Active learning (AL) aims to enhance model performance by selectively collecting highly informative data, thereby minimizing annotation costs. However, in practical scenarios, unlabeled data may contain out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, leading to wasted annotation costs if data is incorrectly selected. Recent research has explored methods to apply AL to open-set data, but these methods often require or incur unavoidable cost losses to minimize them. To address these challenges, we propose a novel selection strategy, CLIPN for AL (CLIPNAL), which minimizes cost losses without requiring OOD samples. CLIPNAL sequentially evaluates the purity and informativeness of data. First, it utilizes a pre-trained vision-language model to detect and exclude OOD data by leveraging linguistic and visual information of in-distribution (ID) data without additional training. Second, it selects highly informative data from the remaining ID data, and then the selected samples are annotated by human experts. Experimental results on datasets with various open-set conditions demonstrate that CLIPNAL achieves the lowest cost loss and highest performance across all scenarios. Code is available at //github.com/DSBA-Lab/OpenAL.
Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent summaries across domains using prompting techniques, reducing the need to train models for summarization applications. However, crafting effective prompts that guide LLMs to generate summaries with the appropriate level of detail and writing style remains a challenge. In this paper, we explore the use of salient information extracted from the source document to enhance summarization prompts. We show that adding keyphrases in prompts can improve ROUGE F1 and recall, making the generated summaries more similar to the reference and more complete. The number of keyphrases can control the precision-recall trade-off. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that incorporating phrase-level salient information is superior to word- or sentence-level. However, the impact on hallucination is not universally positive across LLMs. To conduct this analysis, we introduce Keyphrase Signal Extractor (SigExt), a lightweight model that can be finetuned to extract salient keyphrases. By using SigExt, we achieve consistent ROUGE improvements across datasets and open-weight and proprietary LLMs without any LLM customization. Our findings provide insights into leveraging salient information in building prompt-based summarization systems.
Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting an efficient algorithm for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the state-action value function of any policy is linear in a given feature map. This challenging setting can model environments with infinite states and actions, strictly generalizes classic linear MDPs, and currently lacks a computationally efficient algorithm under online access to the MDP. Specifically, we introduce a new RL algorithm that efficiently finds a near-optimal policy in this setting, using a number of episodes and calls to a cost-sensitive classification (CSC) oracle that are both polynomial in the problem parameters. Notably, our CSC oracle can be efficiently implemented when the feature dimension is constant, representing a clear improvement over state-of-the-art methods, which require solving non-convex problems with horizon-many variables and can incur computational costs that are exponential in the horizon.
Multimodal learning plays a crucial role in enabling machine learning models to fuse and utilize diverse data sources, such as text, images, and audio, to support a variety of downstream tasks. A unified representation across various modalities is particularly important for improving efficiency and performance. Recent binding methods, such as ImageBind (Girdhar et al., 2023), typically use a fixed anchor modality to align multimodal data in the anchor modal embedding space. In this paper, we mathematically analyze the fixed anchor binding methods and uncover notable limitations: (1) over-reliance on the choice of the anchor modality, (2) failure to capture intra-modal information, and (3) failure to account for inter-modal correlation among non-anchored modalities. To address these limitations, we propose CentroBind, a simple yet powerful approach that eliminates the need for a fixed anchor; instead, it employs dynamically adjustable centroid-based anchors generated from all available modalities, resulting in a balanced and rich representation space. We theoretically demonstrate that our method captures three crucial properties of multimodal learning: intra-modal learning, inter-modal learning, and multimodal alignment, while also constructing a robust unified representation across all modalities. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, showing that dynamic anchor methods outperform all fixed anchor binding methods as the former captures more nuanced multimodal interactions.
Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their local data. Recent studies have highlighted the vulnerability of FL to Byzantine attacks, where malicious clients send poisoned updates to degrade model performance. Notably, many attacks have been developed targeting specific aggregation rules, whereas various defense mechanisms have been designed for dedicated threat models. This paper studies the resilience of an attack-agnostic FL scenario, where the server lacks prior knowledge of both the attackers' strategies and the number of malicious clients involved. We first introduce a hybrid defense against state-of-the-art attacks. Our goal is to identify a general-purpose aggregation rule that performs well on average while also avoiding worst-case vulnerabilities. By adaptively selecting from available defenses, we demonstrate that the server remains robust even when confronted with a substantial proportion of poisoned updates. To better understand this resilience, we then assess the attackers' capability using a proxy called client heterogeneity. We also emphasize that the existing FL defenses should not be regarded as secure, as demonstrated through the newly proposed Trapsetter attack. The proposed attack outperforms other state-of-the-art attacks by further reducing the model test accuracy by 8-10%. Our findings highlight the ongoing need for the development of Byzantine-resilient aggregation algorithms in FL.
In reinforcement learning, offline value function learning is the procedure of using an offline dataset to estimate the expected discounted return from each state when taking actions according to a fixed target policy. The stability of this procedure, i.e., whether it converges to its fixed-point, critically depends on the representations of the state-action pairs. Poorly learned representations can make value function learning unstable, or even divergent. Therefore, it is critical to stabilize value function learning by explicitly shaping the state-action representations. Recently, the class of bisimulation-based algorithms have shown promise in shaping representations for control. However, it is still unclear if this class of methods can stabilize value function learning. In this work, we investigate this question and answer it affirmatively. We introduce a bisimulation-based algorithm called kernel representations for offline policy evaluation (KROPE). KROPE uses a kernel to shape state-action representations such that state-action pairs that have similar immediate rewards and lead to similar next state-action pairs under the target policy also have similar representations. We show that KROPE: 1) learns stable representations and 2) leads to lower value error than baselines. Our analysis provides new theoretical insight into the stability properties of bisimulation-based methods and suggests that practitioners can use these methods for stable and accurate evaluation of offline reinforcement learning agents.
Remarkable progress in the development of Deep Learning Weather Prediction (DLWP) models positions them to become competitive with traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Indeed, a wide number of DLWP architectures -- based on various backbones, including U-Net, Transformer, Graph Neural Network (GNN), and Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) -- have demonstrated their potential at forecasting atmospheric states. However, due to differences in training protocols, forecast horizons, and data choices, it remains unclear which (if any) of these methods and architectures are most suitable for weather forecasting and for future model development. Here, we step back and provide a detailed empirical analysis, under controlled conditions, comparing and contrasting the most prominent DLWP models, along with their backbones. We accomplish this by predicting synthetic two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes and real-world global weather dynamics. In terms of accuracy, memory consumption, and runtime, our results illustrate various tradeoffs. For example, on synthetic data, we observe favorable performance of FNO; and on the real-world WeatherBench dataset, our results demonstrate the suitability of ConvLSTM and SwinTransformer for short-to-mid-ranged forecasts. For long-ranged weather rollouts of up to 365 days, we observe superior stability and physical soundness in architectures that formulate a spherical data representation, i.e., GraphCast and Spherical FNO. In addition, we observe that all of these model backbones "saturate," i.e., none of them exhibit so-called neural scaling, which highlights an important direction for future work on these and related models. The code is available at //github.com/amazon-science/dlwp-benchmark.
Dynamic graph representation learning has emerged as a crucial research area, driven by the growing need for analyzing time-evolving graph data in real-world applications. While recent approaches leveraging recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promise, they often fail to adequately capture the impact of temporal edge states on inter-node relationships, consequently overlooking the dynamic changes in node features induced by these evolving relationships. Furthermore, these methods suffer from GNNs' inherent over-smoothing problem, which hinders the extraction of global structural features. To address these challenges, we introduce the Recurrent Structure-reinforced Graph Transformer (RSGT), a novel framework for dynamic graph representation learning. It first designs a heuristic method to explicitly model edge temporal states by employing different edge types and weights based on the differences between consecutive snapshots, thereby integrating varying edge temporal states into the graph's topological structure. We then propose a structure-reinforced graph transformer that captures temporal node representations encoding both graph topology and evolving dynamics through a recurrent learning paradigm, enabling the extraction of both local and global structural features. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate RSGT's superior performance in discrete dynamic graph representation learning, consistently outperforming existing methods in dynamic link prediction tasks.
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.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
Deep learning (DL) based semantic segmentation methods have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years. More specifically, these techniques have been successfully applied to medical image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. One deep learning technique, U-Net, has become one of the most popular for these applications. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) based on U-Net as well as a Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RRCNN) based on U-Net models, which are named RU-Net and R2U-Net respectively. The proposed models utilize the power of U-Net, Residual Network, as well as RCNN. There are several advantages of these proposed architectures for segmentation tasks. First, a residual unit helps when training deep architecture. Second, feature accumulation with recurrent residual convolutional layers ensures better feature representation for segmentation tasks. Third, it allows us to design better U-Net architecture with same number of network parameters with better performance for medical image segmentation. The proposed models are tested on three benchmark datasets such as blood vessel segmentation in retina images, skin cancer segmentation, and lung lesion segmentation. The experimental results show superior performance on segmentation tasks compared to equivalent models including U-Net and residual U-Net (ResU-Net).