OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Generalisable Agents for Neural Network Optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Optimising deep neural networks is a challenging task due to complex training dynamics, high computational requirements, and long training times. To address this difficulty, we propose the framework of Generalisable Agents for Neural Network Optimisation (GANNO) -- a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach that learns to improve neural network optimisation by dynamically and responsively scheduling hyperparameters during training. GANNO utilises an agent per layer that observes localised network dynamics and accordingly takes actions to adjust these dynamics at a layerwise level to collectively improve global performance. In this paper, we use GANNO to control the layerwise learning rate and show that the framework can yield useful and responsive schedules that are competitive with handcrafted heuristics. Furthermore, GANNO is shown to perform robustly across a wide variety of unseen initial conditions, and can successfully generalise to harder problems than it was trained on. Our work presents an overview of the opportunities that this paradigm offers for training neural networks, along with key challenges that remain to be overcome.
Women Are Beautiful, Men Are Leaders: Gender Stereotypes in Machine Translation and Language Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We present GEST -- a new manually created dataset designed to measure gender-stereotypical reasoning in language models and machine translation systems. GEST contains samples for 16 gender stereotypes about men and women (e.g., Women are beautiful, Men are leaders) that are compatible with the English language and 9 Slavic languages. The definition of said stereotypes was informed by gender experts. We used GEST to evaluate English and Slavic masked LMs, English generative LMs, and machine translation systems. We discovered significant and consistent amounts of gender-stereotypical reasoning in almost all the evaluated models and languages. Our experiments confirm the previously postulated hypothesis that the larger the model, the more stereotypical it usually is.
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Alignment has become a critical step for instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to become helpful assistants. However, the effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still largely unexplored. To fill in this gap, we introduce AlignBench, a comprehensive multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs' alignment in Chinese. We design a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, containing eight main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. To ensure the correctness of references, each knowledge-intensive query is accompanied with evidences collected from reliable web sources (including URLs and quotations) by our annotators. For automatic evaluation, our benchmark employs a rule-calibrated multi-dimensional LLM-as-Judge~\cite{zheng2023judging} approach with Chain-of-Thought to generate explanations and final ratings, ensuring high reliability and interpretability. All evaluation code, data, and LLM generations are available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/AlignBench}. Since its release, AlignBench has been adopted by top (Chinese) LLMs for evaluating their alignment capabilities in Chinese, including ChatGLM, Qwen, DeepSeek, Yi, Baichuan, and Abab.
MultiResFormer: Transformer with Adaptive Multi-Resolution Modeling for General Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Transformer-based models have greatly pushed the boundaries of time series forecasting recently. Existing methods typically encode time series data into $\textit{patches}$ using one or a fixed set of patch lengths. This, however, could result in a lack of ability to capture the variety of intricate temporal dependencies present in real-world multi-periodic time series. In this paper, we propose MultiResFormer, which dynamically models temporal variations by adaptively choosing optimal patch lengths. Concretely, at the beginning of each layer, time series data is encoded into several parallel branches, each using a detected periodicity, before going through the transformer encoder block. We conduct extensive evaluations on long- and short-term forecasting datasets comparing MultiResFormer with state-of-the-art baselines. MultiResFormer outperforms patch-based Transformer baselines on long-term forecasting tasks and also consistently outperforms CNN baselines by a large margin, while using much fewer parameters than these baselines.
X-Dreamer: Creating High-quality 3D Content by Bridging the Domain Gap Between Text-to-2D and Text-to-3D Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In recent times, automatic text-to-3D content creation has made significant progress, driven by the development of pretrained 2D diffusion models. Existing text-to-3D methods typically optimize the 3D representation to ensure that the rendered image aligns well with the given text, as evaluated by the pretrained 2D diffusion model. Nevertheless, a substantial domain gap exists between 2D images and 3D assets, primarily attributed to variations in camera-related attributes and the exclusive presence of foreground objects. Consequently, employing 2D diffusion models directly for optimizing 3D representations may lead to suboptimal outcomes. To address this issue, we present X-Dreamer, a novel approach for high-quality text-to-3D content creation that effectively bridges the gap between text-to-2D and text-to-3D synthesis. The key components of X-Dreamer are two innovative designs: Camera-Guided Low-Rank Adaptation (CG-LoRA) and Attention-Mask Alignment (AMA) Loss. CG-LoRA dynamically incorporates camera information into the pretrained diffusion models by employing camera-dependent generation for trainable parameters. This integration enhances the alignment between the generated 3D assets and the camera's perspective. AMA loss guides the attention map of the pretrained diffusion model using the binary mask of the 3D object, prioritizing the creation of the foreground object. This module ensures that the model focuses on generating accurate and detailed foreground objects. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to existing text-to-3D approaches. Our project webpage: https://xmu-xiaoma666.github.io/Projects/X-Dreamer/ .
CLIP-QDA: An Explainable Concept Bottleneck Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce an explainable algorithm designed from a multi-modal foundation model, that performs fast and explainable image classification. Drawing inspiration from CLIP-based Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), our method creates a latent space where each neuron is linked to a specific word. Observing that this latent space can be modeled with simple distributions, we use a Mixture of Gaussians (MoG) formalism to enhance the interpretability of this latent space. Then, we introduce CLIP-QDA, a classifier that only uses statistical values to infer labels from the concepts. In addition, this formalism allows for both local and global explanations. These explanations come from the inner design of our architecture, our work is part of a new family of greybox models, combining performances of opaque foundation models and the interpretability of transparent models. Our empirical findings show that in instances where the MoG assumption holds, CLIP-QDA achieves similar accuracy with state-of-the-art methods CBMs. Our explanations compete with existing XAI methods while being faster to compute.
Universal Backdoor Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Web-scraped datasets are vulnerable to data poisoning, which can be used for backdooring deep image classifiers during training. Since training on large datasets is expensive, a model is trained once and re-used many times. Unlike adversarial examples, backdoor attacks often target specific classes rather than any class learned by the model. One might expect that targeting many classes through a naive composition of attacks vastly increases the number of poison samples. We show this is not necessarily true and more efficient, universal data poisoning attacks exist that allow controlling misclassifications from any source class into any target class with a small increase in poison samples. Our idea is to generate triggers with salient characteristics that the model can learn. The triggers we craft exploit a phenomenon we call inter-class poison transferability, where learning a trigger from one class makes the model more vulnerable to learning triggers for other classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our universal backdoor attacks by controlling models with up to 6,000 classes while poisoning only 0.15% of the training dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Ben-Schneider-code/Universal-Backdoor-Attacks.
Green Edge AI: A Contemporary Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have emerged as pivotal enablers across a multitude of industries largely due to their significant resurgence over the past decade. The transformative power of AI is primarily derived from the utilization of deep neural networks (DNNs), which require extensive data for training and substantial computational resources for processing. Consequently, DNN models are typically trained and deployed on resource-rich cloud servers. However, due to potential latency issues associated with cloud communications, deep learning (DL) workflows are increasingly being transitioned to wireless edge networks in proximity to end-user devices (EUDs). This shift is designed to support latency-sensitive applications and has given rise to a new paradigm of edge AI, which will play a critical role in upcoming sixth-generation (6G) networks to support ubiquitous AI applications. Despite its considerable potential, edge AI faces substantial challenges, mostly due to the dichotomy between the resource limitations of wireless edge networks and the resource-intensive nature of DL. Specifically, the acquisition of large-scale data, as well as the training and inference processes of DNNs, can rapidly deplete the battery energy of EUDs. This necessitates an energy-conscious approach to edge AI to ensure both optimal and sustainable performance. In this paper, we present a contemporary survey on green edge AI. We commence by analyzing the principal energy consumption components of edge AI systems to identify the fundamental design principles of green edge AI. Guided by these principles, we then explore energy-efficient design methodologies for the three critical tasks in edge AI systems, including training data acquisition, edge training, and edge inference. Finally, we underscore potential future research directions to further enhance the energy efficiency of edge AI.
The Philosopher's Stone: Trojaning Plugins of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained popularity because of their comparable performance to proprietary LLMs. To efficiently fulfill domain-specialized tasks, open-source LLMs can be refined, without expensive accelerators, using low-rank adapters. However, it is still unknown whether low-rank adapters can be exploited to control LLMs. To address this gap, we demonstrate that an infected adapter can induce, on specific triggers,an LLM to output content defined by an adversary and to even maliciously use tools. To train a Trojan adapter, we propose two novel attacks, POLISHED and FUSION, that improve over prior approaches. POLISHED uses a superior LLM to align naïvely poisoned data based on our insight that it can better inject poisoning knowledge during training. In contrast, FUSION leverages a novel over-poisoning procedure to transform a benign adapter into a malicious one by magnifying the attention between trigger and target in model weights. In our experiments, we first conduct two case studies to demonstrate that a compromised LLM agent can use malware to control the system (e.g., a LLM-driven robot) or to launch a spear-phishing attack. Then, in terms of targeted misinformation, we show that our attacks provide higher attack effectiveness than the existing baseline and, for the purpose of attracting downloads, preserve or improve the adapter's utility. Finally, we designed and evaluated three potential defenses. However, none proved entirely effective in safeguarding against our attacks, highlighting the need for more robust defenses supporting a secure LLM supply chain.
Instruction-tuning Aligns LLMs to the Human Brain
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Instruction-tuning is a widely adopted finetuning method that enables large language models (LLMs) to generate output that more closely resembles human responses. However, no studies have shown that instruction-tuning actually teaches LLMs to process language in a similar manner as humans. We investigate the effect of instruction-tuning on aligning LLM and human language processing mechanisms in two ways: (1) brain alignment, the similarity of LLM internal representations to neural activity in the human language system, and (2) behavioral alignment, the similarity of LLM and human behavior on a reading task. We assess 25 vanilla and instruction-tuned LLMs on three datasets involving humans reading naturalistic stories and sentences, and find that instruction-tuning generally enhances brain alignment (~6%), but has no similar effect on behavioral alignment. To identify factors underlying this improvement in brain alignment, we compute correlations between brain alignment and various LLM properties, such as model size, problem-solving, and world knowledge understanding. Notably, we find a strong positive correlation between brain alignment and model size (r = 0.95), as well as performance on tasks requiring world knowledge (r = 0.81). Our results demonstrate that instruction-tuning LLMs improves both world knowledge representations and brain alignment, suggesting that the mechanisms that encode world knowledge in LLMs also improve representational alignment to the human brain.
The Efficiency Spectrum of Large Language Models: An Algorithmic Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a driving force in transforming various domains, reshaping the artificial general intelligence landscape. However, the increasing computational and memory demands of these models present substantial challenges, hindering both academic research and practical applications. To address these issues, a wide array of methods, including both algorithmic and hardware solutions, have been developed to enhance the efficiency of LLMs. This survey delivers a comprehensive review of algorithmic advancements aimed at improving LLM efficiency. Unlike other surveys that typically focus on specific areas such as training or model compression, this paper examines the multi-faceted dimensions of efficiency essential for the end-to-end algorithmic development of LLMs. Specifically, it covers various topics related to efficiency, including scaling laws, data utilization, architectural innovations, training and tuning strategies, and inference techniques. This paper aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, laying the groundwork for future innovations in this critical research area. Our repository of relevant references is maintained at url{https://github.com/tding1/Efficient-LLM-Survey}.
Rethinking Detection Based Table Structure Recognition for Visually Rich Document Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) is a widely discussed task aiming at transforming unstructured table images into structured formats, such as HTML sequences, to make text-only models, such as ChatGPT, that can further process these tables. One type of solution is using detection models to detect table components, such as columns and rows, then applying a rule-based post-processing method to convert detection results into HTML sequences. However, existing detection-based models usually cannot perform as well as other types of solutions regarding cell-level TSR metrics, such as TEDS, and the underlying reasons limiting the performance of these models on the TSR task are also not well-explored. Therefore, we revisit existing detection-based models comprehensively and explore the underlying reasons hindering these models' performance, including the improper problem definition, the mismatch issue of detection and TSR metrics, the characteristics of detection models, and the impact of local and long-range features extraction. Based on our analysis and findings, we apply simple methods to tailor a typical two-stage detection model, Cascade R-CNN, for the TSR task. The experimental results show that the tailored Cascade R-CNN based model can improve the base Cascade R-CNN model by 16.35\% on the FinTabNet dataset regarding the structure-only TEDS, outperforming other types of state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating that our findings can be a guideline for improving detection-based TSR models and that a purely detection-based solution is competitive with other types of solutions, such as graph-based and image-to-sequence solutions.
PointBeV: A Sparse Approach to BeV Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Bird's-eye View (BeV) representations have emerged as the de-facto shared space in driving applications, offering a unified space for sensor data fusion and supporting various downstream tasks. However, conventional models use grids with fixed resolution and range and face computational inefficiencies due to the uniform allocation of resources across all cells. To address this, we propose PointBeV, a novel sparse BeV segmentation model operating on sparse BeV cells instead of dense grids. This approach offers precise control over memory usage, enabling the use of long temporal contexts and accommodating memory-constrained platforms. PointBeV employs an efficient two-pass strategy for training, enabling focused computation on regions of interest. At inference time, it can be used with various memory/performance trade-offs and flexibly adjusts to new specific use cases. PointBeV achieves state-of-the-art results on the nuScenes dataset for vehicle, pedestrian, and lane segmentation, showcasing superior performance in static and temporal settings despite being trained solely with sparse signals. We will release our code along with two new efficient modules used in the architecture: Sparse Feature Pulling, designed for the effective extraction of features from images to BeV, and Submanifold Attention, which enables efficient temporal modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/PointBeV.
A Turing Test: Are AI Chatbots Behaviorally Similar to Humans?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

We administer a Turing Test to AI Chatbots. We examine how Chatbots behave in a suite of classic behavioral games that are designed to elicit characteristics such as trust, fairness, risk-aversion, cooperation, \textit{etc.}, as well as how they respond to a traditional Big-5 psychological survey that measures personality traits. ChatGPT-4 exhibits behavioral and personality traits that are statistically indistinguishable from a random human from tens of thousands of human subjects from more than 50 countries. Chatbots also modify their behavior based on previous experience and contexts ``as if'' they were learning from the interactions, and change their behavior in response to different framings of the same strategic situation. Their behaviors are often distinct from average and modal human behaviors, in which case they tend to behave on the more altruistic and cooperative end of the distribution. We estimate that they act as if they are maximizing an average of their own and partner's payoffs.
Towards Redundancy-Free Sub-networks in Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) is a prominent issue in continual learning. Parameter isolation addresses this challenge by masking a sub-network for each task to mitigate interference with old tasks. However, these sub-networks are constructed relying on weight magnitude, which does not necessarily correspond to the importance of weights, resulting in maintaining unimportant weights and constructing redundant sub-networks. To overcome this limitation, inspired by information bottleneck, which removes redundancy between adjacent network layers, we propose \textbf{\underline{I}nformation \underline{B}ottleneck \underline{M}asked sub-network (IBM)} to eliminate redundancy within sub-networks. Specifically, IBM accumulates valuable information into essential weights to construct redundancy-free sub-networks, not only effectively mitigating CF by freezing the sub-networks but also facilitating new tasks training through the transfer of valuable knowledge. Additionally, IBM decomposes hidden representations to automate the construction process and make it flexible. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IBM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, IBM surpasses the state-of-the-art parameter isolation method with a 70\% reduction in the number of parameters within sub-networks and an 80\% decrease in training time.
Describing Globally Distributed Software Architectures for Tax Compliance
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Background: The company-internal reuse of software components owned by organizational units in different countries constitutes an implicit licensing across borders, which is taxable. This makes tax authorities a less known stakeholder in software architectures. Objective: Therefore, we investigate how software companies can describe the implicit license structure of their globally distributed software architectures to tax authorities. Method: We develop a viewpoint that frames the concerns of tax authorities, use this viewpoint to construct a view of a large-scale microservice architecture of a multinational enterprise, and evaluate the resulting software architecture description with a panel of four tax experts. Results: The panel found our proposed architectural viewpoint properly and sufficiently frames the concerns of taxation stakeholders. However, unclear jurisdictions of owners and potentially insufficient definitions of code ownership and software component introduce significant noise to the view that limits the usefulness and explanatory power of our software architecture description. Conclusion: While our software architecture description provides a solid foundation, we believe it only represents the tip of the iceberg. Future research is necessary to pave the way for advancements in tax compliance within software engineering.