Set reconciliation, where two parties hold fixed-length bit strings and run a protocol to learn the strings they are missing from each other, is a fundamental task in many distributed systems. We present Rateless Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables (Rateless IBLT), the first set reconciliation protocol, to the best of our knowledge, that achieves low computation cost and near-optimal communication cost across a wide range of scenarios: set differences of one to millions, bit strings of a few bytes to megabytes, and workloads injected by potential adversaries. Rateless IBLT is based on a novel encoder that incrementally encodes the set difference into an infinite stream of coded symbols, resembling rateless error-correcting codes. We compare Rateless IBLT with state-of-the-art set reconciliation schemes and demonstrate significant improvements. Rateless IBLT achieves 3--4x lower communication cost than non-rateless schemes with similar computation cost, and 2--2000x lower computation cost than schemes with similar communication cost. We show the real-world benefits of Rateless IBLT by applying it to synchronize the state of the Ethereum blockchain, and demonstrate 5.6x lower end-to-end completion time and 4.4x lower communication cost compared to the system used in production.
Interactive Natural Language Processing (iNLP) has emerged as a novel paradigm within the field of NLP, aimed at addressing limitations in existing frameworks while aligning with the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence. This paradigm considers language models as agents capable of observing, acting, and receiving feedback iteratively from external entities. Specifically, language models in this context can: (1) interact with humans for better understanding and addressing user needs, personalizing responses, aligning with human values, and improving the overall user experience; (2) interact with knowledge bases for enriching language representations with factual knowledge, enhancing the contextual relevance of responses, and dynamically leveraging external information to generate more accurate and informed responses; (3) interact with models and tools for effectively decomposing and addressing complex tasks, leveraging specialized expertise for specific subtasks, and fostering the simulation of social behaviors; and (4) interact with environments for learning grounded representations of language, and effectively tackling embodied tasks such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making in response to environmental observations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of iNLP, starting by proposing a unified definition and framework of the concept. We then provide a systematic classification of iNLP, dissecting its various components, including interactive objects, interaction interfaces, and interaction methods. We proceed to delve into the evaluation methodologies used in the field, explore its diverse applications, scrutinize its ethical and safety issues, and discuss prospective research directions. This survey serves as an entry point for researchers who are interested in this rapidly evolving area and offers a broad view of the current landscape and future trajectory of iNLP.
2D-based Industrial Anomaly Detection has been widely discussed, however, multimodal industrial anomaly detection based on 3D point clouds and RGB images still has many untouched fields. Existing multimodal industrial anomaly detection methods directly concatenate the multimodal features, which leads to a strong disturbance between features and harms the detection performance. In this paper, we propose Multi-3D-Memory (M3DM), a novel multimodal anomaly detection method with hybrid fusion scheme: firstly, we design an unsupervised feature fusion with patch-wise contrastive learning to encourage the interaction of different modal features; secondly, we use a decision layer fusion with multiple memory banks to avoid loss of information and additional novelty classifiers to make the final decision. We further propose a point feature alignment operation to better align the point cloud and RGB features. Extensive experiments show that our multimodal industrial anomaly detection model outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both detection and segmentation precision on MVTec-3D AD dataset. Code is available at //github.com/nomewang/M3DM.
Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL) aims to learn a model capable of identifying and disentangling the underlying factors hidden in the observable data in representation form. The process of separating underlying factors of variation into variables with semantic meaning benefits in learning explainable representations of data, which imitates the meaningful understanding process of humans when observing an object or relation. As a general learning strategy, DRL has demonstrated its power in improving the model explainability, controlability, robustness, as well as generalization capacity in a wide range of scenarios such as computer vision, natural language processing, data mining etc. In this article, we comprehensively review DRL from various aspects including motivations, definitions, methodologies, evaluations, applications and model designs. We discuss works on DRL based on two well-recognized definitions, i.e., Intuitive Definition and Group Theory Definition. We further categorize the methodologies for DRL into four groups, i.e., Traditional Statistical Approaches, Variational Auto-encoder Based Approaches, Generative Adversarial Networks Based Approaches, Hierarchical Approaches and Other Approaches. We also analyze principles to design different DRL models that may benefit different tasks in practical applications. Finally, we point out challenges in DRL as well as potential research directions deserving future investigations. We believe this work may provide insights for promoting the DRL research in the community.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
Graph representation learning is to learn universal node representations that preserve both node attributes and structural information. The derived node representations can be used to serve various downstream tasks, such as node classification and node clustering. When a graph is heterogeneous, the problem becomes more challenging than the homogeneous graph node learning problem. Inspired by the emerging information theoretic-based learning algorithm, in this paper we propose an unsupervised graph neural network Heterogeneous Deep Graph Infomax (HDGI) for heterogeneous graph representation learning. We use the meta-path structure to analyze the connections involving semantics in heterogeneous graphs and utilize graph convolution module and semantic-level attention mechanism to capture local representations. By maximizing local-global mutual information, HDGI effectively learns high-level node representations that can be utilized in downstream graph-related tasks. Experiment results show that HDGI remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised graph representation learning methods on both classification and clustering tasks. By feeding the learned representations into a parametric model, such as logistic regression, we even achieve comparable performance in node classification tasks when comparing with state-of-the-art supervised end-to-end GNN models.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and their variants have experienced significant attention and have become the de facto methods for learning graph representations. GCNs derive inspiration primarily from recent deep learning approaches, and as a result, may inherit unnecessary complexity and redundant computation. In this paper, we reduce this excess complexity through successively removing nonlinearities and collapsing weight matrices between consecutive layers. We theoretically analyze the resulting linear model and show that it corresponds to a fixed low-pass filter followed by a linear classifier. Notably, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that these simplifications do not negatively impact accuracy in many downstream applications. Moreover, the resulting model scales to larger datasets, is naturally interpretable, and yields up to two orders of magnitude speedup over FastGCN.
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.
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.