Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed well on various reasoning tasks, but their inaccessibility and numerous parameters hinder wide application in practice. One promising way is distilling the reasoning ability from LLMs to small models by the generated chain-of-thought reasoning paths. In some cases, however, LLMs may produce incorrect reasoning chains, especially when facing complex mathematical problems. Previous studies only transfer knowledge from positive samples and drop the synthesized data with wrong answers. In this work, we illustrate the merit of negative data and propose a model specialization framework to distill LLMs with negative samples besides positive ones. The framework consists of three progressive steps, covering from training to inference stages, to absorb knowledge from negative data. We conduct extensive experiments across arithmetic reasoning tasks to demonstrate the role of negative data in distillation from LLM.
In the realm of causal inference, Potential Outcomes (PO) and Structural Causal Models (SCM) are recognized as the principal frameworks.However, when it comes to Layer 3 valuations -- counterfactual queries deeply entwined with individual-level semantics -- both frameworks encounter limitations due to the degenerative issues brought forth by the consistency rule. This paper advocates for the Distribution-consistency Structural Causal Models (DiscoSCM) framework as a pioneering approach to counterfactual inference, skillfully integrating the strengths of both PO and SCM. The DiscoSCM framework distinctively incorporates a unit selection variable $U$ and embraces the concept of uncontrollable exogenous noise realization. Through personalized incentive scenarios, we demonstrate the inadequacies of PO and SCM frameworks in representing the probability of a user being a complier (a Layer 3 event) without degeneration, an issue adeptly resolved by adopting the assumption of independent counterfactual noises within DiscoSCM. This innovative assumption broadens the foundational counterfactual theory, facilitating the extension of numerous theoretical results regarding the probability of causation to an individual granularity level and leading to a comprehensive set of theories on heterogeneous counterfactual bounds. Ultimately, our paper posits that if one acknowledges and wishes to leverage the ubiquitous heterogeneity, understanding causality as invariance across heterogeneous units, then DiscoSCM stands as a significant advancement in the methodology of counterfactual inference.
The inherent diversity of computation types within individual Deep Neural Network (DNN) models imposes a corresponding need for a varied set of computation units within hardware processors. This diversity poses a significant constraint on computation efficiency during the execution of different neural networks. In this study, we present NeuralMatrix, a framework that transforms the computation of entire DNNs into linear matrix operations. This transformation seamlessly enables the execution of various DNN models using a single General-Purpose Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) accelerator. Extensive experimental results spanning different DNN models demonstrate that our approach preserves network accuracy while providing both generality and application-specific levels of computation efficiency. This allows a broad spectrum of DNN models to be executed using a single GEMM accelerator, eliminating the need for additional special function units.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks and exhibited impressive reasoning abilities by applying zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, due to the evolving nature of sentence prefixes during the pre-training phase, existing zero-shot CoT prompting methods that employ identical CoT prompting across all task instances may not be optimal. In this paper, we introduce a novel zero-shot prompting method that leverages evolutionary algorithms to generate diverse promptings for LLMs dynamically. Our approach involves initializing two CoT promptings, performing evolutionary operations based on LLMs to create a varied set, and utilizing the LLMs to select a suitable CoT prompting for a given problem. Additionally, a rewriting operation, guided by the selected CoT prompting, enhances the understanding of the LLMs about the problem. Extensive experiments conducted across ten reasoning datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to current zero-shot CoT prompting methods on GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4. Moreover, in-depth analytical experiments underscore the adaptability and effectiveness of our method in various reasoning tasks.
LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) is an indispensable sensor for precise long- and wide-range 3D sensing, which directly benefited the recent rapid deployment of autonomous driving (AD). Meanwhile, such a safety-critical application strongly motivates its security research. A recent line of research finds that one can manipulate the LiDAR point cloud and fool object detectors by firing malicious lasers against LiDAR. However, these efforts face 3 critical research gaps: (1) considering only one specific LiDAR (VLP-16); (2) assuming unvalidated attack capabilities; and (3) evaluating object detectors with limited spoofing capability modeling and setup diversity. To fill these critical research gaps, we conduct the first large-scale measurement study on LiDAR spoofing attack capabilities on object detectors with 9 popular LiDARs, covering both first- and new-generation LiDARs, and 3 major types of object detectors trained on 5 different datasets. To facilitate the measurements, we (1) identify spoofer improvements that significantly improve the latest spoofing capability, (2) identify a new object removal attack that overcomes the applicability limitation of the latest method to new-generation LiDARs, and (3) perform novel mathematical modeling for both object injection and removal attacks based on our measurement results. Through this study, we are able to uncover a total of 15 novel findings, including not only completely new ones due to the measurement angle novelty, but also many that can directly challenge the latest understandings in this problem space. We also discuss defenses.
Combining discrete and continuous data is an important capability for generative models. We present Discrete Flow Models (DFMs), a new flow-based model of discrete data that provides the missing link in enabling flow-based generative models to be applied to multimodal continuous and discrete data problems. Our key insight is that the discrete equivalent of continuous space flow matching can be realized using Continuous Time Markov Chains. DFMs benefit from a simple derivation that includes discrete diffusion models as a specific instance while allowing improved performance over existing diffusion-based approaches. We utilize our DFMs method to build a multimodal flow-based modeling framework. We apply this capability to the task of protein co-design, wherein we learn a model for jointly generating protein structure and sequence. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art co-design performance while allowing the same multimodal model to be used for flexible generation of the sequence or structure.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate ever-increasing abilities in mathematical and algorithmic tasks, yet their geometric reasoning skills are underexplored. We investigate LLMs' abilities in constructive geometric problem-solving one of the most fundamental steps in the development of human mathematical reasoning. Our work reveals notable challenges that the state-of-the-art LLMs face in this domain despite many successes in similar areas. LLMs exhibit biases in target variable selection and struggle with 2D spatial relationships, often misrepresenting and hallucinating objects and their placements. To this end, we introduce a framework that formulates an LLMs-based multi-agents system that enhances their existing reasoning potential by conducting an internal dialogue. This work underscores LLMs' current limitations in geometric reasoning and improves geometric reasoning capabilities through self-correction, collaboration, and diverse role specializations.
Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a federated learning paradigm where multiple participants, who share the same set of samples but hold different features, jointly train machine learning models. Although VFL enables collaborative machine learning without sharing raw data, it is still susceptible to various privacy threats. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in privacy attacks and defenses in VFL. We provide taxonomies for both attacks and defenses, based on their characterizations, and discuss open challenges and future research directions. Specifically, our discussion is structured around the model's life cycle, by delving into the privacy threats encountered during different stages of machine learning and their corresponding countermeasures. This survey not only serves as a resource for the research community but also offers clear guidance and actionable insights for practitioners to safeguard data privacy throughout the model's life cycle.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention owing to their ability to handle graph-structured data and the improvement in practical applications. However, many of these models prioritize high utility performance, such as accuracy, with a lack of privacy consideration, which is a major concern in modern society where privacy attacks are rampant. To address this issue, researchers have started to develop privacy-preserving GNNs. Despite this progress, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of the attacks and the techniques for preserving privacy in the graph domain. In this survey, we aim to address this gap by summarizing the attacks on graph data according to the targeted information, categorizing the privacy preservation techniques in GNNs, and reviewing the datasets and applications that could be used for analyzing/solving privacy issues in GNNs. We also outline potential directions for future research in order to build better privacy-preserving GNNs.
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods. For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.