Finding a transformation between two unknown probability distributions from finite samples is crucial for modeling complex data distributions and performing tasks such as sample generation, domain adaptation and statistical inference. One powerful framework for such transformations is normalizing flow, which transforms an unknown distribution into a standard normal distribution using an invertible network. In this paper, we introduce a novel model called SyMOT-Flow that trains an invertible transformation by minimizing the symmetric maximum mean discrepancy between samples from two unknown distributions, and an optimal transport cost is incorporated as regularization to obtain a short-distance and interpretable transformation. The resulted transformation leads to more stable and accurate sample generation. Several theoretical results are established for the proposed model and its effectiveness is validated with low-dimensional illustrative examples as well as high-dimensional bi-modality medical image generation through the forward and reverse flows.
Integrating large language models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs derived from domain-specific data represents an important advancement towards more powerful and factual reasoning. As these models grow more capable, it is crucial to enable them to perform multi-step inferences over real-world knowledge graphs while minimizing hallucination. While large language models excel at conversation and text generation, their ability to reason over domain-specialized graphs of interconnected entities remains limited. For example, can we query a LLM to identify the optimal contact in a professional network for a specific goal, based on relationships and attributes in a private database? The answer is no--such capabilities lie beyond current methods. However, this question underscores a critical technical gap that must be addressed. Many high-value applications in areas such as science, security, and e-commerce rely on proprietary knowledge graphs encoding unique structures, relationships, and logical constraints. We introduce a fine-tuning framework for developing Graph-aligned LAnguage Models (GLaM) that transforms a knowledge graph into an alternate text representation with labeled question-answer pairs. We demonstrate that grounding the models in specific graph-based knowledge expands the models' capacity for structure-based reasoning. Our methodology leverages the large-language model's generative capabilities to create the dataset and proposes an efficient alternate to retrieval-augmented generation styled methods.
In-context learning of large-language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing, while extensive case studies reveal that the single-step chain-of-thought prompting approach faces challenges such as attention diffusion and inadequate performance in complex tasks like text-to-SQL. To improve the contextual learning capabilities of LLMs in text-to-SQL, a workflow paradigm method is proposed, aiming to enhance the attention and problem-solving scope of LLMs through decomposition. Specifically, the information determination module for eliminating redundant information and the brand-new prompt structure based on problem classification greatly enhance the model's attention. Additionally, the inclusion of self-correcting and active learning modules greatly expands the problem-solving scope of LLMs, hence improving the upper limit of LLM-based approaches. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms other methods by a significant margin. About 2-3 percentage point improvements compared to the existing baseline on the Spider Dev and Spider-Realistic datasets and new SOTA results on the Spider Test dataset are achieved. Our code is available on GitHub: \url{//github.com/FlyingFeather/DEA-SQL}.
The task of precisely learning the probability distribution of rows within tabular data and producing authentic synthetic samples is both crucial and non-trivial. Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) marks a notable improvement in generative modeling, addressing the challenges faced by its predecessor, generative adversarial network. However, due to the mixed data types and multimodalities prevalent in tabular data, the delicate equilibrium between the generator and discriminator, as well as the inherent instability of Wasserstein distance in high dimensions, WGAN often fails to produce high-fidelity samples. To this end, we propose POTNet (Penalized Optimal Transport Network), a generative deep neural network based on a novel, robust, and interpretable marginally-penalized Wasserstein (MPW) loss. POTNet can effectively model tabular data containing both categorical and continuous features. Moreover, it offers the flexibility to condition on a subset of features. We provide theoretical justifications for the motivation behind the MPW loss. We also empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on four different benchmarks across a variety of real-world and simulated datasets. Our proposed model achieves orders of magnitude speedup during the sampling stage compared to state-of-the-art generative models for tabular data, thereby enabling efficient large-scale synthetic data generation.
Mutation validation (MV) is a recently proposed approach for model selection, garnering significant interest due to its unique characteristics and potential benefits compared to the widely used cross-validation (CV) method. In this study, we empirically compared MV and $k$-fold CV using benchmark and real-world datasets. By employing Bayesian tests, we compared generalization estimates yielding three posterior probabilities: practical equivalence, CV superiority, and MV superiority. We also evaluated the differences in the capacity of the selected models and computational efficiency. We found that both MV and CV select models with practically equivalent generalization performance across various machine learning algorithms and the majority of benchmark datasets. MV exhibited advantages in terms of selecting simpler models and lower computational costs. However, in some cases MV selected overly simplistic models leading to underfitting and showed instability in hyperparameter selection. These limitations of MV became more evident in the evaluation of a real-world neuroscientific task of predicting sex at birth using brain functional connectivity.
We develop a statistical inference method for an optimal transport map between distributions on real numbers with uniform confidence bands. The concept of optimal transport (OT) is used to measure distances between distributions, and OT maps are used to construct the distance. OT has been applied in many fields in recent years, and its statistical properties have attracted much interest. In particular, since the OT map is a function, a uniform norm-based statistical inference is significant for visualization and interpretation. In this study, we derive a limit distribution of a uniform norm of an estimation error for the OT map, and then develop a uniform confidence band based on it. In addition to our limit theorem, we develop a bootstrap method with kernel smoothing, then also derive its validation and guarantee on an asymptotic coverage probability of the confidence band. Our proof is based on the functional delta method and the representation of OT maps on the reals.
With the continuous growth in the number of parameters of transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the enormous size and computational demands of these models pose significant challenges for adapting them to specific downstream tasks, especially in environments with limited computational resources. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an effective solution by reducing the number of fine-tuning parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. The demands for fine-tuning PLMs, especially LLMs, have led to a surge in the development of PEFT methods, as depicted in Fig. 1. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of PEFT methods for PLMs. We summarize these PEFT methods, discuss their applications, and outline future directions. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using several representative PEFT methods to better understand their effectiveness in parameter efficiency and memory efficiency. By offering insights into the latest advancements and practical applications, this survey serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by PEFT in the context of PLMs.
Agent-based modeling and simulation has evolved as a powerful tool for modeling complex systems, offering insights into emergent behaviors and interactions among diverse agents. Integrating large language models into agent-based modeling and simulation presents a promising avenue for enhancing simulation capabilities. This paper surveys the landscape of utilizing large language models in agent-based modeling and simulation, examining their challenges and promising future directions. In this survey, since this is an interdisciplinary field, we first introduce the background of agent-based modeling and simulation and large language model-empowered agents. We then discuss the motivation for applying large language models to agent-based simulation and systematically analyze the challenges in environment perception, human alignment, action generation, and evaluation. Most importantly, we provide a comprehensive overview of the recent works of large language model-empowered agent-based modeling and simulation in multiple scenarios, which can be divided into four domains: cyber, physical, social, and hybrid, covering simulation of both real-world and virtual environments. Finally, since this area is new and quickly evolving, we discuss the open problems and promising future directions.
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.
Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) attracts increasing attention due to its potential to resolve the scalability problem of supervised Re-ID models. Most existing unsupervised methods adopt an iterative clustering mechanism, where the network was trained based on pseudo labels generated by unsupervised clustering. However, clustering errors are inevitable. To generate high-quality pseudo-labels and mitigate the impact of clustering errors, we propose a novel clustering relationship modeling framework for unsupervised person Re-ID. Specifically, before clustering, the relation between unlabeled images is explored based on a graph correlation learning (GCL) module and the refined features are then used for clustering to generate high-quality pseudo-labels.Thus, GCL adaptively mines the relationship between samples in a mini-batch to reduce the impact of abnormal clustering when training. To train the network more effectively, we further propose a selective contrastive learning (SCL) method with a selective memory bank update policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method shows much better results than most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17 datasets. We will release the code for model reproduction.
Current models for event causality identification (ECI) mainly adopt a supervised framework, which heavily rely on labeled data for training. Unfortunately, the scale of current annotated datasets is relatively limited, which cannot provide sufficient support for models to capture useful indicators from causal statements, especially for handing those new, unseen cases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel approach, shortly named CauSeRL, which leverages external causal statements for event causality identification. First of all, we design a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements. Then, we adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context-specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively).