OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Training Without Depth Limits: Batch Normalization Without Gradient Explosion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Normalization layers are one of the key building blocks for deep neural networks. Several theoretical studies have shown that batch normalization improves the signal propagation, by avoiding the representations from becoming collinear across the layers. However, results on mean-field theory of batch normalization also conclude that this benefit comes at the expense of exploding gradients in depth. Motivated by these two aspects of batch normalization, in this study we pose the following question: "Can a batch-normalized network keep the optimal signal propagation properties, but avoid exploding gradients?" We answer this question in the affirmative by giving a particular construction of an Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) with linear activations and batch-normalization that provably has bounded gradients at any depth. Based on Weingarten calculus, we develop a rigorous and non-asymptotic theory for this constructed MLP that gives a precise characterization of forward signal propagation, while proving that gradients remain bounded for linearly independent input samples, which holds in most practical settings. Inspired by our theory, we also design an activation shaping scheme that empirically achieves the same properties for certain non-linear activations.
Spectral operator learning for parametric PDEs without data reliance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we introduce the Spectral Coefficient Learning via Operator Network (SCLON), a novel operator learning-based approach for solving parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) without the need for data harnessing. The cornerstone of our method is the spectral methodology that employs expansions using orthogonal functions, such as Fourier series and Legendre polynomials, enabling accurate PDE solutions with fewer grid points. By merging the merits of spectral methods - encompassing high accuracy, efficiency, generalization, and the exact fulfillment of boundary conditions - with the prowess of deep neural networks, SCLON offers a transformative strategy. Our approach not only eliminates the need for paired input-output training data, which typically requires extensive numerical computations, but also effectively learns and predicts solutions of complex parametric PDEs, ranging from singularly perturbed convection-diffusion equations to the Navier-Stokes equations. The proposed framework demonstrates superior performance compared to existing scientific machine learning techniques, offering solutions for multiple instances of parametric PDEs without harnessing data. The mathematical framework is robust and reliable, with a well-developed loss function derived from the weak formulation, ensuring accurate approximation of solutions while exactly satisfying boundary conditions. The method's efficacy is further illustrated through its ability to accurately predict intricate natural behaviors like the Kolmogorov flow and boundary layers. In essence, our work pioneers a compelling avenue for parametric PDE solutions, serving as a bridge between traditional numerical methodologies and cutting-edge machine learning techniques in the realm of scientific computation.
Tuning Large language model for End-to-end Speech Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), multimodal models based on LLMs have demonstrated significant potential. Models such as LLaSM, X-LLM, and SpeechGPT exhibit an impressive ability to comprehend and generate human instructions. However, their performance often falters when faced with complex tasks like end-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST), a cross-language and cross-modal translation task. In comparison to single-modal models, multimodal models lag behind in these scenarios. This paper introduces LST, a Large multimodal model designed to excel at the E2E-ST task. LST consists of a speech frontend, an adapter, and a LLM backend. The training of LST consists of two stages: (1) Modality adjustment, where the adapter is tuned to align speech representation with text embedding space, and (2) Downstream task fine-tuning, where both the adapter and LLM model are trained to optimize performance on the E2EST task. Experimental results on the MuST-C speech translation benchmark demonstrate that LST-13B achieves BLEU scores of 30.39/41.55/35.33 on En-De/En-Fr/En-Es language pairs, surpassing previous models and establishing a new state-of-the-art. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of single-modal model selection and the impact of training strategies, which lays the foundation for future research. We will open up our code and models after review.
Controlling Topic-Focus Articulation in Meaning-to-Text Generation using Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

A bare meaning representation can be expressed in various ways using natural language, depending on how the information is structured on the surface level. We are interested in finding ways to control topic-focus articulation when generating text from meaning. We focus on distinguishing active and passive voice for sentences with transitive verbs. The idea is to add pragmatic information such as topic to the meaning representation, thereby forcing either active or passive voice when given to a natural language generation system. We use graph neural models because there is no explicit information about word order in a meaning represented by a graph. We try three different methods for topic-focus articulation (TFA) employing graph neural models for a meaning-to-text generation task. We propose a novel encoding strategy about node aggregation in graph neural models, which instead of traditional encoding by aggregating adjacent node information, learns node representations by using depth-first search. The results show our approach can get competitive performance with state-of-art graph models on general text generation, and lead to significant improvements on the task of active-passive conversion compared to traditional adjacency-based aggregation strategies. Different types of TFA can have a huge impact on the performance of the graph models.
Gotta Catch 'em All: Aggregating CVSS Scores
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Security metrics are not standardized, but inter-national proposals such as the Common Vulnerability ScoringSystem (CVSS) for quantifying the severity of known vulnerabil-ities are widely used. Many CVSS aggregation mechanisms havebeen proposed in the literature. Nevertheless, factors related tothe context of the System Under Test (SUT) are not taken intoaccount in the aggregation process; vulnerabilities that in theoryaffect the SUT, but are not exploitable in reality. We propose aCVSS aggregation algorithm that integrates information aboutthe functionality disruption of the SUT, exploitation difficulty,existence of exploits, and the context where the SUT operates.The aggregation algorithm was applied to OpenPLC V3, showingthat it is capable of filtering out vulnerabilities that cannot beexploited in the real conditions of deployment of the particularsystem. Finally, because of the nature of the proposed algorithm,the result can be interpreted in the same way as a normal CVSS.
What Does the Chart Say? Grouping Cues Guide Viewer Comparisons and Conclusions in Bar Charts
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Reading a visualization is like reading a paragraph. Each sentence is a comparison: the mean of these is higher than those; this difference is smaller than that. What determines which comparisons are made first? The viewer's goals and expertise matter, but the way that values are visually grouped together within the chart also impacts those comparisons. Research from psychology suggests that comparisons involve multiple steps. First, the viewer divides the visualization into a set of units. This might include a single bar or a grouped set of bars. Then the viewer selects and compares two of these units, perhaps noting that one pair of bars is longer than another. Viewers might take an additional third step and perform a second-order comparison, perhaps determining that the difference between one pair of bars is greater than the difference between another pair. We create a visual comparison taxonomy that allows us to develop and test a sequence of hypotheses about which comparisons people are more likely to make when reading a visualization. We find that people tend to compare two groups before comparing two individual bars and that second-order comparisons are rare. Visual cues like spatial proximity and color can influence which elements are grouped together and selected for comparison, with spatial proximity being a stronger grouping cue. Interestingly, once the viewer grouped together and compared a set of bars, regardless of whether the group is formed by spatial proximity or color similarity, they no longer consider other possible groupings in their comparisons.
Point Neighborhood Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Point convolution operations rely on different embedding mechanisms to encode the neighborhood information of each point in order to detect patterns in 3D space. However, as convolutions are usually evaluated as a whole, not much work has been done to investigate which is the ideal mechanism to encode such neighborhood information. In this paper, we provide the first extensive study that analyzes such Point Neighborhood Embeddings (PNE) alone in a controlled experimental setup. From our experiments, we derive a set of recommendations for PNE that can help to improve future designs of neural network architectures for point clouds. Our most surprising finding shows that the most commonly used embedding based on a Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) with ReLU activation functions provides the lowest performance among all embeddings, even being surpassed on some tasks by a simple linear combination of the point coordinates. Additionally, we show that a neural network architecture using simple convolutions based on such embeddings is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on several tasks, outperforming recent and more complex operations. Lastly, we show that these findings extrapolate to other more complex convolution operations, where we show how following our recommendations we are able to improve recent state-of-the-art architectures.
HPCClusterScape: Increasing Transparency and Efficiency of Shared High-Performance Computing Clusters for Large-scale AI Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The emergence of large-scale AI models, like GPT-4, has significantly impacted academia and industry, driving the demand for high-performance computing (HPC) to accelerate workloads. To address this, we present HPCClusterScape, a visualization system that enhances the efficiency and transparency of shared HPC clusters for large-scale AI models. HPCClusterScape provides a comprehensive overview of system-level (e.g., partitions, hosts, and workload status) and application-level (e.g., identification of experiments and researchers) information, allowing HPC operators and machine learning researchers to monitor resource utilization and identify issues through customizable violation rules. The system includes diagnostic tools to investigate workload imbalances and synchronization bottlenecks in large-scale distributed deep learning experiments. Deployed in industrial-scale HPC clusters, HPCClusterScape incorporates user feedback and meets specific requirements. This paper outlines the challenges and prerequisites for efficient HPC operation, introduces the interactive visualization system, and highlights its contributions in addressing pain points and optimizing resource utilization in shared HPC clusters.
CORec-Cri: How collaborative and social technologies can help to contextualize crises?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Crisis situations can present complex and multifaceted challenges, often requiring the involvement of multiple organizations and stakeholders with varying areas of expertise, responsibilities, and resources. Acquiring accurate and timely information about impacted areas is crucial to effectively respond to these crises. In this paper, we investigate how collaborative and social technologies help to contextualize crises, including identifying impacted areas and real-time needs. To this end, we define CORec-Cri (Contextulized Ontology-based Recommender system for crisis management) based on existing work. Our motivation for this approach is two-fold: first, effective collaboration among stakeholders is essential for efficient and coordinated crisis response; second, social computing facilitates interaction, information flow, and collaboration among stakeholders. We detail the key components of our system design, highlighting its potential to support decision-making, resource allocation, and communication among stakeholders. Finally, we provide examples of how our system can be applied to contextualize crises to improve crisis management.
Towards a Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Making
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, the integration of Automated Planning (AP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) has seen a surge of interest. To perform this integration, a general framework for Sequential Decision Making (SDM) would prove immensely useful, as it would help us understand how AP and RL fit together. In this preliminary work, we attempt to provide such a framework, suitable for any method ranging from Classical Planning to Deep RL, by drawing on concepts from Probability Theory and Bayesian inference. We formulate an SDM task as a set of training and test Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), to account for generalization. We provide a general algorithm for SDM which we hypothesize every SDM method is based on. According to it, every SDM algorithm can be seen as a procedure that iteratively improves its solution estimate by leveraging the task knowledge available. Finally, we derive a set of formulas and algorithms for calculating interesting properties of SDM tasks and methods, which make possible their empirical evaluation and comparison.
Lyfe Agents: Generative agents for low-cost real-time social interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Highly autonomous generative agents powered by large language models promise to simulate intricate social behaviors in virtual societies. However, achieving real-time interactions with humans at a low computational cost remains challenging. Here, we introduce Lyfe Agents. They combine low-cost with real-time responsiveness, all while remaining intelligent and goal-oriented. Key innovations include: (1) an option-action framework, reducing the cost of high-level decisions; (2) asynchronous self-monitoring for better self-consistency; and (3) a Summarize-and-Forget memory mechanism, prioritizing critical memory items at a low cost. We evaluate Lyfe Agents' self-motivation and sociability across several multi-agent scenarios in our custom LyfeGame 3D virtual environment platform. When equipped with our brain-inspired techniques, Lyfe Agents can exhibit human-like self-motivated social reasoning. For example, the agents can solve a crime (a murder mystery) through autonomous collaboration and information exchange. Meanwhile, our techniques enabled Lyfe Agents to operate at a computational cost 10-100 times lower than existing alternatives. Our findings underscore the transformative potential of autonomous generative agents to enrich human social experiences in virtual worlds.
Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Models in Hydrology
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In hydrology, modeling streamflow remains a challenging task due to the limited availability of basin characteristics information such as soil geology and geomorphology. These characteristics may be noisy due to measurement errors or may be missing altogether. To overcome this challenge, we propose a knowledge-guided, probabilistic inverse modeling method for recovering physical characteristics from streamflow and weather data, which are more readily available. We compare our framework with state-of-the-art inverse models for estimating river basin characteristics. We also show that these estimates offer improvement in streamflow modeling as opposed to using the original basin characteristic values. Our inverse model offers 3\% improvement in R$^2$ for the inverse model (basin characteristic estimation) and 6\% for the forward model (streamflow prediction). Our framework also offers improved explainability since it can quantify uncertainty in both the inverse and the forward model. Uncertainty quantification plays a pivotal role in improving the explainability of machine learning models by providing additional insights into the reliability and limitations of model predictions. In our analysis, we assess the quality of the uncertainty estimates. Compared to baseline uncertainty quantification methods, our framework offers 10\% improvement in the dispersion of epistemic uncertainty and 13\% improvement in coverage rate. This information can help stakeholders understand the level of uncertainty associated with the predictions and provide a more comprehensive view of the potential outcomes.
Structurally guided task decomposition in spatial navigation tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

How are people able to plan so efficiently despite limited cognitive resources? We aimed to answer this question by extending an existing model of human task decomposition that can explain a wide range of simple planning problems by adding structure information to the task to facilitate planning in more complex tasks. The extended model was then applied to a more complex planning domain of spatial navigation. Our results suggest that our framework can correctly predict the navigation strategies of the majority of the participants in an online experiment.
Leveraging Diffusion Disentangled Representations to Mitigate Shortcuts in Underspecified Visual Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Spurious correlations in the data, where multiple cues are predictive of the target labels, often lead to shortcut learning phenomena, where a model may rely on erroneous, easy-to-learn, cues while ignoring reliable ones. In this work, we propose an ensemble diversification framework exploiting the generation of synthetic counterfactuals using Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs). We discover that DPMs have the inherent capability to represent multiple visual cues independently, even when they are largely correlated in the training data. We leverage this characteristic to encourage model diversity and empirically show the efficacy of the approach with respect to several diversification objectives. We show that diffusion-guided diversification can lead models to avert attention from shortcut cues, achieving ensemble diversity performance comparable to previous methods requiring additional data collection.
Who's Harry Potter? Approximate Unlearning in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive internet corpora that often contain copyrighted content. This poses legal and ethical challenges for the developers and users of these models, as well as the original authors and publishers. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for unlearning a subset of the training data from a LLM, without having to retrain it from scratch. We evaluate our technique on the task of unlearning the Harry Potter books from the Llama2-7b model (a generative language model recently open-sourced by Meta). While the model took over 184K GPU-hours to pretrain, we show that in about 1 GPU hour of finetuning, we effectively erase the model's ability to generate or recall Harry Potter-related content, while its performance on common benchmarks (such as Winogrande, Hellaswag, arc, boolq and piqa) remains almost unaffected. We make our fine-tuned model publicly available on HuggingFace for community evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to present an effective technique for unlearning in generative language models. Our technique consists of three main components: First, we use a reinforced model that is further trained on the target data to identify the tokens that are most related to the unlearning target, by comparing its logits with those of a baseline model. Second, we replace idiosyncratic expressions in the target data with generic counterparts, and leverage the model's own predictions to generate alternative labels for every token. These labels aim to approximate the next-token predictions of a model that has not been trained on the target data. Third, we finetune the model on these alternative labels, which effectively erases the original text from the model's memory whenever it is prompted with its context.
Spherical Rolling Robots Design, Modeling, and Control: A Systematic Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Spherical robots have garnered increasing interest for their applications in exploration, tunnel inspection, and extraterrestrial missions. Diverse designs have emerged, including barycentric configurations, pendulum-based mechanisms, etc. In addition, a wide spectrum of control strategies has been proposed, ranging from traditional PID approaches to cutting-edge neural networks. Our systematic review aims to comprehensively identify and categorize locomotion systems and control schemes employed by spherical robots, spanning the years 1996 to 2023. A meticulous search across five databases yielded a dataset of 3189 records. As a result of our exhaustive analysis, we identified a collection of novel designs and control strategies. Leveraging the insights garnered, we provide valuable recommendations for optimizing the design and control aspects of spherical robots, supporting both novel design endeavors and the advancement of field deployments. Furthermore, we illuminate key research directions that hold the potential to unlock the full capabilities of spherical robots
PASTA: PArallel Spatio-Temporal Attention with spatial auto-correlation gating for fine-grained crowd flow prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Understanding the movement patterns of objects (e.g., humans and vehicles) in a city is essential for many applications, including city planning and management. This paper proposes a method for predicting future city-wide crowd flows by modeling the spatio-temporal patterns of historical crowd flows in fine-grained city-wide maps. We introduce a novel neural network named PArallel Spatio-Temporal Attention with spatial auto-correlation gating (PASTA) that effectively captures the irregular spatio-temporal patterns of fine-grained maps. The novel components in our approach include spatial auto-correlation gating, multi-scale residual block, and temporal attention gating module. The spatial auto-correlation gating employs the concept of spatial statistics to identify irregular spatial regions. The multi-scale residual block is responsible for handling multiple range spatial dependencies in the fine-grained map, and the temporal attention gating filters out irrelevant temporal information for the prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other competing baselines, especially under challenging conditions that contain irregular spatial regions. We also provide a qualitative analysis to derive the critical time information where our model assigns high attention scores in prediction.