OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Real-World Deployment and Evaluation of Kwame for Science, An AI Teaching Assistant for Science Education in West Africa
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Africa has a high student-to-teacher ratio which limits students' access to teachers for learning support such as educational question answering. In this work, we extended Kwame, a bilingual AI teaching assistant for coding education, adapted it for science education, and deployed it as a web app. Kwame for Science provides passages from well-curated knowledge sources and related past national exam questions as answers to questions from students based on the Integrated Science subject of the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE). Furthermore, students can view past national exam questions along with their answers and filter by year, question type, and topics that were automatically categorized by a topic detection model which we developed (91% unweighted average recall). We deployed Kwame for Science in the real world over 8 months and had 750 users across 32 countries (15 in Africa) and 1.5K questions asked. Our evaluation showed an 87.2% top 3 accuracy (n=109 questions) implying that Kwame for Science has a high chance of giving at least one useful answer among the 3 displayed. We categorized the reasons the model incorrectly answered questions to provide insights for future improvements. We also share challenges and lessons with the development, deployment, and human-computer interaction component of such a tool to enable other researchers to deploy similar tools. With a first-of-its-kind tool within the African context, Kwame for Science has the potential to enable the delivery of scalable, cost-effective, and quality remote education to millions of people across Africa.
An Implicit GNN Solver for Poisson-like problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents $Ψ$-GNN, a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach for solving the ubiquitous Poisson PDE problems with mixed boundary conditions. By leveraging the Implicit Layer Theory, $Ψ$-GNN models an "infinitely" deep network, thus avoiding the empirical tuning of the number of required Message Passing layers to attain the solution. Its original architecture explicitly takes into account the boundary conditions, a critical prerequisite for physical applications, and is able to adapt to any initially provided solution. $Ψ$-GNN is trained using a "physics-informed" loss, and the training process is stable by design, and insensitive to its initialization. Furthermore, the consistency of the approach is theoretically proven, and its flexibility and generalization efficiency are experimentally demonstrated: the same learned model can accurately handle unstructured meshes of various sizes, as well as different boundary conditions. To the best of our knowledge, $Ψ$-GNN is the first physics-informed GNN-based method that can handle various unstructured domains, boundary conditions and initial solutions while also providing convergence guarantees.
FiNER-ORD: Financial Named Entity Recognition Open Research Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Over the last two decades, the development of the CoNLL-2003 named entity recognition (NER) dataset has helped enhance the capabilities of deep learning and natural language processing (NLP). The finance domain, characterized by its unique semantic and lexical variations for the same entities, presents specific challenges to the NER task; thus, a domain-specific customized dataset is crucial for advancing research in this field. In our work, we develop the first high-quality English Financial NER Open Research Dataset (FiNER-ORD). We benchmark multiple pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large-language models (LLMs) on FiNER-ORD. We believe our proposed FiNER-ORD dataset will open future opportunities to use FiNER-ORD as a benchmark for financial domain-specific NER and NLP tasks. Our dataset, models, and code are publicly available on GitHub and Hugging Face under CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Enhanced Face Authentication With Separate Loss Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The overall objective of the main project is to propose and develop a system of facial authentication in unlocking phones or applications in phones using facial recognition. The system will include four separate architectures: face detection, face recognition, face spoofing, and classification of closed eyes. In which, we consider the problem of face recognition to be the most important, determining the true identity of the person standing in front of the screen with absolute accuracy is what facial recognition systems need to achieve. Along with the development of the face recognition problem, the problem of the anti-fake face is also gradually becoming popular and equally important. Our goal is to propose and develop two loss functions: LMCot and Double Loss. Then apply them to the face authentication process.
Gap-closing Matters: Perceptual Quality Evaluation and Optimization of Low-Light Image Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

There is a growing consensus in the research community that the optimization of low-light image enhancement approaches should be guided by the visual quality perceived by end users. Despite the substantial efforts invested in the design of low-light enhancement algorithms, there has been comparatively limited focus on assessing subjective and objective quality systematically. To mitigate this gap and provide a clear path towards optimizing low-light image enhancement for better visual quality, we propose a gap-closing framework. In particular, our gap-closing framework starts with the creation of a large-scale dataset for Subjective QUality Assessment of REconstructed LOw-Light Images (SQUARE-LOL). This database serves as the foundation for studying the quality of enhanced images and conducting a comprehensive subjective user study. Subsequently, we propose an objective quality assessment measure that plays a critical role in bridging the gap between visual quality and enhancement. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed objective quality measure can be incorporated into the process of optimizing the learning of the enhancement model toward perceptual optimality. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework through both the accuracy of quality prediction and the perceptual quality of image enhancement. Our database and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Baoliang93/IACA_For_Lowlight_IQA.
Certifiably Correct Range-Aided SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We present the first algorithm to efficiently compute certifiably optimal solutions to range-aided simultaneous localization and mapping (RA-SLAM) problems. Robotic navigation systems increasingly incorporate point-to-point ranging sensors, leading to state estimation problems in the form of RA-SLAM. However, the RA-SLAM problem is significantly more difficult to solve than traditional pose-graph SLAM: ranging sensor models introduce non-convexity and single range measurements do not uniquely determine the transform between the involved sensors. As a result, RA-SLAM inference is sensitive to initial estimates yet lacks reliable initialization techniques. Our approach, certifiably correct RA-SLAM (CORA), leverages a novel quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) formulation of RA-SLAM to relax the RA-SLAM problem to a semidefinite program (SDP). CORA solves the SDP efficiently using the Riemannian Staircase methodology; the SDP solution provides both (i) a lower bound on the RA-SLAM problem's optimal value, and (ii) an approximate solution of the RA-SLAM problem, which can be subsequently refined using local optimization. CORA applies to problems with arbitrary pose-pose, pose-landmark, and ranging measurements and, due to using convex relaxation, is insensitive to initialization. We evaluate CORA on several real-world problems. In contrast to state-of-the-art approaches, CORA is able to obtain high-quality solutions on all problems despite being initialized with random values. Additionally, we study the tightness of the SDP relaxation with respect to important problem parameters: the number of (i) robots, (ii) landmarks, and (iii) range measurements. These experiments demonstrate that the SDP relaxation is often tight and reveal relationships between graph connectivity and the tightness of the SDP relaxation.
Provable Robustness Against a Union of $\ell_0$ Adversarial Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Sparse or $\ell_0$ adversarial attacks arbitrarily perturb an unknown subset of the features. $\ell_0$ robustness analysis is particularly well-suited for heterogeneous (tabular) data where features have different types or scales. State-of-the-art $\ell_0$ certified defenses are based on randomized smoothing and apply to evasion attacks only. This paper proposes feature partition aggregation (FPA) -- a certified defense against the union of $\ell_0$ evasion, backdoor, and poisoning attacks. FPA generates its stronger robustness guarantees via an ensemble whose submodels are trained on disjoint feature sets. Compared to state-of-the-art $\ell_0$ defenses, FPA is up to 3,000${\times}$ faster and provides larger median robustness guarantees (e.g., median certificates of 13 pixels over 10 for CIFAR10, 12 pixels over 10 for MNIST, 4 features over 1 for Weather, and 3 features over 1 for Ames), meaning FPA provides the additional dimensions of robustness essentially for free.
PEM: Perception Error Model for Virtual Testing of Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Even though virtual testing of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has been well recognized as essential for safety assessment, AV simulators are still undergoing active development. One particularly challenging question is to effectively include the Sensing and Perception (S&P) subsystem into the simulation loop. In this article, we define Perception Error Models (PEM), a virtual simulation component that can enable the analysis of the impact of perception errors on AV safety, without the need to model the sensors themselves. We propose a generalized data-driven procedure towards parametric modeling and evaluate it using Apollo, an open-source driving software, and nuScenes, a public AV dataset. Additionally, we implement PEMs in SVL, an open-source vehicle simulator. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of PEM-based virtual tests, by evaluating camera, LiDAR, and camera-LiDAR setups. Our virtual tests highlight limitations in the current evaluation metrics, and the proposed approach can help study the impact of perception errors on AV safety.
Language Model Crossover: Variation through Few-Shot Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper pursues the insight that language models naturally enable an intelligent variation operator similar in spirit to evolutionary crossover. In particular, language models of sufficient scale demonstrate in-context learning, i.e. they can learn from associations between a small number of input patterns to generate outputs incorporating such associations (also called few-shot prompting). This ability can be leveraged to form a simple but powerful variation operator, i.e. to prompt a language model with a few text-based genotypes (such as code, plain-text sentences, or equations), and to parse its corresponding output as those genotypes' offspring. The promise of such language model crossover (which is simple to implement and can leverage many different open-source language models) is that it enables a simple mechanism to evolve semantically-rich text representations (with few domain-specific tweaks), and naturally benefits from current progress in language models. Experiments in this paper highlight the versatility of language-model crossover, through evolving binary bit-strings, sentences, equations, text-to-image prompts, and Python code. The conclusion is that language model crossover is a promising method for evolving genomes representable as text.
Harnessing the Speed and Accuracy of Machine Learning to Advance Cybersecurity
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

As cyber attacks continue to increase in frequency and sophistication, detecting malware has become a critical task for maintaining the security of computer systems. Traditional signature-based methods of malware detection have limitations in detecting complex and evolving threats. In recent years, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a promising solution to detect malware effectively. ML algorithms are capable of analyzing large datasets and identifying patterns that are difficult for humans to identify. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art ML techniques used in malware detection, including supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. We also examine the challenges and limitations of ML-based malware detection, such as the potential for adversarial attacks and the need for large amounts of labeled data. Furthermore, we discuss future directions in ML-based malware detection, including the integration of multiple ML algorithms and the use of explainable AI techniques to enhance the interpret ability of ML-based detection systems. Our research highlights the potential of ML-based techniques to improve the speed and accuracy of malware detection, and contribute to enhancing cybersecurity
Analyzing And Editing Inner Mechanisms Of Backdoored Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Poisoning of data sets is a potential security threat to large language models that can lead to backdoored models. A description of the internal mechanisms of backdoored language models and how they process trigger inputs, e.g., when switching to toxic language, has yet to be found. In this work, we study the internal representations of transformer-based backdoored language models and determine early-layer MLP modules as most important for the backdoor mechanism in combination with the initial embedding projection. We use this knowledge to remove, insert, and modify backdoor mechanisms with engineered replacements that reduce the MLP module outputs to essentials for the backdoor mechanism. To this end, we introduce PCP ablation, where we replace transformer modules with low-rank matrices based on the principal components of their activations. We demonstrate our results on backdoored toy, backdoored large, and non-backdoored open-source models. We show that we can improve the backdoor robustness of large language models by locally constraining individual modules during fine-tuning on potentially poisonous data sets. Trigger warning: Offensive language.
Joint Learning of Blind Super-Resolution and Crack Segmentation for Realistic Degraded Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes crack segmentation augmented by super resolution (SR) with deep neural networks. In the proposed method, a SR network is jointly trained with a binary segmentation network in an end-to-end manner. This joint learning allows the SR network to be optimized for improving segmentation results. For realistic scenarios, the SR network is extended from non-blind to blind for processing a low-resolution image degraded by unknown blurs. The joint network is improved by our proposed two extra paths that further encourage the mutual optimization between SR and segmentation. Comparative experiments with State of The Art (SoTA) segmentation methods demonstrate the superiority of our joint learning, and various ablation studies prove the effects of our contributions.
PiPar: Pipeline Parallelism for Collaborative Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Collaborative machine learning (CML) techniques, such as federated learning, have been proposed to train deep learning models across multiple mobile devices and a server. CML techniques are privacy-preserving as a local model that is trained on each device instead of the raw data from the device is shared with the server. However, CML training is inefficient due to low resource utilization. We identify idling resources on the server and devices due to sequential computation and communication as the principal cause of low resource utilization. A novel framework PiPar that leverages pipeline parallelism for CML techniques is developed to substantially improve resource utilization. A new training pipeline is designed to parallelize the computations on different hardware resources and communication on different bandwidth resources, thereby accelerating the training process in CML. A low overhead automated parameter selection method is proposed to optimize the pipeline, maximizing the utilization of available resources. The experimental results confirm the validity of the underlying approach of PiPar and highlight that when compared to federated learning: (i) the idle time of the server can be reduced by up to 64.1x, and (ii) the overall training time can be accelerated by up to 34.6x under varying network conditions for a collection of six small and large popular deep neural networks and four datasets without sacrificing accuracy. It is also experimentally demonstrated that PiPar achieves performance benefits when incorporating differential privacy methods and operating in environments with heterogeneous devices and changing bandwidths.
Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought from Labeled Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Chain-of-thought (CoT) advances the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) and achieves superior performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, most CoT studies rely on carefully designed human-annotated rational chains to prompt LLMs, posing challenges for real-world applications where labeled data is available without rational chains. This paper proposes a new strategy, Automate-CoT (Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought), that can bypass human engineering of CoT by automatically augmenting rational chains from a small labeled dataset, and then pruning low-quality chains to construct a candidate pool of machine-generated rationale chains based on the labels. Finally, it selects the optimal combination of several rationale chains from the pool for CoT prompting by employing a variance-reduced policy gradient strategy to estimate the significance of each example. Automate-CoT enables a quick adaptation of the CoT technique to different tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where competitive results are achieved on arithmetic reasoning (+2.7%), commonsense reasoning (+3.4%), symbolic reasoning (+3.2%), and non-reasoning tasks (+2.5%). The code is available at https://github.com/SHUMKASHUN/Automate-CoT.
Toward Self-Adjusting k-ary Search Tree Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Datacenter networks are becoming increasingly flexible with the incorporation of new networking technologies, such as optical circuit switches. These technologies allow for programmable network topologies that can be reconfigured to better serve network traffic, thus enabling a trade-off between the benefits (i.e., shorter routes) and costs of reconfigurations (i.e., overhead). Self-Adjusting Networks (SANs) aim at addressing this trade-off by exploiting patterns in network traffic, both when it is revealed piecewise (online dynamic topologies) or known in advance (offline static topologies). In this paper, we take the first steps toward Self-Adjusting k-ary tree networks. These are more powerful generalizations of existing binary search tree networks (like SplayNets), which have been at the core of SAN designs. k-ary search tree networks are a natural generalization offering nodes of higher degrees, reduced route lengths for a fixed number of nodes, and local routing in spite of reconfigurations. We first compute an offline (optimal) static network for arbitrary traffic patterns in $O(n^3 \cdot k)$ time via dynamic programming, and also improve the bound to $O(n^2 \cdot k)$ for the special case of uniformly distributed traffic. Then, we present a centroid-based topology of the network that can be used both in the offline static and the online setting. In the offline uniform-workload case, we construct this quasi-optimal network in linear time $O(n)$ and, finally, we present online self-adjusting k-ary search tree versions of SplayNet. We evaluate experimentally our new structure for $k=2$ (allowing for a comparison with existing SplayNets) on real and synthetic network traces. Our results show that this approach works better than SplayNet in most of the real network traces and in average to low locality synthetic traces, and is only little inferior to SplayNet in all remaining traces.
Discovering Top-k Structural Hole Spanners in Dynamic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Structural Hole (SH) theory states that the node which acts as a connecting link among otherwise disconnected communities gets positional advantages in the network. These nodes are called Structural Hole Spanners (SHS). Numerous solutions are proposed to discover SHSs; however, most of the solutions are only applicable to static networks. Since real-world networks are dynamic networks; consequently, in this study, we aim to discover SHSs in dynamic networks. Discovering SHSs is an NP-hard problem, due to which, instead of discovering exact k SHSs, we adopt a greedy approach to discover Top-k SHSs. We first propose an efficient Tracking-SHS algorithm for updating SHSs in dynamic networks. Our algorithm reuses the information obtained during the initial runs of the static algorithm and avoids the recomputations for the nodes unaffected by the updates. Besides, motivated from the success of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on various graph mining problems, we also design a Graph Neural Network-based model, GNN-SHS, to discover SHSs in dynamic networks, aiming to reduce the computational cost while achieving high accuracy. We provide a theoretical analysis of the Tracking-SHS algorithm, and our theoretical results prove that for a particular type of graphs, such as Preferential Attachment graphs [1], Tracking-SHS algorithm achieves 1.6 times of speedup compared with the static algorithm. We perform extensive experiments, and our results demonstrate that the Tracking-SHS algorithm attains a minimum of 3.24 times speedup over the static algorithm. Also, the proposed second model GNN-SHS is on an average 671.6 times faster than the Tracking-SHS algorithm.
Neural Graph Revealers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Sparse graph recovery methods work well where the data follows their assumptions but often they are not designed for doing downstream probabilistic queries. This limits their adoption to only identifying connections among the input variables. On the other hand, the Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) assume an underlying base graph between variables and learns a distribution over them. PGM design choices are carefully made such that the inference \& sampling algorithms are efficient. This brings in certain restrictions and often simplifying assumptions. In this work, we propose Neural Graph Revealers (NGRs), that are an attempt to efficiently merge the sparse graph recovery methods with PGMs into a single flow. The problem setting consists of an input data X with D features and M samples and the task is to recover a sparse graph showing connection between the features and jointly learn a probability distribution over them. NGRs view the neural networks as a `glass box' or more specifically as a multitask learning framework. We introduce `Graph-constrained path norm' that NGRs leverage to learn a graphical model that captures complex non-linear functional dependencies between the features in the form of an undirected sparse graph. Furthermore, NGRs can handle multimodal inputs like images, text, categorical data, embeddings etc. which is not straightforward to incorporate in the existing methods. We show experimental results of doing sparse graph recovery and probabilistic inference on data from Gaussian graphical models and a multimodal infant mortality dataset by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.