OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Mitigation of Bus Bunching through Setter-Based Curriculum Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Curriculum learning has been growing in the domain of reinforcement learning as a method of improving training efficiency for various tasks. It involves modifying the difficulty (lessons) of the environment as the agent learns, in order to encourage more optimal agent behavior and higher reward states. However, most curriculum learning methods currently involve discrete transitions of the curriculum or predefined steps by the programmer or using automatic curriculum learning on only a small subset training such as only on an adversary. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to curriculum learning that uses a Setter Model to automatically generate an action space, adversary strength, initialization, and bunching strength. Transportation and traffic optimization is a well known area of study, especially for reinforcement learning based solutions. We specifically look at the bus bunching problem for the context of this study. The main idea of the problem is to minimize the delays caused by inefficient bus timings for passengers arriving and departing from a system of buses. While the heavy exploration in the area makes innovation and improvement with regards to performance marginal, it simultaneously provides an effective baseline for developing new generalized techniques. Our group is particularly interested in examining curriculum learning and its effect on training efficiency and overall performance. We decide to try a lesser known approach to curriculum learning, in which the curriculum is not fixed or discretely thresholded. Our method for automated curriculum learning involves a curriculum that is dynamically chosen and learned by an adversary network made to increase the difficulty of the agent's training, and defined by multiple forms of input. Our results are shown in the following sections of this paper.
Oil & Water? Diffusion of AI Within and Across Scientific Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

This study empirically investigates claims of the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI) within roughly 80 million research publications across 20 diverse scientific fields, by examining the change in scholarly engagement with AI from 1985 through 2022. We observe exponential growth, with AI-engaged publications increasing approximately thirteenfold (13x) across all fields, suggesting a dramatic shift from niche to mainstream. Moreover, we provide the first empirical examination of the distribution of AI-engaged publications across publication venues within individual fields, with results that reveal a broadening of AI engagement within disciplines. While this broadening engagement suggests a move toward greater disciplinary integration in every field, increased ubiquity is associated with a semantic tension between AI-engaged research and more traditional disciplinary research. Through an analysis of tens of millions of document embeddings, we observe a complex interplay between AI-engaged and non-AI-engaged research within and across fields, suggesting that increasing ubiquity is something of an oil-and-water phenomenon -- AI-engaged work is spreading out over fields, but not mixing well with non-AI-engaged work.
Hacc-Man: An Arcade Game for Jailbreaking LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The recent leaps in complexity and fluency of Large Language Models (LLMs) mean that, for the first time in human history, people can interact with computers using natural language alone. This creates monumental possibilities of automation and accessibility of computing, but also raises severe security and safety threats: When everyone can interact with LLMs, everyone can potentially break into the systems running LLMs. All it takes is creative use of language. This paper presents Hacc-Man, a game which challenges its players to "jailbreak" an LLM: subvert the LLM to output something that it is not intended to. Jailbreaking is at the intersection between creative problem solving and LLM security. The purpose of the game is threefold: 1. To heighten awareness of the risks of deploying fragile LLMs in everyday systems, 2. To heighten people's self-efficacy in interacting with LLMs, and 3. To discover the creative problem solving strategies, people deploy in this novel context.
Knowledge-Informed Auto-Penetration Testing Based on Reinforcement Learning with Reward Machine
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Automated penetration testing (AutoPT) based on reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its ability to improve the efficiency of vulnerability identification in information systems. However, RL-based PT encounters several challenges, including poor sampling efficiency, intricate reward specification, and limited interpretability. To address these issues, we propose a knowledge-informed AutoPT framework called DRLRM-PT, which leverages reward machines (RMs) to encode domain knowledge as guidelines for training a PT policy. In our study, we specifically focus on lateral movement as a PT case study and formulate it as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) guided by RMs. We design two RMs based on the MITRE ATT\&CK knowledge base for lateral movement. To solve the POMDP and optimize the PT policy, we employ the deep Q-learning algorithm with RM (DQRM). The experimental results demonstrate that the DQRM agent exhibits higher training efficiency in PT compared to agents without knowledge embedding. Moreover, RMs encoding more detailed domain knowledge demonstrated better PT performance compared to RMs with simpler knowledge.
Uncertainty Quantification for Neurosymbolic Programs via Compositional Conformal Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning has become an effective tool for automatically annotating unstructured data (e.g., images) with structured labels (e.g., object detections). As a result, a new programming paradigm called neurosymbolic programming has emerged where users write queries against these predicted annotations. However, due to the intrinsic fallibility of machine learning models, these programs currently lack any notion of correctness. In many domains, users may want some kind of conservative guarantee that the results of their queries contain all possibly relevant instances. Conformal prediction has emerged as a promising strategy for quantifying uncertainty in machine learning by modifying models to predict sets of labels instead of individual labels; it provides a probabilistic guarantee that the prediction set contains the true label with high probability. We propose a novel framework for adapting conformal prediction to neurosymbolic programs; our strategy is to represent prediction sets as abstract values in some abstract domain, and then to use abstract interpretation to propagate prediction sets through the program. Our strategy satisfies three key desiderata: (i) correctness (i.e., the program outputs a prediction set that contains the true output with high probability), (ii) compositionality (i.e., we can quantify uncertainty separately for different modules and then compose them together), and (iii) structured values (i.e., we can provide uncertainty quantification for structured values such as lists). When the full program is available ahead-of-time, we propose an optimization that incorporates conformal prediction at intermediate program points to reduce imprecision in abstract interpretation. We evaluate our approach on programs that take MNIST and MS-COCO images as input, demonstrating that it produces reasonably sized prediction sets while satisfying a coverage guarantee.
Learning Minimum Linear Arrangement of Cliques and Lines
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

In the well-known Minimum Linear Arrangement problem (MinLA), the goal is to arrange the nodes of an undirected graph into a permutation so that the total stretch of the edges is minimized. This paper studies an online (learning) variant of MinLA where the graph is not given at the beginning, but rather revealed piece-by-piece. The algorithm starts in a fixed initial permutation, and after a piece of the graph is revealed, the algorithm must update its current permutation to be a MinLA of the subgraph revealed so far. The objective is to minimize the total number of swaps of adjacent nodes as the algorithm updates the permutation. The main result of this paper is an online randomized algorithm that solves this online variant for the restricted cases where the revealed graph is either a collection of cliques or a collection of lines. We show that the algorithm is $8 \ln n$-competitive, where $n$ is the number of nodes of the graph. We complement this result by constructing an asymptotically matching lower bound of $Ω(\ln n)$.
Hierarchical Clustering via Local Search
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce a local search algorithm for hierarchical clustering. For the local step, we consider a tree re-arrangement operation, known as the {\em interchange}, which involves swapping two closely positioned sub-trees within a tree hierarchy. The interchange operation has been previously used in the context of phylogenetic trees. As the objective function for evaluating the resulting hierarchies, we utilize the revenue function proposed by Moseley and Wang (NIPS 2017.) In our main result, we show that any locally optimal tree guarantees a revenue of at least $\frac{n-2}{3}\sum_{i < j}w(i,j)$ where is $n$ the number of objects and $w: [n] \times [n] \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^+$ is the associated similarity function. This finding echoes the previously established bound for the average link algorithm as analyzed by Moseley and Wang. We demonstrate that this alignment is not coincidental, as the average link trees enjoy the property of being locally optimal with respect to the interchange operation. Consequently, our study provides an alternative insight into the average link algorithm and reveals the existence of a broader range of hierarchies with relatively high revenue achievable through a straightforward local search algorithm. Furthermore, we present an implementation of the local search framework, where each local step requires $O(n)$ computation time. Our empirical results indicate that the proposed method, used as post-processing step, can effectively generate a hierarchical clustering with substantial revenue.
Evaluating and Safeguarding the Adversarial Robustness of Retrieval-Based In-Context Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the emergence of large language models, such as LLaMA and OpenAI GPT-3, In-Context Learning (ICL) gained significant attention due to its effectiveness and efficiency. However, ICL is very sensitive to the choice, order, and verbaliser used to encode the demonstrations in the prompt. Retrieval-Augmented ICL methods try to address this problem by leveraging retrievers to extract semantically related examples as demonstrations. While this approach yields more accurate results, its robustness against various types of adversarial attacks, including perturbations on test samples, demonstrations, and retrieved data, remains under-explored. Our study reveals that retrieval-augmented models can enhance robustness against test sample attacks, outperforming vanilla ICL with a 4.87% reduction in Attack Success Rate (ASR); however, they exhibit overconfidence in the demonstrations, leading to a 2% increase in ASR for demonstration attacks. Adversarial training can help improve the robustness of ICL methods to adversarial attacks; however, such a training scheme can be too costly in the context of LLMs. As an alternative, we introduce an effective training-free adversarial defence method, DARD, which enriches the example pool with those attacked samples. We show that DARD yields improvements in performance and robustness, achieving a 15% reduction in ASR over the baselines. Code and data are released to encourage further research: https://github.com/simonucl/adv-retreival-icl
Transductive Confidence Machine and its application to Medical Data Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The Transductive Confidence Machine Nearest Neighbours (TCMNN) algorithm and a supporting, simple user interface was developed. Different settings of the TCMNN algorithms' parameters were tested on medical data sets, in addition to the use of different Minkowski metrics and polynomial kernels. The effect of increasing the number of nearest neighbours and marking results with significance was also investigated. SVM implementation of the Transductive Confidence Machine was compared with Nearest Neighbours implementation. The application of neural networks was investigated as a useful comparison to the transductive algorithms.
Intensity and Texture Correction of Omnidirectional Image Using Camera Images for Indirect Augmented Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Augmented reality (AR) using camera images in mobile devices is becoming popular for tourism promotion. However, obstructions such as tourists appearing in the camera images may cause the camera pose estimation error, resulting in CG misalignment and reduced visibility of the contents. To avoid this problem, Indirect AR (IAR), which does not use real-time camera images, has been proposed. In this method, an omnidirectional image is captured and virtual objects are synthesized on the image in advance. Users can experience AR by viewing a scene extracted from the synthesized omnidirectional image according to the device's sensor. This enables robustness and high visibility. However, if the weather conditions and season in the pre-captured 360 images differs from the current weather conditions and season when AR is experienced, the realism of the AR experience is reduced. To overcome the problem, we propose a method for correcting the intensity and texture of a past omnidirectional image using camera images from mobile devices. We first perform semantic segmentation. We then reproduce the current sky pattern by panoramic image composition and inpainting. For the other areas, we correct the intensity by histogram matching. In experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method using various scenes.
Feature Protection For Out-of-distribution Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the availability of large pre-trained models, a modern workflow for building real-world machine learning solutions is to fine-tune such models on a downstream task with a relatively small domain-specific dataset. In such applications, one major challenge is that the small fine-tuning dataset does not have sufficient coverage of the distribution encountered when the model is deployed. It is thus important to design fine-tuning methods that are robust to out-of-distribution (OOD) data that are under-represented by the training data. This paper compares common fine-tuning methods to investigate their OOD performance and demonstrates that standard methods will result in a significant change to the pre-trained model so that the fine-tuned features overfit the fine-tuning dataset. However, this causes deteriorated OOD performance. To overcome this issue, we show that protecting pre-trained features leads to a fine-tuned model more robust to OOD generalization. We validate the feature protection methods with extensive experiments of fine-tuning CLIP on ImageNet and DomainNet.
Rethinking Early-Fusion Strategies for Improved Multispectral Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Most recent multispectral object detectors employ a two-branch structure to extract features from RGB and thermal images. While the two-branch structure achieves better performance than a single-branch structure, it overlooks inference efficiency. This conflict is increasingly aggressive, as recent works solely pursue higher performance rather than both performance and efficiency. In this paper, we address this issue by improving the performance of efficient single-branch structures. We revisit the reasons causing the performance gap between these structures. For the first time, we reveal the information interference problem in the naive early-fusion strategy adopted by previous single-branch structures. Besides, we find that the domain gap between multispectral images, and weak feature representation of the single-branch structure are also key obstacles for performance. Focusing on these three problems, we propose corresponding solutions, including a novel shape-priority early-fusion strategy, a weakly supervised learning method, and a core knowledge distillation technique. Experiments demonstrate that single-branch networks equipped with these three contributions achieve significant performance enhancements while retaining high efficiency. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/XueZ-phd/Efficient-RGB-T-Early-Fusion-Detection}.
Theoretical Study of Conflict-Avoidant Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) has shown great promise in many real-world applications. Existing MTRL algorithms often aim to learn a policy that optimizes individual objective functions simultaneously with a given prior preference (or weights) on different tasks. However, these methods often suffer from the issue of \textit{gradient conflict} such that the tasks with larger gradients dominate the update direction, resulting in a performance degeneration on other tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel dynamic weighting multi-task actor-critic algorithm (MTAC) under two options of sub-procedures named as CA and FC in task weight updates. MTAC-CA aims to find a conflict-avoidant (CA) update direction that maximizes the minimum value improvement among tasks, and MTAC-FC targets at a much faster convergence rate. We provide a comprehensive finite-time convergence analysis for both algorithms. We show that MTAC-CA can find a $ε+ε_{\text{app}}$-accurate Pareto stationary policy using $\mathcal{O}({ε^{-5}})$ samples, while ensuring a small $ε+\sqrt{ε_{\text{app}}}$-level CA distance (defined as the distance to the CA direction), where $ε_{\text{app}}$ is the function approximation error. The analysis also shows that MTAC-FC improves the sample complexity to $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3})$, but with a constant-level CA distance. Our experiments on MT10 demonstrate the improved performance of our algorithms over existing MTRL methods with fixed preference.
A Low-Cost Teleoperable Surgical Robot with a Macro-Micro Structure and a Continuum Tip for Open-Source Research
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Surgical robotic systems equipped with microscale, high-dexterity manipulators have shown promising results in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). One barrier to the widespread adoption of such systems is the prohibitive cost of research and development efforts using current state-of-the-art equipment. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a low-cost and modifiable tendon-driven continuum manipulator for MIS applications. The device is capable of being teleoperated in conjunction with a macro-scale six-axis robotic arm using a haptic stylus. Its control software incorporates and extends freely available and open-source software packages. For verification, we perform teleoperation trials on the proposed continuum manipulator using an electromagnetic tracker. We then integrate the manipulator with a UR5e robotic arm. A series of simulated tumour biopsies were conducted using the integrated robotic system and an anatomical model (phantom), validating its potential efficacy in MIS applications. The complete source code, CAD files for all additively manufactured components, a parts list for the manipulator, and a demonstration video of the proposed system are made available in this work.
An Experimental Study of Different Aggregation Schemes in Semi-Asynchronous Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning is highly valued due to its high-performance computing in distributed environments while safeguarding data privacy. To address resource heterogeneity, researchers have proposed a semi-asynchronous federated learning (SAFL) architecture. However, the performance gap between different aggregation targets in SAFL remain unexplored. In this paper, we systematically compare the performance between two algorithm modes, FedSGD and FedAvg that correspond to aggregating gradients and models, respectively. Our results across various task scenarios indicate these two modes exhibit a substantial performance gap. Specifically, FedSGD achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence but experiences more severe fluctuates in accuracy, whereas FedAvg excels in handling straggler issues but converges slower with reduced accuracy.
How Well Do Deep Learning Models Capture Human Concepts? The Case of the Typicality Effect
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

How well do representations learned by ML models align with those of humans? Here, we consider concept representations learned by deep learning models and evaluate whether they show a fundamental behavioral signature of human concepts, the typicality effect. This is the finding that people judge some instances (e.g., robin) of a category (e.g., Bird) to be more typical than others (e.g., penguin). Recent research looking for human-like typicality effects in language and vision models has focused on models of a single modality, tested only a small number of concepts, and found only modest correlations with human typicality ratings. The current study expands this behavioral evaluation of models by considering a broader range of language (N = 8) and vision (N = 10) model architectures. It also evaluates whether the combined typicality predictions of vision + language model pairs, as well as a multimodal CLIP-based model, are better aligned with human typicality judgments than those of models of either modality alone. Finally, it evaluates the models across a broader range of concepts (N = 27) than prior studies. There were three important findings. First, language models better align with human typicality judgments than vision models. Second, combined language and vision models (e.g., AlexNet + MiniLM) better predict the human typicality data than the best-performing language model (i.e., MiniLM) or vision model (i.e., ViT-Huge) alone. Third, multimodal models (i.e., CLIP ViT) show promise for explaining human typicality judgments. These results advance the state-of-the-art in aligning the conceptual representations of ML models and humans. A methodological contribution is the creation of a new image set for testing the conceptual alignment of vision models.
AIGB: Generative Auto-bidding via Conditional Diffusion Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Auto-bidding plays a crucial role in facilitating online advertising by automatically providing bids for advertisers. Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained popularity for auto-bidding. However, most current RL auto-bidding methods are modeled through the Markovian Decision Process (MDP), which assumes the Markovian state transition. This assumption restricts the ability to perform in long horizon scenarios and makes the model unstable when dealing with highly random online advertising environments. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), a novel paradigm for auto-bidding through generative modeling. In this paradigm, we propose DiffBid, a conditional diffusion modeling approach for bid generation. DiffBid directly models the correlation between the return and the entire trajectory, effectively avoiding error propagation across time steps in long horizons. Additionally, DiffBid offers a versatile approach for generating trajectories that maximize given targets while adhering to specific constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world dataset and online A/B test on Alibaba advertising platform demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffBid, achieving 2.81% increase in GMV and 3.36% increase in ROI.