Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Fuzzy Bridge Regression Model Estimating via Simulation

The main problem when dealing with fuzzy data variables is that it cannot be formed by a model that represents the data through the method of Fuzzy Least Squares Estimator (FLSE) which gives false estimates of the invalidity of the method in the case of the existence of the problem of multicollinearity. To overcome this problem, the Fuzzy Bridge Regression Estimator (FBRE) Method was relied upon to estimate a fuzzy linear regression model by triangular fuzzy numbers. Moreover, the detection of the problem of multicollinearity in the fuzzy data can be done by using Variance Inflation Factor when the inputs variable of the model crisp, output variable, and parameters are fuzzed. The results were compared using standard mean squares error via simulated experiments and taking different sample sizes (20, 40, 80, and 160). The model's superiority was shown by achieving the least value of the mean squares error (MSE(, which indicated by the fuzzy bridge regression model.&#x0D;
Unifying (Machine) Vision via Counterfactual World Modeling

Leading approaches in machine vision employ different architectures for different tasks, trained on costly task-specific labeled datasets. This complexity has held back progress in areas, such as robotics, where robust task-general perception remains a bottleneck. In contrast, "foundation models" of natural language have shown how large pre-trained neural networks can provide zero-shot solutions to a broad spectrum of apparently distinct tasks. Here we introduce Counterfactual World Modeling (CWM), a framework for constructing a visual foundation model: a unified, unsupervised network that can be prompted to perform a wide variety of visual computations. CWM has two key components, which resolve the core issues that have hindered application of the foundation model concept to vision. The first is structured masking, a generalization of masked prediction methods that encourages a prediction model to capture the low-dimensional structure in visual data. The model thereby factors the key physical components of a scene and exposes an interface to them via small sets of visual tokens. This in turn enables CWM's second main idea -- counterfactual prompting -- the observation that many apparently distinct visual representations can be computed, in a zero-shot manner, by comparing the prediction model's output on real inputs versus slightly modified ("counterfactual") inputs. We show that CWM generates high-quality readouts on real-world images and videos for a diversity of tasks, including estimation of keypoints, optical flow, occlusions, object segments, and relative depth. Taken together, our results show that CWM is a promising path to unifying the manifold strands of machine vision in a conceptually simple foundation.
Word Embeddings for Banking Industry

Applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are plentiful, from sentiment analysis to text classification. Practitioners rely on static word embeddings (e.g. Word2Vec or GloVe) or static word representation from contextual models (e.g. BERT or ELMo) to perform many of these NLP tasks. These widely available word embeddings are built from large amount of text, so they are likely to have captured most of the vocabulary in different context. However, how well would they capture domain-specific semantics and word relatedness? This paper explores this idea by creating a bank-specific word embeddings and evaluates them against other sources of word embeddings such as GloVe and BERT. Not surprising that embeddings built from bank-specific corpora does a better job of capturing the bank-specific semantics and word relatedness. This finding suggests that bank-specific word embeddings could be a good stand-alone source or a complement to other widely available embeddings when performing NLP tasks specific to the banking industry.
Fast Interactive Search with a Scale-Free Comparison Oracle

A comparison-based search algorithm lets a user find a target item $t$ in a database by answering queries of the form, ``Which of items $i$ and $j$ is closer to $t$?'' Instead of formulating an explicit query (such as one or several keywords), the user navigates towards the target via a sequence of such (typically noisy) queries. We propose a scale-free probabilistic oracle model called $\gamma$-CKL for such similarity triplets $(i,j;t)$, which generalizes the CKL triplet model proposed in the literature. The generalization affords independent control over the discriminating power of the oracle and the dimension of the feature space containing the items. We develop a search algorithm with provably exponential rate of convergence under the $\gamma$-CKL oracle, thanks to a backtracking strategy that deals with the unavoidable errors in updating the belief region around the target. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm both over the posited oracle and over several real-world triplet datasets. We also report on a comprehensive user study, where human subjects navigate a database of face portraits.
Unlearnable Examples for Diffusion Models: Protect Data from Unauthorized Exploitation

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in image generation tasks, paving the way for powerful AIGC applications. However, these widely-used generative models can also raise security and privacy concerns, such as copyright infringement, and sensitive data leakage. To tackle these issues, we propose a method, Unlearnable Diffusion Perturbation, to safeguard images from unauthorized exploitation. Our approach involves designing an algorithm to generate sample-wise perturbation noise for each image to be protected. This imperceptible protective noise makes the data almost unlearnable for diffusion models, i.e., diffusion models trained or fine-tuned on the protected data cannot generate high-quality and diverse images related to the protected training data. Theoretically, we frame this as a max-min optimization problem and introduce EUDP, a noise scheduler-based method to enhance the effectiveness of the protective noise. We evaluate our methods on both Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model and Latent Diffusion Models, demonstrating that training diffusion models on the protected data lead to a significant reduction in the quality of the generated images. Especially, the experimental results on Stable Diffusion demonstrate that our method effectively safeguards images from being used to train Diffusion Models in various tasks, such as training specific objects and styles. This achievement holds significant importance in real-world scenarios, as it contributes to the protection of privacy and copyright against AI-generated content.
PDT: Pretrained Dual Transformers for Time-aware Bipartite Graphs

Pre-training on large models is prevalent and emerging with the ever-growing user-generated content in many machine learning application categories. It has been recognized that learning contextual knowledge from the datasets depicting user-content interaction plays a vital role in downstream tasks. Despite several studies attempting to learn contextual knowledge via pre-training methods, finding an optimal training objective and strategy for this type of task remains a challenging problem. In this work, we contend that there are two distinct aspects of contextual knowledge, namely the user-side and the content-side, for datasets where user-content interaction can be represented as a bipartite graph. To learn contextual knowledge, we propose a pre-training method that learns a bi-directional mapping between the spaces of the user-side and the content-side. We formulate the training goal as a contrastive learning task and propose a dual-Transformer architecture to encode the contextual knowledge. We evaluate the proposed method for the recommendation task. The empirical studies have demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed all the baselines with significant gains.
RITA: Group Attention is All You Need for Timeseries Analytics

Timeseries analytics is of great importance in many real-world applications. Recently, the Transformer model, popular in natural language processing, has been leveraged to learn high quality feature embeddings from timeseries, core to the performance of various timeseries analytics tasks. However, the quadratic time and space complexities limit Transformers' scalability, especially for long timeseries. To address these issues, we develop a timeseries analytics tool, RITA, which uses a novel attention mechanism, named group attention, to address this scalability issue. Group attention dynamically clusters the objects based on their similarity into a small number of groups and approximately computes the attention at the coarse group granularity. It thus significantly reduces the time and space complexity, yet provides a theoretical guarantee on the quality of the computed attention. The dynamic scheduler of RITA continuously adapts the number of groups and the batch size in the training process, ensuring group attention always uses the fewest groups needed to meet the approximation quality requirement. Extensive experiments on various timeseries datasets and analytics tasks demonstrate that RITA outperforms the state-of-the-art in accuracy and is significantly faster -- with speedups of up to 63X.
Linearly convergent adjoint free solution of least squares problems by random descent

We consider the problem of solving linear least squares problems in a framework where only evaluations of the linear map are possible. We derive randomized methods that do not need any other matrix operations than forward evaluations, especially no evaluation of the adjoint map is needed. Our method is motivated by the simple observation that one can get an unbiased estimate of the application of the adjoint. We show convergence of the method and then derive a more efficient method that uses an exact linesearch. This method, called random descent, resembles known methods in other context and has the randomized coordinate descent method as special case. We provide convergence analysis of the random descent method emphasizing the dependence on the underlying distribution of the random vectors. Furthermore we investigate the applicability of the method in the context of ill-posed inverse problems and show that the method can have beneficial properties when the unknown solution is rough. We illustrate the theoretical findings in numerical examples. One particular result is that the random descent method actually outperforms established transposed-free methods (TFQMR and CGS) in examples.
Uncovering the Hidden Dynamics of Video Self-supervised Learning under Distribution Shifts

Video self-supervised learning (VSSL) has made significant progress in recent years. However, the exact behavior and dynamics of these models under different forms of distribution shift are not yet known. In this paper, we comprehensively study the behavior of six popular self-supervised methods (v-SimCLR, v-MoCo, v-BYOL, v-SimSiam, v-DINO, v-MAE) in response to various forms of natural distribution shift, i.e., (i) context shift, (ii) viewpoint shift, (iii) actor shift, (iv) source shift, (v) generalizability to unknown classes (zero-shot), and (vi) open-set recognition. To perform this extensive study, we carefully craft a test bed consisting of 17 in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmark pairs using available public datasets and a series of evaluation protocols to stress-test the different methods under the intended shifts. Our study uncovers a series of intriguing findings and interesting behaviors of VSSL methods. For instance, we observe that while video models generally struggle with context shifts, v-MAE and supervised learning exhibit more robustness. Moreover, our study shows that v-MAE is a strong temporal learner, whereas contrastive methods, v-SimCLR and v-MoCo, exhibit strong performances against viewpoint shifts. When studying the notion of open-set recognition, we notice a trade-off between closed-set and open-set recognition performance if the pretrained VSSL encoders are used without finetuning. We hope that our work will contribute to the development of robust video representation learning frameworks for various real-world scenarios. The project page and code are available at: https://pritamqu.github.io/OOD-VSSL.
Invisible Image Watermarks Are Provably Removable Using Generative AI

Invisible watermarks safeguard images' copyright by embedding hidden messages only detectable by owners. They also prevent people from misusing images, especially those generated by AI models. We propose a family of regeneration attacks to remove these invisible watermarks. The proposed attack method first adds random noise to an image to destroy the watermark and then reconstructs the image. This approach is flexible and can be instantiated with many existing image-denoising algorithms and pre-trained generative models such as diffusion models. Through formal proofs and empirical results, we show that all invisible watermarks are vulnerable to the proposed attack. For a particularly resilient watermark, RivaGAN, regeneration attacks remove 93-99% of the invisible watermarks while the baseline attacks remove no more than 3%. However, if we do not require the watermarked image to look the same as the original one, watermarks that keep the image semantically similar can be an alternative defense against our attack. Our finding underscores the need for a shift in research/industry emphasis from invisible watermarks to semantically similar ones. Code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/WatermarkAttacker.
SGEM: Test-Time Adaptation for Automatic Speech Recognition via Sequential-Level Generalized Entropy Minimization

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are frequently exposed to data distribution shifts in many real-world scenarios, leading to erroneous predictions. To tackle this issue, an existing test-time adaptation (TTA) method has recently been proposed to adapt the pre-trained ASR model on unlabeled test instances without source data. Despite decent performance gain, this work relies solely on naive greedy decoding and performs adaptation across timesteps at a frame level, which may not be optimal given the sequential nature of the model output. Motivated by this, we propose a novel TTA framework, dubbed SGEM, for general ASR models. To treat the sequential output, SGEM first exploits beam search to explore candidate output logits and selects the most plausible one. Then, it utilizes generalized entropy minimization and negative sampling as unsupervised objectives to adapt the model. SGEM achieves state-of-the-art performance for three mainstream ASR models under various domain shifts.
Why We Should Report the Details in Subjective Evaluation of TTS More Rigorously

This paper emphasizes the importance of reporting experiment details in subjective evaluations and demonstrates how such details can significantly impact evaluation results in the field of speech synthesis. Through an analysis of 80 papers presented at INTERSPEECH 2022, we find a lack of thorough reporting on critical details such as evaluator recruitment and filtering, instructions and payments, and the geographic and linguistic backgrounds of evaluators. To illustrate the effect of these details on evaluation outcomes, we conducted mean opinion score (MOS) tests on three well-known TTS systems under different evaluation settings and we obtain at least three distinct rankings of TTS models. We urge the community to report experiment details in subjective evaluations to improve the reliability and interpretability of experimental results.
Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing

Despite increasing interest in the automatic detection of media frames in NLP, the problem is typically simplified as single-label classification and adopts a topic-like view on frames, evading modelling the broader document-level narrative. In this work, we revisit a widely used conceptualization of framing from the communication sciences which explicitly captures elements of narratives, including conflict and its resolution, and integrate it with the narrative framing of key entities in the story as heroes, victims or villains. We adapt an effective annotation paradigm that breaks a complex annotation task into a series of simpler binary questions, and present an annotated data set of English news articles, and a case study on the framing of climate change in articles from news outlets across the political spectrum. Finally, we explore automatic multi-label prediction of our frames with supervised and semi-supervised approaches, and present a novel retrieval-based method which is both effective and transparent in its predictions. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities and challenges for future work on document-level models of narrative framing.
Flew Over Learning Trap: Learn Unlearnable Samples by Progressive Staged Training

Unlearning techniques are proposed to prevent third parties from exploiting unauthorized data, which generate unlearnable samples by adding imperceptible perturbations to data for public publishing. These unlearnable samples effectively misguide model training to learn perturbation features but ignore image semantic features. We make the in-depth analysis and observe that models can learn both image features and perturbation features of unlearnable samples at an early stage, but rapidly go to the overfitting stage since the shallow layers tend to overfit on perturbation features and make models fall into overfitting quickly. Based on the observations, we propose Progressive Staged Training to effectively prevent models from overfitting in learning perturbation features. We evaluated our method on multiple model architectures over diverse datasets, e.g., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-mini. Our method circumvents the unlearnability of all state-of-the-art methods in the literature and provides a reliable baseline for further evaluation of unlearnable techniques.
Incorporating Deep Syntactic and Semantic Knowledge for Chinese Sequence Labeling with GCN

Recently, it is quite common to integrate Chinese sequence labeling results to enhance syntactic and semantic parsing. However, little attention has been paid to the utility of hierarchy and structure information encoded in syntactic and semantic features for Chinese sequence labeling tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to encode syntactic structure features and semantic information for Chinese sequence labeling tasks with graph convolutional networks (GCN). Experiments on five benchmark datasets, including Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging, demonstrate that our model can effectively improve the performance of Chinese labeling tasks.
Segment Anything Meets Semantic Communication

In light of the diminishing returns of traditional methods for enhancing transmission rates, the domain of semantic communication presents promising new frontiers. Focusing on image transmission, this paper explores the application of foundation models, particularly the Segment Anything Model (SAM) developed by Meta AI Research, to improve semantic communication. SAM is a promptable image segmentation model that has gained attention for its ability to perform zero-shot segmentation tasks without explicit training or domain-specific knowledge. By employing SAM's segmentation capability and lightweight neural network architecture for semantic coding, we propose a practical approach to semantic communication. We demonstrate that this approach retains critical semantic features, achieving higher image reconstruction quality and reducing communication overhead. This practical solution eliminates the resource-intensive stage of training a segmentation model and can be applied to any semantic coding architecture, paving the way for real-world applications.
Simulating Noisy Quantum Circuits for Cryptographic Algorithms

The emergence of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers has important consequences for cryptographic algorithms. It is theoretically well-established that key algorithms used in cybersecurity are vulnerable to quantum computers due to the fact that theoretical security guarantees, designed based on algorithmic complexity for classical computers, are not sufficient for quantum circuits. Many different quantum algorithms have been developed, which have potentially broad applications on future computing systems. However, this potential depends on the continued maturation of quantum hardware, which remains an area of active research and development. Theoretical limits provide an upper bound on the performance for algorithms. In practice, threats to encryption can only be accurately be assessed in the context of the rapidly evolving hardware and software landscape. Software co-design refers to the concurrent design of software and hardware as a way to understand the limitations of current capabilities and develop effective strategies to advance the state of the art. Since the capabilities for classical computation currently exceed quantum capabilities, quantum emulation techniques can play an important role in the co-design process. In this paper, we describe how the {\em cuQuantum} environment can support quantum algorithm co-design activities using widely-available commodity hardware. We describe how emulation techniques can be used to assess the impact of noise on algorithms of interest, and identify limitations associated with current hardware. We present our analysis in the context of areas of priority for cybersecurity and cryptography in particular since these algorithms are extraordinarily consequential for securing information in the digital world.
Random matrix theory and the loss surfaces of neural networks

Neural network models are one of the most successful approaches to machine learning, enjoying an enormous amount of development and research over recent years and finding concrete real-world applications in almost any conceivable area of science, engineering and modern life in general. The theoretical understanding of neural networks trails significantly behind their practical success and the engineering heuristics that have grown up around them. Random matrix theory provides a rich framework of tools with which aspects of neural network phenomenology can be explored theoretically. In this thesis, we establish significant extensions of prior work using random matrix theory to understand and describe the loss surfaces of large neural networks, particularly generalising to different architectures. Informed by the historical applications of random matrix theory in physics and elsewhere, we establish the presence of local random matrix universality in real neural networks and then utilise this as a modeling assumption to derive powerful and novel results about the Hessians of neural network loss surfaces and their spectra. In addition to these major contributions, we make use of random matrix models for neural network loss surfaces to shed light on modern neural network training approaches and even to derive a novel and effective variant of a popular optimisation algorithm. Overall, this thesis provides important contributions to cement the place of random matrix theory in the theoretical study of modern neural networks, reveals some of the limits of existing approaches and begins the study of an entirely new role for random matrix theory in the theory of deep learning with important experimental discoveries and novel theoretical results based on local random matrix universality.