Conversational dense retrieval has shown to be effective in conversational search. However, a major limitation of conversational dense retrieval is their lack of interpretability, hindering intuitive understanding of model behaviors for targeted improvements. This paper presents CONVINV, a simple yet effective approach to shed light on interpretable conversational dense retrieval models. CONVINV transforms opaque conversational session embeddings into explicitly interpretable text while faithfully maintaining their original retrieval performance as much as possible. Such transformation is achieved by training a recently proposed Vec2Text model based on the ad-hoc query encoder, leveraging the fact that the session and query embeddings share the same space in existing conversational dense retrieval. To further enhance interpretability, we propose to incorporate external interpretable query rewrites into the transformation process. Extensive evaluations on three conversational search benchmarks demonstrate that CONVINV can yield more interpretable text and faithfully preserve original retrieval performance than baselines. Our work connects opaque session embeddings with transparent query rewriting, paving the way toward trustworthy conversational search.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown to be astonishingly capable models for molecular property prediction, particularly as surrogates for expensive density functional theory calculations of relaxed energy for novel material discovery. However, one limitation of GNNs in this context is the lack of useful uncertainty prediction methods, as this is critical to the material discovery pipeline. In this work, we show that uncertainty quantification for relaxed energy calculations is more complex than uncertainty quantification for other kinds of molecular property prediction, due to the effect that structure optimizations have on the error distribution. We propose that distribution-free techniques are more useful tools for assessing calibration, recalibrating, and developing uncertainty prediction methods for GNNs performing relaxed energy calculations. We also develop a relaxed energy task for evaluating uncertainty methods for equivariant GNNs, based on distribution-free recalibration and using the Open Catalyst Project dataset. We benchmark a set of popular uncertainty prediction methods on this task, and show that latent distance methods, with our novel improvements, are the most well-calibrated and economical approach for relaxed energy calculations. Finally, we demonstrate that our latent space distance method produces results which align with our expectations on a clustering example, and on specific equation of state and adsorbate coverage examples from outside the training dataset.
Additive noise models (ANMs) are an important setting studied in causal inference. Most of the existing works on ANMs assume causal sufficiency, i.e., there are no unobserved confounders. This paper focuses on confounded ANMs, where a set of treatment variables and a target variable are affected by an unobserved confounder that follows a multivariate Gaussian distribution. We introduce a novel approach for estimating the average causal effects (ACEs) of any subset of the treatment variables on the outcome and demonstrate that a small set of interventional distributions is sufficient to estimate all of them. In addition, we propose a randomized algorithm that further reduces the number of required interventions to poly-logarithmic in the number of nodes. Finally, we demonstrate that these interventions are also sufficient to recover the causal structure between the observed variables. This establishes that a poly-logarithmic number of interventions is sufficient to infer the causal effects of any subset of treatments on the outcome in confounded ANMs with high probability, even when the causal structure between treatments is unknown. The simulation results indicate that our method can accurately estimate all ACEs in the finite-sample regime. We also demonstrate the practical significance of our algorithm by evaluating it on semi-synthetic data.
Sharding is essential for improving blockchain scalability. Existing protocols overlook diverse adversarial attacks, limiting transaction throughput. This paper presents Reticulum, a groundbreaking sharding protocol addressing this issue, boosting blockchain scalability. Reticulum employs a two-phase approach, adapting transaction throughput based on runtime adversarial attacks. It comprises "control" and "process" shards in two layers. Process shards contain at least one trustworthy node, while control shards have a majority of trusted nodes. In the first phase, transactions are written to blocks and voted on by nodes in process shards. Unanimously accepted blocks are confirmed. In the second phase, blocks without unanimous acceptance are voted on by control shards. Blocks are accepted if the majority votes in favor, eliminating first-phase opponents and silent voters. Reticulum uses unanimous voting in the first phase, involving fewer nodes, enabling more parallel process shards. Control shards finalize decisions and resolve disputes. Experiments confirm Reticulum's innovative design, providing high transaction throughput and robustness against various network attacks, outperforming existing sharding protocols for blockchain networks.
The Tsetlin Machine (TM) has gained significant attention in Machine Learning (ML). By employing logical fundamentals, it facilitates pattern learning and representation, offering an alternative approach for developing comprehensible Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a specific focus on pattern classification in the form of conjunctive clauses. In the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), TM is utilised to construct word embedding and describe target words using clauses. To enhance the descriptive capacity of these clauses, we study the concept of Reasoning by Elimination (RbE) in clauses' formulation, which involves incorporating feature negations to provide a more comprehensive representation. In more detail, this paper employs the Tsetlin Machine Auto-Encoder (TM-AE) architecture to generate dense word vectors, aiming at capturing contextual information by extracting feature-dense vectors for a given vocabulary. Thereafter, the principle of RbE is explored to improve descriptivity and optimise the performance of the TM. Specifically, the specificity parameter s and the voting margin parameter T are leveraged to regulate feature distribution in the state space, resulting in a dense representation of information for each clause. In addition, we investigate the state spaces of TM-AE, especially for the forgotten/excluded features. Empirical investigations on artificially generated data, the IMDB dataset, and the 20 Newsgroups dataset showcase the robustness of the TM, with accuracy reaching 90.62\% for the IMDB.
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) systems often have imperfect performance, which affects robot navigation decisions. This research introduces a novel Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) integrity monitor for VPR which demonstrates improved performance and generalizability over the previous state-of-the-art SVM approach, removing per-environment training and reducing manual tuning requirements. We test our proposed system in extensive real-world experiments, where we also present two real-time integrity-based VPR verification methods: an instantaneous rejection method for a robot navigating to a goal zone (Experiment 1); and a historical method that takes a best, verified, match from its recent trajectory and uses an odometer to extrapolate forwards to a current position estimate (Experiment 2). Noteworthy results for Experiment 1 include a decrease in aggregate mean along-track goal error from ~9.8m to ~3.1m in missions the robot pursued to completion, and an increase in the aggregate rate of successful mission completion from ~41% to ~55%. Experiment 2 showed a decrease in aggregate mean along-track localization error from ~2.0m to ~0.5m, and an increase in the aggregate precision of localization attempts from ~97% to ~99%. Overall, our results demonstrate the practical usefulness of a VPR integrity monitor in real-world robotics to improve VPR localization and consequent navigation performance.
Metadata play a crucial role in ensuring the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of datasets. This paper investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, to improve adherence to metadata standards. We conducted experiments on 200 random data records describing human samples relating to lung cancer from the NCBI BioSample repository, evaluating GPT-4's ability to suggest edits for adherence to metadata standards. We computed the adherence accuracy of field name-field value pairs through a peer review process, and we observed a marginal average improvement in adherence to the standard data dictionary from 79% to 80% (p<0.5). We then prompted GPT-4 with domain information in the form of the textual descriptions of CEDAR templates and recorded a significant improvement to 97% from 79% (p<0.01). These results indicate that, while LLMs may not be able to correct legacy metadata to ensure satisfactory adherence to standards when unaided, they do show promise for use in automated metadata curation when integrated with a structured knowledge base
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.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.