Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to find a policy that achieves high rewards while satisfying cost constraints. When learning from scratch, safe RL agents tend to be overly conservative, which impedes exploration and restrains the overall performance. In many realistic tasks, e.g. autonomous driving, large-scale expert demonstration data are available. We argue that extracting expert policy from offline data to guide online exploration is a promising solution to mitigate the conserveness issue. Large-capacity models, e.g. decision transformers (DT), have been proven to be competent in offline policy learning. However, data collected in real-world scenarios rarely contain dangerous cases (e.g., collisions), which makes it prohibitive for the policies to learn safety concepts. Besides, these bulk policy networks cannot meet the computation speed requirements at inference time on real-world tasks such as autonomous driving. To this end, we propose Guided Online Distillation (GOLD), an offline-to-online safe RL framework. GOLD distills an offline DT policy into a lightweight policy network through guided online safe RL training, which outperforms both the offline DT policy and online safe RL algorithms. Experiments in both benchmark safe RL tasks and real-world driving tasks based on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) demonstrate that GOLD can successfully distill lightweight policies and solve decision-making problems in challenging safety-critical scenarios.
Real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often suffer from incompleteness, which limits their potential performance. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) techniques aim to address this issue. However, traditional KGC methods are computationally intensive and impractical for large-scale KGs, necessitating the learning of dense node embeddings and computing pairwise distances. Generative transformer-based language models (e.g., T5 and recent KGT5) offer a promising solution as they can predict the tail nodes directly. In this study, we propose to include node neighborhoods as additional information to improve KGC methods based on language models. We examine the effects of this imputation and show that, on both inductive and transductive Wikidata subsets, our method outperforms KGT5 and conventional KGC approaches. We also provide an extensive analysis of the impact of neighborhood on model prediction and show its importance. Furthermore, we point the way to significantly improve KGC through more effective neighborhood selection.
Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have shown enhanced performance across a range of tasks that involve the integration of visual and linguistic modalities. When CLIP is used for depth estimation tasks, the patches, divided from the input images, can be combined with a series of semantic descriptions of the depth information to obtain similarity results. The coarse estimation of depth is then achieved by weighting and summing the depth values, called depth bins, corresponding to the predefined semantic descriptions. The zero-shot approach circumvents the computational and time-intensive nature of traditional fully-supervised depth estimation methods. However, this method, utilizing fixed depth bins, may not effectively generalize as images from different scenes may exhibit distinct depth distributions. To address this challenge, we propose a few-shot-based method which learns to adapt the VLMs for monocular depth estimation to balance training costs and generalization capabilities. Specifically, it assigns different depth bins for different scenes, which can be selected by the model during inference. Additionally, we incorporate learnable prompts to preprocess the input text to convert the easily human-understood text into easily model-understood vectors and further enhance the performance. With only one image per scene for training, our extensive experiment results on the NYU V2 and KITTI dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by up to 10.6\% in terms of MARE.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on corpora disproportionally weighted in favor of Standard American English. As a result, speakers of other dialects experience significantly more failures when interacting with these technologies. In practice, these speakers often accommodate their speech to be better understood. Our work shares the belief that language technologies should be designed to accommodate the diversity in English dialects and not the other way around. However, prior works on dialect struggle with generalizing to evolving and emerging dialects in a scalable manner. To fill this gap, our method, HyperLoRA, leverages expert linguistic knowledge to enable resource-efficient adaptation via hypernetworks. By disentangling dialect-specific and cross-dialectal information, HyperLoRA improves generalization to unseen dialects in a task-agnostic fashion. Not only is HyperLoRA more scalable in the number of parameters, but it also achieves the best or most competitive performance across 5 dialects in a zero-shot setting. In this way, our approach facilitates access to language technology for billions of English dialect speakers who are traditionally underrepresented.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the de facto standard for representation learning on graphs, owing to their ability to effectively integrate graph topology and node attributes. However, the inherent suboptimal nature of node connections, resulting from the complex and contingent formation process of graphs, presents significant challenges in modeling them effectively. To tackle this issue, Graph Structure Learning (GSL), a family of data-centric learning approaches, has garnered substantial attention in recent years. The core concept behind GSL is to jointly optimize the graph structure and the corresponding GNN models. Despite the proposal of numerous GSL methods, the progress in this field remains unclear due to inconsistent experimental protocols, including variations in datasets, data processing techniques, and splitting strategies. In this paper, we introduce OpenGSL, the first comprehensive benchmark for GSL, aimed at addressing this gap. OpenGSL enables a fair comparison among state-of-the-art GSL methods by evaluating them across various popular datasets using uniform data processing and splitting strategies. Through extensive experiments, we observe that existing GSL methods do not consistently outperform vanilla GNN counterparts. We also find that there is no significant correlation between the homophily of the learned structure and task performance, challenging the common belief. Moreover, we observe that the learned graph structure demonstrates a strong generalization ability across different GNN models, despite the high computational and space consumption. We hope that our open-sourced library will facilitate rapid and equitable evaluation and inspire further innovative research in this field. The code of the benchmark can be found in //github.com/OpenGSL/OpenGSL.
A popular track of network compression approach is Quantization aware Training (QAT), which accelerates the forward pass during the neural network training and inference. However, not much prior efforts have been made to quantize and accelerate the backward pass during training, even though that contributes around half of the training time. This can be partly attributed to the fact that errors of low-precision gradients during backward cannot be amortized by the training objective as in the QAT setting. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by incorporating the gradients into the computation graph of the next training iteration via a hypernetwork. Various experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset with different CNN network architectures demonstrate that our hypernetwork-based approach can effectively reduce the negative effect of gradient quantization noise and successfully quantizes the gradients to INT4 with only 0.64 accuracy drop for VGG-16 on CIFAR-10.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become ubiquitous in computer vision. Despite their success, ViTs lack inductive biases, which can make it difficult to train them with limited data. To address this challenge, prior studies suggest training ViTs with self-supervised learning (SSL) and fine-tuning sequentially. However, we observe that jointly optimizing ViTs for the primary task and a Self-Supervised Auxiliary Task (SSAT) is surprisingly beneficial when the amount of training data is limited. We explore the appropriate SSL tasks that can be optimized alongside the primary task, the training schemes for these tasks, and the data scale at which they can be most effective. Our findings reveal that SSAT is a powerful technique that enables ViTs to leverage the unique characteristics of both the self-supervised and primary tasks, achieving better performance than typical ViTs pre-training with SSL and fine-tuning sequentially. Our experiments, conducted on 10 datasets, demonstrate that SSAT significantly improves ViT performance while reducing carbon footprint. We also confirm the effectiveness of SSAT in the video domain for deepfake detection, showcasing its generalizability. Our code is available at //github.com/dominickrei/Limited-data-vits.
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods. For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
ASR (automatic speech recognition) systems like Siri, Alexa, Google Voice or Cortana has become quite popular recently. One of the key techniques enabling the practical use of such systems in people's daily life is deep learning. Though deep learning in computer vision is known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, little is known whether such perturbations are still valid on the practical speech recognition. In this paper, we not only demonstrate such attacks can happen in reality, but also show that the attacks can be systematically conducted. To minimize users' attention, we choose to embed the voice commands into a song, called CommandSong. In this way, the song carrying the command can spread through radio, TV or even any media player installed in the portable devices like smartphones, potentially impacting millions of users in long distance. In particular, we overcome two major challenges: minimizing the revision of a song in the process of embedding commands, and letting the CommandSong spread through the air without losing the voice "command". Our evaluation demonstrates that we can craft random songs to "carry" any commands and the modify is extremely difficult to be noticed. Specially, the physical attack that we play the CommandSongs over the air and record them can success with 94 percentage.