Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, which contains both factual and misleading information about the world. Can language models discern truth from falsehood in this contradicting data? Expanding on the view that LLMs can model different communicative agents, we present the persona hypothesis: LLMs can cluster agents into personas using common features of their generations. For instance, a truthful persona is a group of agents that are likely to produce truthful text and that share similar features like formal writing styles and scientific references. By modeling this persona, LLMs can generalize truthfulness beyond the specific contexts in which each agent generated the training text. For example, the model can infer that the agent "Wikipedia" will behave truthfully on topics that were only generated by "Science" because they both belong to the truthful persona. We show evidence for the persona hypothesis via two observations: (1) we can probe whether a model's answer will be truthful before it is generated; (2) finetuning a model on a set of facts improves its truthfulness on unseen topics. Next, using arithmetics as a synthetic environment, we show that language models can separate true and false statements, and generalize truthfulness across agents; but only if agents in the training data share a truthful generative process that enables the creation of a truthful persona. Overall, our findings suggest that models can exploit hierarchical structures in the data to learn abstract concepts like truthfulness.
The Path-Dependent Neural Jump Ordinary Differential Equation (PD-NJ-ODE) is a model for predicting continuous-time stochastic processes with irregular and incomplete observations. In particular, the method learns optimal forecasts given irregularly sampled time series of incomplete past observations. So far the process itself and the coordinate-wise observation times were assumed to be independent and observations were assumed to be noiseless. In this work we discuss two extensions to lift these restrictions and provide theoretical guarantees as well as empirical examples for them. In particular, we can lift the assumption of independence by extending the theory to much more realistic settings of conditional independence without any need to change the algorithm. Moreover, we introduce a new loss function, which allows us to deal with noisy observations and explain why the previously used loss function did not lead to a consistent estimator.
GFlowNets are probabilistic models that sequentially generate compositional structures through a stochastic policy. Among GFlowNets, temperature-conditional GFlowNets can introduce temperature-based controllability for exploration and exploitation. We propose \textit{Logit-scaling GFlowNets} (Logit-GFN), a novel architectural design that greatly accelerates the training of temperature-conditional GFlowNets. It is based on the idea that previously proposed approaches introduced numerical challenges in the deep network training, since different temperatures may give rise to very different gradient profiles as well as magnitudes of the policy's logits. We find that the challenge is greatly reduced if a learned function of the temperature is used to scale the policy's logits directly. Also, using Logit-GFN, GFlowNets can be improved by having better generalization capabilities in offline learning and mode discovery capabilities in online learning, which is empirically verified in various biological and chemical tasks. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/dbsxodud-11/logit-gfn}
Neural Style Transfer (NST) refers to a class of algorithms able to manipulate an element, most often images, to adopt the appearance or style of another one. Each element is defined as a combination of Content and Style: the Content can be conceptually defined as the what and the Style as the how of said element. In this context, we propose a custom NST framework for transferring a set of styles to the motion of a robotic manipulator, e.g., the same robotic task can be carried out in an angry, happy, calm, or sad way. An autoencoder architecture extracts and defines the Content and the Style of the target robot motions. A Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) network generates the robot control policy using the loss defined by the autoencoder. The proposed Neural Policy Style Transfer TD3 (NPST3) alters the robot motion by introducing the trained style. Such an approach can be implemented either offline, for carrying out autonomous robot motions in dynamic environments, or online, for adapting at runtime the style of a teleoperated robot. The considered styles can be learned online from human demonstrations. We carried out an evaluation with human subjects enrolling 73 volunteers, asking them to recognize the style behind some representative robotic motions. Results show a good recognition rate, proving that it is possible to convey different styles to a robot using this approach.
Large language models (LLMs) are proficient at generating fluent text with minimal task-specific supervision. Yet, their ability to provide well-grounded rationalizations for knowledge-intensive tasks remains under-explored. Such tasks, like commonsense multiple-choice questions, require rationales based on world knowledge to support predictions and refute alternate options. We consider the task of generating knowledge-guided rationalization in natural language by using expert-written examples in a few-shot manner. Surprisingly, crowd-workers preferred knowledge-grounded rationales over crowdsourced rationalizations, citing their factuality, sufficiency, and comprehensive refutations. Although LLMs-generated rationales were preferable, further improvements in conciseness and novelty are required. In another study, we show how rationalization of incorrect model predictions erodes humans' trust in LLM-generated rationales. Motivated by these observations, we create a two-stage pipeline to review task predictions and eliminate potential incorrect decisions before rationalization, enabling trustworthy rationale generation.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are state-of-the-art models for performing prediction tasks on graphs. While existing GNNs have shown great performance on various tasks related to graphs, little attention has been paid to the scenario where out-of-distribution (OOD) nodes exist in the graph during training and inference. Borrowing the concept from CV and NLP, we define OOD nodes as nodes with labels unseen from the training set. Since a lot of networks are automatically constructed by programs, real-world graphs are often noisy and may contain nodes from unknown distributions. In this work, we define the problem of graph learning with out-of-distribution nodes. Specifically, we aim to accomplish two tasks: 1) detect nodes which do not belong to the known distribution and 2) classify the remaining nodes to be one of the known classes. We demonstrate that the connection patterns in graphs are informative for outlier detection, and propose Out-of-Distribution Graph Attention Network (OODGAT), a novel GNN model which explicitly models the interaction between different kinds of nodes and separate inliers from outliers during feature propagation. Extensive experiments show that OODGAT outperforms existing outlier detection methods by a large margin, while being better or comparable in terms of in-distribution classification.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.