Highly effective, task-specific prompts are often heavily engineered by experts to integrate detailed instructions and domain insights based on a deep understanding of both instincts of large language models (LLMs) and the intricacies of the target task. However, automating the generation of such expert-level prompts remains elusive. Existing prompt optimization methods tend to overlook the depth of domain knowledge and struggle to efficiently explore the vast space of expert-level prompts. Addressing this, we present PromptAgent, an optimization method that autonomously crafts prompts equivalent in quality to those handcrafted by experts. At its core, PromptAgent views prompt optimization as a strategic planning problem and employs a principled planning algorithm, rooted in Monte Carlo tree search, to strategically navigate the expert-level prompt space. Inspired by human-like trial-and-error exploration, PromptAgent induces precise expert-level insights and in-depth instructions by reflecting on model errors and generating constructive error feedback. Such a novel framework allows the agent to iteratively examine intermediate prompts (states), refine them based on error feedbacks (actions), simulate future rewards, and search for high-reward paths leading to expert prompts. We apply PromptAgent to 12 tasks spanning three practical domains: BIG-Bench Hard (BBH), as well as domain-specific and general NLP tasks, showing it significantly outperforms strong Chain-of-Thought and recent prompt optimization baselines. Extensive analyses emphasize its capability to craft expert-level, detailed, and domain-insightful prompts with great efficiency and generalizability.
Recent techniques for real-time view synthesis have rapidly advanced in fidelity and speed, and modern methods are capable of rendering near-photorealistic scenes at interactive frame rates. At the same time, a tension has arisen between explicit scene representations amenable to rasterization and neural fields built on ray marching, with state-of-the-art instances of the latter surpassing the former in quality while being prohibitively expensive for real-time applications. In this work, we introduce SMERF, a view synthesis approach that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among real-time methods on large scenes with footprints up to 300 m$^2$ at a volumetric resolution of 3.5 mm$^3$. Our method is built upon two primary contributions: a hierarchical model partitioning scheme, which increases model capacity while constraining compute and memory consumption, and a distillation training strategy that simultaneously yields high fidelity and internal consistency. Our approach enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) navigation within a web browser and renders in real-time on commodity smartphones and laptops. Extensive experiments show that our method exceeds the current state-of-the-art in real-time novel view synthesis by 0.78 dB on standard benchmarks and 1.78 dB on large scenes, renders frames three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art radiance field models, and achieves real-time performance across a wide variety of commodity devices, including smartphones. We encourage the reader to explore these models in person at our project website: //smerf-3d.github.io.
Leveraging network information for predictive modeling has become widespread in many domains. Within the realm of referral and targeted marketing, influencer detection stands out as an area that could greatly benefit from the incorporation of dynamic network representation due to the ongoing development of customer-brand relationships. To elaborate this idea, we introduce INFLECT-DGNN, a new framework for INFLuencer prEdiCTion with Dynamic Graph Neural Networks that combines Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) with weighted loss functions, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique (SMOTE) adapted for graph data, and a carefully crafted rolling-window strategy. To evaluate predictive performance, we utilize a unique corporate data set with networks of three cities and derive a profit-driven evaluation methodology for influencer prediction. Our results show how using RNN to encode temporal attributes alongside GNNs significantly improves predictive performance. We compare the results of various models to demonstrate the importance of capturing graph representation, temporal dependencies, and using a profit-driven methodology for evaluation.
The research study of detecting multiple intents and filling slots is becoming more popular because of its relevance to complicated real-world situations. Recent advanced approaches, which are joint models based on graphs, might still face two potential issues: (i) the uncertainty introduced by constructing graphs based on preliminary intents and slots, which may transfer intent-slot correlation information to incorrect label node destinations, and (ii) direct incorporation of multiple intent labels for each token w.r.t. token-level intent voting might potentially lead to incorrect slot predictions, thereby hurting the overall performance. To address these two issues, we propose a joint model named MISCA. Our MISCA introduces an intent-slot co-attention mechanism and an underlying layer of label attention mechanism. These mechanisms enable MISCA to effectively capture correlations between intents and slot labels, eliminating the need for graph construction. They also facilitate the transfer of correlation information in both directions: from intents to slots and from slots to intents, through multiple levels of label-specific representations, without relying on token-level intent information. Experimental results show that MISCA outperforms previous models, achieving new state-of-the-art overall accuracy performances on two benchmark datasets MixATIS and MixSNIPS. This highlights the effectiveness of our attention mechanisms.
Recent advances in deep learning, and especially the invention of encoder-decoder architectures, has significantly improved the performance of abstractive summarization systems. The majority of research has focused on written documents, however, neglecting the problem of multi-party dialogue summarization. In this paper, we present a dataset of French political debates for the purpose of enhancing resources for multi-lingual dialogue summarization. Our dataset consists of manually transcribed and annotated political debates, covering a range of topics and perspectives. We highlight the importance of high quality transcription and annotations for training accurate and effective dialogue summarization models, and emphasize the need for multilingual resources to support dialogue summarization in non-English languages. We also provide baseline experiments using state-of-the-art methods, and encourage further research in this area to advance the field of dialogue summarization. Our dataset will be made publicly available for use by the research community.
Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters and pretrained on massive amounts of data are now capable of near or better than state-of-the-art performance in a variety of downstream natural language processing tasks. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one such task that LLMs have been applied to with great success. However, little research has focused on applying LLMs to the more difficult subset of NMT called simultaneous translation (SimulMT), where translation begins before the entire source context is available to the model. In this paper, we address key challenges facing LLMs fine-tuned for SimulMT, validate classical SimulMT concepts and practices in the context of LLMs, explore adapting LLMs that are fine-tuned for NMT to the task of SimulMT, and introduce Simul-LLM, the first open-source fine-tuning and evaluation pipeline development framework for LLMs focused on SimulMT.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively.