Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Memory Disaggregation: Advances and Open Challenges

Compute and memory are tightly coupled within each server in traditional datacenters. Large-scale datacenter operators have identified this coupling as a root cause behind fleet-wide resource underutilization and increasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). With the advent of ultra-fast networks and cache-coherent interfaces, memory disaggregation has emerged as a potential solution, whereby applications can leverage available memory even outside server boundaries. This paper summarizes the growing research landscape of memory disaggregation from a software perspective and introduces the challenges toward making it practical under current and future hardware trends. We also reflect on our seven-year journey in the SymbioticLab to build a comprehensive disaggregated memory system over ultra-fast networks. We conclude with some open challenges toward building next-generation memory disaggregation systems leveraging emerging cache-coherent interconnects.
LEO: Generative Latent Image Animator for Human Video Synthesis

Spatio-temporal coherency is a major challenge in synthesizing high quality videos, particularly in synthesizing human videos that contain rich global and local deformations. To resolve this challenge, previous approaches have resorted to different features in the generation process aimed at representing appearance and motion. However, in the absence of strict mechanisms to guarantee such disentanglement, a separation of motion from appearance has remained challenging, resulting in spatial distortions and temporal jittering that break the spatio-temporal coherency. Motivated by this, we here propose LEO, a novel framework for human video synthesis, placing emphasis on spatio-temporal coherency. Our key idea is to represent motion as a sequence of flow maps in the generation process, which inherently isolate motion from appearance. We implement this idea via a flow-based image animator and a Latent Motion Diffusion Model (LMDM). The former bridges a space of motion codes with the space of flow maps, and synthesizes video frames in a warp-and-inpaint manner. LMDM learns to capture motion prior in the training data by synthesizing sequences of motion codes. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis suggests that LEO significantly improves coherent synthesis of human videos over previous methods on the datasets TaichiHD, FaceForensics and CelebV-HQ. In addition, the effective disentanglement of appearance and motion in LEO allows for two additional tasks, namely infinite-length human video synthesis, as well as content-preserving video editing.
An Adversarial Non-Autoregressive Model for Text Generation with Incomplete Information

Non-autoregressive models have been widely studied in the Complete Information Scenario (CIS), in which the input has complete information of corresponding output. However, their explorations in the Incomplete Information Scenario (IIS) are extremely limited. Our analyses reveal that the IIS's incomplete input information will augment the inherent limitations of existing non-autoregressive models trained under Maximum Likelihood Estimation. In this paper, we propose for the IIS an Adversarial Non-autoregressive Transformer (ANT) which has two features: 1) Position-Aware Self-Modulation to provide more reasonable hidden representations, and 2) Dependency Feed Forward Network to strengthen its capacity in dependency modeling. We compare ANT with other mainstream models in the IIS and demonstrate that ANT can achieve comparable performance with much fewer decoding iterations. Furthermore, we show its great potential in various applications like latent interpolation and semi-supervised learning.
Echoes: Unsupervised Debiasing via Pseudo-bias Labeling in an Echo Chamber

Neural networks often learn spurious correlations when exposed to biased training data, leading to poor performance on out-of-distribution data. A biased dataset can be divided, according to biased features, into bias-aligned samples (i.e., with biased features) and bias-conflicting samples (i.e., without biased features). Recent debiasing works typically assume that no bias label is available during the training phase, as obtaining such information is challenging and labor-intensive. Following this unsupervised assumption, existing methods usually train two models: a biased model specialized to learn biased features and a target model that uses information from the biased model for debiasing. This paper first presents experimental analyses revealing that the existing biased models overfit to bias-conflicting samples in the training data, which negatively impacts the debiasing performance of the target models. To address this issue, we propose a straightforward and effective method called Echoes, which trains a biased model and a target model with a different strategy. We construct an "echo chamber" environment by reducing the weights of samples which are misclassified by the biased model, to ensure the biased model fully learns the biased features without overfitting to the bias-conflicting samples. The biased model then assigns lower weights on the bias-conflicting samples. Subsequently, we use the inverse of the sample weights of the biased model for training the target model. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior debiasing results compared to the existing baselines on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/isruihu/Echoes.
SANTA: Separate Strategies for Inaccurate and Incomplete Annotation Noise in Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition effectively alleviates the burden of time-consuming and expensive annotation in the supervised setting. But the context-free matching process and the limited coverage of knowledge bases introduce inaccurate and incomplete annotation noise respectively. Previous studies either considered only incomplete annotation noise or indiscriminately handle two types of noise with the same strategy. In this paper, we argue that the different causes of two types of noise bring up the requirement of different strategies in model architecture. Therefore, we propose the SANTA to handle these two types of noise separately with (1) Memory-smoothed Focal Loss and Entity-aware KNN to relieve the entity ambiguity problem caused by inaccurate annotation, and (2) Boundary Mixup to alleviate decision boundary shifting problem caused by incomplete annotation and a noise-tolerant loss to improve the robustness. Benefiting from our separate tailored strategies, we confirm in the experiment that the two types of noise are well mitigated. SANTA also achieves a new state-of-the-art on five public datasets.
Learning Mixtures of Gaussians with Censored Data

We study the problem of learning mixtures of Gaussians with censored data. Statistical learning with censored data is a classical problem, with numerous practical applications, however, finite-sample guarantees for even simple latent variable models such as Gaussian mixtures are missing. Formally, we are given censored data from a mixture of univariate Gaussians $$ \sum_{i=1}^k w_i \mathcal{N}(\mu_i,\sigma^2), $$ i.e. the sample is observed only if it lies inside a set $S$. The goal is to learn the weights $w_i$ and the means $\mu_i$. We propose an algorithm that takes only $\frac{1}{\varepsilon^{O(k)}}$ samples to estimate the weights $w_i$ and the means $\mu_i$ within $\varepsilon$ error.
MIReAD: Simple Method for Learning High-quality Representations from Scientific Documents

Learning semantically meaningful representations from scientific documents can facilitate academic literature search and improve performance of recommendation systems. Pre-trained language models have been shown to learn rich textual representations, yet they cannot provide powerful document-level representations for scientific articles. We propose MIReAD, a simple method that learns high-quality representations of scientific papers by fine-tuning transformer model to predict the target journal class based on the abstract. We train MIReAD on more than 500,000 PubMed and arXiv abstracts across over 2,000 journal classes. We show that MIReAD produces representations that can be used for similar papers retrieval, topic categorization and literature search. Our proposed approach outperforms six existing models for representation learning on scientific documents across four evaluation standards.
Video-Specific Query-Key Attention Modeling for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to identify and localize the action instances in the untrimmed videos with only video-level action labels. When humans watch videos, we can adapt our abstract-level knowledge about actions in different video scenarios and detect whether some actions are occurring. In this paper, we mimic how humans do and bring a new perspective for locating and identifying multiple actions in a video. We propose a network named VQK-Net with a video-specific query-key attention modeling that learns a unique query for each action category of each input video. The learned queries not only contain the actions' knowledge features at the abstract level but also have the ability to fit this knowledge into the target video scenario, and they will be used to detect the presence of the corresponding action along the temporal dimension. To better learn these action category queries, we exploit not only the features of the current input video but also the correlation between different videos through a novel video-specific action category query learner worked with a query similarity loss. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three commonly used datasets (THUMOS14, ActivityNet1.2, and ActivityNet1.3) and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Influence of Swarm Intelligence in Data Clustering Mechanisms

Data mining focuses on discovering interesting, non-trivial and meaningful information from large datasets. Data clustering is one of the unsupervised and descriptive data mining task which group data based on similarity features and physically stored together. As a partitioning clustering method, K-means is widely used due to its simplicity and easiness of implementation. But this method has limitations such as local optimal convergence and initial point sensibility. Due to these impediments, nature inspired Swarm based algorithms such as Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm, Ant Colony Optimization, Firefly Algorithm, Bat Algorithm and etc. are used for data clustering to cope with larger datasets with lack and inconsistency of data. In some cases, those algorithms are used with traditional approaches such as K-means as hybrid approaches to produce better results. This paper reviews the performances of these new approaches and compares which is best for certain problematic situation.
MrTF: Model Refinery for Transductive Federated Learning

We consider a real-world scenario in which a newly-established pilot project needs to make inferences for newly-collected data with the help of other parties under privacy protection policies. Current federated learning (FL) paradigms are devoted to solving the data heterogeneity problem without considering the to-be-inferred data. We propose a novel learning paradigm named transductive federated learning (TFL) to simultaneously consider the structural information of the to-be-inferred data. On the one hand, the server could use the pre-available test samples to refine the aggregated models for robust model fusion, which tackles the data heterogeneity problem in FL. On the other hand, the refinery process incorporates test samples into training and could generate better predictions in a transductive manner. We propose several techniques including stabilized teachers, rectified distillation, and clustered label refinery to facilitate the model refinery process. Abundant experimental studies verify the superiorities of the proposed \underline{M}odel \underline{r}efinery framework for \underline{T}ransductive \underline{F}ederated learning (MrTF). The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/lxcnju/MrTF}.
Bi-Mapper: Holistic BEV Semantic Mapping for Autonomous Driving

A semantic map of the road scene, covering fundamental road elements, is an essential ingredient in autonomous driving systems. It provides important perception foundations for positioning and planning when rendered in the Bird's-Eye-View (BEV). Currently, the prior knowledge of hypothetical depth can guide the learning of translating front perspective views into BEV directly with the help of calibration parameters. However, it suffers from geometric distortions in the representation of distant objects. In addition, another stream of methods without prior knowledge can learn the transformation between front perspective views and BEV implicitly with a global view. Considering that the fusion of different learning methods may bring surprising beneficial effects, we propose a Bi-Mapper framework for top-down road-scene semantic understanding, which incorporates a global view and local prior knowledge. To enhance reliable interaction between them, an asynchronous mutual learning strategy is proposed. At the same time, an Across-Space Loss (ASL) is designed to mitigate the negative impact of geometric distortions. Extensive results on nuScenes and Cam2BEV datasets verify the consistent effectiveness of each module in the proposed Bi-Mapper framework. Compared with exiting road mapping networks, the proposed Bi-Mapper achieves 2.1% higher IoU on the nuScenes dataset. Moreover, we verify the generalization performance of Bi-Mapper in a real-world driving scenario. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/lynn-yu/Bi-Mapper.
Stochastic Hazard Detection For Landing Under Topographic Uncertainty

Autonomous hazard detection and avoidance is a key technology for future landing missions in unknown surface conditions. Current state-of-the-art stochastic algorithms assume simple Gaussian measurement noise on dense, high-fidelity digital elevation maps, limiting the algorithm's applicability. This paper introduces a new stochastic hazard detection algorithm capable of more general topographic uncertainty by leveraging the Gaussian random field regression. The proposed approach enables the safety assessment with imperfect and sparse sensor measurements, which allows hazard detection operations under more diverse conditions. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach on the existing Mars digital terrain models.
Vcc: Scaling Transformers to 128K Tokens or More by Prioritizing Important Tokens

Transformers are central in modern natural language processing and computer vision applications. Despite recent works devoted to reducing the quadratic cost of such models (as a function of the sequence length), dealing with ultra long sequences (e.g., with more than 16K tokens) remains challenging. Applications such as answering questions based on a book or summarizing a scientific article are inefficient or infeasible. Here, we propose to significantly improve the efficiency of Transformers for ultra long sequences, by compressing the sequence into a much smaller representation at each layer. Specifically, by exploiting the fact that in many tasks, only a small subset of special tokens (we call VIP-tokens) are most relevant to the final prediction, we propose a VIP-token centric compression (VCC) scheme which selectively compresses the sequence based on their impact on approximating the representation of the VIP-tokens. Compared with competitive baselines, our algorithm is not only efficient (achieving more than $3\times$ efficiency gain compared to baselines on 4K and 16K lengths), but also offers competitive/better performance on a large number of tasks. Further, we show that our algorithm scales to 128K tokens (or more) while consistently offering accuracy improvement.
On the perceived relevance of critical internal quality attributes when evolving software features

Several refactorings performed while evolving software features aim to improve internal quality attributes like cohesion and complexity. Indeed, internal attributes can become critical if their measurements assume anomalous values. Yet, current knowledge is scarce on how developers perceive the relevance of critical internal attributes while evolving features. This qualitative study investigates the developers' perception of the relevance of critical internal attributes when evolving features. We target six class-level critical attributes: low cohesion, high complexity, high coupling, large hierarchy depth, large hierarchy breadth, and large size. We performed two industrial case studies based on online focus group sessions. Developers discussed how much (and why) critical attributes are relevant when adding or enhancing features. We assessed the relevance of critical attributes individually and relatively, the reasons behind the relevance of each critical attribute, and the interrelations of critical attributes. Low cohesion and high complexity were perceived as very relevant because they often make evolving features hard while tracking failures and adding features. The other critical attributes were perceived as less relevant when reusing code or adopting design patterns. An example of perceived interrelation is high complexity leading to high coupling.
Classification Tree Pruning Under Covariate Shift

We consider the problem of \emph{pruning} a classification tree, that is, selecting a suitable subtree that balances bias and variance, in common situations with inhomogeneous training data. Namely, assuming access to mostly data from a distribution $P_{X, Y}$, but little data from a desired distribution $Q_{X, Y}$ with different $X$-marginals, we present the first efficient procedure for optimal pruning in such situations, when cross-validation and other penalized variants are grossly inadequate. Optimality is derived with respect to a notion of \emph{average discrepancy} $P_{X} \to Q_{X}$ (averaged over $X$ space) which significantly relaxes a recent notion -- termed \emph{transfer-exponent} -- shown to tightly capture the limits of classification under such a distribution shift. Our relaxed notion can be viewed as a measure of \emph{relative dimension} between distributions, as it relates to existing notions of information such as the Minkowski and Renyi dimensions.
Contrastive Enhanced Slide Filter Mixer for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to model user preferences by capturing behavior patterns from their item historical interaction data. Most existing methods model user preference in the time domain, omitting the fact that users' behaviors are also influenced by various frequency patterns that are difficult to separate in the entangled chronological items. However, few attempts have been made to train SR in the frequency domain, and it is still unclear how to use the frequency components to learn an appropriate representation for the user. To solve this problem, we shift the viewpoint to the frequency domain and propose a novel Contrastive Enhanced \textbf{SLI}de Filter \textbf{M}ixEr for Sequential \textbf{Rec}ommendation, named \textbf{SLIME4Rec}. Specifically, we design a frequency ramp structure to allow the learnable filter slide on the frequency spectrums across different layers to capture different frequency patterns. Moreover, a Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) and a Static Frequency Split (SFS) module are proposed to replace the self-attention module for effectively extracting frequency information in two ways. DFS is used to select helpful frequency components dynamically, and SFS is combined with the dynamic frequency selection module to provide a more fine-grained frequency division. Finally, contrastive learning is utilized to improve the quality of user embedding learned from the frequency domain. Extensive experiments conducted on five widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate our proposed model performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/sudaada/SLIME4Rec.
FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering

Automatic fact verification has received significant attention recently. Contemporary automatic fact-checking systems focus on estimating truthfulness using numerical scores which are not human-interpretable. A human fact-checker generally follows several logical steps to verify a verisimilitude claim and conclude whether its truthful or a mere masquerade. Popular fact-checking websites follow a common structure for fact categorization such as half true, half false, false, pants on fire, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to have an aspect-based (delineating which part(s) are true and which are false) explainable system that can assist human fact-checkers in asking relevant questions related to a fact, which can then be validated separately to reach a final verdict. In this paper, we propose a 5W framework (who, what, when, where, and why) for question-answer-based fact explainability. To that end, we present a semi-automatically generated dataset called FACTIFY-5WQA, which consists of 391, 041 facts along with relevant 5W QAs - underscoring our major contribution to this paper. A semantic role labeling system has been utilized to locate 5Ws, which generates QA pairs for claims using a masked language model. Finally, we report a baseline QA system to automatically locate those answers from evidence documents, which can serve as a baseline for future research in the field. Lastly, we propose a robust fact verification system that takes paraphrased claims and automatically validates them. The dataset and the baseline model are available at https: //github.com/ankuranii/acl-5W-QA
Segmentation of the veterinary cytological images for fast neoplastic tumors diagnosis

This paper shows the machine learning system which performs instance segmentation of cytological images in veterinary medicine. Eleven cell types were used directly and indirectly in the experiments, including damaged and unrecognized categories. The deep learning models employed in the system achieve a high score of average precision and recall metrics, i.e. 0.94 and 0.8 respectively, for the selected three types of tumors. This variety of label types allowed us to draw a meaningful conclusion that there are relatively few mistakes for tumor cell types. Additionally, the model learned tumor cell features well enough to avoid misclassification mistakes of one tumor type into another. The experiments also revealed that the quality of the results improves with the dataset size (excluding the damaged cells). It is worth noting that all the experiments were done using a custom dedicated dataset provided by the cooperating vet doctors.
SegGPT Meets Co-Saliency Scene

Co-salient object detection targets at detecting co-existed salient objects among a group of images. Recently, a generalist model for segmenting everything in context, called SegGPT, is gaining public attention. In view of its breakthrough for segmentation, we can hardly wait to probe into its contribution to the task of co-salient object detection. In this report, we first design a framework to enable SegGPT for the problem of co-salient object detection. Proceed to the next step, we evaluate the performance of SegGPT on the problem of co-salient object detection on three available datasets. We achieve a finding that co-saliency scenes challenges SegGPT due to context discrepancy within a group of co-saliency images.