Solving Challenging Math Word Problems Using GPT-4 Code Interpreter with Code-based Self-Verification

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and PaLM-2 has brought significant advancements in addressing math reasoning problems. In particular, OpenAI's latest version of GPT-4, known as GPT-4 Code Interpreter, shows remarkable performance on challenging math datasets. In this paper, we explore the effect of code on enhancing LLMs' reasoning capability by introducing different constraints on the \textit{Code Usage Frequency} of GPT-4 Code Interpreter. We found that its success can be largely attributed to its powerful skills in generating and executing code, evaluating the output of code execution, and rectifying its solution when receiving unreasonable outputs. Based on this insight, we propose a novel and effective prompting method, explicit \uline{c}ode-based \uline{s}elf-\uline{v}erification~(CSV), to further boost the mathematical reasoning potential of GPT-4 Code Interpreter. This method employs a zero-shot prompt on GPT-4 Code Interpreter to encourage it to use code to self-verify its answers. In instances where the verification state registers as ``False'', the model shall automatically amend its solution, analogous to our approach of rectifying errors during a mathematics examination. Furthermore, we recognize that the states of the verification result indicate the confidence of a solution, which can improve the effectiveness of majority voting. With GPT-4 Code Interpreter and CSV, we achieve an impressive zero-shot accuracy on MATH dataset \textbf{(53.9\% $\to$ 84.3\%)}.

VCSUM: A Versatile Chinese Meeting Summarization Dataset

Compared to news and chat summarization, the development of meeting summarization is hugely decelerated by the limited data. To this end, we introduce a versatile Chinese meeting summarization dataset, dubbed VCSum, consisting of 239 real-life meetings, with a total duration of over 230 hours. We claim our dataset is versatile because we provide the annotations of topic segmentation, headlines, segmentation summaries, overall meeting summaries, and salient sentences for each meeting transcript. As such, the dataset can adapt to various summarization tasks or methods, including segmentation-based summarization, multi-granularity summarization and retrieval-then-generate summarization. Our analysis confirms the effectiveness and robustness of VCSum. We also provide a set of benchmark models regarding different downstream summarization tasks on VCSum to facilitate further research. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/hahahawu/VCSum.

Self-Supervised Sentence Compression for Meeting Summarization

The conventional summarization model often fails to capture critical information in meeting transcripts, as meeting corpus usually involves multiple parties with lengthy conversations and is stuffed with redundant and trivial content. To tackle this problem, we present SVB, an effective and efficient framework for meeting summarization that `compress' the redundancy while preserving important content via three processes: sliding-window dialogue restoration and \textbf{S}coring, channel-wise importance score \textbf{V}oting, and relative positional \textbf{B}ucketing. Specifically, under the self-supervised paradigm, the sliding-window scoring aims to rate the importance of each token from multiple views. Then these ratings are aggregated by channel-wise voting. Tokens with high ratings will be regarded as salient information and labeled as \textit{anchors}. Finally, to tailor the lengthy input to an acceptable length for the language model, the relative positional bucketing algorithm is performed to retain the anchors while compressing other irrelevant contents in different granularities. Without large-scale pre-training or expert-grade annotating tools, our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches. A vast amount of evaluations and analyses are conducted to prove the effectiveness of our method.

PerFedRec++: Enhancing Personalized Federated Recommendation with Self-Supervised Pre-Training

Federated recommendation systems employ federated learning techniques to safeguard user privacy by transmitting model parameters instead of raw user data between user devices and the central server. Nevertheless, the current federated recommender system faces challenges such as heterogeneity and personalization, model performance degradation, and communication bottleneck. Previous studies have attempted to address these issues, but none have been able to solve them simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named PerFedRec++, to enhance the personalized federated recommendation with self-supervised pre-training. Specifically, we utilize the privacy-preserving mechanism of federated recommender systems to generate two augmented graph views, which are used as contrastive tasks in self-supervised graph learning to pre-train the model. Pre-training enhances the performance of federated models by improving the uniformity of representation learning. Also, by providing a better initial state for federated training, pre-training makes the overall training converge faster, thus alleviating the heavy communication burden. We then construct a collaborative graph to learn the client representation through a federated graph neural network. Based on these learned representations, we cluster users into different user groups and learn personalized models for each cluster. Each user learns a personalized model by combining the global federated model, the cluster-level federated model, and its own fine-tuned local model. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our proposed method achieves superior performance over existing methods.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Quantization Achieves Privacy in Distributed Learning

Communication efficiency and privacy protection are two critical issues in distributed machine learning. Existing methods tackle these two issues separately and may have a high implementation complexity that constrains their application in a resource-limited environment. We propose a comprehensive quantization-based solution that could simultaneously achieve communication efficiency and privacy protection, providing new insights into the correlated nature of communication and privacy. Specifically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions in the distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework by adding binomial noise to the uniformly quantized gradients to reach the desired differential privacy level but with a minor sacrifice in communication efficiency. We theoretically capture the new trade-offs between communication, privacy, and learning performance.

A Scalable Test Problem Generator for Sequential Transfer Optimization

Sequential transfer optimization (STO), which aims to improve optimization performance by exploiting knowledge captured from previously-solved optimization tasks stored in a database, has been gaining increasing research attention in recent years. However, despite significant advancements in algorithm design, the test problems in STO are not well designed. Oftentimes, they are either randomly assembled by other benchmark functions that have identical optima or are generated from practical problems that exhibit limited variations. The relationships between the optimal solutions of source and target tasks in these problems are manually configured and thus monotonous, limiting their ability to represent the diverse relationships of real-world problems. Consequently, the promising results achieved by many algorithms on these problems are highly biased and difficult to be generalized to other problems. In light of this, we first introduce a few rudimentary concepts for characterizing STO problems (STOPs) and present an important problem feature overlooked in previous studies, namely similarity distribution, which quantitatively delineates the relationship between the optima of source and target tasks. Then, we propose general design guidelines and a problem generator with superior extendibility. Specifically, the similarity distribution of a problem can be systematically customized by modifying a parameterized density function, enabling a broad spectrum of representation for the diverse similarity relationships of real-world problems. Lastly, a benchmark suite with 12 individual STOPs is developed using the proposed generator, which can serve as an arena for comparing different STO algorithms. The source code of the benchmark suite is available at https://github.com/XmingHsueh/STOP.

Adaptive Top-K in SGD for Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning

Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient compression has emerged as a communication-efficient solution to accelerate distributed learning. Top-K sparsification is one of the most popular gradient compression methods that sparsifies the gradient in a fixed degree during model training. However, there lacks an approach to adaptively adjust the degree of sparsification to maximize the potential of model performance or training speed. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a novel adaptive Top-K SGD framework, enabling adaptive degree of sparsification for each gradient descent step to maximize the convergence performance by exploring the trade-off between communication cost and convergence error. Firstly, we derive an upper bound of the convergence error for the adaptive sparsification scheme and the loss function. Secondly, we design the algorithm by minimizing the convergence error under the communication cost constraints. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed adaptive Top-K in SGD achieves a significantly better convergence rate compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Hiding Images in Deep Probabilistic Models

Data hiding with deep neural networks (DNNs) has experienced impressive successes in recent years. A prevailing scheme is to train an autoencoder, consisting of an encoding network to embed (or transform) secret messages in (or into) a carrier, and a decoding network to extract the hidden messages. This scheme may suffer from several limitations regarding practicability, security, and embedding capacity. In this work, we describe a different computational framework to hide images in deep probabilistic models. Specifically, we use a DNN to model the probability density of cover images, and hide a secret image in one particular location of the learned distribution. As an instantiation, we adopt a SinGAN, a pyramid of generative adversarial networks (GANs), to learn the patch distribution of one cover image. We hide the secret image by fitting a deterministic mapping from a fixed set of noise maps (generated by an embedding key) to the secret image during patch distribution learning. The stego SinGAN, behaving as the original SinGAN, is publicly communicated; only the receiver with the embedding key is able to extract the secret image. We demonstrate the feasibility of our SinGAN approach in terms of extraction accuracy and model security. Moreover, we show the flexibility of the proposed method in terms of hiding multiple images for different receivers and obfuscating the secret image.

Towards Communication Efficient and Fair Federated Personalized Sequential Recommendation

Federated recommendations leverage the federated learning (FL) techniques to make privacy-preserving recommendations. Though recent success in the federated recommender system, several vital challenges remain to be addressed: (i) The majority of federated recommendation models only consider the model performance and the privacy-preserving ability, while ignoring the optimization of the communication process; (ii) Most of the federated recommenders are designed for heterogeneous systems, causing unfairness problems during the federation process; (iii) The personalization techniques have been less explored in many federated recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a Communication efficient and Fair personalized Federated personalized Sequential Recommendation algorithm (CF-FedSR) to tackle these challenges. CF-FedSR introduces a communication-efficient scheme that employs adaptive client selection and clustering-based sampling to accelerate the training process. A fairness-aware model aggregation algorithm that can adaptively capture the data and performance imbalance among different clients to address the unfairness problems is proposed. The personalization module assists clients in making personalized recommendations and boosts the recommendation performance via local fine-tuning and model adaption. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

HySAGE: A Hybrid Static and Adaptive Graph Embedding Network for Context-Drifting Recommendations

The recent popularity of edge devices and Artificial Intelligent of Things (AIoT) has driven a new wave of contextual recommendations, such as location based Point of Interest (PoI) recommendations and computing resource-aware mobile app recommendations. In many such recommendation scenarios, contexts are drifting over time. For example, in a mobile game recommendation, contextual features like locations, battery, and storage levels of mobile devices are frequently drifting over time. However, most existing graph-based collaborative filtering methods are designed under the assumption of static features. Therefore, they would require frequent retraining and/or yield graphical models burgeoning in sizes, impeding their suitability for context-drifting recommendations. In this work, we propose a specifically tailor-made Hybrid Static and Adaptive Graph Embedding (HySAGE) network for context-drifting recommendations. Our key idea is to disentangle the relatively static user-item interaction and rapidly drifting contextual features. Specifically, our proposed HySAGE network learns a relatively static graph embedding from user-item interaction and an adaptive embedding from drifting contextual features. These embeddings are incorporated into an interest network to generate the user interest in some certain context. We adopt an interactive attention module to learn the interactions among static graph embeddings, adaptive contextual embeddings, and user interest, helping to achieve a better final representation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that HySAGE significantly improves the performance of the existing state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms.