The growing carbon footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) models, especially large ones such as GPT-3, has been undergoing public scrutiny. Unfortunately, however, the equally important and enormous water (withdrawal and consumption) footprint of AI models has remained under the radar. For example, training GPT-3 in Microsoft's state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater, but such information has been kept a secret. More critically, the global AI demand might be accountable for 4.2 -- 6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal in 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of 4 -- 6 Denmark or half of the United Kingdom. This is very concerning, as freshwater scarcity has become one of the most pressing challenges shared by all of us in the wake of the rapidly growing population, depleting water resources, and aging water infrastructures. To respond to the global water challenges, AI models can, and also must, take social responsibility and lead by example by addressing their own water footprint. In this paper, we provide a principled methodology to estimate the water footprint of AI models, and also discuss the unique spatial-temporal diversities of AI models' runtime water efficiency. Finally, we highlight the necessity of holistically addressing water footprint along with carbon footprint to enable truly sustainable AI.
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable image generation quality surpassing previous generative models. However, a notable limitation of diffusion models, in comparison to GANs, is their difficulty in smoothly interpolating between two image samples, due to their highly unstructured latent space. Such a smooth interpolation is intriguing as it naturally serves as a solution for the image morphing task with many applications. In this work, we present DiffMorpher, the first approach enabling smooth and natural image interpolation using diffusion models. Our key idea is to capture the semantics of the two images by fitting two LoRAs to them respectively, and interpolate between both the LoRA parameters and the latent noises to ensure a smooth semantic transition, where correspondence automatically emerges without the need for annotation. In addition, we propose an attention interpolation and injection technique and a new sampling schedule to further enhance the smoothness between consecutive images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffMorpher achieves starkly better image morphing effects than previous methods across a variety of object categories, bridging a critical functional gap that distinguished diffusion models from GANs.
We investigate the problem of multimodal search of target modality, where the task involves enhancing a query in a specific target modality by integrating information from auxiliary modalities. The goal is to retrieve relevant objects whose contents in the target modality match the specified multimodal query. The paper first introduces two baseline approaches that integrate techniques from the Database, Information Retrieval, and Computer Vision communities. These baselines either merge the results of separate vector searches for each modality or perform a single-channel vector search by fusing all modalities. However, both baselines have limitations in terms of efficiency and accuracy as they fail to adequately consider the varying importance of fusing information across modalities. To overcome these limitations, the paper proposes a novel framework, called MUST. Our framework employs a hybrid fusion mechanism, combining different modalities at multiple stages. Notably, we leverage vector weight learning to determine the importance of each modality, thereby enhancing the accuracy of joint similarity measurement. Additionally, the proposed framework utilizes a fused proximity graph index, enabling efficient joint search for multimodal queries. MUST offers several other advantageous properties, including pluggable design to integrate any advanced embedding techniques, user flexibility to customize weight preferences, and modularized index construction. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MUST over the baselines in terms of both search accuracy and efficiency. Our framework achieves over 10x faster search times while attaining an average of 93% higher accuracy. Furthermore, MUST exhibits scalability to datasets containing more than 10 million data elements.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is one of the most important tasks in autonomous driving, which requires accurate recognition and complex situation evaluations. However, datasets annotated in a QA format, which guarantees precise language generation and scene recognition from driving scenes, have not been established yet. In this work, we introduce Markup-QA, a novel dataset annotation technique in which QAs are enclosed within markups. This approach facilitates the simultaneous evaluation of a model's capabilities in sentence generation and VQA. Moreover, using this annotation methodology, we designed the NuScenes-MQA dataset. This dataset empowers the development of vision language models, especially for autonomous driving tasks, by focusing on both descriptive capabilities and precise QA. The dataset is available at //github.com/turingmotors/NuScenes-MQA.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in their capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications such as healthcare and finance -- where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives -- including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially because GPT-4 follows (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at //decodingtrust.github.io/. Additionally, our dataset can be previewed at //huggingface.co/datasets/AI-Secure/DecodingTrust, and a concise version of our DecodingTrust is accessible at //openreview.net/pdf?id=kaHpo8OZw2.
To assess the quality of a probabilistic prediction for stochastic dynamical systems (SDSs), scoring rules assign a numerical score based on the predictive distribution and the measured state. In this paper, we propose an $\epsilon$-logarithm score that generalizes the celebrated logarithm score by considering a neighborhood with radius $\epsilon$. To begin with, we prove that the $\epsilon$-logarithm score is proper (the expected score is optimized when the predictive distribution meets the ground truth) based on discrete approximations. Then, we characterize the probabilistic predictability of an SDS by the optimal expected score and approximate it with an error of scale $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon)$. The approximation quantitatively shows how the system predictability is jointly determined by the neighborhood radius, the differential entropies of process noises, and the system dimension. In addition to the expected score, we also analyze the asymptotic behaviors of the score on individual trajectories. Specifically, we prove that the score on a trajectory will converge to the probabilistic predictability when the process noises are independent and identically distributed. Moreover, the convergence speed against the trajectory length $T$ is of scale $\mathcal{O}(T^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ in the sense of probability. Finally, we apply the predictability analysis to design unpredictable SDSs. Numerical examples are given to elaborate the results.
We propose a new model architecture specifically suited for text-to-speech (TTS) models. We combine WavLM, a pre-trained self-supervised learning (SSL) speech model, and the BEST-RQ vector quantization framework. We assess the extent to which the more task-agnostic WavLM, coupled with the superior suitability of the simplistic BEST-RQ framework for a wider array of downstream tasks, yields favorable outcomes. Experiments on the LibriSpeech dataset with SUPERB benchmarking assert that the proposed model significantly underperforms. We speculate the underlying reason for this performance is related to the difference between featurizing raw audio waveforms and spectrograms with a quantizer. We discuss the limitations of this approach to better guide future advancements in TTS.
Organizations typically train large models individually. This is costly and time-consuming, particularly for large-scale foundation models. Such vertical production is known to be suboptimal. Inspired by this economic insight, we ask whether it is possible to leverage others' expertise by trading the constituent parts in models, i.e., sets of weights, as if they were market commodities. While recent advances in aligning and interpolating models suggest that doing so may be possible, a number of fundamental questions must be answered to create viable parameter markets. In this work, we address these basic questions, propose a framework containing the infrastructure necessary for market operations to take place, study strategies for exchanging parameters, and offer means for agents to monetize parameters. Excitingly, compared to agents who train siloed models from scratch, we show that it is possible to mutually gain by using the market, even in competitive settings. This suggests that the notion of parameter markets may be a useful paradigm for improving large-scale model training in the future.
Ensuring alignment, which refers to making models behave in accordance with human intentions [1,2], has become a critical task before deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. For instance, OpenAI devoted six months to iteratively aligning GPT-4 before its release [3]. However, a major challenge faced by practitioners is the lack of clear guidance on evaluating whether LLM outputs align with social norms, values, and regulations. This obstacle hinders systematic iteration and deployment of LLMs. To address this issue, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of key dimensions that are crucial to consider when assessing LLM trustworthiness. The survey covers seven major categories of LLM trustworthiness: reliability, safety, fairness, resistance to misuse, explainability and reasoning, adherence to social norms, and robustness. Each major category is further divided into several sub-categories, resulting in a total of 29 sub-categories. Additionally, a subset of 8 sub-categories is selected for further investigation, where corresponding measurement studies are designed and conducted on several widely-used LLMs. The measurement results indicate that, in general, more aligned models tend to perform better in terms of overall trustworthiness. However, the effectiveness of alignment varies across the different trustworthiness categories considered. This highlights the importance of conducting more fine-grained analyses, testing, and making continuous improvements on LLM alignment. By shedding light on these key dimensions of LLM trustworthiness, this paper aims to provide valuable insights and guidance to practitioners in the field. Understanding and addressing these concerns will be crucial in achieving reliable and ethically sound deployment of LLMs in various applications.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.