Facial Attribute Classification (FAC) holds substantial promise in widespread applications. However, FAC models trained by traditional methodologies can be unfair by exhibiting accuracy inconsistencies across varied data subpopulations. This unfairness is largely attributed to bias in data, where some spurious attributes (e.g., Male) statistically correlate with the target attribute (e.g., Smiling). Most of existing fairness-aware methods rely on the labels of spurious attributes, which may be unavailable in practice. This work proposes a novel, generation-based two-stage framework to train a fair FAC model on biased data without additional annotation. Initially, we identify the potential spurious attributes based on generative models. Notably, it enhances interpretability by explicitly showing the spurious attributes in image space. Following this, for each image, we first edit the spurious attributes with a random degree sampled from a uniform distribution, while keeping target attribute unchanged. Then we train a fair FAC model by fostering model invariance to these augmentation. Extensive experiments on three common datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in promoting fairness in FAC without compromising accuracy. Codes are in //github.com/heqianpei/DiGA.
Recently, the usage of speech self-supervised models (SSL) for downstream tasks has been drawing a lot of attention. While large pre-trained models commonly outperform smaller models trained from scratch, questions regarding the optimal fine-tuning strategies remain prevalent. In this paper, we explore the fine-tuning strategies of the WavLM Large model for the speech emotion recognition task on the MSP Podcast Corpus. More specifically, we perform a series of experiments focusing on using gender and semantic information from utterances. We then sum up our findings and describe the final model we used for submission to Speech Emotion Recognition Challenge 2024.
Decentralized learning (DL) leverages edge devices for collaborative model training while avoiding coordination by a central server. Due to privacy concerns, DL has become an attractive alternative to centralized learning schemes since training data never leaves the device. In a round of DL, all nodes participate in model training and exchange their model with some other nodes. Performing DL in large-scale heterogeneous networks results in high communication costs and prolonged round durations due to slow nodes, effectively inflating the total training time. Furthermore, current DL algorithms also assume all nodes are available for training and aggregation at all times, diminishing the practicality of DL. This paper presents Plexus, an efficient, scalable, and practical DL system. Plexus (1) avoids network-wide participation by introducing a decentralized peer sampler that selects small subsets of available nodes that train the model each round and, (2) aggregates the trained models produced by nodes every round. Plexus is designed to handle joining and leaving nodes (churn). We extensively evaluate Plexus by incorporating realistic traces for compute speed, pairwise latency, network capacity, and availability of edge devices in our experiments. Our experiments on four common learning tasks empirically show that Plexus reduces time-to-accuracy by 1.2-8.3x, communication volume by 2.4-15.3x and training resources needed for convergence by 6.4-370x compared to baseline DL algorithms.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for various vision tasks. One reason behind the success lies in their ability to provide plausible innate explanations for the behavior of neural architectures. However, ViTs suffer from issues with explanation faithfulness, as their focal points are fragile to adversarial attacks and can be easily changed with even slight perturbations on the input image. In this paper, we propose a rigorous approach to mitigate these issues by introducing Faithful ViTs (FViTs). Briefly speaking, an FViT should have the following two properties: (1) The top-$k$ indices of its self-attention vector should remain mostly unchanged under input perturbation, indicating stable explanations; (2) The prediction distribution should be robust to perturbations. To achieve this, we propose a new method called Denoised Diffusion Smoothing (DDS), which adopts randomized smoothing and diffusion-based denoising. We theoretically prove that processing ViTs directly with DDS can turn them into FViTs. We also show that Gaussian noise is nearly optimal for both $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$-norm cases. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments and evaluations. Results show that FViTs are more robust against adversarial attacks while maintaining the explainability of attention, indicating higher faithfulness.
Fine-tuning pre-trained models provides significant advantages in downstream performance. The ubiquitous nature of pre-trained models such as BERT and its derivatives in natural language processing has also led to a proliferation of task-specific fine-tuned models. As these models typically only perform one task well, additional training or ensembling is required in multi-task scenarios. The growing field of model merging provides a solution, dealing with the challenge of combining multiple task-specific models into a single multi-task model. In this study, we introduce a novel model merging method for Transformers, combining insights from previous work in Fisher-weighted averaging and the use of Fisher information in model pruning. Utilizing the Fisher information of mask nodes within the Transformer architecture, we devise a computationally efficient weighted-averaging scheme. Our method exhibits a regular and significant performance increase across various models in the BERT family, outperforming full-scale Fisher-weighted averaging in a fraction of the computational cost, with baseline performance improvements of up to +6.5 and a speedup between 57.4x and 321.7x across models. Our results prove the potential of our method in current multi-task learning environments and suggest its scalability and adaptability to new model architectures and learning scenarios.
Digital assistants have become ubiquitous in e-commerce applications, following the recent advancements in Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, customers are often unsure or unaware of how to effectively converse with these assistants to meet their shopping needs. In this work, we emphasize the importance of providing customers a fast, easy to use, and natural way to interact with conversational shopping assistants. We propose a framework that employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate contextual, useful, answerable, fluent and diverse questions about products, via in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Recommending these questions to customers as helpful suggestions or hints to both start and continue a conversation can result in a smoother and faster shopping experience with reduced conversation overhead and friction. We perform extensive offline evaluations, and discuss in detail about potential customer impact, and the type, length and latency of our generated product questions if incorporated into a real-world shopping assistant.
The dawn of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), characterized by advanced models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and other Large Language Models (LLMs), has been pivotal in reshaping the field of data analysis, pattern recognition, and decision-making processes. This surge in GAI technology has ushered in not only innovative opportunities for data processing and automation but has also introduced significant cybersecurity challenges. As GAI rapidly progresses, it outstrips the current pace of cybersecurity protocols and regulatory frameworks, leading to a paradox wherein the same innovations meant to safeguard digital infrastructures also enhance the arsenal available to cyber criminals. These adversaries, adept at swiftly integrating and exploiting emerging technologies, may utilize GAI to develop malware that is both more covert and adaptable, thus complicating traditional cybersecurity efforts. The acceleration of GAI presents an ambiguous frontier for cybersecurity experts, offering potent tools for threat detection and response, while concurrently providing cyber attackers with the means to engineer more intricate and potent malware. Through the joint efforts of Duke Pratt School of Engineering, Coalfire, and Safebreach, this research undertakes a meticulous analysis of how malicious agents are exploiting GAI to augment their attack strategies, emphasizing a critical issue for the integrity of future cybersecurity initiatives. The study highlights the critical need for organizations to proactively identify and develop more complex defensive strategies to counter the sophisticated employment of GAI in malware creation.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Deep learning shows great potential in generation tasks thanks to deep latent representation. Generative models are classes of models that can generate observations randomly with respect to certain implied parameters. Recently, the diffusion Model becomes a raising class of generative models by virtue of its power-generating ability. Nowadays, great achievements have been reached. More applications except for computer vision, speech generation, bioinformatics, and natural language processing are to be explored in this field. However, the diffusion model has its natural drawback of a slow generation process, leading to many enhanced works. This survey makes a summary of the field of the diffusion model. We firstly state the main problem with two landmark works - DDPM and DSM. Then, we present a diverse range of advanced techniques to speed up the diffusion models - training schedule, training-free sampling, mixed-modeling, and score & diffusion unification. Regarding existing models, we also provide a benchmark of FID score, IS, and NLL according to specific NFE. Moreover, applications with diffusion models are introduced including computer vision, sequence modeling, audio, and AI for science. Finally, there is a summarization of this field together with limitations & further directions.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
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.