Guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND) has received widespread attention recently, and among its variants, ordered reliability bits GRAND (ORBGRAND) is particularly attractive due to its efficient utilization of soft information and its amenability to hardware implementation. It has been recently shown that ORBGRAND is almost capacity-achieving in additive white Gaussian noise channels under antipodal input. In this work, we first extend the analysis of ORBGRAND achievable rate to memoryless binary-input bit channels with general output conditional probability distributions. The analytical result also sheds insight into understanding the gap between the ORBGRAND achievable rate and the channel mutual information. As an application of the analysis, we study the ORBGRAND achievable rate of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). Numerical results indicate that for BICM, the gap between the ORBGRAND achievable rate and the channel mutual information is typically small, and hence suggest the feasibility of ORBGRAND for channels with high-order coded modulation schemes.
Vision-Language Transformers (VLTs) have shown great success recently, but are meanwhile accompanied by heavy computation costs, where a major reason can be attributed to the large number of visual and language tokens. Existing token pruning research for compressing VLTs mainly follows a single-modality-based scheme yet ignores the critical role of aligning different modalities for guiding the token pruning process, causing the important tokens for one modality to be falsely pruned in another modality branch. Meanwhile, existing VLT pruning works also lack the flexibility to dynamically compress each layer based on different input samples. To this end, we propose a novel framework named Multimodal Alignment-Guided Dynamic Token Pruning (MADTP) for accelerating various VLTs. Specifically, we first introduce a well-designed Multi-modality Alignment Guidance (MAG) module that can align features of the same semantic concept from different modalities, to ensure the pruned tokens are less important for all modalities. We further design a novel Dynamic Token Pruning (DTP) module, which can adaptively adjust the token compression ratio in each layer based on different input instances. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that MADTP significantly reduces the computational complexity of kinds of multimodal models while preserving competitive performance. Notably, when applied to the BLIP model in the NLVR2 dataset, MADTP can reduce the GFLOPs by 80% with less than 4% performance degradation.
Weakly-supervised segmentation (WSS) has emerged as a solution to mitigate the conflict between annotation cost and model performance by adopting sparse annotation formats (e.g., point, scribble, block, etc.). Typical approaches attempt to exploit anatomy and topology priors to directly expand sparse annotations into pseudo-labels. However, due to a lack of attention to the ambiguous edges in medical images and insufficient exploration of sparse supervision, existing approaches tend to generate erroneous and overconfident pseudo proposals in noisy regions, leading to cumulative model error and performance degradation. In this work, we propose a novel WSS approach, named ProCNS, encompassing two synergistic modules devised with the principles of progressive prototype calibration and noise suppression. Specifically, we design a Prototype-based Regional Spatial Affinity (PRSA) loss to maximize the pair-wise affinities between spatial and semantic elements, providing our model of interest with more reliable guidance. The affinities are derived from the input images and the prototype-refined predictions. Meanwhile, we propose an Adaptive Noise Perception and Masking (ANPM) module to obtain more enriched and representative prototype representations, which adaptively identifies and masks noisy regions within the pseudo proposals, reducing potential erroneous interference during prototype computation. Furthermore, we generate specialized soft pseudo-labels for the noisy regions identified by ANPM, providing supplementary supervision. Extensive experiments on three medical image segmentation tasks involving different modalities demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms representative state-of-the-art methods
We present AlloyInEcore, a tool for specifying metamodels with their static semantics to facilitate automated, formal reasoning on models. Software development projects require that software systems be specified in various models (e.g., requirements models, architecture models, test models, and source code). It is crucial to reason about those models to ensure the correct and complete system specifications. AlloyInEcore allows the user to specify metamodels with their static semantics, while, using the semantics, it automatically detects inconsistent models, and completes partial models. It has been evaluated on three industrial case studies in the automotive domain (//modelwriter.github.io/AlloyInEcore/).
Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved considerable success in generation tasks. As sampling from DPMs is equivalent to solving diffusion SDE or ODE which is time-consuming, numerous fast sampling methods built upon improved differential equation solvers are proposed. The majority of such techniques consider solving the diffusion ODE due to its superior efficiency. However, stochastic sampling could offer additional advantages in generating diverse and high-quality data. In this work, we engage in a comprehensive analysis of stochastic sampling from two aspects: variance-controlled diffusion SDE and linear multi-step SDE solver. Based on our analysis, we propose SA-Solver, which is an improved efficient stochastic Adams method for solving diffusion SDE to generate data with high quality. Our experiments show that SA-Solver achieves: 1) improved or comparable performance compared with the existing state-of-the-art sampling methods for few-step sampling; 2) SOTA FID scores on substantial benchmark datasets under a suitable number of function evaluations (NFEs).
Teaching is one of many professions for which personalized feedback and reflection can help improve dialogue and discussion between the professional and those they serve. However, professional development (PD) is often impersonal as human observation is labor-intensive. Data-driven PD tools in teaching are of growing interest, but open questions about how professionals engage with their data in practice remain. In this paper, we present ClassInSight, a tool that visualizes three levels of teachers' discussion data and structures reflection. Through 22 reflection sessions and interviews with 5 high school science teachers, we found themes related to dissonance, contextualization, and sustainability in how teachers engaged with their data in the tool and in how their professional vision, the use of professional expertise to interpret events, shifted over time. We discuss guidelines for these conversational support tools to support personalized PD in professions beyond teaching where conversation and interaction are important.
Despite the importance of trust in human-AI interactions, researchers must adopt questionnaires from other disciplines that lack validation in the AI context. Motivated by the need for reliable and valid measures, we investigated the psychometric quality of two trust questionnaires, the Trust between People and Automation scale (TPA) by Jian et al. (2000) and the Trust Scale for the AI Context (TAI) by Hoffman et al. (2023). In a pre-registered online experiment (N = 1485), participants observed interactions with trustworthy and untrustworthy AI (autonomous vehicle and chatbot). Results support the psychometric quality of the TAI while revealing opportunities to improve the TPA, which we outline in our recommendations for using the two questionnaires. Furthermore, our findings provide additional empirical evidence of trust and distrust as two distinct constructs that may coexist independently. Building on our findings, we highlight the opportunities and added value of measuring both trust and distrust in human-AI research and advocate for further work on both constructs.
We introduces Crimson, a system that enhances the strategic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the realm of cybersecurity. By correlating CVEs with MITRE ATT&CK techniques, Crimson advances threat anticipation and strategic defense efforts. Our approach includes defining and evaluating cybersecurity strategic tasks, alongside implementing a comprehensive human-in-the-loop data-synthetic workflow to develop the CVE-to-ATT&CK Mapping (CVEM) dataset. We further enhance LLMs' reasoning abilities through a novel Retrieval-Aware Training (RAT) process and its refined iteration, RAT-R. Our findings demonstrate that an LLM fine-tuned with our techniques, possessing 7 billion parameters, approaches the performance level of GPT-4, showing markedly lower rates of hallucination and errors, and surpassing other models in strategic reasoning tasks. Moreover, domain-specific fine-tuning of embedding models significantly improves performance within cybersecurity contexts, underscoring the efficacy of our methodology. By leveraging Crimson to convert raw vulnerability data into structured and actionable insights, we bolster proactive cybersecurity defenses.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized open-domain dialogue agents but encounter challenges in multi-character role-playing (MCRP) scenarios. To address the issue, we present Neeko, an innovative framework designed for efficient multiple characters imitation. Unlike existing methods, Neeko employs a dynamic low-rank adapter (LoRA) strategy, enabling it to adapt seamlessly to diverse characters. Our framework breaks down the role-playing process into agent pre-training, multiple characters playing, and character incremental learning, effectively handling both seen and unseen roles. This dynamic approach, coupled with distinct LoRA blocks for each character, enhances Neeko's adaptability to unique attributes, personalities, and speaking patterns. As a result, Neeko demonstrates superior performance in MCRP over most existing methods, offering more engaging and versatile user interaction experiences. Code and data are available at //github.com/weiyifan1023/Neeko.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI bound, which in turn weakens the information theoretic explanation for generalization. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a probabilistic representation of DNNs for accurately estimating the MI. Leveraging the proposed MI estimator, we validate the information theoretic explanation for generalization, and derive a tighter generalization bound than the state-of-the-art relaxations.