OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Regular Methods for Operator Precedence Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2023
Year: 2023

The operator precedence languages (OPLs) represent the largest known subclass of the context-free languages which enjoys all desirable closure and decidability properties. This includes the decidability of language inclusion, which is the ultimate verification problem. Operator precedence grammars, automata, and logics have been investigated and used, for example, to verify programs with arithmetic expressions and exceptions (both of which are deterministic pushdown but lie outside the scope of the visibly pushdown languages). In this paper, we complete the picture and give, for the first time, an algebraic characterization of the class of OPLs in the form of a syntactic congruence that has finitely many equivalence classes exactly for the operator precedence languages. This is a generalization of the celebrated Myhill-Nerode theorem for the regular languages to OPLs. As one of the consequences, we show that universality and language inclusion for nondeterministic operator precedence automata can be solved by an antichain algorithm. Antichain algorithms avoid determinization and complementation through an explicit subset construction, by leveraging a quasi-order on words, which allows the pruning of the search space for counterexample words without sacrificing completeness. Antichain algorithms can be implemented symbolically, and these implementations are today the best-performing algorithms in practice for the inclusion of finite automata. We give a generic construction of the quasi-order needed for antichain algorithms from a finite syntactic congruence. This yields the first antichain algorithm for OPLs, an algorithm that solves the \textsc{ExpTime}-hard language inclusion problem for OPLs in exponential time.
A technical note on bilinear layers for interpretability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The ability of neural networks to represent more features than neurons makes interpreting them challenging. This phenomenon, known as superposition, has spurred efforts to find architectures that are more interpretable than standard multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) with elementwise activation functions. In this note, I examine bilinear layers, which are a type of MLP layer that are mathematically much easier to analyze while simultaneously performing better than standard MLPs. Although they are nonlinear functions of their input, I demonstrate that bilinear layers can be expressed using only linear operations and third order tensors. We can integrate this expression for bilinear layers into a mathematical framework for transformer circuits, which was previously limited to attention-only transformers. These results suggest that bilinear layers are easier to analyze mathematically than current architectures and thus may lend themselves to deeper safety insights by allowing us to talk more formally about circuits in neural networks. Additionally, bilinear layers may offer an alternative path for mechanistic interpretability through understanding the mechanisms of feature construction instead of enumerating a (potentially exponentially) large number of features in large models.
Efficient simulation of the heat transfer in fused filament fabrication
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

Heat transfer simulations of the fused filament fabrication process are an important tool to predict bonding, residual stresses and strength of 3D printed parts. But in order to capture the significant thermal gradients that occur in the FFF printing process, a fine mesh discretization and short time steps are required, leading to extensive computational efforts. In this work a simulation framework is presented which combines several efficiency measures with the objective of reducing the computational efforts required in simulating the FFF printing process without simplifying the deposition physics or reducing the overall accuracy. Thus, the material deposition has been modeled with a hybrid element activation approach and elements are adaptively coarsened through an error-based coarsening condition. Additionally, an appropriate coarsening technique is presented for geometries with air-filled infill patterns. The accuracy of the numerical framework is experimentally validated and the efficiency of the framework is validated numerically by comparing the performance of models with and without any efficiency measures. Finally, its effectiveness is shown by simulating the printing process of a larger geometry.
Interactive Acquisition of Fine-grained Visual Concepts by Exploiting Semantics of Generic Characterizations in Discourse
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Interactive Task Learning (ITL) concerns learning about unforeseen domain concepts via natural interactions with human users. The learner faces a number of significant constraints: learning should be online, incremental and few-shot, as it is expected to perform tangible belief updates right after novel words denoting unforeseen concepts are introduced. In this work, we explore a challenging symbol grounding task--discriminating among object classes that look very similar--within the constraints imposed by ITL. We demonstrate empirically that more data-efficient grounding results from exploiting the truth-conditions of the teacher's generic statements (e.g., "Xs have attribute Z.") and their implicatures in context (e.g., as an answer to "How are Xs and Ys different?", one infers Y lacks attribute Z).
Improving Cancer Hallmark Classification with BERT-based Deep Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a novel approach to accurately classify the hallmarks of cancer, which is a crucial task in cancer research. Our proposed method utilizes the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) architecture, which has shown exceptional performance in various downstream applications. By applying transfer learning, we fine-tuned the pre-trained BERT model on a small corpus of biomedical text documents related to cancer. The outcomes of our experimental investigations demonstrate that our approach attains a noteworthy accuracy of 94.45%, surpassing almost all prior findings with a substantial increase of at least 8.04% as reported in the literature. These findings highlight the effectiveness of our proposed model in accurately classifying and comprehending text documents for cancer research, thus contributing significantly to the field. As cancer remains one of the top ten leading causes of death globally, our approach holds great promise in advancing cancer research and improving patient outcomes.
Leveraging BERT Language Model for Arabic Long Document Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Given the number of Arabic speakers worldwide and the notably large amount of content in the web today in some fields such as law, medicine, or even news, documents of considerable length are produced regularly. Classifying those documents using traditional learning models is often impractical since extended length of the documents increases computational requirements to an unsustainable level. Thus, it is necessary to customize these models specifically for long textual documents. In this paper we propose two simple but effective models to classify long length Arabic documents. We also fine-tune two different models-namely, Longformer and RoBERT, for the same task and compare their results to our models. Both of our models outperform the Longformer and RoBERT in this task over two different datasets.
A context-aware multiple Blockchain architecture for managing low memory devices
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Blockchain technology constitutes a paradigm shift in the way we conceive distributed architectures. A Blockchain system lets us build platforms where data are immutable and tamper-proof, with some constraints on the throughput and the amount of memory required to store the ledger. This paper aims to solve the issue of memory and performance requirements developing a multiple Blockchain architecture that mixes the benefits deriving from a public and a private Blockchain. This kind of approach enables small sensors - with memory and performance constraints - to join the network without worrying about the amount of data to store. The development is proposed following a context-aware approach, to make the architecture scalable and easy to use in different scenarios.
In-context Learning as Maintaining Coherency: A Study of On-the-fly Machine Translation Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The phenomena of in-context learning has typically been thought of as "learning from examples". In this work which focuses on Machine Translation, we present a perspective of in-context learning as the desired generation task maintaining coherency with its context, i.e., the prompt examples. We first investigate randomly sampled prompts across 4 domains, and find that translation performance improves when shown in-domain prompts. Next, we investigate coherency for the in-domain setting, which uses prompt examples from a moving window. We study this with respect to other factors that have previously been identified in the literature such as length, surface similarity and sentence embedding similarity. Our results across 3 models (GPTNeo2.7B, Bloom3B, XGLM2.9B), and three translation directions (\texttt{en}$\rightarrow$\{\texttt{pt, de, fr}\}) suggest that the long-term coherency of the prompts and the test sentence is a good indicator of downstream translation performance. In doing so, we demonstrate the efficacy of In-context Machine Translation for on-the-fly adaptation.
Initial Steps Towards Tackling High-dimensional Surrogate Modeling for Neuroevolution Using Kriging Partial Least Squares
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) aim to use efficient computational models with the goal of approximating the fitness function in evolutionary computation systems. This area of research has been active for over two decades and has received significant attention from the specialised research community in different areas, for example, single and many objective optimisation or dynamic and stationary optimisation problems. An emergent and exciting area that has received little attention from the SAEAs community is in neuroevolution. This refers to the use of evolutionary algorithms in the automatic configuration of artificial neural network (ANN) architectures, hyper-parameters and/or the training of ANNs. However, ANNs suffer from two major issues: (a) the use of highly-intense computational power for their correct training, and (b) the highly specialised human expertise required to correctly configure ANNs necessary to get a well-performing network. This work aims to fill this important research gap in SAEAs in neuroevolution by addressing these two issues. We demonstrate how one can use a Kriging Partial Least Squares method that allows efficient computation of good approximate surrogate models compared to the well-known Kriging method, which normally cannot be used in neuroevolution due to the high dimensionality of the data.
Query Expansion by Prompting Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query expansion approaches such as Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) that relies on retrieving a good set of pseudo-relevant documents to expand queries, we rely on the generative and creative abilities of an LLM and leverage the knowledge inherent in the model. We study a variety of different prompts, including zero-shot, few-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We find that CoT prompts are especially useful for query expansion as these prompts instruct the model to break queries down step-by-step and can provide a large number of terms related to the original query. Experimental results on MS-MARCO and BEIR demonstrate that query expansions generated by LLMs can be more powerful than traditional query expansion methods.
DAMO-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 2: A Unified Retrieval-augmented System for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The MultiCoNER \RNum{2} shared task aims to tackle multilingual named entity recognition (NER) in fine-grained and noisy scenarios, and it inherits the semantic ambiguity and low-context setting of the MultiCoNER \RNum{1} task. To cope with these problems, the previous top systems in the MultiCoNER \RNum{1} either incorporate the knowledge bases or gazetteers. However, they still suffer from insufficient knowledge, limited context length, single retrieval strategy. In this paper, our team \textbf{DAMO-NLP} proposes a unified retrieval-augmented system (U-RaNER) for fine-grained multilingual NER. We perform error analysis on the previous top systems and reveal that their performance bottleneck lies in insufficient knowledge. Also, we discover that the limited context length causes the retrieval knowledge to be invisible to the model. To enhance the retrieval context, we incorporate the entity-centric Wikidata knowledge base, while utilizing the infusion approach to broaden the contextual scope of the model. Also, we explore various search strategies and refine the quality of retrieval knowledge. Our system\footnote{We will release the dataset, code, and scripts of our system at {\small \url{https://github.com/modelscope/AdaSeq/tree/master/examples/U-RaNER}}.} wins 9 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER \RNum{2} shared task. Additionally, we compared our system with ChatGPT, one of the large language models which have unlocked strong capabilities on many tasks. The results show that there is still much room for improvement for ChatGPT on the extraction task.
Fine-Grained Product Classification on Leaflet Advertisements
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we describe a first publicly available fine-grained product recognition dataset based on leaflet images. Using advertisement leaflets, collected over several years from different European retailers, we provide a total of 41.6k manually annotated product images in 832 classes. Further, we investigate three different approaches for this fine-grained product classification task, Classification by Image, by Text, as well as by Image and Text. The approach "Classification by Text" uses the text extracted directly from the leaflet product images. We show, that the combination of image and text as input improves the classification of visual difficult to distinguish products. The final model leads to an accuracy of 96.4% with a Top-3 score of 99.2%. We release our code at https://github.com/ladwigd/Leaflet-Product-Classification.
Neural Architecture Search for Intel Movidius VPU
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technologies have been proposed to automate and speed up model design to meet both quality and inference efficiency requirements on a given hardware. Prior arts have shown the capability of NAS on hardware specific network design. In this whitepaper, we further extend the use of NAS to Intel Movidius VPU (Vision Processor Units). To determine the hardware-cost to be incorporated into the NAS process, we introduced two methods: pre-collected hardware-cost on device and device-specific hardware-cost model VPUNN. With the help of NAS, for classification task on VPU, we can achieve 1.3x fps acceleration over Mobilenet-v2-1.4 and 2.2x acceleration over Resnet50 with the same accuracy score. For super resolution task on VPU, we can achieve 1.08x PSNR and 6x higher fps compared with EDSR3.
A Non-Asymptotic Analysis of Mismatched Guesswork
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The problem of mismatched guesswork considers the additional cost incurred by using a guessing function which is optimal for a distribution $q$ when the random variable to be guessed is actually distributed according to a different distribution $p$. This problem has been well-studied from an asymptotic perspective, but there has been little work on quantifying the difference in guesswork between optimal and suboptimal strategies for a finite number of symbols. In this non-asymptotic regime, we consider a definition for mismatched guesswork which we show is equivalent to a variant of the Kendall tau permutation distance applied to optimal guessing functions for the mismatched distributions. We use this formulation to bound the cost of guesswork under mismatch given a bound on the total variation distance between the two distributions.
Train Global, Tailor Local: Minimalist Multilingual Translation into Endangered Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In many humanitarian scenarios, translation into severely low resource languages often does not require a universal translation engine, but a dedicated text-specific translation engine. For example, healthcare records, hygienic procedures, government communication, emergency procedures and religious texts are all limited texts. While generic translation engines for all languages do not exist, translation of multilingually known limited texts into new, endangered languages may be possible and reduce human translation effort. We attempt to leverage translation resources from many rich resource languages to efficiently produce best possible translation quality for a well known text, which is available in multiple languages, in a new, severely low resource language. We examine two approaches: 1. best selection of seed sentences to jump start translations in a new language in view of best generalization to the remainder of a larger targeted text(s), and 2. we adapt large general multilingual translation engines from many other languages to focus on a specific text in a new, unknown language. We find that adapting large pretrained multilingual models to the domain/text first and then to the severely low resource language works best. If we also select a best set of seed sentences, we can improve average chrF performance on new test languages from a baseline of 21.9 to 50.7, while reducing the number of seed sentences to only around 1,000 in the new, unknown language.
Beyond the Model: Data Pre-processing Attack to Deep Learning Models in Android Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The increasing popularity of deep learning (DL) models and the advantages of computing, including low latency and bandwidth savings on smartphones, have led to the emergence of intelligent mobile applications, also known as DL apps, in recent years. However, this technological development has also given rise to several security concerns, including adversarial examples, model stealing, and data poisoning issues. Existing works on attacks and countermeasures for on-device DL models have primarily focused on the models themselves. However, scant attention has been paid to the impact of data processing disturbance on the model inference. This knowledge disparity highlights the need for additional research to fully comprehend and address security issues related to data processing for on-device models. In this paper, we introduce a data processing-based attacks against real-world DL apps. In particular, our attack could influence the performance and latency of the model without affecting the operation of a DL app. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack, we carry out an empirical study on 517 real-world DL apps collected from Google Play. Among 320 apps utilizing MLkit, we find that 81.56\% of them can be successfully attacked. The results emphasize the importance of DL app developers being aware of and taking actions to secure on-device models from the perspective of data processing.
Adaptive loose optimization for robust question answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Question answering methods are well-known for leveraging data bias, such as the language prior in visual question answering and the position bias in machine reading comprehension (extractive question answering). Current debiasing methods often come at the cost of significant in-distribution performance to achieve favorable out-of-distribution generalizability, while non-debiasing methods sacrifice a considerable amount of out-of-distribution performance in order to obtain high in-distribution performance. Therefore, it is challenging for them to deal with the complicated changing real-world situations. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective novel loss function with adaptive loose optimization, which seeks to make the best of both worlds for question answering. Our main technical contribution is to reduce the loss adaptively according to the ratio between the previous and current optimization state on mini-batch training data. This loose optimization can be used to prevent non-debiasing methods from overlearning data bias while enabling debiasing methods to maintain slight bias learning. Experiments on the visual question answering datasets, including VQA v2, VQA-CP v1, VQA-CP v2, GQA-OOD, and the extractive question answering dataset SQuAD demonstrate that our approach enables QA methods to obtain state-of-the-art in- and out-of-distribution performance in most cases. The source code has been released publicly in \url{https://github.com/reml-group/ALO}.
Attacking Pre-trained Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, a series of pioneer studies have shown the potency of pre-trained models in sequential recommendation, illuminating the path of building an omniscient unified pre-trained recommendation model for different downstream recommendation tasks. Despite these advancements, the vulnerabilities of classical recommender systems also exist in pre-trained recommendation in a new form, while the security of pre-trained recommendation model is still unexplored, which may threaten its widely practical applications. In this study, we propose a novel framework for backdoor attacking in pre-trained recommendation. We demonstrate the provider of the pre-trained model can easily insert a backdoor in pre-training, thereby increasing the exposure rates of target items to target user groups. Specifically, we design two novel and effective backdoor attacks: basic replacement and prompt-enhanced, under various recommendation pre-training usage scenarios. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our proposed attack strategies significantly improve the exposure rates of target items to target users by hundreds of times in comparison to the clean model.
AADiff: Audio-Aligned Video Synthesis with Text-to-Image Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in diffusion models have showcased promising results in the text-to-video (T2V) synthesis task. However, as these T2V models solely employ text as the guidance, they tend to struggle in modeling detailed temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce a novel T2V framework that additionally employ audio signals to control the temporal dynamics, empowering an off-the-shelf T2I diffusion to generate audio-aligned videos. We propose audio-based regional editing and signal smoothing to strike a good balance between the two contradicting desiderata of video synthesis, i.e., temporal flexibility and coherence. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments, and further present practical applications for contents creation.