In a recent paper published in the Journal of Causal Inference, Philip Dawid has described a graphical causal model based on decision diagrams. This article describes how single-world intervention graphs (SWIGs) relate to these diagrams. In this way, a correspondence is established between Dawid's approach and those based on potential outcomes such as Robins' Finest Fully Randomized Causally Interpreted Structured Tree Graphs. In more detail, a reformulation of Dawid's theory is given that is essentially equivalent to his proposal and isomorphic to SWIGs.
This paper proposes PerfVec, a novel deep learning-based performance modeling framework that learns high-dimensional, independent/orthogonal program and microarchitecture representations. Once learned, a program representation can be used to predict its performance on any microarchitecture, and likewise, a microarchitecture representation can be applied in the performance prediction of any program. Additionally, PerfVec yields a foundation model that captures the performance essence of instructions, which can be directly used by developers in numerous performance modeling related tasks without incurring its training cost. The evaluation demonstrates that PerfVec is more general, efficient, and accurate than previous approaches.
In many real-world scenarios, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are trained on data with dynamics shift, i.e., with different underlying environment dynamics. A majority of current methods address such issue by training context encoders to identify environment parameters. Data with dynamics shift are separated according to their environment parameters to train the corresponding policy. However, these methods can be sample inefficient as data are used \textit{ad hoc}, and policies trained for one dynamics cannot benefit from data collected in all other environments with different dynamics. In this paper, we find that in many environments with similar structures and different dynamics, optimal policies have similar stationary state distributions. We exploit such property and learn the stationary state distribution from data with dynamics shift for efficient data reuse. Such distribution is used to regularize the policy trained in a new environment, leading to the SRPO (\textbf{S}tate \textbf{R}egularized \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization) algorithm. To conduct theoretical analyses, the intuition of similar environment structures is characterized by the notion of homomorphous MDPs. We then demonstrate a lower-bound performance guarantee on policies regularized by the stationary state distribution. In practice, SRPO can be an add-on module to context-based algorithms in both online and offline RL settings. Experimental results show that SRPO can make several context-based algorithms far more data efficient and significantly improve their overall performance.
In this paper, we describe a spoken Arabic dialect identification (ADI) model for Arabic that consistently outperforms previously published results on two benchmark datasets: ADI-5 and ADI-17. We explore two architectural variations: ResNet and ECAPA-TDNN, coupled with two types of acoustic features: MFCCs and features exratected from the pre-trained self-supervised model UniSpeech-SAT Large, as well as a fusion of all four variants. We find that individually, ECAPA-TDNN network outperforms ResNet, and models with UniSpeech-SAT features outperform models with MFCCs by a large margin. Furthermore, a fusion of all four variants consistently outperforms individual models. Our best models outperform previously reported results on both datasets, with accuracies of 84.7% and 96.9% on ADI-5 and ADI-17, respectively.
The advent of large pre-trained language models in the domain of Code Synthesis has shown remarkable performance on various benchmarks, treating the problem of Code Generation in a fashion similar to Natural Language Generation, trained with a Language Modelling (LM) objective. In addition, the property of programming language code being precisely evaluable with respect to its semantics -- through the use of Unit Tests to check its functional correctness -- lends itself to using Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a further training paradigm. Previous work has shown that RL can be applied as such to improve models' coding capabilities; however, such RL-based methods rely on a reward signal based on defined Unit Tests, which are much harder to obtain compared to the huge crawled code datasets used in LM objectives. In this work, we present a novel approach to automatically obtain data consisting of function signatures and associated Unit Tests, suitable for RL training of Code Synthesis models. We also introduce a straightforward, simple yet effective Actor-Critic RL training scheme and show that it, in conjunction with automatically generated training data, leads to improvement of a pre-trained code language model's performance by up to 9.9% improvement over the original underlying code synthesis LM, and up to 4.3% over RL-based models trained with standard PPO or CodeRL.
We present an implementation of a Web3 platform that leverages the Groth16 Zero-Knowledge Proof schema to verify the validity of questionnaire results within Smart Contracts. Our approach ensures that the answer key of the questionnaire remains undisclosed throughout the verification process, while ensuring that the evaluation is done fairly. To accomplish this, users respond to a series of questions, and their answers are encoded and securely transmitted to a hidden backend. The backend then performs an evaluation of the user's answers, generating the overall result of the questionnaire. Additionally, it generates a Zero-Knowledge Proof, attesting that the answers were appropriately evaluated against a valid set of constraints. Next, the user submits their result along with the proof to a Smart Contract, which verifies their validity and issues a non-fungible token (NFT) as an attestation of the user's test result. In this research, we implemented the Zero-Knowledge functionality using Circom 2 and deployed the Smart Contract using Solidity, thereby showcasing a practical and secure solution for questionnaire validity verification in the context of Smart Contracts.
This paper is on the problem of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA). Recent works have emphasized the significance of incorporating both explicit (through external databases) and implicit (through LLMs) knowledge to answer questions requiring external knowledge effectively. A common limitation of such approaches is that they consist of relatively complicated pipelines and often heavily rely on accessing GPT-3 API. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a much simpler and readily reproducible pipeline which, in a nutshell, is based on efficient in-context learning by prompting LLaMA (1 and 2) using question-informative captions as contextual information. Contrary to recent approaches, our method is training-free, does not require access to external databases or APIs, and yet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the OK-VQA and A-OK-VQA datasets. Finally, we perform several ablation studies to understand important aspects of our method. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/alexandrosXe/ASimple-Baseline-For-Knowledge-Based-VQA
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at //github.com/2051/RSICD_optimal