We consider the verification of distributed systems composed of an arbitrary number of asynchronous processes. Processes are identical finite-state machines that communicate by reading from and writing to a shared memory. Beyond the standard model with finitely many registers, we tackle round-based shared-memory systems with fresh registers at each round. In the latter model, both the number of processes and the number of registers are unbounded, making verification particularly challenging. The properties studied are generic presence reachability objectives, which subsume classical questions such as safety or synchronization by expressing the presence or absence of processes in some states. In the more general round-based setting, we establish that the parameterized verification of presence reachability properties is PSPACE-complete. Moreover, for the roundless model with finitely many registers, we prove that the complexity drops down to NP-complete and we provide several natural restrictions that make the problem solvable in polynomial time.
Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) have attracted attention for their exceptional generation quality and diversity. This success is largely attributed to the use of class- or text-conditional diffusion guidance methods, such as classifier and classifier-free guidance. In this paper, we present a more comprehensive perspective that goes beyond the traditional guidance methods. From this generalized perspective, we introduce novel condition- and training-free strategies to enhance the quality of generated images. As a simple solution, blur guidance improves the suitability of intermediate samples for their fine-scale information and structures, enabling diffusion models to generate higher quality samples with a moderate guidance scale. Improving upon this, Self-Attention Guidance (SAG) uses the intermediate self-attention maps of diffusion models to enhance their stability and efficacy. Specifically, SAG adversarially blurs only the regions that diffusion models attend to at each iteration and guides them accordingly. Our experimental results show that our SAG improves the performance of various diffusion models, including ADM, IDDPM, Stable Diffusion, and DiT. Moreover, combining SAG with conventional guidance methods leads to further improvement.
Depression, a common mental disorder, significantly influences individuals and imposes considerable societal impacts. The complexity and heterogeneity of the disorder necessitate prompt and effective detection, which nonetheless, poses a difficult challenge. This situation highlights an urgent requirement for improved detection methods. Exploiting auditory data through advanced machine learning paradigms presents promising research directions. Yet, existing techniques mainly rely on single-dimensional feature models, potentially neglecting the abundance of information hidden in various speech characteristics. To rectify this, we present the novel Attention-Based Acoustic Feature Fusion Network (ABAFnet) for depression detection. ABAFnet combines four different acoustic features into a comprehensive deep learning model, thereby effectively integrating and blending multi-tiered features. We present a novel weight adjustment module for late fusion that boosts performance by efficaciously synthesizing these features. The effectiveness of our approach is confirmed via extensive validation on two clinical speech databases, CNRAC and CS-NRAC, thereby outperforming previous methods in depression detection and subtype classification. Further in-depth analysis confirms the key role of each feature and highlights the importance of MFCCrelated features in speech-based depression detection.
Measures of algorithmic fairness are usually discussed in the context of binary decisions. We extend the approach to continuous scores. So far, ROC-based measures have mainly been suggested for this purpose. Other existing methods depend heavily on the distribution of scores, are unsuitable for ranking tasks, or their effect sizes are not interpretable. Here, we propose a distributionally invariant version of fairness measures for continuous scores with a reasonable interpretation based on the Wasserstein distance. Our measures are easily computable and well suited for quantifying and interpreting the strength of group disparities as well as for comparing biases across different models, datasets, or time points. We derive a link between the different families of existing fairness measures for scores and show that the proposed distributionally invariant fairness measures outperform ROC-based fairness measures because they are more explicit and can quantify significant biases that ROC-based fairness measures miss. Finally, we demonstrate their effectiveness through experiments on the most commonly used fairness benchmark datasets.
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently been introduced in image deblurring and exhibited promising performance, particularly in terms of details reconstruction. However, the diffusion model requires a large number of inference iterations to recover the clean image from pure Gaussian noise, which consumes massive computational resources. Moreover, the distribution synthesized by the diffusion model is often misaligned with the target results, leading to restrictions in distortion-based metrics. To address the above issues, we propose the Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model (HI-Diff), for realistic image deblurring. Specifically, we perform the DM in a highly compacted latent space to generate the prior feature for the deblurring process. The deblurring process is implemented by a regression-based method to obtain better distortion accuracy. Meanwhile, the highly compact latent space ensures the efficiency of the DM. Furthermore, we design the hierarchical integration module to fuse the prior into the regression-based model from multiple scales, enabling better generalization in complex blurry scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world blur datasets demonstrate that our HI-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code and trained models are available at //github.com/zhengchen1999/HI-Diff.
Stochastic-gradient sampling methods are often used to perform Bayesian inference on neural networks. It has been observed that the methods in which notions of differential geometry are included tend to have better performances, with the Riemannian metric improving posterior exploration by accounting for the local curvature. However, the existing methods often resort to simple diagonal metrics to remain computationally efficient. This loses some of the gains. We propose two non-diagonal metrics that can be used in stochastic-gradient samplers to improve convergence and exploration but have only a minor computational overhead over diagonal metrics. We show that for fully connected neural networks (NNs) with sparsity-inducing priors and convolutional NNs with correlated priors, using these metrics can provide improvements. For some other choices the posterior is sufficiently easy also for the simpler metrics.
We present HyperSeg, a hyperdimensional computing (HDC) approach to unsupervised dialogue topic segmentation. HDC is a class of vector symbolic architectures that leverages the probabilistic orthogonality of randomly drawn vectors at extremely high dimensions (typically over 10,000). HDC generates rich token representations through its low-cost initialization of many unrelated vectors. This is especially beneficial in topic segmentation, which often operates as a resource-constrained pre-processing step for downstream transcript understanding tasks. HyperSeg outperforms the current state-of-the-art in 4 out of 5 segmentation benchmarks -- even when baselines are given partial access to the ground truth -- and is 10 times faster on average. We show that HyperSeg also improves downstream summarization accuracy. With HyperSeg, we demonstrate the viability of HDC in a major language task. We open-source HyperSeg to provide a strong baseline for unsupervised topic segmentation.
We consider extensions of the Newton-MR algorithm for nonconvex optimization to the settings where Hessian information is approximated. Under additive noise model on the Hessian matrix, we investigate the iteration and operation complexities of these variants to achieve first and second-order sub-optimality criteria. We show that, under certain conditions, the algorithms achieve iteration and operation complexities that match those of the exact variant. Focusing on the particular nonconvex problems satisfying Polyak-\L ojasiewicz condition, we show that our algorithm achieves a linear convergence rate. We finally compare the performance of our algorithms with several alternatives on a few machine learning problems.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
The key challenge of image manipulation detection is how to learn generalizable features that are sensitive to manipulations in novel data, whilst specific to prevent false alarms on authentic images. Current research emphasizes the sensitivity, with the specificity overlooked. In this paper we address both aspects by multi-view feature learning and multi-scale supervision. By exploiting noise distribution and boundary artifact surrounding tampered regions, the former aims to learn semantic-agnostic and thus more generalizable features. The latter allows us to learn from authentic images which are nontrivial to be taken into account by current semantic segmentation network based methods. Our thoughts are realized by a new network which we term MVSS-Net. Extensive experiments on five benchmark sets justify the viability of MVSS-Net for both pixel-level and image-level manipulation detection.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.