Conditional Monte Carlo or pre-integration is a powerful tool for reducing variance and improving the regularity of integrands when using Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. To select the variable to pre-integrate, one must consider both the variable's importance and the tractability of the conditional expectation. For integrals over a Gaussian distribution, any linear combination of variables can potentially be pre-integrated. Liu and Owen (2022) propose to select the linear combination based on an active subspace decomposition of the integrand. However, pre-integrating the selected direction might be intractable. In this work, we address this issue by finding the active subspace subject to constraints such that pre-integration can be easily carried out. The proposed algorithm also provides a computationally-efficient alternative to dimension reduction for pre-integrated functions. The method is applied to examples from computational finance, density estimation, and computational chemistry, and is shown to achieve smaller errors than previous methods.
While standard speaker diarization attempts to answer the question "who spoken when", most of relevant applications in reality are more interested in determining "who spoken what". Whether it is the conventional modularized approach or the more recent end-to-end neural diarization (EEND), an additional automatic speech recognition (ASR) model and an orchestration algorithm are required to associate the speaker labels with recognized words. In this paper, we propose Word-level End-to-End Neural Diarization (WEEND) with auxiliary network, a multi-task learning algorithm that performs end-to-end ASR and speaker diarization in the same neural architecture. That is, while speech is being recognized, speaker labels are predicted simultaneously for each recognized word. Experimental results demonstrate that WEEND outperforms the turn-based diarization baseline system on all 2-speaker short-form scenarios and has the capability to generalize to audio lengths of 5 minutes. Although 3+speaker conversations are harder, we find that with enough in-domain training data, WEEND has the potential to deliver high quality diarized text.
We consider the problem of signal estimation in a generalized linear model (GLM). GLMs include many canonical problems in statistical estimation, such as linear regression, phase retrieval, and 1-bit compressed sensing. Recent work has precisely characterized the asymptotic minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) for GLMs with i.i.d. Gaussian sensing matrices. However, in many models there is a significant gap between the MMSE and the performance of the best known feasible estimators. In this work, we address this issue by considering GLMs defined via spatially coupled sensing matrices. We propose an efficient approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm for estimation and prove that with a simple choice of spatially coupled design, the MSE of a carefully tuned AMP estimator approaches the asymptotic MMSE in the high-dimensional limit. To prove the result, we first rigorously characterize the asymptotic performance of AMP for a GLM with a generic spatially coupled design. This characterization is in terms of a deterministic recursion (`state evolution') that depends on the parameters defining the spatial coupling. Then, using a simple spatially coupled design and judicious choice of functions defining the AMP, we analyze the fixed points of the resulting state evolution and show that it achieves the asymptotic MMSE. Numerical results for phase retrieval and rectified linear regression show that spatially coupled designs can yield substantially lower MSE than i.i.d. Gaussian designs at finite dimensions when used with AMP algorithms.
Hand tracking is an important aspect of human-computer interaction and has a wide range of applications in extended reality devices. However, current hand motion capture methods suffer from various limitations. For instance, visual-based hand pose estimation is susceptible to self-occlusion and changes in lighting conditions, while IMU-based tracking gloves experience significant drift and are not resistant to external magnetic field interference. To address these issues, we propose a novel and low-cost hand-tracking glove that utilizes several MEMS-ultrasonic sensors attached to the fingers, to measure the distance matrix among the sensors. Our lightweight deep network then reconstructs the hand pose from the distance matrix. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach is both accurate, size-agnostic, and robust to external interference. We also show the design logic for the sensor selection, sensor configurations, circuit diagram, as well as model architecture.
Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in //github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.
In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial research question is how to select good demonstrations for ICL. One effective strategy is leveraging semantic similarity between the ICL demonstrations and test inputs by using a text retriever, which however is sub-optimal as that does not consider the LLM's existing knowledge about that task. From prior work (Min et al., 2022), we already know that labels paired with the demonstrations bias the model predictions. This leads us to our hypothesis whether considering LLM's existing knowledge about the task, especially with respect to the output label space can help in a better demonstration selection strategy. Through extensive experimentation on three text classification tasks, we find that it is beneficial to not only choose semantically similar ICL demonstrations but also to choose those demonstrations that help resolve the inherent label ambiguity surrounding the test example. Interestingly, we find that including demonstrations that the LLM previously mis-classified and also fall on the test example's decision boundary, brings the most performance gain.
Smishing, also known as SMS phishing, is a type of fraudulent communication in which an attacker disguises SMS communications to deceive a target into providing their sensitive data. Smishing attacks use a variety of tactics; however, they have a similar goal of stealing money or personally identifying information (PII) from a victim. In response to these attacks, a wide variety of anti-smishing tools have been developed to block or filter these communications. Despite this, the number of phishing attacks continue to rise. In this paper, we developed a test bed for measuring the effectiveness of popular anti-smishing tools against fresh smishing attacks. To collect fresh smishing data, we introduce Smishtank.com, a collaborative online resource for reporting and collecting smishing data sets. The SMS messages were validated by a security expert and an in-depth qualitative analysis was performed on the collected messages to provide further insights. To compare tool effectiveness, we experimented with 20 smishing and benign messages across 3 key segments of the SMS messaging delivery ecosystem. Our results revealed significant room for improvement in all 3 areas against our smishing set. Most anti-phishing apps and bulk messaging services didn't filter smishing messages beyond the carrier blocking. The 2 apps that blocked the most smish also blocked 85-100\% of benign messages. Finally, while carriers did not block any benign messages, they were only able to reach a 25-35\% blocking rate for smishing messages. Our work provides insights into the performance of anti-smishing tools and the roles they play in the message blocking process. This paper would enable the research community and industry to be better informed on the current state of anti-smishing technology on the SMS platform.
We address the problem of coding for classical multiple-access channels (MACs) with the assistance of non-signaling correlations between parties. It is well-known that non-signaling assistance does not change the capacity of classical point-to-point channels. However, it was recently observed that one can construct MACs from two-player non-local games while relating the winning probability of the game to the capacity of the MAC. By considering games for which entanglement increases the winning probability, this shows that for some specific kinds of channels, entanglement between the senders can increase the capacity. We make several contributions towards understanding the capacity region for MACs with the assistance of non-signaling correlations. We develop a linear program computing the optimal success probability for coding over $n$ copies of a MAC $W$ with size growing polynomially in $n$. Solving this linear program allows us to achieve inner bounds for MACs. Applying this method to the binary adder channel, we show that using non-signaling assistance, the sum-rate $1.5425$ can be reached even with zero error, which beats the maximum sum-rate capacity of $1.5$ in the unassisted case. For noisy channels, where the zero-error non-signaling assisted capacity region is trivial, we can use concatenated codes to obtain achievable points in the capacity region. Applied to a noisy version of the binary adder channel, we show that non-signaling assistance still improves the sum-rate capacity. Complementing these achievability results, we give an outer bound on the non-signaling assisted capacity region that has the same expression as the unassisted region except that the channel inputs are not required to be independent. Finally, we show that the capacity region with non-signaling assistance shared only between each sender and the receiver independently is the same as without assistance.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis.