The late interaction paradigm introduced with ColBERT stands out in the neural Information Retrieval space, offering a compelling effectiveness-efficiency trade-off across many benchmarks. Efficient late interaction retrieval is based on an optimized multi-step strategy, where an approximate search first identifies a set of candidate documents to re-rank exactly. In this work, we introduce SPLATE, a simple and lightweight adaptation of the ColBERTv2 model which learns an ``MLM adapter'', mapping its frozen token embeddings to a sparse vocabulary space with a partially learned SPLADE module. This allows us to perform the candidate generation step in late interaction pipelines with traditional sparse retrieval techniques, making it particularly appealing for running ColBERT in CPU environments. Our SPLATE ColBERTv2 pipeline achieves the same effectiveness as the PLAID ColBERTv2 engine by re-ranking 50 documents that can be retrieved under 10ms.
Does the stethoscope in the picture make the adjacent person a doctor or a patient? This, of course, depends on the contextual relationship of the two objects. If it's obvious, why don't explanation methods for vision models use contextual information? In this paper, we (1) review the most popular methods of explaining computer vision models by pointing out that they do not take into account context information, (2) show examples of failures of popular XAI methods, (3) provide examples of real-world use cases where spatial context plays a significant role, (4) propose new research directions that may lead to better use of context information in explaining computer vision models, (5) argue that a change in approach to explanations is needed from 'where' to 'how'.
We present a differentiable representation, DMesh, for general 3D triangular meshes. DMesh considers both the geometry and connectivity information of a mesh. In our design, we first get a set of convex tetrahedra that compactly tessellates the domain based on Weighted Delaunay Triangulation (WDT), and select triangular faces on the tetrahedra to define the final mesh. We formulate probability of faces to exist on the actual surface in a differentiable manner based on the WDT. This enables DMesh to represent meshes of various topology in a differentiable way, and allows us to reconstruct the mesh under various observations, such as point cloud and multi-view images using gradient-based optimization. The source code and full paper is available at: //sonsang.github.io/dmesh-project.
The field of AI alignment aims to steer AI systems toward human goals, preferences, and ethical principles. Its contributions have been instrumental for improving the output quality, safety, and trustworthiness of today's AI models. This perspective article draws attention to a fundamental challenge inherent in all AI alignment endeavors, which we term the "AI alignment paradox": The better we align AI models with our values, the easier we make it for adversaries to misalign the models. We illustrate the paradox by sketching three concrete example incarnations for the case of language models, each corresponding to a distinct way in which adversaries can exploit the paradox. With AI's increasing real-world impact, it is imperative that a broad community of researchers be aware of the AI alignment paradox and work to find ways to break out of it, in order to ensure the beneficial use of AI for the good of humanity.
Blockchain's decentralization, transparency, and tamper-resistance properties have facilitated the system's use in various application fields. However, the low throughput and high confirmation latency hinder the widespread adoption of Blockchain. Many solutions have been proposed to address these issues, including first-layer solutions (or on-chain solutions) and second-layer solutions (or off-chain solutions). Among the proposed solutions, the blockchain sharding system is the most scalable one, where the nodes in the network are divided into several groups. The nodes in different shards work in parallel to validate the transactions and add them to the blocks, and in such a way, the throughput increases significantly. However, previous works have not adequately summarized the latest achievements in blockchain sharding, nor have they fully showcased its state-of-the-art. Our study provides a systemization of knowledge of public blockchain sharding, including the core components of sharding systems, challenges, limitations, and mechanisms of the latest sharding protocols. We also compare their performance and discuss current constraints and future research directions.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved superior performance in powering text-based AI agents, endowing them with decision-making and reasoning abilities akin to humans. Concurrently, there is an emerging research trend focused on extending these LLM-powered AI agents into the multimodal domain. This extension enables AI agents to interpret and respond to diverse multimodal user queries, thereby handling more intricate and nuanced tasks. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of LLM-driven multimodal agents, which we refer to as large multimodal agents ( LMAs for short). First, we introduce the essential components involved in developing LMAs and categorize the current body of research into four distinct types. Subsequently, we review the collaborative frameworks integrating multiple LMAs , enhancing collective efficacy. One of the critical challenges in this field is the diverse evaluation methods used across existing studies, hindering effective comparison among different LMAs . Therefore, we compile these evaluation methodologies and establish a comprehensive framework to bridge the gaps. This framework aims to standardize evaluations, facilitating more meaningful comparisons. Concluding our review, we highlight the extensive applications of LMAs and propose possible future research directions. Our discussion aims to provide valuable insights and guidelines for future research in this rapidly evolving field. An up-to-date resource list is available at //github.com/jun0wanan/awesome-large-multimodal-agents.
Data plays a fundamental role in the training of Large Language Models (LLMs). Effective data management, particularly in the formulation of a well-suited training dataset, holds significance for enhancing model performance and improving training efficiency during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning phases. Despite the considerable importance of data management, the current research community still falls short in providing a systematic analysis of the rationale behind management strategy selection, its consequential effects, methodologies for evaluating curated datasets, and the ongoing pursuit of improved strategies. Consequently, the exploration of data management has attracted more and more attention among the research community. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of current research in data management within both the pretraining and supervised fine-tuning stages of LLMs, covering various noteworthy aspects of data management strategy design: data quantity, data quality, domain/task composition, etc. Looking toward the future, we extrapolate existing challenges and outline promising directions for development in this field. Therefore, this survey serves as a guiding resource for practitioners aspiring to construct powerful LLMs through effective data management practices. The collection of the latest papers is available at //github.com/ZigeW/data_management_LLM.
Learning disentanglement aims at finding a low dimensional representation which consists of multiple explanatory and generative factors of the observational data. The framework of variational autoencoder (VAE) is commonly used to disentangle independent factors from observations. However, in real scenarios, factors with semantics are not necessarily independent. Instead, there might be an underlying causal structure which renders these factors dependent. We thus propose a new VAE based framework named CausalVAE, which includes a Causal Layer to transform independent exogenous factors into causal endogenous ones that correspond to causally related concepts in data. We further analyze the model identifiabitily, showing that the proposed model learned from observations recovers the true one up to a certain degree. Experiments are conducted on various datasets, including synthetic and real word benchmark CelebA. Results show that the causal representations learned by CausalVAE are semantically interpretable, and their causal relationship as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is identified with good accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed CausalVAE model is able to generate counterfactual data through "do-operation" to the causal factors.
We present CoDEx, a set of knowledge graph completion datasets extracted from Wikidata and Wikipedia that improve upon existing knowledge graph completion benchmarks in scope and level of difficulty. In terms of scope, CoDEx comprises three knowledge graphs varying in size and structure, multilingual descriptions of entities and relations, and tens of thousands of hard negative triples that are plausible but verified to be false. To characterize CoDEx, we contribute thorough empirical analyses and benchmarking experiments. First, we analyze each CoDEx dataset in terms of logical relation patterns. Next, we report baseline link prediction and triple classification results on CoDEx for five extensively tuned embedding models. Finally, we differentiate CoDEx from the popular FB15K-237 knowledge graph completion dataset by showing that CoDEx covers more diverse and interpretable content, and is a more difficult link prediction benchmark. Data, code, and pretrained models are available at //bit.ly/2EPbrJs.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.