The fairness of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models has emerged as a crucial concern. Information theory indicates that to achieve fairness, a model should not be able to predict sensitive variables, such as gender, ethnicity, and age. However, information related to these variables often appears implicitly in language, posing a challenge in identifying and mitigating biases effectively. To tackle this issue, we present a novel approach that operates at the embedding level of an NLP model, independent of the specific architecture. Our method leverages insights from recent advances in XAI techniques and employs an embedding transformation to eliminate implicit information from a selected variable. By directly manipulating the embeddings in the final layer, our approach enables a seamless integration into existing models without requiring significant modifications or retraining. In evaluation, we show that the proposed post-hoc approach significantly reduces gender-related associations in NLP models while preserving the overall performance and functionality of the models. An implementation of our method is available: //github.com/fanny-jourdan/TaCo
The unparalleled performance of closed-sourced ChatGPT has sparked efforts towards its democratization, with notable strides made by leveraging real user and ChatGPT dialogues, as evidenced by Vicuna. However, due to challenges in gathering dialogues involving human participation, current endeavors like Baize and UltraChat rely on ChatGPT conducting roleplay to simulate humans based on instructions, resulting in overdependence on seeds, diminished human-likeness, limited topic diversity, and an absence of genuine multi-round conversational dynamics. To address the above issues, we propose a paradigm to simulate human behavior better and explore the benefits of incorporating more human-like questions in multi-turn conversations. Specifically, we directly target human questions extracted from genuine human-machine conversations as a learning goal and provide a novel user simulator called `Socratic'. The experimental results show our response model, `PlatoLM', achieves SoTA performance among LLaMA-based 7B models in MT-Bench. Our findings further demonstrate that our method introduces highly human-like questioning patterns and rich topic structures, which can teach the response model better than previous works in multi-round conversations.
Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a principled manner by identifying the source of the misalignment as a form of distributional shift and uncertainty in learning human preferences. To mitigate overoptimization, we first propose a theoretical algorithm that chooses the best policy for an adversarially chosen reward model; one that simultaneously minimizes the maximum likelihood estimation of the loss and a reward penalty term. Here, the reward penalty term is introduced to prevent the policy from choosing actions with spurious high proxy rewards, resulting in provable sample efficiency of the algorithm under a partial coverage style condition. Moving from theory to practice, the proposed algorithm further enjoys an equivalent but surprisingly easy-to-implement reformulation. Using the equivalence between reward models and the corresponding optimal policy, the algorithm features a simple objective that combines: (i) a preference optimization loss that directly aligns the policy with human preference, and (ii) a supervised learning loss that explicitly imitates the policy with a (suitable) baseline distribution. In the context of aligning large language models (LLM), this objective fuses the direct preference optimization (DPO) loss with the supervised fune-tuning (SFT) loss to help mitigate the overoptimization towards undesired responses, for which we name the algorithm Regularized Preference Optimization (RPO). Experiments of aligning LLMs demonstrate the improved performance of RPO compared with DPO baselines. Our work sheds light on the interplay between preference optimization and SFT in tuning LLMs with both theoretical guarantees and empirical evidence.
Sparse models, including sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, have emerged as an effective approach for scaling Transformer models. However, they often suffer from computational inefficiency since a significant number of parameters are unnecessarily involved in computations via multiplying values by zero or low activation values. To address this issue, we present \tool, a novel MoE designed to enhance both the efficacy and efficiency of sparse MoE models. \tool leverages small experts and a threshold-based router to enable tokens to selectively engage only essential parameters. Our extensive experiments on language modeling and machine translation tasks demonstrate that \tool can enhance model performance while decreasing the computation load at MoE layers by over 50\% without sacrificing performance. Furthermore, we present the versatility of \tool by applying it to dense models, enabling sparse computation during inference. We provide a comprehensive analysis and make our code available at //github.com/ysngki/XMoE.
As the current initialization method in the state-of-the-art Stereo Visual-Inertial SLAM framework, ORB-SLAM3 has limitations. Its success depends on the performance of the pure stereo SLAM system and is based on the underlying assumption that pure visual SLAM can accurately estimate the camera trajectory, which is essential for inertial parameter estimation. Meanwhile, the further improved initialization method for ORB-SLAM3, known as Stereo-NEC, is time-consuming due to applying keypoint tracking to estimate gyroscope bias with normal epipolar constraints. To address the limitations of previous methods, this paper proposes a method aimed at enhancing translation accuracy during the initialization stage. The fundamental concept of our method is to improve the translation estimate with a 3 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) Bundle Adjustment (BA), independently, while the rotation estimate is fixed, instead of using ORB-SLAM3's 6-DoF BA. Additionally, the rotation estimate will be updated by considering IMU measurements and gyroscope bias, unlike ORB-SLAM3's rotation, which is directly obtained from stereo visual odometry and may yield inferior results when operating in challenging scenarios. We also conduct extensive evaluations on the public benchmark, the EuRoC dataset, demonstrating that our method excels in accuracy.
Advances in latent diffusion models (LDMs) have revolutionized high-resolution image generation, but the design space of the autoencoder that is central to these systems remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LiteVAE, a family of autoencoders for LDMs that leverage the 2D discrete wavelet transform to enhance scalability and computational efficiency over standard variational autoencoders (VAEs) with no sacrifice in output quality. We also investigate the training methodologies and the decoder architecture of LiteVAE and propose several enhancements that improve the training dynamics and reconstruction quality. Our base LiteVAE model matches the quality of the established VAEs in current LDMs with a six-fold reduction in encoder parameters, leading to faster training and lower GPU memory requirements, while our larger model outperforms VAEs of comparable complexity across all evaluated metrics (rFID, LPIPS, PSNR, and SSIM).
Training large Deep Neural Network (DNN) models requires thousands of GPUs for days or weeks at a time. At these scales, failures are frequent and can have a big impact on training throughput. Restoring performance using spare GPU servers becomes increasingly expensive as models grow. SlipStream is a system for efficient DNN training in the presence of failures, without using spare servers. It exploits the functional redundancy inherent in distributed training systems -- servers hold the same model parameters across data-parallel groups -- as well as the bubbles in the pipeline schedule within each data-parallel group. SlipStream dynamically re-routes the work of a failed server to its data-parallel peers, ensuring continuous training despite multiple failures. However, re-routing work leads to imbalances across pipeline stages that degrades training throughput. SlipStream introduces two optimizations that allow re-routed work to execute within bubbles of the original pipeline schedule. First, it decouples the backward pass computation into two phases. Second, it staggers the execution of the optimizer step across pipeline stages. Combined, these optimizations enable schedules that minimize or even eliminate training throughput degradation during failures. We describe a prototype for SlipStream and show that it achieves high training throughput under multiple failures, outperforming recent proposals for fault-tolerant training such as Oobleck and Bamboo by up to 1.46x and 1.64x, respectively.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.