Data Augmentation using LLMs: Data Perspectives, Learning Paradigms and Challenges

In the rapidly evolving field of machine learning (ML), data augmentation (DA) has emerged as a pivotal technique for enhancing model performance by diversifying training examples without the need for additional data collection. This survey explores the transformative impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on DA, particularly addressing the unique challenges and opportunities they present in the context of natural language processing (NLP) and beyond. From a data perspective and a learning perspective, we examine various strategies that utilize Large Language Models for data augmentation, including a novel exploration of learning paradigms where LLM-generated data is used for further training. Additionally, this paper delineates the primary challenges faced in this domain, ranging from controllable data augmentation to multi modal data augmentation. This survey highlights the paradigm shift introduced by LLMs in DA, aims to serve as a foundational guide for researchers and practitioners in this field.

Panda LLM: Training Data and Evaluation for Open-Sourced Chinese Instruction-Following Large Language Models

This project focuses on enhancing open-source large language models through instruction-tuning and providing comprehensive evaluations of their performance. We explore how various training data factors, such as quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, influence the performance of instruction-tuned models trained on publicly accessible high-quality instruction datasets for both English and Chinese languages. Our goal is to supplement evaluation with quantitative analyses, providing valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Our model, data, and code are publicly available for others to use and build upon.

Fast Graph Generation via Spectral Diffusion

Generating graph-structured data is a challenging problem, which requires learning the underlying distribution of graphs. Various models such as graph VAE, graph GANs, and graph diffusion models have been proposed to generate meaningful and reliable graphs, among which the diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we argue that running full-rank diffusion SDEs on the whole graph adjacency matrix space hinders diffusion models from learning graph topology generation, and hence significantly deteriorates the quality of generated graph data. To address this limitation, we propose an efficient yet effective Graph Spectral Diffusion Model (GSDM), which is driven by low-rank diffusion SDEs on the graph spectrum space. Our spectral diffusion model is further proven to enjoy a substantially stronger theoretical guarantee than standard diffusion models. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that, our proposed GSDM turns out to be the SOTA model, by exhibiting both significantly higher generation quality and much less computational consumption than the baselines.

Domain Confused Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this work, we study Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in a challenging self-supervised approach. One of the difficulties is how to learn task discrimination in the absence of target labels. Unlike previous literature which directly aligns cross-domain distributions or leverages reverse gradient, we propose Domain Confused Contrastive Learning (DCCL) to bridge the source and the target domains via domain puzzles, and retain discriminative representations after adaptation. Technically, DCCL searches for a most domain-challenging direction and exquisitely crafts domain confused augmentations as positive pairs, then it contrastively encourages the model to pull representations towards the other domain, thus learning more stable and effective domain invariances. We also investigate whether contrastive learning necessarily helps with UDA when performing other data augmentations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCCL significantly outperforms baselines.

Domain-Augmented Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables knowledge transfer from the labelled source domain to the unlabeled target domain by reducing the cross-domain discrepancy. However, most of the studies were based on direct adaptation from the source domain to the target domain and have suffered from large domain discrepancies. To overcome this challenge, in this paper, we propose the domain-augmented domain adaptation (DADA) to generate pseudo domains that have smaller discrepancies with the target domain, to enhance the knowledge transfer process by minimizing the discrepancy between the target domain and pseudo domains. Furthermore, we design a pseudo-labeling method for DADA by projecting representations from the target domain to multiple pseudo domains and taking the averaged predictions on the classification from the pseudo domains as the pseudo labels. We conduct extensive experiments with the state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on four benchmark datasets: Office Home, Office-31, VisDA2017, and Digital datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of our model.

Re-ranking With Constraints on Diversified Exposures for Homepage Recommender System

The homepage recommendation on most E-commerce applications places items in a hierarchical manner, where different channels display items in different styles. Existing algorithms usually optimize the performance of a single channel. So designing the model to achieve the optimal recommendation list which maximize the Click-Through Rate (CTR) of whole homepage is a challenge problem. Other than the accuracy objective, display diversity on the homepage is also important since homogeneous display usually hurts user experience. In this paper, we propose a two-stage architecture of the homepage recommendation system. In the first stage, we develop efficient algorithms for recommending items to proper channels while maintaining diversity. The two methods can be combined: user-channel-item predictive model with diversity constraint. In the second stage, we provide an ordered list of items in each channel. Existing re-ranking models are hard to describe the mutual influence between items in both intra-channel and inter-channel. Therefore, we propose a Deep \& Hierarchical Attention Network Re-ranking (DHANR) model for homepage recommender systems. The Hierarchical Attention Network consists of an item encoder, an item-level attention layer, a channel encoder and a channel-level attention layer. Our method achieves a significant improvement in terms of precision, intra-list average distance(ILAD) and channel-wise Precision@k in offline experiments and in terms of CTR and ILAD in our online systems.

Mitigating Performance Saturation in Neural Marked Point Processes: Architectures and Loss Functions

Attributed event sequences are commonly encountered in practice. A recent research line focuses on incorporating neural networks with the statistical model -- marked point processes, which is the conventional tool for dealing with attributed event sequences. Neural marked point processes possess good interpretability of probabilistic models as well as the representational power of neural networks. However, we find that performance of neural marked point processes is not always increasing as the network architecture becomes more complicated and larger, which is what we call the performance saturation phenomenon. This is due to the fact that the generalization error of neural marked point processes is determined by both the network representational ability and the model specification at the same time. Therefore we can draw two major conclusions: first, simple network structures can perform no worse than complicated ones for some cases; second, using a proper probabilistic assumption is as equally, if not more, important as improving the complexity of the network. Based on this observation, we propose a simple graph-based network structure called GCHP, which utilizes only graph convolutional layers, thus it can be easily accelerated by the parallel mechanism. We directly consider the distribution of interarrival times instead of imposing a specific assumption on the conditional intensity function, and propose to use a likelihood ratio loss with a moment matching mechanism for optimization and model selection. Experimental results show that GCHP can significantly reduce training time and the likelihood ratio loss with interarrival time probability assumptions can greatly improve the model performance.