Large-scale models require substantial computational resources for analysis and studying treatment conditions. Specifically, estimating treatment effects using simulations may require a lot of infeasible resources to allocate at every treatment condition. Therefore, it is essential to develop efficient methods to allocate computational resources for estimating treatment effects. Agent-based simulation allows us to generate highly realistic simulation samples. FRED (A Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics) is an agent-based modeling system with a geospatial perspective using a synthetic population constructed based on the U.S. census data. Given its synthetic population, FRED simulations present a baseline for comparable results from different treatment conditions and treatment conditions. In this paper, we show three other methods for estimating treatment effects. In the first method, we resort to brute-force allocation, where all treatment conditions have an equal number of samples with a relatively large number of simulation runs. In the second method, we try to reduce the number of simulation runs by customizing individual samples required for each treatment effect based on the width of confidence intervals around the mean estimates. In the third method, we use a regression model, which allows us to learn across the treatment conditions such that simulation samples allocated for a treatment condition will help better estimate treatment effects in other conditions. We show that the regression-based methods result in a comparable estimate of treatment effects with less computational resources. The reduced variability and faster convergence of model-based estimates come at the cost of increased bias, and the bias-variance trade-off can be controlled by adjusting the number of model parameters (e.g., including higher-order interaction terms in the regression model).
Foundation models exhibit significant capabilities in decision-making and logical deductions. Nonetheless, a continuing discourse persists regarding their genuine understanding of the world as opposed to mere stochastic mimicry. This paper meticulously examines a simple transformer trained for Othello, extending prior research to enhance comprehension of the emergent world model of Othello-GPT. The investigation reveals that Othello-GPT encapsulates a linear representation of opposing pieces, a factor that causally steers its decision-making process. This paper further elucidates the interplay between the linear world representation and causal decision-making, and their dependence on layer depth and model complexity. We have made the code public.
Sorting is a fundamental operation of all computer systems, having been a long-standing significant research topic. Beyond the problem formulation of traditional sorting algorithms, we consider sorting problems for more abstract yet expressive inputs, e.g., multi-digit images and image fragments, through a neural sorting network. To learn a mapping from a high-dimensional input to an ordinal variable, the differentiability of sorting networks needs to be guaranteed. In this paper we define a softening error by a differentiable swap function, and develop an error-free swap function that holds non-decreasing and differentiability conditions. Furthermore, a permutation-equivariant Transformer network with multi-head attention is adopted to capture dependency between given inputs and also leverage its model capacity with self-attention. Experiments on diverse sorting benchmarks show that our methods perform better than or comparable to baseline methods.
Efficiency is essential to support responsiveness w.r.t. ever-growing datasets, especially for Deep Learning (DL) systems. DL frameworks have traditionally embraced deferred execution-style DL code -- supporting symbolic, graph-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) computation. While scalable, such development tends to produce code that is error-prone, non-intuitive, and difficult to debug. Consequently, more natural, less error-prone imperative DL frameworks encouraging eager execution have emerged at the expense of run-time performance. Though hybrid approaches aim for the "best of both worlds," using them effectively requires subtle considerations to make code amenable to safe, accurate, and efficient graph execution -- avoiding performance bottlenecks and semantically inequivalent results. We present our ongoing work on an automated refactoring approach that assists developers in specifying whether and how their otherwise eagerly-executed imperative DL code could be reliably and efficiently executed as graphs at run-time in a semantics-preserving fashion. The approach, based on a novel tensor analysis specifically for imperative DL code, consists of refactoring preconditions for automatically determining when it is safe and potentially advantageous to migrate imperative DL code to graph execution and modifying decorator parameters or eagerly executing code already running as graphs. The approach is being implemented as a PyDev Eclipse IDE plug-in and uses the WALA Ariadne analysis framework. We discuss our ongoing work towards optimizing imperative DL code to its full potential.
We study matrix estimation problems arising in reinforcement learning (RL) with low-rank structure. In low-rank bandits, the matrix to be recovered specifies the expected arm rewards, and for low-rank Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), it may for example characterize the transition kernel of the MDP. In both cases, each entry of the matrix carries important information, and we seek estimation methods with low entry-wise error. Importantly, these methods further need to accommodate for inherent correlations in the available data (e.g. for MDPs, the data consists of system trajectories). We investigate the performance of simple spectral-based matrix estimation approaches: we show that they efficiently recover the singular subspaces of the matrix and exhibit nearly-minimal entry-wise error. These new results on low-rank matrix estimation make it possible to devise reinforcement learning algorithms that fully exploit the underlying low-rank structure. We provide two examples of such algorithms: a regret minimization algorithm for low-rank bandit problems, and a best policy identification algorithm for reward-free RL in low-rank MDPs. Both algorithms yield state-of-the-art performance guarantees.
We propose FedGT, a novel framework for identifying malicious clients in federated learning with secure aggregation. Inspired by group testing, the framework leverages overlapping groups of clients to identify the presence of malicious clients in the groups via a decoding operation. The clients identified as malicious are then removed from the training of the model, which is performed over the remaining clients. By choosing the size, number, and overlap between groups, FedGT strikes a balance between privacy and security. Specifically, the server learns the aggregated model of the clients in each group - vanilla federated learning and secure aggregation correspond to the extreme cases of FedGT with group size equal to one and the total number of clients, respectively. The effectiveness of FedGT is demonstrated through extensive experiments on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ISIC2019 datasets in a cross-silo setting under different data-poisoning attacks. These experiments showcase FedGT's ability to identify malicious clients, resulting in high model utility. We further show that FedGT significantly outperforms the private robust aggregation approach based on the geometric median recently proposed by Pillutla et al. on heterogeneous client data (ISIC2019) and in the presence of targeted attacks (CIFAR-10 and ISIC2019).
Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.
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.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
We address the task of automatically scoring the competency of candidates based on textual features, from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions in the asynchronous video job interview (AVI). The key challenge is how to construct the dependency relation between questions and answers, and conduct the semantic level interaction for each question-answer (QA) pair. However, most of the recent studies in AVI focus on how to represent questions and answers better, but ignore the dependency information and interaction between them, which is critical for QA evaluation. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Reasoning Graph Neural Network (HRGNN) for the automatic assessment of question-answer pairs. Specifically, we construct a sentence-level relational graph neural network to capture the dependency information of sentences in or between the question and the answer. Based on these graphs, we employ a semantic-level reasoning graph attention network to model the interaction states of the current QA session. Finally, we propose a gated recurrent unit encoder to represent the temporal question-answer pairs for the final prediction. Empirical results conducted on CHNAT (a real-world dataset) validate that our proposed model significantly outperforms text-matching based benchmark models. Ablation studies and experimental results with 10 random seeds also show the effectiveness and stability of our models.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.