Navigating the landscape of particle accelerators has become increasingly challenging with recent surges in contributions. These intricate devices challenge comprehension, even within individual facilities. To address this, we introduce PACuna, a fine-tuned language model refined through publicly available accelerator resources like conferences, pre-prints, and books. We automated data collection and question generation to minimize expert involvement and make the data publicly available. PACuna demonstrates proficiency in addressing intricate accelerator questions, validated by experts. Our approach shows adapting language models to scientific domains by fine-tuning technical texts and auto-generated corpora capturing the latest developments can further produce pre-trained models to answer some intricate questions that commercially available assistants cannot and can serve as intelligent assistants for individual facilities.
Reasoning with knowledge graphs (KGs) has primarily focused on triple-shaped facts. Recent advancements have been explored to enhance the semantics of these facts by incorporating more potent representations, such as hyper-relational facts. However, these approaches are limited to \emph{atomic facts}, which describe a single piece of information. This paper extends beyond \emph{atomic facts} and delves into \emph{nested facts}, represented by quoted triples where subjects and objects are triples themselves (e.g., ((\emph{BarackObama}, \emph{holds\_position}, \emph{President}), \emph{succeed\_by}, (\emph{DonaldTrump}, \emph{holds\_position}, \emph{President}))). These nested facts enable the expression of complex semantics like \emph{situations} over time and \emph{logical patterns} over entities and relations. In response, we introduce NestE, a novel KG embedding approach that captures the semantics of both atomic and nested factual knowledge. NestE represents each atomic fact as a $1\times3$ matrix, and each nested relation is modeled as a $3\times3$ matrix that rotates the $1\times3$ atomic fact matrix through matrix multiplication. Each element of the matrix is represented as a complex number in the generalized 4D hypercomplex space, including (spherical) quaternions, hyperbolic quaternions, and split-quaternions. Through thorough analysis, we demonstrate the embedding's efficacy in capturing diverse logical patterns over nested facts, surpassing the confines of first-order logic-like expressions. Our experimental results showcase NestE's significant performance gains over current baselines in triple prediction and conditional link prediction. The code and pre-trained models are open available at //github.com/xiongbo010/NestE.
Table reasoning has shown remarkable progress in a wide range of table-based tasks. These challenging tasks require reasoning over both free-form natural language (NL) questions and semi-structured tabular data. However, previous table reasoning solutions suffer from significant performance degradation on "huge" tables. In addition, most existing methods struggle to reason over complex questions since they lack essential information or they are scattered in different places. To alleviate these challenges, we exploit a table provider, namely TAP4LLM, on versatile sampling, augmentation, and packing methods to achieve effective semi-structured data reasoning using large language models (LLMs), which 1) decompose raw tables into sub-tables with specific rows or columns based on the rules or semantic similarity; 2) augment table information by extracting semantic and statistical metadata from raw tables while retrieving relevant knowledge from trustworthy knowledge sources (e.g., Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia); 3) pack sampled tables with augmented knowledge into sequence prompts for LLMs reasoning while balancing the token allocation trade-off. We show that TAP4LLM allows for different components as plug-ins, enhancing LLMs' understanding of structured data in diverse tabular tasks.
When selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of represented voters) of the selected committee. Previous work has studied the impact on utilitarian welfare and coverage when requiring the committee to satisfy minimal requirements such as justified representation or weak proportionality. In this paper, we consider the impact of imposing much more demanding proportionality axioms. We identify a class of voting rules that achieve strong guarantees on utilitarian welfare and coverage when combined with appropriate completions. This class is defined via a weakening of priceability and contains prominent rules such as the Method of Equal Shares. We show that committees selected by these rules (i) can be completed to achieve optimal coverage and (ii) can be completed to achieve an asymptotically optimal approximation to the utilitarian welfare if they additionally satisfy EJR+. Answering an open question of Elkind et al. (2022), we use the Greedy Justified Candidate Rule to obtain the best possible utilitarian guarantee subject to proportionality. We also consider completion methods suggested in the participatory budgeting literature and other objectives besides welfare and coverage.
Semantic segmentation is a common task in autonomous driving to understand the surrounding environment. Driveable Area Segmentation and Lane Detection are particularly important for safe and efficient navigation on the road. However, original semantic segmentation models are computationally expensive and require high-end hardware, which is not feasible for embedded systems in autonomous vehicles. This paper proposes a lightweight model for the driveable area and lane line segmentation. TwinLiteNet is designed cheaply but achieves accurate and efficient segmentation results. We evaluate TwinLiteNet on the BDD100K dataset and compare it with modern models. Experimental results show that our TwinLiteNet performs similarly to existing approaches, requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Specifically, TwinLiteNet achieves a mIoU score of 91.3% for the Drivable Area task and 31.08% IoU for the Lane Detection task with only 0.4 million parameters and achieves 415 FPS on GPU RTX A5000. Furthermore, TwinLiteNet can run in real-time on embedded devices with limited computing power, especially since it achieves 60FPS on Jetson Xavier NX, making it an ideal solution for self-driving vehicles. Code is available: url{//github.com/chequanghuy/TwinLiteNet}.
Diffusion models have gained significant attention in the realm of image generation due to their exceptional performance. Their success has been recently expanded to text generation via generating all tokens within a sequence concurrently. However, natural language exhibits a far more pronounced sequential dependency in comparison to images, and the majority of existing language models are trained with a left-to-right auto-regressive approach. To account for the inherent sequential characteristic of natural language, we introduce Auto-Regressive Diffusion (AR-Diffusion). AR-Diffusion ensures that the generation of tokens on the right depends on the generated ones on the left, a mechanism achieved through employing a dynamic number of denoising steps that vary based on token position. This results in tokens on the left undergoing fewer denoising steps than those on the right, thereby enabling them to generate earlier and subsequently influence the generation of tokens on the right. In a series of experiments on various text generation tasks, including text summarization, machine translation, and common sense generation, AR-Diffusion clearly demonstrated its superiority over existing diffusion language models and that it can be $100\times\sim600\times$ faster when achieving comparable results. Our code is available at //github.com/microsoft/ProphetNet/tree/master/AR-diffusion.
Privacy-preserving distributed average consensus has received significant attention recently due to its wide applicability. Based on the achieved performances, existing approaches can be broadly classified into perfect accuracy-prioritized approaches such as secure multiparty computation (SMPC), and worst-case privacy-prioritized approaches such as differential privacy (DP). Methods of the first class achieve perfect output accuracy but reveal some private information, while methods from the second class provide privacy against the strongest adversary at the cost of a loss of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a general approach named adaptive differentially quantized subspace perturbation (ADQSP) which combines quantization schemes with so-called subspace perturbation. Although not relying on cryptographic primitives, the proposed approach enjoys the benefits of both accuracy-prioritized and privacy-prioritized methods and is able to unify them. More specifically, we show that by varying a single quantization parameter the proposed method can vary between SMPC-type performances and DP-type performances. Our results show the potential of exploiting traditional distributed signal processing tools for providing cryptographic guarantees. In addition to a comprehensive theoretical analysis, numerical validations are conducted to substantiate our results.
The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is crucial to assess their performance and mitigate potential security risks. In this paper, we introduce PromptBench, a unified library to evaluate LLMs. It consists of several key components that are easily used and extended by researchers: prompt construction, prompt engineering, dataset and model loading, adversarial prompt attack, dynamic evaluation protocols, and analysis tools. PromptBench is designed to be an open, general, and flexible codebase for research purposes that can facilitate original study in creating new benchmarks, deploying downstream applications, and designing new evaluation protocols. The code is available at: //github.com/microsoft/promptbench and will be continuously supported.
Robots' acceptability among humans and their sociability can be significantly enhanced by incorporating human-like reactions. Humans can react to environmental events very quickly and without thinking. An instance where humans display natural reactions is when they encounter a sudden and loud sound that startles or frightens them. During such moments, individuals may instinctively move their hands, turn toward the origin of the sound, and try to determine the event's cause. This inherent behavior motivated us to explore this less-studied part of social robotics. In this work, a multi-modal system composed of an action generator, sound classifier, and YOLO object detector was designed to sense the environment and, in the presence of sudden loud sounds, show natural human fear reactions, and finally, locate the fear-causing sound source in the environment. These unique and valid generated motions and inferences could imitate intrinsic human reactions and enhance the sociability of robots. For motion generation, a model based on LSTM and MDN networks was proposed to synthesize various motions. Also, in the case of sound detection, a transfer learning model was preferred that used the spectrogram of sound signals as its input. After developing individual models for sound detection, motion generation, and image recognition, they were integrated into a comprehensive fear module that was implemented on the NAO robot. Finally, the fear module was tested in practical application and two groups of experts and non-experts filled out a questionnaire to evaluate the performance of the robot. Given our promising results, this preliminary exploratory research provides a fresh perspective on social robotics and could be a starting point for modeling intrinsic human behaviors and emotions in robots.
The cyber-threat landscape has evolved tremendously in recent years, with new threat variants emerging daily, and large-scale coordinated campaigns becoming more prevalent. In this study, we propose CELEST (CollaborativE LEarning for Scalable Threat detection), a federated machine learning framework for global threat detection over HTTP, which is one of the most commonly used protocols for malware dissemination and communication. CELEST leverages federated learning in order to collaboratively train a global model across multiple clients who keep their data locally, thus providing increased privacy and confidentiality assurances. Through a novel active learning component integrated with the federated learning technique, our system continuously discovers and learns the behavior of new, evolving, and globally-coordinated cyber threats. We show that CELEST is able to expose attacks that are largely invisible to individual organizations. For instance, in one challenging attack scenario with data exfiltration malware, the global model achieves a three-fold increase in Precision-Recall AUC compared to the local model. We deploy CELEST on two university networks and show that it is able to detect the malicious HTTP communication with high precision and low false positive rates. Furthermore, during its deployment, CELEST detected a set of previously unknown 42 malicious URLs and 20 malicious domains in one day, which were confirmed to be malicious by VirusTotal.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.