This paper focuses on predicting the occurrence of grokking in neural networks, a phenomenon in which perfect generalization emerges long after signs of overfitting or memorization are observed. It has been reported that grokking can only be observed with certain hyper-parameters. This makes it critical to identify the parameters that lead to grokking. However, since grokking occurs after a large number of epochs, searching for the hyper-parameters that lead to it is time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a low-cost method to predict grokking without training for a large number of epochs. In essence, by studying the learning curve of the first few epochs, we show that one can predict whether grokking will occur later on. Specifically, if certain oscillations occur in the early epochs, one can expect grokking to occur if the model is trained for a much longer period of time. We propose using the spectral signature of a learning curve derived by applying the Fourier transform to quantify the amplitude of low-frequency components to detect the presence of such oscillations. We also present additional experiments aimed at explaining the cause of these oscillations and characterizing the loss landscape.
The synthesis of human motion has traditionally been addressed through task-dependent models that focus on specific challenges, such as predicting future motions or filling in intermediate poses conditioned on known key-poses. In this paper, we present a novel task-independent model called UNIMASK-M, which can effectively address these challenges using a unified architecture. Our model obtains comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art in each field. Inspired by Vision Transformers (ViTs), our UNIMASK-M model decomposes a human pose into body parts to leverage the spatio-temporal relationships existing in human motion. Moreover, we reformulate various pose-conditioned motion synthesis tasks as a reconstruction problem with different masking patterns given as input. By explicitly informing our model about the masked joints, our UNIMASK-M becomes more robust to occlusions. Experimental results show that our model successfully forecasts human motion on the Human3.6M dataset. Moreover, it achieves state-of-the-art results in motion inbetweening on the LaFAN1 dataset, particularly in long transition periods. More information can be found on the project website //sites.google.com/view/estevevallsmascaro/publications/unimask-m.
Safeguarding data from unauthorized exploitation is vital for privacy and security, especially in recent rampant research in security breach such as adversarial/membership attacks. To this end, \textit{unlearnable examples} (UEs) have been recently proposed as a compelling protection, by adding imperceptible perturbation to data so that models trained on them cannot classify them accurately on original clean distribution. Unfortunately, we find UEs provide a false sense of security, because they cannot stop unauthorized users from utilizing other unprotected data to remove the protection, by turning unlearnable data into learnable again. Motivated by this observation, we formally define a new threat by introducing \textit{learnable unauthorized examples} (LEs) which are UEs with their protection removed. The core of this approach is a novel purification process that projects UEs onto the manifold of LEs. This is realized by a new joint-conditional diffusion model which denoises UEs conditioned on the pixel and perceptual similarity between UEs and LEs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LE delivers state-of-the-art countering performance against both supervised UEs and unsupervised UEs in various scenarios, which is the first generalizable countermeasure to UEs across supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/jiangw-0/LE_JCDP}.
Causal inference is a crucial goal of science, enabling researchers to arrive at meaningful conclusions regarding the predictions of hypothetical interventions using observational data. Path models, Structural Equation Models (SEMs), and, more generally, Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), provide a means to unambiguously specify assumptions regarding the causal structure underlying a phenomenon. Unlike DAGs, which make very few assumptions about the functional and parametric form, SEM assumes linearity. This can result in functional misspecification which prevents researchers from undertaking reliable effect size estimation. In contrast, we propose Super Learner Equation Modeling, a path modeling technique integrating machine learning Super Learner ensembles. We empirically demonstrate its ability to provide consistent and unbiased estimates of causal effects, its competitive performance for linear models when compared with SEM, and highlight its superiority over SEM when dealing with non-linear relationships. We provide open-source code, and a tutorial notebook with example usage, accentuating the easy-to-use nature of the method.
Virtual try-on is a critical image synthesis task that aims to transfer clothes from one image to another while preserving the details of both humans and clothes. While many existing methods rely on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to achieve this, flaws can still occur, particularly at high resolutions. Recently, the diffusion model has emerged as a promising alternative for generating high-quality images in various applications. However, simply using clothes as a condition for guiding the diffusion model to inpaint is insufficient to maintain the details of the clothes. To overcome this challenge, we propose an exemplar-based inpainting approach that leverages a warping module to guide the diffusion model's generation effectively. The warping module performs initial processing on the clothes, which helps to preserve the local details of the clothes. We then combine the warped clothes with clothes-agnostic person image and add noise as the input of diffusion model. Additionally, the warped clothes is used as local conditions for each denoising process to ensure that the resulting output retains as much detail as possible. Our approach, namely Diffusion-based Conditional Inpainting for Virtual Try-ON (DCI-VTON), effectively utilizes the power of the diffusion model, and the incorporation of the warping module helps to produce high-quality and realistic virtual try-on results. Experimental results on VITON-HD demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
Deep neural networks are vulnerable to universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), an instance-agnostic perturbation capable of fooling the target model for most samples. Compared to instance-specific adversarial examples, UAP is more challenging as it needs to generalize across various samples and models. In this paper, we examine the serious dilemma of UAP generation methods from a generalization perspective -- the gradient vanishing problem using small-batch stochastic gradient optimization and the local optima problem using large-batch optimization. To address these problems, we propose a simple and effective method called Stochastic Gradient Aggregation (SGA), which alleviates the gradient vanishing and escapes from poor local optima at the same time. Specifically, SGA employs the small-batch training to perform multiple iterations of inner pre-search. Then, all the inner gradients are aggregated as a one-step gradient estimation to enhance the gradient stability and reduce quantization errors. Extensive experiments on the standard ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the generalization ability of UAP and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at //github.com/liuxuannan/Stochastic-Gradient-Aggregation.
Educational chatbots come with a promise of interactive and personalized learning experiences, yet their development has been limited by the restricted free interaction capabilities of available platforms and the difficulty of encoding knowledge in a suitable format. Recent advances in language learning models with zero-shot learning capabilities, such as ChatGPT, suggest a new possibility for developing educational chatbots using a prompt-based approach. We present a case study with a simple system that enables mixed-turn chatbot interactions and discuss the insights and preliminary guidelines obtained from initial tests. We examine ChatGPT's ability to pursue multiple interconnected learning objectives, adapt the educational activity to users' characteristics, such as culture, age, and level of education, and its ability to use diverse educational strategies and conversational styles. Although the results are encouraging, challenges are posed by the limited history maintained for the conversation and the highly structured form of responses by ChatGPT, as well as their variability, which can lead to an unexpected switch of the chatbot's role from a teacher to a therapist. We provide some initial guidelines to address these issues and to facilitate the development of effective educational chatbots.
Recently, graph neural networks have been gaining a lot of attention to simulate dynamical systems due to their inductive nature leading to zero-shot generalizability. Similarly, physics-informed inductive biases in deep-learning frameworks have been shown to give superior performance in learning the dynamics of physical systems. There is a growing volume of literature that attempts to combine these two approaches. Here, we evaluate the performance of thirteen different graph neural networks, namely, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian graph neural networks, graph neural ODE, and their variants with explicit constraints and different architectures. We briefly explain the theoretical formulation highlighting the similarities and differences in the inductive biases and graph architecture of these systems. We evaluate these models on spring, pendulum, gravitational, and 3D deformable solid systems to compare the performance in terms of rollout error, conserved quantities such as energy and momentum, and generalizability to unseen system sizes. Our study demonstrates that GNNs with additional inductive biases, such as explicit constraints and decoupling of kinetic and potential energies, exhibit significantly enhanced performance. Further, all the physics-informed GNNs exhibit zero-shot generalizability to system sizes an order of magnitude larger than the training system, thus providing a promising route to simulate large-scale realistic systems.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.