Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable adaptability, showcasing their capacity to excel in tasks for which they were not explicitly trained. However, despite their impressive natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, effective alignment of LLMs remains a crucial challenge when deploying them for specific clinical applications. The ability to generate responses with factually accurate content and to engage in non-trivial reasoning steps are crucial for the LLMs to be eligible for applications in clinical medicine. Employing a combination of techniques including instruction-tuning and in-prompt strategies like few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting has significantly enhanced the performance of LLMs. Our proposed alignment strategy for medical question-answering, known as 'expand-guess-refine', offers a parameter and data-efficient solution. A preliminary analysis of this method demonstrated outstanding performance, achieving a score of 70.63% on a subset of questions sourced from the USMLE dataset.
Despite the success of Siamese encoder models such as sentence transformers (ST), little is known about the aspects of inputs they pay attention to. A barrier is that their predictions cannot be attributed to individual features, as they compare two inputs rather than processing a single one. This paper derives a local attribution method for Siamese encoders by generalizing the principle of integrated gradients to models with multiple inputs. The solution takes the form of feature-pair attributions, and can be reduced to a token-token matrix for STs. Our method involves the introduction of integrated Jacobians and inherits the advantageous formal properties of integrated gradients: it accounts for the model's full computation graph and is guaranteed to converge to the actual prediction. A pilot study shows that in an ST few token-pairs can often explain large fractions of predictions, and it focuses on nouns and verbs. For accurate predictions, it however needs to attend to the majority of tokens and parts of speech.
Anomaly Detection (AD) is a critical task that involves identifying observations that do not conform to a learned model of normality. Prior work in deep AD is predominantly based on a familiarity hypothesis, where familiar features serve as the reference in a pre-trained embedding space. While this strategy has proven highly successful, it turns out that it causes consistent false negatives when anomalies consist of truly novel features that are not well captured by the pre-trained encoding. We propose a novel approach to AD using explainability to capture novel features as unexplained observations in the input space. We achieve strong performance across a wide range of anomaly benchmarks by combining similarity and novelty in a hybrid approach. Our approach establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple benchmarks, handling diverse anomaly types while eliminating the need for expensive background models and dense matching. In particular, we show that by taking account of novel features, we reduce false negative anomalies by up to 40% on challenging benchmarks compared to the state-of-the-art. Our method gives visually inspectable explanations for pixel-level anomalies.
Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) is a core task in multilingual NLP that still, to a large extent, relies on calculating cross-lingual word representations. Inspired by the global paradigm shift in NLP towards Large Language Models (LLMs), we examine the potential of the latest generation of LLMs for the development of bilingual lexicons. We ask the following research question: Is it possible to prompt and fine-tune multilingual LLMs (mLLMs) for BLI, and how does this approach compare against and complement current BLI approaches? To this end, we systematically study 1) zero-shot prompting for unsupervised BLI and 2) few-shot in-context prompting with a set of seed translation pairs, both without any LLM fine-tuning, as well as 3) standard BLI-oriented fine-tuning of smaller LLMs. We experiment with 18 open-source text-to-text mLLMs of different sizes (from 0.3B to 13B parameters) on two standard BLI benchmarks covering a range of typologically diverse languages. Our work is the first to demonstrate strong BLI capabilities of text-to-text mLLMs. The results reveal that few-shot prompting with in-context examples from nearest neighbours achieves the best performance, establishing new state-of-the-art BLI scores for many language pairs. We also conduct a series of in-depth analyses and ablation studies, providing more insights on BLI with (m)LLMs, also along with their limitations.
As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense tasks. This work studies the impact of the reward signal that is provided to the agents when training for this task. Due to the nature of cybersecurity tasks, the reward signal is typically 1) in the form of penalties (e.g., when a compromise occurs), and 2) distributed sparsely across each defense episode. Such reward characteristics are atypical of classic reinforcement learning tasks where the agent is regularly rewarded for progress (cf. to getting occasionally penalized for failures). We investigate reward shaping techniques that could bridge this gap so as to enable agents to train more sample-efficiently and potentially converge to a better performance. We first show that deep reinforcement learning algorithms are sensitive to the magnitude of the penalties and their relative size. Then, we combine penalties with positive external rewards and study their effect compared to penalty-only training. Finally, we evaluate intrinsic curiosity as an internal positive reward mechanism and discuss why it might not be as advantageous for high-level network monitoring tasks.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function. Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks.
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has achieved extraordinary success in learning effective task-specific representations of nodes in graphs. However, regarding Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), existing HIN-oriented GCN methods still suffer from two deficiencies: (1) they cannot flexibly explore all possible meta-paths and extract the most useful ones for a target object, which hinders both effectiveness and interpretability; (2) they often need to generate intermediate meta-path based dense graphs, which leads to high computational complexity. To address the above issues, we propose an interpretable and efficient Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (ie-HGCN) to learn the representations of objects in HINs. It is designed as a hierarchical aggregation architecture, i.e., object-level aggregation first, followed by type-level aggregation. The novel architecture can automatically extract useful meta-paths for each object from all possible meta-paths (within a length limit), which brings good model interpretability. It can also reduce the computational cost by avoiding intermediate HIN transformation and neighborhood attention. We provide theoretical analysis about the proposed ie-HGCN in terms of evaluating the usefulness of all possible meta-paths, its connection to the spectral graph convolution on HINs, and its quasi-linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real network datasets demonstrate the superiority of ie-HGCN over the state-of-the-art methods.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been used for node and graph classification tasks with great success, but GNNs model dependencies among the attributes of nearby neighboring nodes rather than dependencies among observed node labels. In this work, we consider the task of inductive node classification using GNNs in supervised and semi-supervised settings, with the goal of incorporating label dependencies. Because current GNNs are not universal (i.e., most-expressive) graph representations, we propose a general collective learning approach to increase the representation power of any existing GNN. Our framework combines ideas from collective classification with self-supervised learning, and uses a Monte Carlo approach to sampling embeddings for inductive learning across graphs. We evaluate performance on five real-world network datasets and demonstrate consistent, significant improvement in node classification accuracy, for a variety of state-of-the-art GNNs.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.