Instructing the model to generate a sequence of intermediate steps, a.k.a., a chain of thought (CoT), is a highly effective method to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on arithmetics and symbolic reasoning tasks. However, the mechanism behind CoT remains unclear. This work provides a theoretical understanding of the power of CoT for decoder-only transformers through the lens of expressiveness. Conceptually, CoT empowers the model with the ability to perform inherently serial computation, which is otherwise lacking in transformers, especially when depth is low. Given input length $n$, previous works have shown that constant-depth transformers with finite precision $\mathsf{poly}(n)$ embedding size can only solve problems in $\mathsf{TC}^0$ without CoT. We first show an even tighter expressiveness upper bound for constant-depth transformers with constant-bit precision, which can only solve problems in $\mathsf{AC}^0$, a proper subset of $ \mathsf{TC}^0$. However, with $T$ steps of CoT, constant-depth transformers using constant-bit precision and $O(\log n)$ embedding size can solve any problem solvable by boolean circuits of size $T$. Empirically, enabling CoT dramatically improves the accuracy for tasks that are hard for parallel computation, including the composition of permutation groups, iterated squaring, and circuit value problems, especially for low-depth transformers.
Foundation models have become prominent in computer vision, achieving notable success in various tasks. However, their effectiveness largely depends on pre-training with extensive datasets. Applying foundation models directly to small datasets of capsule endoscopy images from scratch is challenging. Pre-training on broad, general vision datasets is crucial for successfully fine-tuning our model for specific tasks. In this work, we introduce a simplified approach called Adapt foundation models with a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique for easier customization. Our method, inspired by the DINOv2 foundation model, applies low-rank adaptation learning to tailor foundation models for capsule endoscopy diagnosis effectively. Unlike traditional fine-tuning methods, our strategy includes LoRA layers designed to absorb specific surgical domain knowledge. During the training process, we keep the main model (the backbone encoder) fixed and focus on optimizing the LoRA layers and the disease classification component. We tested our method on two publicly available datasets for capsule endoscopy disease classification. The results were impressive, with our model achieving 97.75% accuracy on the Kvasir-Capsule dataset and 98.81% on the Kvasirv2 dataset. Our solution demonstrates that foundation models can be adeptly adapted for capsule endoscopy diagnosis, highlighting that mere reliance on straightforward fine-tuning or pre-trained models from general computer vision tasks is inadequate for such specific applications.
We prove that training neural networks on 1-D data is equivalent to solving a convex Lasso problem with a fixed, explicitly defined dictionary matrix of features. The specific dictionary depends on the activation and depth. We consider 2 and 3-layer networks with piecewise linear activations, and rectangular and tree networks with sign activation and arbitrary depth. Interestingly in absolute value and symmetrized ReLU networks, a third layer creates features that represent reflections of training data about themselves. The Lasso representation sheds insight to globally optimal networks and the solution landscape.
We consider the problem of selecting an optimal subset of information sources for a hypothesis testing/classification task where the goal is to identify the true state of the world from a finite set of hypotheses, based on finite observation samples from the sources. In order to characterize the learning performance, we propose a misclassification penalty framework, which enables nonuniform treatment of different misclassification errors. In a centralized Bayesian learning setting, we study two variants of the subset selection problem: (i) selecting a minimum cost information set to ensure that the maximum penalty of misclassifying the true hypothesis is below a desired bound and (ii) selecting an optimal information set under a limited budget to minimize the maximum penalty of misclassifying the true hypothesis. Under certain assumptions, we prove that the objective (or constraints) of these combinatorial optimization problems are weak (or approximate) submodular, and establish high-probability performance guarantees for greedy algorithms. Further, we propose an alternate metric for information set selection which is based on the total penalty of misclassification. We prove that this metric is submodular and establish near-optimal guarantees for the greedy algorithms for both the information set selection problems. Finally, we present numerical simulations to validate our theoretical results over several randomly generated instances.
We prove impossibility results for adaptivity in non-smooth stochastic convex optimization. Given a set of problem parameters we wish to adapt to, we define a "price of adaptivity" (PoA) that, roughly speaking, measures the multiplicative increase in suboptimality due to uncertainty in these parameters. When the initial distance to the optimum is unknown but a gradient norm bound is known, we show that the PoA is at least logarithmic for expected suboptimality, and double-logarithmic for median suboptimality. When there is uncertainty in both distance and gradient norm, we show that the PoA must be polynomial in the level of uncertainty. Our lower bounds nearly match existing upper bounds, and establish that there is no parameter-free lunch. En route, we also establish tight upper and lower bounds for (known-parameter) high-probability stochastic convex optimization with heavy-tailed and bounded noise, respectively.
We discuss the advantages of a spline-based freeform shape optimization approach using the example of a multi-tapered coaxial balun connected to a spiral antenna. The underlying simulation model is given in terms of a recently proposed isogeometric integral equation formulation, which can be interpreted as a high-order generalization of the partial element equivalent circuit method. We demonstrate a significant improvement in the optimized design, i.e., a reduction in the magnitude of the scattering parameter over a wide frequency range.
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the absence of active exploration calls for attention on the model robustness to tackle the sim-to-real gap, where the discrepancy between the simulated and deployed environments can significantly undermine the performance of the learned policy. To endow the learned policy with robustness in a sample-efficient manner in the presence of high-dimensional state-action space, this paper considers the sample complexity of distributionally robust linear Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an uncertainty set characterized by the total variation distance using offline data. We develop a pessimistic model-based algorithm and establish its sample complexity bound under minimal data coverage assumptions, which outperforms prior art by at least $\widetilde{O}(d)$, where $d$ is the feature dimension. We further improve the performance guarantee of the proposed algorithm by incorporating a carefully-designed variance estimator.
In this work, a deep learning-based technique is used to study the image-to-joint inverse kinematics of a tendon-driven supportive continuum arm. An eye-off-hand configuration is considered by mounting a camera at a fixed pose with respect to the inertial frame attached at the arm base. This camera captures an image for each distinct joint variable at each sampling time to construct the training dataset. This dataset is then employed to adapt a feed-forward deep convolutional neural network, namely the modified VGG-16 model, to estimate the joint variable. One thousand images are recorded to train the deep network, and transfer learning and fine-tuning techniques are applied to the modified VGG-16 to further improve the training. Finally, training is also completed with a larger dataset of images that are affected by various types of noises, changes in illumination, and partial occlusion. The main contribution of this research is the development of an image-to-joint network that can estimate the joint variable given an image of the arm, even if the image is not captured in an ideal condition. The key benefits of this research are twofold: 1) image-to-joint mapping can offer a real-time alternative to computationally complex inverse kinematic mapping through analytical models; and 2) the proposed technique can provide robustness against noise, occlusion, and changes in illumination. The dataset is publicly available on Kaggle.
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.