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2501.17076
DINOSTAR: Deep Iterative Neural Object Detector Self-Supervised Training for Roadside LiDAR Applications
cs.CV
Recent advancements in deep-learning methods for object detection in point-cloud data have enabled numerous roadside applications, fostering improvements in transportation safety and management. However, the intricate nature of point-cloud data poses significant challenges for human-supervised labeling, resulting in substantial expenditures of time and capital. This paper addresses the issue by developing an end-to-end, scalable, and self-supervised framework for training deep object detectors tailored for roadside point-cloud data. The proposed framework leverages self-supervised, statistically modeled teachers to train off-the-shelf deep object detectors, thus circumventing the need for human supervision. The teacher models follow fine-tuned set standard practices of background filtering, object clustering, bounding-box fitting, and classification to generate noisy labels. It is presented that by training the student model over the combined noisy annotations from multitude of teachers enhances its capacity to discern background/foreground more effectively and forces it to learn diverse point-cloud-representations for object categories of interest. The evaluations, involving publicly available roadside datasets and state-of-art deep object detectors, demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves comparable performance to deep object detectors trained on human-annotated labels, despite not utilizing such human-annotations in its training process.
2501.17077
Induced Modularity and Community Detection for Functionally Interpretable Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Interpretability in reinforcement learning is crucial for ensuring AI systems align with human values and fulfill the diverse related requirements including safety, robustness and fairness. Building on recent approaches to encouraging sparsity and locality in neural networks, we demonstrate how the penalisation of non-local weights leads to the emergence of functionally independent modules in the policy network of a reinforcement learning agent. To illustrate this, we demonstrate the emergence of two parallel modules for assessment of movement along the X and Y axes in a stochastic Minigrid environment. Through the novel application of community detection algorithms, we show how these modules can be automatically identified and their functional roles verified through direct intervention on the network weights prior to inference. This establishes a scalable framework for reinforcement learning interpretability through functional modularity, addressing challenges regarding the trade-off between completeness and cognitive tractability of reinforcement learning explanations.
2501.17079
Learning Mean Field Control on Sparse Graphs
cs.MA cs.AI cs.GT cs.LG
Large agent networks are abundant in applications and nature and pose difficult challenges in the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) due to their computational and theoretical complexity. While graphon mean field games and their extensions provide efficient learning algorithms for dense and moderately sparse agent networks, the case of realistic sparser graphs remains largely unsolved. Thus, we propose a novel mean field control model inspired by local weak convergence to include sparse graphs such as power law networks with coefficients above two. Besides a theoretical analysis, we design scalable learning algorithms which apply to the challenging class of graph sequences with finite first moment. We compare our model and algorithms for various examples on synthetic and real world networks with mean field algorithms based on Lp graphons and graphexes. As it turns out, our approach outperforms existing methods in many examples and on various networks due to the special design aiming at an important, but so far hard to solve class of MARL problems.
2501.17081
Graph Transformers for inverse physics: reconstructing flows around arbitrary 2D airfoils
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CE
We introduce a Graph Transformer framework that serves as a general inverse physics engine on meshes, demonstrated through the challenging task of reconstructing aerodynamic flow fields from sparse surface measurements. While deep learning has shown promising results in forward physics simulation, inverse problems remain particularly challenging due to their ill-posed nature and the difficulty of propagating information from limited boundary observations. Our approach addresses these challenges by combining the geometric expressiveness of message-passing neural networks with the global reasoning of Transformers, enabling efficient learning of inverse mappings from boundary conditions to complete states. We evaluate this framework on a comprehensive dataset of steady-state RANS simulations around diverse airfoil geometries, where the task is to reconstruct full pressure and velocity fields from surface pressure measurements alone. The architecture achieves high reconstruction accuracy while maintaining fast inference times. We conduct experiments and provide insights into the relative importance of local geometric processing and global attention mechanisms in mesh-based inverse problems. We also find that the framework is robust to reduced sensor coverage. These results suggest that Graph Transformers can serve as effective inverse physics engines across a broader range of applications where complete system states must be reconstructed from limited boundary observations.
2501.17084
Token-by-Token Regeneration and Domain Biases: A Benchmark of LLMs on Advanced Mathematical Problem-Solving
cs.LG
Large language models (LLMs) excel in many natural language tasks, yet they struggle with complex mathemat-ical problem-solving, particularly in symbolic reasoning and maintaining consistent output. This study evalu-ates 10 LLMs with 7 to 8 billion parameters using 945 competition-level problems from the MATH dataset. The focus is on their ability to generate executable Python code as a step in their reasoning process, involving over 9,450 code executions. The research introduces an evaluation framework using mistral-large-2411 to rate answers on a 5-point scale, which helps address inconsistencies in mathematical notation. It also examines the impact of regenerating output token-by-token on refining results. The findings reveal a significant 34.5% per-formance gap between the top commercial model (gpt-4o-mini, scoring 83.7%) and the least effective open-source model (open-codestral-mamba:v0.1, scoring 49.2%). This disparity is especially noticeable in complex areas like Number Theory. While token-by-token regeneration slightly improved accuracy (+0.8%) for the model llama3.1:8b, it also reduced code execution time by 36.7%, highlighting a trade-off between efficiency and precision. The study also noted a consistent trend where harder problems correlated with lower accuracy across all models. Despite using controlled execution environments, less than 1% of the generated code was unsafe, and 3.17% of problems remained unsolved after 10 attempts, suggesting that hybrid reasoning methods may be beneficial.
2501.17085
Evaluating CrowdSplat: Perceived Level of Detail for Gaussian Crowds
cs.CV
Efficient and realistic crowd rendering is an important element of many real-time graphics applications such as Virtual Reality (VR) and games. To this end, Levels of Detail (LOD) avatar representations such as polygonal meshes, image-based impostors, and point clouds have been proposed and evaluated. More recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting has been explored as a potential method for real-time crowd rendering. In this paper, we present a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) experiment that aims to determine the perceived quality of 3D Gaussian avatars. Three factors were explored: Motion, LOD (i.e., #Gaussians), and the avatar height in Pixels (corresponding to the viewing distance). Participants viewed pairs of animated 3D Gaussian avatars and were tasked with choosing the most detailed one. Our findings can inform the optimization of LOD strategies in Gaussian-based crowd rendering, thereby helping to achieve efficient rendering while maintaining visual quality in real-time applications.
2501.17086
Accelerated Training through Iterative Gradient Propagation Along the Residual Path
cs.LG
Despite being the cornerstone of deep learning, backpropagation is criticized for its inherent sequentiality, which can limit the scalability of very deep models. Such models faced convergence issues due to vanishing gradient, later resolved using residual connections. Variants of these are now widely used in modern architecture. However, the computational cost of backpropagation remains a major burden, accounting for most of the training time. Taking advantage of residual-like architectural designs, we introduce Highway backpropagation, a parallelizable iterative algorithm that approximates backpropagation, by alternatively i) accumulating the gradient estimates along the residual path, and ii) backpropagating them through every layer in parallel. This algorithm is naturally derived from a decomposition of the gradient as the sum of gradients flowing through all paths and is adaptable to a diverse set of common architectures, ranging from ResNets and Transformers to recurrent neural networks. Through an extensive empirical study on a large selection of tasks and models, we evaluate Highway-BP and show that major speedups can be achieved with minimal performance degradation.
2501.17088
Mamba-Shedder: Post-Transformer Compression for Efficient Selective Structured State Space Models
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Large pre-trained models have achieved outstanding results in sequence modeling. The Transformer block and its attention mechanism have been the main drivers of the success of these models. Recently, alternative architectures, such as Selective Structured State Space Models (SSMs), have been proposed to address the inefficiencies of Transformers. This paper explores the compression of SSM-based models, particularly Mamba and its hybrids. We study the sensitivity of these models to the removal of selected components at different granularities to reduce the model size and computational overhead, thus improving their efficiency while maintaining accuracy. The proposed solutions, collectively referred to as Mamba-Shedder, achieve a speedup of up to 1.4x during inference, demonstrating that model efficiency can be improved by eliminating several redundancies with minimal impact on the overall model performance. The code is available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning.
2501.17096
Why is the estimation of metaorder impact with public market data so challenging?
q-fin.TR cs.AI econ.EM physics.soc-ph
Estimating market impact and transaction costs of large trades (metaorders) is a very important topic in finance. However, using models of price and trade based on public market data provide average price trajectories which are qualitatively different from what is observed during real metaorder executions: the price increases linearly, rather than in a concave way, during the execution and the amount of reversion after its end is very limited. We claim that this is a generic phenomenon due to the fact that even sophisticated statistical models are unable to correctly describe the origin of the autocorrelation of the order flow. We propose a modified Transient Impact Model which provides more realistic trajectories by assuming that only a fraction of the metaorder trading triggers market order flow. Interestingly, in our model there is a critical condition on the kernels of the price and order flow equations in which market impact becomes permanent.
2501.17099
Text-to-Image Generation for Vocabulary Learning Using the Keyword Method
cs.HC cs.CV cs.GR cs.LG
The 'keyword method' is an effective technique for learning vocabulary of a foreign language. It involves creating a memorable visual link between what a word means and what its pronunciation in a foreign language sounds like in the learner's native language. However, these memorable visual links remain implicit in the people's mind and are not easy to remember for a large set of words. To enhance the memorisation and recall of the vocabulary, we developed an application that combines the keyword method with text-to-image generators to externalise the memorable visual links into visuals. These visuals represent additional stimuli during the memorisation process. To explore the effectiveness of this approach we first run a pilot study to investigate how difficult it is to externalise the descriptions of mental visualisations of memorable links, by asking participants to write them down. We used these descriptions as prompts for text-to-image generator (DALL-E2) to convert them into images and asked participants to select their favourites. Next, we compared different text-to-image generators (DALL-E2, Midjourney, Stable and Latent Diffusion) to evaluate the perceived quality of the generated images by each. Despite heterogeneous results, participants mostly preferred images generated by DALL-E2, which was used also for the final study. In this study, we investigated whether providing such images enhances the retention of vocabulary being learned, compared to the keyword method only. Our results indicate that people did not encounter difficulties describing their visualisations of memorable links and that providing corresponding images significantly improves memory retention.
2501.17104
COS(M+O)S: Curiosity and RL-Enhanced MCTS for Exploring Story Space via Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
We present COS(M+O)S, a System 2-inspired framework for open-ended plot development that systematically explores the vast space of possible story expansions, enabling a 3B-parameter language model to approach the plot quality of a 70B model on select short-story tasks. The method accomplishes this by combining Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), guided by a step-level value model that rewards moderate surprisal (curiosity) while penalizing incoherence, and Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO) to fine-tune the policy on high-value plot expansions. This iterative reinforcement learning loop systematically explores multiple candidate plot branches, backpropagates quality signals, and adapts the policy for faster convergence, notably shifting the policy from puzzle-based Chain-of-Thought to more character-driven storytelling. In small-scale tests with short-story prompts, 67%-77% of participants favored COS(M+O)S's highest-rated expansions over lower-rated ones, suggesting that our learned value function aligns. GPT-4o ratings further show that COS(M+O)S surpasses naive single-pass decoding from Llama 3.2 3B by 0.59 SD, coming within 0.06 SD of Llama 3.1 70B (no significant difference, p=0.93). Pairwise comparisons with o1 place COS(M+O)S 1.5 SD above the 3B baseline and find no statistically significant gap from 70B. Nevertheless, absolute story quality remains modest, constrained by the small model's capacity and limited training data.
2501.17105
Optimal control over Markovian wireless communication channels under generalized packet dropout compensation
eess.SY cs.SY math.OC
Control loops closed over wireless links greatly benefit from accurate estimates of the communication channel condition. To this end, the finite-state Markov channel model allows for reliable channel state estimation. This paper develops a Markov jump linear system representation for wireless networked control with persistent channel state observation, stochastic message losses, and generalized packet dropout compensation. With this model, we solve the finite- and infinite-horizon linear quadratic regulation problems and introduce an easy-to-test stability condition for any given infinite-horizon control law. We also thoroughly analyze the impact of a scalar general dropout compensation factor on the stability and closed-loop performance of a rotary inverted pendulum controlled remotely through a wireless link. Finally, we validate the results numerically via extensive Monte Carlo simulations, showing the benefits of the proposed control strategy.
2501.17110
Solving Roughly Forced Nonlinear PDEs via Misspecified Kernel Methods and Neural Networks
math.NA cs.LG cs.NA
We consider the use of Gaussian Processes (GPs) or Neural Networks (NNs) to numerically approximate the solutions to nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) with rough forcing or source terms, which commonly arise as pathwise solutions to stochastic PDEs. Kernel methods have recently been generalized to solve nonlinear PDEs by approximating their solutions as the maximum a posteriori estimator of GPs that are conditioned to satisfy the PDE at a finite set of collocation points. The convergence and error guarantees of these methods, however, rely on the PDE being defined in a classical sense and its solution possessing sufficient regularity to belong to the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We propose a generalization of these methods to handle roughly forced nonlinear PDEs while preserving convergence guarantees with an oversmoothing GP kernel that is misspecified relative to the true solution's regularity. This is achieved by conditioning a regular GP to satisfy the PDE with a modified source term in a weak sense (when integrated against a finite number of test functions). This is equivalent to replacing the empirical $L^2$-loss on the PDE constraint by an empirical negative-Sobolev norm. We further show that this loss function can be used to extend physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to stochastic equations, thereby resulting in a new NN-based variant termed Negative Sobolev Norm-PINN (NeS-PINN).
2501.17112
Unlocking Transparent Alignment Through Enhanced Inverse Constitutional AI for Principle Extraction
cs.LG
Traditional methods for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), rely on implicit principles, limiting interpretability. Constitutional AI (CAI) offers an explicit, rule-based framework for guiding model outputs. Building on this, we refine the Inverse Constitutional AI (ICAI) algorithm, which extracts constitutions from preference datasets. By improving principle generation, clustering, and embedding processes, our approach enhances the accuracy and generalizability of extracted principles across synthetic and real-world datasets. While in-context alignment yields modest improvements, our results highlight the potential of these principles to foster more transparent and adaptable alignment methods, offering a promising direction for future advancements beyond traditional fine-tuning.
2501.17115
Evidence on the Regularisation Properties of Maximum-Entropy Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG
The generalisation and robustness properties of policies learnt through Maximum-Entropy Reinforcement Learning are investigated on chaotic dynamical systems with Gaussian noise on the observable. First, the robustness under noise contamination of the agent's observation of entropy regularised policies is observed. Second, notions of statistical learning theory, such as complexity measures on the learnt model, are borrowed to explain and predict the phenomenon. Results show the existence of a relationship between entropy-regularised policy optimisation and robustness to noise, which can be described by the chosen complexity measures.
2501.17116
Optimizing Large Language Model Training Using FP4 Quantization
cs.LG cs.CL
The growing computational demands of training large language models (LLMs) necessitate more efficient methods. Quantized training presents a promising solution by enabling low-bit arithmetic operations to reduce these costs. While FP8 precision has demonstrated feasibility, leveraging FP4 remains a challenge due to significant quantization errors and limited representational capacity. This work introduces the first FP4 training framework for LLMs, addressing these challenges with two key innovations: a differentiable quantization estimator for precise weight updates and an outlier clamping and compensation strategy to prevent activation collapse. To ensure stability, the framework integrates a mixed-precision training scheme and vector-wise quantization. Experimental results demonstrate that our FP4 framework achieves accuracy comparable to BF16 and FP8, with minimal degradation, scaling effectively to 13B-parameter LLMs trained on up to 100B tokens. With the emergence of next-generation hardware supporting FP4, our framework sets a foundation for efficient ultra-low precision training.
2501.17117
Histoires Morales: A French Dataset for Assessing Moral Alignment
cs.CL cs.AI
Aligning language models with human values is crucial, especially as they become more integrated into everyday life. While models are often adapted to user preferences, it is equally important to ensure they align with moral norms and behaviours in real-world social situations. Despite significant progress in languages like English and Chinese, French has seen little attention in this area, leaving a gap in understanding how LLMs handle moral reasoning in this language. To address this gap, we introduce Histoires Morales, a French dataset derived from Moral Stories, created through translation and subsequently refined with the assistance of native speakers to guarantee grammatical accuracy and adaptation to the French cultural context. We also rely on annotations of the moral values within the dataset to ensure their alignment with French norms. Histoires Morales covers a wide range of social situations, including differences in tipping practices, expressions of honesty in relationships, and responsibilities toward animals. To foster future research, we also conduct preliminary experiments on the alignment of multilingual models on French and English data and the robustness of the alignment. We find that while LLMs are generally aligned with human moral norms by default, they can be easily influenced with user-preference optimization for both moral and immoral data.
2501.17122
Convergence of two-timescale gradient descent ascent dynamics: finite-dimensional and mean-field perspectives
math.OC cs.LG cs.NA math.NA
The two-timescale gradient descent-ascent (GDA) is a canonical gradient algorithm designed to find Nash equilibria in min-max games. We analyze the two-timescale GDA by investigating the effects of learning rate ratios on convergence behavior in both finite-dimensional and mean-field settings. In particular, for finite-dimensional quadratic min-max games, we obtain long-time convergence in near quasi-static regimes through the hypocoercivity method. For mean-field GDA dynamics, we investigate convergence under a finite-scale ratio using a mixed synchronous-reflection coupling technique.
2501.17123
Hybrid Deep Learning Model for Multiple Cache Side Channel Attacks Detection: A Comparative Analysis
cs.CR cs.NE
Cache side channel attacks are a sophisticated and persistent threat that exploit vulnerabilities in modern processors to extract sensitive information. These attacks leverage weaknesses in shared computational resources, particularly the last level cache, to infer patterns in data access and execution flows, often bypassing traditional security defenses. Such attacks are especially dangerous as they can be executed remotely without requiring physical access to the victim's device. This study focuses on a specific class of these threats: fingerprinting attacks, where an adversary monitors and analyzes the behavior of co-located processes via cache side channels. This can potentially reveal confidential information, such as encryption keys or user activity patterns. A comprehensive threat model illustrates how attackers sharing computational resources with target systems exploit these side channels to compromise sensitive data. To mitigate such risks, a hybrid deep learning model is proposed for detecting cache side channel attacks. Its performance is compared with five widely used deep learning models: Multi-Layer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Network, Simple Recurrent Neural Network, Long Short-Term Memory, and Gated Recurrent Unit. The experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid model achieves a detection rate of up to 99.96%. These findings highlight the limitations of existing models, the need for enhanced defensive mechanisms, and directions for future research to secure sensitive data against evolving side channel threats.
2501.17124
The Asymptotic Capacity of Byzantine Symmetric Private Information Retrieval and Its Consequences
cs.IT cs.CR cs.NI eess.SP math.IT
We consider the problem of finding the asymptotic capacity of symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) with $B$ Byzantine servers. Prior to finding the capacity, a definition for the Byzantine servers is needed since in the literature there are two different definitions. In \cite{byzantine_tpir}, where it was first defined, the Byzantine servers can send any symbol from the storage, their received queries and some independent random symbols. In \cite{unresponsive_byzantine_1}, Byzantine servers send any random symbol independently of their storage and queries. It is clear that these definitions are not identical, especially when \emph{symmetric} privacy is required. To that end, we define Byzantine servers, inspired by \cite{byzantine_tpir}, as the servers that can share everything, before and after the scheme initiation. In this setting, we find an upper bound, for an infinite number of messages case, that should be satisfied for all schemes that protect against this setting and develop a scheme that achieves this upper bound. Hence, we identify the capacity of the problem.
2501.17125
CoRe-Net: Co-Operational Regressor Network with Progressive Transfer Learning for Blind Radar Signal Restoration
cs.LG
Real-world radar signals are frequently corrupted by various artifacts, including sensor noise, echoes, interference, and intentional jamming, differing in type, severity, and duration. This pilot study introduces a novel model, called Co-Operational Regressor Network (CoRe-Net) for blind radar signal restoration, designed to address such limitations and drawbacks. CoRe-Net replaces adversarial training with a novel cooperative learning strategy, leveraging the complementary roles of its Apprentice Regressor (AR) and Master Regressor (MR). The AR restores radar signals corrupted by various artifacts, while the MR evaluates the quality of the restoration and provides immediate and task-specific feedback, ensuring stable and efficient learning. The AR, therefore, has the advantage of both self-learning and assistive learning by the MR. The proposed model has been extensively evaluated over the benchmark Blind Radar Signal Restoration (BRSR) dataset, which simulates diverse real-world artifact scenarios. Under the fair experimental setup, this study shows that the CoRe-Net surpasses the Op-GANs over a 1 dB mean SNR improvement. To further boost the performance gain, this study proposes multi-pass restoration by cascaded CoRe-Nets trained with a novel paradigm called Progressive Transfer Learning (PTL), which enables iterative refinement, thus achieving an additional 2 dB mean SNR enhancement. Multi-pass CoRe-Net training by PTL consistently yields incremental performance improvements through successive restoration passes whilst highlighting CoRe-Net ability to handle such a complex and varying blend of artifacts.
2501.17131
Scenario Understanding of Traffic Scenes Through Large Visual Language Models
cs.CV
Deep learning models for autonomous driving, encompassing perception, planning, and control, depend on vast datasets to achieve their high performance. However, their generalization often suffers due to domain-specific data distributions, making an effective scene-based categorization of samples necessary to improve their reliability across diverse domains. Manual captioning, though valuable, is both labor-intensive and time-consuming, creating a bottleneck in the data annotation process. Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) present a compelling solution by automating image analysis and categorization through contextual queries, often without requiring retraining for new categories. In this study, we evaluate the capabilities of LVLMs, including GPT-4 and LLaVA, to understand and classify urban traffic scenes on both an in-house dataset and the BDD100K. We propose a scalable captioning pipeline that integrates state-of-the-art models, enabling a flexible deployment on new datasets. Our analysis, combining quantitative metrics with qualitative insights, demonstrates the effectiveness of LVLMs to understand urban traffic scenarios and highlights their potential as an efficient tool for data-driven advancements in autonomous driving.
2501.17132
ASTRAL: Automated Safety Testing of Large Language Models
cs.SE cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained attention due to their ability to understand and generate sophisticated human-like content. However, ensuring their safety is paramount as they might provide harmful and unsafe responses. Existing LLM testing frameworks address various safety-related concerns (e.g., drugs, terrorism, animal abuse) but often face challenges due to unbalanced and obsolete datasets. In this paper, we present ASTRAL, a tool that automates the generation and execution of test cases (i.e., prompts) for testing the safety of LLMs. First, we introduce a novel black-box coverage criterion to generate balanced and diverse unsafe test inputs across a diverse set of safety categories as well as linguistic writing characteristics (i.e., different style and persuasive writing techniques). Second, we propose an LLM-based approach that leverages Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), few-shot prompting strategies and web browsing to generate up-to-date test inputs. Lastly, similar to current LLM test automation techniques, we leverage LLMs as test oracles to distinguish between safe and unsafe test outputs, allowing a fully automated testing approach. We conduct an extensive evaluation on well-known LLMs, revealing the following key findings: i) GPT3.5 outperforms other LLMs when acting as the test oracle, accurately detecting unsafe responses, and even surpassing more recent LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), as well as LLMs that are specifically tailored to detect unsafe LLM outputs (e.g., LlamaGuard); ii) the results confirm that our approach can uncover nearly twice as many unsafe LLM behaviors with the same number of test inputs compared to currently used static datasets; and iii) our black-box coverage criterion combined with web browsing can effectively guide the LLM on generating up-to-date unsafe test inputs, significantly increasing the number of unsafe LLM behaviors.
2501.17144
FactCG: Enhancing Fact Checkers with Graph-Based Multi-Hop Data
cs.CL cs.AI
Prior research on training grounded factuality classification models to detect hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) has relied on public natural language inference (NLI) data and synthetic data. However, conventional NLI datasets are not well-suited for document-level reasoning, which is critical for detecting LLM hallucinations. Recent approaches to document-level synthetic data generation involve iteratively removing sentences from documents and annotating factuality using LLM-based prompts. While effective, this method is computationally expensive for long documents and limited by the LLM's capabilities. In this work, we analyze the differences between existing synthetic training data used in state-of-the-art models and real LLM output claims. Based on our findings, we propose a novel approach for synthetic data generation, CG2C, that leverages multi-hop reasoning on context graphs extracted from documents. Our fact checker model, FactCG, demonstrates improved performance with more connected reasoning, using the same backbone models. Experiments show it even outperforms GPT-4-o on the LLM-Aggrefact benchmark with much smaller model size.
2501.17148
AxBench: Steering LLMs? Even Simple Baselines Outperform Sparse Autoencoders
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Fine-grained steering of language model outputs is essential for safety and reliability. Prompting and finetuning are widely used to achieve these goals, but interpretability researchers have proposed a variety of representation-based techniques as well, including sparse autoencoders (SAEs), linear artificial tomography, supervised steering vectors, linear probes, and representation finetuning. At present, there is no benchmark for making direct comparisons between these proposals. Therefore, we introduce AxBench, a large-scale benchmark for steering and concept detection, and report experiments on Gemma-2-2B and 9B. For steering, we find that prompting outperforms all existing methods, followed by finetuning. For concept detection, representation-based methods such as difference-in-means, perform the best. On both evaluations, SAEs are not competitive. We introduce a novel weakly-supervised representational method (Rank-1 Representation Finetuning; ReFT-r1), which is competitive on both tasks while providing the interpretability advantages that prompting lacks. Along with AxBench, we train and publicly release SAE-scale feature dictionaries for ReFT-r1 and DiffMean.
2501.17151
Scanning Trojaned Models Using Out-of-Distribution Samples
cs.LG
Scanning for trojan (backdoor) in deep neural networks is crucial due to their significant real-world applications. There has been an increasing focus on developing effective general trojan scanning methods across various trojan attacks. Despite advancements, there remains a shortage of methods that perform effectively without preconceived assumptions about the backdoor attack method. Additionally, we have observed that current methods struggle to identify classifiers trojaned using adversarial training. Motivated by these challenges, our study introduces a novel scanning method named TRODO (TROjan scanning by Detection of adversarial shifts in Out-of-distribution samples). TRODO leverages the concept of "blind spots"--regions where trojaned classifiers erroneously identify out-of-distribution (OOD) samples as in-distribution (ID). We scan for these blind spots by adversarially shifting OOD samples towards in-distribution. The increased likelihood of perturbed OOD samples being classified as ID serves as a signature for trojan detection. TRODO is both trojan and label mapping agnostic, effective even against adversarially trained trojaned classifiers. It is applicable even in scenarios where training data is absent, demonstrating high accuracy and adaptability across various scenarios and datasets, highlighting its potential as a robust trojan scanning strategy.
2501.17152
Three-Dimensional Diffusion-Weighted Multi-Slab MRI With Slice Profile Compensation Using Deep Energy Model
eess.IV cs.AI physics.med-ph
Three-dimensional (3D) multi-slab acquisition is a technique frequently employed in high-resolution diffusion-weighted MRI in order to achieve the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) efficiency. However, this technique is limited by slab boundary artifacts that cause intensity fluctuations and aliasing between slabs which reduces the accuracy of anatomical imaging. Addressing this issue is crucial for advancing diffusion MRI quality and making high-resolution imaging more feasible for clinical and research applications. In this work, we propose a regularized slab profile encoding (PEN) method within a Plug-and-Play ADMM framework, incorporating multi-scale energy (MuSE) regularization to effectively improve the slab combined reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves image quality compared to non-regularized and TV-regularized PEN approaches. The regularized PEN framework provides a more robust and efficient solution for high-resolution 3D diffusion MRI, potentially enabling clearer, more reliable anatomical imaging across various applications.
2501.17159
IC-Portrait: In-Context Matching for View-Consistent Personalized Portrait
cs.CV
Existing diffusion models show great potential for identity-preserving generation. However, personalized portrait generation remains challenging due to the diversity in user profiles, including variations in appearance and lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we propose IC-Portrait, a novel framework designed to accurately encode individual identities for personalized portrait generation. Our key insight is that pre-trained diffusion models are fast learners (e.g.,100 ~ 200 steps) for in-context dense correspondence matching, which motivates the two major designs of our IC-Portrait framework. Specifically, we reformulate portrait generation into two sub-tasks: 1) Lighting-Aware Stitching: we find that masking a high proportion of the input image, e.g., 80%, yields a highly effective self-supervisory representation learning of reference image lighting. 2) View-Consistent Adaptation: we leverage a synthetic view-consistent profile dataset to learn the in-context correspondence. The reference profile can then be warped into arbitrary poses for strong spatial-aligned view conditioning. Coupling these two designs by simply concatenating latents to form ControlNet-like supervision and modeling, enables us to significantly enhance the identity preservation fidelity and stability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that IC-Portrait consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, with particularly notable improvements in visual qualities. Furthermore, IC-Portrait even demonstrates 3D-aware relighting capabilities.
2501.17160
A Hybrid Deep Learning CNN Model for Enhanced COVID-19 Detection from Computed Tomography (CT) Scan Images
eess.IV cs.AI cs.CV
Early detection of COVID-19 is crucial for effective treatment and controlling its spread. This study proposes a novel hybrid deep learning model for detecting COVID-19 from CT scan images, designed to assist overburdened medical professionals. Our proposed model leverages the strengths of VGG16, DenseNet121, and MobileNetV2 to extract features, followed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction, after which the features are stacked and classified using a Support Vector Classifier (SVC). We conducted comparative analysis between the proposed hybrid model and individual pre-trained CNN models, using a dataset of 2,108 training images and 373 test images comprising both COVID-positive and non-COVID images. Our proposed hybrid model achieved an accuracy of 98.93%, outperforming the individual models in terms of precision, recall, F1 scores, and ROC curve performance.
2501.17161
SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training
cs.AI cs.CV cs.LG
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the difference between SFT and RL on generalization and memorization, focusing on text-based rule variants and visual variants. We introduce GeneralPoints, an arithmetic reasoning card game, and adopt V-IRL, a real-world navigation environment, to assess how models trained with SFT and RL generalize to unseen variants in both textual and visual domains. We show that RL, especially when trained with an outcome-based reward, generalizes across both rule-based textual and visual variants. SFT, in contrast, tends to memorize training data and struggles to generalize out-of-distribution scenarios. Further analysis reveals that RL improves the model's underlying visual recognition capabilities, contributing to its enhanced generalization in the visual domain. Despite RL's superior generalization, we show that SFT remains essential for effective RL training; SFT stabilizes the model's output format, enabling subsequent RL to achieve its performance gains. These findings demonstrates the capability of RL for acquiring generalizable knowledge in complex, multi-modal tasks.
2501.17162
CubeDiff: Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Models for Panorama Generation
cs.CV cs.LG
We introduce a novel method for generating 360{\deg} panoramas from text prompts or images. Our approach leverages recent advances in 3D generation by employing multi-view diffusion models to jointly synthesize the six faces of a cubemap. Unlike previous methods that rely on processing equirectangular projections or autoregressive generation, our method treats each face as a standard perspective image, simplifying the generation process and enabling the use of existing multi-view diffusion models. We demonstrate that these models can be adapted to produce high-quality cubemaps without requiring correspondence-aware attention layers. Our model allows for fine-grained text control, generates high resolution panorama images and generalizes well beyond its training set, whilst achieving state-of-the-art results, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: https://cubediff.github.io/
2501.17164
Split Knowledge Distillation for Large Models in IoT: Architecture, Challenges, and Solutions
cs.LG cs.AI
Large models (LMs) have immense potential in Internet of Things (IoT) systems, enabling applications such as intelligent voice assistants, predictive maintenance, and healthcare monitoring. However, training LMs on edge servers raises data privacy concerns, while deploying them directly on IoT devices is constrained by limited computational and memory resources. We analyze the key challenges of training LMs in IoT systems, including energy constraints, latency requirements, and device heterogeneity, and propose potential solutions such as dynamic resource management, adaptive model partitioning, and clustered collaborative training. Furthermore, we propose a split knowledge distillation framework to efficiently distill LMs into smaller, deployable versions for IoT devices while ensuring raw data remains local. This framework integrates knowledge distillation and split learning to minimize energy consumption and meet low model training delay requirements. A case study is presented to evaluate the feasibility and performance of the proposed framework.
2501.17166
Optimizing Carbon Footprint in ICT through Swarm Intelligence with Algorithmic Complexity
cs.NE physics.comp-ph
Global emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production were recorded in 2022, signaling a resurgence to pre-pandemic levels and providing an apodictic indication that emission peaks have not yet been achieved. Significant contributions to this upward trend are made by the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry due to its substantial energy consumption. This shows the need for further exploration of swarm intelligence applications to measure and optimize the carbon footprint within ICT. All causative factors are evaluated based on the quality of data collection; variations from each source are quantified; and an objective function related to carbon footprint in ICT energy management is optimized. Emphasis is placed on the asyndetic integration of data sources to construct a convex optimization problem. An apodictic necessity to prevent the erosion of accuracy in carbon footprint assessments is addressed. Complexity percentages ranged from 5.25% for the Bat Algorithm to 7.87% for Fast Bacterial Swarming, indicating significant fluctuations in resource intensity among algorithms. These findings suggest that we were able to quantify the environmental impact of various swarm algorithms.
2501.17167
QualityFlow: An Agentic Workflow for Program Synthesis Controlled by LLM Quality Checks
cs.SE cs.AI
We introduce QualityFlow, a dynamic agentic workflow for program synthesis. Given the English description of a programming problem and a set of unit tests, the model's goal is to synthesize the correct program that solves the problem and passes the tests. QualityFlow consists of multiple large language model (LLM) agents that resemble a software development team, including code generation, testing, and self-debugging. Existing program synthesis methods face three major limitations: assumption of visible unit test conformity, bottleneck of synthesized test quality, and deviation of self-debugging trajectory. To address them, we propose the LLM Quality Checker, which explicitly "imagines" whether the synthesized programs' execution would conform to the unit tests. The Quality Checks dynamically control the workflow, including actions to submit the final answer, clarify the problem statement, and revert previous workflow steps. As a result, our Quality Checker can precisely accept any correct program, mitigate faulty synthesized tests, and prevent potential workflow deviation. The success of the Quality Checker further enables Diversified Prompting, which encourages variations in LLM responses to maximize the possibility that a correct program appears and passes the quality check. In experiments, QualityFlow establishes the state-of-the-art results on four program synthesis benchmarks: MBPP, HumanEval, and the stricter evaluations of both MBPP and HumanEval from EvalPlus. Our systematic analysis shows that the dynamic workflow controlled by LLM quality checks can outperform static workflows and single-attempt zero-shot synthesis. The Quality Checker is the center of our investigation, and we dissect its individual performance and integrated impact on the workflow accuracy, as well as other ablations experiments to justify our workflow design.
2501.17168
EvoGP: A GPU-accelerated Framework for Tree-based Genetic Programming
cs.NE cs.AI
Tree-based Genetic Programming (TGP) is a key evolutionary algorithm widely used in symbolic regression, feature engineering, and scientific modeling. Its high computational demands make GPU acceleration essential for scalable and high-performance evolutionary computation. However, GPU acceleration of TGP faces three key challenges: inefficient tree encoding, highly heterogeneous genetic operations, and limited parallelism in fitness evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce EvoGP, a comprehensive GPU-accelerated TGP framework. First, we design a tensorized encoding scheme to represent tree with different structures as tensors with the same shape, optimizing memory access and enabling efficient parallel execution. Second, we propose a unified parallel framework for genetic operations by leveraging shared computational primitives and implementing dedicated CUDA kernels for scalable performance. Third, we present a fully parallel fitness evaluation strategy for symbolic regression, exploiting both population-level and data-level parallelism to maximize GPU utilization. Moreover, we implement a comprehensive library to provide rich algorithm operators and benchmark problems. EvoGP is extensively tested on various tasks, including symbolic regression, classification, and robotics control, demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness across diverse application scenarios. Experimental results show that EvoGP achieves up to a 140.89x speedup over the state-of-the-art GPU-based TGP implementation, while maintaining or exceeding the accuracy of baseline methods. EvoGP is open-source and accessible at: https://github.com/EMI-Group/evogp.
2501.17170
Benchmarking Randomized Optimization Algorithms on Binary, Permutation, and Combinatorial Problem Landscapes
cs.NE cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
In this paper, we evaluate the performance of four randomized optimization algorithms: Randomized Hill Climbing (RHC), Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic Algorithms (GA), and MIMIC (Mutual Information Maximizing Input Clustering), across three distinct types of problems: binary, permutation, and combinatorial. We systematically compare these algorithms using a set of benchmark fitness functions that highlight the specific challenges and requirements of each problem category. Our study analyzes each algorithm's effectiveness based on key performance metrics, including solution quality, convergence speed, computational cost, and robustness. Results show that while MIMIC and GA excel in producing high-quality solutions for binary and combinatorial problems, their computational demands vary significantly. RHC and SA, while computationally less expensive, demonstrate limited performance in complex problem landscapes. The findings offer valuable insights into the trade-offs between different optimization strategies and provide practical guidance for selecting the appropriate algorithm based on the type of problems, accuracy requirements, and computational constraints.
2501.17171
Separated Inter/Intra-Modal Fusion Prompts for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG eess.IV
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize subtle differences in meaning or the combination of states and objects through the use of known and unknown concepts during training. Existing methods either focused on prompt configuration or on using prompts to tune the pre-trained Vision-Language model. However, these methods faced challenges in accurately identifying subtle differences in meaning or combining states with objects. To jointly eradicate the above issues and construct an efficient and effective CZSL technique, we suggest a method to improve attribute recognition performance by utilizing diverse Prompt Learning with an Inter/Intra-Modality Fusion Synthesizer in scene understanding involving subtle semantic differences and multiple objects.
2501.17172
Towards spiking analog hardware implementation of a trajectory interpolation mechanism for smooth closed-loop control of a spiking robot arm
cs.NE cs.RO
Neuromorphic engineering aims to incorporate the computational principles found in animal brains, into modern technological systems. Following this approach, in this work we propose a closed-loop neuromorphic control system for an event-based robotic arm. The proposed system consists of a shifted Winner-Take-All spiking network for interpolating a reference trajectory and a spiking comparator network responsible for controlling the flow continuity of the trajectory, which is fed back to the actual position of the robot. The comparator model is based on a differential position comparison neural network, which governs the execution of the next trajectory points to close the control loop between both components of the system. To evaluate the system, we implemented and deployed the model on a mixed-signal analog-digital neuromorphic platform, the DYNAP-SE2, to facilitate integration and communication with the ED-Scorbot robotic arm platform. Experimental results on one joint of the robot validate the use of this architecture and pave the way for future neuro-inspired control of the entire robot.
2501.17173
Model Evaluation of a Transformable CubeSat for Nonholonomic Attitude Reorientation Using a Drop Tower
astro-ph.IM cs.RO
This paper presents a design for a drop tower test to evaluate a numerical model for a structurally reconfigurable spacecraft with actuatable joints, referred to as a transformable spacecraft. A mock-up robot for a 3U-sized transformable spacecraft is designed to fit in a limited time and space of the microgravity environment available in the drop tower. The robot performs agile reorientation, referred to as nonholonomic attitude control, by actuating joints in a particular manner. To adapt to the very short duration of microgravity in the drop tower test, a successive joint actuation maneuver is optimized to maximize the amount of attitude reorientation within the time constraint. The robot records the angular velocity history of all four bodies, and the data is analyzed to evaluate the accuracy of the numerical model. We confirm that the constructed numerical model sufficiently replicates the robot's motion and show that the post-experiment model corrections further improve the accuracy of the numerical simulations. Finally, the difference between this drop tower test and the actual orbit demonstration is discussed to show the prospect.
2501.17174
Extractive Schema Linking for Text-to-SQL
cs.DB cs.AI cs.CL
Text-to-SQL is emerging as a practical interface for real world databases. The dominant paradigm for Text-to-SQL is cross-database or schema-independent, supporting application schemas unseen during training. The schema of a database defines the tables, columns, column types and foreign key connections between tables. Real world schemas can be large, containing hundreds of columns, but for any particular query only a small fraction will be relevant. Placing the entire schema in the prompt for an LLM can be impossible for models with smaller token windows and expensive even when the context window is large enough to allow it. Even apart from computational considerations, the accuracy of the model can be improved by focusing the SQL generation on only the relevant portion of the database. Schema linking identifies the portion of the database schema useful for the question. Previous work on schema linking has used graph neural networks, generative LLMs, and cross encoder classifiers. We introduce a new approach to adapt decoder-only LLMs to schema linking that is both computationally more efficient and more accurate than the generative approach. Additionally our extractive approach permits fine-grained control over the precision-recall trade-off for schema linking.
2501.17175
Document-Level Sentiment Analysis of Urdu Text Using Deep Learning Techniques
cs.CL cs.AI cs.IR
Document level Urdu Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a challenging Natural Language Processing (NLP) task as it deals with large documents in a resource-poor language. In large documents, there are ample amounts of words that exhibit different viewpoints. Deep learning (DL) models comprise of complex neural network architectures that have the ability to learn diverse features of the data to classify various sentiments. Besides audio, image and video classification; DL algorithms are now extensively used in text-based classification problems. To explore the powerful DL techniques for Urdu SA, we have applied five different DL architectures namely, Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Convolutional Neural Network with Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (CNN-BiLSTM), Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT). In this paper, we have proposed a DL hybrid model that integrates BiLSTM with Single Layer Multi Filter Convolutional Neural Network (BiLSTM-SLMFCNN). The proposed and baseline techniques are applied on Urdu Customer Support data set and IMDB Urdu movie review data set by using pretrained Urdu word embeddings that are suitable for (SA) at the document level. Results of these techniques are evaluated and our proposed model outperforms all other DL techniques for Urdu SA. BiLSTM-SLMFCNN outperformed the baseline DL models and achieved 83{\%}, 79{\%}, 83{\%} and 94{\%} accuracy on small, medium and large sized IMDB Urdu movie review data set and Urdu Customer Support data set respectively.
2501.17176
Prompt-Based Cost-Effective Evaluation and Operation of ChatGPT as a Computer Programming Teaching Assistant
cs.CY cs.AI cs.CL
The dream of achieving a student-teacher ratio of 1:1 is closer than ever thanks to the emergence of large language models (LLMs). One potential application of these models in the educational field would be to provide feedback to students in university introductory programming courses, so that a student struggling to solve a basic implementation problem could seek help from an LLM available 24/7. This article focuses on studying three aspects related to such an application. First, the performance of two well-known models, GPT-3.5T and GPT-4T, in providing feedback to students is evaluated. The empirical results showed that GPT-4T performs much better than GPT-3.5T, however, it is not yet ready for use in a real-world scenario. This is due to the possibility of generating incorrect information that potential users may not always be able to detect. Second, the article proposes a carefully designed prompt using in-context learning techniques that allows automating important parts of the evaluation process, as well as providing a lower bound for the fraction of feedbacks containing incorrect information, saving time and effort. This was possible because the resulting feedback has a programmatically analyzable structure that incorporates diagnostic information about the LLM's performance in solving the requested task. Third, the article also suggests a possible strategy for implementing a practical learning tool based on LLMs, which is rooted on the proposed prompting techniques. This strategy opens up a whole range of interesting possibilities from a pedagogical perspective.
2501.17178
Tuning LLM Judge Design Decisions for 1/1000 of the Cost
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) often requires costly human annotations. To address this, LLM-based judges have been proposed, which compare the outputs of two LLMs enabling the ranking of models without human intervention. While several approaches have been proposed, many confounding factors are present between different papers. For instance the model, the prompt and other hyperparameters are typically changed at the same time making apple-to-apple comparisons challenging. In this paper, we propose to systematically analyze and tune hyperparameter of LLM judges. To alleviate the high cost of evaluating a judge, we propose to leverage multi-objective multi-fidelity which allows to find judges that trades accuracy for cost and also reduce significantly the cost of the search. Our method identifies judges that not only outperform existing benchmarks in accuracy and cost-efficiency but also utilize open-weight models, ensuring greater accessibility and reproducibility.
2501.17181
An AI-Driven Live Systematic Reviews in the Brain-Heart Interconnectome: Minimizing Research Waste and Advancing Evidence Synthesis
cs.AI cs.CL cs.DL cs.IR
The Brain-Heart Interconnectome (BHI) combines neurology and cardiology but is hindered by inefficiencies in evidence synthesis, poor adherence to quality standards, and research waste. To address these challenges, we developed an AI-driven system to enhance systematic reviews in the BHI domain. The system integrates automated detection of Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, and Study design (PICOS), semantic search using vector embeddings, graph-based querying, and topic modeling to identify redundancies and underexplored areas. Core components include a Bi-LSTM model achieving 87% accuracy for PICOS compliance, a study design classifier with 95.7% accuracy, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with GPT-3.5, which outperformed GPT-4 for graph-based and topic-driven queries. The system provides real-time updates, reducing research waste through a living database and offering an interactive interface with dashboards and conversational AI. While initially developed for BHI, the system's adaptable architecture enables its application across various biomedical fields, supporting rigorous evidence synthesis, efficient resource allocation, and informed clinical decision-making.
2501.17182
Dialogue Systems for Emotional Support via Value Reinforcement
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY cs.HC
Emotional support dialogue systems aim to reduce help-seekers' distress and help them overcome challenges. While human values$\unicode{x2013}$core beliefs that shape an individual's priorities$\unicode{x2013}$are increasingly emphasized in contemporary psychological therapy for their role in fostering internal transformation and long-term emotional well-being, their integration into emotional support systems remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present a value-driven method for training emotional support dialogue systems designed to reinforce positive values in seekers. Our model learns to identify which values to reinforce at each turn and how to do so, by leveraging online support conversations from Reddit. The model demonstrated superior performance in emotional support capabilities, outperforming various baselines. Notably, it more effectively explored and elicited values from seekers. Expert assessments by therapists highlighted two key strengths of our model: its ability to validate users' challenges and its effectiveness in emphasizing positive aspects of their situations$\unicode{x2013}$both crucial elements of value reinforcement. Our work validates the effectiveness of value reinforcement for emotional support systems and establishes a foundation for future research.
2501.17183
LLM Evaluation Based on Aerospace Manufacturing Expertise: Automated Generation and Multi-Model Question Answering
cs.CL cs.AI
Aerospace manufacturing demands exceptionally high precision in technical parameters. The remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and QWen, in Natural Language Processing has sparked industry interest in their application to tasks including process design, material selection, and tool information retrieval. However, LLMs are prone to generating "hallucinations" in specialized domains, producing inaccurate or false information that poses significant risks to the quality of aerospace products and flight safety. This paper introduces a set of evaluation metrics tailored for LLMs in aerospace manufacturing, aiming to assess their accuracy by analyzing their performance in answering questions grounded in professional knowledge. Firstly, key information is extracted through in-depth textual analysis of classic aerospace manufacturing textbooks and guidelines. Subsequently, utilizing LLM generation techniques, we meticulously construct multiple-choice questions with multiple correct answers of varying difficulty. Following this, different LLM models are employed to answer these questions, and their accuracy is recorded. Experimental results demonstrate that the capabilities of LLMs in aerospace professional knowledge are in urgent need of improvement. This study provides a theoretical foundation and practical guidance for the application of LLMs in aerospace manufacturing, addressing a critical gap in the field.
2501.17184
Deep Learning in Wireless Communication Receiver: A Survey
cs.IT cs.LG cs.NI math.IT
The design of wireless communication receivers to enhance signal processing in complex and dynamic environments is going through a transformation by leveraging deep neural networks (DNNs). Traditional wireless receivers depend on mathematical models and algorithms, which do not have the ability to adapt or learn from data. In contrast, deep learning-based receivers are more suitable for modern wireless communication systems because they can learn from data and adapt accordingly. This survey explores various deep learning architectures such as multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and autoencoders, focusing on their application in the design of wireless receivers. Key modules of a receiver such as synchronization, channel estimation, equalization, space-time decoding, demodulation, decoding, interference cancellation, and modulation classification are discussed in the context of advanced wireless technologies like orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multiple input multiple output (MIMO), semantic communication, task-oriented communication, and next-generation (Next-G) networks. The survey not only emphasizes the potential of deep learning-based receivers in future wireless communication but also investigates different challenges of deep learning-based receivers, such as data availability, security and privacy concerns, model interpretability, computational complexity, and integration with legacy systems.
2501.17186
Complete Chess Games Enable LLM Become A Chess Master
cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Large language models (LLM) have shown remarkable abilities in text generation, question answering, language translation, reasoning and many other tasks. It continues to advance rapidly and is becoming increasingly influential in various fields, from technology and business to education and entertainment. Despite LLM's success in multiple areas, its ability to play abstract games, such as chess, is underexplored. Chess-playing requires the language models to output legal and reasonable moves from textual inputs. Here, we propose the Large language model ChessLLM to play full chess games. We transform the game into a textual format with the best move represented in the Forsyth-Edwards Notation. We show that by simply supervised fine-tuning, our model has achieved a professional-level Elo rating of 1788 in matches against the standard Elo-rated Stockfish when permitted to sample 10 times. We further show that data quality is important. Long-round data supervision enjoys a 350 Elo rating improvement over short-round data.
2501.17187
Visualizing Uncertainty in Translation Tasks: An Evaluation of LLM Performance and Confidence Metrics
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized for machine translation, yet their predictions often exhibit uncertainties that hinder interpretability and user trust. Effectively visualizing these uncertainties can enhance the usability of LLM outputs, particularly in contexts where translation accuracy is critical. This paper addresses two primary objectives: (1) providing users with token-level insights into model confidence and (2) developing a web-based visualization tool to quantify and represent translation uncertainties. To achieve these goals, we utilized the T5 model with the WMT19 dataset for translation tasks and evaluated translation quality using established metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE. We introduced three novel uncertainty quantification (UQ) metrics: (1) the geometric mean of token probabilities, (2) the arithmetic mean of token probabilities, and (3) the arithmetic mean of the kurtosis of token distributions. These metrics provide a simple yet effective framework for evaluating translation performance. Our analysis revealed a linear relationship between the traditional evaluation metrics and our UQ metrics, demonstrating the validity of our approach. Additionally, we developed an interactive web-based visualization that uses a color gradient to represent token confidence. This tool offers users a clear and intuitive understanding of translation quality while providing valuable insights into model performance. Overall, we show that our UQ metrics and visualization are both robust and interpretable, offering practical tools for evaluating and accessing machine translation systems.
2501.17188
Letters, Colors, and Words: Constructing the Ideal Building Blocks Set
cs.AI cs.NE
Define a building blocks set to be a collection of n cubes (each with six sides) where each side is assigned one letter and one color from a palette of m colors. We propose a novel problem of assigning letters and colors to each face so as to maximize the number of words one can spell from a chosen dataset that are either mono words, all letters have the same color, or rainbow words, all letters have unique colors. We explore this problem considering a chosen set of English words, up to six letters long, from a typical vocabulary of a US American 14 year old and explore the problem when n=6 and m=6, with the added restriction that each color appears exactly once on the cube. The problem is intractable, as the size of the solution space makes a brute force approach computationally infeasible. Therefore we aim to solve this problem using random search, simulated annealing, two distinct tree search approaches (greedy and best-first), and a genetic algorithm. To address this, we explore a range of optimization techniques: random search, simulated annealing, two distinct tree search methods (greedy and best-first), and a genetic algorithm. Additionally, we attempted to implement a reinforcement learning approach; however, the model failed to converge to viable solutions within the problem's constraints. Among these methods, the genetic algorithm delivered the best performance, achieving a total of 2846 mono and rainbow words.
2501.17190
A Comprehensive Study on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Medical Question Answering Using Classification Models and Comparative Analysis
cs.CL
This paper presents the overview of the development and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) designed specifically for answering medical questions. We are mainly improving the accuracy and efficiency of providing reliable answers to medical queries. In our approach, we have two stages, prediction of a specific label for the received medical question and then providing a predefined answer for this label. Various models such as RoBERTa and BERT were examined and evaluated based on their ability. The models are trained using the datasets derived from 6,800 samples that were scraped from Healthline. com with additional synthetic data. For evaluation, we conducted a comparative study using 5-fold cross-validation. For accessing performance we used metrics like, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score and also recorded the training time. The performance of the models was evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. The LoRA Roberta-large model achieved an accuracy of 78.47%, precision of 72.91%, recall of 76.95%, and an F1 score of 73.56%. The Roberta-base model demonstrated high performance with an accuracy of 99.87%, precision of 99.81%, recall of 99.86%, and an F1 score of 99.82%. The Bert Uncased model showed strong results with an accuracy of 95.85%, precision of 94.42%, recall of 95.58%, and an F1 score of 94.72%. Lastly, the Bert Large Uncased model achieved the highest performance, with an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 100%. The results obtained have helped indicate the capability of the models in classifying the medical questions and generating accurate answers in the prescription of improved health-related AI solutions.
2501.17191
Aspect-Aware Decomposition for Opinion Summarization
cs.CL cs.IR
Opinion summarization plays a key role in deriving meaningful insights from large-scale online reviews. To make this process more explainable and grounded, we propose a modular approach guided by review aspects which separates the tasks of aspect identification, opinion consolidation, and meta-review synthesis, enabling greater transparency and ease of inspection. We conduct extensive experiments across datasets representing scientific research, business, and product domains. Results show that our method generates more grounded summaries compared to strong baseline models, as verified through automated and human evaluations. Additionally, our modular approach, which incorporates reasoning based on review aspects, produces more informative intermediate outputs than knowledge-agnostic decomposed prompting. These intermediate outputs can also effectively support humans in summarizing opinions from large volumes of reviews.
2501.17194
AI-assisted German Employment Contract Review: A Benchmark Dataset
cs.CL
Employment contracts are used to agree upon the working conditions between employers and employees all over the world. Understanding and reviewing contracts for void or unfair clauses requires extensive knowledge of the legal system and terminology. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) hold promise for assisting in these reviews. However, applying NLP techniques on legal text is particularly difficult due to the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets. To address this issue and as a starting point for our effort in assisting lawyers with contract reviews using NLP, we release an anonymized and annotated benchmark dataset for legality and fairness review of German employment contract clauses, alongside with baseline model evaluations.
2501.17195
Atla Selene Mini: A General Purpose Evaluation Model
cs.CL cs.AI
We introduce Atla Selene Mini, a state-of-the-art small language model-as-a-judge (SLMJ). Selene Mini is a general-purpose evaluator that outperforms the best SLMJs and GPT-4o-mini on overall performance across 11 out-of-distribution benchmarks, spanning absolute scoring, classification, and pairwise preference tasks. It is the highest-scoring 8B generative model on RewardBench, surpassing strong baselines like GPT-4o and specialized judges. To achieve this, we develop a principled data curation strategy that augments public datasets with synthetically generated critiques and ensures high quality through filtering and dataset ablations. We train our model on a combined direct preference optimization (DPO) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) loss, and produce a highly promptable evaluator that excels in real-world scenarios. Selene Mini shows dramatically improved zero-shot agreement with human expert evaluations on financial and medical industry datasets. It is also robust to variations in prompt format. Preliminary results indicate that Selene Mini is the top-ranking evaluator in a live, community-driven Judge Arena. We release the model weights on HuggingFace (https://hf.co/AtlaAI/Selene-1-Mini-Llama-3.1-8B) and Ollama to encourage widespread community adoption.
2501.17200
Improving LLM Leaderboards with Psychometrical Methodology
cs.CL cs.AI stat.AP
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has necessitated the creation of benchmarks to evaluate their performance. These benchmarks resemble human tests and surveys, as they consist of sets of questions designed to measure emergent properties in the cognitive behavior of these systems. However, unlike the well-defined traits and abilities studied in social sciences, the properties measured by these benchmarks are often vaguer and less rigorously defined. The most prominent benchmarks are often grouped into leaderboards for convenience, aggregating performance metrics and enabling comparisons between models. Unfortunately, these leaderboards typically rely on simplistic aggregation methods, such as taking the average score across benchmarks. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of applying contemporary psychometric methodologies - originally developed for human tests and surveys - to improve the ranking of large language models on leaderboards. Using data from the Hugging Face Leaderboard as an example, we compare the results of the conventional naive ranking approach with a psychometrically informed ranking. The findings highlight the benefits of adopting psychometric techniques for more robust and meaningful evaluation of LLM performance.
2501.17201
Smart Cubing for Graph Search: A Comparative Study
cs.AI
Parallel solving via cube-and-conquer is a key method for scaling SAT solvers to hard instances. While cube-and-conquer has proven successful for pure SAT problems, notably the Pythagorean triples conjecture, its application to SAT solvers extended with propagators presents unique challenges, as these propagators learn constraints dynamically during the search. We study this problem using SAT Modulo Symmetries (SMS) as our primary test case, where a symmetry-breaking propagator reduces the search space by learning constraints that eliminate isomorphic graphs. Through extensive experimentation comprising over 10,000 CPU hours, we systematically evaluate different cube-and-conquer variants on three well-studied combinatorial problems. Our methodology combines prerun phases to collect learned constraints, various cubing strategies, and parameter tuning via algorithm configuration and LLM-generated design suggestions. The comprehensive empirical evaluation provides new insights into effective cubing strategies for propagator-based SAT solving, with our best method achieving speedups of 2-3x from improved cubing and parameter tuning, providing an additional 1.5-2x improvement on harder instances.
2501.17202
Audio Large Language Models Can Be Descriptive Speech Quality Evaluators
cs.SD cs.CL eess.AS
An ideal multimodal agent should be aware of the quality of its input modalities. Recent advances have enabled large language models (LLMs) to incorporate auditory systems for handling various speech-related tasks. However, most audio LLMs remain unaware of the quality of the speech they process. This limitation arises because speech quality evaluation is typically excluded from multi-task training due to the lack of suitable datasets. To address this, we introduce the first natural language-based speech evaluation corpus, generated from authentic human ratings. In addition to the overall Mean Opinion Score (MOS), this corpus offers detailed analysis across multiple dimensions and identifies causes of quality degradation. It also enables descriptive comparisons between two speech samples (A/B tests) with human-like judgment. Leveraging this corpus, we propose an alignment approach with LLM distillation (ALLD) to guide the audio LLM in extracting relevant information from raw speech and generating meaningful responses. Experimental results demonstrate that ALLD outperforms the previous state-of-the-art regression model in MOS prediction, with a mean square error of 0.17 and an A/B test accuracy of 98.6%. Additionally, the generated responses achieve BLEU scores of 25.8 and 30.2 on two tasks, surpassing the capabilities of task-specific models. This work advances the comprehensive perception of speech signals by audio LLMs, contributing to the development of real-world auditory and sensory intelligent agents.
2501.17205
Near-Optimal Algorithms for Omniprediction
stat.ML cs.DS cs.LG
Omnipredictors are simple prediction functions that encode loss-minimizing predictions with respect to a hypothesis class $\mathcal{H}$, simultaneously for every loss function within a class of losses $\mathcal{L}$. In this work, we give near-optimal learning algorithms for omniprediction, in both the online and offline settings. To begin, we give an oracle-efficient online learning algorithm that acheives $(\mathcal{L},\mathcal{H})$-omniprediction with $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T \log |\mathcal{H}|})$ regret for any class of Lipschitz loss functions $\mathcal{L} \subseteq \mathcal{L}_\mathrm{Lip}$. Quite surprisingly, this regret bound matches the optimal regret for \emph{minimization of a single loss function} (up to a $\sqrt{\log(T)}$ factor). Given this online algorithm, we develop an online-to-offline conversion that achieves near-optimal complexity across a number of measures. In particular, for all bounded loss functions within the class of Bounded Variation losses $\mathcal{L}_\mathrm{BV}$ (which include all convex, all Lipschitz, and all proper losses) and any (possibly-infinite) $\mathcal{H}$, we obtain an offline learning algorithm that, leveraging an (offline) ERM oracle and $m$ samples from $\mathcal{D}$, returns an efficient $(\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{BV}},\mathcal{H},\varepsilon(m))$-omnipredictor for $\varepsilon(m)$ scaling near-linearly in the Rademacher complexity of $\mathrm{Th} \circ \mathcal{H}$.
2501.17206
Integrating Reinforcement Learning and AI Agents for Adaptive Robotic Interaction and Assistance in Dementia Care
cs.AI cs.RO
This study explores a novel approach to advancing dementia care by integrating socially assistive robotics, reinforcement learning (RL), large language models (LLMs), and clinical domain expertise within a simulated environment. This integration addresses the critical challenge of limited experimental data in socially assistive robotics for dementia care, providing a dynamic simulation environment that realistically models interactions between persons living with dementia (PLWDs) and robotic caregivers. The proposed framework introduces a probabilistic model to represent the cognitive and emotional states of PLWDs, combined with an LLM-based behavior simulation to emulate their responses. We further develop and train an adaptive RL system enabling humanoid robots, such as Pepper, to deliver context-aware and personalized interactions and assistance based on PLWDs' cognitive and emotional states. The framework also generalizes to computer-based agents, highlighting its versatility. Results demonstrate that the RL system, enhanced by LLMs, effectively interprets and responds to the complex needs of PLWDs, providing tailored caregiving strategies. This research contributes to human-computer and human-robot interaction by offering a customizable AI-driven caregiving platform, advancing understanding of dementia-related challenges, and fostering collaborative innovation in assistive technologies. The proposed approach has the potential to enhance the independence and quality of life for PLWDs while alleviating caregiver burden, underscoring the transformative role of interaction-focused AI systems in dementia care.
2501.17207
Rethinking Functional Brain Connectome Analysis: Do Graph Deep Learning Models Help?
cs.NE cs.AI cs.LG q-bio.NC
Functional brain connectome is crucial for deciphering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive functions and neurological disorders. Graph deep learning models have recently gained tremendous popularity in this field. However, their actual effectiveness in modeling the brain connectome remains unclear. In this study, we re-examine graph deep learning models based on four large-scale neuroimaging studies encompassing diverse cognitive and clinical outcomes. Surprisingly, we find that the message aggregation mechanism, a hallmark of graph deep learning models, does not help with predictive performance as typically assumed, but rather consistently degrades it. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid model combining a linear model with a graph attention network through dual pathways, achieving robust predictions and enhanced interpretability by revealing both localized and global neural connectivity patterns. Our findings urge caution in adopting complex deep learning models for functional brain connectome analysis, emphasizing the need for rigorous experimental designs to establish tangible performance gains and perhaps more importantly, to pursue improvements in model interpretability.
2501.17211
MR imaging in the low-field: Leveraging the power of machine learning
eess.IV cs.LG
Recent innovations in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) hardware and software have reignited interest in low-field ($<1\,\mathrm{T}$) and ultra-low-field MRI ($<0.1\,\mathrm{T}$). These technologies offer advantages such as lower power consumption, reduced specific absorption rate, reduced field-inhomogeneities, and cost-effectiveness, presenting a promising alternative for resource-limited and point-of-care settings. However, low-field MRI faces inherent challenges like reduced signal-to-noise ratio and therefore, potentially lower spatial resolution or longer scan times. This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities of low-field and ultra-low-field MRI, with a focus on the role of machine learning (ML) in overcoming these limitations. We provide an overview of deep neural networks and their application in enhancing low-field and ultra-low-field MRI performance. Specific ML-based solutions, including advanced image reconstruction, denoising, and super-resolution algorithms, are discussed. The chapter concludes by exploring how integrating ML with low-field MRI could expand its clinical applications and improve accessibility, potentially revolutionizing its use in diverse healthcare settings.
2501.17216
Amplifier: Bringing Attention to Neglected Low-Energy Components in Time Series Forecasting
cs.LG
We propose an energy amplification technique to address the issue that existing models easily overlook low-energy components in time series forecasting. This technique comprises an energy amplification block and an energy restoration block. The energy amplification block enhances the energy of low-energy components to improve the model's learning efficiency for these components, while the energy restoration block returns the energy to its original level. Moreover, considering that the energy-amplified data typically displays two distinct energy peaks in the frequency spectrum, we integrate the energy amplification technique with a seasonal-trend forecaster to model the temporal relationships of these two peaks independently, serving as the backbone for our proposed model, Amplifier. Additionally, we propose a semi-channel interaction temporal relationship enhancement block for Amplifier, which enhances the model's ability to capture temporal relationships from the perspective of the commonality and specificity of each channel in the data. Extensive experiments on eight time series forecasting benchmarks consistently demonstrate our model's superiority in both effectiveness and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods.
2501.17256
Increasing Information for Model Predictive Control with Semi-Markov Decision Processes
cs.LG
Recent works in Learning-Based Model Predictive Control of dynamical systems show impressive sample complexity performances using criteria from Information Theory to accelerate the learning procedure. However, the sequential exploration opportunities are limited by the system local state, restraining the amount of information of the observations from the current exploration trajectory. This article resolves this limitation by introducing temporal abstraction through the framework of Semi-Markov Decision Processes. The framework increases the total information of the gathered data for a fixed sampling budget, thus reducing the sample complexity.
2501.17260
ViT-2SPN: Vision Transformer-based Dual-Stream Self-Supervised Pretraining Networks for Retinal OCT Classification
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging modality essential for diagnosing various eye diseases. Despite its clinical significance, developing OCT-based diagnostic tools faces challenges, such as limited public datasets, sparse annotations, and privacy concerns. Although deep learning has made progress in automating OCT analysis, these challenges remain unresolved. To address these limitations, we introduce the Vision Transformer-based Dual-Stream Self-Supervised Pretraining Network (ViT-2SPN), a novel framework designed to enhance feature extraction and improve diagnostic accuracy. ViT-2SPN employs a three-stage workflow: Supervised Pretraining, Self-Supervised Pretraining (SSP), and Supervised Fine-Tuning. The pretraining phase leverages the OCTMNIST dataset (97,477 unlabeled images across four disease classes) with data augmentation to create dual-augmented views. A Vision Transformer (ViT-Base) backbone extracts features, while a negative cosine similarity loss aligns feature representations. Pretraining is conducted over 50 epochs with a learning rate of 0.0001 and momentum of 0.999. Fine-tuning is performed on a stratified 5.129% subset of OCTMNIST using 10-fold cross-validation. ViT-2SPN achieves a mean AUC of 0.93, accuracy of 0.77, precision of 0.81, recall of 0.75, and an F1 score of 0.76, outperforming existing SSP-based methods.
2501.17261
NUS-Emo at SemEval-2024 Task 3: Instruction-Tuning LLM for Multimodal Emotion-Cause Analysis in Conversations
cs.CL
This paper describes the architecture of our system developed for Task 3 of SemEval-2024: Multimodal Emotion-Cause Analysis in Conversations. Our project targets the challenges of subtask 2, dedicated to Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction with Emotion Category (MECPE-Cat), and constructs a dual-component system tailored to the unique challenges of this task. We divide the task into two subtasks: emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) and emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE). To address these subtasks, we capitalize on the abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), which have consistently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across various natural language processing tasks and domains. Most importantly, we design an approach of emotion-cause-aware instruction-tuning for LLMs, to enhance the perception of the emotions with their corresponding causal rationales. Our method enables us to adeptly navigate the complexities of MECPE-Cat, achieving a weighted average 34.71% F1 score of the task, and securing the 2nd rank on the leaderboard. The code and metadata to reproduce our experiments are all made publicly available.
2501.17265
Giving the Old a Fresh Spin: Quality Estimation-Assisted Constrained Decoding for Automatic Post-Editing
cs.CL
Automatic Post-Editing (APE) systems often struggle with over-correction, where unnecessary modifications are made to a translation, diverging from the principle of minimal editing. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to mitigate over-correction by incorporating word-level Quality Estimation (QE) information during the decoding process. This method is architecture-agnostic, making it adaptable to any APE system, regardless of the underlying model or training approach. Our experiments on English-German, English-Hindi, and English-Marathi language pairs show the proposed approach yields significant improvements over their corresponding baseline APE systems, with TER gains of $0.65$, $1.86$, and $1.44$ points, respectively. These results underscore the complementary relationship between QE and APE tasks and highlight the effectiveness of integrating QE information to reduce over-correction in APE systems.
2501.17266
Advancing the Biological Plausibility and Efficacy of Hebbian Convolutional Neural Networks
cs.NE cs.CV
The research presented in this paper advances the integration of Hebbian learning into Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for image processing, systematically exploring different architectures to build an optimal configuration, adhering to biological tenability. Hebbian learning operates on local unsupervised neural information to form feature representations, providing an alternative to the popular but arguably biologically implausible and computationally intensive backpropagation learning algorithm. The suggested optimal architecture significantly enhances recent research aimed at integrating Hebbian learning with competition mechanisms and CNNs, expanding their representational capabilities by incorporating hard Winner-Takes-All (WTA) competition, Gaussian lateral inhibition mechanisms and Bienenstock-Cooper-Munro (BCM) learning rule in a single model. The resulting model achieved 76% classification accuracy on CIFAR-10, rivalling its end-to-end backpropagation variant (77%) and critically surpassing the state-of-the-art hard-WTA performance in CNNs of the same network depth (64.6%) by 11.4%. Moreover, results showed clear indications of sparse hierarchical learning through increasingly complex and abstract receptive fields. In summary, our implementation enhances both the performance and the generalisability of the learnt representations and constitutes a crucial step towards more biologically realistic artificial neural networks.
2501.17269
A 1-D CNN inference engine for constrained platforms
cs.LG
1D-CNNs are used for time series classification in various domains with a high degree of accuracy. Most implementations collect the incoming data samples in a buffer before performing inference on it. On edge devices, which are typically constrained and single-threaded, such an implementation may interfere with time-critical tasks. One such task is that of sample acquisition. In this work, we propose an inference scheme that interleaves the convolution operations between sample intervals, which allows us to reduce the inference latency. Furthermore, our scheme is well-suited for storing data in ring buffers, yielding a small memory footprint. We demonstrate these improvements by comparing our approach to TFLite's inference method, giving a 10% reduction in the inference delay while almost halving the memory usage. Our approach is feasible on common consumer devices, which we show using an AVR-based Arduino board and an ARM-based Arduino board.
2501.17270
Comprehensive Evaluation for a Large Scale Knowledge Graph Question Answering Service
cs.CL cs.DB
Question answering systems for knowledge graph (KGQA), answer factoid questions based on the data in the knowledge graph. KGQA systems are complex because the system has to understand the relations and entities in the knowledge-seeking natural language queries and map them to structured queries against the KG to answer them. In this paper, we introduce Chronos, a comprehensive evaluation framework for KGQA at industry scale. It is designed to evaluate such a multi-component system comprehensively, focusing on (1) end-to-end and component-level metrics, (2) scalable to diverse datasets and (3) a scalable approach to measure the performance of the system prior to release. In this paper, we discuss the unique challenges associated with evaluating KGQA systems at industry scale, review the design of Chronos, and how it addresses these challenges. We will demonstrate how it provides a base for data-driven decisions and discuss the challenges of using it to measure and improve a real-world KGQA system.
2501.17273
Tailored Truths: Optimizing LLM Persuasion with Personalization and Fabricated Statistics
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly persuasive, demonstrating the ability to personalize arguments in conversation with humans by leveraging their personal data. This may have serious impacts on the scale and effectiveness of disinformation campaigns. We studied the persuasiveness of LLMs in a debate setting by having humans $(n=33)$ engage with LLM-generated arguments intended to change the human's opinion. We quantified the LLM's effect by measuring human agreement with the debate's hypothesis pre- and post-debate and analyzing both the magnitude of opinion change, as well as the likelihood of an update in the LLM's direction. We compare persuasiveness across established persuasion strategies, including personalized arguments informed by user demographics and personality, appeal to fabricated statistics, and a mixed strategy utilizing both personalized arguments and fabricated statistics. We found that static arguments generated by humans and GPT-4o-mini have comparable persuasive power. However, the LLM outperformed static human-written arguments when leveraging the mixed strategy in an interactive debate setting. This approach had a $\mathbf{51\%}$ chance of persuading participants to modify their initial position, compared to $\mathbf{32\%}$ for the static human-written arguments. Our results highlight the concerning potential for LLMs to enable inexpensive and persuasive large-scale disinformation campaigns.
2501.17275
Dual-Lagrange Encoding for Storage and Download in Elastic Computing for Resilience
cs.IT cs.DC math.IT
Coded elastic computing enables virtual machines to be preempted for high-priority tasks while allowing new virtual machines to join ongoing computation seamlessly. This paper addresses coded elastic computing for matrix-matrix multiplications with straggler tolerance by encoding both storage and download using Lagrange codes. In 2018, Yang et al. introduced the first coded elastic computing scheme for matrix-matrix multiplications, achieving a lower computational load requirement. However, this scheme lacks straggler tolerance and suffers from high upload cost. Zhong et al. (2023) later tackled these shortcomings by employing uncoded storage and Lagrange-coded download. However, their approach requires each machine to store the entire dataset. This paper introduces a new class of elastic computing schemes that utilize Lagrange codes to encode both storage and download, achieving a reduced storage size. The proposed schemes efficiently mitigate both elasticity and straggler effects, with a storage size reduced to a fraction $\frac{1}{L}$ of Zhong et al.'s approach, at the expense of doubling the download cost. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed schemes on AWS EC2 by measuring computation time under two different tasks allocations: heterogeneous and cyclic assignments. Both assignments minimize computation redundancy of the system while distributing varying computation loads across machines.
2501.17281
Stiff Transfer Learning for Physics-Informed Neural Networks
cs.LG math.AP
Stiff differential equations are prevalent in various scientific domains, posing significant challenges due to the disparate time scales of their components. As computational power grows, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have led to significant improvements in modeling physical processes described by differential equations. Despite their promising outcomes, vanilla PINNs face limitations when dealing with stiff systems, known as failure modes. In response, we propose a novel approach, stiff transfer learning for physics-informed neural networks (STL-PINNs), to effectively tackle stiff ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and partial differential equations (PDEs). Our methodology involves training a Multi-Head-PINN in a low-stiff regime, and obtaining the final solution in a high stiff regime by transfer learning. This addresses the failure modes related to stiffness in PINNs while maintaining computational efficiency by computing "one-shot" solutions. The proposed approach demonstrates superior accuracy and speed compared to PINNs-based methods, as well as comparable computational efficiency with implicit numerical methods in solving stiff-parameterized linear and polynomial nonlinear ODEs and PDEs under stiff conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the scalability of such an approach and the superior speed it offers for simulations involving initial conditions and forcing function reparametrization.
2501.17282
From Natural Language to Extensive-Form Game Representations
cs.AI cs.CL cs.GT cs.MA
We introduce a framework for translating game descriptions in natural language into extensive-form representations in game theory, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and in-context learning. Given the varying levels of strategic complexity in games, such as perfect versus imperfect information, directly applying in-context learning would be insufficient. To address this, we introduce a two-stage framework with specialized modules to enhance in-context learning, enabling it to divide and conquer the problem effectively. In the first stage, we tackle the challenge of imperfect information by developing a module that identifies information sets along and the corresponding partial tree structure. With this information, the second stage leverages in-context learning alongside a self-debugging module to produce a complete extensive-form game tree represented using pygambit, the Python API of a recognized game-theoretic analysis tool called Gambit. Using this python representation enables the automation of tasks such as computing Nash equilibria directly from natural language descriptions. We evaluate the performance of the full framework, as well as its individual components, using various LLMs on games with different levels of strategic complexity. Our experimental results show that the framework significantly outperforms baseline models in generating accurate extensive-form games, with each module playing a critical role in its success.
2501.17284
Nonlinear dynamics of localization in neural receptive fields
cs.LG
Localized receptive fields -- neurons that are selective for certain contiguous spatiotemporal features of their input -- populate early sensory regions of the mammalian brain. Unsupervised learning algorithms that optimize explicit sparsity or independence criteria replicate features of these localized receptive fields, but fail to explain directly how localization arises through learning without efficient coding, as occurs in early layers of deep neural networks and might occur in early sensory regions of biological systems. We consider an alternative model in which localized receptive fields emerge without explicit top-down efficiency constraints -- a feedforward neural network trained on a data model inspired by the structure of natural images. Previous work identified the importance of non-Gaussian statistics to localization in this setting but left open questions about the mechanisms driving dynamical emergence. We address these questions by deriving the effective learning dynamics for a single nonlinear neuron, making precise how higher-order statistical properties of the input data drive emergent localization, and we demonstrate that the predictions of these effective dynamics extend to the many-neuron setting. Our analysis provides an alternative explanation for the ubiquity of localization as resulting from the nonlinear dynamics of learning in neural circuits.
2501.17286
Fine-Tuning Open-Source Large Language Models to Improve Their Performance on Radiation Oncology Tasks: A Feasibility Study to Investigate Their Potential Clinical Applications in Radiation Oncology
physics.med-ph cs.AI cs.CL
Background: The radiation oncology clinical practice involves many steps relying on the dynamic interplay of abundant text data. Large language models have displayed remarkable capabilities in processing complex text information. But their direct applications in specific fields like radiation oncology remain underexplored. Purpose: This study aims to investigate whether fine-tuning LLMs with domain knowledge can improve the performance on Task (1) treatment regimen generation, Task (2) treatment modality selection (photon, proton, electron, or brachytherapy), and Task (3) ICD-10 code prediction in radiation oncology. Methods: Data for 15,724 patient cases were extracted. Cases where patients had a single diagnostic record, and a clearly identifiable primary treatment plan were selected for preprocessing and manual annotation to have 7,903 cases of the patient diagnosis, treatment plan, treatment modality, and ICD-10 code. Each case was used to construct a pair consisting of patient diagnostics details and an answer (treatment regimen, treatment modality, or ICD-10 code respectively) for the supervised fine-tuning of these three tasks. Open source LLaMA2-7B and Mistral-7B models were utilized for the fine-tuning with the Low-Rank Approximations method. Accuracy and ROUGE-1 score were reported for the fine-tuned models and original models. Clinical evaluation was performed on Task (1) by radiation oncologists, while precision, recall, and F-1 score were evaluated for Task (2) and (3). One-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used to statistically analyze the results. Results: Fine-tuned LLMs outperformed original LLMs across all tasks with p-value <= 0.001. Clinical evaluation demonstrated that over 60% of the fine-tuned LLMs-generated treatment regimens were clinically acceptable. Precision, recall, and F1-score showed improved performance of fine-tuned LLMs.
2501.17289
A Contrastive Teacher-Student Framework for Novelty Detection under Style Shifts
cs.CV
There have been several efforts to improve Novelty Detection (ND) performance. However, ND methods often suffer significant performance drops under minor distribution shifts caused by changes in the environment, known as style shifts. This challenge arises from the ND setup, where the absence of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples during training causes the detector to be biased toward the dominant style features in the in-distribution (ID) data. As a result, the model mistakenly learns to correlate style with core features, using this shortcut for detection. Robust ND is crucial for real-world applications like autonomous driving and medical imaging, where test samples may have different styles than the training data. Motivated by this, we propose a robust ND method that crafts an auxiliary OOD set with style features similar to the ID set but with different core features. Then, a task-based knowledge distillation strategy is utilized to distinguish core features from style features and help our model rely on core features for discriminating crafted OOD and ID sets. We verified the effectiveness of our method through extensive experimental evaluations on several datasets, including synthetic and real-world benchmarks, against nine different ND methods.
2501.17295
Mitigating Hallucinated Translations in Large Language Models with Hallucination-focused Preference Optimization
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Machine Translation (MT) is undergoing a paradigm shift, with systems based on fine-tuned large language models (LLM) becoming increasingly competitive with traditional encoder-decoder models trained specifically for translation tasks. However, LLM-based systems are at a higher risk of generating hallucinations, which can severely undermine user's trust and safety. Most prior research on hallucination mitigation focuses on traditional MT models, with solutions that involve post-hoc mitigation - detecting hallucinated translations and re-translating them. While effective, this approach introduces additional complexity in deploying extra tools in production and also increases latency. To address these limitations, we propose a method that intrinsically learns to mitigate hallucinations during the model training phase. Specifically, we introduce a data creation framework to generate hallucination focused preference datasets. Fine-tuning LLMs on these preference datasets reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 96% across five language pairs, while preserving overall translation quality. In a zero-shot setting our approach reduces hallucinations by 89% on an average across three unseen target languages.
2501.17296
Multi-Physics Simulations via Coupled Fourier Neural Operator
cs.LG cs.AI
Physical simulations are essential tools across critical fields such as mechanical and aerospace engineering, chemistry, meteorology, etc. While neural operators, particularly the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), have shown promise in predicting simulation results with impressive performance and efficiency, they face limitations when handling real-world scenarios involving coupled multi-physics outputs. Current neural operator methods either overlook the correlations between multiple physical processes or employ simplistic architectures that inadequately capture these relationships. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel coupled multi-physics neural operator learning (COMPOL) framework that extends the capabilities of Fourier operator layers to model interactions among multiple physical processes. Our approach implements feature aggregation through recurrent and attention mechanisms, enabling comprehensive modeling of coupled interactions. Our method's core is an innovative system for aggregating latent features from multi-physics processes. These aggregated features serve as enriched information sources for neural operator layers, allowing our framework to capture complex physical relationships accurately. We evaluated our coupled multi-physics neural operator across diverse physical simulation tasks, including biological systems, fluid mechanics, and multiphase flow in porous media. Our proposed model demonstrates a two to three-fold improvement in predictive performance compared to existing approaches.
2501.17299
"Ownership, Not Just Happy Talk": Co-Designing a Participatory Large Language Model for Journalism
cs.HC cs.CL cs.CY
Journalism has emerged as an essential domain for understanding the uses, limitations, and impacts of large language models (LLMs) in the workplace. News organizations face divergent financial incentives: LLMs already permeate newswork processes within financially constrained organizations, even as ongoing legal challenges assert that AI companies violate their copyright. At stake are key questions about what LLMs are created to do, and by whom: How might a journalist-led LLM work, and what can participatory design illuminate about the present-day challenges about adapting ``one-size-fits-all'' foundation models to a given context of use? In this paper, we undertake a co-design exploration to understand how a participatory approach to LLMs might address opportunities and challenges around AI in journalism. Our 20 interviews with reporters, data journalists, editors, labor organizers, product leads, and executives highlight macro, meso, and micro tensions that designing for this opportunity space must address. From these desiderata, we describe the result of our co-design work: organizational structures and functionality for a journalist-controlled LLM. In closing, we discuss the limitations of commercial foundation models for workplace use, and the methodological implications of applying participatory methods to LLM co-design.
2501.17300
Dilemmas and trade-offs in the diffusion of conventions
physics.soc-ph cs.SI stat.AP
Outside ideal settings, conventions are shaped by heterogeneous competing processes that can challenge the emergence of universal norms. This paper identifies three trade-offs challenging the diffusion of conventions and explores each of them empirically using observational behavioral data. The first trade-off (I) concerns the imperatives of social, sequential, and contextual consistency that individuals must balance when choosing between competing conventions. The second trade-off (II) involves the balance between local and global coordination, depending on whether individuals coordinate their behavior via interactions throughout a social network or external factors transcending the network. The third trade-off (III) is the balance between decision optimality (e.g., collective satisfaction) and decision costs when collectives with conflicting preferences choose one convention. We develop a utilitarian account of conventions which we translate into a broadly applicable statistical physics framework for measuring each of these trade-offs. We then apply this framework to a sign convention in physics using textual and network data. Our analysis suggests that the purpose of conventions may exceed coordination, and that multiple infrastructures (including prior cultural traits and social networks) concurrently shape individual preferences towards conventions. Additionally, we confirm the role of seniority in resolving conflicting preferences in collaborations, resulting in suboptimal outcomes.
2501.17303
Measurement-Based Modeling and Analysis of UAV Air-Ground Channels at 1 and 4 GHz
eess.SP cs.IT math.IT physics.ins-det
In the design of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wireless communications, a better understanding of propagation characteristics and an accurate channel model are required. Measurements and comprehensive analysis for the UAV-based air-ground (AG) propagation channel in the vertical dimension are presented in this letter. Based on the measurement data at 1 and 4 GHz, the large-scale and small-scale channel parameters are extracted in the line-of-sight (LOS) and nonLOS case, respectively. The altitude-dependent path loss model is proposed herein. Furthermore, shadow fading and fast fading are statistically analyzed for comprehensively describing the fading behavior. Our results will be useful in the modeling of AG channels and the performance analysis for UAV-enabled wireless communication systems.
2501.17304
Summary of the NOTSOFAR-1 Challenge: Highlights and Learnings
cs.SD cs.LG eess.AS
The first Natural Office Talkers in Settings of Far-field Audio Recordings (NOTSOFAR-1) Challenge is a pivotal initiative that sets new benchmarks by offering datasets more representative of the needs of real-world business applications than those previously available. The challenge provides a unique combination of 280 recorded meetings across 30 diverse environments, capturing real-world acoustic conditions and conversational dynamics, and a 1000-hour simulated training dataset, synthesized with enhanced authenticity for real-world generalization, incorporating 15,000 real acoustic transfer functions. In this paper, we provide an overview of the systems submitted to the challenge and analyze the top-performing approaches, hypothesizing the factors behind their success. Additionally, we highlight promising directions left unexplored by participants. By presenting key findings and actionable insights, this work aims to drive further innovation and progress in DASR research and applications.
2501.17310
Probing LLM World Models: Enhancing Guesstimation with Wisdom of Crowds Decoding
cs.AI cs.HC
Guesstimation, the task of making approximate quantity estimates, is a common real-world challenge. However, it has been largely overlooked in large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) research. We introduce a novel guesstimation dataset, MARBLES. This dataset requires one to estimate how many items (e.g., marbles) can fit into containers (e.g., a one-cup measuring cup), both with and without accompanying images. Inspired by the social science concept of the ``Wisdom of Crowds'' (WOC) - taking the median from estimates from a crowd), which has proven effective in guesstimation, we propose ``WOC decoding'' strategy for LLM guesstimation. We show that LLMs/VLMs perform well on guesstimation, suggesting that they possess some level of a "world model" necessary for guesstimation. Moreover, similar to human performance, the WOC decoding method improves LLM/VLM guesstimation accuracy. Furthermore, the inclusion of images in the multimodal condition enhances model performance. These results highlight the value of WOC decoding strategy for LLMs/VLMs and position guesstimation as a probe for evaluating LLMs/VLMs' world model. As LLMs' world model is a fundamental prerequisite for many real-world tasks, e.g., human-AI teaming, our findings have broad implications for the AI community.
2501.17311
RLPP: A Residual Method for Zero-Shot Real-World Autonomous Racing on Scaled Platforms
cs.RO cs.LG
Autonomous racing presents a complex environment requiring robust controllers capable of making rapid decisions under dynamic conditions. While traditional controllers based on tire models are reliable, they often demand extensive tuning or system identification. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods offer significant potential due to their ability to learn directly from interaction, yet they typically suffer from the sim-to-real gap, where policies trained in simulation fail to perform effectively in the real world. In this paper, we propose RLPP, a residual RL framework that enhances a Pure Pursuit (PP) controller with an RL-based residual. This hybrid approach leverages the reliability and interpretability of PP while using RL to fine-tune the controller's performance in real-world scenarios. Extensive testing on the F1TENTH platform demonstrates that RLPP improves lap times of the baseline controllers by up to 6.37 %, closing the gap to the State-of-the-Art methods by more than 52 % and providing reliable performance in zero-shot real-world deployment, overcoming key challenges associated with the sim-to-real transfer and reducing the performance gap from simulation to reality by more than 8-fold when compared to the baseline RL controller. The RLPP framework is made available as an open-source tool, encouraging further exploration and advancement in autonomous racing research. The code is available at: www.github.com/forzaeth/rlpp.
2501.17313
Surena-V: A Humanoid Robot for Human-Robot Collaboration with Optimization-based Control Architecture
cs.RO
This paper presents Surena-V, a humanoid robot designed to enhance human-robot collaboration capabilities. The robot features a range of sensors, including barometric tactile sensors in its hands, to facilitate precise environmental interaction. This is demonstrated through an experiment showcasing the robot's ability to control a medical needle's movement through soft material. Surena-V's operational framework emphasizes stability and collaboration, employing various optimization-based control strategies such as Zero Moment Point (ZMP) modification through upper body movement and stepping. Notably, the robot's interaction with the environment is improved by detecting and interpreting external forces at their point of effect, allowing for more agile responses compared to methods that control overall balance based on external forces. The efficacy of this architecture is substantiated through an experiment illustrating the robot's collaboration with a human in moving a bar. This work contributes to the field of humanoid robotics by presenting a comprehensive system design and control architecture focused on human-robot collaboration and environmental adaptability.
2501.17315
A sketch of an AI control safety case
cs.AI cs.CR cs.SE
As LLM agents gain a greater capacity to cause harm, AI developers might increasingly rely on control measures such as monitoring to justify that they are safe. We sketch how developers could construct a "control safety case", which is a structured argument that models are incapable of subverting control measures in order to cause unacceptable outcomes. As a case study, we sketch an argument that a hypothetical LLM agent deployed internally at an AI company won't exfiltrate sensitive information. The sketch relies on evidence from a "control evaluation,"' where a red team deliberately designs models to exfiltrate data in a proxy for the deployment environment. The safety case then hinges on several claims: (1) the red team adequately elicits model capabilities to exfiltrate data, (2) control measures remain at least as effective in deployment, and (3) developers conservatively extrapolate model performance to predict the probability of data exfiltration in deployment. This safety case sketch is a step toward more concrete arguments that can be used to show that a dangerously capable LLM agent is safe to deploy.
2501.17318
Floodgates up to contain the DeePC and limit extrapolation
eess.SY cs.SY
Behavioral data-enabled control approaches typically assume data-generating systems of linear dynamics. This may result in false generalization if the newly designed closed-loop system results in input-output distributional shifts beyond learning data. These shifts may compromise safety by activating harmful nonlinearities in the data-generating system not experienced previously in the data and/or not captured by the linearity assumption inherent in these approaches. This paper proposes an approach to slow down the distributional shifts and therefore enhance the safety of the data-enabled methods. This is achieved by introducing quadratic regularization terms to the data-enabled predictive control formulations. Slowing down the distributional shifts comes at the expense of slowing down the exploration, in a trade-off resembling the exploration vs exploitation balance in machine learning.
2501.17319
MDDM: A Molecular Dynamics Diffusion Model to Predict Particle Self-Assembly
cs.LG physics.comp-ph
The discovery and study of new material systems relies on molecular simulations that often come with significant computational expense. We propose MDDM, a Molecular Dynamics Diffusion Model, which is capable of predicting a valid output conformation for a given input pair potential function. After training MDDM on a large dataset of molecular dynamics self-assembly results, the proposed model can convert uniform noise into a meaningful output particle structure corresponding to an arbitrary input potential. The model's architecture has domain-specific properties built-in, such as satisfying periodic boundaries and being invariant to translation. The model significantly outperforms the baseline point-cloud diffusion model for both unconditional and conditional generation tasks.
2501.17322
Influence of field of view in visual prostheses design: Analysis with a VR system
cs.HC cs.CV
Visual prostheses are designed to restore partial functional vision in patients with total vision loss. Retinal visual prostheses provide limited capabilities as a result of low resolution, limited field of view and poor dynamic range. Understanding the influence of these parameters in the perception results can guide prostheses research and design. In this work, we evaluate the influence of field of view with respect to spatial resolution in visual prostheses, measuring the accuracy and response time in a search and recognition task. Twenty-four normally sighted participants were asked to find and recognize usual objects, such as furniture and home appliance in indoor room scenes. For the experiment, we use a new simulated prosthetic vision system that allows simple and effective experimentation. Our system uses a virtual-reality environment based on panoramic scenes. The simulator employs a head-mounted display which allows users to feel immersed in the scene by perceiving the entire scene all around. Our experiments use public image datasets and a commercial head-mounted display. We have also released the virtual-reality software for replicating and extending the experimentation. Results show that the accuracy and response time decrease when the field of view is increased. Furthermore, performance appears to be correlated with the angular resolution, but showing a diminishing return even with a resolution of less than 2.3 phosphenes per degree. Our results seem to indicate that, for the design of retinal prostheses, it is better to concentrate the phosphenes in a small area, to maximize the angular resolution, even if that implies sacrificing field of view.
2501.17323
Exploring Non-Convex Discrete Energy Landscapes: A Langevin-Like Sampler with Replica Exchange
cs.LG stat.ML
Gradient-based Discrete Samplers (GDSs) are effective for sampling discrete energy landscapes. However, they often stagnate in complex, non-convex settings. To improve exploration, we introduce the Discrete Replica EXchangE Langevin (DREXEL) sampler and its variant with Adjusted Metropolis (DREAM). These samplers use two GDSs at different temperatures and step sizes: one focuses on local exploitation, while the other explores broader energy landscapes. When energy differences are significant, sample swaps occur, which are determined by a mechanism tailored for discrete sampling to ensure detailed balance. Theoretically, we prove both DREXEL and DREAM converge asymptotically to the target energy and exhibit faster mixing than a single GDS. Experiments further confirm their efficiency in exploring non-convex discrete energy landscapes.
2501.17324
CardiCat: a Variational Autoencoder for High-Cardinality Tabular Data
cs.LG stat.ML
High-cardinality categorical features are a common characteristic of mixed-type tabular datasets. Existing generative model architectures struggle to learn the complexities of such data at scale, primarily due to the difficulty of parameterizing the categorical features. In this paper, we present a general variational autoencoder model, CardiCat, that can accurately fit imbalanced high-cardinality and heterogeneous tabular data. Our method substitutes one-hot encoding with regularized dual encoder-decoder embedding layers, which are jointly learned. This approach enables us to use embeddings that depend also on the other covariates, leading to a compact and homogenized parameterization of categorical features. Our model employs a considerably smaller trainable parameter space than competing methods, enabling learning at a large scale. CardiCat generates high-quality synthetic data that better represent high-cardinality and imbalanced features compared to competing VAE models for multiple real and simulated datasets.
2501.17325
Connecting Federated ADMM to Bayes
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
We provide new connections between two distinct federated learning approaches based on (i) ADMM and (ii) Variational Bayes (VB), and propose new variants by combining their complementary strengths. Specifically, we show that the dual variables in ADMM naturally emerge through the 'site' parameters used in VB with isotropic Gaussian covariances. Using this, we derive two versions of ADMM from VB that use flexible covariances and functional regularisation, respectively. Through numerical experiments, we validate the improvements obtained in performance. The work shows connection between two fields that are believed to be fundamentally different and combines them to improve federated learning.
2501.17326
Memorize and Rank: Elevating Large Language Models for Clinical Diagnosis Prediction
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Clinical diagnosis prediction models, when provided with a patient's medical history, aim to detect potential diseases early, facilitating timely intervention and improving prognostic outcomes. However, the inherent scarcity of patient data and large disease candidate space often pose challenges in developing satisfactory models for this intricate task. The exploration of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for encapsulating clinical decision processes has been limited. We introduce MERA, a clinical diagnosis prediction model that bridges pertaining natural language knowledge with medical practice. We apply hierarchical contrastive learning on a disease candidate ranking list to alleviate the large decision space issue. With concept memorization through fine-tuning, we bridge the natural language clinical knowledge with medical codes. Experimental results on MIMIC-III and IV datasets show that MERA achieves the state-of-the-art diagnosis prediction performance and dramatically elevates the diagnosis prediction capabilities of generative LMs.
2501.17328
WASUP: Interpretable Classification with Weight-Input Alignment and Class-Discriminative SUPports Vectors
cs.CV cs.LG
The deployment of deep learning models in critical domains necessitates a balance between high accuracy and interpretability. We introduce WASUP, an inherently interpretable neural network that provides local and global explanations of its decision-making process. We prove that these explanations are faithful by fulfilling established axioms for explanations. Leveraging the concept of case-based reasoning, WASUP extracts class-representative support vectors from training images, ensuring they capture relevant features while suppressing irrelevant ones. Classification decisions are made by calculating and aggregating similarity scores between these support vectors and the input's latent feature vector. We employ B-Cos transformations, which align model weights with inputs to enable faithful mappings of latent features back to the input space, facilitating local explanations in addition to global explanations of case-based reasoning. We evaluate WASUP on three tasks: fine-grained classification on Stanford Dogs, multi-label classification on Pascal VOC, and pathology detection on the RSNA dataset. Results indicate that WASUP not only achieves competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art black-box models but also offers insightful explanations verified through theoretical analysis. Our findings underscore WASUP's potential for applications where understanding model decisions is as critical as the decisions themselves.
2501.17329
Anomaly Detection in Cooperative Vehicle Perception Systems under Imperfect Communication
cs.MA cs.AI cs.LG
Anomaly detection is a critical requirement for ensuring safety in autonomous driving. In this work, we leverage Cooperative Perception to share information across nearby vehicles, enabling more accurate identification and consensus of anomalous behaviors in complex traffic scenarios. To account for the real-world challenge of imperfect communication, we propose a cooperative-perception-based anomaly detection framework (CPAD), which is a robust architecture that remains effective under communication interruptions, thereby facilitating reliable performance even in low-bandwidth settings. Since no multi-agent anomaly detection dataset exists for vehicle trajectories, we introduce 15,000 different scenarios with a 90,000 trajectories benchmark dataset generated through rule-based vehicle dynamics analysis. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms standard anomaly classification methods in F1-score, AUC and showcase strong robustness to agent connection interruptions.
2501.17330
Attribution analysis of legal language as used by LLM
cs.LG cs.CL
Three publicly-available LLM specifically designed for legal tasks have been implemented and shown that classification accuracy can benefit from training over legal corpora, but why and how? Here we use two publicly-available legal datasets, a simpler binary classification task of ``overruling'' texts, and a more elaborate multiple choice task identifying ``holding'' judicial decisions. We report on experiments contrasting the legal LLM and a generic BERT model for comparison, against both datasets. We use integrated gradient attribution techniques to impute ``causes'' of variation in the models' perfomance, and characterize them in terms of the tokenizations each use. We find that while all models can correctly classify some test examples from the casehold task, other examples can only be identified by only one, model, and attribution can be used to highlight the reasons for this. We find that differential behavior of the models' tokenizers accounts for most of the difference and analyze these differences in terms of the legal language they process. Frequency analysis of tokens generated by dataset texts, combined with use of known ``stop word'' lists, allow identification of tokens that are clear signifiers of legal topics.
2501.17332
Compact Neural TTS Voices for Accessibility
cs.SD cs.LG eess.AS
Contemporary text-to-speech solutions for accessibility applications can typically be classified into two categories: (i) device-based statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) or unit selection (USEL) and (ii) cloud-based neural TTS. SPSS and USEL offer low latency and low disk footprint at the expense of naturalness and audio quality. Cloud-based neural TTS systems provide significantly better audio quality and naturalness but regress in terms of latency and responsiveness, rendering these impractical for real-world applications. More recently, neural TTS models were made deployable to run on handheld devices. Nevertheless, latency remains higher than SPSS and USEL, while disk footprint prohibits pre-installation for multiple voices at once. In this work, we describe a high-quality compact neural TTS system achieving latency on the order of 15 ms with low disk footprint. The proposed solution is capable of running on low-power devices.
2501.17333
A Guaranteed-Stable Neural Network Approach for Optimal Control of Nonlinear Systems
math.OC cs.LG
A promising approach to optimal control of nonlinear systems involves iteratively linearizing the system and solving an optimization problem at each time instant to determine the optimal control input. Since this approach relies on online optimization, it can be computationally expensive, and thus unrealistic for systems with limited computing resources. One potential solution to this issue is to incorporate a Neural Network (NN) into the control loop to emulate the behavior of the optimal control scheme. Ensuring stability and reference tracking in the resulting NN-based closed-loop system requires modifications to the primary optimization problem. These modifications often introduce non-convexity and nonlinearity with respect to the decision variables, which may surpass the capabilities of existing solvers and complicate the generation of the training dataset. To address this issue, this paper develops a Neural Optimization Machine (NOM) to solve the resulting optimization problems. The central concept of a NOM is to transform the optimization challenges into the problem of training a NN. Rigorous proofs demonstrate that when a NN trained on data generated by the NOM is used in the control loop, all signals remain bounded and the system states asymptotically converge to a neighborhood around the desired equilibrium point, with a tunable proximity threshold. Simulation and experimental studies are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.
2501.17335
Pandora's Box: Cross-Chain Arbitrages in the Realm of Blockchain Interoperability
cs.CR cs.CE
Over recent years, the blockchain ecosystem has grown significantly with the emergence of new Layer-1 (L1) and Layer-2 (L2) networks. These blockchains typically host Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes) for trading assets such as native currencies and stablecoins. While this diversity enriches the ecosystem, it also fragments liquidity, posing challenges for DEXes offering the same assets across multiple blockchains. This fragmentation leads to price discrepancies, creating opportunities like arbitrages for profit-seeking traders, which fall under the broader category of exploitative economic practices known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). Although MEV extraction has been extensively studied within single domains (i.e., individual blockchains), cross-chain arbitrages, a form of cross-domain MEV, have received little attention due to their non-atomic nature, complicating both execution and detection. In this paper, we shed light on opaque cross-chain MEV activities by presenting the first systematic study of two non-atomic cross-chain arbitrage strategies: Sequence-Independent Arbitrage (SIA) and Sequence-Dependent Arbitrage (SDA). The former involves independent, opposite-direction trades across chains, while the latter relies on asset bridges. We analyze the effectiveness of these strategies across nine blockchains over a one-year period from September 2023 to August 2024, identifying 260,808 cross-chain arbitrages, 32.37% of which involve bridging solutions. These arbitrages generated a lower-bound profit of 9,496,115.28 USD from a total traded volume of 465,797,487.98 USD. Additionally, we examine the security implications of cross-chain arbitrages, uncovering centralization among arbitrageurs, network congestion caused by failed transactions, and growing private mempool adoption. Finally, we discuss sequencer incentives and propose a risk-optimized arbitrage strategy.
2501.17338
Inferring from Logits: Exploring Best Practices for Decoding-Free Generative Candidate Selection
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Generative Language Models rely on autoregressive decoding to produce the output sequence token by token. Many tasks such as preference optimization, require the model to produce task-level output consisting of multiple tokens directly by selecting candidates from a pool as predictions. Determining a task-level prediction from candidates using the ordinary token-level decoding mechanism is constrained by time-consuming decoding and interrupted gradients by discrete token selection. Existing works have been using decoding-free candidate selection methods to obtain candidate probability from initial output logits over vocabulary. Though these estimation methods are widely used, they are not systematically evaluated, especially on end tasks. We introduce an evaluation of a comprehensive collection of decoding-free candidate selection approaches on a comprehensive set of tasks, including five multiple-choice QA tasks with a small candidate pool and four clinical decision tasks with a massive amount of candidates, some with 10k+ options. We evaluate the estimation methods paired with a wide spectrum of foundation LMs covering different architectures, sizes and training paradigms. The results and insights from our analysis inform the future model design.