Polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes, as a concatenated coding scheme based on polar codes, is able to approach the finite-length bound of binary-input AWGN channel at short blocklengths. In this paper, we extend PAC codes to the fields of source coding and joint source-channel coding and show that they can also approach the corresponding finite-length bounds at short blocklengths.
To plan the trajectories of a large and heterogeneous swarm, sequential or synchronous distributed methods usually become intractable, due to the lack of global connectivity and clock synchronization, Moreover, the existing asynchronously distributed schemes usually require recheck-like mechanisms instead of inherently considering the other' moving tendency. To this end, we propose a novel asynchronous protocol to allocate the agents' derivable space in a distributed way, by which each agent can replan trajectory depending on its own timetable. Properties such as collision avoidance and recursive feasibility are theoretically shown and a lower bound of protocol updating is provided. Comprehensive simulations and comparisons with five state-of-the-art methods validate the effectiveness of our method and illustrate the improvement in both the completion time and the moving distance. Finally, hardware experiments are carried out, where 8 heterogeneous unmanned ground vehicles with onboard computation navigate in cluttered scenarios at a high agility.
Prediction rule ensembles (PREs) are a relatively new statistical learning method, which aim to strike a balance between predictive accuracy and interpretability. Starting from a decision tree ensemble, like a boosted tree ensemble or a random forest, PREs retain a small subset of tree nodes in the final predictive model. These nodes can be written as simple rules of the form if [condition] then [prediction]. As a result, PREs are often much less complex than full decision tree ensembles, while they have been found to provide similar predictive accuracy in many situations. The current paper introduces the methodology and shows how PREs can be fitted using the R package pre through several real-data examples from psychological research. The examples also illustrate a number of features of package \textbf{pre} that may be particularly useful for applications in psychology: support for categorical, multivariate and count responses, application of (non-)negativity constraints, inclusion of confirmatory rules and standardized variable importance measures.
In the classical source coding problem, the compressed source is reconstructed at the decoder with respect to some distortion metric. Motivated by settings in which we are interested in more than simply reconstructing the compressed source, we investigate a single-shot compression problem where the decoder is tasked with reconstructing the original data as well as making inferences from it. Quality of inference and reconstruction is determined by a distortion criteria for each task. Given allowable distortion levels, we are interested in characterizing the probability of excess distortion. Modeling the joint inference and reconstruction problem as direct-indirect source coding one, we obtain lower and upper bounds for excess distortion probability. We specialize the converse bound and present a new easily computable achievability bound for the case where the distortion metric for reconstruction is logarithmic loss.
Model overconfidence and poor calibration are common in machine learning and difficult to account for when applying standard empirical risk minimization. In this work, we propose a novel method to alleviate these problems that we call odd-$k$-out learning (OKO), which minimizes the cross-entropy error for sets rather than for single examples. This naturally allows the model to capture correlations across data examples and achieves both better accuracy and calibration, especially in limited training data and class-imbalanced regimes. Perhaps surprisingly, OKO often yields better calibration even when training with hard labels and dropping any additional calibration parameter tuning, such as temperature scaling. We provide theoretical justification, establishing that OKO naturally yields better calibration, and provide extensive experimental analyses that corroborate our theoretical findings. We emphasize that OKO is a general framework that can be easily adapted to many settings and the trained model can be applied to single examples at inference time, without introducing significant run-time overhead or architecture changes.
Code generation is to automatically generate source code conforming to a given programming specification, which has received extensive attention especially with the development of large language models (LLMs). Due to the inherent difficulty of code generation, the code generated by LLMs may be also not aligned with the specification. To improve the perfor mance of LLMs in code generation, some Chain of Thought (CoT) techniques have been proposed to guide LLMs for programming understanding before code generation. However, they are still hard to figure out complicated programming logic according to the (concise) specification, leadingto unsatisfactory code generation performance. In this work, we propose the first test-case-driven CoT technique, called TCoT, to further enhance the ability of LLMs in code generation. It understands the programming specification from the novel perspective of test cases, which is aligned with human practice by using examples to understand complicated problems. Due to the existence of the expected output specified in a test case, TCoT can instantly check the correctness of the programming understanding and then refine it to be as correct as possible before code generation. In this way, it is more likely to generate correct code. Our evaluation on 6 datasets and 14 baselines demonstrates the effectiveness of TCoT. For example, TCoT improves ChatGPT by 13.93%~69.44% in terms of Pass@1 (measuring the ratio of programming problems for which the generated code passes all test cases), and outperforms the existing CoT technique with the improvement of 12.14%~53.72% in terms of Pass@1.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
Verifiability is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, where editors are encouraged to provide citations for the added statements. Statements can be any arbitrary piece of text, ranging from a sentence up to a paragraph. However, in many cases, citations are either outdated, missing, or link to non-existing references (e.g. dead URL, moved content etc.). In total, 20\% of the cases such citations refer to news articles and represent the second most cited source. Even in cases where citations are provided, there are no explicit indicators for the span of a citation for a given piece of text. In addition to issues related with the verifiability principle, many Wikipedia entity pages are incomplete, with relevant information that is already available in online news sources missing. Even for the already existing citations, there is often a delay between the news publication time and the reference time. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose automated approaches that enforce the verifiability principle in Wikipedia, and suggest relevant and missing news references for further enriching Wikipedia entity pages.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.