High-quality random numbers are very critical to many fields such as cryptography, finance, and scientific simulation, which calls for the design of reliable true random number generators (TRNGs). Limited by entropy source, throughput, reliability, and system integration, existing TRNG designs are difficult to be deployed in real computing systems to greatly accelerate target applications. This study proposes a TRNG circuit named RHS-TRNG based on spin-transfer torque magnetic tunnel junction (STT-MTJ). RHS-TRNG generates resilient and high-speed random bit sequences exploiting the stochastic switching characteristics of STT-MTJ. By circuit/system co-design, we integrate RHS-TRNG into a RISC-V processor as an acceleration component, which is driven by customized random number generation instructions. Our experimental results show that a single cell of RHS-TRNG has a random bit generation speed of up to 303 Mb/s, which is the highest among existing MTJ-based TRNGs. Higher throughput can be achieved by exploiting cell-level parallelism. RHS-TRNG also shows strong resilience against PVT variations thanks to our designs using bidirectional switching currents and dual generator units. In addition, our system evaluation results using gem5 simulator suggest that the system equipped with RHS-TRNG can achieve 3.4-12x higher performance in speeding up option pricing programs than software implementations of random number generation.
Spatiotemporal predictive learning, which predicts future frames through historical prior knowledge with the aid of deep learning, is widely used in many fields. Previous work essentially improves the model performance by widening or deepening the network, but it also brings surging memory overhead, which seriously hinders the development and application of this technology. In order to improve the performance without increasing memory consumption, we focus on scale, which is another dimension to improve model performance but with low memory requirement. The effectiveness has been widely demonstrated in many CNN-based tasks such as image classification and semantic segmentation, but it has not been fully explored in recent RNN models. In this paper, learning from the benefit of multi-scale, we propose a general framework named Multi-Scale RNN (MS-RNN) to boost recent RNN models for spatiotemporal predictive learning. We verify the MS-RNN framework by thorough theoretical analyses and exhaustive experiments, where the theory focuses on memory reduction and performance improvement while the experiments employ eight RNN models (ConvLSTM, TrajGRU, PredRNN, PredRNN++, MIM, MotionRNN, PredRNN-V2, and PrecipLSTM) and four datasets (Moving MNIST, TaxiBJ, KTH, and Germany). The results show the efficiency that RNN models incorporating our framework have much lower memory cost but better performance than before. Our code is released at \url{//github.com/mazhf/MS-RNN}.
Unlike ordinal-utility matching markets, which are well-developed from the viewpoint of both theory and practice, recent insights from a computer science perspective have left cardinal-utility matching markets in a quandary. The celebrated pricing-based mechanism for one-sided cardinal-utility matching markets due to Hylland and Zeckhauser, which had long eluded efficient algorithms, was finally shown to be PPAD-complete. This led us to ask the question: is there an alternative, polynomial time, mechanism for one-sided cardinal-utility matching markets which achieves the desirable properties of HZ, i.e.\ (ex-ante) envy-freeness (EF) and Pareto-optimality (PO)? In this paper we show: 1. The problem of finding an EF+PO lottery in a one-sided cardinal-utility matching market is PPAD-complete. 2. A $(2 + \epsilon)$-approximately envy-free and (exactly) Pareto-optimal lottery can be found in polynomial time using Nash bargaining. We also present several results on two-sided cardinal-utility matching markets, including non-existence of EF+PO lotteries as well as existence of justified-envy-free and weak Pareto-optimal lotteries.
Selecting high-quality pre-training data is important for creating capable language models, but existing methods rely on simple heuristics. We introduce QuRating, a method for selecting pre-training data that captures the abstract qualities of texts which humans intuitively perceive. In this paper, we investigate four qualities - writing style, required expertise, facts & trivia, and educational value. We find that LLMs are able to discern these qualities and observe that they are better at making pairwise judgments of texts than at rating the quality of a text directly. We train a QuRater model to learn scalar ratings from pairwise judgments, and use it to annotate a 260B training corpus with quality ratings for each of the four criteria. In our experiments, we select 30B tokens according to the different quality ratings and train 1.3B-parameter language models on the selected data. We find that it is important to balance quality and diversity, as selecting only the highest-rated documents leads to poor results. When we sample using quality ratings as logits over documents, our models achieve lower perplexity and stronger in-context learning performance than baselines. Beyond data selection, we use the quality ratings to construct a training curriculum which improves performance without changing the training dataset. We extensively analyze the quality ratings and discuss their characteristics, biases, and wider implications.
The imperative need to scale computation across numerous nodes highlights the significance of efficient parallel computing, particularly in the realm of Message Passing Interface (MPI) integration. The challenging parallel programming task of generating MPI-based parallel programs has remained unexplored. This study first investigates the performance of state-of-the-art language models in generating MPI-based parallel programs. Findings reveal that widely used models such as GPT-3.5 and PolyCoder (specialized multi-lingual code models) exhibit notable performance degradation, when generating MPI-based programs compared to general-purpose programs. In contrast, domain-specific models such as MonoCoder, which are pretrained on MPI-related programming languages of C and C++, outperform larger models. Subsequently, we introduce a dedicated downstream task of MPI-based program generation by fine-tuning MonoCoder on HPCorpusMPI. We call the resulting model as MPIrigen. We propose an innovative preprocessing for completion only after observing the whole code, thus enabling better completion with a wider context. Comparative analysis against GPT-3.5 zero-shot performance, using a novel HPC-oriented evaluation method, demonstrates that MPIrigen excels in generating accurate MPI functions up to 0.8 accuracy in location and function predictions, and with more than 0.9 accuracy for argument predictions. The success of this tailored solution underscores the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning in optimizing language models for parallel computing code generation, paving the way for a new generation of automatic parallelization tools. The sources of this work are available at our GitHub MPIrigen repository: //github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MPI-rigen
In various practical situations, matrix factorization methods suffer from poor data quality, such as high data sparsity and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Here, we consider a matrix factorization problem by utilizing auxiliary information, which is massively available in real-world applications, to overcome the challenges caused by poor data quality. Unlike existing methods that mainly rely on simple linear models to combine auxiliary information with the main data matrix, we propose to integrate gradient boosted trees in the probabilistic matrix factorization framework to effectively leverage auxiliary information (MFAI). Thus, MFAI naturally inherits several salient features of gradient boosted trees, such as the capability of flexibly modeling nonlinear relationships and robustness to irrelevant features and missing values in auxiliary information. The parameters in MFAI can be automatically determined under the empirical Bayes framework, making it adaptive to the utilization of auxiliary information and immune to overfitting. Moreover, MFAI is computationally efficient and scalable to large datasets by exploiting variational inference. We demonstrate the advantages of MFAI through comprehensive numerical results from simulation studies and real data analyses. Our approach is implemented in the R package mfair available at //github.com/YangLabHKUST/mfair.
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.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
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.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.