pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Does Graph Prompt Work? A Data Operation Perspective with Theoretical Analysis
Authors: Qunzhong Wang, Xiangguo Sun, Hong Cheng
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In recent years, graph prompting has emerged as a promising research direction, enabling the learning of additional tokens or subgraphs appended to the original graphs without requiring retraining of pre-trained graph models across various applications. This novel paradigm, shifting from the traditional pretraining and finetuning to pretraining and prompting has shown significant empirical success in simulating graph data operations, with applications ranging from recommendation systems to biological networks and graph transferring. However, despite its potential, the theoretical underpinnings of graph prompting remain underexplored, raising critical questions about its fundamental effectiveness. The lack of rigorous theoretical proof of why and how much it works is more like a dark cloud over the graph prompt area to go further. To fill this gap, this paper introduces a theoretical framework that rigorously analyzes graph prompting from a data operation perspective. Our contributions are threefold: First, we provide a formal guarantee theorem, demonstrating graph prompts capacity to approximate graph transformation operators, effectively linking upstream and downstream tasks. Second, we derive upper bounds on the error of these data operations by graph prompts for a single graph and extend this discussion to batches of graphs, which are common in graph model training. Third, we analyze the distribution of data operation errors, extending our theoretical findings from linear graph models (e.g., GCN) to non-linear graph models (e.g., GAT). Extensive experiments support our theoretical results and confirm the practical implications of these guarantees.
Stochasticity in Motion: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Aron Distelzweig, Andreas Look, Eitan Kosman, Faris Janjoš, Jörg Wagner, Abhinav Valada
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Motion Planning, motion prediction, Trajectory Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

In autonomous driving, accurate motion prediction is crucial for safe and efficient motion planning. To ensure safety, planners require reliable uncertainty estimates of the predicted behavior of surrounding agents, yet this aspect has received limited attention. In particular, decomposing uncertainty into its aleatoric and epistemic components is essential for distinguishing between inherent environmental randomness and model uncertainty, thereby enabling more robust and informed decision-making. This paper addresses the challenge of uncertainty modeling in trajectory prediction with a holistic approach that emphasizes uncertainty quantification, decomposition, and the impact of model composition. Our method, grounded in information theory, provides a theoretically principled way to measure uncertainty and decompose it into aleatoric and epistemic components. Unlike prior work, our approach is compatible with state-of-the-art motion predictors, allowing for broader applicability. We demonstrate its utility by conducting extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset, which shows how different architectures and configurations influence uncertainty quantification and model robustness.
Fira: Can We Achieve Full-rank Training of LLMs Under Low-rank Constraint?
Authors: Xi Chen, Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li, Xunhao Lai, Xiangyu Yue, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Low-rank training has emerged as a promising approach for reducing memory usage in training Large Language Models (LLMs). Previous methods either rely on decomposing weight matrices (e.g., LoRA), or seek to decompose gradient matrices (e.g., GaLore) to ensure reduced memory consumption. However, both of them constrain the training in a low-rank subspace, thus inevitably leading to sub-optimal performance. This raises a question: whether it is possible to consistently preserve the low-rank constraint for memory efficiency, while achieving full-rank training (i.e., training with full-rank gradients of full-rank weights) to avoid inferior outcomes? In this paper, we propose a new plug-and-play training framework for LLMs called Fira, as the first attempt to achieve this goal. First, we observe an interesting phenomenon during LLM training: the scaling impact of adaptive optimizers (e.g., Adam) on the gradient norm remains similar from low-rank to full-rank training. Based on this observation, we propose a norm-based scaling method, which utilizes the scaling impact of low-rank optimizers as substitutes for that of original full-rank optimizers to enable full-rank training. In this way, we can preserve the low-rank constraint in the optimizer while achieving full-rank training for better performance. Moreover, we find that there are sudden gradient rises during the optimization process, potentially causing loss spikes. To address this, we further put forward a norm-growth limiter to smooth the gradient via regulating the relative increase of gradient norms. Extensive experiments on the pre-training and fine-tuning of LLMs show that Fira outperforms both LoRA and GaLore, achieving performance that is comparable to or even better than full-rank training.
DRUPI: Dataset Reduction Using Privileged Information
Authors: Shaobo Wang, Yantai Yang, Shuaiyu Zhang, Chenghao Sun, Weiya Li, Xuming Hu, Linfeng Zhang
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Dataset reduction (DR) seeks to select or distill samples from large datasets into smaller subsets while preserving performance on target tasks. Existing methods primarily focus on pruning or synthesizing data in the same format as the original dataset, typically the input data and corresponding labels. However, in DR settings, we find it is possible to synthesize more information beyond the data-label pair as an additional learning target to facilitate model training. In this paper, we introduce Dataset Reduction Using Privileged Information (DRUPI), which enriches DR by synthesizing privileged information alongside the reduced dataset. This privileged information can take the form of feature labels or attention labels, providing auxiliary supervision to improve model learning. Our findings reveal that effective feature labels must balance between being overly discriminative and excessively diverse, with a moderate level proving optimal for improving the reduced dataset's efficacy. Extensive experiments on ImageNet, CIFAR-10/100, and Tiny ImageNet demonstrate that DRUPI integrates seamlessly with existing dataset reduction methods, offering significant performance gains. *The code will be released after the paper is accepted.*
Upcycling Instruction Tuning from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts via Parameter Merging
Authors: Tingfeng Hui, Zhenyu Zhang, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Sen Su
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Mixture-of-Experts

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) shines brightly in large language models (LLMs) and demonstrates outstanding performance in plentiful natural language processing tasks. However, existing methods transforming LLMs from dense to MoE face significant data requirements and typically rely on large-scale post-training. In this paper, we propose Upcycling Instruction Tuning (UpIT), a data-efficient approach for tuning a dense pre-trained model into a MoE instruction model. Specifically, we first point out that intermediate checkpoints during instruction tuning of the dense model are naturally suitable for specialized experts, and then propose an expert expansion stage to flexibly achieve models with flexible numbers of experts, where genetic algorithm and parameter merging are introduced to ensure sufficient diversity of new extended experts. To ensure that each specialized expert in the MoE model works as expected, we select a small amount of seed data that each expert excels to pre-optimize the router. Extensive experiments with various data scales and upcycling settings demonstrate the outstanding performance and data efficiency of UpIT, as well as stable improvement in expert or data scaling. Further analysis reveals the importance of ensuring expert diversity in upcycling.
Automated Red Teaming with GOAT: the Generative Offensive Agent Tester
Authors: Maya Pavlova, Erik Brinkman, Krithika Iyer, Vitor Albiero, Joanna Bitton, Hailey Nguyen, Joe Li, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Ivan Evtimov, Aaron Grattafiori
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Red teaming assesses how large language models (LLMs) can produce content that violates norms, policies, and rules set during their safety training. However, most existing automated methods in the literature are not representative of the way humans tend to interact with AI models. Common users of AI models may not have advanced knowledge of adversarial machine learning methods or access to model internals, and they do not spend a lot of time crafting a single highly effective adversarial prompt. Instead, they are likely to make use of techniques commonly shared online and exploit the multiturn conversational nature of LLMs. While manual testing addresses this gap, it is an inefficient and often expensive process. To address these limitations, we introduce the Generative Offensive Agent Tester (GOAT), an automated agentic red teaming system that simulates plain language adversarial conversations while leveraging multiple adversarial prompting techniques to identify vulnerabilities in LLMs. We instantiate GOAT with 7 red teaming attacks by prompting a general-purpose model in a way that encourages reasoning through the choices of methods available, the current target model's response, and the next steps. Our approach is designed to be extensible and efficient, allowing human testers to focus on exploring new areas of risk while automation covers the scaled adversarial stress-testing of known risk territory. We present the design and evaluation of GOAT, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art LLMs, with an ASR@10 of 97% against Llama 3.1 and 88% against GPT-4 on the JailbreakBench dataset.
Elaborative Subtopic Query Reformulation for Broad and Indirect Queries in Travel Destination Recommendation
Authors: Qianfeng Wen, Yifan Liu, Joshua Zhang, George Saad, Anton Korikov, Yury Sambale, Scott Sanner
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

In Query-driven Travel Recommender Systems (RSs), it is crucial to understand the user intent behind challenging natural language(NL) destination queries such as the broadly worded "youth-friendly activities" or the indirect description "a high school graduation trip". Such queries are challenging due to the wide scope and subtlety of potential user intents that confound the ability of retrieval methods to infer relevant destinations from available textual descriptions such as WikiVoyage. While query reformulation (QR) has proven effective in enhancing retrieval by addressing user intent, existing QR methods tend to focus only on expanding the range of potentially matching query subtopics (breadth) or elaborating on the potential meaning of a query (depth), but not both. In this paper, we introduce Elaborative Subtopic Query Reformulation (EQR), a large language model-based QR method that combines both breadth and depth by generating potential query subtopics with information-rich elaborations. We also release TravelDest, a novel dataset for query-driven travel destination RSs. Experiments on TravelDest show that EQR achieves significant improvements in recall and precision over existing state-of-the-art QR methods.
Imaging foundation model for universal enhancement of non-ideal measurement CT
Authors: Yuxin Liu, Rongjun Ge, Yuting He, Zhan Wu, Shangwen Yang, Yuan Gao, Chenyu You, Ge Wang, Yang Chen, Shuo Li
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Enhancement, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Non-ideal measurement computed tomography (NICT) employs suboptimal imaging protocols to expand CT applications. However, the resulting trade-offs degrade image quality, limiting clinical acceptability. Although deep learning methods have been used to enhance NICT images, their reliance on large training datasets and limited generalizability across diverse settings hinder practical use. We propose the multi-scale integrated Transformer AMPlifier (TAMP), the first imaging foundation model for universal NICT enhancement. Pre-trained on 10.8 million physics-driven simulated NICT images, TAMP generalizes effectively across various NICT settings, defect degrees, and body regions. Moreover, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy enables TAMP to adapt to specific clinical scenarios using only few slices. Extensive experiments, including radiologists and real-world validations, demonstrate that TAMP consistently improves image quality and clinical acceptability, underscoring its significant potential to advance CT imaging and broaden NICT applications in clinical practice.
Iterated Local Search with Linkage Learning
Authors: Renato Tinós, Michal W. Przewozniczek, Darrell Whitley, Francisco Chicano
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

In pseudo-Boolean optimization, a variable interaction graph represents variables as vertices, and interactions between pairs of variables as edges. In black-box optimization, the variable interaction graph may be at least partially discovered by using empirical linkage learning techniques. These methods never report false variable interactions, but they are computationally expensive. The recently proposed local search with linkage learning discovers the partial variable interaction graph as a side-effect of iterated local search. However, information about the strength of the interactions is not learned by the algorithm. We propose local search with linkage learning 2, which builds a weighted variable interaction graph that stores information about the strength of the interaction between variables. The weighted variable interaction graph can provide new insights about the optimization problem and behavior of optimizers. Experiments with NK landscapes, knapsack problem, and feature selection show that local search with linkage learning 2 is able to efficiently build weighted variable interaction graphs. In particular, experiments with feature selection show that the weighted variable interaction graphs can be used for visualizing the feature interactions in machine learning. Additionally, new transformation operators that exploit the interactions between variables can be designed. We illustrate this ability by proposing a new perturbation operator for iterated local search.
Spoken Grammar Assessment Using LLM
Authors: Sunil Kumar Kopparapu, Chitralekha Bhat, Ashish Panda
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Spoken language assessment (SLA) systems restrict themselves to evaluating the pronunciation and oral fluency of a speaker by analysing the read and spontaneous spoken utterances respectively. The assessment of language grammar or vocabulary is relegated to written language assessment (WLA) systems. Most WLA systems present a set of sentences from a curated finite-size database of sentences thereby making it possible to anticipate the test questions and train oneself. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end SLA system to assess language grammar from spoken utterances thus making WLA systems redundant; additionally, we make the assessment largely unteachable by employing a large language model (LLM) to bring in variations in the test. We further demonstrate that a hybrid automatic speech recognition (ASR) with a custom-built language model outperforms the state-of-the-art ASR engine for spoken grammar assessment.
Computing Ex Ante Equilibrium in Heterogeneous Zero-Sum Team Games
Authors: Naming Liu, Mingzhi Wang, Xihuai Wang, Weinan Zhang, Yaodong Yang, Youzhi Zhang, Bo An, Ying Wen
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

The ex ante equilibrium for two-team zero-sum games, where agents within each team collaborate to compete against the opposing team, is known to be the best a team can do for coordination. Many existing works on ex ante equilibrium solutions are aiming to extend the scope of ex ante equilibrium solving to large-scale team games based on Policy Space Response Oracle (PSRO). However, the joint team policy space constructed by the most prominent method, Team PSRO, cannot cover the entire team policy space in heterogeneous team games where teammates play distinct roles. Such insufficient policy expressiveness causes Team PSRO to be trapped into a sub-optimal ex ante equilibrium with significantly higher exploitability and never converges to the global ex ante equilibrium. To find the global ex ante equilibrium without introducing additional computational complexity, we first parameterize heterogeneous policies for teammates, and we prove that optimizing the heterogeneous teammates' policies sequentially can guarantee a monotonic improvement in team rewards. We further propose Heterogeneous-PSRO (H-PSRO), a novel framework for heterogeneous team games, which integrates the sequential correlation mechanism into the PSRO framework and serves as the first PSRO framework for heterogeneous team games. We prove that H-PSRO achieves lower exploitability than Team PSRO in heterogeneous team games. Empirically, H-PSRO achieves convergence in matrix heterogeneous games that are unsolvable by non-heterogeneous baselines. Further experiments reveal that H-PSRO outperforms non-heterogeneous baselines in both heterogeneous team games and homogeneous settings.
OpenMathInstruct-2: Accelerating AI for Math with Massive Open-Source Instruction Data
Authors: Shubham Toshniwal, Wei Du, Ivan Moshkov, Branislav Kisacanin, Alexan Ayrapetyan, Igor Gitman
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Arithmetic Reasoning, Large Language Model, Math, Mathematical Reasoning, Math Word Problem Solving

Mathematical reasoning continues to be a critical challenge in large language model (LLM) development with significant interest. However, most of the cutting-edge progress in mathematical reasoning with LLMs has become \emph{closed-source} due to lack of access to training data. This lack of data access limits researchers from understanding the impact of different choices for synthesizing and utilizing the data. With the goal of creating a high-quality finetuning (SFT) dataset for math reasoning, we conduct careful ablation experiments on data synthesis using the recently released \texttt{Llama3.1} family of models. Our experiments show that: (a) solution format matters, with excessively verbose solutions proving detrimental to SFT performance, (b) data generated by a strong teacher outperforms equally-sized data generated by a weak student model, (c) SFT is robust to low-quality solutions, allowing for imprecise data filtering, and (d) question diversity is crucial for achieving data scaling gains. Based on these insights, we create the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset, which consists of 14M question-solution pairs ($\approx$ 600K unique questions), making it nearly eight times larger than the previous largest open-source math reasoning dataset. Finetuning the \texttt{Llama-3.1-8B-Base} using OpenMathInstruct-2 outperforms \texttt{Llama3.1-8B-Instruct} on MATH by an absolute 15.9\% (51.9\% $\rightarrow$ 67.8\%). Finally, to accelerate the open-source efforts, we release the code, the finetuned models, and the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset under a commercially permissive license.
Integrative Decoding: Improve Factuality via Implicit Self-consistency
Authors: Yi Cheng, Xiao Liang, Yeyun Gong, Wen Xiao, Song Wang, Yuji Zhang, Wenjun Hou, Kaishuai Xu, Wenge Liu, Wenjie Li, Jian Jiao, Qi Chen, Peng Cheng, Wayne Xiong
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: TruthfulQA

Self-consistency-based approaches, which involve repeatedly sampling multiple outputs and selecting the most consistent one as the final response, prove to be remarkably effective in improving the factual accuracy of large language models. Nonetheless, existing methods usually have strict constraints on the task format, largely limiting their applicability. In this paper, we present Integrative Decoding (ID), to unlock the potential of self-consistency in open-ended generation tasks. ID operates by constructing a set of inputs, each prepended with a previously sampled response, and then processes them concurrently, with the next token being selected by aggregating of all their corresponding predictions at each decoding step. In essence, this simple approach implicitly incorporates self-consistency in the decoding objective. Extensive evaluation shows that ID consistently enhances factuality over a wide range of language models, with substantial improvements on the TruthfulQA (+11.2%), Biographies (+15.4%) and LongFact (+8.5%) benchmarks. The performance gains amplify progressively as the number of sampled responses increases, indicating the potential of ID to scale up with repeated sampling.
MedQA-CS: Benchmarking Large Language Models Clinical Skills Using an AI-SCE Framework
Authors: Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Chaolong Tang, Xingyu Bian, Youxia Zhao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Huixue Zhou, Won Seok Jang, Feiyun ouyang, Hong Yu
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Instruction Following, MedQA, Multiple-choice

Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) in healthcare require advanced clinical skills (CS), yet current benchmarks fail to evaluate these comprehensively. We introduce MedQA-CS, an AI-SCE framework inspired by medical education's Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), to address this gap. MedQA-CS evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks, LLM-as-medical-student and LLM-as-CS-examiner, designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. Our contributions include developing MedQA-CS, a comprehensive evaluation framework with publicly available data and expert annotations, and providing the quantitative and qualitative assessment of LLMs as reliable judges in CS evaluation. Our experiments show that MedQA-CS is a more challenging benchmark for evaluating clinical skills than traditional multiple-choice QA benchmarks (e.g., MedQA). Combined with existing benchmarks, MedQA-CS enables a more comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' clinical capabilities for both open- and closed-source LLMs.
Edge-preserving noise for diffusion models
Authors: Jente Vandersanden, Sascha Holl, Xingchang Huang, Gurprit Singh
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Unconditional Image Generation

Classical generative diffusion models learn an isotropic Gaussian denoising process, treating all spatial regions uniformly, thus neglecting potentially valuable structural information in the data. Inspired by the long-established work on anisotropic diffusion in image processing, we present a novel edge-preserving diffusion model that generalizes over existing isotropic models by considering a hybrid noise scheme. In particular, we introduce an edge-aware noise scheduler that varies between edge-preserving and isotropic Gaussian noise. We show that our model's generative process converges faster to results that more closely match the target distribution. We demonstrate its capability to better learn the low-to-mid frequencies within the dataset, which plays a crucial role in representing shapes and structural information. Our edge-preserving diffusion process consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in unconditional image generation. It is also particularly more robust for generative tasks guided by a shape-based prior, such as stroke-to-image generation. We present qualitative and quantitative results (FID and CLIP score) showing consistent improvements of up to 30% for both tasks.