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2501.00037
Effects of Turbulence Modeling and Parcel Approach on Dispersed Two-Phase Swirling Flow
physics.flu-dyn cs.CE cs.NA math.NA
Several numerical simulations of a co-axial particle-laden swirling air flow in a vertical circular pipe were performed. The air flow was modeled using the unsteady Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. A Lagrangian model was used for the particle motion. The gas and particles are coupled through two-way momentum exchange. The results of the simulations using three versions of the k-epsilon turbulence model (standard, re-normalization group (RNG), and realizable) are compared with experimental mean velocity profiles. The standard model achieved the best overall performance. The realizable model was unable to satisfactorily predict the radial velocity; it is also the most computationally-expensive model. The simulations using the RNG model predicted additional recirculation zones. We also compared the particle and parcel approaches in solving the particle motion. In the latter, multiple similar particles are grouped in a single parcel, thereby reducing the amount of computation.
2501.00038
Sound-Based Recognition of Touch Gestures and Emotions for Enhanced Human-Robot Interaction
cs.HC cs.RO cs.SD eess.AS
Emotion recognition and touch gesture decoding are crucial for advancing human-robot interaction (HRI), especially in social environments where emotional cues and tactile perception play important roles. However, many humanoid robots, such as Pepper, Nao, and Furhat, lack full-body tactile skin, limiting their ability to engage in touch-based emotional and gesture interactions. In addition, vision-based emotion recognition methods usually face strict GDPR compliance challenges due to the need to collect personal facial data. To address these limitations and avoid privacy issues, this paper studies the potential of using the sounds produced by touching during HRI to recognise tactile gestures and classify emotions along the arousal and valence dimensions. Using a dataset of tactile gestures and emotional interactions from 28 participants with the humanoid robot Pepper, we design an audio-only lightweight touch gesture and emotion recognition model with only 0.24M parameters, 0.94MB model size, and 0.7G FLOPs. Experimental results show that the proposed sound-based touch gesture and emotion recognition model effectively recognises the arousal and valence states of different emotions, as well as various tactile gestures, when the input audio length varies. The proposed model is low-latency and achieves similar results as well-known pretrained audio neural networks (PANNs), but with much smaller FLOPs, parameters, and model size.
2501.00039
Speech Recognition With LLMs Adapted to Disordered Speech Using Reinforcement Learning
eess.AS cs.CL cs.LG cs.SD
We introduce a large language model (LLM) capable of processing speech inputs and show that tuning it further with reinforcement learning on human preference (RLHF) enables it to adapt better to disordered speech than traditional fine-tuning. Our method replaces low-frequency text tokens in an LLM's vocabulary with audio tokens and enables the model to recognize speech by fine-tuning it on speech with transcripts. We then use RL with rewards based on syntactic and semantic accuracy measures generalizing the LLM further to recognize disordered speech. While the resulting LLM does not outperform existing systems for speech recognition, we find that tuning with reinforcement learning using custom rewards leads to substantially better performance than supervised fine-tuning of the language model, specifically when adapting to speech in a different setting. This presents a compelling alternative tuning strategy for speech recognition using large language models.
2501.00042
Resource-Efficient Transformer Architecture: Optimizing Memory and Execution Time for Real-Time Applications
cs.LG cs.AI
This paper describes a memory-efficient transformer model designed to drive a reduction in memory usage and execution time by substantial orders of magnitude without impairing the model's performance near that of the original model. Recently, new architectures of transformers were presented, focused on parameter efficiency and computational optimization; however, such models usually require considerable resources in terms of hardware when deployed in real-world applications on edge devices. This approach addresses this concern by halving embedding size and applying targeted techniques such as parameter pruning and quantization to optimize the memory footprint with minimum sacrifices in terms of accuracy. Experimental results include a 52% reduction in memory usage and a 33% decrease in execution time, resulting in better efficiency than state-of-the-art models. This work compared our model with existing compelling architectures, such as MobileBERT and DistilBERT, and proved its feasibility in the domain of resource-friendly deep learning architectures, mainly for applications in real-time and in resource-constrained applications.
2501.00045
Cross-Linguistic Examination of Machine Translation Transfer Learning
cs.CL cs.LG
This study investigates the effectiveness of transfer learning in machine translation across diverse linguistic families by evaluating five distinct language pairs. Leveraging pre-trained models on high-resource languages, these models were fine-tuned on low-resource languages, examining variations in hyperparameters such as learning rate, batch size, number of epochs, and weight decay. The research encompasses language pairs from different linguistic backgrounds: Semitic (Modern Standard Arabic - Levantine Arabic), Bantu (Hausa - Zulu), Romance (Spanish - Catalan), Slavic (Slovakian - Macedonian), and language isolates (Eastern Armenian - Western Armenian). Results demonstrate that transfer learning is effective across different language families, although the impact of hyperparameters varies. A moderate batch size (e.g., 32) is generally more effective, while very high learning rates can disrupt model training. The study highlights the universality of transfer learning in multilingual contexts and suggests that consistent hyperparameter settings can simplify and enhance the efficiency of multilingual model training.
2501.00046
Numerical solutions of fixed points in two-dimensional Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation expedited by reinforcement learning
cs.LG
This paper presents a combined approach to enhancing the effectiveness of Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) method by deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in identifying fixed points within the 2D Kuramoto-Sivashinsky Equation (KSE). JFNK approach entails a good initial guess for improved convergence when searching for fixed points. With a properly defined reward function, we utilise DRL as a preliminary step to enhance the initial guess in the converging process. We report new results of fixed points in the 2D KSE which have not been reported in the literature. Additionally, we explored control optimization for the 2D KSE to navigate the system trajectories between known fixed points, based on parallel reinforcement learning techniques. This combined method underscores the improved JFNK approach to finding new fixed-point solutions within the context of 2D KSE, which may be instructive for other high-dimensional dynamical systems.
2501.00048
Stroke Prediction using Clinical and Social Features in Machine Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Every year in the United States, 800,000 individuals suffer a stroke - one person every 40 seconds, with a death occurring every four minutes. While individual factors vary, certain predictors are more prevalent in determining stroke risk. As strokes are the second leading cause of death and disability worldwide, predicting stroke likelihood based on lifestyle factors is crucial. Showing individuals their stroke risk could motivate lifestyle changes, and machine learning offers solutions to this prediction challenge. Neural networks excel at predicting outcomes based on training features like lifestyle factors, however, they're not the only option. Logistic regression models can also effectively compute the likelihood of binary outcomes based on independent variables, making them well-suited for stroke prediction. This analysis will compare both neural networks (dense and convolutional) and logistic regression models for stroke prediction, examining their pros, cons, and differences to develop the most effective predictor that minimizes false negatives.
2501.00049
Seq2Seq Model-Based Chatbot with LSTM and Attention Mechanism for Enhanced User Interaction
cs.CL cs.ET
A chatbot is an intelligent software application that automates conversations and engages users in natural language through messaging platforms. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots serve various functions, including customer service, information gathering, and casual conversation. Existing virtual assistant chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, demonstrate the potential of AI in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, many current solutions rely on predefined APIs, which can result in vendor lock-in and high costs. To address these challenges, this work proposes a chatbot developed using a Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) model with an encoder-decoder architecture that incorporates attention mechanisms and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells. By avoiding predefined APIs, this approach ensures flexibility and cost-effectiveness. The chatbot is trained, validated, and tested on a dataset specifically curated for the tourism sector in Draa-Tafilalet, Morocco. Key evaluation findings indicate that the proposed Seq2Seq model-based chatbot achieved high accuracies: approximately 99.58% in training, 98.03% in validation, and 94.12% in testing. These results demonstrate the chatbot's effectiveness in providing relevant and coherent responses within the tourism domain, highlighting the potential of specialized AI applications to enhance user experience and satisfaction in niche markets.
2501.00050
Learning in Multiple Spaces: Few-Shot Network Attack Detection with Metric-Fused Prototypical Networks
cs.CR cs.LG
Network intrusion detection systems face significant challenges in identifying emerging attack patterns, especially when limited data samples are available. To address this, we propose a novel Multi-Space Prototypical Learning (MSPL) framework tailored for few-shot attack detection. The framework operates across multiple metric spaces-Euclidean, Cosine, Chebyshev, and Wasserstein distances-integrated through a constrained weighting scheme to enhance embedding robustness and improve pattern recognition. By leveraging Polyak-averaged prototype generation, the framework stabilizes the learning process and effectively adapts to rare and zero-day attacks. Additionally, an episodic training paradigm ensures balanced representation across diverse attack classes, enabling robust generalization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSPL outperforms traditional approaches in detecting low-profile and novel attack types, establishing it as a robust solution for zero-day attack detection.
2501.00051
DDD-GenDT: Dynamic Data-driven Generative Digital Twin Framework
cs.LG cs.AI cs.SY eess.SY
Digital twin (DT) technology has emerged as a transformative approach to simulate, predict, and optimize the behavior of physical systems, with applications that span manufacturing, healthcare, climate science, and more. However, the development of DT models often faces challenges such as high data requirements, integration complexity, and limited adaptability to dynamic changes in physical systems. This paper presents a new method inspired by dynamic data-driven applications systems (DDDAS), called the dynamic data-driven generative of digital twins framework (DDD-GenDT), which combines the physical system with LLM, allowing LLM to act as DT to interact with the physical system operating status and generate the corresponding physical behaviors. We apply DDD-GenDT to the computer numerical control (CNC) machining process, and we use the spindle current measurement data in the NASA milling wear data set as an example to enable LLMs to forecast the physical behavior from historical data and interact with current observations. Experimental results show that in the zero-shot prediction setting, the LLM-based DT can adapt to the change in the system, and the average RMSE of the GPT-4 prediction is 0.479A, which is 4.79% of the maximum spindle motor current measurement of 10A, with little training data and instructions required. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of DDD-GenDT in this specific application and their potential to construct digital twins. We also discuss the limitations and challenges that may arise in practical implementations.
2501.00052
Efficient and Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mean Field Control Games
cs.LG cs.GT cs.MA
Mean Field Control Games (MFCGs) provide a powerful theoretical framework for analyzing systems of infinitely many interacting agents, blending elements from Mean Field Games (MFGs) and Mean Field Control (MFC). However, solving the coupled Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman and Fokker-Planck equations that characterize MFCG equilibria remains a significant computational challenge, particularly in high-dimensional or complex environments. This paper presents a scalable deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to approximate equilibrium solutions of MFCGs. Building on previous works, We reformulate the infinite-agent stochastic control problem as a Markov Decision Process, where each representative agent interacts with the evolving mean field distribution. We use the actor-critic based algorithm from a previous paper (Angiuli et.al., 2024) as the baseline and propose several versions of more scalable and efficient algorithms, utilizing techniques including parallel sample collection (batching); mini-batching; target network; proximal policy optimization (PPO); generalized advantage estimation (GAE); and entropy regularization. By leveraging these techniques, we effectively improved the efficiency, scalability, and training stability of the baseline algorithm. We evaluate our method on a linear-quadratic benchmark problem, where an analytical solution to the MFCG equilibrium is available. Our results show that some versions of our proposed approach achieve faster convergence and closely approximate the theoretical optimum, outperforming the baseline algorithm by an order of magnitude in sample efficiency. Our work lays the foundation for adapting deep RL to solve more complicated MFCGs closely related to real life, such as large-scale autonomous transportation systems, multi-firm economic competition, and inter-bank borrowing problems.
2501.00053
Implementing Trust in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Diagnosis with a Conformalized Uncertainty-Aware AI Framework in Whole-Slide Images
eess.IV cs.AI cs.LG
Ensuring trustworthiness is fundamental to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) that is considered societally responsible, particularly in cancer diagnostics, where a misdiagnosis can have dire consequences. Current digital pathology AI models lack systematic solutions to address trustworthiness concerns arising from model limitations and data discrepancies between model deployment and development environments. To address this issue, we developed TRUECAM, a framework designed to ensure both data and model trustworthiness in non-small cell lung cancer subtyping with whole-slide images. TRUECAM integrates 1) a spectral-normalized neural Gaussian process for identifying out-of-scope inputs and 2) an ambiguity-guided elimination of tiles to filter out highly ambiguous regions, addressing data trustworthiness, as well as 3) conformal prediction to ensure controlled error rates. We systematically evaluated the framework across multiple large-scale cancer datasets, leveraging both task-specific and foundation models, illustrate that an AI model wrapped with TRUECAM significantly outperforms models that lack such guidance, in terms of classification accuracy, robustness, interpretability, and data efficiency, while also achieving improvements in fairness. These findings highlight TRUECAM as a versatile wrapper framework for digital pathology AI models with diverse architectural designs, promoting their responsible and effective applications in real-world settings.
2501.00054
AdvAnchor: Enhancing Diffusion Model Unlearning with Adversarial Anchors
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Security concerns surrounding text-to-image diffusion models have driven researchers to unlearn inappropriate concepts through fine-tuning. Recent fine-tuning methods typically align the prediction distributions of unsafe prompts with those of predefined text anchors. However, these techniques exhibit a considerable performance trade-off between eliminating undesirable concepts and preserving other concepts. In this paper, we systematically analyze the impact of diverse text anchors on unlearning performance. Guided by this analysis, we propose AdvAnchor, a novel approach that generates adversarial anchors to alleviate the trade-off issue. These adversarial anchors are crafted to closely resemble the embeddings of undesirable concepts to maintain overall model performance, while selectively excluding defining attributes of these concepts for effective erasure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdvAnchor outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AdvAnchor.
2501.00055
LLM-Virus: Evolutionary Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CL
While safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as the cornerstone for powerful systems such as multi-agent frameworks to solve complex real-world problems, they still suffer from potential adversarial queries, such as jailbreak attacks, which attempt to induce harmful content. Researching attack methods allows us to better understand the limitations of LLM and make trade-offs between helpfulness and safety. However, existing jailbreak attacks are primarily based on opaque optimization techniques (e.g. token-level gradient descent) and heuristic search methods like LLM refinement, which fall short in terms of transparency, transferability, and computational cost. In light of these limitations, we draw inspiration from the evolution and infection processes of biological viruses and propose LLM-Virus, a jailbreak attack method based on evolutionary algorithm, termed evolutionary jailbreak. LLM-Virus treats jailbreak attacks as both an evolutionary and transfer learning problem, utilizing LLMs as heuristic evolutionary operators to ensure high attack efficiency, transferability, and low time cost. Our experimental results on multiple safety benchmarks show that LLM-Virus achieves competitive or even superior performance compared to existing attack methods.
2501.00056
Transforming CCTV cameras into NO$_2$ sensors at city scale for adaptive policymaking
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CY
Air pollution in cities, especially NO\textsubscript{2}, is linked to numerous health problems, ranging from mortality to mental health challenges and attention deficits in children. While cities globally have initiated policies to curtail emissions, real-time monitoring remains challenging due to limited environmental sensors and their inconsistent distribution. This gap hinders the creation of adaptive urban policies that respond to the sequence of events and daily activities affecting pollution in cities. Here, we demonstrate how city CCTV cameras can act as a pseudo-NO\textsubscript{2} sensors. Using a predictive graph deep model, we utilised traffic flow from London's cameras in addition to environmental and spatial factors, generating NO\textsubscript{2} predictions from over 133 million frames. Our analysis of London's mobility patterns unveiled critical spatiotemporal connections, showing how specific traffic patterns affect NO\textsubscript{2} levels, sometimes with temporal lags of up to 6 hours. For instance, if trucks only drive at night, their effects on NO\textsubscript{2} levels are most likely to be seen in the morning when people commute. These findings cast doubt on the efficacy of some of the urban policies currently being implemented to reduce pollution. By leveraging existing camera infrastructure and our introduced methods, city planners and policymakers could cost-effectively monitor and mitigate the impact of NO\textsubscript{2} and other pollutants.
2501.00057
VisTabNet: Adapting Vision Transformers for Tabular Data
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Although deep learning models have had great success in natural language processing and computer vision, we do not observe comparable improvements in the case of tabular data, which is still the most common data type used in biological, industrial and financial applications. In particular, it is challenging to transfer large-scale pre-trained models to downstream tasks defined on small tabular datasets. To address this, we propose VisTabNet -- a cross-modal transfer learning method, which allows for adapting Vision Transformer (ViT) with pre-trained weights to process tabular data. By projecting tabular inputs to patch embeddings acceptable by ViT, we can directly apply a pre-trained Transformer Encoder to tabular inputs. This approach eliminates the conceptual cost of designing a suitable architecture for processing tabular data, while reducing the computational cost of training the model from scratch. Experimental results on multiple small tabular datasets (less than 1k samples) demonstrate VisTabNet's superiority, outperforming both traditional ensemble methods and recent deep learning models. The proposed method goes beyond conventional transfer learning practice and shows that pre-trained image models can be transferred to solve tabular problems, extending the boundaries of transfer learning.
2501.00059
Large Language Models for Mathematical Analysis
cs.CL cs.AI
Mathematical problem-solving is a key field in artificial intelligence (AI) and a critical benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While extensive research has focused on mathematical problem-solving, most existing work and datasets concentrate on computational tasks, leaving gaps in areas like mathematical analysis, which demands rigorous proofs and formal reasoning. We developed the DEMI-MathAnalysis dataset, comprising proof-based problems from mathematical analysis topics such as Sequences and Limits, Infinite Series, and Convex Functions. We also designed a guiding framework to rigorously enhance LLMs' ability to solve these problems. Through fine-tuning LLMs on this dataset and employing our framework, we observed significant improvements in their capability to generate logical, complete, and elegant proofs. This work addresses critical gaps in mathematical reasoning and contributes to advancing trustworthy AI capable of handling formalized mathematical language. The code is publicly accessible at LLMs for Mathematical Analysis.
2501.00061
Training-free Heterogeneous Model Merging
cs.LG cs.AI
Model merging has attracted significant attention as a powerful paradigm for model reuse, facilitating the integration of task-specific models into a singular, versatile framework endowed with multifarious capabilities. Previous studies, predominantly utilizing methods such as Weight Average (WA), have shown that model merging can effectively leverage pretrained models without the need for laborious retraining. However, the inherent heterogeneity among models poses a substantial constraint on its applicability, particularly when confronted with discrepancies in model architectures. To overcome this challenge, we propose an innovative model merging framework designed for heterogeneous models, encompassing both depth and width heterogeneity. To address depth heterogeneity, we introduce a layer alignment strategy that harmonizes model layers by segmenting deeper models, treating consecutive layers with similar representations as a cohesive segment, thus enabling the seamless merging of models with differing layer depths. For width heterogeneity, we propose a novel elastic neuron zipping algorithm that projects the weights from models of varying widths onto a common dimensional space, eliminating the need for identical widths. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of these proposed methods, demonstrating that the merging of structurally heterogeneous models can achieve performance levels comparable to those of homogeneous merging, across both vision and NLP tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/training_free_heterogeneous_model_merging.
2501.00062
ELECTRA and GPT-4o: Cost-Effective Partners for Sentiment Analysis
cs.CL cs.AI
Bidirectional transformers excel at sentiment analysis, and Large Language Models (LLM) are effective zero-shot learners. Might they perform better as a team? This paper explores collaborative approaches between ELECTRA and GPT-4o for three-way sentiment classification. We fine-tuned (FT) four models (ELECTRA Base/Large, GPT-4o/4o-mini) using a mix of reviews from Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) and DynaSent. We provided input from ELECTRA to GPT as: predicted label, probabilities, and retrieved examples. Sharing ELECTRA Base FT predictions with GPT-4o-mini significantly improved performance over either model alone (82.74 macro F1 vs. 79.29 ELECTRA Base FT, 79.52 GPT-4o-mini) and yielded the lowest cost/performance ratio (\$0.12/F1 point). However, when GPT models were fine-tuned, including predictions decreased performance. GPT-4o FT-M was the top performer (86.99), with GPT-4o-mini FT close behind (86.77) at much less cost (\$0.38 vs. \$1.59/F1 point). Our results show that augmenting prompts with predictions from fine-tuned encoders is an efficient way to boost performance, and a fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini is nearly as good as GPT-4o FT at 76% less cost. Both are affordable options for projects with limited resources.
2501.00063
"Generative Models for Financial Time Series Data: Enhancing Signal-to-Noise Ratio and Addressing Data Scarcity in A-Share Market
cs.LG cs.AI
The financial industry is increasingly seeking robust methods to address the challenges posed by data scarcity and low signal-to-noise ratios, which limit the application of deep learning techniques in stock market analysis. This paper presents two innovative generative model-based approaches to synthesize stock data, specifically tailored for different scenarios within the A-share market in China. The first method, a sector-based synthesis approach, enhances the signal-to-noise ratio of stock data by classifying the characteristics of stocks from various sectors in China's A-share market. This method employs an Approximate Non-Local Total Variation algorithm to smooth the generated data, a bandpass filtering method based on Fourier Transform to eliminate noise, and Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models to accelerate sampling speed. The second method, a recursive stock data synthesis approach based on pattern recognition, is designed to synthesize data for stocks with short listing periods and limited comparable companies. It leverages pattern recognition techniques and Markov models to learn and generate variable-length stock sequences, while introducing a sub-time-level data augmentation method to alleviate data scarcity issues.We validate the effectiveness of these methods through extensive experiments on various datasets, including those from the main board, STAR Market, Growth Enterprise Market Board, Beijing Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, NYSE, and AMEX. The results demonstrate that our synthesized data not only improve the performance of predictive models but also enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of individual stock signals in price trading strategies. Furthermore, the introduction of sub-time-level data significantly improves the quality of synthesized data.
2501.00064
Lungmix: A Mixup-Based Strategy for Generalization in Respiratory Sound Classification
cs.SD cs.LG eess.AS
Respiratory sound classification plays a pivotal role in diagnosing respiratory diseases. While deep learning models have shown success with various respiratory sound datasets, our experiments indicate that models trained on one dataset often fail to generalize effectively to others, mainly due to data collection and annotation \emph{inconsistencies}. To address this limitation, we introduce \emph{Lungmix}, a novel data augmentation technique inspired by Mixup. Lungmix generates augmented data by blending waveforms using loudness and random masks while interpolating labels based on their semantic meaning, helping the model learn more generalized representations. Comprehensive evaluations across three datasets, namely ICBHI, SPR, and HF, demonstrate that Lungmix significantly enhances model generalization to unseen data. In particular, Lungmix boosts the 4-class classification score by up to 3.55\%, achieving performance comparable to models trained directly on the target dataset.
2501.00065
Predicting Preschoolers' Externalizing Problems with Mother-Child Interaction Dynamics and Deep Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Objective: Predicting children's future levels of externalizing problems helps to identify children at risk and guide targeted prevention. Existing studies have shown that mothers providing support in response to children's dysregulation was associated with children's lower levels of externalizing problems. The current study aims to evaluate and improve the accuracy of predicting children's externalizing problems with mother-child interaction dynamics. Method: This study used mother-child interaction dynamics during a challenging puzzle task to predict children's externalizing problems six months later (N=101, 46 boys, Mage=57.41 months, SD=6.58). Performance of the Residual Dynamic Structural Equation Model (RDSEM) was compared with the Attention-based Sequential Behavior Interaction Modeling (ASBIM) model, developed using the deep learning techniques. Results: The RDSEM revealed that children whose mothers provided more autonomy support after increases of child defeat had lower levels of externalizing problems. Five-fold cross-validation showed that the RDSEM had good prediction accuracy. The ASBIM model further improved prediction accuracy, especially after including child inhibitory control as a personalized individual feature. Conclusions: The dynamic process of mother-child interaction provides important information for predicting children's externalizing problems, especially maternal autonomy supportive response to child defeat. The deep learning model is a useful tool to further improve prediction accuracy.
2501.00066
On Adversarial Robustness of Language Models in Transfer Learning
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CR cs.LG
We investigate the adversarial robustness of LLMs in transfer learning scenarios. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets (MBIB Hate Speech, MBIB Political Bias, MBIB Gender Bias) and various model architectures (BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-2, Gemma, Phi), we reveal that transfer learning, while improving standard performance metrics, often leads to increased vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Our findings demonstrate that larger models exhibit greater resilience to this phenomenon, suggesting a complex interplay between model size, architecture, and adaptation methods. Our work highlights the crucial need for considering adversarial robustness in transfer learning scenarios and provides insights into maintaining model security without compromising performance. These findings have significant implications for the development and deployment of LLMs in real-world applications where both performance and robustness are paramount.
2501.00067
Ensemble of classifiers for speech evaluation
cs.SD cs.AI eess.AS
The article describes an attempt to apply an ensemble of binary classifiers to solve the problem of speech assessment in medicine. A dataset was compiled based on quantitative and expert assessments of syllable pronunciation quality. Quantitative assessments of 7 selected metrics were used as features: dynamic time warp distance, Minkowski distance, correlation coefficient, longest common subsequence (LCSS), edit distance of real se-quence (EDR), edit distance with real penalty (ERP), and merge split (MSM). Expert as-sessment of pronunciation quality was used as a class label: class 1 means high-quality speech, class 0 means distorted. A comparison of training results was carried out for five classification methods: logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), naive Bayes (NB), decision trees (DT), and K-nearest neighbors (KNN). The results of using the mixture method to build an ensemble of classifiers are also presented. The use of an en-semble for the studied data sets allowed us to slightly increase the classification accuracy compared to the use of individual binary classifiers.
2501.00068
Dynamic Optimization of Storage Systems Using Reinforcement Learning Techniques
cs.OS cs.DC cs.LG
The exponential growth of data-intensive applications has placed unprecedented demands on modern storage systems, necessitating dynamic and efficient optimization strategies. Traditional heuristics employed for storage performance optimization often fail to adapt to the variability and complexity of contemporary workloads, leading to significant performance bottlenecks and resource inefficiencies. To address these challenges, this paper introduces RL-Storage, a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework designed to dynamically optimize storage system configurations. RL-Storage leverages deep Q-learning algorithms to continuously learn from real-time I/O patterns and predict optimal storage parameters, such as cache size, queue depths, and readahead settings[1]. The proposed framework operates within the storage kernel, ensuring minimal latency and low computational overhead. Through an adaptive feedback mechanism, RL-Storage dynamically adjusts critical parameters, achieving efficient resource utilization across a wide range of workloads. Experimental evaluations conducted on a range of benchmarks, including RocksDB and PostgreSQL, demonstrate significant improvements, with throughput gains of up to 2.6x and latency reductions of 43% compared to baseline heuristics. Additionally, RL-Storage achieves these performance enhancements with a negligible CPU overhead of 0.11% and a memory footprint of only 5 KB, making it suitable for seamless deployment in production environments. This work underscores the transformative potential of reinforcement learning techniques in addressing the dynamic nature of modern storage systems. By autonomously adapting to workload variations in real time, RL-Storage provides a robust and scalable solution for optimizing storage performance, paving the way for next-generation intelligent storage infrastructures.
2501.00069
Adversarial Negotiation Dynamics in Generative Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Generative language models are increasingly used for contract drafting and enhancement, creating a scenario where competing parties deploy different language models against each other. This introduces not only a game-theory challenge but also significant concerns related to AI safety and security, as the language model employed by the opposing party can be unknown. These competitive interactions can be seen as adversarial testing grounds, where models are effectively red-teamed to expose vulnerabilities such as generating biased, harmful or legally problematic text. Despite the importance of these challenges, the competitive robustness and safety of these models in adversarial settings remain poorly understood. In this small study, we approach this problem by evaluating the performance and vulnerabilities of major open-source language models in head-to-head competitions, simulating real-world contract negotiations. We further explore how these adversarial interactions can reveal potential risks, informing the development of more secure and reliable models. Our findings contribute to the growing body of research on AI safety, offering insights into model selection and optimisation in competitive legal contexts and providing actionable strategies for mitigating risks.
2501.00070
ICLR: In-Context Learning of Representations
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Recent work has demonstrated that semantics specified by pretraining data influence how representations of different concepts are organized in a large language model (LLM). However, given the open-ended nature of LLMs, e.g., their ability to in-context learn, we can ask whether models alter these pretraining semantics to adopt alternative, context-specified ones. Specifically, if we provide in-context exemplars wherein a concept plays a different role than what the pretraining data suggests, do models reorganize their representations in accordance with these novel semantics? To answer this question, we take inspiration from the theory of conceptual role semantics and define a toy "graph tracing" task wherein the nodes of the graph are referenced via concepts seen during training (e.g., apple, bird, etc.) and the connectivity of the graph is defined via some predefined structure (e.g., a square grid). Given exemplars that indicate traces of random walks on the graph, we analyze intermediate representations of the model and find that as the amount of context is scaled, there is a sudden re-organization from pretrained semantic representations to in-context representations aligned with the graph structure. Further, we find that when reference concepts have correlations in their semantics (e.g., Monday, Tuesday, etc.), the context-specified graph structure is still present in the representations, but is unable to dominate the pretrained structure. To explain these results, we analogize our task to energy minimization for a predefined graph topology, providing evidence towards an implicit optimization process to infer context-specified semantics. Overall, our findings indicate scaling context-size can flexibly re-organize model representations, possibly unlocking novel capabilities.
2501.00072
Open-Book Neural Algorithmic Reasoning
cs.LG cs.AI
Neural algorithmic reasoning is an emerging area of machine learning that focuses on building neural networks capable of solving complex algorithmic tasks. Recent advancements predominantly follow the standard supervised learning paradigm -- feeding an individual problem instance into the network each time and training it to approximate the execution steps of a classical algorithm. We challenge this mode and propose a novel open-book learning framework. In this framework, whether during training or testing, the network can access and utilize all instances in the training dataset when reasoning for a given instance. Empirical evaluation is conducted on the challenging CLRS Algorithmic Reasoning Benchmark, which consists of 30 diverse algorithmic tasks. Our open-book learning framework exhibits a significant enhancement in neural reasoning capabilities. Further, we notice that there is recent literature suggesting that multi-task training on CLRS can improve the reasoning accuracy of certain tasks, implying intrinsic connections between different algorithmic tasks. We delve into this direction via the open-book framework. When the network reasons for a specific task, we enable it to aggregate information from training instances of other tasks in an attention-based manner. We show that this open-book attention mechanism offers insights into the inherent relationships among various tasks in the benchmark and provides a robust tool for interpretable multi-task training.
2501.00073
Position Information Emerges in Causal Transformers Without Positional Encodings via Similarity of Nearby Embeddings
cs.CL cs.LG
Transformers with causal attention can solve tasks that require positional information without using positional encodings. In this work, we propose and investigate a new hypothesis about how positional information can be stored without using explicit positional encoding. We observe that nearby embeddings are more similar to each other than faraway embeddings, allowing the transformer to potentially reconstruct the positions of tokens. We show that this pattern can occur in both the trained and the randomly initialized Transformer models with causal attention and no positional encodings over a common range of hyperparameters.
2501.00076
A Novel Framework for Learning Stochastic Representations for Sequence Generation and Recognition
cs.LG cs.AI cs.RO
The ability to generate and recognize sequential data is fundamental for autonomous systems operating in dynamic environments. Inspired by the key principles of the brain-predictive coding and the Bayesian brain-we propose a novel stochastic Recurrent Neural Network with Parametric Biases (RNNPB). The proposed model incorporates stochasticity into the latent space using the reparameterization trick used in variational autoencoders. This approach enables the model to learn probabilistic representations of multidimensional sequences, capturing uncertainty and enhancing robustness against overfitting. We tested the proposed model on a robotic motion dataset to assess its performance in generating and recognizing temporal patterns. The experimental results showed that the stochastic RNNPB model outperformed its deterministic counterpart in generating and recognizing motion sequences. The results highlighted the proposed model's capability to quantify and adjust uncertainty during both learning and inference. The stochasticity resulted in a continuous latent space representation, facilitating stable motion generation and enhanced generalization when recognizing novel sequences. Our approach provides a biologically inspired framework for modeling temporal patterns and advances the development of robust and adaptable systems in artificial intelligence and robotics.
2501.00078
Human-like Bots for Tactical Shooters Using Compute-Efficient Sensors
cs.HC cs.AI cs.LG
Artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled agents to master complex video games, from first-person shooters like Counter-Strike to real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II and racing games like Gran Turismo. While these achievements are notable, applying these AI methods in commercial video game production remains challenging due to computational constraints. In commercial scenarios, the majority of computational resources are allocated to 3D rendering, leaving limited capacity for AI methods, which often demand high computational power, particularly those relying on pixel-based sensors. Moreover, the gaming industry prioritizes creating human-like behavior in AI agents to enhance player experience, unlike academic models that focus on maximizing game performance. This paper introduces a novel methodology for training neural networks via imitation learning to play a complex, commercial-standard, VALORANT-like 2v2 tactical shooter game, requiring only modest CPU hardware during inference. Our approach leverages an innovative, pixel-free perception architecture using a small set of ray-cast sensors, which capture essential spatial information efficiently. These sensors allow AI to perform competently without the computational overhead of traditional methods. Models are trained to mimic human behavior using supervised learning on human trajectory data, resulting in realistic and engaging AI agents. Human evaluation tests confirm that our AI agents provide human-like gameplay experiences while operating efficiently under computational constraints. This offers a significant advancement in AI model development for tactical shooter games and possibly other genres.
2501.00083
AI Agent for Education: von Neumann Multi-Agent System Framework
cs.MA cs.AI cs.CY
The development of large language models has ushered in new paradigms for education. This paper centers on the multi-Agent system in education and proposes the von Neumann multi-Agent system framework. It breaks down each AI Agent into four modules: control unit, logic unit, storage unit, and input-output devices, defining four types of operations: task deconstruction, self-reflection, memory processing, and tool invocation. Furthermore, it introduces related technologies such as Chain-of-Thought, Reson+Act, and Multi-Agent Debate associated with these four types of operations. The paper also discusses the ability enhancement cycle of a multi-Agent system for education, including the outer circulation for human learners to promote knowledge construction and the inner circulation for LLM-based-Agents to enhance swarm intelligence. Through collaboration and reflection, the multi-Agent system can better facilitate human learners' learning and enhance their teaching abilities in this process.
2501.00085
Machine Learning-Based Security Policy Analysis
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CR
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a robust security mechanism that enforces mandatory access controls (MAC), but its policy language's complexity creates challenges for policy analysis and management. This research investigates the automation of SELinux policy analysis using graph-based techniques combined with machine learning approaches to detect policy anomalies. The study addresses two key questions: Can SELinux policy analysis be automated through graph analysis, and how do different anomaly detection models compare in analyzing SELinux policies? We will be comparing different machine learning models by evaluating their effectiveness in detecting policy violations and anomalies. Our approach utilizes Neo4j for graph representation of policies, with Node2vec transforming these graph structures into meaningful vector embeddings that can be processed by our machine learning models. In our results, the MLP Neural Network consistently demonstrated superior performance across different dataset sizes, achieving 95% accuracy with balanced precision and recall metrics, while both Random Forest and SVM models showed competitive but slightly lower performance in detecting policy violations. This combination of graph-based modeling and machine learning provides a more sophisticated and automated approach to understanding and analyzing complex SELinux policies compared to traditional manual analysis methods.
2501.00087
High-Dimensional Markov-switching Ordinary Differential Processes
stat.ME cs.LG math.ST stat.AP stat.TH
We investigate the parameter recovery of Markov-switching ordinary differential processes from discrete observations, where the differential equations are nonlinear additive models. This framework has been widely applied in biological systems, control systems, and other domains; however, limited research has been conducted on reconstructing the generating processes from observations. In contrast, many physical systems, such as human brains, cannot be directly experimented upon and rely on observations to infer the underlying systems. To address this gap, this manuscript presents a comprehensive study of the model, encompassing algorithm design, optimization guarantees, and quantification of statistical errors. Specifically, we develop a two-stage algorithm that first recovers the continuous sample path from discrete samples and then estimates the parameters of the processes. We provide novel theoretical insights into the statistical error and linear convergence guarantee when the processes are $\beta$-mixing. Our analysis is based on the truncation of the latent posterior processes and demonstrates that the truncated processes approximate the true processes under mixing conditions. We apply this model to investigate the differences in resting-state brain networks between the ADHD group and normal controls, revealing differences in the transition rate matrices of the two groups.
2501.00089
Insights on Galaxy Evolution from Interpretable Sparse Feature Networks
astro-ph.GA cs.LG
Galaxy appearances reveal the physics of how they formed and evolved. Machine learning models can now exploit galaxies' information-rich morphologies to predict physical properties directly from image cutouts. Learning the relationship between pixel-level features and galaxy properties is essential for building a physical understanding of galaxy evolution, but we are still unable to explicate the details of how deep neural networks represent image features. To address this lack of interpretability, we present a novel neural network architecture called a Sparse Feature Network (SFNet). SFNets produce interpretable features that can be linearly combined in order to estimate galaxy properties like optical emission line ratios or gas-phase metallicity. We find that SFNets do not sacrifice accuracy in order to gain interpretability, and that they perform comparably well to cutting-edge models on astronomical machine learning tasks. Our novel approach is valuable for finding physical patterns in large datasets and helping astronomers interpret machine learning results.
2501.00093
Machine Learning Gravity Compactifications on Negatively Curved Manifolds
hep-th cs.LG gr-qc
Constructing the landscape of vacua of higher-dimensional theories of gravity by directly solving the low-energy (semi-)classical equations of motion is notoriously difficult. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of Machine Learning techniques as tools for solving the equations of motion for general warped gravity compactifications. As a proof-of-concept we use Neural Networks to solve the Einstein PDEs on non-trivial three manifolds obtained by filling one or more cusps of hyperbolic manifolds. While in three dimensions an Einstein metric is also locally hyperbolic, the generality and scalability of Machine Learning methods, the availability of explicit families of hyperbolic manifolds in higher dimensions, and the universality of the filling procedure strongly suggest that the methods and code developed in this work can be of broader applicability. Specifically, they can be used to tackle both the geometric problem of numerically constructing novel higher-dimensional negatively curved Einstein metrics, as well as the physical problem of constructing four-dimensional de Sitter compactifications of M-theory on the same manifolds.
2501.00097
CaseSumm: A Large-Scale Dataset for Long-Context Summarization from U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY cs.LG
This paper introduces CaseSumm, a novel dataset for long-context summarization in the legal domain that addresses the need for longer and more complex datasets for summarization evaluation. We collect 25.6K U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) opinions and their official summaries, known as "syllabuses." Our dataset is the largest open legal case summarization dataset, and is the first to include summaries of SCOTUS decisions dating back to 1815. We also present a comprehensive evaluation of LLM-generated summaries using both automatic metrics and expert human evaluation, revealing discrepancies between these assessment methods. Our evaluation shows Mistral 7b, a smaller open-source model, outperforms larger models on most automatic metrics and successfully generates syllabus-like summaries. In contrast, human expert annotators indicate that Mistral summaries contain hallucinations. The annotators consistently rank GPT-4 summaries as clearer and exhibiting greater sensitivity and specificity. Further, we find that LLM-based evaluations are not more correlated with human evaluations than traditional automatic metrics. Furthermore, our analysis identifies specific hallucinations in generated summaries, including precedent citation errors and misrepresentations of case facts. These findings demonstrate the limitations of current automatic evaluation methods for legal summarization and highlight the critical role of human evaluation in assessing summary quality, particularly in complex, high-stakes domains. CaseSumm is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ChicagoHAI/CaseSumm
2501.00103
LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion
cs.CV
We introduce LTX-Video, a transformer-based latent diffusion model that adopts a holistic approach to video generation by seamlessly integrating the responsibilities of the Video-VAE and the denoising transformer. Unlike existing methods, which treat these components as independent, LTX-Video aims to optimize their interaction for improved efficiency and quality. At its core is a carefully designed Video-VAE that achieves a high compression ratio of 1:192, with spatiotemporal downscaling of 32 x 32 x 8 pixels per token, enabled by relocating the patchifying operation from the transformer's input to the VAE's input. Operating in this highly compressed latent space enables the transformer to efficiently perform full spatiotemporal self-attention, which is essential for generating high-resolution videos with temporal consistency. However, the high compression inherently limits the representation of fine details. To address this, our VAE decoder is tasked with both latent-to-pixel conversion and the final denoising step, producing the clean result directly in pixel space. This approach preserves the ability to generate fine details without incurring the runtime cost of a separate upsampling module. Our model supports diverse use cases, including text-to-video and image-to-video generation, with both capabilities trained simultaneously. It achieves faster-than-real-time generation, producing 5 seconds of 24 fps video at 768x512 resolution in just 2 seconds on an Nvidia H100 GPU, outperforming all existing models of similar scale. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available, setting a new benchmark for accessible and scalable video generation.
2501.00106
LicenseGPT: A Fine-tuned Foundation Model for Publicly Available Dataset License Compliance
cs.SE cs.AI
Dataset license compliance is a critical yet complex aspect of developing commercial AI products, particularly with the increasing use of publicly available datasets. Ambiguities in dataset licenses pose significant legal risks, making it challenging even for software IP lawyers to accurately interpret rights and obligations. In this paper, we introduce LicenseGPT, a fine-tuned foundation model (FM) specifically designed for dataset license compliance analysis. We first evaluate existing legal FMs (i.e., FMs specialized in understanding and processing legal texts) and find that the best-performing model achieves a Prediction Agreement (PA) of only 43.75%. LicenseGPT, fine-tuned on a curated dataset of 500 licenses annotated by legal experts, significantly improves PA to 64.30%, outperforming both legal and general-purpose FMs. Through an A/B test and user study with software IP lawyers, we demonstrate that LicenseGPT reduces analysis time by 94.44%, from 108 seconds to 6 seconds per license, without compromising accuracy. Software IP lawyers perceive LicenseGPT as a valuable supplementary tool that enhances efficiency while acknowledging the need for human oversight in complex cases. Our work underscores the potential of specialized AI tools in legal practice and offers a publicly available resource for practitioners and researchers.
2501.00107
An Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Electricity Consumption Using Reinforcement Learning and Time Series Forest Based Framework
cs.LG cs.AI
Anomaly detection (AD) plays a crucial role in time series applications, primarily because time series data is employed across real-world scenarios. Detecting anomalies poses significant challenges since anomalies take diverse forms making them hard to pinpoint accurately. Previous research has explored different AD models, making specific assumptions with varying sensitivity toward particular anomaly types. To address this issue, we propose a novel model selection for unsupervised AD using a combination of time series forest (TSF) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches that dynamically chooses an AD technique. Our approach allows for effective AD without explicitly depending on ground truth labels that are often scarce and expensive to obtain. Results from the real-time series dataset demonstrate that the proposed model selection approach outperforms all other AD models in terms of the F1 score metric. For the synthetic dataset, our proposed model surpasses all other AD models except for KNN, with an impressive F1 score of 0.989. The proposed model selection framework also exceeded the performance of GPT-4 when prompted to act as an anomaly detector on the synthetic dataset. Exploring different reward functions revealed that the original reward function in our proposed AD model selection approach yielded the best overall scores. We evaluated the performance of the six AD models on an additional three datasets, having global, local, and clustered anomalies respectively, showing that each AD model exhibited distinct performance depending on the type of anomalies. This emphasizes the significance of our proposed AD model selection framework, maintaining high performance across all datasets, and showcasing superior performance across different anomaly types.
2501.00110
Modelling and Control of Spatial Behaviours in Multi-Agent Systems with Applications to Biology and Robotics
eess.SY cs.MA cs.RO cs.SY
Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems (LS-MAS) consist of several autonomous components, interacting in a non-trivial way, so that the emerging behaviour of the ensemble depends on the individual dynamics of the components and their reciprocal interactions. These models can describe a rich variety of natural systems, as well as artificial ones, characterised by unparalleled scalability, robustness, and flexibility. Indeed, a crucial objective is devising efficient strategies to model and control the spatial behaviours of LS-MAS to achieve specific goals. However, the inherent complexity of these systems and the wide spectrum of their emerging behaviours pose significant challenges. The overarching goal of this thesis is, therefore, to advance methods for modelling, analyzing and controlling the spatial behaviours of LS-MAS, with applications to cellular populations and swarm robotics. The thesis begins with an overview of the existing Literature, and is then organized into two distinct parts. In the context of swarm robotics, Part I deals with distributed control algorithms to spatially organize agents on geometric patterns. The contribution is twofold, encompassing both the development of original control algorithms, and providing a novel formal analysis, which allows to guarantee the emergence of specific geometric patterns. In Part II, looking at the spatial behaviours of biological agents, experiments are carried out to study the movement of microorganisms and their response to light stimuli. This allows the derivation and parametrization of mathematical models that capture these behaviours, and pave the way for the development of innovative approaches for the spatial control of microorganisms. The results presented in the thesis were developed by leveraging formal analytical tools, simulations, and experiments, using innovative platforms and original computational frameworks.
2501.00112
Steppability-informed Quadrupedal Contact Planning through Deep Visual Search Heuristics
cs.RO
In this work, we introduce a method for predicting environment steppability -- the ability of a legged robot platform to place a foothold at a particular location in the local environment -- in the image space. This novel environment representation captures this critical geometric property of the local terrain while allowing us to exploit the computational benefits of sensing and planning in the image space. We adapt a primitive shapes-based synthetic data generation scheme to create geometrically rich and diverse simulation scenes and extract ground truth semantic information in order to train a steppability model. We then integrate this steppability model into an existing interleaved graph search and trajectory optimization-based footstep planner to demonstrate how this steppability paradigm can inform footstep planning in complex, unknown environments. We analyze the steppability model performance to demonstrate its validity, and we deploy the perception-informed footstep planner both in offline and online settings to experimentally verify planning performance.
2501.00113
AltGen: AI-Driven Alt Text Generation for Enhancing EPUB Accessibility
cs.AI
Digital accessibility is a cornerstone of inclusive content delivery, yet many EPUB files fail to meet fundamental accessibility standards, particularly in providing descriptive alt text for images. Alt text plays a critical role in enabling visually impaired users to understand visual content through assistive technologies. However, generating high-quality alt text at scale is a resource-intensive process, creating significant challenges for organizations aiming to ensure accessibility compliance. This paper introduces AltGen, a novel AI-driven pipeline designed to automate the generation of alt text for images in EPUB files. By integrating state-of-the-art generative models, including advanced transformer-based architectures, AltGen achieves contextually relevant and linguistically coherent alt text descriptions. The pipeline encompasses multiple stages, starting with data preprocessing to extract and prepare relevant content, followed by visual analysis using computer vision models such as CLIP and ViT. The extracted visual features are enriched with contextual information from surrounding text, enabling the fine-tuned language models to generate descriptive and accurate alt text. Validation of the generated output employs both quantitative metrics, such as cosine similarity and BLEU scores, and qualitative feedback from visually impaired users. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of AltGen across diverse datasets, achieving a 97.5% reduction in accessibility errors and high scores in similarity and linguistic fidelity metrics. User studies highlight the practical impact of AltGen, with participants reporting significant improvements in document usability and comprehension. Furthermore, comparative analyses reveal that AltGen outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy, relevance, and scalability.
2501.00116
Text-to-Image GAN with Pretrained Representations
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Generating desired images conditioned on given text descriptions has received lots of attention. Recently, diffusion models and autoregressive models have demonstrated their outstanding expressivity and gradually replaced GAN as the favored architectures for text-to-image synthesis. However, they still face some obstacles: slow inference speed and expensive training costs. To achieve more powerful and faster text-to-image synthesis under complex scenes, we propose TIGER, a text-to-image GAN with pretrained representations. To be specific, we propose a vision-empowered discriminator and a high-capacity generator. (i) The vision-empowered discriminator absorbs the complex scene understanding ability and the domain generalization ability from pretrained vision models to enhance model performance. Unlike previous works, we explore stacking multiple pretrained models in our discriminator to collect multiple different representations. (ii) The high-capacity generator aims to achieve effective text-image fusion while increasing the model capacity. The high-capacity generator consists of multiple novel high-capacity fusion blocks (HFBlock). And the HFBlock contains several deep fusion modules and a global fusion module, which play different roles to benefit our model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed TIGER both on standard and zero-shot text-to-image synthesis tasks. On the standard text-to-image synthesis task, TIGER achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging datasets, which obtain a new FID 5.48 (COCO) and 9.38 (CUB). On the zero-shot text-to-image synthesis task, we achieve comparable performance with fewer model parameters, smaller training data size and faster inference speed. Additionally, more experiments and analyses are conducted in the Supplementary Material.
2501.00119
Post Launch Evaluation of Policies in a High-Dimensional Setting
stat.ML cs.LG stat.AP stat.ME
A/B tests, also known as randomized controlled experiments (RCTs), are the gold standard for evaluating the impact of new policies, products, or decisions. However, these tests can be costly in terms of time and resources, potentially exposing users, customers, or other test subjects (units) to inferior options. This paper explores practical considerations in applying methodologies inspired by "synthetic control" as an alternative to traditional A/B testing in settings with very large numbers of units, involving up to hundreds of millions of units, which is common in modern applications such as e-commerce and ride-sharing platforms. This method is particularly valuable in settings where the treatment affects only a subset of units, leaving many units unaffected. In these scenarios, synthetic control methods leverage data from unaffected units to estimate counterfactual outcomes for treated units. After the treatment is implemented, these estimates can be compared to actual outcomes to measure the treatment effect. A key challenge in creating accurate counterfactual outcomes is interpolation bias, a well-documented phenomenon that occurs when control units differ significantly from treated units. To address this, we propose a two-phase approach: first using nearest neighbor matching based on unit covariates to select similar control units, then applying supervised learning methods suitable for high-dimensional data to estimate counterfactual outcomes. Testing using six large-scale experiments demonstrates that this approach successfully improves estimate accuracy. However, our analysis reveals that machine learning bias -- which arises from methods that trade off bias for variance reduction -- can impact results and affect conclusions about treatment effects. We document this bias in large-scale experimental settings and propose effective de-biasing techniques to address this challenge.
2501.00124
PQD: Post-training Quantization for Efficient Diffusion Models
cs.CV cs.LG
Diffusionmodels(DMs)havedemonstratedremarkableachievements in synthesizing images of high fidelity and diversity. However, the extensive computational requirements and slow generative speed of diffusion models have limited their widespread adoption. In this paper, we propose a novel post-training quantization for diffusion models (PQD), which is a time-aware optimization framework for diffusion models based on post-training quantization. The proposed framework optimizes the inference process by selecting representative samples and conducting time-aware calibration. Experimental results show that our proposed method is able to directly quantize full-precision diffusion models into 8-bit or 4-bit models while maintaining comparable performance in a training-free manner, achieving a few FID change on ImageNet for unconditional image generation. Our approach demonstrates compatibility and can also be applied to 512x512 text-guided image generation for the first time.
2501.00129
A Data-Centric Approach to Detecting and Mitigating Demographic Bias in Pediatric Mental Health Text: A Case Study in Anxiety Detection
cs.CL cs.AI
Introduction: Healthcare AI models often inherit biases from their training data. While efforts have primarily targeted bias in structured data, mental health heavily depends on unstructured data. This study aims to detect and mitigate linguistic differences related to non-biological differences in the training data of AI models designed to assist in pediatric mental health screening. Our objectives are: (1) to assess the presence of bias by evaluating outcome parity across sex subgroups, (2) to identify bias sources through textual distribution analysis, and (3) to develop a de-biasing method for mental health text data. Methods: We examined classification parity across demographic groups and assessed how gendered language influences model predictions. A data-centric de-biasing method was applied, focusing on neutralizing biased terms while retaining salient clinical information. This methodology was tested on a model for automatic anxiety detection in pediatric patients. Results: Our findings revealed a systematic under-diagnosis of female adolescent patients, with a 4% lower accuracy and a 9% higher False Negative Rate (FNR) compared to male patients, likely due to disparities in information density and linguistic differences in patient notes. Notes for male patients were on average 500 words longer, and linguistic similarity metrics indicated distinct word distributions between genders. Implementing our de-biasing approach reduced diagnostic bias by up to 27%, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing equity across demographic groups. Discussion: We developed a data-centric de-biasing framework to address gender-based content disparities within clinical text. By neutralizing biased language and enhancing focus on clinically essential information, our approach demonstrates an effective strategy for mitigating bias in AI healthcare models trained on text.
2501.00135
GroverGPT: A Large Language Model with 8 Billion Parameters for Quantum Searching
quant-ph cs.AI cs.LG
Quantum computing is an exciting non-Von Neumann paradigm, offering provable speedups over classical computing for specific problems. However, the practical limits of classical simulatability for quantum circuits remain unclear, especially with current noisy quantum devices. In this work, we explore the potential of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate the output of a quantum Turing machine using Grover's quantum circuits, known to provide quadratic speedups over classical counterparts. To this end, we developed GroverGPT, a specialized model based on LLaMA's 8-billion-parameter architecture, trained on over 15 trillion tokens. Unlike brute-force state-vector simulations, which demand substantial computational resources, GroverGPT employs pattern recognition to approximate quantum search algorithms without explicitly representing quantum states. Analyzing 97K quantum search instances, GroverGPT consistently outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4o (45\% accuracy), achieving nearly 100\% accuracy on 6- and 10-qubit datasets when trained on 4-qubit or larger datasets. It also demonstrated strong generalization, surpassing 95\% accuracy for systems with over 20 qubits when trained on 3- to 6-qubit data. Analysis indicates GroverGPT captures quantum features of Grover's search rather than classical patterns, supported by novel prompting strategies to enhance performance. Although accuracy declines with increasing system size, these findings offer insights into the practical boundaries of classical simulatability. This work suggests task-specific LLMs can surpass general-purpose models like GPT-4o in quantum algorithm learning and serve as powerful tools for advancing quantum research.
2501.00136
Detection-Fusion for Knowledge Graph Extraction from Videos
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
One of the challenging tasks in the field of video understanding is extracting semantic content from video inputs. Most existing systems use language models to describe videos in natural language sentences, but this has several major shortcomings. Such systems can rely too heavily on the language model component and base their output on statistical regularities in natural language text rather than on the visual contents of the video. Additionally, natural language annotations cannot be readily processed by a computer, are difficult to evaluate with performance metrics and cannot be easily translated into a different natural language. In this paper, we propose a method to annotate videos with knowledge graphs, and so avoid these problems. Specifically, we propose a deep-learning-based model for this task that first predicts pairs of individuals and then the relations between them. Additionally, we propose an extension of our model for the inclusion of background knowledge in the construction of knowledge graphs.
2501.00138
NiaAutoARM: Automated generation and evaluation of Association Rule Mining pipelines
cs.NE cs.AI
The Numerical Association Rule Mining paradigm that includes concurrent dealing with numerical and categorical attributes is beneficial for discovering associations from datasets consisting of both features. The process is not considered as easy since it incorporates several processing steps running sequentially that form an entire pipeline, e.g., preprocessing, algorithm selection, hyper-parameter optimization, and the definition of metrics evaluating the quality of the association rule. In this paper, we proposed a novel Automated Machine Learning method, NiaAutoARM, for constructing the full association rule mining pipelines based on stochastic population-based meta-heuristics automatically. Along with the theoretical representation of the proposed method, we also present a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the proposed method.
2501.00142
Minimalist Vision with Freeform Pixels
cs.CV eess.IV
A minimalist vision system uses the smallest number of pixels needed to solve a vision task. While traditional cameras use a large grid of square pixels, a minimalist camera uses freeform pixels that can take on arbitrary shapes to increase their information content. We show that the hardware of a minimalist camera can be modeled as the first layer of a neural network, where the subsequent layers are used for inference. Training the network for any given task yields the shapes of the camera's freeform pixels, each of which is implemented using a photodetector and an optical mask. We have designed minimalist cameras for monitoring indoor spaces (with 8 pixels), measuring room lighting (with 8 pixels), and estimating traffic flow (with 8 pixels). The performance demonstrated by these systems is on par with a traditional camera with orders of magnitude more pixels. Minimalist vision has two major advantages. First, it naturally tends to preserve the privacy of individuals in the scene since the captured information is inadequate for extracting visual details. Second, since the number of measurements made by a minimalist camera is very small, we show that it can be fully self-powered, i.e., function without an external power supply or a battery.
2501.00149
LASSE: Learning Active Sampling for Storm Tide Extremes in Non-Stationary Climate Regimes
physics.ao-ph cs.LG physics.geo-ph
Identifying tropical cyclones that generate destructive storm tides for risk assessment, such as from large downscaled storm catalogs for climate studies, is often intractable because it entails many expensive Monte Carlo hydrodynamic simulations. Here, we show that surrogate models are promising from accuracy, recall, and precision perspectives, and they "generalize" to novel climate scenarios. We then present an informative online learning approach to rapidly search for extreme storm tide-producing cyclones using only a few hydrodynamic simulations. Starting from a minimal subset of TCs with detailed storm tide hydrodynamic simulations, a surrogate model selects informative data to retrain online and iteratively improves its predictions of damaging TCs. Results on an extensive catalog of downscaled TCs indicate 100% precision in retrieving rare destructive storms using less than 20% of the simulations as training. The informative sampling approach is efficient, scalable to large storm catalogs, and generalizable to climate scenarios.
2501.00152
Temporal reasoning for timeline summarisation in social media
cs.CL cs.AI
This paper explores whether enhancing temporal reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) can improve the quality of timeline summarisation, the task of summarising long texts containing sequences of events, such as social media threads. We first introduce NarrativeReason, a novel dataset focused on temporal relationships among sequential events within narratives, distinguishing it from existing temporal reasoning datasets that primarily address pair-wise event relationships. Our approach then combines temporal reasoning with timeline summarisation through a knowledge distillation framework, where we first fine-tune a teacher model on temporal reasoning tasks and then distill this knowledge into a student model while simultaneously training it for the task of timeline summarisation. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance on out-of-domain mental health-related timeline summarisation tasks, which involve long social media threads with repetitions of events and a mix of emotions, highlighting the importance and generalisability of leveraging temporal reasoning to improve timeline summarisation.
2501.00154
Probabilistic Explanations for Linear Models
cs.AI cs.CC
Formal XAI is an emerging field that focuses on providing explanations with mathematical guarantees for the decisions made by machine learning models. A significant amount of work in this area is centered on the computation of "sufficient reasons". Given a model $M$ and an input instance $\vec{x}$, a sufficient reason for the decision $M(\vec{x})$ is a subset $S$ of the features of $\vec{x}$ such that for any instance $\vec{z}$ that has the same values as $\vec{x}$ for every feature in $S$, it holds that $M(\vec{x}) = M(\vec{z})$. Intuitively, this means that the features in $S$ are sufficient to fully justify the classification of $\vec{x}$ by $M$. For sufficient reasons to be useful in practice, they should be as small as possible, and a natural way to reduce the size of sufficient reasons is to consider a probabilistic relaxation; the probability of $M(\vec{x}) = M(\vec{z})$ must be at least some value $\delta \in (0,1]$, for a random instance $\vec{z}$ that coincides with $\vec{x}$ on the features in $S$. Computing small $\delta$-sufficient reasons ($\delta$-SRs) is known to be a theoretically hard problem; even over decision trees--traditionally deemed simple and interpretable models--strong inapproximability results make the efficient computation of small $\delta$-SRs unlikely. We propose the notion of $(\delta, \epsilon)$-SR, a simple relaxation of $\delta$-SRs, and show that this kind of explanation can be computed efficiently over linear models.
2501.00158
Urban Water Consumption Forecasting Using Deep Learning and Correlated District Metered Areas
cs.LG cs.CY
Accurate water consumption forecasting is a crucial tool for water utilities and policymakers, as it helps ensure a reliable supply, optimize operations, and support infrastructure planning. Urban Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) are divided into District Metered Areas (DMAs), where water flow is monitored to efficiently manage resources. This work focuses on short-term forecasting of DMA consumption using deep learning and aims to address two key challenging issues. First, forecasting based solely on a DMA's historical data may lack broader context and provide limited insights. Second, DMAs may experience sensor malfunctions providing incorrect data, or some DMAs may not be monitored at all due to computational costs, complicating accurate forecasting. We propose a novel method that first identifies DMAs with correlated consumption patterns and then uses these patterns, along with the DMA's local data, as input to a deep learning model for forecasting. In a real-world study with data from five DMAs, we show that: i) the deep learning model outperforms a classical statistical model; ii) accurate forecasting can be carried out using only correlated DMAs' consumption patterns; and iii) even when a DMA's local data is available, including correlated DMAs' data improves accuracy.
2501.00160
Deterministic Model of Incremental Multi-Agent Boltzmann Q-Learning: Transient Cooperation, Metastability, and Oscillations
cs.MA nlin.AO physics.soc-ph
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning involves agents that learn together in a shared environment, leading to emergent dynamics sensitive to initial conditions and parameter variations. A Dynamical Systems approach, which studies the evolution of multi-component systems over time, has uncovered some of the underlying dynamics by constructing deterministic approximation models of stochastic algorithms. In this work, we demonstrate that even in the simplest case of independent Q-learning with a Boltzmann exploration policy, significant discrepancies arise between the actual algorithm and previous approximations. We elaborate why these models actually approximate interesting variants rather than the original incremental algorithm. To explain the discrepancies, we introduce a new discrete-time approximation model that explicitly accounts for agents' update frequencies within the learning process and show that its dynamics fundamentally differ from the simplified dynamics of prior models. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach by applying it to the question of spontaneous cooperation in social dilemmas, specifically the Prisoner's Dilemma as the simplest case study. We identify conditions under which the learning behaviour appears as long-term stable cooperation from an external perspective. However, our model shows that this behaviour is merely a metastable transient phase and not a true equilibrium, making it exploitable. We further exemplify how specific parameter settings can significantly exacerbate the moving target problem in independent learning. Through a systematic analysis of our model, we show that increasing the discount factor induces oscillations, preventing convergence to a joint policy. These oscillations arise from a supercritical Neimark-Sacker bifurcation, which transforms the unique stable fixed point into an unstable focus surrounded by a stable limit cycle.
2501.00162
Class-based Subset Selection for Transfer Learning under Extreme Label Shift
cs.LG cs.AI
Existing work within transfer learning often follows a two-step process -- pre-training over a large-scale source domain and then finetuning over limited samples from the target domain. Yet, despite its popularity, this methodology has been shown to suffer in the presence of distributional shift -- specifically when the output spaces diverge. Previous work has focused on increasing model performance within this setting by identifying and classifying only the shared output classes between distributions. However, these methods are inherently limited as they ignore classes outside the shared class set, disregarding potential information relevant to the model transfer. This paper proposes a new process for few-shot transfer learning that selects and weighs classes from the source domain to optimize the transfer between domains. More concretely, we use Wasserstein distance to choose a set of source classes and their weights that minimize the distance between the source and target domain. To justify our proposed algorithm, we provide a generalization analysis of the performance of the learned classifier over the target domain and show that our method corresponds to a bound minimization algorithm. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach (WaSS) by experimenting on several different datasets and presenting superior performance within various label shift settings, including the extreme case where the label spaces are disjoint.
2501.00164
Measuring Large Language Models Capacity to Annotate Journalistic Sourcing
cs.CL cs.CY
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the capacities of Large Language Models and their evaluation have been in constant discussion and evaluation both in academic research and in the industry. Scenarios and benchmarks have been developed in several areas such as law, medicine and math (Bommasani et al., 2023) and there is continuous evaluation of model variants. One area that has not received sufficient scenario development attention is journalism, and in particular journalistic sourcing and ethics. Journalism is a crucial truth-determination function in democracy (Vincent, 2023), and sourcing is a crucial pillar to all original journalistic output. Evaluating the capacities of LLMs to annotate stories for the different signals of sourcing and how reporters justify them is a crucial scenario that warrants a benchmark approach. It offers potential to build automated systems to contrast more transparent and ethically rigorous forms of journalism with everyday fare. In this paper we lay out a scenario to evaluate LLM performance on identifying and annotating sourcing in news stories on a five-category schema inspired from journalism studies (Gans, 2004). We offer the use case, our dataset and metrics and as the first step towards systematic benchmarking. Our accuracy findings indicate LLM-based approaches have more catching to do in identifying all the sourced statements in a story, and equally, in matching the type of sources. An even harder task is spotting source justifications.
2501.00165
Dynamic Graph Communication for Decentralised Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
cs.MA
This work presents a novel communication framework for decentralized multi-agent systems operating in dynamic network environments. Integrated into a multi-agent reinforcement learning system, the framework is designed to enhance decision-making by optimizing the network's collective knowledge through efficient communication. Key contributions include adapting a static network packet-routing scenario to a dynamic setting with node failures, incorporating a graph attention network layer in a recurrent message-passing framework, and introducing a multi-round communication targeting mechanism. This approach enables an attention-based aggregation mechanism to be successfully trained within a sparse-reward, dynamic network packet-routing environment using only reinforcement learning. Experimental results show improvements in routing performance, including a 9.5 percent increase in average rewards and a 6.4 percent reduction in communication overhead compared to a baseline system. The study also examines the ethical and legal implications of deploying such systems in critical infrastructure and military contexts, identifies current limitations, and suggests potential directions for future research.
2501.00167
On Functional Observability of Nonlinear Systems and the Design of Functional Observers with Assignable Error Dynamics
eess.SY cs.SY
This paper proposes a novel approach for designing functional observers for nonlinear systems, with linear error dynamics and assignable poles. Sufficient conditions for functional observability are first derived, leading to functional relationships between the Lie derivatives of the output to be estimated and the ones of the measured output. These are directly used in the proposed design of the functional observer. The functional observer is defined in differential input-output form, satisfying an appropriate invariance condition that emerges from the state-space invariance conditions of the literature. A concept of functional observer index is also proposed, to characterize the lowest feasible order of functional observer with pole assignment. Two chemical reactor applications are used to illustrate the proposed approach.
2501.00169
DeepLL: Considering Linear Logic for the Analysis of Deep Learning Experiments
cs.PL cs.AI cs.CL cs.SE
Deep Learning experiments have critical requirements regarding the careful handling of their datasets as well as the efficient and correct usage of APIs that interact with hardware accelerators. On the one hand, software mistakes during data handling can contaminate experiments and lead to incorrect results. On the other hand, poorly coded APIs that interact with the hardware can lead to sub-optimal usage and untrustworthy conclusions. In this work we investigate the use of Linear Logic for the analysis of Deep Learning experiments. We show that primitives and operators of Linear Logic can be used to express: (i) an abstract representation of the control flow of an experiment, (ii) a set of available experimental resources, such as API calls to the underlying data-structures and hardware as well as (iii) reasoning rules about the correct consumption of resources during experiments. Our proposed model is not only lightweight but also easy to comprehend having both a symbolic and a visual component. Finally, its artifacts are themselves proofs in Linear Logic that can be readily verified by off-the-shelf reasoners.
2501.00170
Federated Learning with Workload Reduction through Partial Training of Client Models and Entropy-Based Data Selection
cs.LG cs.AI cs.DC
With the rapid expansion of edge devices, such as IoT devices, where crucial data needed for machine learning applications is generated, it becomes essential to promote their participation in privacy-preserving Federated Learning (FL) systems. The best way to achieve this desiderate is by reducing their training workload to match their constrained computational resources. While prior FL research has address the workload constrains by introducing lightweight models on the edge, limited attention has been given to optimizing on-device training efficiency through reducing the amount of data need during training. In this work, we propose FedFT-EDS, a novel approach that combines Fine-Tuning of partial client models with Entropy-based Data Selection to reduce training workloads on edge devices. By actively selecting the most informative local instances for learning, FedFT-EDS reduces training data significantly in FL and demonstrates that not all user data is equally beneficial for FL on all rounds. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show that FedFT-EDS uses only 50% user data while improving the global model performance compared to baseline methods, FedAvg and FedProx. Importantly, FedFT-EDS improves client learning efficiency by up to 3 times, using one third of training time on clients to achieve an equivalent performance to the baselines. This work highlights the importance of data selection in FL and presents a promising pathway to scalable and efficient Federate Learning.
2501.00172
Algebraic Control: Complete Stable Inversion with Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
math.OC cs.SY eess.SY
Recent advances in learning-based control have increased interest in stable inversion to meet growing performance demands. Here, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for stable inversion, addressing challenges in non-minimum phase, non-square, and singular systems. An H-Infinity based algebraic approximation is introduced for near-perfect tracking without preview. Additionally, we propose a novel robust control strategy combining the nominal model with dual feedforward control to form a feedback structure. Numerical comparison demonstrates the approach's effectiveness.
2501.00174
The Text Classification Pipeline: Starting Shallow going Deeper
cs.CL cs.AI cs.IR
Text Classification (TC) stands as a cornerstone within the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly when viewed through the lens of computer science and engineering. The past decade has seen deep learning revolutionize TC, propelling advancements in text retrieval, categorization, information extraction, and summarization. The scholarly literature is rich with datasets, models, and evaluation criteria, with English being the predominant language of focus, despite studies involving Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and others. The efficacy of TC models relies heavily on their ability to capture intricate textual relationships and nonlinear correlations, necessitating a comprehensive examination of the entire TC pipeline. This monograph provides an in-depth exploration of the TC pipeline, with a particular emphasis on evaluating the impact of each component on the overall performance of TC models. The pipeline includes state-of-the-art datasets, text preprocessing techniques, text representation methods, classification models, evaluation metrics, current results and future trends. Each chapter meticulously examines these stages, presenting technical innovations and significant recent findings. The work critically assesses various classification strategies, offering comparative analyses, examples, case studies, and experimental evaluations. These contributions extend beyond a typical survey, providing a detailed and insightful exploration of TC.
2501.00184
TrajLearn: Trajectory Prediction Learning using Deep Generative Models
cs.LG cs.CV cs.RO
Trajectory prediction aims to estimate an entity's future path using its current position and historical movement data, benefiting fields like autonomous navigation, robotics, and human movement analytics. Deep learning approaches have become key in this area, utilizing large-scale trajectory datasets to model movement patterns, but face challenges in managing complex spatial dependencies and adapting to dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we introduce TrajLearn, a novel model for trajectory prediction that leverages generative modeling of higher-order mobility flows based on hexagonal spatial representation. TrajLearn predicts the next $k$ steps by integrating a customized beam search for exploring multiple potential paths while maintaining spatial continuity. We conducted a rigorous evaluation of TrajLearn, benchmarking it against leading state-of-the-art approaches and meaningful baselines. The results indicate that TrajLearn achieves significant performance gains, with improvements of up to ~40% across multiple real-world trajectory datasets. In addition, we evaluated different prediction horizons (i.e., various values of $k$), conducted resolution sensitivity analysis, and performed ablation studies to assess the impact of key model components. Furthermore, we developed a novel algorithm to generate mixed-resolution maps by hierarchically subdividing hexagonal regions into finer segments within a specified observation area. This approach supports selective detailing, applying finer resolution to areas of interest or high activity (e.g., urban centers) while using coarser resolution for less significant regions (e.g., rural areas), effectively reducing data storage requirements and computational overhead. We promote reproducibility and adaptability by offering complete code, data, and detailed documentation with flexible configuration options for various applications.
2501.00190
SepsisCalc: Integrating Clinical Calculators into Early Sepsis Prediction via Dynamic Temporal Graph Construction
cs.LG cs.AI cs.HC
Sepsis is an organ dysfunction caused by a deregulated immune response to an infection. Early sepsis prediction and identification allow for timely intervention, leading to improved clinical outcomes. Clinical calculators (e.g., the six-organ dysfunction assessment of SOFA) play a vital role in sepsis identification within clinicians' workflow, providing evidence-based risk assessments essential for sepsis diagnosis. However, artificial intelligence (AI) sepsis prediction models typically generate a single sepsis risk score without incorporating clinical calculators for assessing organ dysfunctions, making the models less convincing and transparent to clinicians. To bridge the gap, we propose to mimic clinicians' workflow with a novel framework SepsisCalc to integrate clinical calculators into the predictive model, yielding a clinically transparent and precise model for utilization in clinical settings. Practically, clinical calculators usually combine information from multiple component variables in Electronic Health Records (EHR), and might not be applicable when the variables are (partially) missing. We mitigate this issue by representing EHRs as temporal graphs and integrating a learning module to dynamically add the accurately estimated calculator to the graphs. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on sepsis prediction tasks. Moreover, we developed a system to identify organ dysfunctions and potential sepsis risks, providing a human-AI interaction tool for deployment, which can help clinicians understand the prediction outputs and prepare timely interventions for the corresponding dysfunctions, paving the way for actionable clinical decision-making support for early intervention.
2501.00191
Equilibria in Network Constrained Markets with Market Maker
cs.GT cs.MA cs.SI cs.SY eess.SY math.OC
We study a networked economic system composed of $n$ producers supplying a single homogeneous good to a number of geographically separated markets and of a centralized authority, called the market maker. Producers compete \`a la Cournot, by choosing the quantities of good to supply to each market they have access to in order to maximize their profit. Every market is characterized by its inverse demand functions returning the unit price of the considered good as a function of the total available quantity. Markets are interconnected by a dispatch network through which quantities of the considered good can flow within finite capacity constraints. Such flows are determined by the market maker, who aims at maximizing a designated welfare function. We model such competition as a strategic game with $n+1$ players: the producers and the market game. For this game, we first establish the existence of Nash equilibria under standard concavity assumptions. We then identify sufficient conditions for the game to be potential with an essentially unique Nash equilibrium. Next, we present a general result that connects the optimal action of the market maker with the capacity constraints imposed on the network. For the commonly used Walrasian welfare, our finding proves a connection between capacity bottlenecks in the market network and the emergence of price differences between markets separated by saturated lines. This phenomenon is frequently observed in real-world scenarios, for instance in power networks. Finally, we validate the model with data from the Italian day-ahead electricity market.
2501.00192
MLLM-as-a-Judge for Image Safety without Human Labeling
cs.CV cs.CL cs.CY cs.LG
Image content safety has become a significant challenge with the rise of visual media on online platforms. Meanwhile, in the age of AI-generated content (AIGC), many image generation models are capable of producing harmful content, such as images containing sexual or violent material. Thus, it becomes crucial to identify such unsafe images based on established safety rules. Pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer potential in this regard, given their strong pattern recognition abilities. Existing approaches typically fine-tune MLLMs with human-labeled datasets, which however brings a series of drawbacks. First, relying on human annotators to label data following intricate and detailed guidelines is both expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, users of safety judgment systems may need to frequently update safety rules, making fine-tuning on human-based annotation more challenging. This raises the research question: Can we detect unsafe images by querying MLLMs in a zero-shot setting using a predefined safety constitution (a set of safety rules)? Our research showed that simply querying pre-trained MLLMs does not yield satisfactory results. This lack of effectiveness stems from factors such as the subjectivity of safety rules, the complexity of lengthy constitutions, and the inherent biases in the models. To address these challenges, we propose a MLLM-based method includes objectifying safety rules, assessing the relevance between rules and images, making quick judgments based on debiased token probabilities with logically complete yet simplified precondition chains for safety rules, and conducting more in-depth reasoning with cascaded chain-of-thought processes if necessary. Experiment results demonstrate that our method is highly effective for zero-shot image safety judgment tasks.
2501.00193
A Pseudo-random Number Generator for Multi-Sequence Generation with Programmable Statistics
cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
Pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) are essential in a wide range of applications, from cryptography to statistical simulations and optimization algorithms. While uniform randomness is crucial for security-critical areas like cryptography, many domains, such as simulated annealing and CMOS-based Ising Machines, benefit from controlled or non-uniform randomness to enhance solution exploration and optimize performance. This paper presents a hardware PRNG that can simultaneously generate multiple uncorrelated sequences with programmable statistics tailored to specific application needs. Designed in 65nm process, the PRNG occupies an area of approximately 0.0013mm^2 and has an energy consumption of 0.57pJ/bit. Simulations confirm the PRNG's effectiveness in modulating the statistical distribution while demonstrating high-quality randomness properties.
2501.00195
Towards Unraveling and Improving Generalization in World Models
cs.LG cs.AI
World models have recently emerged as a promising approach to reinforcement learning (RL), achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of visual control tasks. This work aims to obtain a deep understanding of the robustness and generalization capabilities of world models. Thus motivated, we develop a stochastic differential equation formulation by treating the world model learning as a stochastic dynamical system, and characterize the impact of latent representation errors on robustness and generalization, for both cases with zero-drift representation errors and with non-zero-drift representation errors. Our somewhat surprising findings, based on both theoretic and experimental studies, reveal that for the case with zero drift, modest latent representation errors can in fact function as implicit regularization and hence result in improved robustness. We further propose a Jacobian regularization scheme to mitigate the compounding error propagation effects of non-zero drift, thereby enhancing training stability and robustness. Our experimental studies corroborate that this regularization approach not only stabilizes training but also accelerates convergence and improves accuracy of long-horizon prediction.
2501.00199
GPT-4 on Clinic Depression Assessment: An LLM-Based Pilot Study
cs.CL cs.AI
Depression has impacted millions of people worldwide and has become one of the most prevalent mental disorders. Early mental disorder detection can lead to cost savings for public health agencies and avoid the onset of other major comorbidities. Additionally, the shortage of specialized personnel is a critical issue because clinical depression diagnosis is highly dependent on expert professionals and is time consuming. In this study, we explore the use of GPT-4 for clinical depression assessment based on transcript analysis. We examine the model's ability to classify patient interviews into binary categories: depressed and not depressed. A comparative analysis is conducted considering prompt complexity (e.g., using both simple and complex prompts) as well as varied temperature settings to assess the impact of prompt complexity and randomness on the model's performance. Results indicate that GPT-4 exhibits considerable variability in accuracy and F1-Score across configurations, with optimal performance observed at lower temperature values (0.0-0.2) for complex prompts. However, beyond a certain threshold (temperature >= 0.3), the relationship between randomness and performance becomes unpredictable, diminishing the gains from prompt complexity. These findings suggest that, while GPT-4 shows promise for clinical assessment, the configuration of the prompts and model parameters requires careful calibration to ensure consistent results. This preliminary study contributes to understanding the dynamics between prompt engineering and large language models, offering insights for future development of AI-powered tools in clinical settings.
2501.00200
Scalable Neural Network Verification with Branch-and-bound Inferred Cutting Planes
cs.LG cs.CR math.OC
Recently, cutting-plane methods such as GCP-CROWN have been explored to enhance neural network verifiers and made significant advances. However, GCP-CROWN currently relies on generic cutting planes (cuts) generated from external mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers. Due to the poor scalability of MIP solvers, large neural networks cannot benefit from these cutting planes. In this paper, we exploit the structure of the neural network verification problem to generate efficient and scalable cutting planes specific for this problem setting. We propose a novel approach, Branch-and-bound Inferred Cuts with COnstraint Strengthening (BICCOS), which leverages the logical relationships of neurons within verified subproblems in the branch-and-bound search tree, and we introduce cuts that preclude these relationships in other subproblems. We develop a mechanism that assigns influence scores to neurons in each path to allow the strengthening of these cuts. Furthermore, we design a multi-tree search technique to identify more cuts, effectively narrowing the search space and accelerating the BaB algorithm. Our results demonstrate that BICCOS can generate hundreds of useful cuts during the branch-and-bound process and consistently increase the number of verifiable instances compared to other state-of-the-art neural network verifiers on a wide range of benchmarks, including large networks that previous cutting plane methods could not scale to. BICCOS is part of the $\alpha,\beta$-CROWN verifier, the VNN-COMP 2024 winner. The code is available at http://github.com/Lemutisme/BICCOS .
2501.00201
Hierarchical Functionality Prioritization in Multicast ISAC: Optimal Admission Control and Discrete-Phase Beamforming
eess.SP cs.IT math.IT
We investigate the joint admission control and discrete-phase multicast beamforming design for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems, where sensing and communications functionalities have different hierarchies. Specifically, the ISAC system first allocates resources to the higher-hierarchy functionality and opportunistically uses the remaining resources to support the lower-hierarchy one. This resource allocation problem is a nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP). We propose an exact mixed-integer linear program (MILP) reformulation, leading to a globally optimal solution. In addition, we implemented three baselines for comparison, which our proposed method outperforms by more than 39%.
2501.00204
MSM-BD: Multimodal Social Media Bot Detection Using Heterogeneous Information
cs.MM cs.SI
Although social bots can be engineered for constructive applications, their potential for misuse in manipulative schemes and malware distribution cannot be overlooked. This dichotomy underscores the critical need to detect social bots on social media platforms. Advances in artificial intelligence have improved the abilities of social bots, allowing them to generate content that is almost indistinguishable from human-created content. These advancements require the development of more advanced detection techniques to accurately identify these automated entities. Given the heterogeneous information landscape on social media, spanning images, texts, and user statistical features, we propose MSM-BD, a Multimodal Social Media Bot Detection approach using heterogeneous information. MSM-BD incorporates specialized encoders for heterogeneous information and introduces a cross-modal fusion technology, Cross-Modal Residual Cross-Attention (CMRCA), to enhance detection accuracy. We validate the effectiveness of our model through extensive experiments using the TwiBot-22 dataset.
2501.00208
An Empirical Evaluation of Large Language Models on Consumer Health Questions
cs.CL cs.AI
This study evaluates the performance of several Large Language Models (LLMs) on MedRedQA, a dataset of consumer-based medical questions and answers by verified experts extracted from the AskDocs subreddit. While LLMs have shown proficiency in clinical question answering (QA) benchmarks, their effectiveness on real-world, consumer-based, medical questions remains less understood. MedRedQA presents unique challenges, such as informal language and the need for precise responses suited to non-specialist queries. To assess model performance, responses were generated using five LLMs: GPT-4o mini, Llama 3.1: 70B, Mistral-123B, Mistral-7B, and Gemini-Flash. A cross-evaluation method was used, where each model evaluated its responses as well as those of others to minimize bias. The results indicated that GPT-4o mini achieved the highest alignment with expert responses according to four out of the five models' judges, while Mistral-7B scored lowest according to three out of five models' judges. This study highlights the potential and limitations of current LLMs for consumer health medical question answering, indicating avenues for further development.
2501.00210
Debunking the CUDA Myth Towards GPU-based AI Systems
cs.DC cs.AI cs.AR
With the rise of AI, NVIDIA GPUs have become the de facto standard for AI system design. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of Intel Gaudi NPUs as an alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI model serving. First, we create a suite of microbenchmarks to compare Intel Gaudi-2 with NVIDIA A100, showing that Gaudi-2 achieves competitive performance not only in primitive AI compute, memory, and communication operations but also in executing several important AI workloads end-to-end. We then assess Gaudi NPU's programmability by discussing several software-level optimization strategies to employ for implementing critical FBGEMM operators and vLLM, evaluating their efficiency against GPU-optimized counterparts. Results indicate that Gaudi-2 achieves energy efficiency comparable to A100, though there are notable areas for improvement in terms of software maturity. Overall, we conclude that, with effective integration into high-level AI frameworks, Gaudi NPUs could challenge NVIDIA GPU's dominance in the AI server market, though further improvements are necessary to fully compete with NVIDIA's robust software ecosystem.
2501.00214
OciorMVBA: Near-Optimal Error-Free Asynchronous MVBA
cs.CR cs.DC cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we propose an error-free, information-theoretically secure, asynchronous multi-valued validated Byzantine agreement (MVBA) protocol, called OciorMVBA. This protocol achieves MVBA consensus on a message $\boldsymbol{w}$ with expected $O(n |\boldsymbol{w}|\log n + n^2 \log q)$ communication bits, expected $O(n^2)$ messages, expected $O(\log n)$ rounds, and expected $O(\log n)$ common coins, under optimal resilience $n \geq 3t + 1$ in an $n$-node network, where up to $t$ nodes may be dishonest. Here, $q$ denotes the alphabet size of the error correction code used in the protocol. When error correction codes with a constant alphabet size (e.g., Expander Codes) are used, $q$ becomes a constant. An MVBA protocol that guarantees all required properties without relying on any cryptographic assumptions, such as signatures or hashing, except for the common coin assumption, is said to be information-theoretically secure (IT secure). Under the common coin assumption, an MVBA protocol that guarantees all required properties in all executions is said to be error-free. We also propose another error-free, IT-secure, asynchronous MVBA protocol, called OciorMVBArr. This protocol achieves MVBA consensus with expected $O(n |\boldsymbol{w}| + n^2 \log n)$ communication bits, expected $O(1)$ rounds, and expected $O(1)$ common coins, under a relaxed resilience (RR) of $n \geq 5t + 1$. Additionally, we propose a hash-based asynchronous MVBA protocol, called OciorMVBAh. This protocol achieves MVBA consensus with expected $O(n |\boldsymbol{w}| + n^3)$ bits, expected $O(1)$ rounds, and expected $O(1)$ common coins, under optimal resilience $n \geq 3t + 1$.
2501.00217
The Potential of LLMs in Automating Software Testing: From Generation to Reporting
cs.SE cs.AI
Having a high quality software is essential in software engineering, which requires robust validation and verification processes during testing activities. Manual testing, while effective, can be time consuming and costly, leading to an increased demand for automated methods. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly influenced software engineering, particularly in areas like requirements analysis, test automation, and debugging. This paper explores an agent-oriented approach to automated software testing, using LLMs to reduce human intervention and enhance testing efficiency. The proposed framework integrates LLMs to generate unit tests, visualize call graphs, and automate test execution and reporting. Evaluations across multiple applications in Python and Java demonstrate the system's high test coverage and efficient operation. This research underscores the potential of LLM-powered agents to streamline software testing workflows while addressing challenges in scalability and accuracy.
2501.00219
Autonomous Minibus Service with Semi-on-demand Routes in Grid Networks
eess.SY cs.SY math.OC
This paper investigates the potential of autonomous minibuses which take on-demand directional routes for pick-up and drop-off in a grid network of wider area with low density, followed by fixed routes in areas with demand. Mathematical formulation for generalized costs demonstrates its benefits, with indicators proposed to select existing bus routes for conversion with the options of zonal express and parallel routes. Simulations on modeled scenarios and case studies with bus routes in Chicago show reductions in both passenger costs and generalized costs over existing fixed-route bus service between suburban areas and CBD.
2501.00220
DecoratingFusion: A LiDAR-Camera Fusion Network with the Combination of Point-level and Feature-level Fusion
cs.CV cs.LG
Lidars and cameras play essential roles in autonomous driving, offering complementary information for 3D detection. The state-of-the-art fusion methods integrate them at the feature level, but they mostly rely on the learned soft association between point clouds and images, which lacks interpretability and neglects the hard association between them. In this paper, we combine feature-level fusion with point-level fusion, using hard association established by the calibration matrices to guide the generation of object queries. Specifically, in the early fusion stage, we use the 2D CNN features of images to decorate the point cloud data, and employ two independent sparse convolutions to extract the decorated point cloud features. In the mid-level fusion stage, we initialize the queries with a center heatmap and embed the predicted class labels as auxiliary information into the queries, making the initial positions closer to the actual centers of the targets. Extensive experiments conducted on two popular datasets, i.e. KITTI, Waymo, demonstrate the superiority of DecoratingFusion.
2501.00223
CancerKG.ORG A Web-scale, Interactive, Verifiable Knowledge Graph-LLM Hybrid for Assisting with Optimal Cancer Treatment and Care
cs.AI cs.IR cs.LG
Here, we describe one of the first Web-scale hybrid Knowledge Graph (KG)-Large Language Model (LLM), populated with the latest peer-reviewed medical knowledge on colorectal Cancer. It is currently being evaluated to assist with both medical research and clinical information retrieval tasks at Moffitt Cancer Center, which is one of the top Cancer centers in the U.S. and in the world. Our hybrid is remarkable as it serves the user needs better than just an LLM, KG or a search-engine in isolation. LLMs as is are known to exhibit hallucinations and catastrophic forgetting as well as are trained on outdated corpora. The state of the art KGs, such as PrimeKG, cBioPortal, ChEMBL, NCBI, and other require manual curation, hence are quickly getting stale. CancerKG is unsupervised and is capable of automatically ingesting and organizing the latest medical findings. To alleviate the LLMs shortcomings, the verified KG serves as a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) guardrail. CancerKG exhibits 5 different advanced user interfaces, each tailored to serve different data modalities better and more convenient for the user.
2501.00224
Extracting effective solutions hidden in large language models via generated comprehensive specialists: case studies in developing electronic devices
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Recently, many studies have increasingly explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate research ideas and scientific hypotheses. However, real-world research and development often require solving complex, interdisciplinary challenges where solutions may not be readily found through existing knowledge related to the problem. Therefore, it is desirable to leverage the vast, comprehensive knowledge of LLMs to generate effective, breakthrough solutions by integrating various perspectives from other disciplines. Here, we propose SELLM (Solution Enumeration via comprehensive List and LLM), a framework leveraging LLMs and structured guidance using MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) principles, such as International Patent Classification (IPC) and the periodic table of elements. SELLM systematically constructs comprehensive expert agents from the list to generate cross-disciplinary and effective solutions. To evaluate SELLM's practicality, we applied it to two challenges: improving light extraction in organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting and developing electrodes for next-generation memory materials. The results demonstrate that SELLM significantly facilitates the generation of effective solutions compared to cases without specific customization or effort, showcasing the potential of SELLM to enable LLMs to generate effective solutions even for challenging problems.
2501.00226
Generative Emergent Communication: Large Language Model is a Collective World Model
cs.AI cs.CL
This study proposes a unifying theoretical framework called generative emergent communication (generative EmCom) that bridges emergent communication, world models, and large language models (LLMs) through the lens of collective predictive coding (CPC). The proposed framework formalizes the emergence of language and symbol systems through decentralized Bayesian inference across multiple agents, extending beyond conventional discriminative model-based approaches to emergent communication. This study makes the following two key contributions: First, we propose generative EmCom as a novel framework for understanding emergent communication, demonstrating how communication emergence in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can be derived from control as inference while clarifying its relationship to conventional discriminative approaches. Second, we propose a mathematical formulation showing the interpretation of LLMs as collective world models that integrate multiple agents' experiences through CPC. The framework provides a unified theoretical foundation for understanding how shared symbol systems emerge through collective predictive coding processes, bridging individual cognitive development and societal language evolution. Through mathematical formulations and discussion on prior works, we demonstrate how this framework explains fundamental aspects of language emergence and offers practical insights for understanding LLMs and developing sophisticated AI systems for improving human-AI interaction and multi-agent systems.
2501.00230
Federated Deep Subspace Clustering
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CR
This paper introduces FDSC, a private-protected subspace clustering (SC) approach with federated learning (FC) schema. In each client, there is a deep subspace clustering network accounting for grouping the isolated data, composed of a encode network, a self-expressive layer, and a decode network. FDSC is achieved by uploading the encode network to communicate with other clients in the server. Besides, FDSC is also enhanced by preserving the local neighborhood relationship in each client. With the effects of federated learning and locality preservation, the learned data features from the encoder are boosted so as to enhance the self-expressiveness learning and result in better clustering performance. Experiments test FDSC on public datasets and compare with other clustering methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of FDSC.
2501.00233
Zero-Shot Strategies for Length-Controllable Summarization
cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with precise length control, particularly in zero-shot settings. We conduct a comprehensive study evaluating LLMs' length control capabilities across multiple measures and propose practical methods to improve controllability. Our experiments with LLaMA 3 reveal stark differences in length adherence across measures and highlight inherent biases of the model. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of methods: length approximation, target adjustment, sample filtering, and automated revisions. By combining these methods, we demonstrate substantial improvements in length compliance while maintaining or enhancing summary quality, providing highly effective zero-shot strategies for precise length control without the need for model fine-tuning or architectural changes. With our work, we not only advance our understanding of LLM behavior in controlled text generation but also pave the way for more reliable and adaptable summarization systems in real-world applications.
2501.00237
Make Domain Shift a Catastrophic Forgetting Alleviator in Class-Incremental Learning
cs.CV cs.LG
In the realm of class-incremental learning (CIL), alleviating the catastrophic forgetting problem is a pivotal challenge. This paper discovers a counter-intuitive observation: by incorporating domain shift into CIL tasks, the forgetting rate is significantly reduced. Our comprehensive studies demonstrate that incorporating domain shift leads to a clearer separation in the feature distribution across tasks and helps reduce parameter interference during the learning process. Inspired by this observation, we propose a simple yet effective method named DisCo to deal with CIL tasks. DisCo introduces a lightweight prototype pool that utilizes contrastive learning to promote distinct feature distributions for the current task relative to previous ones, effectively mitigating interference across tasks. DisCo can be easily integrated into existing state-of-the-art class-incremental learning methods. Experimental results show that incorporating our method into various CIL methods achieves substantial performance improvements, validating the benefits of our approach in enhancing class-incremental learning by separating feature representation and reducing interference. These findings illustrate that DisCo can serve as a robust fashion for future research in class-incremental learning.
2501.00241
Exploring Variability in Fine-Tuned Models for Text Classification with DistilBERT
cs.CL cs.AI
This study evaluates fine-tuning strategies for text classification using the DistilBERT model, specifically the distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english variant. Through structured experiments, we examine the influence of hyperparameters such as learning rate, batch size, and epochs on accuracy, F1-score, and loss. Polynomial regression analyses capture foundational and incremental impacts of these hyperparameters, focusing on fine-tuning adjustments relative to a baseline model. Results reveal variability in metrics due to hyperparameter configurations, showing trade-offs among performance metrics. For example, a higher learning rate reduces loss in relative analysis (p=0.027) but challenges accuracy improvements. Meanwhile, batch size significantly impacts accuracy and F1-score in absolute regression (p=0.028 and p=0.005) but has limited influence on loss optimization (p=0.170). The interaction between epochs and batch size maximizes F1-score (p=0.001), underscoring the importance of hyperparameter interplay. These findings highlight the need for fine-tuning strategies addressing non-linear hyperparameter interactions to balance performance across metrics. Such variability and metric trade-offs are relevant for tasks beyond text classification, including NLP and computer vision. This analysis informs fine-tuning strategies for large language models and promotes adaptive designs for broader model applicability.
2501.00242
Automotive Speed Estimation: Sensor Types and Error Characteristics from OBD-II to ADAS
eess.SP cs.RO
Modern on-road navigation systems heavily depend on integrating speed measurements with inertial navigation systems (INS) and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Telemetry-based applications typically source speed data from the On-Board Diagnostic II (OBD-II) system. However, the method of deriving speed, as well as the types of sensors used to measure wheel speed, differs across vehicles. These differences result in varying error characteristics that must be accounted for in navigation and autonomy applications. This paper addresses this gap by examining the diverse speed-sensing technologies employed in standard automotive systems and alternative techniques used in advanced systems designed for higher levels of autonomy, such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Autonomous Driving (AD), or surveying applications. We propose a method to identify the type of speed sensor in a vehicle and present strategies for accurately modeling its error characteristics. To validate our approach, we collected and analyzed data from three long real road trajectories conducted in urban environments in Toronto and Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The results underscore the critical role of integrating multiple sensor modalities to achieve more accurate speed estimation, thus improving automotive navigation state estimation, particularly in GNSS-denied environments.
2501.00243
Cross-Layer Cache Aggregation for Token Reduction in Ultra-Fine-Grained Image Recognition
cs.CV
Ultra-fine-grained image recognition (UFGIR) is a challenging task that involves classifying images within a macro-category. While traditional FGIR deals with classifying different species, UFGIR goes beyond by classifying sub-categories within a species such as cultivars of a plant. In recent times the usage of Vision Transformer-based backbones has allowed methods to obtain outstanding recognition performances in this task but this comes at a significant cost in terms of computation specially since this task significantly benefits from incorporating higher resolution images. Therefore, techniques such as token reduction have emerged to reduce the computational cost. However, dropping tokens leads to loss of essential information for fine-grained categories, specially as the token keep rate is reduced. Therefore, to counteract the loss of information brought by the usage of token reduction we propose a novel Cross-Layer Aggregation Classification Head and a Cross-Layer Cache mechanism to recover and access information from previous layers in later locations. Extensive experiments covering more than 2000 runs across diverse settings including 5 datasets, 9 backbones, 7 token reduction methods, 5 keep rates, and 2 image sizes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed plug-and-play modules and allow us to push the boundaries of accuracy vs cost for UFGIR by reducing the kept tokens to extremely low ratios of up to 10\% while maintaining a competitive accuracy to state-of-the-art models. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/arkel23/CLCA}
2501.00244
Have We Designed Generalizable Structural Knowledge Promptings? Systematic Evaluation and Rethinking
cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in text generation within current NLP research. However, the lack of factual accuracy is still a dark cloud hanging over the LLM skyscraper. Structural knowledge prompting (SKP) is a prominent paradigm to integrate external knowledge into LLMs by incorporating structural representations, achieving state-of-the-art results in many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing methods often focus on specific problems, lacking a comprehensive exploration of the generalization and capability boundaries of SKP. This paper aims to evaluate and rethink the generalization capability of the SKP paradigm from four perspectives including Granularity, Transferability, Scalability, and Universality. To provide a thorough evaluation, we introduce a novel multi-granular, multi-level benchmark called SUBARU, consisting of 9 different tasks with varying levels of granularity and difficulty.
2501.00249
A Universal Controller for Grid-Tied Inverters
eess.SY cs.SY
This paper presents the development of "Control-Sync," a novel firmware for universal inverters in microgrids, designed to enhance grid stability and flexibility. As hybrid PV-battery systems become increasingly prevalent, there is a critical need for inverters capable of efficiently transitioning between grid-forming (GFM) and grid-following (GFL) modes. Our firmware introduces dual control paths that allow for seamless transitions without reliance on external control devices, reducing communication overhead and increasing operational reliability. Key features include direct phase-angle detection and frequency restoration capabilities, essential for managing asymmetrical power grids and dynamic load changes. The efficacy of Control-Sync is demonstrated through rigorous testing with grid emulators and multi-phase inverters, confirming its potential to improve microgrid reliability and efficiency. This study offers a scalable solution to enhance inverter adaptability in various grid conditions, fostering a more resilient energy infrastructure.
2501.00252
Towards Pattern-aware Data Augmentation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
cs.LG cs.DB cs.IR
Predicting missing facts for temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is a fundamental task, called temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC). One key challenge in this task is the imbalance in data distribution, where facts are unevenly spread across entities and timestamps. This imbalance can lead to poor completion performance or long-tail entities and timestamps, and unstable training due to the introduction of false negative samples. Unfortunately, few previous studies have investigated how to mitigate these effects. Moreover, for the first time, we found that existing methods suffer from model preferences, revealing that entities with specific properties (e.g., recently active) are favored by different models. Such preferences will lead to error accumulation and further exacerbate the effects of imbalanced data distribution, but are overlooked by previous studies. To alleviate the impacts of imbalanced data and model preferences, we introduce Booster, the first data augmentation strategy for TKGs. The unique requirements here lie in generating new samples that fit the complex semantic and temporal patterns within TKGs, and identifying hard-learning samples specific to models. Therefore, we propose a hierarchical scoring algorithm based on triadic closures within TKGs. By incorporating both global semantic patterns and local time-aware structures, the algorithm enables pattern-aware validation for new samples. Meanwhile, we propose a two-stage training approach to identify samples that deviate from the model's preferred patterns. With a well-designed frequency-based filtering strategy, this approach also helps to avoid the misleading of false negatives. Experiments justify that Booster can seamlessly adapt to existing TKGC models and achieve up to an 8.7% performance improvement.
2501.00254
Automatically Planning Optimal Parallel Strategy for Large Language Models
cs.AI cs.CL
The number of parameters in large-scale language models based on transformers is gradually increasing, and the scale of computing clusters is also growing. The technology of quickly mobilizing large amounts of computing resources for parallel computing is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we propose an automatic parallel algorithm that automatically plans the parallel strategy with maximum throughput based on model and hardware information. By decoupling the training time into computation, communication, and overlap, we established a training duration simulation model. Based on this simulation model, we prune the parallel solution space to shorten the search time required. The multi-node experiment results show that the algorithm can estimate the parallel training duration in real time with an average accuracy of 96%. In our test, the recommendation strategy provided by the algorithm is always globally optimal.
2501.00257
EQUATOR: A Deterministic Framework for Evaluating LLM Reasoning with Open-Ended Questions. # v1.0.0-beta
cs.CL
Despite the remarkable coherence of Large Language Models (LLMs), existing evaluation methods often suffer from fluency bias and rely heavily on multiple-choice formats, making it difficult to assess factual accuracy and complex reasoning effectively. LLMs thus frequently generate factually inaccurate responses, especially in complex reasoning tasks, highlighting two prominent challenges: (1) the inadequacy of existing methods to evaluate reasoning and factual accuracy effectively, and (2) the reliance on human evaluators for nuanced judgment, as illustrated by Williams and Huckle (2024)[1], who found manual grading indispensable despite automated grading advancements. To address evaluation gaps in open-ended reasoning tasks, we introduce the EQUATOR Evaluator (Evaluation of Question Answering Thoroughness in Open-ended Reasoning). This framework combines deterministic scoring with a focus on factual accuracy and robust reasoning assessment. Using a vector database, EQUATOR pairs open-ended questions with human-evaluated answers, enabling more precise and scalable evaluations. In practice, EQUATOR significantly reduces reliance on human evaluators for scoring and improves scalability compared to Williams and Huckle's (2004)[1] methods. Our results demonstrate that this framework significantly outperforms traditional multiple-choice evaluations while maintaining high accuracy standards. Additionally, we introduce an automated evaluation process leveraging smaller, locally hosted LLMs. We used LLaMA 3.2B, running on the Ollama binaries to streamline our assessments. This work establishes a new paradigm for evaluating LLM performance, emphasizing factual accuracy and reasoning ability, and provides a robust methodological foundation for future research.
2501.00258
Optimal design of frame structures with mixed categorical and continuous design variables using the Gumbel-Softmax method
cs.CE math.OC
In optimizing real-world structures, due to fabrication or budgetary restraints, the design variables may be restricted to a set of standard engineering choices. Such variables, commonly called categorical variables, are discrete and unordered in essence, precluding the utilization of gradient-based optimizers for the problems containing them. In this paper, incorporating the Gumbel-Softmax (GSM) method, we propose a new gradient-based optimizer for handling such variables in the optimal design of large-scale frame structures. The GSM method provides a means to draw differentiable samples from categorical distributions, thereby enabling sensitivity analysis for the variables generated from such distributions. The sensitivity information can greatly reduce the computational cost of traversing high-dimensional and discrete design spaces in comparison to employing gradient-free optimization methods. In addition, since the developed optimizer is gradient-based, it can naturally handle the simultaneous optimization of categorical and continuous design variables. Through three numerical case studies, different aspects of the proposed optimizer are studied and its advantages over population-based optimizers, specifically a genetic algorithm, are demonstrated.
2501.00260
Detection and Prevention of Smishing Attacks
cs.CR cs.SI
Phishing is an online identity theft technique where attackers steal users personal information, leading to financial losses for individuals and organizations. With the increasing adoption of smartphones, which provide functionalities similar to desktop computers, attackers are targeting mobile users. Smishing, a phishing attack carried out through Short Messaging Service (SMS), has become prevalent due to the widespread use of SMS-based services. It involves deceptive messages designed to extract sensitive information. Despite the growing number of smishing attacks, limited research focuses on detecting these threats. This work presents a smishing detection model using a content-based analysis approach. To address the challenge posed by slang, abbreviations, and short forms in text communication, the model normalizes these into standard forms. A machine learning classifier is employed to classify messages as smishing or ham. Experimental results demonstrate the model effectiveness, achieving classification accuracies of 97.14% for smishing and 96.12% for ham messages, with an overall accuracy of 96.20%.
2501.00261
Collaborative Approaches to Enhancing Smart Vehicle Cybersecurity by AI-Driven Threat Detection
cs.CR cs.AI
The introduction sets the stage for exploring collaborative approaches to bolstering smart vehicle cybersecurity through AI-driven threat detection. As the automotive industry increasingly adopts connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), the need for robust cybersecurity measures becomes paramount. With the emergence of new vulnerabilities and security requirements, the integration of advanced technologies such as 5G networks, blockchain, and quantum computing presents promising avenues for enhancing CAV cybersecurity . Additionally, the roadmap for cybersecurity in autonomous vehicles emphasizes the importance of efficient intrusion detection systems and AI-based techniques, along with the integration of secure hardware, software stacks, and advanced threat intelligence to address cybersecurity challenges in future autonomous vehicles.
2501.00262
Integrating Cascade Pumped Micro-Hydro Storage: A Sustainable Approach to Energy and Water Management
eess.SY cs.SY
As traditional large hydropower has been extensively exploited, micro-hydro systems have caught research increasing interest. New engineering challenges arise in developing micro-hydro systems in areas with significant elevation but prohibitive horizontal distances between primary reservoirs. This study addresses these challenges by proposing a cascade-pumped micro-hydro storage (CPMHS) system that leverages intermediate reservoirs to bridge long horizontal distances, enabling efficient energy transfer and storage. The methodology utilizes naturally occurring lakes with substantial head heights but limited feasibility for direct pumped storage due to horizontal separations. Integrating smaller, strategically placed intermediate reservoirs maximizes energy capture along the cascading path, making pumped storage viable in geographically constrained locations. The proposed system will enhance energy generation potential and provide additional benefits for water management. Using geographical data and a detailed case study focused on Mountain Lake and surrounding lakes, this paper demonstrates the energy efficiency and viability of cascade-based micro-hydro storage. A practical methodology for implementing CPMHS systems is proposed and validated by case studies. An optimization framework is developed for efficient energy capture in regions with challenging topography.
2501.00264
Enhancing Wireless Sensor Network Security through Integration with the ServiceNow Cloud Platform
cs.CR cs.AI
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) continue to experience rapid developments and integration into modern-day applications. Overall, WSNs collect and process relevant data through sensors or nodes and communicate with different networks for superior information management. Nevertheless, a primary concern relative to WSNs is security. Considering the high constraints on throughput, battery, processing power, and memory, typical security procedures present limitations for application in WSNs. This research focuses on the integration of WSNs with the cloud platform, specifically to address these security risks. The cloud platform also adopts a security-driven approach and has attracted many applications across various sectors globally. This research specifically explores how cloud computing could be exploited to impede Denial of Service attacks from endangering WSNs. WSNs are now deployed in various low-powered applications, including disaster management, homeland security, battlefield surveillance, agriculture, and the healthcare industry. WSNs are distinguished from traditional networks by the numerous wireless connected sensors being deployed to conduct an assigned task. In testing scenarios, the size of WSNs ranges from a few to several thousand. The overarching requirements of WSNs include rapid processing of collected data, low-cost installation and maintenance, and low latency in network operations. Given that a substantial amount of WSN applications are used in high-risk and volatile environments, they must effectively address security concerns. This includes the secure movement, storage, and communication of data through networks, an environment in which WSNs are notably vulnerable. The limitations of WSNs have meant that they are predominantly used in unsecured applications despite positive advancements. This study explores methods for integrating the WSN with the cloud.
2501.00265
Outlier-Robust Training of Machine Learning Models
cs.LG cs.CV
Robust training of machine learning models in the presence of outliers has garnered attention across various domains. The use of robust losses is a popular approach and is known to mitigate the impact of outliers. We bring to light two literatures that have diverged in their ways of designing robust losses: one using M-estimation, which is popular in robotics and computer vision, and another using a risk-minimization framework, which is popular in deep learning. We first show that a simple modification of the Black-Rangarajan duality provides a unifying view. The modified duality brings out a definition of a robust loss kernel $\sigma$ that is satisfied by robust losses in both the literatures. Secondly, using the modified duality, we propose an Adaptive Alternation Algorithm (AAA) for training machine learning models with outliers. The algorithm iteratively trains the model by using a weighted version of the non-robust loss, while updating the weights at each iteration. The algorithm is augmented with a novel parameter update rule by interpreting the weights as inlier probabilities, and obviates the need for complex parameter tuning. Thirdly, we investigate convergence of the adaptive alternation algorithm to outlier-free optima. Considering arbitrary outliers (i.e., with no distributional assumption on the outliers), we show that the use of robust loss kernels {\sigma} increases the region of convergence. We experimentally show the efficacy of our algorithm on regression, classification, and neural scene reconstruction problems. We release our implementation code: https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/ORT.