Mix-up training approaches have proven to be effective in improving the generalization ability of Deep Neural Networks. Over the years, the research community expands mix-up methods into two directions, with extensive efforts to improve saliency-guided procedures but minimal focus on the arbitrary path, leaving the randomization domain unexplored. In this paper, inspired by the superior qualities of each direction over one another, we introduce a novel method that lies at the junction of the two routes. By combining the best elements of randomness and saliency utilization, our method balances speed, simplicity, and accuracy. We name our method R-Mix following the concept of "Random Mix-up". We demonstrate its effectiveness in generalization, weakly supervised object localization, calibration, and robustness to adversarial attacks. Finally, in order to address the question of whether there exists a better decision protocol, we train a Reinforcement Learning agent that decides the mix-up policies based on the classifier's performance, reducing dependency on human-designed objectives and hyperparameter tuning. Extensive experiments further show that the agent is capable of performing at the cutting-edge level, laying the foundation for a fully automatic mix-up. Our code is released at [//github.com/minhlong94/Random-Mixup].
Energy-based models (EBMs) are known in the Machine Learning community for decades. Since the seminal works devoted to EBMs dating back to the noughties, there have been a lot of efficient methods which solve the generative modelling problem by means of energy potentials (unnormalized likelihood functions). In contrast, the realm of Optimal Transport (OT) and, in particular, neural OT solvers is much less explored and limited by few recent works (excluding WGAN-based approaches which utilize OT as a loss function and do not model OT maps themselves). In our work, we bridge the gap between EBMs and Entropy-regularized OT. We present a novel methodology which allows utilizing the recent developments and technical improvements of the former in order to enrich the latter. From the theoretical perspective, we prove generalization bounds for our technique. In practice, we validate its applicability in toy 2D and image domains. To showcase the scalability, we empower our method with a pre-trained StyleGAN and apply it to high-res AFHQ $512\times 512$ unpaired I2I translation. For simplicity, we choose simple short- and long-run EBMs as a backbone of our Energy-guided Entropic OT approach, leaving the application of more sophisticated EBMs for future research. Our code is publicly available.
This study focuses on the critical aspect of robust state estimation for the safe navigation of an Autonomous Vehicle (AV). Existing literature primarily employs two prevalent techniques for state estimation, namely filtering-based and graph-based approaches. Factor Graph (FG) is a graph-based approach, constructed using Values and Factors for Maximum Aposteriori (MAP) estimation, that offers a modular architecture that facilitates the integration of inputs from diverse sensors. However, most FG-based architectures in current use require explicit knowledge of sensor parameters and are designed for single setups. To address these limitations, this research introduces a novel plug-and-play FG-based state estimator capable of operating without predefined sensor parameters. This estimator is suitable for deployment in multiple sensor setups, offering convenience and providing comprehensive state estimation at a high frequency, including mean and covariances. The proposed algorithm undergoes rigorous validation using various sensor setups on two different vehicles: a quadricycle and a shuttle bus. The algorithm provides accurate and robust state estimation across diverse scenarios, even when faced with degraded Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements or complete outages. These findings highlight the efficacy and reliability of the algorithm in real-world AV applications.
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth objectives (convex or non-convex), that tolerates heavy-tailed samples (including infinite variance) and a fraction of outliers in the data stream akin to Huber contamination. Our mathematical analysis leverages the connection between constant step size SGD and Markov chains and handles the bias introduced by clipping in an original way. For strongly convex objectives, we prove that the iteration converges to a concentrated distribution and derive high probability bounds on the final estimation error. In the non-convex case, we prove that the limit distribution is localized on a neighborhood with low gradient. We propose an implementation of this algorithm using rolling quantiles which leads to a highly efficient optimization procedure with strong robustness properties, as confirmed by our numerical experiments.
This report examines the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in improving the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by previous studies \cite{Min2022RethinkingWork}, we analyze the impact of three types of CoT prompt perturbations, namely CoT order, CoT values, and CoT operators on the performance of GPT-3 on various tasks. Our findings show that incorrect CoT prompting leads to poor performance on accuracy metrics. Correct values in the CoT is crucial for predicting correct answers. Moreover, incorrect demonstrations, where the CoT operators or the CoT order are wrong, do not affect the performance as drastically when compared to the value based perturbations. This research deepens our understanding of CoT prompting and opens some new questions regarding the capability of LLMs to learn reasoning in context.
Higher-order abstract GSOS is a recent extension of Turi and Plotkin's framework of Mathematical Operational Semantics to higher-order languages. The fundamental well-behavedness property of all specifications within the framework is that coalgebraic strong (bi)similarity on their operational model is a congruence. In the present work, we establish a corresponding congruence theorem for weak similarity, which is shown to instantiate to well-known concepts such as Abramsky's applicative similarity for the lambda-calculus. On the way, we develop several techniques of independent interest at the level of abstract categories, including relation liftings of mixed-variance bifunctors and higher-order GSOS laws, as well as Howe's method.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has achieved extraordinary success in learning effective task-specific representations of nodes in graphs. However, regarding Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), existing HIN-oriented GCN methods still suffer from two deficiencies: (1) they cannot flexibly explore all possible meta-paths and extract the most useful ones for a target object, which hinders both effectiveness and interpretability; (2) they often need to generate intermediate meta-path based dense graphs, which leads to high computational complexity. To address the above issues, we propose an interpretable and efficient Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (ie-HGCN) to learn the representations of objects in HINs. It is designed as a hierarchical aggregation architecture, i.e., object-level aggregation first, followed by type-level aggregation. The novel architecture can automatically extract useful meta-paths for each object from all possible meta-paths (within a length limit), which brings good model interpretability. It can also reduce the computational cost by avoiding intermediate HIN transformation and neighborhood attention. We provide theoretical analysis about the proposed ie-HGCN in terms of evaluating the usefulness of all possible meta-paths, its connection to the spectral graph convolution on HINs, and its quasi-linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real network datasets demonstrate the superiority of ie-HGCN over the state-of-the-art methods.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have received increasing attention in recent machine learning. How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly optimizing the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the GEneralized Multi-relational Graph Convolutional Networks (GEM-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge-base embedding methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that GEM-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of GEM-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
In Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC), one sample can belong to more than one class. It is observed that most MLTC tasks, there are dependencies or correlations among labels. Existing methods tend to ignore the relationship among labels. In this paper, a graph attention network-based model is proposed to capture the attentive dependency structure among the labels. The graph attention network uses a feature matrix and a correlation matrix to capture and explore the crucial dependencies between the labels and generate classifiers for the task. The generated classifiers are applied to sentence feature vectors obtained from the text feature extraction network (BiLSTM) to enable end-to-end training. Attention allows the system to assign different weights to neighbor nodes per label, thus allowing it to learn the dependencies among labels implicitly. The results of the proposed model are validated on five real-world MLTC datasets. The proposed model achieves similar or better performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art models.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan