OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Do Androids Know They're Only Dreaming of Electric Sheep?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We design probes trained on the internal representations of a transformer language model to predict its hallucinatory behavior on three grounded generation tasks. To train the probes, we annotate for span-level hallucination on both sampled (organic) and manually edited (synthetic) reference outputs. Our probes are narrowly trained and we find that they are sensitive to their training domain: they generalize poorly from one task to another or from synthetic to organic hallucinations. However, on in-domain data, they can reliably detect hallucinations at many transformer layers, achieving 95% of their peak performance as early as layer 4. Here, probing proves accurate for evaluating hallucination, outperforming several contemporary baselines and even surpassing an expert human annotator in response-level detection F1. Similarly, on span-level labeling, probes are on par or better than the expert annotator on two out of three generation tasks. Overall, we find that probing is a feasible and efficient alternative to language model hallucination evaluation when model states are available.
Randomness Requirements and Asymmetries in Nash Equilibria
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

In general, Nash equilibria in normal-form games may require players to play (probabilistically) mixed strategies. We define a measure of the complexity of finite probability distributions and study the complexity required to play Nash equilibria in finite two player $n\times n$ games with rational payoffs. Our central results show that there exist games in which there is an exponential vs. linear gap in the complexity of the mixed distributions that the two players play in the (unique) Nash equilibrium of these games. This gap induces asymmetries in the amounts of space required by the players to represent and sample from the corresponding distributions using known state-of-the-art sampling algorithms. We also establish exponential upper and lower bounds on the complexity of Nash equilibria in normal-form games. These results highlight (i) the nontriviality of the assumption that players can play any mixed strategy and (ii) the disparity in resources that players may require to play Nash equilibria in normal-form games.
MosaicBERT: A Bidirectional Encoder Optimized for Fast Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Although BERT-style encoder models are heavily used in NLP research, many researchers do not pretrain their own BERTs from scratch due to the high cost of training. In the past half-decade since BERT first rose to prominence, many advances have been made with other transformer architectures and training configurations that have yet to be systematically incorporated into BERT. Here, we introduce MosaicBERT, a BERT-style encoder architecture and training recipe that is empirically optimized for fast pretraining. This efficient architecture incorporates FlashAttention, Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi), Gated Linear Units (GLU), a module to dynamically remove padded tokens, and low precision LayerNorm into the classic transformer encoder block. The training recipe includes a 30% masking ratio for the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective, bfloat16 precision, and vocabulary size optimized for GPU throughput, in addition to best-practices from RoBERTa and other encoder models. When pretrained from scratch on the C4 dataset, this base model achieves a downstream average GLUE (dev) score of 79.6 in 1.13 hours on 8 A100 80 GB GPUs at a cost of roughly $20. We plot extensive accuracy vs. pretraining speed Pareto curves and show that MosaicBERT base and large are consistently Pareto optimal when compared to a competitive BERT base and large. This empirical speed up in pretraining enables researchers and engineers to pretrain custom BERT-style models at low cost instead of finetune on existing generic models. We open source our model weights and code.
Action-Item-Driven Summarization of Long Meeting Transcripts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The increased prevalence of online meetings has significantly enhanced the practicality of a model that can automatically generate the summary of a given meeting. This paper introduces a novel and effective approach to automate the generation of meeting summaries. Current approaches to this problem generate general and basic summaries, considering the meeting simply as a long dialogue. However, our novel algorithms can generate abstractive meeting summaries that are driven by the action items contained in the meeting transcript. This is done by recursively generating summaries and employing our action-item extraction algorithm for each section of the meeting in parallel. All of these sectional summaries are then combined and summarized together to create a coherent and action-item-driven summary. In addition, this paper introduces three novel methods for dividing up long transcripts into topic-based sections to improve the time efficiency of our algorithm, as well as to resolve the issue of large language models (LLMs) forgetting long-term dependencies. Our pipeline achieved a BERTScore of 64.98 across the AMI corpus, which is an approximately 4.98% increase from the current state-of-the-art result produced by a fine-tuned BART (Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformers) model.
Investigating the Effects of Sparse Attention on Cross-Encoders
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-encoders are effective passage and document re-rankers but less efficient than other neural or classic retrieval models. A few previous studies have applied windowed self-attention to make cross-encoders more efficient. However, these studies did not investigate the potential and limits of different attention patterns or window sizes. We close this gap and systematically analyze how token interactions can be reduced without harming the re-ranking effectiveness. Experimenting with asymmetric attention and different window sizes, we find that the query tokens do not need to attend to the passage or document tokens for effective re-ranking and that very small window sizes suffice. In our experiments, even windows of 4 tokens still yield effectiveness on par with previous cross-encoders while reducing the memory requirements by at least 22% / 59% and being 1% / 43% faster at inference time for passages / documents.
Jatmo: Prompt Injection Defense by Task-Specific Finetuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) are attracting significant research attention due to their instruction-following abilities, allowing users and developers to leverage LLMs for a variety of tasks. However, LLMs are vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks: a class of attacks that hijack the model's instruction-following abilities, changing responses to prompts to undesired, possibly malicious ones. In this work, we introduce Jatmo, a method for generating task-specific models resilient to prompt-injection attacks. Jatmo leverages the fact that LLMs can only follow instructions once they have undergone instruction tuning. It harnesses a teacher instruction-tuned model to generate a task-specific dataset, which is then used to fine-tune a base model (i.e., a non-instruction-tuned model). Jatmo only needs a task prompt and a dataset of inputs for the task: it uses the teacher model to generate outputs. For situations with no pre-existing datasets, Jatmo can use a single example, or in some cases none at all, to produce a fully synthetic dataset. Our experiments on seven tasks show that Jatmo models provide similar quality of outputs on their specific task as standard LLMs, while being resilient to prompt injections. The best attacks succeeded in less than 0.5% of cases against our models, versus 87% success rate against GPT-3.5-Turbo. We release Jatmo at https://github.com/wagner-group/prompt-injection-defense.
ShennongAlpha: an AI-driven sharing and collaboration platform for intelligent curation, acquisition, and translation of natural medicinal material knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Natural Medicinal Materials (NMMs) have a long history of global clinical applications and a wealth of records and knowledge. Although NMMs are a major source for drug discovery and clinical application, the utilization and sharing of NMM knowledge face crucial challenges, including the standardized description of critical information, efficient curation and acquisition, and language barriers. To address these, we developed ShennongAlpha, an AI-driven sharing and collaboration platform for intelligent knowledge curation, acquisition, and translation. For standardized knowledge curation, the platform introduced a Systematic Nomenclature to enable accurate differentiation and identification of NMMs. More than fourteen thousand Chinese NMMs have been curated into the platform along with their knowledge. Furthermore, the platform pioneered chat-based knowledge acquisition, standardized machine translation, and collaborative knowledge updating. Together, our study represents the first major advance in leveraging AI to empower NMM knowledge sharing, which not only marks a novel application of AI for Science, but also will significantly benefit the global biomedical, pharmaceutical, physician, and patient communities.
AClassiHonk: A System Framework to Annotate and Classify Vehicular Honk from Road Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies emphasize that vehicular honking contributes to over 50% of noise pollution in developing urban and suburban areas. Frequent honking negatively impacts health, road safety, and the environment. Recognizing and classifying different vehicle honks could offer valuable insights into environmental noise pollution. Existing research on outdoor sound classification and honk detection lacks the ability to classify honks based on vehicle types, limiting contextual information inference for locations, areas, or traffic. Therefore, it becomes imperative to design a system that can detect and classify honks of different types of vehicles from which we can infer some contextual information. In this paper, we have developed a novel framework AClassiHonk that performs raw vehicular honk sensing, data labeling and classifies the honk into three major groups, i.e., light-weight vehicles, medium-weight vehicles, and heavy-weight vehicles. We collected the raw audio samples of different vehicular honking based on spatio-temporal characteristics and converted them into spectrogram images. We have proposed a deep learning-based Multi-label Autoencoder model (MAE) for automated labeling of the unlabeled data samples, which provides 97.64% accuracy in contrast to existing deep learning-based data labeling methods. Further, we have used various pre-trained models, namely Inception V3, ResNet50, MobileNet, ShuffleNet, and proposed an Ensembled Transfer Learning model (EnTL) for vehicle honks classification and performed comparative analysis. Results reveal that EnTL exhibits the best performance compared to pre-trained models and achieves 96.72% accuracy in our dataset. In addition, we have identified a context of a location based on these classified honk signatures in a city.
Solving Causal Stream Inclusions
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

We study solutions to systems of stream inclusions of the form 'f in T(f)', where the nondeterministic transformer 'T' on omega-infinite streams is assumed to be causal in the sense that elements in output streams are determined by a finite prefix of inputs. We first establish a correspondence between logic-based causality and metric-based contraction. Based on this causality-contraction connection we then apply fixpoint principles to the spherically complete ultrametric space of streams to construct solutions of stream inclusions. The underlying fixpoint iterations induce fixpoint induction principles to reason about these solutions.In addition, the fixpoint approximation provides an anytime algorithm with which finite prefixes of solutions can be calculated. These developments are illustrated for some central concepts of system design.
Advancing TTP Analysis: Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) outline the methods attackers use to exploit vulnerabilities. The interpretation of TTPs in the MITRE ATT&CK framework can be challenging for cybersecurity practitioners due to presumed expertise and complex dependencies. Meanwhile, advancements with Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to recent surge in studies exploring its uses in cybersecurity operations. It is, however, unclear how LLMs can be used in an efficient and proper way to provide accurate responses for critical domains such as cybersecurity. This leads us to investigate how to better use two types of LLMs: small-scale encoder-only (e.g., RoBERTa) and larger decoder-only (e.g., GPT-3.5) LLMs to comprehend and summarize TTPs with the intended purposes (i.e., tactics) of a cyberattack procedure. This work studies and compares the uses of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of encoder-only LLMs vs. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for decoder-only LLMs (without fine-tuning). Both SFT and RAG techniques presumably enhance the LLMs with relevant contexts for each cyberattack procedure. Our studies show decoder-only LLMs with RAG achieves better performance than encoder-only models with SFT, particularly when directly relevant context is extracted by RAG. The decoder-only results could suffer low `Precision' while achieving high `Recall'. Our findings further highlight a counter-intuitive observation that more generic prompts tend to yield better predictions of cyberattack tactics than those that are more specifically tailored.
SynCDR : Training Cross Domain Retrieval Models with Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In cross-domain retrieval, a model is required to identify images from the same semantic category across two visual domains. For instance, given a sketch of an object, a model needs to retrieve a real image of it from an online store's catalog. A standard approach for such a problem is learning a feature space of images where Euclidean distances reflect similarity. Even without human annotations, which may be expensive to acquire, prior methods function reasonably well using unlabeled images for training. Our problem constraint takes this further to scenarios where the two domains do not necessarily share any common categories in training data. This can occur when the two domains in question come from different versions of some biometric sensor recording identities of different people. We posit a simple solution, which is to generate synthetic data to fill in these missing category examples across domains. This, we do via category preserving translation of images from one visual domain to another. We compare approaches specifically trained for this translation for a pair of domains, as well as those that can use large-scale pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models via prompts, and find that the latter can generate better replacement synthetic data, leading to more accurate cross-domain retrieval models. Our best SynCDR model can outperform prior art by up to 15\%. Code for our work is available at https://github.com/samarth4149/SynCDR .
A Comprehensive Overview of Fish-Eye Camera Distortion Correction Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The fisheye camera, with its unique wide field of view and other characteristics, has found extensive applications in various fields. However, the fisheye camera suffers from significant distortion compared to pinhole cameras, resulting in distorted images of captured objects. Fish-eye camera distortion is a common issue in digital image processing, requiring effective correction techniques to enhance image quality. This review provides a comprehensive overview of various methods used for fish-eye camera distortion correction. The article explores the polynomial distortion model, which utilizes polynomial functions to model and correct radial distortions. Additionally, alternative approaches such as panorama mapping, grid mapping, direct methods, and deep learning-based methods are discussed. The review highlights the advantages, limitations, and recent advancements of each method, enabling readers to make informed decisions based on their specific needs.
Analyzing Local Representations of Self-supervised Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of various self-supervised Vision Transformers (ViTs), focusing on their local representative power. Inspired by large language models, we examine the abilities of ViTs to perform various computer vision tasks with little to no fine-tuning. We design evaluation framework to analyze the quality of local, i.e.\ patch-level, representations in the context of few-shot semantic segmentation, instance identification, object retrieval and tracking. We discover that contrastive learning based methods like DINO produce more universal patch representations that can be immediately applied for downstream tasks with no parameter tuning, compared to masked image modeling. The embeddings learned using the latter approach, e.g. in masked autoencoders, have high variance features that harm distance-based algorithms, such as k-NN, and do not contain useful information for most downstream tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that removing these high-variance features enhances k-NN for MAE, as well as for its recent extension Scale-MAE. Finally, we find an object instance retrieval setting where DINOv2, a model pretrained on two orders of magnitude more data, falls short of its less compute intensive counterpart DINO.
E-chat: Emotion-sensitive Spoken Dialogue System with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This study focuses on emotion-sensitive spoken dialogue in human-machine speech interaction. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue systems can handle multimodal data, including audio. Recent models have enhanced the understanding of complex audio signals through the integration of various audio events. However, they are unable to generate appropriate responses based on emotional speech. To address this, we introduce the Emotional chat Model (E-chat), a novel spoken dialogue system capable of comprehending and responding to emotions conveyed from speech. This model leverages an emotion embedding extracted by a speech encoder, combined with LLMs, enabling it to respond according to different emotional contexts. Additionally, we introduce the E-chat200 dataset, designed explicitly for emotion-sensitive spoken dialogue. In various evaluation metrics, E-chat consistently outperforms baseline model, demonstrating its potential in emotional comprehension and human-machine interaction.
Simplicity bias, algorithmic probability, and the random logistic map
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Simplicity bias is an intriguing phenomenon prevalent in various input-output maps, characterized by a preference for simpler, more regular, or symmetric outputs. Notably, these maps typically feature high-probability outputs with simple patterns, whereas complex patterns are exponentially less probable. This bias has been extensively examined and attributed to principles derived from algorithmic information theory and algorithmic probability. In a significant advancement, it has been demonstrated that the renowned logistic map and other one-dimensional maps exhibit simplicity bias when conceptualized as input-output systems. Building upon this work, our research delves into the manifestations of simplicity bias within the random logistic map, specifically focusing on scenarios involving additive noise. We discover that simplicity bias is observable in the random logistic map for specific ranges of $μ$ and noise magnitudes. Additionally, we find that this bias persists even with the introduction of small measurement noise, though it diminishes as noise levels increase. Our studies also revisit the phenomenon of noise-induced chaos, particularly when $μ=3.83$, revealing its characteristics through complexity-probability plots. Intriguingly, we employ the logistic map to illustrate a paradoxical aspect of data analysis: more data adhering to a consistent trend can occasionally lead to \emph{reduced} confidence in extrapolation predictions, challenging conventional wisdom. We propose that adopting a probability-complexity perspective in analyzing dynamical systems could significantly enrich statistical learning theories related to series prediction and analysis. This approach not only facilitates a deeper understanding of simplicity bias and its implications but also paves the way for novel methodologies in forecasting complex systems behavior.
Predicting Anti-microbial Resistance using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

During times of increasing antibiotic resistance and the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19, it is important to classify genes related to antibiotic resistance. As natural language processing has advanced with transformer-based language models, many language models that learn characteristics of nucleotide sequences have also emerged. These models show good performance in classifying various features of nucleotide sequences. When classifying nucleotide sequences, not only the sequence itself, but also various background knowledge is utilized. In this study, we use not only a nucleotide sequence-based language model but also a text language model based on PubMed articles to reflect more biological background knowledge in the model. We propose a method to fine-tune the nucleotide sequence language model and the text language model based on various databases of antibiotic resistance genes. We also propose an LLM-based augmentation technique to supplement the data and an ensemble method to effectively combine the two models. We also propose a benchmark for evaluating the model. Our method achieved better performance than the nucleotide sequence language model in the drug resistance class prediction.
Point Cloud in the Air
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Acquisition and processing of point clouds (PCs) is a crucial enabler for many emerging applications reliant on 3D spatial data, such as robot navigation, autonomous vehicles, and augmented reality. In most scenarios, PCs acquired by remote sensors must be transmitted to an edge server for fusion, segmentation, or inference. Wireless transmission of PCs not only puts on increased burden on the already congested wireless spectrum, but also confronts a unique set of challenges arising from the irregular and unstructured nature of PCs. In this paper, we meticulously delineate these challenges and offer a comprehensive examination of existing solutions while candidly acknowledging their inherent limitations. In response to these intricacies, we proffer four pragmatic solution frameworks, spanning advanced techniques, hybrid schemes, and distributed data aggregation approaches. In doing so, our goal is to chart a path toward efficient, reliable, and low-latency wireless PC transmission.