Towards Visual Syntactical Understanding

Syntax is usually studied in the realm of linguistics and refers to the arrangement of words in a sentence. Similarly, an image can be considered as a visual 'sentence', with the semantic parts of the image acting as 'words'. While visual syntactic understanding occurs naturally to humans, it is interesting to explore whether deep neural networks (DNNs) are equipped with such reasoning. To that end, we alter the syntax of natural images (e.g. swapping the eye and nose of a face), referred to as 'incorrect' images, to investigate the sensitivity of DNNs to such syntactic anomaly. Through our experiments, we discover an intriguing property of DNNs where we observe that state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, as well as vision transformers, fail to discriminate between syntactically correct and incorrect images when trained on only correct ones. To counter this issue and enable visual syntactic understanding with DNNs, we propose a three-stage framework- (i) the 'words' (or the sub-features) in the image are detected, (ii) the detected words are sequentially masked and reconstructed using an autoencoder, (iii) the original and reconstructed parts are compared at each location to determine syntactic correctness. The reconstruction module is trained with BERT-like masked autoencoding for images, with the motivation to leverage language model inspired training to better capture the syntax. Note, our proposed approach is unsupervised in the sense that the incorrect images are only used during testing and the correct versus incorrect labels are never used for training. We perform experiments on CelebA, and AFHQ datasets and obtain classification accuracy of 92.10%, and 90.89%, respectively. Notably, the approach generalizes well to ImageNet samples which share common classes with CelebA and AFHQ without explicitly training on them.

On the Prospects of Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) in Automated Planning and Scheduling (APS)

Automated Planning and Scheduling is among the growing areas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) where mention of LLMs has gained popularity. Based on a comprehensive review of 126 papers, this paper investigates eight categories based on the unique applications of LLMs in addressing various aspects of planning problems: language translation, plan generation, model construction, multi-agent planning, interactive planning, heuristics optimization, tool integration, and brain-inspired planning. For each category, we articulate the issues considered and existing gaps. A critical insight resulting from our review is that the true potential of LLMs unfolds when they are integrated with traditional symbolic planners, pointing towards a promising neuro-symbolic approach. This approach effectively combines the generative aspects of LLMs with the precision of classical planning methods. By synthesizing insights from existing literature, we underline the potential of this integration to address complex planning challenges. Our goal is to encourage the ICAPS community to recognize the complementary strengths of LLMs and symbolic planners, advocating for a direction in automated planning that leverages these synergistic capabilities to develop more advanced and intelligent planning systems.

K-PERM: Personalized Response Generation Using Dynamic Knowledge Retrieval and Persona-Adaptive Queries

Personalizing conversational agents can enhance the quality of conversations and increase user engagement. However, they often lack external knowledge to appropriately tend to a user's persona. This is particularly crucial for practical applications like mental health support, nutrition planning, culturally sensitive conversations, or reducing toxic behavior in conversational agents. To enhance the relevance and comprehensiveness of personalized responses, we propose using a two-step approach that involves (1) selectively integrating user personas and (2) contextualizing the response with supplementing information from a background knowledge source. We develop K-PERM (Knowledge-guided PErsonalization with Reward Modulation), a dynamic conversational agent that combines these elements. K-PERM achieves state-of-the-art performance on the popular FoCus dataset, containing real-world personalized conversations concerning global landmarks. We show that using responses from K-PERM can improve performance in state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT 3.5) by 10.5%, highlighting the impact of K-PERM for personalizing chatbots.

WWW: What, When, Where to Compute-in-Memory

Compute-in-memory (CiM) has emerged as a compelling solution to alleviate high data movement costs in von Neumann machines. CiM can perform massively parallel general matrix multiplication (GEMM) operations in memory, the dominant computation in Machine Learning (ML) inference. However, re-purposing memory for compute poses key questions on 1) What type of CiM to use: Given a multitude of analog and digital CiMs, determining their suitability from systems perspective is needed. 2) When to use CiM: ML inference includes workloads with a variety of memory and compute requirements, making it difficult to identify when CiM is more beneficial than standard processing cores. 3) Where to integrate CiM: Each memory level has different bandwidth and capacity, that affects the data movement and locality benefits of CiM integration. In this paper, we explore answers to these questions regarding CiM integration for ML inference acceleration. We use Timeloop-Accelergy for early system-level evaluation of CiM prototypes, including both analog and digital primitives. We integrate CiM into different cache memory levels in an Nvidia A100-like baseline architecture and tailor the dataflow for various ML workloads. Our experiments show CiM architectures improve energy efficiency, achieving up to 0.12x lower energy than the established baseline with INT-8 precision, and upto 4x performance gains with weight interleaving and duplication. The proposed work provides insights into what type of CiM to use, and when and where to optimally integrate it in the cache hierarchy for GEMM acceleration.

GEAR-Up: Generative AI and External Knowledge-based Retrieval Upgrading Scholarly Article Searches for Systematic Reviews

Systematic reviews (SRs) - the librarian-assisted literature survey of scholarly articles takes time and requires significant human resources. Given the ever-increasing volume of published studies, applying existing computing and informatics technology can decrease this time and resource burden. Due to the revolutionary advances in (1) Generative AI such as ChatGPT, and (2) External knowledge-augmented information extraction efforts such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation, In this work, we explore the use of techniques from (1) and (2) for SR. We demonstrate a system that takes user queries, performs query expansion to obtain enriched context (includes additional terms and definitions by querying language models and knowledge graphs), and uses this context to search for articles on scholarly databases to retrieve articles. We perform qualitative evaluations of our system through comparison against sentinel (ground truth) articles provided by an in-house librarian. The demo can be found at: https://youtu.be/zMdP56GJ9mU.

RDR: the Recap, Deliberate, and Respond Method for Enhanced Language Understanding

Natural language understanding (NLU) using neural network pipelines often requires additional context that is not solely present in the input data. Through Prior research, it has been evident that NLU benchmarks are susceptible to manipulation by neural models, wherein these models exploit statistical artifacts within the encoded external knowledge to artificially inflate performance metrics for downstream tasks. Our proposed approach, known as the Recap, Deliberate, and Respond (RDR) paradigm, addresses this issue by incorporating three distinct objectives within the neural network pipeline. Firstly, the Recap objective involves paraphrasing the input text using a paraphrasing model in order to summarize and encapsulate its essence. Secondly, the Deliberation objective entails encoding external graph information related to entities mentioned in the input text, utilizing a graph embedding model. Finally, the Respond objective employs a classification head model that utilizes representations from the Recap and Deliberation modules to generate the final prediction. By cascading these three models and minimizing a combined loss, we mitigate the potential for gaming the benchmark and establish a robust method for capturing the underlying semantic patterns, thus enabling accurate predictions. To evaluate the effectiveness of the RDR method, we conduct tests on multiple GLUE benchmark tasks. Our results demonstrate improved performance compared to competitive baselines, with an enhancement of up to 2\% on standard metrics. Furthermore, we analyze the observed evidence for semantic understanding exhibited by RDR models, emphasizing their ability to avoid gaming the benchmark and instead accurately capture the true underlying semantic patterns.

Neurosymbolic Value-Inspired AI (Why, What, and How)

The rapid progression of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, facilitated by the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), has resulted in their widespread application to provide human assistance across diverse industries. This trend has sparked significant discourse centered around the ever-increasing need for LLM-based AI systems to function among humans as part of human society, sharing human values, especially as these systems are deployed in high-stakes settings (e.g., healthcare, autonomous driving, etc.). Towards this end, neurosymbolic AI systems are attractive due to their potential to enable easy-to-understand and interpretable interfaces for facilitating value-based decision-making, by leveraging explicit representations of shared values. In this paper, we introduce substantial extensions to Khaneman's System one/two framework and propose a neurosymbolic computational framework called Value-Inspired AI (VAI). It outlines the crucial components essential for the robust and practical implementation of VAI systems, aiming to represent and integrate various dimensions of human values. Finally, we further offer insights into the current progress made in this direction and outline potential future directions for the field.

Deep Unlearning: Fast and Efficient Training-free Approach to Controlled Forgetting

Machine unlearning has emerged as a prominent and challenging area of interest, driven in large part by the rising regulatory demands for industries to delete user data upon request and the heightened awareness of privacy. Existing approaches either retrain models from scratch or use several finetuning steps for every deletion request, often constrained by computational resource limitations and restricted access to the original training data. In this work, we introduce a novel class unlearning algorithm designed to strategically eliminate an entire class or a group of classes from the learned model. To that end, our algorithm first estimates the Retain Space and the Forget Space, representing the feature or activation spaces for samples from classes to be retained and unlearned, respectively. To obtain these spaces, we propose a novel singular value decomposition-based technique that requires layer wise collection of network activations from a few forward passes through the network. We then compute the shared information between these spaces and remove it from the forget space to isolate class-discriminatory feature space for unlearning. Finally, we project the model weights in the orthogonal direction of the class-discriminatory space to obtain the unlearned model. We demonstrate our algorithm's efficacy on ImageNet using a Vision Transformer with only $\sim$1.5% drop in retain accuracy compared to the original model while maintaining under 1% accuracy on the unlearned class samples. Further, our algorithm consistently performs well when subject to Membership Inference Attacks showing 7.8% improvement on average across a variety of image classification datasets and network architectures, as compared to other baselines while being $\sim$6x more computationally efficient.

Presentation Attack Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks and Local Binary Patterns

The use of biometrics to authenticate users and control access to secure areas has become extremely popular in recent years, and biometric access control systems are frequently used by both governments and private corporations. However, these systems may represent risks to security when deployed without considering the possibility of biometric presentation attacks (also known as spoofing). Presentation attacks are a serious threat because they do not require significant time, expense, or skill to carry out while remaining effective against many biometric systems in use today. This research compares three different software-based methods for facial and iris presentation attack detection in images. The first method uses Inception-v3, a pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) made by Google for the ImageNet challenge, which is retrained for this problem. The second uses a shallow CNN based on a modified Spoofnet architecture, which is trained normally. The third is a texture-based method using Local Binary Patterns (LBP). The datasets used are the ATVS-FIr dataset, which contains real and fake iris images, and the CASIA Face Anti-Spoofing Dataset, which contains real images as well as warped photos, cut photos, and video replay presentation attacks. We also present a third set of results, based on cropped versions of the CASIA images.

Touch Analysis: An Empirical Evaluation of Machine Learning Classification Algorithms on Touch Data

Our research aims at classifying individuals based on their unique interactions on touchscreen-based smartphones. In this research, we use Touch-Analytics datasets, which include 41 subjects and 30 different behavioral features. Furthermore, we derived new features from the raw data to improve the overall authentication performance. Previous research has already been done on the Touch-Analytics datasets with the state-of-the-art classifiers, including Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and achieved equal error rates (EERs) between 0% to 4%. Here, we propose a novel Deep Neural Net (DNN) architecture to classify the individuals correctly. The proposed DNN architecture has three dense layers and uses many-to-many mapping techniques. When we combine the new features with the existing ones, SVM and kNN achieved the classification accuracy of 94.7% and 94.6%, respectively. This research explored seven other classifiers and out of them, the decision tree and our proposed DNN classifiers resulted in the highest accuracy of 100%. The others included: Logistic Regression (LR), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Gaussian Naive Bayes (NB), Neural Network, and VGGNet with the following accuracy scores of 94.7%, 95.9%, 31.9%, 88.8%, and 96.1%, respectively.