Reasoning about time is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand the world. Previous works focus on solving specific tasks, primarily on time-sensitive question answering. While these methods have proven effective, they cannot generalize to a wider spectrum of temporal reasoning tasks. Therefore, we propose a crucial question: Can we build a universal framework to handle a variety of temporal reasoning tasks? To that end, we systematically study 38 temporal reasoning tasks. Based on the observation that 19 tasks are directly related to mathematics, we first leverage the available mathematical dataset to set a solid foundation for temporal reasoning. However, the in-depth study indicates that focusing solely on mathematical enhancement falls short of addressing pure temporal reasoning tasks. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a simple but effective self-critic temporal optimization method to enhance the model's temporal reasoning capabilities without sacrificing general task abilities. Finally, we develop Timo, a model designed to excel in temporal reasoning at the 7B and 13B scales. Notably, Timo outperforms the counterpart LLMs by 10.0 and 7.6 in average accuracy scores and achieves the new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of comparable size. Extensive experiments further validate our framework's effectiveness and its generalization across diverse temporal tasks. The code is available at //github.com/zhaochen0110/Timo.
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.
We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent in Minecraft that continuously explores the world, acquires diverse skills, and makes novel discoveries without human intervention. Voyager consists of three key components: 1) an automatic curriculum that maximizes exploration, 2) an ever-growing skill library of executable code for storing and retrieving complex behaviors, and 3) a new iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates environment feedback, execution errors, and self-verification for program improvement. Voyager interacts with GPT-4 via blackbox queries, which bypasses the need for model parameter fine-tuning. The skills developed by Voyager are temporally extended, interpretable, and compositional, which compounds the agent's abilities rapidly and alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, Voyager shows strong in-context lifelong learning capability and exhibits exceptional proficiency in playing Minecraft. It obtains 3.3x more unique items, travels 2.3x longer distances, and unlocks key tech tree milestones up to 15.3x faster than prior SOTA. Voyager is able to utilize the learned skill library in a new Minecraft world to solve novel tasks from scratch, while other techniques struggle to generalize. We open-source our full codebase and prompts at //voyager.minedojo.org/.
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
The rapid advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) refresh the state-of-the-art performances in various vision tasks, overshadowing the conventional CNN-based models. This ignites a few recent striking-back research in the CNN world showing that pure CNN models can achieve as good performance as ViT models when carefully tuned. While encouraging, designing such high-performance CNN models is challenging, requiring non-trivial prior knowledge of network design. To this end, a novel framework termed Mathematical Architecture Design for Deep CNN (DeepMAD) is proposed to design high-performance CNN models in a principled way. In DeepMAD, a CNN network is modeled as an information processing system whose expressiveness and effectiveness can be analytically formulated by their structural parameters. Then a constrained mathematical programming (MP) problem is proposed to optimize these structural parameters. The MP problem can be easily solved by off-the-shelf MP solvers on CPUs with a small memory footprint. In addition, DeepMAD is a pure mathematical framework: no GPU or training data is required during network design. The superiority of DeepMAD is validated on multiple large-scale computer vision benchmark datasets. Notably on ImageNet-1k, only using conventional convolutional layers, DeepMAD achieves 0.7% and 1.5% higher top-1 accuracy than ConvNeXt and Swin on Tiny level, and 0.8% and 0.9% higher on Small level.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
The past few years have seen rapid progress in combining reinforcement learning (RL) with deep learning. Various breakthroughs ranging from games to robotics have spurred the interest in designing sophisticated RL algorithms and systems. However, the prevailing workflow in RL is to learn tabula rasa, which may incur computational inefficiency. This precludes continuous deployment of RL algorithms and potentially excludes researchers without large-scale computing resources. In many other areas of machine learning, the pretraining paradigm has shown to be effective in acquiring transferable knowledge, which can be utilized for a variety of downstream tasks. Recently, we saw a surge of interest in Pretraining for Deep RL with promising results. However, much of the research has been based on different experimental settings. Due to the nature of RL, pretraining in this field is faced with unique challenges and hence requires new design principles. In this survey, we seek to systematically review existing works in pretraining for deep reinforcement learning, provide a taxonomy of these methods, discuss each sub-field, and bring attention to open problems and future directions.
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, in the last few years, a large research effort has been devoted to image captioning, i.e. the task of describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoding step and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, and relationships and the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fusion strategies. However, regardless of the impressive results obtained, research in image captioning has not reached a conclusive answer yet. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview and categorization of image captioning approaches, from visual encoding and text generation to training strategies, used datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this respect, we quantitatively compare many relevant state-of-the-art approaches to identify the most impactful technical innovations in image captioning architectures and training strategies. Moreover, many variants of the problem and its open challenges are analyzed and discussed. The final goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing state-of-the-art and highlighting the future directions for an area of research where Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing can find an optimal synergy.
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.
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.
We study the problem of learning to reason in large scale knowledge graphs (KGs). More specifically, we describe a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning multi-hop relational paths: we use a policy-based agent with continuous states based on knowledge graph embeddings, which reasons in a KG vector space by sampling the most promising relation to extend its path. In contrast to prior work, our approach includes a reward function that takes the accuracy, diversity, and efficiency into consideration. Experimentally, we show that our proposed method outperforms a path-ranking based algorithm and knowledge graph embedding methods on Freebase and Never-Ending Language Learning datasets.