OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
RSVP: Customer Intent Detection via Agent Response Contrastive and Generative Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The dialogue systems in customer services have been developed with neural models to provide users with precise answers and round-the-clock support in task-oriented conversations by detecting customer intents based on their utterances. Existing intent detection approaches have highly relied on adaptively pre-training language models with large-scale datasets, yet the predominant cost of data collection may hinder their superiority. In addition, they neglect the information within the conversational responses of the agents, which have a lower collection cost, but are significant to customer intent as agents must tailor their replies based on the customers' intent. In this paper, we propose RSVP, a self-supervised framework dedicated to task-oriented dialogues, which utilizes agent responses for pre-training in a two-stage manner. Specifically, we introduce two pre-training tasks to incorporate the relations of utterance-response pairs: 1) Response Retrieval by selecting a correct response from a batch of candidates, and 2) Response Generation by mimicking agents to generate the response to a given utterance. Our benchmark results for two real-world customer service datasets show that RSVP significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by 4.95% for accuracy, 3.4% for MRR@3, and 2.75% for MRR@5 on average. Extensive case studies are investigated to show the validity of incorporating agent responses into the pre-training stage.
CBARF: Cascaded Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields from Imperfect Camera Poses
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Existing volumetric neural rendering techniques, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), face limitations in synthesizing high-quality novel views when the camera poses of input images are imperfect. To address this issue, we propose a novel 3D reconstruction framework that enables simultaneous optimization of camera poses, dubbed CBARF (Cascaded Bundle-Adjusting NeRF).In a nutshell, our framework optimizes camera poses in a coarse-to-fine manner and then reconstructs scenes based on the rectified poses. It is observed that the initialization of camera poses has a significant impact on the performance of bundle-adjustment (BA). Therefore, we cascade multiple BA modules at different scales to progressively improve the camera poses. Meanwhile, we develop a neighbor-replacement strategy to further optimize the results of BA in each stage. In this step, we introduce a novel criterion to effectively identify poorly estimated camera poses. Then we replace them with the poses of neighboring cameras, thus further eliminating the impact of inaccurate camera poses. Once camera poses have been optimized, we employ a density voxel grid to generate high-quality 3D reconstructed scenes and images in novel views. Experimental results demonstrate that our CBARF model achieves state-of-the-art performance in both pose optimization and novel view synthesis, especially in the existence of large camera pose noise.
Negative Sampling with Adaptive Denoising Mixup for Knowledge Graph Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) aims to map entities and relations of a knowledge graph (KG) into a low-dimensional and dense vector space via contrasting the positive and negative triples. In the training process of KGEs, negative sampling is essential to find high-quality negative triples since KGs only contain positive triples. Most existing negative sampling methods assume that non-existent triples with high scores are high-quality negative triples. However, negative triples sampled by these methods are likely to contain noise. Specifically, they ignore that non-existent triples with high scores might also be true facts due to the incompleteness of KGs, which are usually called false negative triples. To alleviate the above issue, we propose an easily pluggable denoising mixup method called DeMix, which generates high-quality triples by refining sampled negative triples in a self-supervised manner. Given a sampled unlabeled triple, DeMix firstly classifies it into a marginal pseudo-negative triple or a negative triple based on the judgment of the KGE model itself. Secondly, it selects an appropriate mixup partner for the current triple to synthesize a partially positive or a harder negative triple. Experimental results on the knowledge graph completion task show that the proposed DeMix is superior to other negative sampling techniques, ensuring corresponding KGEs a faster convergence and better link prediction results.
Can LSH (Locality-Sensitive Hashing) Be Replaced by Neural Network?
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

With the rapid development of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technologies and neural networks, we can explore more appropriate data structures and algorithms. Recent progress shows that neural networks can partly replace traditional data structures. In this paper, we proposed a novel DNN (Deep Neural Network)-based learned locality-sensitive hashing, called LLSH, to efficiently and flexibly map high-dimensional data to low-dimensional space. LLSH replaces the traditional LSH (Locality-sensitive Hashing) function families with parallel multi-layer neural networks, which reduces the time and memory consumption and guarantees query accuracy simultaneously. The proposed LLSH demonstrate the feasibility of replacing the hash index with learning-based neural networks and open a new door for developers to design and configure data organization more accurately to improve information-searching performance. Extensive experiments on different types of datasets show the superiority of the proposed method in query accuracy, time consumption, and memory usage.
Improved Flow Recovery from Packet Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Typical event datasets such as those used in network intrusion detection comprise hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of discrete packet events. These datasets tend to be high dimensional, stateful, and time-series in nature, holding complex local and temporal feature associations. Packet data can be abstracted into lower dimensional summary data, such as packet flow records, where some of the temporal complexities of packet data can be mitigated, and smaller well-engineered feature subsets can be created. This data can be invaluable as training data for machine learning and cyber threat detection techniques. Data can be collected in real-time, or from historical packet trace archives. In this paper we focus on how flow records and summary metadata can be extracted from packet data with high accuracy and robustness. We identify limitations in current methods, how they may impact datasets, and how these flaws may impact learning models. Finally, we propose methods to improve the state of the art and introduce proof of concept tools to support this work.
Reinforcement Learning for Reduced-order Models of Legged Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Model-based approaches for planning and control for bipedal locomotion have a long history of success. It can provide stability and safety guarantees while being effective in accomplishing many locomotion tasks. Model-free reinforcement learning, on the other hand, has gained much popularity in recent years due to computational advancements. It can achieve high performance in specific tasks, but it lacks physical interpretability and flexibility in re-purposing the policy for a different set of tasks. For instance, we can initially train a neural network (NN) policy using velocity commands as inputs. However, to handle new task commands like desired hand or footstep locations at a desired walking velocity, we must retrain a new NN policy. In this work, we attempt to bridge the gap between these two bodies of work on a bipedal platform. We formulate a model-based reinforcement learning problem to learn a reduced-order model (ROM) within a model predictive control (MPC). Results show a 49% improvement in viable task region size and a 21% reduction in motor torque cost. All videos and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/ymchen/research/rl-for-roms.
Unmasking the Web of Deceit: Uncovering Coordinated Activity to Expose Information Operations on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have become pivotal arenas for influence campaigns, often orchestrated by state-sponsored information operations (IOs). This paper delves into the detection of key players driving IOs by employing similarity graphs constructed from behavioral pattern data. We unveil that well-known, yet underutilized network properties can help accurately identify coordinated IO drivers. Drawing from a comprehensive dataset of 49 million tweets from six countries, which includes multiple verified IOs, our study reveals that traditional network filtering techniques do not consistently pinpoint IO drivers across campaigns. We first propose a framework based on node pruning that emerges superior, particularly when combining multiple behavioral indicators across different networks. Then, we introduce a supervised machine learning model that harnesses a vector representation of the fused similarity network. This model, which boasts a precision exceeding 0.95, adeptly classifies IO drivers on a global scale and reliably forecasts their temporal engagements. Our findings are crucial in the fight against deceptive influence campaigns on social media, helping us better understand and detect them.
Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Transfer-based Adversarial Attacks via Data-centric Robust Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Transfer-based adversarial attacks raise a severe threat to real-world deep learning systems since they do not require access to target models. Adversarial training (AT), which is recognized as the strongest defense against white-box attacks, has also guaranteed high robustness to (black-box) transfer-based attacks. However, AT suffers from heavy computational overhead since it optimizes the adversarial examples during the whole training process. In this paper, we demonstrate that such heavy optimization is not necessary for AT against transfer-based attacks. Instead, a one-shot adversarial augmentation prior to training is sufficient, and we name this new defense paradigm Data-centric Robust Learning (DRL). Our experimental results show that DRL outperforms widely-used AT techniques (e.g., PGD-AT, TRADES, EAT, and FAT) in terms of black-box robustness and even surpasses the top-1 defense on RobustBench when combined with diverse data augmentations and loss regularizations. We also identify other benefits of DRL, for instance, the model generalization capability and robust fairness.
Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in h-space of Pre-trained Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose the first unsupervised and learning-based method to identify interpretable directions in h-space of pre-trained diffusion models. Our method is derived from an existing technique that operates on the GAN latent space. Specifically, we employ a shift control module that works on h-space of pre-trained diffusion models to manipulate a sample into a shifted version of itself, followed by a reconstructor to reproduce both the type and the strength of the manipulation. By jointly optimizing them, the model will spontaneously discover disentangled and interpretable directions. To prevent the discovery of meaningless and destructive directions, we employ a discriminator to maintain the fidelity of shifted sample. Due to the iterative generative process of diffusion models, our training requires a substantial amount of GPU VRAM to store numerous intermediate tensors for back-propagating gradient. To address this issue, we propose a general VRAM-efficient training algorithm based on gradient checkpointing technique to back-propagate any gradient through the whole generative process, with acceptable occupancy of VRAM and sacrifice of training efficiency. Compared with existing related works on diffusion models, our method inherently identifies global and scalable directions, without necessitating any other complicated procedures. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Network Disruption via Continuous Batch Removal: The Case of Sicilian Mafia
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Network disruption is pivotal in understanding the robustness and vulnerability of complex networks, which is instrumental in devising strategies for infrastructure protection, epidemic control, cybersecurity, and combating crime. In this paper, with a particular focus on disrupting criminal networks, we proposed to impose a within-the-largest-connected-component constraint in a continuous batch removal disruption process. Through a series of experiments on a recently released Sicilian Mafia network, we revealed that the constraint would enhance degree-based methods while weakening betweenness-based approaches. Moreover, based on the findings from the experiments using various disruption strategies, we propose a structurally-filtered greedy disruption strategy that integrates the effectiveness of greedy-like methods with the efficiency of structural-metric-based approaches. The proposed strategy significantly outperforms the longstanding state-of-the-art method of betweenness centrality while maintaining the same time complexity.
Applications of Machine Learning in Biopharmaceutical Process Development and Manufacturing: Current Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

While machine learning (ML) has made significant contributions to the biopharmaceutical field, its applications are still in the early stages in terms of providing direct support for quality-by-design based development and manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals, hindering the enormous potential for bioprocesses automation from their development to manufacturing. However, the adoption of ML-based models instead of conventional multivariate data analysis methods is significantly increasing due to the accumulation of large-scale production data. This trend is primarily driven by the real-time monitoring of process variables and quality attributes of biopharmaceutical products through the implementation of advanced process analytical technologies. Given the complexity and multidimensionality of a bioproduct design, bioprocess development, and product manufacturing data, ML-based approaches are increasingly being employed to achieve accurate, flexible, and high-performing predictive models to address the problems of analytics, monitoring, and control within the biopharma field. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the current applications of ML solutions in a bioproduct design, monitoring, control, and optimisation of upstream, downstream, and product formulation processes. Finally, this paper thoroughly discusses the main challenges related to the bioprocesses themselves, process data, and the use of machine learning models in biopharmaceutical process development and manufacturing. Moreover, it offers further insights into the adoption of innovative machine learning methods and novel trends in the development of new digital biopharma solutions.
A Survey of Graph and Attention Based Hyperspectral Image Classification Methods for Remote Sensing Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The use of Deep Learning techniques for classification in Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is rapidly growing and achieving improved performances. Due to the nature of the data captured by sensors that produce HSI images, a common issue is the dimensionality of the bands that may or may not contribute to the label class distinction. Due to the widespread nature of class labels, Principal Component Analysis is a common method used for reducing the dimensionality. However,there may exist methods that incorporate all bands of the Hyperspectral image with the help of the Attention mechanism. Furthermore, to yield better spectral spatial feature extraction, recent methods have also explored the usage of Graph Convolution Networks and their unique ability to use node features in prediction, which is akin to the pixel spectral makeup. In this survey we present a comprehensive summary of Graph based and Attention based methods to perform Hyperspectral Image Classification for remote sensing and aerial HSI images. We also summarize relevant datasets on which these techniques have been evaluated and benchmark the processing techniques.
Towards Unified and Effective Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose $\textbf{UniDG}$, a novel and $\textbf{Uni}$fied framework for $\textbf{D}$omain $\textbf{G}$eneralization that is capable of significantly enhancing the out-of-distribution generalization performance of foundation models regardless of their architectures. The core idea of UniDG is to finetune models during the inference stage, which saves the cost of iterative training. Specifically, we encourage models to learn the distribution of test data in an unsupervised manner and impose a penalty regarding the updating step of model parameters. The penalty term can effectively reduce the catastrophic forgetting issue as we would like to maximally preserve the valuable knowledge in the original model. Empirically, across 12 visual backbones, including CNN-, MLP-, and Transformer-based models, ranging from 1.89M to 303M parameters, UniDG shows an average accuracy improvement of +5.4% on DomainBed. These performance results demonstrate the superiority and versatility of UniDG. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/invictus717/UniDG
Towards Scalable Cross-Chain Messaging
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Blockchains were originally designed as closed execution environments and lack the ability to communicate directly with external systems. To overcome this limitation, many blockchains employ relayers, external applications capable of transporting data between different blockchains. Typically, the process of relaying data is permissionless and multiple independent relayers work concurrently to transport the same information between two blockchains. While this model increases the reliability of data delivery by providing redundancy, it also introduces challenges that have not been previously discussed. In this work, we bridge this gap by discussing the shortcomings of permissionless cross-chain relaying systems and identifying three issues that adversely impact their performance, scalability and security. We take the first step towards addressing issues that hinder performance and scalability by proposing a novel protocol to enable coordination among independent relayers. Additionally, we provide an in-depth discussion about the trade-offs associated with the design of relayer coordination protocols for permissionless settings. Through this work we provide a foundation for improving cross-chain relaying services.
Dual-Scale Interest Extraction Framework with Self-Supervision for Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

In the sequential recommendation task, the recommender generally learns multiple embeddings from a user's historical behaviors, to catch the diverse interests of the user. Nevertheless, the existing approaches just extract each interest independently for the corresponding sub-sequence while ignoring the global correlation of the entire interaction sequence, which may fail to capture the user's inherent preference for the potential interests generalization and unavoidably make the recommended items homogeneous with the historical behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Scale Interest Extraction framework (DSIE) to precisely estimate the user's current interests. Specifically, DSIE explicitly models the user's inherent preference with contrastive learning by attending over his/her entire interaction sequence at the global scale and catches the user's diverse interests in a fine granularity at the local scale. Moreover, we develop a novel interest aggregation module to integrate the multi-interests according to the inherent preference to generate the user's current interests for the next-item prediction. Experiments conducted on three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that DSIE outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of recommendation preciseness and novelty.
TRANSOM: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant System for Training LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, represented by chatGPT, have achieved profound impact on various fields. However, training LLMs with super-large-scale parameters requires large high-performance GPU clusters and long training periods lasting for months. Due to the inevitable hardware and software failures in large-scale clusters, maintaining uninterrupted and long-duration training is extremely challenging. As a result, A substantial amount of training time is devoted to task checkpoint saving and loading, task rescheduling and restart, and task manual anomaly checks, which greatly harms the overall training efficiency. To address these issues, we propose TRANSOM, a novel fault-tolerant LLM training system. In this work, we design three key subsystems: the training pipeline automatic fault tolerance and recovery mechanism named Transom Operator and Launcher (TOL), the training task multi-dimensional metric automatic anomaly detection system named Transom Eagle Eye (TEE), and the training checkpoint asynchronous access automatic fault tolerance and recovery technology named Transom Checkpoint Engine (TCE). Here, TOL manages the lifecycle of training tasks, while TEE is responsible for task monitoring and anomaly reporting. TEE detects training anomalies and reports them to TOL, who automatically enters the fault tolerance strategy to eliminate abnormal nodes and restart the training task. And the asynchronous checkpoint saving and loading functionality provided by TCE greatly shorten the fault tolerance overhead. The experimental results indicate that TRANSOM significantly enhances the efficiency of large-scale LLM training on clusters. Specifically, the pre-training time for GPT3-175B has been reduced by 28%, while checkpoint saving and loading performance have improved by a factor of 20.