The idea to generate synthetic data as a tool for broadening access to sensitive microdata has been proposed for the first time three decades ago. While first applications of the idea emerged around the turn of the century, the approach really gained momentum over the last ten years, stimulated at least in parts by some recent developments in computer science. We consider the upcoming 30th jubilee of Rubin's seminal paper on synthetic data (Rubin, 1993) as an opportunity to look back at the historical developments, but also to offer a review of the diverse approaches and methodological underpinnings proposed over the years. We will also discuss the various strategies that have been suggested to measure the utility and remaining risk of disclosure of the generated data.
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Data plays a crucial role in machine learning. However, in real-world applications, there are several problems with data, e.g., data are of low quality; a limited number of data points lead to under-fitting of the machine learning model; it is hard to access the data due to privacy, safety and regulatory concerns. Synthetic data generation offers a promising new avenue, as it can be shared and used in ways that real-world data cannot. This paper systematically reviews the existing works that leverage machine learning models for synthetic data generation. Specifically, we discuss the synthetic data generation works from several perspectives: (i) applications, including computer vision, speech, natural language, healthcare, and business; (ii) machine learning methods, particularly neural network architectures and deep generative models; (iii) privacy and fairness issue. In addition, we identify the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field and suggest future research directions.
Despite their tremendous successes, most large language models do not have any long-term memory mechanisms, which restricts their applications. Overcoming this limitation would not only require changes to the typical transformer architectures or training procedures, but also a dataset on which these new models could be trained and evaluated. We argue that existing resources lack a few key properties, and that at present, there are no naturalistic datasets of sufficient scale to train (and not only evaluate) long-term memory language models. We then present our solution that capitalizes on the advances in short-term memory language models to create such a dataset. Using GPT 3.5, we summarized each scene in 1500 hand-curated books from Project Gutenberg, which resulted in approximately 150 scene-level summaries per book. We then created a number of reading comprehension questions based on these summaries, including three types of multiple-choice scene recognition questions, as well as free-form narrative reconstruction questions. Each book is thus associated with more than 500 reading comprehension questions. Crucially, most questions have a known ``retention demand'', indicating how long-term of a memory is needed to answer it, which should aid long-term memory performance evaluation. We validate our data in three small-scale experiments: one with human labelers, and two with existing language models. We show that our questions 1) adequately represent the source material 2) can be used to diagnose the model's memory capacity 3) are not trivial for modern language models even when the memory demand does not exceed those models' context lengths. Lastly, we provide our code which can be used to further expand the dataset in an automated manner.
We introduce the Dutch Model Benchmark: DUMB. The benchmark includes a diverse set of datasets for low-, medium- and high-resource tasks. The total set of eight tasks include three tasks that were previously not available in Dutch. Instead of relying on a mean score across tasks, we propose Relative Error Reduction (RER), which compares the DUMB performance of models to a strong baseline which can be referred to in the future even when assessing different sets of models. Through a comparison of 14 pre-trained models (mono- and multi-lingual, of varying sizes), we assess the internal consistency of the benchmark tasks, as well as the factors that likely enable high performance. Our results indicate that current Dutch monolingual models under-perform and suggest training larger Dutch models with other architectures and pre-training objectives. At present, the highest performance is achieved by DeBERTaV3 (large), XLM-R (large) and mDeBERTaV3 (base). In addition to highlighting best strategies for training larger Dutch models, DUMB will foster further research on Dutch. A public leaderboard is available at //dumbench.nl.
While LLMs have shown great success in understanding and generating text in traditional conversational settings, their potential for performing ill-defined complex tasks is largely under-studied. Indeed, we are yet to conduct comprehensive benchmarking studies with multiple LLMs that are exclusively focused on a complex task. However, conducting such benchmarking studies is challenging because of the large variations in LLMs' performance when different prompt types/styles are used and different degrees of detail are provided in the prompts. To address this issue, the paper proposes a general taxonomy that can be used to design prompts with specific properties in order to perform a wide range of complex tasks. This taxonomy will allow future benchmarking studies to report the specific categories of prompts used as part of the study, enabling meaningful comparisons across different studies. Also, by establishing a common standard through this taxonomy, researchers will be able to draw more accurate conclusions about LLMs' performance on a specific complex task.
Prognostics and health management (PHM) technology plays a critical role in industrial production and equipment maintenance by identifying and predicting possible equipment failures and damages, thereby allowing necessary maintenance measures to be taken to enhance equipment service life and reliability while reducing production costs and downtime. In recent years, PHM technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable achievements in the context of the industrial IoT and big data, and it is widely used in various industries, such as railway, energy, and aviation, for condition monitoring, fault prediction, and health management. The emergence of large-scale foundation models (LSF-Models) such as ChatGPT and DALLE-E marks the entry of AI into a new era of AI-2.0 from AI-1.0, where deep models have rapidly evolved from a research paradigm of single-modal, single-task, and limited-data to a multi-modal, multi-task, massive data, and super-large model paradigm. ChatGPT represents a landmark achievement in this research paradigm, offering hope for general artificial intelligence due to its highly intelligent natural language understanding ability. However, the PHM field lacks a consensus on how to respond to this significant change in the AI field, and a systematic review and roadmap is required to elucidate future development directions. To fill this gap, this paper systematically expounds on the key components and latest developments of LSF-Models. Then, we systematically answered how to build the LSF-Model applicable to PHM tasks and outlined the challenges and future development roadmaps for this research paradigm.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Recent years have witnessed significant advances in technologies and services in modern network applications, including smart grid management, wireless communication, cybersecurity as well as multi-agent autonomous systems. Considering the heterogeneous nature of networked entities, emerging network applications call for game-theoretic models and learning-based approaches in order to create distributed network intelligence that responds to uncertainties and disruptions in a dynamic or an adversarial environment. This paper articulates the confluence of networks, games and learning, which establishes a theoretical underpinning for understanding multi-agent decision-making over networks. We provide an selective overview of game-theoretic learning algorithms within the framework of stochastic approximation theory, and associated applications in some representative contexts of modern network systems, such as the next generation wireless communication networks, the smart grid and distributed machine learning. In addition to existing research works on game-theoretic learning over networks, we highlight several new angles and research endeavors on learning in games that are related to recent developments in artificial intelligence. Some of the new angles extrapolate from our own research interests. The overall objective of the paper is to provide the reader a clear picture of the strengths and challenges of adopting game-theoretic learning methods within the context of network systems, and further to identify fruitful future research directions on both theoretical and applied studies.
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
Behaviors of the synthetic characters in current military simulations are limited since they are generally generated by rule-based and reactive computational models with minimal intelligence. Such computational models cannot adapt to reflect the experience of the characters, resulting in brittle intelligence for even the most effective behavior models devised via costly and labor-intensive processes. Observation-based behavior model adaptation that leverages machine learning and the experience of synthetic entities in combination with appropriate prior knowledge can address the issues in the existing computational behavior models to create a better training experience in military training simulations. In this paper, we introduce a framework that aims to create autonomous synthetic characters that can perform coherent sequences of believable behavior while being aware of human trainees and their needs within a training simulation. This framework brings together three mutually complementary components. The first component is a Unity-based simulation environment - Rapid Integration and Development Environment (RIDE) - supporting One World Terrain (OWT) models and capable of running and supporting machine learning experiments. The second is Shiva, a novel multi-agent reinforcement and imitation learning framework that can interface with a variety of simulation environments, and that can additionally utilize a variety of learning algorithms. The final component is the Sigma Cognitive Architecture that will augment the behavior models with symbolic and probabilistic reasoning capabilities. We have successfully created proof-of-concept behavior models leveraging this framework on realistic terrain as an essential step towards bringing machine learning into military simulations.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
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