The Data Provenance Initiative: A Large Scale Audit of Dataset Licensing & Attribution in AI

The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we convene a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data. This points to a deepening divide in the types of data that are made available under different license conditions, and heightened implications for jurisdictional legal interpretations of copyright and fair use. We also observe frequent miscategorization of licenses on widely used dataset hosting sites, with license omission of 70%+ and error rates of 50%+. This points to a crisis in misattribution and informed use of the most popular datasets driving many recent breakthroughs. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire audit, with an interactive UI, the Data Provenance Explorer, which allows practitioners to trace and filter on data provenance for the most popular open source finetuning data collections: www.dataprovenance.org.

Translate Meanings, Not Just Words: IdiomKB's Role in Optimizing Idiomatic Translation with Language Models

To translate well, machine translation (MT) systems and general-purposed language models (LMs) need a deep understanding of both source and target languages and cultures. Therefore, idioms, with their non-compositional nature, pose particular challenges for Transformer-based systems, as literal translations often miss the intended meaning. Traditional methods, which replace idioms using existing knowledge bases (KBs), often lack scale and context awareness. Addressing these challenges, our approach prioritizes context awareness and scalability, allowing for offline storage of idioms in a manageable KB size. This ensures efficient serving with smaller models and provides a more comprehensive understanding of idiomatic expressions. We introduce a multilingual idiom KB (IdiomKB) developed using large LMs to address this. This KB facilitates better translation by smaller models, such as BLOOMZ (7.1B), Alpaca (7B), and InstructGPT (6.7B), by retrieving idioms' figurative meanings. We present a novel, GPT-4-powered metric for human-aligned evaluation, demonstrating that IdiomKB considerably boosts model performance. Human evaluations further validate our KB's quality.

Demystifying Oversmoothing in Attention-Based Graph Neural Networks

Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) refers to the phenomenon where increasing network depth leads to homogeneous node representations. While previous work has established that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) exponentially lose expressive power, it remains controversial whether the graph attention mechanism can mitigate oversmoothing. In this work, we provide a definitive answer to this question through a rigorous mathematical analysis, by viewing attention-based GNNs as nonlinear time-varying dynamical systems and incorporating tools and techniques from the theory of products of inhomogeneous matrices and the joint spectral radius. We establish that, contrary to popular belief, the graph attention mechanism cannot prevent oversmoothing and loses expressive power exponentially. The proposed framework extends the existing results on oversmoothing for symmetric GCNs to a significantly broader class of GNN models. In particular, our analysis accounts for asymmetric, state-dependent and time-varying aggregation operators and a wide range of common nonlinear activation functions, such as ReLU, LeakyReLU, GELU and SiLU.

The secret of immersion: actor driven camera movement generation for auto-cinematography

Immersion plays a vital role when designing cinematic creations, yet the difficulty in immersive shooting prevents designers to create satisfactory outputs. In this work, we analyze the specific components that contribute to cinematographic immersion considering spatial, emotional, and aesthetic level, while these components are then combined into a high-level evaluation mechanism. Guided by such a immersion mechanism, we propose a GAN-based camera control system that is able to generate actor-driven camera movements in the 3D virtual environment to obtain immersive film sequences. The proposed encoder-decoder architecture in the generation flow transfers character motion into camera trajectory conditioned on an emotion factor. This ensures spatial and emotional immersion by performing actor-camera synchronization physically and psychologically. The emotional immersion is further strengthened by incorporating regularization that controls camera shakiness for expressing different mental statuses. To achieve aesthetic immersion, we make effort to improve aesthetic frame compositions by modifying the synthesized camera trajectory. Based on a self-supervised adjustor, the adjusted camera placements can project the character to the appropriate on-frame locations following aesthetic rules. The experimental results indicate that our proposed camera control system can efficiently offer immersive cinematic videos, both quantitatively and qualitatively, based on a fine-grained immersive shooting. Live examples are shown in the supplementary video.

Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Stratified Class-Specific Attention Based Transformer Network

3D point cloud semantic segmentation aims to group all points into different semantic categories, which benefits important applications such as point cloud scene reconstruction and understanding. Existing supervised point cloud semantic segmentation methods usually require large-scale annotated point clouds for training and cannot handle new categories. While a few-shot learning method was proposed recently to address these two problems, it suffers from high computational complexity caused by graph construction and inability to learn fine-grained relationships among points due to the use of pooling operations. In this paper, we further address these problems by developing a new multi-layer transformer network for few-shot point cloud semantic segmentation. In the proposed network, the query point cloud features are aggregated based on the class-specific support features in different scales. Without using pooling operations, our method makes full use of all pixel-level features from the support samples. By better leveraging the support features for few-shot learning, the proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, with 15\% less inference time, over existing few-shot 3D point cloud segmentation models on the S3DIS dataset and the ScanNet dataset.

Parametric Surface Constrained Upsampler Network for Point Cloud

Designing a point cloud upsampler, which aims to generate a clean and dense point cloud given a sparse point representation, is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision. A line of attempts achieves this goal by establishing a point-to-point mapping function via deep neural networks. However, these approaches are prone to produce outlier points due to the lack of explicit surface-level constraints. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel surface regularizer into the upsampler network by forcing the neural network to learn the underlying parametric surface represented by bicubic functions and rotation functions, where the new generated points are then constrained on the underlying surface. These designs are integrated into two different networks for two tasks that take advantages of upsampling layers - point cloud upsampling and point cloud completion for evaluation. The state-of-the-art experimental results on both tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The implementation code will be available at https://github.com/corecai163/PSCU.

A Non-Asymptotic Analysis of Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks

A central challenge of building more powerful Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is the oversmoothing phenomenon, where increasing the network depth leads to homogeneous node representations and thus worse classification performance. While previous works have only demonstrated that oversmoothing is inevitable when the number of graph convolutions tends to infinity, in this paper, we precisely characterize the mechanism behind the phenomenon via a non-asymptotic analysis. Specifically, we distinguish between two different effects when applying graph convolutions -- an undesirable mixing effect that homogenizes node representations in different classes, and a desirable denoising effect that homogenizes node representations in the same class. By quantifying these two effects on random graphs sampled from the Contextual Stochastic Block Model (CSBM), we show that oversmoothing happens once the mixing effect starts to dominate the denoising effect, and the number of layers required for this transition is $O(\log N/\log (\log N))$ for sufficiently dense graphs with $N$ nodes. We also extend our analysis to study the effects of Personalized PageRank (PPR) on oversmoothing. Our results suggest that while PPR mitigates oversmoothing at deeper layers, PPR-based architectures still achieve their best performance at a shallow depth and are outperformed by the graph convolution approach on certain graphs. Finally, we support our theoretical results with numerical experiments, which further suggest that the oversmoothing phenomenon observed in practice may be exacerbated by the difficulty of optimizing deep GNN models.

Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation with Transductive Fine-tuning

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) expects models trained on base classes to work on novel classes with the help of a few support images. However, when there exists a domain gap between the base and novel classes, the state-of-the-art FSS methods may even fail to segment simple objects. To improve their performance on unseen domains, we propose to transductively fine-tune the base model on a set of query images under the few-shot setting, where the core idea is to implicitly guide the segmentation of query images using support labels. Although different images are not directly comparable, their class-wise prototypes are desired to be aligned in the feature space. By aligning query and support prototypes with an uncertainty-aware contrastive loss, and using a supervised cross-entropy loss and an unsupervised boundary loss as regularizations, our method could generalize the base model to the target domain without additional labels. We conduct extensive experiments under various cross-domain settings of natural, remote sensing, and medical images. The results show that our method could consistently and significantly improve the performance of prototypical FSS models in all cross-domain tasks.

PLMCL: Partial-Label Momentum Curriculum Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification

Multi-label image classification aims to predict all possible labels in an image. It is usually formulated as a partial-label learning problem, given the fact that it could be expensive in practice to annotate all labels in every training image. Existing works on partial-label learning focus on the case where each training image is annotated with only a subset of its labels. A special case is to annotate only one positive label in each training image. To further relieve the annotation burden and enhance the performance of the classifier, this paper proposes a new partial-label setting in which only a subset of the training images are labeled, each with only one positive label, while the rest of the training images remain unlabeled. To handle this new setting, we propose an end-to-end deep network, PLMCL (Partial Label Momentum Curriculum Learning), that can learn to produce confident pseudo labels for both partially-labeled and unlabeled training images. The novel momentum-based law updates soft pseudo labels on each training image with the consideration of the updating velocity of pseudo labels, which help avoid trapping to low-confidence local minimum, especially at the early stage of training in lack of both observed labels and confidence on pseudo labels. In addition, we present a confidence-aware scheduler to adaptively perform easy-to-hard learning for different labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed PLMCL outperforms many state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods under various partial-label settings on three different datasets.