The use of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) tasks is rapidly increasing, leading to changes in how researchers approach problems in the field. To fully utilize these models' abilities, a better understanding of their behavior for different input protocols is required. With LLMs, users can directly interact with the models through a text-based interface to define and solve various tasks. Hence, understanding the conversational abilities of these LLMs, which may not have been specifically trained for dialog modeling, is also important. This study examines different approaches for building dialog systems using LLMs by considering various aspects of the prompt. As part of prompt tuning, we experiment with various ways of providing instructions, exemplars, current query and additional context. The research also analyzes the representations of dialog history that have the optimal usable-information density. Based on the findings, the paper suggests more compact ways of providing dialog history information while ensuring good performance and reducing model's inference-API costs. The research contributes to a better understanding of how LLMs can be effectively used for building interactive systems.
In disentangled representation learning, a model is asked to tease apart a dataset's underlying sources of variation and represent them independently of one another. Since the model is provided with no ground truth information about these sources, inductive biases take a paramount role in enabling disentanglement. In this work, we construct an inductive bias towards compositionally encoding and decoding data by enforcing a harsh communication bottleneck. Concretely, we do this by (i) quantizing the latent space into learnable discrete codes with a separate scalar codebook per dimension and (ii) applying strong model regularization via an unusually high weight decay. Intuitively, the quantization forces the encoder to use a small number of latent values across many datapoints, which in turn enables the decoder to assign a consistent meaning to each value. Regularization then serves to drive the model towards this parsimonious strategy. We demonstrate the broad applicability of this approach by adding it to both basic data-reconstructing (vanilla autoencoder) and latent-reconstructing (InfoGAN) generative models. In order to reliably assess these models, we also propose InfoMEC, new metrics for disentanglement that are cohesively grounded in information theory and fix well-established shortcomings in previous metrics. Together with regularization, latent quantization dramatically improves the modularity and explicitness of learned representations on a representative suite of benchmark datasets. In particular, our quantized-latent autoencoder (QLAE) consistently outperforms strong methods from prior work in these key disentanglement properties without compromising data reconstruction.
Currently, video behavior recognition is one of the most foundational tasks of computer vision. The 2D neural networks of deep learning are built for recognizing pixel-level information such as images with RGB, RGB-D, or optical flow formats, with the current increasingly wide usage of surveillance video and more tasks related to human action recognition. There are increasing tasks requiring temporal information for frames dependency analysis. The researchers have widely studied video-based recognition rather than image-based(pixel-based) only to extract more informative elements from geometry tasks. Our current related research addresses multiple novel proposed research works and compares their advantages and disadvantages between the derived deep learning frameworks rather than machine learning frameworks. The comparison happened between existing frameworks and datasets, which are video format data only. Due to the specific properties of human actions and the increasingly wide usage of deep neural networks, we collected all research works within the last three years between 2020 to 2022. In our article, the performance of deep neural networks surpassed most of the techniques in the feature learning and extraction tasks, especially video action recognition.
Imperfect Information Games (IIGs) offer robust models for scenarios where decision-makers face uncertainty or lack complete information. Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) has been one of the most successful family of algorithms for tackling IIGs. The integration of skill-based strategy learning with CFR could potentially enhance learning performance for complex IIGs. For this, a hierarchical strategy needs to be learnt, wherein low-level components represent specific skills and the high-level component manages the transition between skills. This hierarchical approach also enhances interpretability, helping humans pinpoint scenarios where the agent is struggling and intervene with targeted expertise. This paper introduces the first hierarchical version of Deep CFR (HDCFR), an innovative method that boosts learning efficiency in tasks involving extensively large state spaces and deep game trees. A notable advantage of HDCFR over previous research in this field is its ability to facilitate learning with predefined (human) expertise and foster the acquisition of transferable skills that can be applied to similar tasks. To achieve this, we initially construct our algorithm on a tabular setting, encompassing hierarchical CFR updating rules and a variance-reduced Monte-Carlo sampling extension, and offer its essential theoretical guarantees. Then, to adapt our algorithm for large-scale applications, we employ neural networks as function approximators and suggest deep learning objectives that coincide with those in the tabular setting while maintaining the theoretical outcomes.
Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We introduce a new task of recommending relevant datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To operationalize this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present the first-ever published system for text-based dataset recommendation using machine learning techniques. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) constitute the backbone of critical infrastructures such as power grids or water distribution networks. Operating failures in these systems can cause serious risks for society. To avoid or minimize downtime, operators require real-time awareness about critical incidents. However, online event identification in CPSs is challenged by the complex interdependency of numerous physical and digital components, requiring to take cyber attacks and physical failures equally into account. The online event identification problem is further complicated through the lack of historical observations of critical but rare events, and the continuous evolution of cyber attack strategies. This work introduces and demonstrates CyPhERS, a Cyber-Physical Event Reasoning System. CyPhERS provides real-time information pertaining the occurrence, location, physical impact, and root cause of potentially critical events in CPSs, without the need for historical event observations. Key novelty of CyPhERS is the capability to generate informative and interpretable event signatures of known and unknown types of both cyber attacks and physical failures. The concept is evaluated and benchmarked on a demonstration case that comprises a multitude of attack and fault events targeting various components of a CPS. The results demonstrate that the event signatures provide relevant and inferable information on both known and unknown event types.
Biologically inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered considerable attention due to their low-energy consumption and spatio-temporal information processing capabilities. Most existing SNNs training methods first integrate output information across time steps, then adopt the cross-entropy (CE) loss to supervise the prediction of the average representations. However, in this work, we find the method above is not ideal for the SNNs training as it omits the temporal dynamics of SNNs and degrades the performance quickly with the decrease of inference time steps. One tempting method to model temporal correlations is to apply the same label supervision at each time step and treat them identically. Although it can acquire relatively consistent performance across various time steps, it still faces challenges in obtaining SNNs with high performance. Inspired by these observations, we propose Temporal-domain supervised Contrastive Learning (TCL) framework, a novel method to obtain SNNs with low latency and high performance by incorporating contrastive supervision with temporal domain information. Contrastive learning (CL) prompts the network to discern both consistency and variability in the representation space, enabling it to better learn discriminative and generalizable features. We extend this concept to the temporal domain of SNNs, allowing us to flexibly and fully leverage the correlation between representations at different time steps. Furthermore, we propose a Siamese Temporal-domain supervised Contrastive Learning (STCL) framework to enhance the SNNs via augmentation, temporal and class constraints simultaneously. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SNNs trained by our TCL and STCL can achieve both high performance and low latency, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of datasets (e.g., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and DVS-CIFAR10).
In this paper we introduce StructNet-CE, a novel real-time online learning framework for MIMO-OFDM channel estimation, which only utilizes over-the-air (OTA) pilot symbols for online training and converges within one OFDM subframe. The design of StructNet-CE leverages the structure information in the MIMO-OFDM system, including the repetitive structure of modulation constellation and the invariant property of symbol classification to inter-stream interference. The embedded structure information enables StructNet-CE to conduct channel estimation with a binary classification task and accurately learn channel coefficients with as few as two pilot OFDM symbols. Experiments show that the channel estimation performance is significantly improved with the incorporation of structure knowledge. StructNet-CE is compatible and readily applicable to current and future wireless networks, demonstrating the effectiveness and importance of combining machine learning techniques with domain knowledge for wireless communication systems.
This paper presents HaVQA, the first multimodal dataset for visual question-answering (VQA) tasks in the Hausa language. The dataset was created by manually translating 6,022 English question-answer pairs, which are associated with 1,555 unique images from the Visual Genome dataset. As a result, the dataset provides 12,044 gold standard English-Hausa parallel sentences that were translated in a fashion that guarantees their semantic match with the corresponding visual information. We conducted several baseline experiments on the dataset, including visual question answering, visual question elicitation, text-only and multimodal machine translation.
Deep-learning of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is creating highly functional tools that are, unfortunately, as hard to interpret as their natural counterparts. While it is possible to identify functional modules in natural brains using technologies such as fMRI, we do not have at our disposal similarly robust methods for artificial neural networks. Ideally, understanding which parts of an artificial neural network perform what function might help us to address a number of vexing problems in ANN research, such as catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. Furthermore, revealing a network's modularity could improve our trust in them by making these black boxes more transparent. Here we introduce a new information-theoretic concept that proves useful in understanding and analyzing a network's functional modularity: the relay information $I_R$. The relay information measures how much information groups of neurons that participate in a particular function (modules) relay from inputs to outputs. Combined with a greedy search algorithm, relay information can be used to {\em identify} computational modules in neural networks. We also show that the functionality of modules correlates with the amount of relay information they carry.