We present CAFA-evaluator, a powerful Python program designed to evaluate the performance of prediction methods on targets with hierarchical concept dependencies. It generalizes multi-label evaluation to modern ontologies where the prediction targets are drawn from a directed acyclic graph and achieves high efficiency by leveraging matrix computation and topological sorting. The program requirements include a small number of standard Python libraries, making CAFA-evaluator easy to maintain. The code replicates the Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotation (CAFA) benchmarking, which evaluates predictions of the consistent subgraphs in Gene Ontology. Owing to its reliability and accuracy, the organizers have selected CAFA-evaluator as the official CAFA evaluation software.
Federated learning (FL) provides a promising collaborative framework to build a model from distributed clients, and this work investigates the carbon emission of the FL process. Cloud and edge servers hosting FL clients may exhibit diverse carbon footprints influenced by their geographical locations with varying power sources, offering opportunities to reduce carbon emissions by training local models with adaptive computations and communications. In this paper, we propose FedGreen, a carbon-aware FL approach to efficiently train models by adopting adaptive model sizes shared with clients based on their carbon profiles and locations using ordered dropout as a model compression technique. We theoretically analyze the trade-offs between the produced carbon emissions and the convergence accuracy, considering the carbon intensity discrepancy across countries to choose the parameters optimally. Empirical studies show that FedGreen can substantially reduce the carbon footprints of FL compared to the state-of-the-art while maintaining competitive model accuracy.
The generalized Gauss-Newton (GGN) optimization method incorporates curvature estimates into its solution steps, and provides a good approximation to the Newton method for large-scale optimization problems. GGN has been found particularly interesting for practical training of deep neural networks, not only for its impressive convergence speed, but also for its close relation with neural tangent kernel regression, which is central to recent studies that aim to understand the optimization and generalization properties of neural networks. This work studies a GGN method for optimizing a two-layer neural network with explicit regularization. In particular, we consider a class of generalized self-concordant (GSC) functions that provide smooth approximations to commonly-used penalty terms in the objective function of the optimization problem. This approach provides an adaptive learning rate selection technique that requires little to no tuning for optimal performance. We study the convergence of the two-layer neural network, considered to be overparameterized, in the optimization loop of the resulting GGN method for a given scaling of the network parameters. Our numerical experiments highlight specific aspects of GSC regularization that help to improve generalization of the optimized neural network. The code to reproduce the experimental results is available at //github.com/adeyemiadeoye/ggn-score-nn.
We present a versatile NeRF-based simulator for testing autonomous driving (AD) software systems, designed with a focus on sensor-realistic closed-loop evaluation and the creation of safety-critical scenarios. The simulator learns from sequences of real-world driving sensor data and enables reconfigurations and renderings of new, unseen scenarios. In this work, we use our simulator to test the responses of AD models to safety-critical scenarios inspired by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). Our evaluation reveals that, while state-of-the-art end-to-end planners excel in nominal driving scenarios in an open-loop setting, they exhibit critical flaws when navigating our safety-critical scenarios in a closed-loop setting. This highlights the need for advancements in the safety and real-world usability of end-to-end planners. By publicly releasing our simulator and scenarios as an easy-to-run evaluation suite, we invite the research community to explore, refine, and validate their AD models in controlled, yet highly configurable and challenging sensor-realistic environments. Code and instructions can be found at //github.com/atonderski/neuro-ncap
The ability of the foundation models heavily relies on large-scale, diverse, and high-quality pretraining data. In order to improve data quality, researchers and practitioners often have to manually curate datasets from difference sources and develop dedicated data cleansing pipeline for each data repository. Lacking a unified data processing framework, this process is repetitive and cumbersome. To mitigate this issue, we propose a data processing framework that integrates a Processing Module which consists of a series of operators at different granularity levels, and an Analyzing Module which supports probing and evaluation of the refined data. The proposed framework is easy to use and highly flexible. In this demo paper, we first introduce how to use this framework with some example use cases and then demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the data quality with an automated evaluation with ChatGPT and an end-to-end evaluation in pretraining the GPT-2 model. The code and demonstration videos are accessible on GitHub.
This paper presents a novel optimization framework for beamforming design in integrated sensing and communication systems where a base station seeks to minimize the Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao bound of a sensing problem while satisfying quality of service constraints for the communication users. Prior approaches formulate the design problem as a semidefinite program for which acquiring a beamforming solution is computationally expensive. In this work, we show that the computational burden can be considerably alleviated. To achieve this, we transform the design problem to a tractable form that not only provides a new understanding of Cram\'er-Rao bound optimization, but also allows for an uplink-downlink duality relation to be developed. Such a duality result gives rise to an efficient algorithm that enables the beamforming design problem to be solved at a much lower complexity as compared to the-state-of-the-art methods.
Instead of building deep learning models from scratch, developers are more and more relying on adapting pre-trained models to their customized tasks. However, powerful pre-trained models may be misused for unethical or illegal tasks, e.g., privacy inference and unsafe content generation. In this paper, we introduce a pioneering learning paradigm, non-fine-tunable learning, which prevents the pre-trained model from being fine-tuned to indecent tasks while preserving its performance on the original task. To fulfill this goal, we propose SOPHON, a protection framework that reinforces a given pre-trained model to be resistant to being fine-tuned in pre-defined restricted domains. Nonetheless, this is challenging due to a diversity of complicated fine-tuning strategies that may be adopted by adversaries. Inspired by model-agnostic meta-learning, we overcome this difficulty by designing sophisticated fine-tuning simulation and fine-tuning evaluation algorithms. In addition, we carefully design the optimization process to entrap the pre-trained model within a hard-to-escape local optimum regarding restricted domains. We have conducted extensive experiments on two deep learning modes (classification and generation), seven restricted domains, and six model architectures to verify the effectiveness of SOPHON. Experiment results verify that fine-tuning SOPHON-protected models incurs an overhead comparable to or even greater than training from scratch. Furthermore, we confirm the robustness of SOPHON to three fine-tuning methods, five optimizers, various learning rates and batch sizes. SOPHON may help boost further investigations into safe and responsible AI.
User interface (UI) design is a difficult yet important task for ensuring the usability, accessibility, and aesthetic qualities of applications. In our paper, we develop a machine-learned model, UIClip, for assessing the design quality and visual relevance of a UI given its screenshot and natural language description. To train UIClip, we used a combination of automated crawling, synthetic augmentation, and human ratings to construct a large-scale dataset of UIs, collated by description and ranked by design quality. Through training on the dataset, UIClip implicitly learns properties of good and bad designs by i) assigning a numerical score that represents a UI design's relevance and quality and ii) providing design suggestions. In an evaluation that compared the outputs of UIClip and other baselines to UIs rated by 12 human designers, we found that UIClip achieved the highest agreement with ground-truth rankings. Finally, we present three example applications that demonstrate how UIClip can facilitate downstream applications that rely on instantaneous assessment of UI design quality: i) UI code generation, ii) UI design tips generation, and iii) quality-aware UI example search.
This paper presents Pix2Seq, a simple and generic framework for object detection. Unlike existing approaches that explicitly integrate prior knowledge about the task, we simply cast object detection as a language modeling task conditioned on the observed pixel inputs. Object descriptions (e.g., bounding boxes and class labels) are expressed as sequences of discrete tokens, and we train a neural net to perceive the image and generate the desired sequence. Our approach is based mainly on the intuition that if a neural net knows about where and what the objects are, we just need to teach it how to read them out. Beyond the use of task-specific data augmentations, our approach makes minimal assumptions about the task, yet it achieves competitive results on the challenging COCO dataset, compared to highly specialized and well optimized detection algorithms.
We describe ACE0, a lightweight platform for evaluating the suitability and viability of AI methods for behaviour discovery in multiagent simulations. Specifically, ACE0 was designed to explore AI methods for multi-agent simulations used in operations research studies related to new technologies such as autonomous aircraft. Simulation environments used in production are often high-fidelity, complex, require significant domain knowledge and as a result have high R&D costs. Minimal and lightweight simulation environments can help researchers and engineers evaluate the viability of new AI technologies for behaviour discovery in a more agile and potentially cost effective manner. In this paper we describe the motivation for the development of ACE0.We provide a technical overview of the system architecture, describe a case study of behaviour discovery in the aerospace domain, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the system. The evaluation includes a brief description of collaborative research projects with academic partners, exploring different AI behaviour discovery methods.
Vision-based vehicle detection approaches achieve incredible success in recent years with the development of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, existing CNN based algorithms suffer from the problem that the convolutional features are scale-sensitive in object detection task but it is common that traffic images and videos contain vehicles with a large variance of scales. In this paper, we delve into the source of scale sensitivity, and reveal two key issues: 1) existing RoI pooling destroys the structure of small scale objects, 2) the large intra-class distance for a large variance of scales exceeds the representation capability of a single network. Based on these findings, we present a scale-insensitive convolutional neural network (SINet) for fast detecting vehicles with a large variance of scales. First, we present a context-aware RoI pooling to maintain the contextual information and original structure of small scale objects. Second, we present a multi-branch decision network to minimize the intra-class distance of features. These lightweight techniques bring zero extra time complexity but prominent detection accuracy improvement. The proposed techniques can be equipped with any deep network architectures and keep them trained end-to-end. Our SINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed (up to 37 FPS) on the KITTI benchmark and a new highway dataset, which contains a large variance of scales and extremely small objects.