OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ToMChallenges: A Principle-Guided Dataset and Diverse Evaluation Tasks for Exploring Theory of Mind
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Theory of Mind (ToM), the capacity to comprehend the mental states of distinct individuals, is essential for numerous practical applications. With the development of large language models (LLMs), there is a heated debate about whether they are able to perform ToM tasks. Previous studies have used different tasks and prompts to test the ToM on LLMs and the results are inconsistent: some studies asserted these models are capable of exhibiting ToM, while others suggest the opposite. In this study, We present ToMChallenges, a dataset for comprehensively evaluating the Theory of Mind based on the Sally-Anne and Smarties tests with a diverse set of tasks. In addition, we also propose an auto-grader to streamline the answer evaluation process. We tested three models: davinci, turbo, and gpt-4. Our evaluation results and error analyses show that LLMs have inconsistent behaviors across prompts and tasks. Performing the ToM tasks robustly remains a challenge for the LLMs. In addition, our paper wants to raise awareness in evaluating the ToM in LLMs and we want to invite more discussion on how to design the prompts and tasks for ToM tasks that can better assess the LLMs' ability.
Deceptive-NeRF/3DGS: Diffusion-Generated Pseudo-Observations for High-Quality Sparse-View Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Novel view synthesis via Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) or 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) typically necessitates dense observations with hundreds of input images to circumvent artifacts. We introduce Deceptive-NeRF/3DGS to enhance sparse-view reconstruction with only a limited set of input images, by leveraging a diffusion model pre-trained from multiview datasets. Different from using diffusion priors to regularize representation optimization, our method directly uses diffusion-generated images to train NeRF/3DGS as if they were real input views. Specifically, we propose a deceptive diffusion model turning noisy images rendered from few-view reconstructions into high-quality photorealistic pseudo-observations. To resolve consistency among pseudo-observations and real input views, we develop an uncertainty measure to guide the diffusion model's generation. Our system progressively incorporates diffusion-generated pseudo-observations into the training image sets, ultimately densifying the sparse input observations by 5 to 10 times. Extensive experiments across diverse and challenging datasets validate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and is capable of synthesizing novel views with super-resolution in the few-view setting.
Winner-Take-All Column Row Sampling for Memory Efficient Adaptation of Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid growth in model size, fine-tuning the large pre-trained language model has become increasingly difficult due to its extensive memory usage. Previous works usually focus on reducing the number of trainable parameters in the network. While the model parameters do contribute to memory usage, the primary memory bottleneck during training arises from storing feature maps, also known as activations, as they are crucial for gradient calculation. Notably, neural networks are usually trained using stochastic gradient descent. We argue that in stochastic optimization, models can handle noisy gradients as long as the gradient estimator is unbiased with reasonable variance. Following this motivation, we propose a new family of unbiased estimators called WTA-CRS, for matrix production with reduced variance, which only requires storing the sub-sampled activations for calculating the gradient. Our work provides both theoretical and experimental evidence that, in the context of tuning transformers, our proposed estimators exhibit lower variance compared to existing ones. By replacing the linear operation with our approximated one in transformers, we can achieve up to 2.7$\times$ peak memory reduction with almost no accuracy drop and enables up to $6.4\times$ larger batch size. Under the same hardware, WTA-CRS enables better down-streaming task performance by applying larger models and/or faster training speed with larger batch sizes.
On the Convergence of Black-Box Variational Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain, bounded support, only optimizing for the scale, and such), our setup does not need any such algorithmic modifications. Our results hold for log-smooth posterior densities with and without strong log-concavity and the location-scale variational family. Also, our analysis reveals that certain algorithm design choices commonly employed in practice, particularly, nonlinear parameterizations of the scale of the variational approximation, can result in suboptimal convergence rates. Fortunately, running BBVI with proximal stochastic gradient descent fixes these limitations, and thus achieves the strongest known convergence rate guarantees. We evaluate this theoretical insight by comparing proximal SGD against other standard implementations of BBVI on large-scale Bayesian inference problems.
Private and Collaborative Kaplan-Meier Estimators
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Kaplan-Meier estimators are essential tools in survival analysis, capturing the survival behavior of a cohort. Their accuracy improves with large, diverse datasets, encouraging data holders to collaborate for more precise estimations. However, these datasets often contain sensitive individual information, necessitating stringent data protection measures that preclude naive data sharing. In this work, we introduce two novel differentially private methods that offer flexibility in applying differential privacy to various functions of the data. Additionally, we propose a synthetic dataset generation technique that enables easy and rapid conversion between different data representations. Utilizing these methods, we propose various paths that allow a joint estimation of the Kaplan-Meier curves with strict privacy guarantees. Our contribution includes a taxonomy of methods for this task and an extensive experimental exploration and evaluation based on this structure. We demonstrate that our approach can construct a joint, global Kaplan-Meier estimator that adheres to strict privacy standards ($\varepsilon = 1$) while exhibiting no statistically significant deviation from the nonprivate centralized estimator.
Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation With Limited Parallel Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Existing speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) models fall into two camps: they either leverage text as an intermediate step or require hundreds of hours of parallel speech data. Both approaches are incompatible with textless languages or language pairs with limited parallel data. We present PFB, a framework for training textless S2ST models that require just dozens of hours of parallel speech data. We first pretrain a model on large-scale monolingual speech data, finetune it with a small amount of parallel speech data (20-60 hours), and lastly train with an unsupervised backtranslation objective. We train and evaluate our models for English-to-German, German-to-English and Marathi-to-English translation on three different domains (European Parliament, Common Voice, and All India Radio) with single-speaker synthesized speech. Evaluated using the ASR-BLEU metric, our models achieve reasonable performance on all three domains, with some being within 1-2 points of our higher-resourced topline.
Distributed Online Rollout for Multivehicle Routing in Unmapped Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In this work we consider a generalization of the well-known multivehicle routing problem: given a network, a set of agents occupying a subset of its nodes, and a set of tasks, we seek a minimum cost sequence of movements subject to the constraint that each task is visited by some agent at least once. The classical version of this problem assumes a central computational server that observes the entire state of the system perfectly and directs individual agents according to a centralized control scheme. In contrast, we assume that there is no centralized server and that each agent is an individual processor with no a priori knowledge of the underlying network (including task and agent locations). Moreover, our agents possess strictly local communication and sensing capabilities (restricted to a fixed radius around their respective locations), aligning more closely with several real-world multiagent applications. These restrictions introduce many challenges that are overcome through local information sharing and direct coordination between agents. We present a fully distributed, online, and scalable reinforcement learning algorithm for this problem whereby agents self-organize into local clusters and independently apply a multiagent rollout scheme locally to each cluster. We demonstrate empirically via extensive simulations that there exists a critical sensing radius beyond which the distributed rollout algorithm begins to improve over a greedy base policy. This critical sensing radius grows proportionally to the $\log^*$ function of the size of the network, and is, therefore, a small constant for any relevant network. Our decentralized reinforcement learning algorithm achieves approximately a factor of two cost improvement over the base policy for a range of radii bounded from below and above by two and three times the critical sensing radius, respectively.
IDEA: Invariant Defense for Graph Adversarial Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the success of graph neural networks (GNNs), their vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses tremendous challenges for practical applications. Existing defense methods suffer from severe performance decline under unseen attacks, due to either limited observed adversarial examples or pre-defined heuristics. To address these limitations, we analyze the causalities in graph adversarial attacks and conclude that causal features are key to achieve graph adversarial robustness, owing to their determinedness for labels and invariance across attacks. To learn these causal features, we innovatively propose an Invariant causal DEfense method against adversarial Attacks (IDEA). We derive node-based and structure-based invariance objectives from an information-theoretic perspective. IDEA ensures strong predictability for labels and invariant predictability across attacks, which is provably a causally invariant defense across various attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IDEA attains state-of-the-art defense performance under all five attacks on all five datasets. The implementation of IDEA is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IDEA.
Impact of Log Parsing on Deep Learning-Based Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software systems log massive amounts of data, recording important runtime information. Such logs are used, for example, for log-based anomaly detection, which aims to automatically detect abnormal behaviors of the system under analysis by processing the information recorded in its logs. Many log-based anomaly detection techniques based on deep learning models include a pre-processing step called log parsing. However, understanding the impact of log parsing on the accuracy of anomaly detection techniques has received surprisingly little attention so far. Investigating what are the key properties log parsing techniques should ideally have to help anomaly detection is therefore warranted. In this paper, we report on a comprehensive empirical study on the impact of log parsing on anomaly detection accuracy, using 13 log parsing techniques, seven anomaly detection techniques (five based on deep learning and two based on traditional machine learning) on three publicly available log datasets. Our empirical results show that, despite what is widely assumed, there is no strong correlation between log parsing accuracy and anomaly detection accuracy, regardless of the metric used for measuring log parsing accuracy. Moreover, we experimentally confirm existing theoretical results showing that it is a property that we refer to as distinguishability in log parsing results as opposed to their accuracy that plays an essential role in achieving accurate anomaly detection.
Learning DAGs from Data with Few Root Causes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present a novel perspective and algorithm for learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data generated by a linear structural equation model (SEM). First, we show that a linear SEM can be viewed as a linear transform that, in prior work, computes the data from a dense input vector of random valued root causes (as we will call them) associated with the nodes. Instead, we consider the case of (approximately) few root causes and also introduce noise in the measurement of the data. Intuitively, this means that the DAG data is produced by few data-generating events whose effect percolates through the DAG. We prove identifiability in this new setting and show that the true DAG is the global minimizer of the $L^0$-norm of the vector of root causes. For data with few root causes, with and without noise, we show superior performance compared to prior DAG learning methods.
Dynamic Inter-treatment Information Sharing for Individualized Treatment Effects Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Estimation of individualized treatment effects (ITE) from observational studies is a fundamental problem in causal inference and holds significant importance across domains, including healthcare. However, limited observational datasets pose challenges in reliable ITE estimation as data have to be split among treatment groups to train an ITE learner. While information sharing among treatment groups can partially alleviate the problem, there is currently no general framework for end-to-end information sharing in ITE estimation. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning framework based on `\textit{soft weight sharing}' to train ITE learners, enabling \textit{dynamic end-to-end} information sharing among treatment groups. The proposed framework complements existing ITE learners, and introduces a new class of ITE learners, referred to as \textit{HyperITE}. We extend state-of-the-art ITE learners with \textit{HyperITE} versions and evaluate them on IHDP, ACIC-2016, and Twins benchmarks. Our experimental results show that the proposed framework improves ITE estimation error, with increasing effectiveness for smaller datasets.
Efficient Document Embeddings via Self-Contrastive Bregman Divergence Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Learning quality document embeddings is a fundamental problem in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), recommendation systems, and search engines. Despite recent advances in the development of transformer-based models that produce sentence embeddings with self-contrastive learning, the encoding of long documents (Ks of words) is still challenging with respect to both efficiency and quality considerations. Therefore, we train Longfomer-based document encoders using a state-of-the-art unsupervised contrastive learning method (SimCSE). Further on, we complement the baseline method -- siamese neural network -- with additional convex neural networks based on functional Bregman divergence aiming to enhance the quality of the output document representations. We show that overall the combination of a self-contrastive siamese network and our proposed neural Bregman network outperforms the baselines in two linear classification settings on three long document topic classification tasks from the legal and biomedical domains.
Learning Safety Constraints from Demonstrations with Unknown Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward functions. While previous work is limited to demonstrations with known rewards or fully known environment dynamics, CoCoRL can learn constraints from demonstrations with different unknown rewards without knowledge of the environment dynamics. CoCoRL constructs a convex safe set based on demonstrations, which provably guarantees safety even for potentially sub-optimal (but safe) demonstrations. For near-optimal demonstrations, CoCoRL converges to the true safe set with no policy regret. We evaluate CoCoRL in gridworld environments and a driving simulation with multiple constraints. CoCoRL learns constraints that lead to safe driving behavior. Importantly, we can safely transfer the learned constraints to different tasks and environments. In contrast, alternative methods based on Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) often exhibit poor performance and learn unsafe policies.
Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey on Classification and Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has greatly benefited Natural Language Processing (NLP) during the past decade. However, the demands of long document analysis are quite different from those of shorter texts, while the ever increasing size of documents uploaded online renders automated understanding of lengthy texts a critical issue. Relevant applications include automated Web mining, legal document review, medical records analysis, financial reports analysis, contract management, environmental impact assessment, news aggregation, etc. Despite the relatively recent development of efficient algorithms for analyzing long documents, practical tools in this field are currently flourishing. This article serves as an entry point into this dynamic domain and aims to achieve two objectives. First of all, it provides an introductory overview of the relevant neural building blocks, serving as a concise tutorial for the field. Secondly, it offers a brief examination of the current state-of-the-art in two key long document analysis tasks: document classification and document summarization. Sentiment analysis for long texts is also covered, since it is typically treated as a particular case of document classification. Consequently, this article presents an introductory exploration of document-level analysis, addressing the primary challenges, concerns, and existing solutions. Finally, it offers a concise definition of "long text/document", presents an original overarching taxonomy of common deep neural methods for long document analysis and lists publicly available annotated datasets that can facilitate further research in this area.
Diffusion-Based Adversarial Sample Generation for Improved Stealthiness and Controllability
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks are known to be susceptible to adversarial samples: small variations of natural examples crafted to deliberately mislead the models. While they can be easily generated using gradient-based techniques in digital and physical scenarios, they often differ greatly from the actual data distribution of natural images, resulting in a trade-off between strength and stealthiness. In this paper, we propose a novel framework dubbed Diffusion-Based Projected Gradient Descent (Diff-PGD) for generating realistic adversarial samples. By exploiting a gradient guided by a diffusion model, Diff-PGD ensures that adversarial samples remain close to the original data distribution while maintaining their effectiveness. Moreover, our framework can be easily customized for specific tasks such as digital attacks, physical-world attacks, and style-based attacks. Compared with existing methods for generating natural-style adversarial samples, our framework enables the separation of optimizing adversarial loss from other surrogate losses (e.g., content/smoothness/style loss), making it more stable and controllable. Finally, we demonstrate that the samples generated using Diff-PGD have better transferability and anti-purification power than traditional gradient-based methods. Code will be released in https://github.com/xavihart/Diff-PGD
ReConPatch : Contrastive Patch Representation Learning for Industrial Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Anomaly detection is crucial to the advanced identification of product defects such as incorrect parts, misaligned components, and damages in industrial manufacturing. Due to the rare observations and unknown types of defects, anomaly detection is considered to be challenging in machine learning. To overcome this difficulty, recent approaches utilize the common visual representations pre-trained from natural image datasets and distill the relevant features. However, existing approaches still have the discrepancy between the pre-trained feature and the target data, or require the input augmentation which should be carefully designed, particularly for the industrial dataset. In this paper, we introduce ReConPatch, which constructs discriminative features for anomaly detection by training a linear modulation of patch features extracted from the pre-trained model. ReConPatch employs contrastive representation learning to collect and distribute features in a way that produces a target-oriented and easily separable representation. To address the absence of labeled pairs for the contrastive learning, we utilize two similarity measures between data representations, pairwise and contextual similarities, as pseudo-labels. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance (99.72%) for the widely used and challenging MVTec AD dataset. Additionally, we achieved a state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance (95.8%) for the BTAD dataset.
Motion-Based Sign Language Video Summarization using Curvature and Torsion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

An interesting problem in many video-based applications is the generation of short synopses by selecting the most informative frames, a procedure which is known as video summarization. For sign language videos the benefits of using the $t$-parameterized counterpart of the curvature of the 2-D signer's wrist trajectory to identify keyframes, have been recently reported in the literature. In this paper we extend these ideas by modeling the 3-D hand motion that is extracted from each frame of the video. To this end we propose a new informative function based on the $t$-parameterized curvature and torsion of the 3-D trajectory. The method to characterize video frames as keyframes depends on whether the motion occurs in 2-D or 3-D space. Specifically, in the case of 3-D motion we look for the maxima of the harmonic mean of the curvature and torsion of the target's trajectory; in the planar motion case we seek for the maxima of the trajectory's curvature. The proposed 3-D feature is experimentally evaluated in applications of sign language videos on (1) objective measures using ground-truth keyframe annotations, (2) human-based evaluation of understanding, and (3) gloss classification and the results obtained are promising.