Active Test-Time Adaptation: Theoretical Analyses and An Algorithm

Test-time adaptation (TTA) addresses distribution shifts for streaming test data in unsupervised settings. Currently, most TTA methods can only deal with minor shifts and rely heavily on heuristic and empirical studies. To advance TTA under domain shifts, we propose the novel problem setting of active test-time adaptation (ATTA) that integrates active learning within the fully TTA setting. We provide a learning theory analysis, demonstrating that incorporating limited labeled test instances enhances overall performances across test domains with a theoretical guarantee. We also present a sample entropy balancing for implementing ATTA while avoiding catastrophic forgetting (CF). We introduce a simple yet effective ATTA algorithm, known as SimATTA, using real-time sample selection techniques. Extensive experimental results confirm consistency with our theoretical analyses and show that the proposed ATTA method yields substantial performance improvements over TTA methods while maintaining efficiency and shares similar effectiveness to the more demanding active domain adaptation (ADA) methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/divelab/ATTA

SineNet: Learning Temporal Dynamics in Time-Dependent Partial Differential Equations

We consider using deep neural networks to solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs), where multi-scale processing is crucial for modeling complex, time-evolving dynamics. While the U-Net architecture with skip connections is commonly used by prior studies to enable multi-scale processing, our analysis shows that the need for features to evolve across layers results in temporally misaligned features in skip connections, which limits the model's performance. To address this limitation, we propose SineNet, consisting of multiple sequentially connected U-shaped network blocks, referred to as waves. In SineNet, high-resolution features are evolved progressively through multiple stages, thereby reducing the amount of misalignment within each stage. We furthermore analyze the role of skip connections in enabling both parallel and sequential processing of multi-scale information. Our method is rigorously tested on multiple PDE datasets, including the Navier-Stokes equations and shallow water equations, showcasing the advantages of our proposed approach over conventional U-Nets with a comparable parameter budget. We further demonstrate that increasing the number of waves in SineNet while maintaining the same number of parameters leads to a monotonically improved performance. The results highlight the effectiveness of SineNet and the potential of our approach in advancing the state-of-the-art in neural PDE solver design. Our code is available as part of AIRS (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).

Complete and Efficient Graph Transformers for Crystal Material Property Prediction

Crystal structures are characterized by atomic bases within a primitive unit cell that repeats along a regular lattice throughout 3D space. The periodic and infinite nature of crystals poses unique challenges for geometric graph representation learning. Specifically, constructing graphs that effectively capture the complete geometric information of crystals and handle chiral crystals remains an unsolved and challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the periodic patterns of unit cells to establish the lattice-based representation for each atom, enabling efficient and expressive graph representations of crystals. Furthermore, we propose ComFormer, a SE(3) transformer designed specifically for crystalline materials. ComFormer includes two variants; namely, iComFormer that employs invariant geometric descriptors of Euclidean distances and angles, and eComFormer that utilizes equivariant vector representations. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art predictive accuracy of ComFormer variants on various tasks across three widely-used crystal benchmarks. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).

On the Markov Property of Neural Algorithmic Reasoning: Analyses and Methods

Neural algorithmic reasoning is an emerging research direction that endows neural networks with the ability to mimic algorithmic executions step-by-step. A common paradigm in existing designs involves the use of historical embeddings in predicting the results of future execution steps. Our observation in this work is that such historical dependence intrinsically contradicts the Markov nature of algorithmic reasoning tasks. Based on this motivation, we present our ForgetNet, which does not use historical embeddings and thus is consistent with the Markov nature of the tasks. To address challenges in training ForgetNet at early stages, we further introduce G-ForgetNet, which uses a gating mechanism to allow for the selective integration of historical embeddings. Such an enhanced capability provides valuable computational pathways during the model's early training phase. Our extensive experiments, based on the CLRS-30 algorithmic reasoning benchmark, demonstrate that both ForgetNet and G-ForgetNet achieve better generalization capability than existing methods. Furthermore, we investigate the behavior of the gating mechanism, highlighting its degree of alignment with our intuitions and its effectiveness for robust performance.

TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. Therefore, ensuring the trustworthiness of LLMs emerges as an important topic. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLMs, including principles for different dimensions of trustworthiness, established benchmark, evaluation, and analysis of trustworthiness for mainstream LLMs, and discussion of open challenges and future directions. Specifically, we first propose a set of principles for trustworthy LLMs that span eight different dimensions. Based on these principles, we further establish a benchmark across six dimensions including truthfulness, safety, fairness, robustness, privacy, and machine ethics. We then present a study evaluating 16 mainstream LLMs in TrustLLM, consisting of over 30 datasets. Our findings firstly show that in general trustworthiness and utility (i.e., functional effectiveness) are positively related. Secondly, our observations reveal that proprietary LLMs generally outperform most open-source counterparts in terms of trustworthiness, raising concerns about the potential risks of widely accessible open-source LLMs. However, a few open-source LLMs come very close to proprietary ones. Thirdly, it is important to note that some LLMs may be overly calibrated towards exhibiting trustworthiness, to the extent that they compromise their utility by mistakenly treating benign prompts as harmful and consequently not responding. Finally, we emphasize the importance of ensuring transparency not only in the models themselves but also in the technologies that underpin trustworthiness. Knowing the specific trustworthy technologies that have been employed is crucial for analyzing their effectiveness.

Genetic InfoMax: Exploring Mutual Information Maximization in High-Dimensional Imaging Genetics Studies

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are used to identify relationships between genetic variations and specific traits. When applied to high-dimensional medical imaging data, a key step is to extract lower-dimensional, yet informative representations of the data as traits. Representation learning for imaging genetics is largely under-explored due to the unique challenges posed by GWAS in comparison to typical visual representation learning. In this study, we tackle this problem from the mutual information (MI) perspective by identifying key limitations of existing methods. We introduce a trans-modal learning framework Genetic InfoMax (GIM), including a regularized MI estimator and a novel genetics-informed transformer to address the specific challenges of GWAS. We evaluate GIM on human brain 3D MRI data and establish standardized evaluation protocols to compare it to existing approaches. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of GIM and a significantly improved performance on GWAS.

Video Timeline Modeling For News Story Understanding

In this paper, we present a novel problem, namely video timeline modeling. Our objective is to create a video-associated timeline from a set of videos related to a specific topic, thereby facilitating the content and structure understanding of the story being told. This problem has significant potential in various real-world applications, such as news story summarization. To bootstrap research in this area, we curate a realistic benchmark dataset, YouTube-News-Timeline, consisting of over $12$k timelines and $300$k YouTube news videos. Additionally, we propose a set of quantitative metrics as the protocol to comprehensively evaluate and compare methodologies. With such a testbed, we further develop and benchmark exploratory deep learning approaches to tackle this problem. We anticipate that this exploratory work will pave the way for further research in video timeline modeling. The assets are available via https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/video_timeline_modeling.

Artificial Intelligence for Science in Quantum, Atomistic, and Continuum Systems

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are fueling a new paradigm of discoveries in natural sciences. Today, AI has started to advance natural sciences by improving, accelerating, and enabling our understanding of natural phenomena at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, giving rise to a new area of research known as AI for science (AI4Science). Being an emerging research paradigm, AI4Science is unique in that it is an enormous and highly interdisciplinary area. Thus, a unified and technical treatment of this field is needed yet challenging. This paper aims to provide a technically thorough account of a subarea of AI4Science; namely, AI for quantum, atomistic, and continuum systems. These areas aim at understanding the physical world from the subatomic (wavefunctions and electron density), atomic (molecules, proteins, materials, and interactions), to macro (fluids, climate, and subsurface) scales and form an important subarea of AI4Science. A unique advantage of focusing on these areas is that they largely share a common set of challenges, thereby allowing a unified and foundational treatment. A key common challenge is how to capture physics first principles, especially symmetries, in natural systems by deep learning methods. We provide an in-depth yet intuitive account of techniques to achieve equivariance to symmetry transformations. We also discuss other common technical challenges, including explainability, out-of-distribution generalization, knowledge transfer with foundation and large language models, and uncertainty quantification. To facilitate learning and education, we provide categorized lists of resources that we found to be useful. We strive to be thorough and unified and hope this initial effort may trigger more community interests and efforts to further advance AI4Science.

Towards Symmetry-Aware Generation of Periodic Materials

We consider the problem of generating periodic materials with deep models. While symmetry-aware molecule generation has been studied extensively, periodic materials possess different symmetries, which have not been completely captured by existing methods. In this work, we propose SyMat, a novel material generation approach that can capture physical symmetries of periodic material structures. SyMat generates atom types and lattices of materials through generating atom type sets, lattice lengths and lattice angles with a variational auto-encoder model. In addition, SyMat employs a score-based diffusion model to generate atom coordinates of materials, in which a novel symmetry-aware probabilistic model is used in the coordinate diffusion process. We show that SyMat is theoretically invariant to all symmetry transformations on materials and demonstrate that SyMat achieves promising performance on random generation and property optimization tasks.