Meaningful Learning: Advancing Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models via Generic Fact Guidance

Large language models (LLMs) have developed impressive performance and strong explainability across various reasoning scenarios, marking a significant stride towards mimicking human-like intelligence. Despite this, when tasked with simple questions supported by a generic fact, LLMs often fail to provide consistent and precise answers, indicating a deficiency in abstract reasoning abilities. This has sparked a vigorous debate about whether LLMs are genuinely reasoning or merely memorizing. In light of this, we design a preliminary study to quantify and delve into the abstract reasoning abilities of existing LLMs. Our findings reveal a substantial discrepancy between their general reasoning and abstract reasoning performances. To relieve this problem, we tailor an abstract reasoning dataset (AbsR) together with a meaningful learning paradigm to teach LLMs how to leverage generic facts for reasoning purposes. The results show that our approach not only boosts the general reasoning performance of LLMs but also makes considerable strides towards their capacity for abstract reasoning, moving beyond simple memorization or imitation to a more nuanced understanding and application of generic facts.

RIS-empowered Topology Control for Distributed Learning in Urban Air Mobility

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) expands vehicles from the ground to the near-ground space, envisioned as a revolution for transportation systems. Comprehensive scene perception is the foundation for autonomous aerial driving. However, UAM encounters the intelligent perception challenge: high perception learning requirements conflict with the limited sensors and computing chips of flying cars. To overcome the challenge, federated learning (FL) and other collaborative learning have been proposed to enable resource-limited devices to conduct onboard deep learning (DL) collaboratively. But traditional collaborative learning like FL relies on a central integrator for DL model aggregation, which is difficult to deploy in dynamic environments. The fully decentralized learning schemes may be the intuitive solution while the convergence of distributed learning cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, this paper explores reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) empowered distributed learning, taking account of topological attributes to facilitate the learning performance with convergence guarantee. We propose several FL topological criteria for optimizing the transmission delay and convergence rate by exploiting the Laplacian matrix eigenvalues of the communication network. Subsequently, we innovatively leverage the RIS link modification ability to remold the current network according to the proposed topological criteria. This paper rethinks the functions of RIS from the perspective of the network layer. Furthermore, a deep deterministic policy gradient-based RIS phase shift control algorithm is developed to construct or deconstruct the network links simultaneously to reshape the communication network. Simulation experiments are conducted over MobileNet-based multi-view learning to verify the efficiency of the distributed FL framework.

Deciphering the lmpact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning

Through pretraining on a corpus with various sources, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained impressive performance. However, the impact of each component of the pretraining corpus remains opaque. As a result, the organization of the pretraining corpus is still empirical and may deviate from the optimal. To address this issue, we systematically analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of LLMs and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories of model capabilities. Our analyses provide empirical results about the contribution of multiple corpora on the performances of LLMs, along with their joint impact patterns, including complementary, orthogonal, and correlational relationships. We also identify a set of ``high-impact data'' such as Books that is significantly related to a set of model capabilities. These findings provide insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of LLMs.

PACE: Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments

Pose estimation is a crucial task in computer vision, enabling tracking and manipulating objects in images or videos. While several datasets exist for pose estimation, there is a lack of large-scale datasets specifically focusing on cluttered scenes with occlusions. This limitation is a bottleneck in the development and evaluation of pose estimation methods, particularly toward the goal of real-world application in environments where occlusions are common. Addressing this, we introduce PACE (Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments), a large-scale benchmark designed to advance the development and evaluation of pose estimation methods in cluttered scenarios. PACE encompasses 54,945 frames with 257,673 annotations across 300 videos, covering 576 objects from 44 categories and featuring a mix of rigid and articulated items in cluttered scenes. To annotate the real-world data efficiently, we developed an innovative annotation system utilizing a calibrated 3-camera setup. We test state-of-the-art algorithms in PACE along two tracks: pose estimation, and object pose tracking, revealing the benchmark's challenges and research opportunities. We plan to release PACE as a public evaluation benchmark, along the annotations tools we developed, to stimulate further advancements in the field. Our code and data is available on https://github.com/qq456cvb/PACE.

Intuitive or Dependent? Investigating LLMs' Robustness to Conflicting Prompts

This paper explores the robustness of LLMs' preference to their internal memory or the given prompt, which may contain contrasting information in real-world applications due to noise or task settings. To this end, we establish a quantitative benchmarking framework and conduct the role playing intervention to control LLMs' preference. In specific, we define two types of robustness, factual robustness targeting the ability to identify the correct fact from prompts or memory, and decision style to categorize LLMs' behavior in making consistent choices -- assuming there is no definitive "right" answer -- intuitive, dependent, or rational based on cognitive theory. Our findings, derived from extensive experiments on seven open-source and closed-source LLMs, reveal that these models are highly susceptible to misleading prompts, especially for instructing commonsense knowledge. While detailed instructions can mitigate the selection of misleading answers, they also increase the incidence of invalid responses. After Unraveling the preference, we intervene different sized LLMs through specific style of role instruction, showing their varying upper bound of robustness and adaptivity.

Examining the Inter-Consistency of Large Language Models: An In-depth Analysis via Debate

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like intelligence and are widely used in various applications. However, LLMs still exhibit various kinds of inconsistency problems. Existing works mainly focus on the inconsistency issues within a single LLM, while we investigate the inter-consistency among multiple LLMs, which is critical for collaborating to solve a complex task. To examine whether LLMs can collaborate to ultimately achieve a consensus for the shared goal and whether LLMs easily change their viewpoints, we introduce a Formal Debate framework (FORD) With FORD, we conduct a three-stage debate aligned with real-world scenarios: fair debate, mismatched debate, and roundtable debate. Through extensive experiments on the commonsense reasoning task, LLMs not only become more inter-consistent but also achieve higher performance. Moreover, we observe that stronger LLMs tend to dominate the debates by adhering to their perspectives, while weaker ones are more likely to change viewpoints. Additionally, we highlight the importance of a competent judge, such as GPT-4, to draw more proper conclusions. Our work contributes to understanding the inter-consistency among LLMs and lays the foundation for the development of future collaboration methods.

Improving Cross-Task Generalization with Step-by-Step Instructions

Instruction tuning has been shown to be able to improve cross-task generalization of language models. However, it is still challenging for language models to complete the target tasks following the instructions, as the instructions are general and lack intermediate steps. To address this problem, we propose to incorporate the step-by-step instructions to help language models to decompose the tasks, which can provide the detailed and specific procedures for completing the target tasks. The step-by-step instructions are obtained automatically by prompting ChatGPT, which are further combined with the original instructions to tune language models. The extensive experiments on SUP-NATINST show that the high-quality step-by-step instructions can improve cross-task generalization across different model sizes. Moreover, the further analysis indicates the importance of the order of steps of the step-by-step instruction for the improvement. To facilitate future research, we release the step-by-step instructions and their human quality evaluation results.

A Digital Twin Empowered Lightweight Model Sharing Scheme for Multi-Robot Systems

Multi-robot system for manufacturing is an Industry Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm with significant operational cost savings and productivity improvement, where Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are employed to control and implement collaborative productions without human intervention. This mission-critical system relies on 3-Dimension (3-D) scene recognition to improve operation accuracy in the production line and autonomous piloting. However, implementing 3-D point cloud learning, such as Pointnet, is challenging due to limited sensing and computing resources equipped with UAVs. Therefore, we propose a Digital Twin (DT) empowered Knowledge Distillation (KD) method to generate several lightweight learning models and select the optimal model to deploy on UAVs. With a digital replica of the UAVs preserved at the edge server, the DT system controls the model sharing network topology and learning model structure to improve recognition accuracy further. Moreover, we employ network calculus to formulate and solve the model sharing configuration problem toward minimal resource consumption, as well as convergence. Simulation experiments are conducted over a popular point cloud dataset to evaluate the proposed scheme. Experiment results show that the proposed model sharing scheme outperforms the individual model in terms of computing resource consumption and recognition accuracy.

ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks

Causal chain reasoning (CCR) is an essential ability for many decision-making AI systems, which requires the model to build reliable causal chains by connecting causal pairs. However, CCR suffers from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. In other words, the causal pairs to be spliced may have a conflicting threshold boundary or scenario. To address these issues, we propose a novel Reliable Causal chain reasoning framework~(ReCo), which introduces exogenous variables to represent the threshold and scene factors of each causal pair within the causal chain, and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions across exogenous variables via structural causal recurrent neural networks~(SRNN). Experiments show that ReCo outperforms a series of strong baselines on both Chinese and English CCR datasets. Moreover, by injecting reliable causal chain knowledge distilled by ReCo, BERT can achieve better performances on four downstream causal-related tasks than BERT models enhanced by other kinds of knowledge.

One-Shot General Object Localization

This paper presents a general one-shot object localization algorithm called OneLoc. Current one-shot object localization or detection methods either rely on a slow exhaustive feature matching process or lack the ability to generalize to novel objects. In contrast, our proposed OneLoc algorithm efficiently finds the object center and bounding box size by a special voting scheme. To keep our method scale-invariant, only unit center offset directions and relative sizes are estimated. A novel dense equalized voting module is proposed to better locate small texture-less objects. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art overall performance on two datasets: OnePose dataset and LINEMOD dataset. In addition, our method can also achieve one-shot multi-instance detection and non-rigid object localization. Code repository: https://github.com/qq456cvb/OneLoc.