Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize automated traceability by overcoming the challenges faced by previous methods and introducing new possibilities. However, the optimal utilization of LLMs for automated traceability remains unclear. This paper explores the process of prompt engineering to extract link predictions from an LLM. We provide detailed insights into our approach for constructing effective prompts, offering our lessons learned. Additionally, we propose multiple strategies for leveraging LLMs to generate traceability links, improving upon previous zero-shot methods on the ranking of candidate links after prompt refinement. The primary objective of this paper is to inspire and assist future researchers and engineers by highlighting the process of constructing traceability prompts to effectively harness LLMs for advancing automatic traceability.
In September 2022, Ethereum transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) during "the merge" - making it the largest PoS cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With this work, we present a comprehensive measurement study of the current state of the Ethereum PoS consensus layer on the beacon chain. We perform a longitudinal study of the history of the beacon chain. Our work finds that all dips in network participation are caused by network upgrades, issues with major consensus clients, or issues with service operators controlling a large number of validators. Further, our longitudinal staking power decentralization analysis reveals that Ethereum PoS fairs similarly to its PoW counterpart in terms of decentralization and exhibits the immense impact of (liquid) staking services on staking power decentralization. Finally, we highlight the heightened security concerns in Ethereum PoS caused by high degrees of centralization.
Measuring the distance between machine-produced and human language is a critical open problem. Inspired by empirical findings from psycholinguistics on the periodicity of entropy in language, we propose FACE, a set of metrics based on Fourier Analysis of the estimated Cross-Entropy of language, for measuring the similarity between model-generated and human-written languages. Based on an open-ended generation task and the experimental data from previous studies, we find that FACE can effectively identify the human-model gap, scales with model size, reflects the outcomes of different sampling methods for decoding, correlates well with other evaluation metrics and with human judgment scores. FACE is computationally efficient and provides intuitive interpretations.
Large Language Models (LLMs), acting as a powerful reasoner and generator, exhibit extraordinary performance across various natural language tasks, such as question answering (QA). Among these tasks, Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) stands as a widely discussed category, necessitating seamless integration between LLMs and the retrieval of external knowledge. Existing methods employ LLM to generate reasoning paths and plans, and utilize IR to iteratively retrieve related knowledge, but these approaches have inherent flaws. On one hand, Information Retriever (IR) is hindered by the low quality of generated queries by LLM. On the other hand, LLM is easily misguided by the irrelevant knowledge by IR. These inaccuracies, accumulated by the iterative interaction between IR and LLM, lead to a disaster in effectiveness at the end. To overcome above barriers, in this paper, we propose a novel pipeline for MHQA called Furthest-Reasoning-with-Plan-Assessment (FuRePA), including an improved framework (Furthest Reasoning) and an attached module (Plan Assessor). 1) Furthest reasoning operates by masking previous reasoning path and generated queries for LLM, encouraging LLM generating chain of thought from scratch in each iteration. This approach enables LLM to break the shackle built by previous misleading thoughts and queries (if any). 2) The Plan Assessor is a trained evaluator that selects an appropriate plan from a group of candidate plans proposed by LLM. Our methods are evaluated on three highly recognized public multi-hop question answering datasets and outperform state-of-the-art on most metrics (achieving a 10%-12% in answer accuracy).
Federated training of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has become popular in recent years due to its ability to perform graph-related tasks under data isolation scenarios while preserving data privacy. However, graph heterogeneity issues in federated GNN systems continue to pose challenges. Existing frameworks address the problem by representing local tasks using different statistics and relating them through a simple aggregation mechanism. However, these approaches suffer from limited efficiency from two aspects: low quality of task-relatedness quantification and inefficacy of exploiting the collaboration structure. To address these issues, we propose FedGKD, a novel federated GNN framework that utilizes a novel client-side graph dataset distillation method to extract task features that better describe task-relatedness, and introduces a novel server-side aggregation mechanism that is aware of the global collaboration structure. We conduct extensive experiments on six real-world datasets of different scales, demonstrating our framework's outperformance.
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in various NLP tasks. However, these advances have not been reflected in the translation task, especially those with moderate model sizes (i.e., 7B or 13B parameters), which still lag behind conventional supervised encoder-decoder translation models. Previous studies have attempted to improve the translation capabilities of these moderate LLMs, but their gains have been limited. In this study, we propose a novel fine-tuning approach for LLMs that is specifically designed for the translation task, eliminating the need for the abundant parallel data that traditional translation models usually depend on. Our approach consists of two fine-tuning stages: initial fine-tuning on monolingual data followed by subsequent fine-tuning on a small set of high-quality parallel data. We introduce the LLM developed through this strategy as Advanced Language Model-based trAnslator (ALMA). Based on LLaMA-2 as our underlying model, our results show that the model can achieve an average improvement of more than 12 BLEU and 12 COMET over its zero-shot performance across 10 translation directions from the WMT'21 (2 directions) and WMT'22 (8 directions) test datasets. The performance is significantly better than all prior work and even superior to the NLLB-54B model and GPT-3.5-text-davinci-003, with only 7B or 13B parameters. This method establishes the foundation for a novel training paradigm in machine translation.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved astonishing advances over the past decade, defining state-of-the-art in several computer vision tasks. CNNs are capable of learning robust representations of the data directly from the RGB pixels. However, most image data are usually available in compressed format, from which the JPEG is the most widely used due to transmission and storage purposes demanding a preliminary decoding process that have a high computational load and memory usage. For this reason, deep learning methods capable of learning directly from the compressed domain have been gaining attention in recent years. Those methods usually extract a frequency domain representation of the image, like DCT, by a partial decoding, and then make adaptation to typical CNNs architectures to work with them. One limitation of these current works is that, in order to accommodate the frequency domain data, the modifications made to the original model increase significantly their amount of parameters and computational complexity. On one hand, the methods have faster preprocessing, since the cost of fully decoding the images is avoided, but on the other hand, the cost of passing the images though the model is increased, mitigating the possible upside of accelerating the method. In this paper, we propose a further study of the computational cost of deep models designed for the frequency domain, evaluating the cost of decoding and passing the images through the network. We also propose handcrafted and data-driven techniques for reducing the computational complexity and the number of parameters for these models in order to keep them similar to their RGB baselines, leading to efficient models with a better trade off between computational cost and accuracy.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) relying only on image-level supervision is a promising approach to deal with the need for Segmentation networks, especially for generating a large number of pixel-wise masks in a given dataset. However, most state-of-the-art image-level WSSS techniques lack an understanding of the geometric features embedded in the images since the network cannot derive any object boundary information from just image-level labels. We define a boundary here as the line separating an object and its background, or two different objects. To address this drawback, we are proposing our novel ReFit framework, which deploys state-of-the-art class activation maps combined with various post-processing techniques in order to achieve fine-grained higher-accuracy segmentation masks. To achieve this, we investigate a state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation network that can be used to construct a boundary map, which enables ReFit to predict object locations with sharper boundaries. By applying our method to WSSS predictions, we achieved up to 10% improvement over the current state-of-the-art WSSS methods for medical imaging. The framework is open-source, to ensure that our results are reproducible, and accessible online at //github.com/bharathprabakaran/ReFit.
Federated Learning (FL) is currently one of the most popular technologies in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to its collaborative learning and ability to preserve client privacy. However, it faces challenges such as non-identically and non-independently distributed (non-IID) and data with imbalanced labels among local clients. To address these limitations, the research community has explored various approaches such as using local model parameters, federated generative adversarial learning, and federated representation learning. In our study, we propose a novel Clustered FedStack framework based on the previously published Stacked Federated Learning (FedStack) framework. The local clients send their model predictions and output layer weights to a server, which then builds a robust global model. This global model clusters the local clients based on their output layer weights using a clustering mechanism. We adopt three clustering mechanisms, namely K-Means, Agglomerative, and Gaussian Mixture Models, into the framework and evaluate their performance. We use Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) with the maximum likelihood function to determine the number of clusters. The Clustered FedStack models outperform baseline models with clustering mechanisms. To estimate the convergence of our proposed framework, we use Cyclical learning rates.
AI Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) has the potential to improve human decision-making beyond AI predictions alone by providing additional useful probabilistic information to users. The majority of past research on AI and human decision-making has concentrated on model explainability and interpretability. We implemented instance-based UQ for three real datasets. To achieve this, we trained different AI models for classification for each dataset, and used random samples generated around the neighborhood of the given instance to create confidence intervals for UQ. The computed UQ was calibrated using a strictly proper scoring rule as a form of quality assurance for UQ. We then conducted two preregistered online behavioral experiments that compared objective human decision-making performance under different AI information conditions, including UQ. In Experiment 1, we compared decision-making for no AI (control), AI prediction alone, and AI prediction with a visualization of UQ. We found UQ significantly improved decision-making beyond the other two conditions. In Experiment 2, we focused on comparing different representations of UQ information: Point vs. distribution of uncertainty and visualization type (needle vs. dotplot). We did not find meaningful differences in decision-making performance among these different representations of UQ. Overall, our results indicate that human decision-making can be improved by providing UQ information along with AI predictions, and that this benefit generalizes across a variety of representations of UQ.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.