Unveiling Privacy, Memorization, and Input Curvature Links

Deep Neural Nets (DNNs) have become a pervasive tool for solving many emerging problems. However, they tend to overfit to and memorize the training set. Memorization is of keen interest since it is closely related to several concepts such as generalization, noisy learning, and privacy. To study memorization, Feldman (2019) proposed a formal score, however its computational requirements limit its practical use. Recent research has shown empirical evidence linking input loss curvature (measured by the trace of the loss Hessian w.r.t inputs) and memorization. It was shown to be ~3 orders of magnitude more efficient than calculating the memorization score. However, there is a lack of theoretical understanding linking memorization with input loss curvature. In this paper, we not only investigate this connection but also extend our analysis to establish theoretical links between differential privacy, memorization, and input loss curvature. First, we derive an upper bound on memorization characterized by both differential privacy and input loss curvature. Second, we present a novel insight showing that input loss curvature is upper-bounded by the differential privacy parameter. Our theoretical findings are further empirically validated using deep models on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets, showing a strong correlation between our theoretical predictions and results observed in practice.

Prompt-Based Bias Calibration for Better Zero/Few-Shot Learning of Language Models

Prompt learning is susceptible to intrinsic bias present in pre-trained language models (LMs), resulting in sub-optimal performance of prompt-based zero/few-shot learning. In this work, we propose a null-input prompting method to calibrate intrinsic bias encoded in pre-trained LMs. Different from prior efforts that address intrinsic bias primarily for social fairness and often involve excessive computational cost, our objective is to explore enhancing LMs' performance in downstream zero/few-shot learning while emphasizing the efficiency of intrinsic bias calibration. Specifically, we leverage a diverse set of auto-selected null-meaning inputs generated from GPT-4 to prompt pre-trained LMs for intrinsic bias probing. Utilizing the bias-reflected probability distribution, we formulate a distribution disparity loss for bias calibration, where we exclusively update bias parameters ($0.1\%$ of total parameters) of LMs towards equal probability distribution. Experimental results show that the calibration promotes an equitable starting point for LMs while preserving language modeling abilities. Across a wide range of datasets, including sentiment analysis and topic classification, our method significantly improves zero/few-shot learning performance of LMs for both in-context learning and prompt-based fine-tuning (on average $9\%$ and $2\%$, respectively).

Towards Image Semantics and Syntax Sequence Learning

Convolutional neural networks and vision transformers have achieved outstanding performance in machine perception, particularly for image classification. Although these image classifiers excel at predicting image-level class labels, they may not discriminate missing or shifted parts within an object. As a result, they may fail to detect corrupted images that involve missing or disarrayed semantic information in the object composition. On the contrary, human perception easily distinguishes such corruptions. To mitigate this gap, we introduce the concept of "image grammar", consisting of "image semantics" and "image syntax", to denote the semantics of parts or patches of an image and the order in which these parts are arranged to create a meaningful object. To learn the image grammar relative to a class of visual objects/scenes, we propose a weakly supervised two-stage approach. In the first stage, we use a deep clustering framework that relies on iterative clustering and feature refinement to produce part-semantic segmentation. In the second stage, we incorporate a recurrent bi-LSTM module to process a sequence of semantic segmentation patches to capture the image syntax. Our framework is trained to reason over patch semantics and detect faulty syntax. We benchmark the performance of several grammar learning models in detecting patch corruptions. Finally, we verify the capabilities of our framework in Celeb and SUNRGBD datasets and demonstrate that it can achieve a grammar validation accuracy of 70 to 90% in a wide variety of semantic and syntactical corruption scenarios.

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.

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.

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.