candidate MST'' $T$. The algorithms asymptotically match our lower bound, conditioned on the 1-vs-2-cycle conjecture.
Unsupervised Pairwise Causal Discovery on Heterogeneous Data using Mutual Information Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

A fundamental task in science is to determine the underlying causal relations because it is the knowledge of this functional structure what leads to the correct interpretation of an effect given the apparent associations in the observed data. In this sense, Causal Discovery is a technique that tackles this challenge by analyzing the statistical properties of the constituent variables. In this work, we target the generalizability of the discovery method by following a reductionist approach that only involves two variables, i.e., the pairwise or bi-variate setting. We question the current (possibly misleading) baseline results on the basis that they were obtained through supervised learning, which is arguably contrary to this genuinely exploratory endeavor. In consequence, we approach this problem in an unsupervised way, using robust Mutual Information measures, and observing the impact of the different variable types, which is oftentimes ignored in the design of solutions. Thus, we provide a novel set of standard unbiased results that can serve as a reference to guide future discovery tasks in completely unknown environments.