Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
What Can an Accent Identifier Learn? Probing Phonetic and Prosodic Information in a Wav2vec2-based Accent Identification Model

This study is focused on understanding and quantifying the change in phoneme and prosody information encoded in the Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) model, brought by an accent identification (AID) fine-tuning task. This problem is addressed based on model probing. Specifically, we conduct a systematic layer-wise analysis of the representations of the Transformer layers on a phoneme correlation task, and a novel word-level prosody prediction task. We compare the probing performance of the pre-trained and fine-tuned SSL models. Results show that the AID fine-tuning task steers the top 2 layers to learn richer phoneme and prosody representation. These changes share some similarities with the effects of fine-tuning with an Automatic Speech Recognition task. In addition, we observe strong accent-specific phoneme representations in layer 9. To sum up, this study provides insights into the understanding of SSL features and their interactions with fine-tuning tasks.
Push: Concurrent Probabilistic Programming for Bayesian Deep Learning

We introduce a library called Push that takes a probabilistic programming approach to Bayesian deep learning (BDL). This library enables concurrent execution of BDL inference algorithms on multi-GPU hardware for neural network (NN) models. To accomplish this, Push introduces an abstraction that represents an input NN as a particle. Push enables easy creation of particles so that an input NN can be replicated and particles can communicate asynchronously so that a variety of parameter updates can be expressed, including common BDL algorithms. Our hope is that Push lowers the barrier to experimenting with BDL by streamlining the scaling of particles across GPUs. We evaluate the scaling behavior of particles on single-node multi-GPU devices on vision and scientific machine learning (SciML) tasks.
Inductive reasoning in humans and large language models

The impressive recent performance of large language models has led many to wonder to what extent they can serve as models of general intelligence or are similar to human cognition. We address this issue by applying GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to a classic problem in human inductive reasoning known as property induction. Over two experiments, we elicit human judgments on a range of property induction tasks spanning multiple domains. Although GPT-3.5 struggles to capture many aspects of human behaviour, GPT-4 is much more successful: for the most part, its performance qualitatively matches that of humans, and the only notable exception is its failure to capture the phenomenon of premise non-monotonicity. Our work demonstrates that property induction allows for interesting comparisons between human and machine intelligence and provides two large datasets that can serve as benchmarks for future work in this vein.
Policy Regularization with Dataset Constraint for Offline Reinforcement Learning

We consider the problem of learning the best possible policy from a fixed dataset, known as offline Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common taxonomy of existing offline RL works is policy regularization, which typically constrains the learned policy by distribution or support of the behavior policy. However, distribution and support constraints are overly conservative since they both force the policy to choose similar actions as the behavior policy when considering particular states. It will limit the learned policy's performance, especially when the behavior policy is sub-optimal. In this paper, we find that regularizing the policy towards the nearest state-action pair can be more effective and thus propose Policy Regularization with Dataset Constraint (PRDC). When updating the policy in a given state, PRDC searches the entire dataset for the nearest state-action sample and then restricts the policy with the action of this sample. Unlike previous works, PRDC can guide the policy with proper behaviors from the dataset, allowing it to choose actions that do not appear in the dataset along with the given state. It is a softer constraint but still keeps enough conservatism from out-of-distribution actions. Empirical evidence and theoretical analysis show that PRDC can alleviate offline RL's fundamentally challenging value overestimation issue with a bounded performance gap. Moreover, on a set of locomotion and navigation tasks, PRDC achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/PRDC
Towards Diverse and Effective Question-Answer Pair Generation from Children Storybooks

Recent advances in QA pair generation (QAG) have raised interest in applying this technique to the educational field. However, the diversity of QA types remains a challenge despite its contributions to comprehensive learning and assessment of children. In this paper, we propose a QAG framework that enhances QA type diversity by producing different interrogative sentences and implicit/explicit answers. Our framework comprises a QFS-based answer generator, an iterative QA generator, and a relevancy-aware ranker. The two generators aim to expand the number of candidates while covering various types. The ranker trained on the in-context negative samples clarifies the top-N outputs based on the ranking score. Extensive evaluations and detailed analyses demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art results by significant margins, achieving improved diversity and quality. Our task-oriented processes are consistent with real-world demand, which highlights our system's high applicability.
Variational Imbalanced Regression: Fair Uncertainty Quantification via Probabilistic Smoothing

Existing regression models tend to fall short in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation when the label distribution is imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression (VIR), which not only performs well in imbalanced regression but naturally produces reasonable uncertainty estimation as a byproduct. Different from typical variational autoencoders assuming I.I.D. representations (a data point's representation is not directly affected by other data points), our VIR borrows data with similar regression labels to compute the latent representation's variational distribution; furthermore, different from deterministic regression models producing point estimates, VIR predicts the entire normal-inverse-gamma distributions and modulates the associated conjugate distributions to impose probabilistic reweighting on the imbalanced data, thereby providing better uncertainty estimation. Experiments in several real-world datasets show that our VIR can outperform state-of-the-art imbalanced regression models in terms of both accuracy and uncertainty estimation. Code will soon be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/variational-imbalanced-regression.
RoBERTweet: A BERT Language Model for Romanian Tweets

Developing natural language processing (NLP) systems for social media analysis remains an important topic in artificial intelligence research. This article introduces RoBERTweet, the first Transformer architecture trained on Romanian tweets. Our RoBERTweet comes in two versions, following the base and large architectures of BERT. The corpus used for pre-training the models represents a novelty for the Romanian NLP community and consists of all tweets collected from 2008 to 2022. Experiments show that RoBERTweet models outperform the previous general-domain Romanian and multilingual language models on three NLP tasks with tweet inputs: emotion detection, sexist language identification, and named entity recognition. We make our models and the newly created corpus of Romanian tweets freely available.
Weakly Supervised Visual Question Answer Generation

Growing interest in conversational agents promote twoway human-computer communications involving asking and answering visual questions have become an active area of research in AI. Thus, generation of visual questionanswer pair(s) becomes an important and challenging task. To address this issue, we propose a weakly-supervised visual question answer generation method that generates a relevant question-answer pairs for a given input image and associated caption. Most of the prior works are supervised and depend on the annotated question-answer datasets. In our work, we present a weakly supervised method that synthetically generates question-answer pairs procedurally from visual information and captions. The proposed method initially extracts list of answer words, then does nearest question generation that uses the caption and answer word to generate synthetic question. Next, the relevant question generator converts the nearest question to relevant language question by dependency parsing and in-order tree traversal, finally, fine-tune a ViLBERT model with the question-answer pair(s) generated at end. We perform an exhaustive experimental analysis on VQA dataset and see that our model significantly outperform SOTA methods on BLEU scores. We also show the results wrt baseline models and ablation study.
Parameter-free version of Adaptive Gradient Methods for Strongly-Convex Functions

The optimal learning rate for adaptive gradient methods applied to {\lambda}-strongly convex functions relies on the parameters {\lambda} and learning rate {\eta}. In this paper, we adapt a universal algorithm along the lines of Metagrad, to get rid of this dependence on {\lambda} and {\eta}. The main idea is to concurrently run multiple experts and combine their predictions to a master algorithm. This master enjoys O(d log T) regret bounds.
On Minimizing the Impact of Dataset Shifts on Actionable Explanations

The Right to Explanation is an important regulatory principle that allows individuals to request actionable explanations for algorithmic decisions. However, several technical challenges arise when providing such actionable explanations in practice. For instance, models are periodically retrained to handle dataset shifts. This process may invalidate some of the previously prescribed explanations, thus rendering them unactionable. But, it is unclear if and when such invalidations occur, and what factors determine explanation stability i.e., if an explanation remains unchanged amidst model retraining due to dataset shifts. In this paper, we address the aforementioned gaps and provide one of the first theoretical and empirical characterizations of the factors influencing explanation stability. To this end, we conduct rigorous theoretical analysis to demonstrate that model curvature, weight decay parameters while training, and the magnitude of the dataset shift are key factors that determine the extent of explanation (in)stability. Extensive experimentation with real-world datasets not only validates our theoretical results, but also demonstrates that the aforementioned factors dramatically impact the stability of explanations produced by various state-of-the-art methods.
Language Versatilists vs. Specialists: An Empirical Revisiting on Multilingual Transfer Ability

Multilingual transfer ability, which reflects how well the models fine-tuned on one source language can be applied to other languages, has been well studied in multilingual pre-trained models (e.g., BLOOM). However, such ability has not been investigated for English-centric models (e.g., LLaMA). To fill this gap, we study the following research questions. First, does multilingual transfer ability exist in English-centric models and how does it compare with multilingual pretrained models? Second, does it only appears when English is the source language for the English-centric model? Third, how does it vary in different tasks? We take multilingual reasoning ability as our focus and conduct extensive experiments across four types of reasoning tasks. We find that the multilingual pretrained model does not always outperform an English-centric model. Furthermore, English appears to be a less suitable source language, and the choice of source language becomes less important when the English-centric model scales up. In addition, different types of tasks exhibit different multilingual transfer abilities. These findings demonstrate that English-centric models not only possess multilingual transfer ability but may even surpass the transferability of multilingual pretrained models if well-trained. By showing the strength and weaknesses, the experiments also provide valuable insights into enhancing multilingual reasoning abilities for the English-centric models.
FedDec: Peer-to-peer Aided Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has enabled training machine learning models exploiting the data of multiple agents without compromising privacy. However, FL is known to be vulnerable to data heterogeneity, partial device participation, and infrequent communication with the server, which are nonetheless three distinctive characteristics of this framework. While much of the recent literature has tackled these weaknesses using different tools, only a few works have explored the possibility of exploiting inter-agent communication to improve FL's performance. In this work, we present FedDec, an algorithm that interleaves peer-to-peer communication and parameter averaging (similar to decentralized learning in networks) between the local gradient updates of FL. We analyze the convergence of FedDec under the assumptions of non-iid data distribution, partial device participation, and smooth and strongly convex costs, and show that inter-agent communication alleviates the negative impact of infrequent communication rounds with the server by reducing the dependence on the number of local updates $H$ from $O(H^2)$ to $O(H)$. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the term improved in the bound is multiplied by a constant that depends on the spectrum of the inter-agent communication graph, and that vanishes quickly the more connected the network is. We confirm the predictions of our theory in numerical simulations, where we show that FedDec converges faster than FedAvg, and that the gains are greater as either $H$ or the connectivity of the network increase.
$E(2)$-Equivariant Vision Transformer

Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved remarkable performance in computer vision. However, positional encoding in ViT makes it substantially difficult to learn the intrinsic equivariance in data. Initial attempts have been made on designing equivariant ViT but are proved defective in some cases in this paper. To address this issue, we design a Group Equivariant Vision Transformer (GE-ViT) via a novel, effective positional encoding operator. We prove that GE-ViT meets all the theoretical requirements of an equivariant neural network. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on standard benchmark datasets, demonstrating that GE-ViT significantly outperforms non-equivariant self-attention networks. The code is available at https://github.com/ZJUCDSYangKaifan/GEVit.
Generating One-Hot Maps under Encryption

One-hot maps are commonly used in the AI domain. Unsurprisingly, they can also bring great benefits to ML-based algorithms such as decision trees that run under Homomorphic Encryption (HE), specifically CKKS. Prior studies in this domain used these maps but assumed that the client encrypts them. Here, we consider different tradeoffs that may affect the client's decision on how to pack and store these maps. We suggest several conversion algorithms when working with encrypted data and report their costs. Our goal is to equip the ML over HE designer with the data it needs for implementing encrypted one-hot maps.
Friction-adaptive descent: a family of dynamics-based optimization methods

We describe a family of descent algorithms which generalizes common existing schemes used in applications such as neural network training and more broadly for optimization of smooth functions--potentially for global optimization, or as a local optimization method to be deployed within global optimization schemes like basin hopping. By introducing an auxiliary degree of freedom we create a dynamical system with improved stability, reducing oscillatory modes and accelerating convergence to minima. The resulting algorithms are simple to implement and control, and convergence can be shown directly by Lyapunov's second method. Although this framework, which we refer to as friction-adaptive descent (FAD), is fairly general, we focus most of our attention here on a specific variant: kinetic energy stabilization (which can be viewed as a zero-temperature Nos\'e--Hoover scheme but with added dissipation in both physical and auxiliary variables), termed KFAD (kinetic FAD). To illustrate the flexibility of the FAD framework we consider several other methods. in certain asymptotic limits, these methods can be viewed as introducing cubic damping in various forms; they can be more efficient than linearly dissipated Hamiltonian dynamics in common optimization settings. We present details of the numerical methods and show convergence for both the continuous and discretized dynamics in the convex setting by constructing Lyapunov functions. The methods are tested using a toy model (the Rosenbrock function). We also demonstrate the methods for structural optimization for atomic clusters in Lennard--Jones and Morse potentials. The experiments show the relative efficiency and robustness of FAD in comparison to linearly dissipated Hamiltonian dynamics.
TrojLLM: A Black-box Trojan Prompt Attack on Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are progressively being utilized as machine learning services and interface tools for various applications. However, the security implications of LLMs, particularly in relation to adversarial and Trojan attacks, remain insufficiently examined. In this paper, we propose TrojLLM, an automatic and black-box framework to effectively generate universal and stealthy triggers. When these triggers are incorporated into the input data, the LLMs' outputs can be maliciously manipulated. Moreover, the framework also supports embedding Trojans within discrete prompts, enhancing the overall effectiveness and precision of the triggers' attacks. Specifically, we propose a trigger discovery algorithm for generating universal triggers for various inputs by querying victim LLM-based APIs using few-shot data samples. Furthermore, we introduce a novel progressive Trojan poisoning algorithm designed to generate poisoned prompts that retain efficacy and transferability across a diverse range of models. Our experiments and results demonstrate TrojLLM's capacity to effectively insert Trojans into text prompts in real-world black-box LLM APIs including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, while maintaining exceptional performance on clean test sets. Our work sheds light on the potential security risks in current models and offers a potential defensive approach. The source code of TrojLLM is available at https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/TrojLLM.
Between-Sample Relationship in Learning Tabular Data Using Graph and Attention Networks

Traditional machine learning assumes samples in tabular data to be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d). This assumption may miss useful information within and between sample relationships in representation learning. This paper relaxes the i.i.d assumption to learn tabular data representations by incorporating between-sample relationships for the first time using graph neural networks (GNN). We investigate our hypothesis using several GNNs and state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep attention models to learn the between-sample relationship on ten tabular data sets by comparing them to traditional machine learning methods. GNN methods show the best performance on tabular data with large feature-to-sample ratios. Our results reveal that attention-based GNN methods outperform traditional machine learning on five data sets and SOTA deep tabular learning methods on three data sets. Between-sample learning via GNN and deep attention methods yield the best classification accuracy on seven of the ten data sets. This suggests that the i.i.d assumption may not always hold for most tabular data sets.
Motivational models for validating agile requirements in Software Engineering subjects

This paper describes how motivational models can be used to cross check agile requirements artifacts to improve consistency and completeness of software requirements. Motivational models provide a high level understanding of the purposes of a software system. They complement personas and user stories which focus more on user needs rather than on system features. We present an exploratory case study sought to understand how software engineering students could use motivational models to create better requirements artifacts so they are understandable to non-technical users, easily understood by developers, and are consistent with each other. Nine consistency principles were created as an outcome of our study and are now successfully adopted by software engineering students at the University of Melbourne to ensure consistency between motivational models, personas, and user stories in requirements engineering.
AraMUS: Pushing the Limits of Data and Model Scale for Arabic Natural Language Processing

Developing monolingual large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is shown to be very successful in handling different tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this work, we present AraMUS, the largest Arabic PLM with 11B parameters trained on 529GB of high-quality Arabic textual data. AraMUS achieves state-of-the-art performances on a diverse set of Arabic classification and generative tasks. Moreover, AraMUS shows impressive few-shot learning abilities compared with the best existing Arabic PLMs.
Stable Remaster: Bridging the Gap Between Old Content and New Displays

The invention of modern displays has enhanced the viewer experience for any kind of content: ranging from sports to movies in 8K high-definition resolution. However, older content developed for CRT or early Plasma screen TVs has become outdated quickly and no longer meets current aspect ratio and resolution standards. In this paper, we explore whether we can solve this problem with the use of diffusion models to adapt old content to meet contemporary expectations. We explore the ability to combine multiple independent computer vision tasks to attempt to solve the problem of expanding aspect ratios of old animated content such that the new content would be indistinguishable from the source material to a brand-new viewer. These existing capabilities include Stable Diffusion, Content-Aware Scene Detection, Object Detection, and Key Point Matching. We were able to successfully chain these tasks together in a way that generated reasonable outputs, however, future work needs to be done to improve and expand the application to non-animated content as well.
Rethink DARTS Search Space and Renovate a New Benchmark

DARTS search space (DSS) has become a canonical benchmark for NAS whereas some emerging works pointed out the issue of narrow accuracy range and claimed it would hurt the method ranking. We observe some recent studies already suffer from this issue that overshadows the meaning of scores. In this work, we first propose and orchestrate a suite of improvements to frame a larger and harder DSS, termed LHD, while retaining high efficiency in search. We step forward to renovate a LHD-based new benchmark, taking care of both discernibility and accessibility. Specifically, we re-implement twelve baselines and evaluate them across twelve conditions by combining two underexpolored influential factors: transductive robustness and discretization policy, to reasonably construct a benchmark upon multi-condition evaluation. Considering that the tabular benchmarks are always insufficient to adequately evaluate the methods of neural architecture search (NAS), our work can serve as a crucial basis for the future progress of NAS. https://github.com/chaoji90/LHD