OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Trustworthy Dataset Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Efficiency and trustworthiness are two eternal pursuits when applying deep learning in real-world applications. With regard to efficiency, dataset distillation (DD) endeavors to reduce training costs by distilling the large dataset into a tiny synthetic dataset. However, existing methods merely concentrate on in-distribution (InD) classification in a closed-world setting, disregarding out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. On the other hand, OOD detection aims to enhance models' trustworthiness, which is always inefficiently achieved in full-data settings. For the first time, we simultaneously consider both issues and propose a novel paradigm called Trustworthy Dataset Distillation (TrustDD). By distilling both InD samples and outliers, the condensed datasets are capable of training models competent in both InD classification and OOD detection. To alleviate the requirement of real outlier data, we further propose to corrupt InD samples to generate pseudo-outliers, namely Pseudo-Outlier Exposure (POE). Comprehensive experiments on various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of TrustDD, and POE surpasses the state-of-the-art method Outlier Exposure (OE). Compared with the preceding DD, TrustDD is more trustworthy and applicable to open-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/mashijie1028/TrustDD
Distilling Knowledge from Text-to-Image Generative Models Improves Visio-Linguistic Reasoning in CLIP
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image-text contrastive models like CLIP have wide applications in zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer learning. However, they often struggle on compositional visio-linguistic tasks (e.g., attribute-binding or object-relationships) where their performance is no better than random chance. To address this, we introduce SDS-CLIP, a lightweight and sample-efficient distillation method to enhance CLIP's compositional visio-linguistic reasoning. Our approach fine-tunes CLIP using a distillation objective borrowed from large text-to-image generative models like Stable-Diffusion, which are known for their strong visio-linguistic reasoning abilities. On the challenging Winoground benchmark, SDS-CLIP improves the visio-linguistic performance of various CLIP models by up to 7%, while on the ARO dataset, it boosts performance by up to 3%. This work underscores the potential of well-designed distillation objectives from generative models to enhance contrastive image-text models with improved visio-linguistic reasoning capabilities.
Energy Efficient Deep Multi-Label ON/OFF Classification of Low Frequency Metered Home Appliances
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is the process of obtaining appliance-level data from a single metering point, measuring total electricity consumption of a household or a business. Appliance-level data can be directly used for demand response applications and energy management systems as well as for awareness raising and motivation for improvements in energy efficiency. Recently, classical machine learning and deep learning (DL) techniques became very popular and proved as highly effective for NILM classification, but with the growing complexity these methods are faced with significant computational and energy demands during both their training and operation. In this paper, we introduce a novel DL model aimed at enhanced multi-label classification of NILM with improved computation and energy efficiency. We also propose an evaluation methodology for comparison of different models using data synthesized from the measurement datasets so as to better represent real-world scenarios. Compared to the state-of-the-art, the proposed model has its energy consumption reduced by more than 23% while providing on average approximately 8 percentage points in performance improvement when evaluating on data derived from REFIT and UK-DALE datasets. We also show a 12 percentage point performance advantage of the proposed DL based model over a random forest model and observe performance degradation with the increase of the number of devices in the household, namely with each additional 5 devices, the average performance degrades by approximately 7 percentage points.
The Role of Dimension in the Online Chasing Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Let $(X, d)$ be a metric space and $C \subseteq 2^X$ -- a collection of special objects. In the $(X,d,C)$-chasing problem, an online player receives a sequence of online requests $\{B_t\}_{t=1}^T \subseteq C$ and responds with a trajectory $\{x_t\}_{t=1}^T$ such that $x_t \in B_t$. This response incurs a movement cost $\sum_{t=1}^T d(x_t, x_{t-1})$, and the online player strives to minimize the competitive ratio -- the worst case ratio over all input sequences between the online movement cost and the optimal movement cost in hindsight. Under this setup, we call the $(X,d,C)$-chasing problem $\textit{chaseable}$ if there exists an online algorithm with finite competitive ratio. In the case of Convex Body Chasing (CBC) over real normed vector spaces, (Bubeck et al. 2019) proved the chaseability of the problem. Furthermore, in the vector space setting, the dimension of the ambient space appears to be the factor controlling the size of the competitive ratio. Indeed, recently, (Sellke 2020) provided a $d-$competitive online algorithm over arbitrary real normed vector spaces $(\mathbb{R}^d, ||\cdot||)$, and we will shortly present a general strategy for obtaining novel lower bounds of the form $Ω(d^c), \enspace c > 0$, for CBC in the same setting. In this paper, we also prove that the $\textit{doubling}$ and $\textit{Assouad}$ dimensions of a metric space exert no control on the hardness of ball chasing over the said metric space. More specifically, we show that for any large enough $ρ\in \mathbb{R}$, there exists a metric space $(X,d)$ of doubling dimension $Θ(ρ)$ and Assouad dimension $ρ$ such that no online selector can achieve a finite competitive ratio in the general ball chasing regime.
ZeQR: Zero-shot Query Reformulation for Conversational Search
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

As the popularity of voice assistants continues to surge, conversational search has gained increased attention in Information Retrieval. However, data sparsity issues in conversational search significantly hinder the progress of supervised conversational search methods. Consequently, researchers are focusing more on zero-shot conversational search approaches. Nevertheless, existing zero-shot methods face three primary limitations: they are not universally applicable to all retrievers, their effectiveness lacks sufficient explainability, and they struggle to resolve common conversational ambiguities caused by omission. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Zero-shot Query Reformulation (or Query Rewriting) (ZeQR) framework that reformulates queries based on previous dialogue contexts without requiring supervision from conversational search data. Specifically, our framework utilizes language models designed for machine reading comprehension tasks to explicitly resolve two common ambiguities: coreference and omission, in raw queries. In comparison to existing zero-shot methods, our approach is universally applicable to any retriever without additional adaptation or indexing. It also provides greater explainability and effectively enhances query intent understanding because ambiguities are explicitly and proactively resolved. Through extensive experiments on four TREC conversational datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Transient Neural Radiance Fields for Lidar View Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have become a ubiquitous tool for modeling scene appearance and geometry from multiview imagery. Recent work has also begun to explore how to use additional supervision from lidar or depth sensor measurements in the NeRF framework. However, previous lidar-supervised NeRFs focus on rendering conventional camera imagery and use lidar-derived point cloud data as auxiliary supervision; thus, they fail to incorporate the underlying image formation model of the lidar. Here, we propose a novel method for rendering transient NeRFs that take as input the raw, time-resolved photon count histograms measured by a single-photon lidar system, and we seek to render such histograms from novel views. Different from conventional NeRFs, the approach relies on a time-resolved version of the volume rendering equation to render the lidar measurements and capture transient light transport phenomena at picosecond timescales. We evaluate our method on a first-of-its-kind dataset of simulated and captured transient multiview scans from a prototype single-photon lidar. Overall, our work brings NeRFs to a new dimension of imaging at transient timescales, newly enabling rendering of transient imagery from novel views. Additionally, we show that our approach recovers improved geometry and conventional appearance compared to point cloud-based supervision when training on few input viewpoints. Transient NeRFs may be especially useful for applications which seek to simulate raw lidar measurements for downstream tasks in autonomous driving, robotics, and remote sensing.
Modal Logic with Relations over Paths: a Theoretical Development through Comonadic Semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Game comonads provide categorical semantics for comparison games in Finite Model Theory, thus providing an abstract characterisation of logical equivalence for a wide range of logics, each one captured through a specific choice of comonad. Motivated by the goal of applying comonadic tools to the study of data-aware logics such as CoreDataXPath, in this work we introduce a generalisation of Modal Logic that allows relation symbols of arbitrary arity as atoms of the syntax, which we call Path Predicate Modal Logic or PPML. We motivate this logic as arising from a shift in perspective on a previously studied fragment of CoreDataXPath, called DataGL, and prove that PPML recovers DataGL for a specific choice of signature. We argue that this shift in perspective allows the capturing and designing of new data-aware logics. We introduce resource-bounded simulation and bisimulation games for PPML and show the Hennessy-Milner property relating bisimilarity and logical equivalence. We define the PPML comonad and prove that it captures these games. We develop the model-theoretical understanding of PPML by making systematic use of the comonadic framework. This includes results such as a tree-model property and an alternative proof of the one-way Hennessy-Milner property using a correspondence between positive PPML formulas and canonical models. We also use the comonadic perspective to establish connections with other logics, such as bounded quantifier rank and bounded variable number fragments of First Order Logic on one side and Basic Modal Logic on the other, and show how the PPML comonad induces a syntax-free characterisation of logical equivalence for DataGL, our original motivation. With respect to Basic Modal Logic, a functorial assignment from PPML unravellings into Kripke trees enables us to obtain polynomial-time reductions from PPML problems to their Basic Modal Logic counterparts.
TbExplain: A Text-based Explanation Method for Scene Classification Models with the Statistical Prediction Correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to improve the interpretability of black-box machine learning models. Building a heatmap based on the importance value of input features is a popular method for explaining the underlying functions of such models in producing their predictions. Heatmaps are almost understandable to humans, yet they are not without flaws. Non-expert users, for example, may not fully understand the logic of heatmaps (the logic in which relevant pixels to the model's prediction are highlighted with different intensities or colors). Additionally, objects and regions of the input image that are relevant to the model prediction are frequently not entirely differentiated by heatmaps. In this paper, we propose a framework called TbExplain that employs XAI techniques and a pre-trained object detector to present text-based explanations of scene classification models. Moreover, TbExplain incorporates a novel method to correct predictions and textually explain them based on the statistics of objects in the input image when the initial prediction is unreliable. To assess the trustworthiness and validity of the text-based explanations, we conducted a qualitative experiment, and the findings indicated that these explanations are sufficiently reliable. Furthermore, our quantitative and qualitative experiments on TbExplain with scene classification datasets reveal an improvement in classification accuracy over ResNet variants.
A Hierarchical Architecture for Neural Materials
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Neural reflectance models are capable of reproducing the spatially-varying appearance of many real-world materials at different scales. Unfortunately, existing techniques such as NeuMIP have difficulties handling materials with strong shadowing effects or detailed specular highlights. In this paper, we introduce a neural appearance model that offers a new level of accuracy. Central to our model is an inception-based core network structure that captures material appearances at multiple scales using parallel-operating kernels and ensures multi-stage features through specialized convolution layers. Furthermore, we encode the inputs into frequency space, introduce a gradient-based loss, and employ it adaptive to the progress of the learning phase. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using a variety of synthetic and real examples.
Measuring Online Emotional Reactions to Events
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

The rich and dynamic information environment of social media provides researchers, policy makers, and entrepreneurs with opportunities to learn about social phenomena in a timely manner. However, using this data to understand social behavior is difficult due heterogeneity of topics and events discussed in the highly dynamic online information environment. To address these challenges, we present a method for systematically detecting and measuring emotional reactions to offline events using change point detection on the time series of collective affect, and further explaining these reactions using a transformer-based topic model. We demonstrate the utility of the method on a corpus of tweets from a large US metropolitan area between January and August, 2020, covering a period of great social change. We demonstrate that our method is able to disaggregate topics to measure population's emotional and moral reactions. This capability allows for better monitoring of population's reactions during crises using online data.
PharmacyGPT: The AI Pharmacist
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we introduce PharmacyGPT, a novel framework to assess the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 in emulating the role of clinical pharmacists. Our methodology encompasses the utilization of LLMs to generate comprehensible patient clusters, formulate medication plans, and forecast patient outcomes. We conduct our investigation using real data acquired from the intensive care unit (ICU) at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC) Hospital. Our analysis offers valuable insights into the potential applications and limitations of LLMs in the field of clinical pharmacy, with implications for both patient care and the development of future AI-driven healthcare solutions. By evaluating the performance of PharmacyGPT, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discourse surrounding the integration of artificial intelligence in healthcare settings, ultimately promoting the responsible and efficacious use of such technologies.
Uncertainty Quantification for Molecular Property Predictions with Graph Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a prominent class of data-driven methods for molecular property prediction. However, a key limitation of typical GNN models is their inability to quantify uncertainties in the predictions. This capability is crucial for ensuring the trustworthy use and deployment of models in downstream tasks. To that end, we introduce AutoGNNUQ, an automated uncertainty quantification (UQ) approach for molecular property prediction. AutoGNNUQ leverages architecture search to generate an ensemble of high-performing GNNs, enabling the estimation of predictive uncertainties. Our approach employs variance decomposition to separate data (aleatoric) and model (epistemic) uncertainties, providing valuable insights for reducing them. In our computational experiments, we demonstrate that AutoGNNUQ outperforms existing UQ methods in terms of both prediction accuracy and UQ performance on multiple benchmark datasets. Additionally, we utilize t-SNE visualization to explore correlations between molecular features and uncertainty, offering insight for dataset improvement. AutoGNNUQ has broad applicability in domains such as drug discovery and materials science, where accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial for decision-making.
Integrating a Heterogeneous Graph with Entity-aware Self-attention using Relative Position Labels for Reading Comprehension Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the significant progress made by transformer models in machine reading comprehension tasks, they still fall short in handling complex reasoning tasks due to the absence of explicit knowledge in the input sequence. To address this limitation, many recent works have proposed injecting external knowledge into the model. However, selecting relevant external knowledge, ensuring its availability, and requiring additional processing steps remain challenging. In this paper, we introduce a novel attention pattern that integrates reasoning knowledge derived from a heterogeneous graph into the transformer architecture without relying on external knowledge. The proposed attention pattern comprises three key elements: global-local attention for word tokens, graph attention for entity tokens that exhibit strong attention towards tokens connected in the graph as opposed to those unconnected, and the consideration of the type of relationship between each entity token and word token. This results in optimized attention between the two if a relationship exists. The pattern is coupled with special relative position labels, allowing it to integrate with LUKE's entity-aware self-attention mechanism. The experimental findings corroborate that our model outperforms both the cutting-edge LUKE-Graph and the baseline LUKE model across two distinct datasets: ReCoRD, emphasizing commonsense reasoning, and WikiHop, focusing on multi-hop reasoning challenges.
Fisher-Rao distance and pullback SPD cone distances between multivariate normal distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Data sets of multivariate normal distributions abound in many scientific areas like diffusion tensor imaging, structure tensor computer vision, radar signal processing, machine learning, just to name a few. In order to process those normal data sets for downstream tasks like filtering, classification or clustering, one needs to define proper notions of dissimilarities between normals and paths joining them. The Fisher-Rao distance defined as the Riemannian geodesic distance induced by the Fisher information metric is such a principled metric distance which however is not known in closed-form excepts for a few particular cases. In this work, we first report a fast and robust method to approximate arbitrarily finely the Fisher-Rao distance between multivariate normal distributions. Second, we introduce a class of distances based on diffeomorphic embeddings of the normal manifold into a submanifold of the higher-dimensional symmetric positive-definite cone corresponding to the manifold of centered normal distributions. We show that the projective Hilbert distance on the cone yields a metric on the embedded normal submanifold and we pullback that cone distance with its associated straight line Hilbert cone geodesics to obtain a distance and smooth paths between normal distributions. Compared to the Fisher-Rao distance approximation, the pullback Hilbert cone distance is computationally light since it requires to compute only the extreme minimal and maximal eigenvalues of matrices. Finally, we show how to use those distances in clustering tasks.
A Survey of What to Share in Federated Learning: Perspectives on Model Utility, Privacy Leakage, and Communication Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a secure paradigm for collaborative training among clients. Without data centralization, FL allows clients to share local information in a privacy-preserving manner. This approach has gained considerable attention, promoting numerous surveys to summarize the related works. However, the majority of these surveys concentrate on FL methods that share model parameters during the training process, while overlooking the possibility of sharing local information in other forms. In this paper, we present a systematic survey from a new perspective of what to share in FL, with an emphasis on the model utility, privacy leakage, and communication efficiency. First, we present a new taxonomy of FL methods in terms of three sharing methods, which respectively share model, synthetic data, and knowledge. Second, we analyze the vulnerability of different sharing methods to privacy attacks and review the defense mechanisms. Third, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the learning performance and communication overhead of various sharing methods in FL. Besides, we assess the potential privacy leakage through model inversion and membership inference attacks, while comparing the effectiveness of various defense approaches. Finally, we identify future research directions and conclude the survey.
Actor-agnostic Multi-label Action Recognition with Multi-modal Query
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Existing action recognition methods are typically actor-specific due to the intrinsic topological and apparent differences among the actors. This requires actor-specific pose estimation (e.g., humans vs. animals), leading to cumbersome model design complexity and high maintenance costs. Moreover, they often focus on learning the visual modality alone and single-label classification whilst neglecting other available information sources (e.g., class name text) and the concurrent occurrence of multiple actions. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new approach called 'actor-agnostic multi-modal multi-label action recognition,' which offers a unified solution for various types of actors, including humans and animals. We further formulate a novel Multi-modal Semantic Query Network (MSQNet) model in a transformer-based object detection framework (e.g., DETR), characterized by leveraging visual and textual modalities to represent the action classes better. The elimination of actor-specific model designs is a key advantage, as it removes the need for actor pose estimation altogether. Extensive experiments on five publicly available benchmarks show that our MSQNet consistently outperforms the prior arts of actor-specific alternatives on human and animal single- and multi-label action recognition tasks by up to 50%. Code is made available at https://github.com/mondalanindya/MSQNet.