pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model
Authors: Jiwoo Hong, Noah Lee, James Thorne
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: model

While recent preference alignment algorithms for language models have demonstrated promising results, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) remains imperative for achieving successful convergence. In this paper, we study the crucial role of SFT within the context of preference alignment, emphasizing that a minor penalty for the disfavored generation style is sufficient for preference-aligned SFT. Building on this foundation, we introduce a straightforward and innovative reference model-free monolithic odds ratio preference optimization algorithm, ORPO, eliminating the necessity for an additional preference alignment phase. We demonstrate, both empirically and theoretically, that the odds ratio is a sensible choice for contrasting favored and disfavored styles during SFT across the diverse sizes from 125M to 7B. Specifically, fine-tuning Phi-2 (2.7B), Llama-2 (7B), and Mistral (7B) with ORPO on the UltraFeedback alone surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art language models with more than 7B and 13B parameters: achieving up to 12.20% on $\text{AlpacaEval}_{2.0}$ (Figure 1), 66.19% on IFEval (instruction-level loose, Table 6), and 7.32 in MT-Bench (Figure 12). We release code and model checkpoints for Mistral-ORPO-$\alpha$ (7B) and Mistral-ORPO-$\beta$ (7B).
Maxwell's Demon at Work: Efficient Pruning by Leveraging Saturation of Neurons
Authors: Simon Dufort-Labbé, Pierluca D'Oro, Evgenii Nikishin, Razvan Pascanu, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Aristide Baratin
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Model Compression

When training deep neural networks, the phenomenon of $\textit{dying neurons}$ $\unicode{x2013}$units that become inactive or saturated, output zero during training$\unicode{x2013}$ has traditionally been viewed as undesirable, linked with optimization challenges, and contributing to plasticity loss in continual learning scenarios. In this paper, we reassess this phenomenon, focusing on sparsity and pruning. By systematically exploring the impact of various hyperparameter configurations on dying neurons, we unveil their potential to facilitate simple yet effective structured pruning algorithms. We introduce $\textit{Demon Pruning}$ (DemP), a method that controls the proliferation of dead neurons, dynamically leading to network sparsity. Achieved through a combination of noise injection on active units and a one-cycled schedule regularization strategy, DemP stands out for its simplicity and broad applicability. Experiments on CIFAR10 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that DemP surpasses existing structured pruning techniques, showcasing superior accuracy-sparsity tradeoffs and training speedups. These findings suggest a novel perspective on dying neurons as a valuable resource for efficient model compression and optimization.
Annotations on a Budget: Leveraging Geo-Data Similarity to Balance Model Performance and Annotation Cost
Authors: Oana Ignat, Longju Bai, Joan Nwatu, Rada Mihalcea
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00

Current foundation models have shown impressive performance across various tasks. However, several studies have revealed that these models are not effective for everyone due to the imbalanced geographical and economic representation of the data used in the training process. Most of this data comes from Western countries, leading to poor results for underrepresented countries. To address this issue, more data needs to be collected from these countries, but the cost of annotation can be a significant bottleneck. In this paper, we propose methods to identify the data to be annotated to balance model performance and annotation costs. Our approach first involves finding the countries with images of topics (objects and actions) most visually distinct from those already in the training datasets used by current large vision-language foundation models. Next, we identify countries with higher visual similarity for these topics and show that using data from these countries to supplement the training data improves model performance and reduces annotation costs. The resulting lists of countries and corresponding topics are made available at https://github.com/MichiganNLP/visual_diversity_budget.
Scalable Spatiotemporal Prediction with Bayesian Neural Fields
Authors: Feras Saad, Jacob Burnim, Colin Carroll, Brian Patton, Urs Köster, Rif A. Saurous, Matthew Hoffman
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Demand Forecasting, GPU, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Spatiotemporal datasets, which consist of spatially-referenced time series, are ubiquitous in diverse applications, such as air pollution monitoring, disease tracking, and cloud-demand forecasting. As the scale of modern datasets increases, there is a growing need for statistical methods that are flexible enough to capture complex spatiotemporal dynamics and scalable enough to handle many observations. This article introduces the Bayesian Neural Field (BayesNF), a domain-general statistical model that infers rich spatiotemporal probability distributions for data-analysis tasks including forecasting, interpolation, and variography. BayesNF integrates a deep neural network architecture for high-capacity function estimation with hierarchical Bayesian inference for robust predictive uncertainty quantification. Evaluations against prominent baselines show that BayesNF delivers improvements on prediction problems from climate and public health data containing tens to hundreds of thousands of measurements. Accompanying the paper is an open-source software package (https://github.com/google/bayesnf) that runs on GPU and TPU accelerators through the JAX machine learning platform.
Hunting Attributes: Context Prototype-Aware Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Feilong Tang, Zhongxing Xu, Zhaojun Qu, Wei Feng, Xingjian Jiang, ZongYuan Ge
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Learning Theory, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Recent weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods strive to incorporate contextual knowledge to improve the completeness of class activation maps (CAM). In this work, we argue that the knowledge bias between instances and contexts affects the capability of the prototype to sufficiently understand instance semantics. Inspired by prototype learning theory, we propose leveraging prototype awareness to capture diverse and fine-grained feature attributes of instances. The hypothesis is that contextual prototypes might erroneously activate similar and frequently co-occurring object categories due to this knowledge bias. Therefore, we propose to enhance the prototype representation ability by mitigating the bias to better capture spatial coverage in semantic object regions. With this goal, we present a Context Prototype-Aware Learning (CPAL) strategy, which leverages semantic context to enrich instance comprehension. The core of this method is to accurately capture intra-class variations in object features through context-aware prototypes, facilitating the adaptation to the semantic attributes of various instances. We design feature distribution alignment to optimize prototype awareness, aligning instance feature distributions with dense features. In addition, a unified training framework is proposed to combine label-guided classification supervision and prototypes-guided self-supervision. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 show that CPAL significantly improves off-the-shelf methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The project is available at https://github.com/Barrett-python/CPAL.
Multiple Latent Space Mapping for Compressed Dark Image Enhancement
Authors: Yi Zeng, Zhengning Wang, Yuxuan Liu, Tianjiao Zeng, Xuhang Liu, Xinglong Luo, Shuaicheng Liu, Shuyuan Zhu, Bing Zeng
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Blocking, Image Enhancement

Dark image enhancement aims at converting dark images to normal-light images. Existing dark image enhancement methods take uncompressed dark images as inputs and achieve great performance. However, in practice, dark images are often compressed before storage or transmission over the Internet. Current methods get poor performance when processing compressed dark images. Artifacts hidden in the dark regions are amplified by current methods, which results in uncomfortable visual effects for observers. Based on this observation, this study aims at enhancing compressed dark images while avoiding compression artifacts amplification. Since texture details intertwine with compression artifacts in compressed dark images, detail enhancement and blocking artifacts suppression contradict each other in image space. Therefore, we handle the task in latent space. To this end, we propose a novel latent mapping network based on variational auto-encoder (VAE). Firstly, different from previous VAE-based methods with single-resolution features only, we exploit multiple latent spaces with multi-resolution features, to reduce the detail blur and improve image fidelity. Specifically, we train two multi-level VAEs to project compressed dark images and normal-light images into their latent spaces respectively. Secondly, we leverage a latent mapping network to transform features from compressed dark space to normal-light space. Specifically, since the degradation models of darkness and compression are different from each other, the latent mapping process is divided mapping into enlightening branch and deblocking branch. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in compressed dark image enhancement.
Efficient Knowledge Deletion from Trained Models through Layer-wise Partial Machine Unlearning
Authors: Vinay Chakravarthi Gogineni, Esmaeil S. Nadimi
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning has garnered significant attention due to its ability to selectively erase knowledge obtained from specific training data samples in an already trained machine learning model. This capability enables data holders to adhere strictly to data protection regulations. However, existing unlearning techniques face practical constraints, often causing performance degradation, demanding brief fine-tuning post unlearning, and requiring significant storage. In response, this paper introduces a novel class of machine unlearning algorithms. First method is partial amnesiac unlearning, integration of layer-wise pruning with amnesiac unlearning. In this method, updates made to the model during training are pruned and stored, subsequently used to forget specific data from trained model. The second method assimilates layer-wise partial-updates into label-flipping and optimization-based unlearning to mitigate the adverse effects of data deletion on model efficacy. Through a detailed experimental evaluation, we showcase the effectiveness of proposed unlearning methods. Experimental results highlight that the partial amnesiac unlearning not only preserves model efficacy but also eliminates the necessity for brief post fine-tuning, unlike conventional amnesiac unlearning. Moreover, employing layer-wise partial updates in label-flipping and optimization-based unlearning techniques demonstrates superiority in preserving model efficacy compared to their naive counterparts.
Couler: Unified Machine Learning Workflow Optimization in Cloud
Authors: Xiaoda Wang, Yuan Tang, Tengda Guo, Bo Sang, Jingji Wu, Jian Sha, Ke Zhang, Jiang Qian, Mingjie Tang
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

Machine Learning (ML) has become ubiquitous, fueling data-driven applications across various organizations. Contrary to the traditional perception of ML in research, ML workflows can be complex, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. Expanding an ML workflow to encompass a wider range of data infrastructure and data types may lead to larger workloads and increased deployment costs. Currently, numerous workflow engines are available (with over ten being widely recognized). This variety poses a challenge for end-users in terms of mastering different engine APIs. While efforts have primarily focused on optimizing ML Operations (MLOps) for a specific workflow engine, current methods largely overlook workflow optimization across different engines. In this work, we design and implement Couler, a system designed for unified ML workflow optimization in the cloud. Our main insight lies in the ability to generate an ML workflow using natural language (NL) descriptions. We integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into workflow generation, and provide a unified programming interface for various workflow engines. This approach alleviates the need to understand various workflow engines' APIs. Moreover, Couler enhances workflow computation efficiency by introducing automated caching at multiple stages, enabling large workflow auto-parallelization and automatic hyperparameters tuning. These enhancements minimize redundant computational costs and improve fault tolerance during deep learning workflow training. Couler is extensively deployed in real-world production scenarios at Ant Group, handling approximately 22k workflows daily, and has successfully improved the CPU/Memory utilization by more than 15% and the workflow completion rate by around 17%.
Optimizing Negative Prompts for Enhanced Aesthetics and Fidelity in Text-To-Image Generation
Authors: Michael Ogezi, Ning Shi
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

In text-to-image generation, using negative prompts, which describe undesirable image characteristics, can significantly boost image quality. However, producing good negative prompts is manual and tedious. To address this, we propose NegOpt, a novel method for optimizing negative prompt generation toward enhanced image generation, using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Our combined approach results in a substantial increase of 25% in Inception Score compared to other approaches and surpasses ground-truth negative prompts from the test set. Furthermore, with NegOpt we can preferentially optimize the metrics most important to us. Finally, we construct Negative Prompts DB (https://huggingface.co/datasets/mikeogezi/negopt_full), a publicly available dataset of negative prompts.
Perennial Semantic Data Terms of Use for Decentralized Web
Authors: Rui Zhao, Jun Zhao
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

In today's digital landscape, the Web has become increasingly centralized, raising concerns about user privacy violations. Decentralized Web architectures, such as Solid, offer a promising solution by empowering users with better control over their data in their personal `Pods'. However, a significant challenge remains: users must navigate numerous applications to decide which application can be trusted with access to their data Pods. This often involves reading lengthy and complex Terms of Use agreements, a process that users often find daunting or simply ignore. This compromises user autonomy and impedes detection of data misuse. We propose a novel formal description of Data Terms of Use (DToU), along with a DToU reasoner. Users and applications specify their own parts of the DToU policy with local knowledge, covering permissions, requirements, prohibitions and obligations. Automated reasoning verifies compliance, and also derives policies for output data. This constitutes a ``perennial'' DToU language, where the policy authoring only occurs once, and we can conduct ongoing automated checks across users, applications and activity cycles. Our solution is built on Turtle, Notation 3 and RDF Surfaces, for the language and the reasoning engine. It ensures seamless integration with other semantic tools for enhanced interoperability. We have successfully integrated this language into the Solid framework, and conducted performance benchmark. We believe this work demonstrates a practicality of a perennial DToU language and the potential of a paradigm shift to how users interact with data and applications in a decentralized Web, offering both improved privacy and usability.
Federated Learning of Socially Appropriate Agent Behaviours in Simulated Home Environments
Authors: Saksham Checker, Nikhil Churamani, Hatice Gunes
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Federated Learning

As social robots become increasingly integrated into daily life, ensuring their behaviours align with social norms is crucial. For their widespread open-world application, it is important to explore Federated Learning (FL) settings where individual robots can learn about their unique environments while also learning from each others' experiences. In this paper, we present a novel FL benchmark that evaluates different strategies, using multi-label regression objectives, where each client individually learns to predict the social appropriateness of different robot actions while also sharing their learning with others. Furthermore, splitting the training data by different contexts such that each client incrementally learns across contexts, we present a novel Federated Continual Learning (FCL) benchmark that adapts FL-based methods to use state-of-the-art Continual Learning (CL) methods to continually learn socially appropriate agent behaviours under different contextual settings. Federated Averaging (FedAvg) of weights emerges as a robust FL strategy while rehearsal-based FCL enables incrementally learning the social appropriateness of robot actions, across contextual splits.
Towards a Dynamic Future with Adaptable Computing and Network Convergence (ACNC)
Authors: Masoud Shokrnezhad, Hao Yu, Tarik Taleb, Richard Li, Kyunghan Lee, Jaeseung Song, Cedric Westphal
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Dimensionality Reduction

In the context of advancing 6G, a substantial paradigm shift is anticipated, highlighting comprehensive everything-to-everything interactions characterized by numerous connections and stringent adherence to Quality of Service/Experience (QoS/E) prerequisites. The imminent challenge stems from resource scarcity, prompting a deliberate transition to Computing-Network Convergence (CNC) as an auspicious approach for joint resource orchestration. While CNC-based mechanisms have garnered attention, their effectiveness in realizing future services, particularly in use cases like the Metaverse, may encounter limitations due to the continually changing nature of users, services, and resources. Hence, this paper presents the concept of Adaptable CNC (ACNC) as an autonomous Machine Learning (ML)-aided mechanism crafted for the joint orchestration of computing and network resources, catering to dynamic and voluminous user requests with stringent requirements. ACNC encompasses two primary functionalities: state recognition and context detection. Given the intricate nature of the user-service-computing-network space, the paper employs dimension reduction to generate live, holistic, abstract system states in a hierarchical structure. To address the challenges posed by dynamic changes, Continual Learning (CL) is employed, classifying the system state into contexts controlled by dedicated ML agents, enabling them to operate efficiently. These two functionalities are intricately linked within a closed loop overseen by the End-to-End (E2E) orchestrator to allocate resources. The paper introduces the components of ACNC, proposes a Metaverse scenario to exemplify ACNC's role in resource provisioning with Segment Routing v6 (SRv6), outlines ACNC's workflow, details a numerical analysis for efficiency assessment, and concludes with discussions on relevant challenges and potential avenues for future research.
An Improved Strategy for Blood Glucose Control Using Multi-Step Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Weiwei Gu, Senquan Wang
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Blood Glucose (BG) control involves keeping an individual's BG within a healthy range through extracorporeal insulin injections is an important task for people with type 1 diabetes. However,traditional patient self-management is cumbersome and risky. Recent research has been devoted to exploring individualized and automated BG control approaches, among which Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) shows potential as an emerging approach. In this paper, we use an exponential decay model of drug concentration to convert the formalization of the BG control problem, which takes into account the delay and prolongedness of drug effects, from a PAE-POMDP (Prolonged Action Effect-Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) to a MDP, and we propose a novel multi-step DRL-based algorithm to solve the problem. The Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) sampling method is also used in it. Compared to single-step bootstrapped updates, multi-step learning is more efficient and reduces the influence from biasing targets. Our proposed method converges faster and achieves higher cumulative rewards compared to the benchmark in the same training environment, and improves the time-in-range (TIR), the percentage of time the patient's BG is within the target range, in the evaluation phase. Our work validates the effectiveness of multi-step reinforcement learning in BG control, which may help to explore the optimal glycemic control measure and improve the survival of diabetic patients.
The future of document indexing: GPT and Donut revolutionize table of content processing
Authors: Degaga Wolde Feyisa, Haylemicheal Berihun, Amanuel Zewdu, Mahsa Najimoghadam, Marzieh Zare
Date: 2024-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Industrial projects rely heavily on lengthy, complex specification documents, making tedious manual extraction of structured information a major bottleneck. This paper introduces an innovative approach to automate this process, leveraging the capabilities of two cutting-edge AI models: Donut, a model that extracts information directly from scanned documents without OCR, and OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo, a robust large language model. The proposed methodology is initiated by acquiring the table of contents (ToCs) from construction specification documents and subsequently structuring the ToCs text into JSON data. Remarkable accuracy is achieved, with Donut reaching 85% and GPT-3.5 Turbo reaching 89% in effectively organizing the ToCs. This landmark achievement represents a significant leap forward in document indexing, demonstrating the immense potential of AI to automate information extraction tasks across diverse document types, boosting efficiency and liberating critical resources in various industries.