Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Multi-Abstractive Neural Controller: An Efficient Hierarchical Control Architecture for Interactive Driving

As learning-based methods make their way from perception systems to planning/control stacks, robot control systems have started to enjoy the benefits that data-driven methods provide. Because control systems directly affect the motion of the robot, data-driven methods, especially black box approaches, need to be used with caution considering aspects such as stability and interpretability. In this paper, we describe a differentiable and hierarchical control architecture. The proposed representation, called \textit{multi-abstractive neural controller}, uses the input image to control the transitions within a novel discrete behavior planner (referred to as the visual automaton generative network, or \textit{vAGN}). The output of a vAGN controls the parameters of a set of dynamic movement primitives which provides the system controls. We train this neural controller with real-world driving data via behavior cloning and show improved explainability, sample efficiency, and similarity to human driving.
Meta-learning For Vision-and-language Cross-lingual Transfer

Current pre-trained vison-language models (PVLMs) achieve excellent performance on a range of multi-modal datasets. Recent work has aimed at building multilingual models, and a range of novel multilingual multi-modal datasets have been proposed. Current PVLMs typically perform poorly on these datasets when used for multi-modal zero-shot or few-shot cross-lingual transfer, especially for low-resource languages. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel meta-learning fine-tuning framework. Our framework makes current PVLMs rapidly adaptive to new languages in vision-language scenarios by designing MAML in a cross-lingual multi-modal manner. Experiments show that our method boosts the performance of current state-of-the-art PVLMs in both zero-shot and few-shot cross-lingual transfer on a range of vision-language understanding tasks and datasets (XVNLI, xGQA, MaRVL, xFlicker&Co)
Personalized DP-SGD using Sampling Mechanisms

Personalized privacy becomes critical in deep learning for Trustworthy AI. While Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is widely used in deep learning methods supporting privacy, it provides the same level of privacy to all individuals, which may lead to overprotection and low utility. In practice, different users may require different privacy levels, and the model can be improved by using more information about the users with lower privacy requirements. There are also recent works on differential privacy of individuals when using DP-SGD, but they are mostly about individual privacy accounting and do not focus on satisfying different privacy levels. We thus extend DP-SGD to support a recent privacy notion called ($\Phi$,$\Delta$)-Personalized Differential Privacy (($\Phi$,$\Delta$)-PDP), which extends an existing PDP concept called $\Phi$-PDP. Our algorithm uses a multi-round personalized sampling mechanism and embeds it within the DP-SGD iterations. Experiments on real datasets show that our algorithm outperforms DP-SGD and simple combinations of DP-SGD with existing PDP mechanisms in terms of model performance and efficiency due to its embedded sampling mechanism.
Collaborative Recommendation Model Based on Multi-modal Multi-view Attention Network: Movie and literature cases

The existing collaborative recommendation models that use multi-modal information emphasize the representation of users' preferences but easily ignore the representation of users' dislikes. Nevertheless, modelling users' dislikes facilitates comprehensively characterizing user profiles. Thus, the representation of users' dislikes should be integrated into the user modelling when we construct a collaborative recommendation model. In this paper, we propose a novel Collaborative Recommendation Model based on Multi-modal multi-view Attention Network (CRMMAN), in which the users are represented from both preference and dislike views. Specifically, the users' historical interactions are divided into positive and negative interactions, used to model the user's preference and dislike views, respectively. Furthermore, the semantic and structural information extracted from the scene is employed to enrich the item representation. We validate CRMMAN by designing contrast experiments based on two benchmark MovieLens-1M and Book-Crossing datasets. Movielens-1m has about a million ratings, and Book-Crossing has about 300,000 ratings. Compared with the state-of-the-art knowledge-graph-based and multi-modal recommendation methods, the AUC, NDCG@5 and NDCG@10 are improved by 2.08%, 2.20% and 2.26% on average of two datasets. We also conduct controlled experiments to explore the effects of multi-modal information and multi-view mechanism. The experimental results show that both of them enhance the model's performance.
Are Pre-trained Language Models Useful for Model Ensemble in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction?

Model ensemble has been in widespread use for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), boosting model performance. We hypothesize that model ensemble based on the perplexity (PPL) computed by pre-trained language models (PLMs) should benefit the GEC system. To this end, we explore several ensemble strategies based on strong PLMs with four sophisticated single models. However, the performance does not improve but even gets worse after the PLM-based ensemble. This surprising result sets us doing a detailed analysis on the data and coming up with some insights on GEC. The human references of correct sentences is far from sufficient in the test data, and the gap between a correct sentence and an idiomatic one is worth our attention. Moreover, the PLM-based ensemble strategies provide an effective way to extend and improve GEC benchmark data. Our source code is available at https://github.com/JamyDon/PLM-based-CGEC-Model-Ensemble.
Towards Adaptive Prefix Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Fine-tuning

Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on various downstream tasks with whole parameters is prohibitively expensive. Hence, Parameter-efficient fine-tuning has attracted attention that only optimizes a few task-specific parameters with the frozen pre-trained model. In this work, we focus on prefix tuning, which only optimizes continuous prefix vectors (i.e. pseudo tokens) inserted into Transformer layers. Based on the observation that the learned syntax and semantics representation varies a lot at different layers, we argue that the adaptive prefix will be further tailored to each layer than the fixed one, enabling the fine-tuning more effective and efficient. Thus, we propose Adaptive Prefix Tuning (APT) to adjust the prefix in terms of both fine-grained token level and coarse-grained layer level with a gate mechanism. Experiments on the SuperGLUE and NER datasets show the effectiveness of APT. In addition, taking the gate as a probing, we validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the variable prefix.
Boosting Cross-lingual Transferability in Multilingual Models via In-Context Learning

Existing cross-lingual transfer (CLT) prompting methods are only concerned with monolingual demonstration examples in the source language. In this paper, we propose In-CLT, a novel cross-lingual transfer prompting method that leverages both source and target languages to construct the demonstration examples. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on multilingual benchmarks, focusing on question answering tasks. Experiment results show that In-CLT prompt not only improves multilingual models' cross-lingual transferability, but also demonstrates remarkable unseen language generalization ability. In-CLT prompting, in particular, improves model performance by 10 to 20\% points on average when compared to prior cross-lingual transfer approaches. We also observe the surprising performance gain on the other multilingual benchmarks, especially in reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between lexical similarity and pre-training corpora in terms of the cross-lingual transfer gap.
Discounting in Strategy Logic

Discounting is an important dimension in multi-agent systems as long as we want to reason about strategies and time. It is a key aspect in economics as it captures the intuition that the far-away future is not as important as the near future. Traditional verification techniques allow to check whether there is a winning strategy for a group of agents but they do not take into account the fact that satisfying a goal sooner is different from satisfying it after a long wait. In this paper, we augment Strategy Logic with future discounting over a set of discounted functions D, denoted SLdisc[D]. We consider "until" operators with discounting functions: the satisfaction value of a specification in SLdisc[D] is a value in [0, 1], where the longer it takes to fulfill requirements, the smaller the satisfaction value is. We motivate our approach with classical examples from Game Theory and study the complexity of model-checking SLdisc[D]-formulas.
Collaborative World Models: An Online-Offline Transfer RL Approach

Training offline reinforcement learning (RL) models using visual inputs poses two significant challenges, i.e., the overfitting problem in representation learning and the overestimation bias for expected future rewards. Recent work has attempted to alleviate the overestimation bias by encouraging conservative behaviors. This paper, in contrast, tries to build more flexible constraints for value estimation without impeding the exploration of potential advantages. The key idea is to leverage off-the-shelf RL simulators, which can be easily interacted with in an online manner, as the "test bed" for offline policies. To enable effective online-to-offline knowledge transfer, we introduce CoWorld, a model-based RL approach that mitigates cross-domain discrepancies in state and reward spaces. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CoWorld, outperforming existing RL approaches by large margins.
Context-Aware Transformer Pre-Training for Answer Sentence Selection

Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a core component for building an accurate Question Answering pipeline. AS2 models rank a set of candidate sentences based on how likely they answer a given question. The state of the art in AS2 exploits pre-trained transformers by transferring them on large annotated datasets, while using local contextual information around the candidate sentence. In this paper, we propose three pre-training objectives designed to mimic the downstream fine-tuning task of contextual AS2. This allows for specializing LMs when fine-tuning for contextual AS2. Our experiments on three public and two large-scale industrial datasets show that our pre-training approaches (applied to RoBERTa and ELECTRA) can improve baseline contextual AS2 accuracy by up to 8% on some datasets.
Learning high-level visual representations from a child's perspective without strong inductive biases

Young children develop sophisticated internal models of the world based on their visual experience. Can such models be learned from a child's visual experience without strong inductive biases? To investigate this, we train state-of-the-art neural networks on a realistic proxy of a child's visual experience without any explicit supervision or domain-specific inductive biases. Specifically, we train both embedding models and generative models on 200 hours of headcam video from a single child collected over two years and comprehensively evaluate their performance in downstream tasks using various reference models as yardsticks. On average, the best embedding models perform at a respectable 70% of a high-performance ImageNet-trained model, despite substantial differences in training data. They also learn broad semantic categories and object localization capabilities without explicit supervision, but they are less object-centric than models trained on all of ImageNet. Generative models trained with the same data successfully extrapolate simple properties of partially masked objects, like their rough outline, texture, color, or orientation, but struggle with finer object details. We replicate our experiments with two other children and find remarkably consistent results. Broadly useful high-level visual representations are thus robustly learnable from a representative sample of a child's visual experience without strong inductive biases.
"What if?" in Probabilistic Logic Programming

A ProbLog program is a logic program with facts that only hold with a specified probability. In this contribution we extend this ProbLog language by the ability to answer "What if" queries. Intuitively, a ProbLog program defines a distribution by solving a system of equations in terms of mutually independent predefined Boolean random variables. In the theory of causality, Judea Pearl proposes a counterfactual reasoning for such systems of equations. Based on Pearl's calculus, we provide a procedure for processing these counterfactual queries on ProbLog programs, together with a proof of correctness and a full implementation. Using the latter, we provide insights into the influence of different parameters on the scalability of inference. Finally, we also show that our approach is consistent with CP-logic, i.e. with the causal semantics for logic programs with annotated with disjunctions.
Uncovering and Quantifying Social Biases in Code Generation

With the popularity of automatic code generation tools, such as Copilot, the study of the potential hazards of these tools is gaining importance. In this work, we explore the social bias problem in pre-trained code generation models. We propose a new paradigm to construct code prompts and successfully uncover social biases in code generation models. To quantify the severity of social biases in generated code, we develop a dataset along with three metrics to evaluate the overall social bias and fine-grained unfairness across different demographics. Experimental results on three pre-trained code generation models (Codex, InCoder, and CodeGen) with varying sizes, reveal severe social biases. Moreover, we conduct analysis to provide useful insights for further choice of code generation models with low social bias. (This work contains examples that potentially implicate stereotypes, associations, and other harms that could be offensive to individuals in certain social groups.)
Peek Across: Improving Multi-Document Modeling via Cross-Document Question-Answering

The integration of multi-document pre-training objectives into language models has resulted in remarkable improvements in multi-document downstream tasks. In this work, we propose extending this idea by pre-training a generic multi-document model from a novel cross-document question answering pre-training objective. To that end, given a set (or cluster) of topically-related documents, we systematically generate semantically-oriented questions from a salient sentence in one document and challenge the model, during pre-training, to answer these questions while "peeking" into other topically-related documents. In a similar manner, the model is also challenged to recover the sentence from which the question was generated, again while leveraging cross-document information. This novel multi-document QA formulation directs the model to better recover cross-text informational relations, and introduces a natural augmentation that artificially increases the pre-training data. Further, unlike prior multi-document models that focus on either classification or summarization tasks, our pre-training objective formulation enables the model to perform tasks that involve both short text generation (e.g., QA) and long text generation (e.g., summarization). Following this scheme, we pre-train our model -- termed QAmden -- and evaluate its performance across several multi-document tasks, including multi-document QA, summarization, and query-focused summarization, yielding improvements of up to 7%, and significantly outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.
Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages

Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it. Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages. In this paper, we show how disparity in the treatment of different languages arises at the tokenization stage, well before a model is even invoked. The same text translated into different languages can have drastically different tokenization lengths, with differences up to 15 times in some cases. These disparities persist even for tokenizers that are intentionally trained for multilingual support. Character-level and byte-level models also exhibit over 4 times the difference in the encoding length for some language pairs. This induces unfair treatment for some language communities in regard to the cost of accessing commercial language services, the processing time and latency, as well as the amount of content that can be provided as context to the models. Therefore, we make the case that we should train future language models using multilingually fair subword tokenizers.
Proper Interpretation of Heaps' and Zipf's Laws

We checked that the distribution of words in text should uniform, which gives Heaps' law as natural result, that is, the number of types of words can be expressed as a power law of the number of tokens within text. We developed a ``superposition'' model, which leads to an asymptotic power-law distribution of the number of occurrences (or frequency) of words, that is, Zipf's law. The model is well consistent with observations.
Deriving Language Models from Masked Language Models

Masked language models (MLM) do not explicitly define a distribution over language, i.e., they are not language models per se. However, recent work has implicitly treated them as such for the purposes of generation and scoring. This paper studies methods for deriving explicit joint distributions from MLMs, focusing on distributions over two tokens, which makes it possible to calculate exact distributional properties. We find that an approach based on identifying joints whose conditionals are closest to those of the MLM works well and outperforms existing Markov random field-based approaches. We further find that this derived model's conditionals can even occasionally outperform the original MLM's conditionals.
Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners

Large language models (LLMs) can capture rich representations of concepts that are useful for real-world tasks. However, language alone is limited. While existing LLMs excel at text-based inferences, health applications require that models be grounded in numerical data (e.g., vital signs, laboratory values in clinical domains; steps, movement in the wellness domain) that is not easily or readily expressed as text in existing training corpus. We demonstrate that with only few-shot tuning, a large language model is capable of grounding various physiological and behavioral time-series data and making meaningful inferences on numerous health tasks for both clinical and wellness contexts. Using data from wearable and medical sensor recordings, we evaluate these capabilities on the tasks of cardiac signal analysis, physical activity recognition, metabolic calculation (e.g., calories burned), and estimation of stress reports and mental health screeners.
TOAST: Transfer Learning via Attention Steering

Transfer learning involves adapting a pre-trained model to novel downstream tasks. However, we observe that current transfer learning methods often fail to focus on task-relevant features. In this work, we explore refocusing model attention for transfer learning. We introduce Top-Down Attention Steering (TOAST), a novel transfer learning algorithm that keeps the pre-trained backbone frozen, selects task-relevant features in the output, and feeds those features back to the model to steer the attention to the task-specific features. By refocusing the attention only, TOAST achieves state-of-the-art results on a number of transfer learning benchmarks, while having a small number of tunable parameters. Compared to fully fine-tuning, LoRA, and prompt tuning, TOAST substantially improves performance across a range of fine-grained visual classification datasets (e.g., 81.1% -> 86.2% on FGVC). TOAST also outperforms the fully fine-tuned Alpaca and Vicuna models on instruction-following language generation. Code is available at https://github.com/bfshi/TOAST.
How to fix a broken confidence estimator: Evaluating post-hoc methods for selective classification with deep neural networks

This paper addresses the problem of selective classification for deep neural networks, where a model is allowed to abstain from low-confidence predictions to avoid potential errors. We focus on so-called post-hoc methods, which replace the confidence estimator of a given classifier without modifying or retraining it, thus being practically appealing. Considering neural networks with softmax outputs, our goal is to identify the best confidence estimator that can be computed directly from the unnormalized logits. This problem is motivated by the intriguing observation in recent work that many classifiers appear to have a "broken" confidence estimator, in the sense that their selective classification performance is much worse than what could be expected by their corresponding accuracies. We perform an extensive experimental study of many existing and proposed confidence estimators applied to 84 pretrained ImageNet classifiers available from popular repositories. Our results show that a simple $p$-norm normalization of the logits, followed by taking the maximum logit as the confidence estimator, can lead to considerable gains in selective classification performance, completely fixing the pathological behavior observed in many classifiers. As a consequence, the selective classification performance of any classifier becomes almost entirely determined by its corresponding accuracy. Moreover, these results are shown to be consistent under distribution shift.
Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Natural Language to First-Order Logic Translation

Translating natural language sentences to first-order logic (NL-FOL translation) is a longstanding challenge in the NLP and formal logic literature. This paper introduces LogicLLaMA, a LLaMA-7B model fine-tuned for NL-FOL translation using LoRA on a single GPU. LogicLLaMA is capable of directly translating natural language into FOL rules, which outperforms GPT-3.5. LogicLLaMA is also equipped to correct FOL rules predicted by GPT-3.5, and can achieve similar performance as GPT-4 with a fraction of the cost. This correction ability was achieved by a novel supervised fine-tuning (SFT) + reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, which initially trains on synthetically perturbed NL-FOL pairs to encourage chain-of-thought reasoning and then fine-tunes with RLHF on GPT-3.5 outputs using a FOL verifier as the reward model. To train LogicLLaMA, we present MALLS (large language $\textbf{M}$odel gener$\textbf{A}$ted N$\textbf{L}$-FO$\textbf{L}$ pair$\textbf{S}$), a dataset of 34K high-quality and diverse sentence-level NL-FOL pairs collected from GPT-4. The dataset was created by implementing a pipeline that prompts GPT-4 for pairs, and dynamically adjusts the prompts to ensure the collection of pairs with rich and diverse contexts at different levels of complexity, and verifies the validity of the generated FOL rules. Codes, weights, and data are available at $\href{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}{{\small \text{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}}}$.