OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Simulating Weighted Automata over Sequences and Trees with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Transformers are ubiquitous models in the natural language processing (NLP) community and have shown impressive empirical successes in the past few years. However, little is understood about how they reason and the limits of their computational capabilities. These models do not process data sequentially, and yet outperform sequential neural models such as RNNs. Recent work has shown that these models can compactly simulate the sequential reasoning abilities of deterministic finite automata (DFAs). This leads to the following question: can transformers simulate the reasoning of more complex finite state machines? In this work, we show that transformers can simulate weighted finite automata (WFAs), a class of models which subsumes DFAs, as well as weighted tree automata (WTA), a generalization of weighted automata to tree structured inputs. We prove these claims formally and provide upper bounds on the sizes of the transformer models needed as a function of the number of states the target automata. Empirically, we perform synthetic experiments showing that transformers are able to learn these compact solutions via standard gradient-based training.
What Was Your Prompt? A Remote Keylogging Attack on AI Assistants
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

AI assistants are becoming an integral part of society, used for asking advice or help in personal and confidential issues. In this paper, we unveil a novel side-channel that can be used to read encrypted responses from AI Assistants over the web: the token-length side-channel. We found that many vendors, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have this side-channel. However, inferring the content of a response from a token-length sequence alone proves challenging. This is because tokens are akin to words, and responses can be several sentences long leading to millions of grammatically correct sentences. In this paper, we show how this can be overcome by (1) utilizing the power of a large language model (LLM) to translate these sequences, (2) providing the LLM with inter-sentence context to narrow the search space and (3) performing a known-plaintext attack by fine-tuning the model on the target model's writing style. Using these methods, we were able to accurately reconstruct 29\% of an AI assistant's responses and successfully infer the topic from 55\% of them. To demonstrate the threat, we performed the attack on OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 and Microsoft's Copilot on both browser and API traffic.
Comparing Rationality Between Large Language Models and Humans: Insights and Open Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper delves into the dynamic landscape of artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on the burgeoning prominence of large language models (LLMs). We underscore the pivotal role of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in augmenting LLMs' rationality and decision-making prowess. By meticulously examining the intricate relationship between human interaction and LLM behavior, we explore questions surrounding rationality and performance disparities between humans and LLMs, with particular attention to the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Our research employs comprehensive comparative analysis and delves into the inherent challenges of irrationality in LLMs, offering valuable insights and actionable strategies for enhancing their rationality. These findings hold significant implications for the widespread adoption of LLMs across diverse domains and applications, underscoring their potential to catalyze advancements in artificial intelligence.
xLP: Explainable Link Prediction for Master Data Management
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Explaining neural model predictions to users requires creativity. Especially in enterprise applications, where there are costs associated with users' time, and their trust in the model predictions is critical for adoption. For link prediction in master data management, we have built a number of explainability solutions drawing from research in interpretability, fact verification, path ranking, neuro-symbolic reasoning and self-explaining AI. In this demo, we present explanations for link prediction in a creative way, to allow users to choose explanations they are more comfortable with.
Towards the Reusability and Compositionality of Causal Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Causal Representation Learning (CRL) aims at identifying high-level causal factors and their relationships from high-dimensional observations, e.g., images. While most CRL works focus on learning causal representations in a single environment, in this work we instead propose a first step towards learning causal representations from temporal sequences of images that can be adapted in a new environment, or composed across multiple related environments. In particular, we introduce DECAF, a framework that detects which causal factors can be reused and which need to be adapted from previously learned causal representations. Our approach is based on the availability of intervention targets, that indicate which variables are perturbed at each time step. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that integrating our framework with four state-of-the-art CRL approaches leads to accurate representations in a new environment with only a few samples.
BAT-LZ Out of Hell
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Despite consistently yielding the best compression on repetitive text collections, the Lempel-Ziv parsing has resisted all attempts at offering relevant guarantees on the cost to access an arbitrary symbol. This makes it less attractive for use on compressed self-indexes and other compressed data structures. In this paper we introduce a variant we call BAT-LZ (for Bounded Access Time Lempel-Ziv) where the access cost is bounded by a parameter given at compression time. We design and implement a linear-space algorithm that, in time $O(n\log^3 n)$, obtains a BAT-LZ parse of a text of length $n$ by greedily maximizing each next phrase length. The algorithm builds on a new linear-space data structure that solves 5-sided orthogonal range queries in rank space, allowing updates to the coordinate where the one-sided queries are supported, in $O(\log^3 n)$ time for both queries and updates. This time can be reduced to $O(\log^2 n)$ if $O(n\log n)$ space is used. We design a second algorithm that chooses the sources for the phrases in a clever way, using an enhanced suffix tree, albeit no longer guaranteeing longest possible phrases. This algorithm is much slower in theory, but in practice it is comparable to the greedy parser, while achieving significantly superior compression. We then combine the two algorithms, resulting in a parser that always chooses the longest possible phrases, and the best sources for those. Our experimentation shows that, on most repetitive texts, our algorithms reach an access cost close to $\log_2 n$ on texts of length $n$, while incurring almost no loss in the compression ratio when compared with classical LZ-compression. Several open challenges are discussed at the end of the paper.
Robust Light-Weight Facial Affective Behavior Recognition with CLIP
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Human affective behavior analysis aims to delve into human expressions and behaviors to deepen our understanding of human emotions. Basic expression categories (EXPR) and Action Units (AUs) are two essential components in this analysis, which categorize emotions and break down facial movements into elemental units, respectively. Despite advancements, existing approaches in expression classification and AU detection often necessitate complex models and substantial computational resources, limiting their applicability in everyday settings. In this work, we introduce the first lightweight framework adept at efficiently tackling both expression classification and AU detection. This framework employs a frozen CLIP image encoder alongside a trainable multilayer perceptron (MLP), enhanced with Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) for robustness and a loss landscape flattening strategy for improved generalization. Experimental results on the Aff-wild2 dataset demonstrate superior performance in comparison to the baseline while maintaining minimal computational demands, offering a practical solution for affective behavior analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Affective_Behavior_Analysis_M2_PURDUE
Recurrent Drafter for Fast Speculative Decoding in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We present Recurrent Drafter (ReDrafter), an advanced speculative decoding approach that achieves state-of-the-art speedup for large language models (LLMs) inference. The performance gains are driven by three key aspects: (1) leveraging a recurrent neural network (RNN) as the draft model conditioning on LLM's hidden states, (2) applying a dynamic tree attention algorithm over beam search results to eliminate duplicated prefixes in candidate sequences, and (3) training through knowledge distillation from the LLM. ReDrafter accelerates Vicuna inference in MT-Bench by up to 2.8x with a PyTorch implementation on Nvidia H100 GPUs. To demonstrate its practicality in real environments, we also validated its effectiveness for on-device applications by implementing the approach in MLX and benchmarking performance on Metal GPUs in Apple Silicon chips, achieving up to 2.3x speedup.
Shifting Focus: From Global Semantics to Local Prominent Features in Swin-Transformer for Knee Osteoarthritis Severity Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Conventional imaging diagnostics frequently encounter bottlenecks due to manual inspection, which can lead to delays and inconsistencies. Although deep learning offers a pathway to automation and enhanced accuracy, foundational models in computer vision often emphasize global context at the expense of local details, which are vital for medical imaging diagnostics. To address this, we harness the Swin Transformer's capacity to discern extended spatial dependencies within images through the hierarchical framework. Our novel contribution lies in refining local feature representations, orienting them specifically toward the final distribution of the classifier. This method ensures that local features are not only preserved but are also enriched with task-specific information, enhancing their relevance and detail at every hierarchical level. By implementing this strategy, our model demonstrates significant robustness and precision, as evidenced by extensive validation of two established benchmarks for Knee OsteoArthritis (KOA) grade classification. These results highlight our approach's effectiveness and its promising implications for the future of medical imaging diagnostics. Our implementation is available on https://github.com/mtliba/KOA_NLCS2024
Fast Group Scheduling for Downlink Large-Scale Multi-Group Multicast Beamforming
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Next-generation wireless networks need to handle massive user access effectively. This paper addresses the problem of joint group scheduling and multicast beamforming for downlink transmission with many active user groups. Aiming to maximize the minimum user throughput, we propose a three-phase approach to tackle this difficult joint optimization problem efficiently. In Phase 1, we utilize the optimal multicast beamforming structure obtained recently to find the group-channel directions for all groups. We propose two low-complexity group scheduling algorithms in Phase 2, which determine the subset of groups in each time slot sequentially and the total number of time slots required for all groups. The first algorithm measures the level of spatial separation among groups and selects the dissimilar groups that maximize the minimum user rate into the same time slot. In contrast, the second algorithm first identifies the spatially correlated groups via a learning-based clustering method based on the group-channel directions, and then separates spatially similar groups into different time slots. Finally, the multicast beamformers for the scheduled groups are obtained in each time slot by a computationally efficient method. Simulation results show that our proposed scheduling methods can effectively capture the level of spatial separation among groups to improve the minimum user throughput over the conventional approach that serves all groups in a single time slot or one group per time slot, and can be executed with low computational complexity.
NNCTC: Physical Layer Cross-Technology Communication via Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-technology communication(CTC) enables seamless interactions between diverse wireless technologies. Most existing work is based on reversing the transmission path to identify the appropriate payload to generate the waveform that the target devices can recognize. However, this method suffers from many limitations, including dependency on specific technologies and the necessity for intricate algorithms to mitigate distortion. In this work, we present NNCTC, a Neural-Network-based Cross-Technology Communication framework inspired by the adaptability of trainable neural models in wireless communications. By converting signal processing components within the CTC pipeline into neural models, the NNCTC is designed for end-to-end training without requiring labeled data. This enables the NNCTC system to autonomously derive the optimal CTC payload, which significantly eases the development complexity and showcases the scalability potential for various CTC links. Particularly, we construct a CTC system from Wi-Fi to ZigBee. The NNCTC system outperforms the well-recognized WEBee and WIDE design in error performance, achieving an average packet reception rate(PRR) of 92.3% and an average symbol error rate(SER) as low as 1.3%.
Boundary Matters: A Bi-Level Active Finetuning Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The pretraining-finetuning paradigm has gained widespread adoption in vision tasks and other fields, yet it faces the significant challenge of high sample annotation costs. To mitigate this, the concept of active finetuning has emerged, aiming to select the most appropriate samples for model finetuning within a limited budget. Traditional active learning methods often struggle in this setting due to their inherent bias in batch selection. Furthermore, the recent active finetuning approach has primarily concentrated on aligning the distribution of selected subsets with the overall data pool, focusing solely on diversity. In this paper, we propose a Bi-Level Active Finetuning framework to select the samples for annotation in one shot, which includes two stages: core sample selection for diversity, and boundary sample selection for uncertainty. The process begins with the identification of pseudo-class centers, followed by an innovative denoising method and an iterative strategy for boundary sample selection in the high-dimensional feature space, all without relying on ground-truth labels. Our comprehensive experiments provide both qualitative and quantitative evidence of our method's efficacy, outperforming all the existing baselines.
A survey of synthetic data augmentation methods in computer vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The standard approach to tackling computer vision problems is to train deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models using large-scale image datasets which are representative of the target task. However, in many scenarios, it is often challenging to obtain sufficient image data for the target task. Data augmentation is a way to mitigate this challenge. A common practice is to explicitly transform existing images in desired ways so as to create the required volume and variability of training data necessary to achieve good generalization performance. In situations where data for the target domain is not accessible, a viable workaround is to synthesize training data from scratch--i.e., synthetic data augmentation. This paper presents an extensive review of synthetic data augmentation techniques. It covers data synthesis approaches based on realistic 3D graphics modeling, neural style transfer (NST), differential neural rendering, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs). For each of these classes of methods, we focus on the important data generation and augmentation techniques, general scope of application and specific use-cases, as well as existing limitations and possible workarounds. Additionally, we provide a summary of common synthetic datasets for training computer vision models, highlighting the main features, application domains and supported tasks. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of synthetic data augmentation methods. Since this is the first paper to explore synthetic data augmentation methods in great detail, we are hoping to equip readers with the necessary background information and in-depth knowledge of existing methods and their attendant issues.
DRAGIN: Dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation based on the Information Needs of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Dynamic retrieval augmented generation (RAG) paradigm actively decides when and what to retrieve during the text generation process of Large Language Models (LLMs). There are two key elements of this paradigm: identifying the optimal moment to activate the retrieval module (deciding when to retrieve) and crafting the appropriate query once retrieval is triggered (determining what to retrieve). However, current dynamic RAG methods fall short in both aspects. Firstly, the strategies for deciding when to retrieve often rely on static rules. Moreover, the strategies for deciding what to retrieve typically limit themselves to the LLM's most recent sentence or the last few tokens, while the LLM's real-time information needs may span across the entire context. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new framework, DRAGIN, i.e., Dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation based on the real-time Information Needs of LLMs. Our framework is specifically designed to make decisions on when and what to retrieve based on the LLM's real-time information needs during the text generation process. We evaluate DRAGIN along with existing methods comprehensively over 4 knowledge-intensive generation datasets. Experimental results show that DRAGIN achieves superior performance on all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. We have open-sourced all the code, data, and models in GitHub: https://github.com/oneal2000/DRAGIN/tree/main
Large Language Models to Generate System-Level Test Programs Targeting Non-functional Properties
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

System-Level Test (SLT) has been a part of the test flow for integrated circuits for over a decade and still gains importance. However, no systematic approaches exist for test program generation, especially targeting non-functional properties of the Device under Test (DUT). Currently, test engineers manually compose test suites from off-the-shelf software, approximating the end-user environment of the DUT. This is a challenging and tedious task that does not guarantee sufficient control over non-functional properties. This paper proposes Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate test programs. We take a first glance at how pre-trained LLMs perform in test program generation to optimize non-functional properties of the DUT. Therefore, we write a prompt to generate C code snippets that maximize the instructions per cycle of a super-scalar, out-of-order architecture in simulation. Additionally, we apply prompt and hyperparameter optimization to achieve the best possible results without further training.
CSDNet: Detect Salient Object in Depth-Thermal via A Lightweight Cross Shallow and Deep Perception Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

While we enjoy the richness and informativeness of multimodal data, it also introduces interference and redundancy of information. To achieve optimal domain interpretation with limited resources, we propose CSDNet, a lightweight \textbf{C}ross \textbf{S}hallow and \textbf{D}eep Perception \textbf{Net}work designed to integrate two modalities with less coherence, thereby discarding redundant information or even modality. We implement our CSDNet for Salient Object Detection (SOD) task in robotic perception. The proposed method capitalises on spatial information prescreening and implicit coherence navigation across shallow and deep layers of the depth-thermal (D-T) modality, prioritising integration over fusion to maximise the scene interpretation. To further refine the descriptive capabilities of the encoder for the less-known D-T modalities, we also propose SAMAEP to guide an effective feature mapping to the generalised feature space. Our approach is tested on the VDT-2048 dataset, leveraging the D-T modality outperforms those of SOTA methods using RGB-T or RGB-D modalities for the first time, achieves comparable performance with the RGB-D-T triple-modality benchmark method with 5.97 times faster at runtime and demanding 0.0036 times fewer FLOPs. Demonstrates the proposed CSDNet effectively integrates the information from the D-T modality. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Meta Operator for Complex Query Answering on Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge graphs contain informative factual knowledge but are considered incomplete. To answer complex queries under incomplete knowledge, learning-based Complex Query Answering (CQA) models are proposed to directly learn from the query-answer samples to avoid the direct traversal of incomplete graph data. Existing works formulate the training of complex query answering models as multi-task learning and require a large number of training samples. In this work, we explore the compositional structure of complex queries and argue that the different logical operator types, rather than the different complex query types, are the key to improving generalizability. Accordingly, we propose a meta-learning algorithm to learn the meta-operators with limited data and adapt them to different instances of operators under various complex queries. Empirical results show that learning meta-operators is more effective than learning original CQA or meta-CQA models.
Regularization-Based Efficient Continual Learning in Deep State-Space Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep state-space models (DSSMs) have gained popularity in recent years due to their potent modeling capacity for dynamic systems. However, existing DSSM works are limited to single-task modeling, which requires retraining with historical task data upon revisiting a forepassed task. To address this limitation, we propose continual learning DSSMs (CLDSSMs), which are capable of adapting to evolving tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed CLDSSMs integrate mainstream regularization-based continual learning (CL) methods, ensuring efficient updates with constant computational and memory costs for modeling multiple dynamic systems. We also conduct a comprehensive cost analysis of each CL method applied to the respective CLDSSMs, and demonstrate the efficacy of CLDSSMs through experiments on real-world datasets. The results corroborate that while various competing CL methods exhibit different merits, the proposed CLDSSMs consistently outperform traditional DSSMs in terms of effectively addressing catastrophic forgetting, enabling swift and accurate parameter transfer to new tasks.