Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Smoothed Log Barrier Function

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely applied to many control tasks and substantially improved the performances compared to conventional control methods in many domains where the reward function is well defined. However, for many real-world problems, it is often more convenient to formulate optimization problems in terms of rewards and constraints simultaneously. Optimizing such constrained problems via reward shaping can be difficult as it requires tedious manual tuning of reward functions with several interacting terms. Recent formulations which include constraints mostly require a pre-training phase, which often needs human expertise to collect data or assumes having a sub-optimal policy readily available. We propose a new constrained RL method called CSAC-LB (Constrained Soft Actor-Critic with Log Barrier Function), which achieves competitive performance without any pre-training by applying a linear smoothed log barrier function to an additional safety critic. It implements an adaptive penalty for policy learning and alleviates the numerical issues that are known to complicate the application of the log barrier function method. As a result, we show that with CSAC-LB, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several constrained control tasks with different levels of difficulty and evaluate our methods in a locomotion task on a real quadruped robot platform.

Unifying Generation and Compression: Ultra-low bitrate Image Coding Via Multi-stage Transformer

Recent progress in generative compression technology has significantly improved the perceptual quality of compressed data. However, these advancements primarily focus on producing high-frequency details, often overlooking the ability of generative models to capture the prior distribution of image content, thus impeding further bitrate reduction in extreme compression scenarios (<0.05 bpp). Motivated by the capabilities of predictive language models for lossless compression, this paper introduces a novel Unified Image Generation-Compression (UIGC) paradigm, merging the processes of generation and compression. A key feature of the UIGC framework is the adoption of vector-quantized (VQ) image models for tokenization, alongside a multi-stage transformer designed to exploit spatial contextual information for modeling the prior distribution. As such, the dual-purpose framework effectively utilizes the learned prior for entropy estimation and assists in the regeneration of lost tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed UIGC framework over existing codecs in perceptual quality and human perception, particularly in ultra-low bitrate scenarios (<=0.03 bpp), pioneering a new direction in generative compression.

"Lossless" Compression of Deep Neural Networks: A High-dimensional Neural Tangent Kernel Approach

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) are extremely powerful; however, this comes at the price of increased depth and having more parameters per layer, making their training and inference more computationally challenging. In an attempt to address this key limitation, efforts have been devoted to the compression (e.g., sparsification and/or quantization) of these large-scale machine learning models, so that they can be deployed on low-power IoT devices. In this paper, building upon recent advances in neural tangent kernel (NTK) and random matrix theory (RMT), we provide a novel compression approach to wide and fully-connected \emph{deep} neural nets. Specifically, we demonstrate that in the high-dimensional regime where the number of data points $n$ and their dimension $p$ are both large, and under a Gaussian mixture model for the data, there exists \emph{asymptotic spectral equivalence} between the NTK matrices for a large family of DNN models. This theoretical result enables "lossless" compression of a given DNN to be performed, in the sense that the compressed network yields asymptotically the same NTK as the original (dense and unquantized) network, with its weights and activations taking values \emph{only} in $\{ 0, \pm 1 \}$ up to a scaling. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data are conducted to support the advantages of the proposed compression scheme, with code available at \url{https://github.com/Model-Compression/Lossless_Compression}.

Open Ad Hoc Teamwork with Cooperative Game Theory

Ad hoc teamwork poses a challenging problem, requiring the design of an agent to collaborate with teammates without prior coordination or joint training. Open ad hoc teamwork further complicates this challenge by considering environments with a changing number of teammates, referred to as open teams. The state-of-the-art solution to this problem is graph-based policy learning (GPL), leveraging the generalizability of graph neural networks to handle an unrestricted number of agents and effectively address open teams. GPL's performance is superior to other methods, but its joint Q-value representation presents challenges for interpretation, hindering further development of this research line and applicability. In this paper, we establish a new theory to give an interpretation for the joint Q-value representation employed in GPL, from the perspective of cooperative game theory. Building on our theory, we propose a novel algorithm based on GPL framework, to complement the critical features that facilitate learning, but overlooked in GPL. Through experiments, we demonstrate the correctness of our theory by comparing the performance of the resulting algorithm with GPL in dynamic team compositions.

Intersectional Two-sided Fairness in Recommendation

Fairness of recommender systems (RS) has attracted increasing attention recently. Based on the involved stakeholders, the fairness of RS can be divided into user fairness, item fairness, and two-sided fairness which considers both user and item fairness simultaneously. However, we argue that the intersectional two-sided unfairness may still exist even if the RS is two-sided fair, which is observed and shown by empirical studies on real-world data in this paper, and has not been well-studied previously. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel approach called Intersectional Two-sided Fairness Recommendation (ITFR). Our method utilizes a sharpness-aware loss to perceive disadvantaged groups, and then uses collaborative loss balance to develop consistent distinguishing abilities for different intersectional groups. Additionally, predicted score normalization is leveraged to align positive predicted scores to fairly treat positives in different intersectional groups. Extensive experiments and analyses on three public datasets show that our proposed approach effectively alleviates the intersectional two-sided unfairness and consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Rapid Adoption, Hidden Risks: The Dual Impact of Large Language Model Customization

The increasing demand for customized Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of solutions like GPTs. These solutions facilitate tailored LLM creation via natural language prompts without coding. However, the trustworthiness of third-party custom versions of LLMs remains an essential concern. In this paper, we propose the first instruction backdoor attacks against applications integrated with untrusted customized LLMs (e.g., GPTs). Specifically, these attacks embed the backdoor into the custom version of LLMs by designing prompts with backdoor instructions, outputting the attacker's desired result when inputs contain the pre-defined triggers. Our attack includes 3 levels of attacks: word-level, syntax-level, and semantic-level, which adopt different types of triggers with progressive stealthiness. We stress that our attacks do not require fine-tuning or any modification to the backend LLMs, adhering strictly to GPTs development guidelines. We conduct extensive experiments on 4 prominent LLMs and 5 benchmark text classification datasets. The results show that our instruction backdoor attacks achieve the desired attack performance without compromising utility. Additionally, we propose an instruction-ignoring defense mechanism and demonstrate its partial effectiveness in mitigating such attacks. Our findings highlight the vulnerability and the potential risks of LLM customization such as GPTs.

Understanding Time Series Anomaly State Detection through One-Class Classification

For a long time, research on time series anomaly detection has mainly focused on finding outliers within a given time series. Admittedly, this is consistent with some practical problems, but in other practical application scenarios, people are concerned about: assuming a standard time series is given, how to judge whether another test time series deviates from the standard time series, which is more similar to the problem discussed in one-class classification (OCC). Therefore, in this article, we try to re-understand and define the time series anomaly detection problem through OCC, which we call 'time series anomaly state detection problem'. We first use stochastic processes and hypothesis testing to strictly define the 'time series anomaly state detection problem', and its corresponding anomalies. Then, we use the time series classification dataset to construct an artificial dataset corresponding to the problem. We compile 38 anomaly detection algorithms and correct some of the algorithms to adapt to handle this problem. Finally, through a large number of experiments, we fairly compare the actual performance of various time series anomaly detection algorithms, providing insights and directions for future research by researchers.

Can Large Language Models Understand Context?

Understanding context is key to understanding human language, an ability which Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly seen to demonstrate to an impressive extent. However, though the evaluation of LLMs encompasses various domains within the realm of Natural Language Processing, limited attention has been paid to probing their linguistic capability of understanding contextual features. This paper introduces a context understanding benchmark by adapting existing datasets to suit the evaluation of generative models. This benchmark comprises of four distinct tasks and nine datasets, all featuring prompts designed to assess the models' ability to understand context. First, we evaluate the performance of LLMs under the in-context learning pretraining scenario. Experimental results indicate that pre-trained dense models struggle with understanding more nuanced contextual features when compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Second, as LLM compression holds growing significance in both research and real-world applications, we assess the context understanding of quantized models under in-context-learning settings. We find that 3-bit post-training quantization leads to varying degrees of performance reduction on our benchmark. We conduct an extensive analysis of these scenarios to substantiate our experimental results.

ChatterBox: Multi-round Multimodal Referring and Grounding

In this study, we establish a baseline for a new task named multimodal multi-round referring and grounding (MRG), opening up a promising direction for instance-level multimodal dialogues. We present a new benchmark and an efficient vision-language model for this purpose. The new benchmark, named CB-300K, spans challenges including multi-round dialogue, complex spatial relationships among multiple instances, and consistent reasoning, which are beyond those shown in existing benchmarks. The proposed model, named ChatterBox, utilizes a two-branch architecture to collaboratively handle vision and language tasks. By tokenizing instance regions, the language branch acquires the ability to perceive referential information. Meanwhile, ChatterBox feeds a query embedding in the vision branch to a token receiver for visual grounding. A two-stage optimization strategy is devised, making use of both CB-300K and auxiliary external data to improve the model's stability and capacity for instance-level understanding. Experiments show that ChatterBox outperforms existing models in MRG both quantitatively and qualitatively, paving a new path towards multimodal dialogue scenarios with complicated and precise interactions. Code, data, and model are available at: https://github.com/sunsmarterjie/ChatterBox.

Cloud-Device Collaborative Learning for Multimodal Large Language Models

The burgeoning field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has exhibited remarkable performance in diverse tasks such as captioning, commonsense reasoning, and visual scene understanding. However, the deployment of these large-scale MLLMs on client devices is hindered by their extensive model parameters, leading to a notable decline in generalization capabilities when these models are compressed for device deployment. Addressing this challenge, we introduce a Cloud-Device Collaborative Continual Adaptation framework, designed to enhance the performance of compressed, device-deployed MLLMs by leveraging the robust capabilities of cloud-based, larger-scale MLLMs. Our framework is structured into three key components: a device-to-cloud uplink for efficient data transmission, cloud-based knowledge adaptation, and an optimized cloud-to-device downlink for model deployment. In the uplink phase, we employ an Uncertainty-guided Token Sampling (UTS) strategy to effectively filter out-of-distribution tokens, thereby reducing transmission costs and improving training efficiency. On the cloud side, we propose Adapter-based Knowledge Distillation (AKD) method to transfer refined knowledge from large-scale to compressed, pocket-size MLLMs. Furthermore, we propose a Dynamic Weight update Compression (DWC) strategy for the downlink, which adaptively selects and quantizes updated weight parameters, enhancing transmission efficiency and reducing the representational disparity between cloud and device models. Extensive experiments on several multimodal benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over prior Knowledge Distillation and device-cloud collaboration methods. Notably, we also validate the feasibility of our approach to real-world experiments.