This paper presents the results of the shared task on Lay Summarisation of Biomedical Research Articles (BioLaySumm), hosted at the BioNLP Workshop at ACL 2023. The goal of this shared task is to develop abstractive summarisation models capable of generating "lay summaries" (i.e., summaries that are comprehensible to non-technical audiences) in both a controllable and non-controllable setting. There are two subtasks: 1) Lay Summarisation, where the goal is for participants to build models for lay summary generation only, given the full article text and the corresponding abstract as input; and 2) Readability-controlled Summarisation, where the goal is for participants to train models to generate both the technical abstract and the lay summary, given an article's main text as input. In addition to overall results, we report on the setup and insights from the BioLaySumm shared task, which attracted a total of 20 participating teams across both subtasks.
Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress and broad application of diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs). Sampling from DPMs can be viewed as solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE). Despite the promising performance, the generation of DPMs usually consumes much time due to the large number of function evaluations (NFE). Though recent works have accelerated the sampling to around 20 steps with high-order solvers, the sample quality with less than 10 NFE can still be improved. In this paper, we propose a unified sampling framework (USF) to study the optional strategies for solver. Under this framework, we further reveal that taking different solving strategies at different timesteps may help further decrease the truncation error, and a carefully designed \emph{solver schedule} has the potential to improve the sample quality by a large margin. Therefore, we propose a new sampling framework based on the exponential integral formulation that allows free choices of solver strategy at each step and design specific decisions for the framework. Moreover, we propose $S^3$, a predictor-based search method that automatically optimizes the solver schedule to get a better time-quality trade-off of sampling. We demonstrate that $S^3$ can find outstanding solver schedules which outperform the state-of-the-art sampling methods on CIFAR-10, CelebA, ImageNet, and LSUN-Bedroom datasets. Specifically, we achieve 2.69 FID with 10 NFE and 6.86 FID with 5 NFE on CIFAR-10 dataset, outperforming the SOTA method significantly. We further apply $S^3$ to Stable-Diffusion model and get an acceleration ratio of 2$\times$, showing the feasibility of sampling in very few steps without retraining the neural network.
This paper presents EdgeSAM, an accelerated variant of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), optimized for efficient execution on edge devices with minimal compromise in performance. Our approach involves distilling the original ViT-based SAM image encoder into a purely CNN-based architecture, better suited for edge devices. We carefully benchmark various distillation strategies and demonstrate that task-agnostic encoder distillation fails to capture the full knowledge embodied in SAM. To overcome this bottleneck, we include both the prompt encoder and mask decoder in the distillation process, with box and point prompts in the loop, so that the distilled model can accurately capture the intricate dynamics between user input and mask generation. To mitigate dataset bias issues stemming from point prompt distillation, we incorporate a lightweight module within the encoder. EdgeSAM achieves a 40-fold speed increase compared to the original SAM, and it also outperforms MobileSAM, being 14 times as fast when deployed on edge devices while enhancing the mIoUs on COCO and LVIS by 2.3 and 3.2 respectively. It is also the first SAM variant that can run at over 30 FPS on an iPhone 14. Code and models are available at //github.com/chongzhou96/EdgeSAM.
Recent advances in instruction tuning have led to the development of State-of-the-Art Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Given the novelty of these models, the impact of visual adversarial attacks on LMMs has not been thoroughly examined. We conduct a comprehensive study of the robustness of various LMMs against different adversarial attacks, evaluated across tasks including image classification, image captioning, and Visual Question Answer (VQA). We find that in general LMMs are not robust to visual adversarial inputs. However, our findings suggest that context provided to the model via prompts, such as questions in a QA pair helps to mitigate the effects of visual adversarial inputs. Notably, the LMMs evaluated demonstrated remarkable resilience to such attacks on the ScienceQA task with only an 8.10% drop in performance compared to their visual counterparts which dropped 99.73%. We also propose a new approach to real-world image classification which we term query decomposition. By incorporating existence queries into our input prompt we observe diminished attack effectiveness and improvements in image classification accuracy. This research highlights a previously under-explored facet of LMM robustness and sets the stage for future work aimed at strengthening the resilience of multimodal systems in adversarial environments.
Detecting Parkinson's Disease in its early stages using EEG data presents a significant challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach, representing EEG data as a 15-variate series of bandpower and peak frequency values/coefficients. The hypothesis is that this representation captures essential information from the noisy EEG signal, improving disease detection. Statistical features extracted from this representation are utilised as input for interpretable machine learning models, specifically Decision Tree and AdaBoost classifiers. Our classification pipeline is deployed within our proposed framework which enables high-importance data types and brain regions for classification to be identified. Interestingly, our analysis reveals that while there is no significant regional importance, the N1 sleep data type exhibits statistically significant predictive power (p < 0.01) for early-stage Parkinson's Disease classification. AdaBoost classifiers trained on the N1 data type consistently outperform baseline models, achieving over 80% accuracy and recall. Our classification pipeline statistically significantly outperforms baseline models indicating that the model has acquired useful information. Paired with the interpretability (ability to view feature importance's) of our pipeline this enables us to generate meaningful insights into the classification of early stage Parkinson's with our N1 models. In Future, these models could be deployed in the real world - the results presented in this paper indicate that more than 3 in 4 early-stage Parkinson's cases would be captured with our pipeline.
Nowadays, neuromorphic systems based on Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) attract attentions of many researchers. There are many studies to improve performances of neuromorphic systems. These studies have been showing satisfactory results. To magnify performances of neuromorphic systems, developing actual neuromorphic systems is essential. For developing them, memristors play key role due to their useful characteristics. Although memristors are essential for actual neuromorphic systems, they are vulnerable to faults. However, there are few studies analyzing effects of fault elements in neuromorphic systems using memristors. To solve this problem, we analyze performance of a memristive neuromorphic system with fault elements changing fault ratios, types, and positions. We choose neurons and synapses to inject faults. We inject two types of faults to synapses: SA0 and SA1 faults. The fault synapses appear in random and important positions. Through our analysis, we discover the following four interesting points. First, memristive characteristics increase vulnerability of neuromorphic systems to fault elements. Second, fault neuron ratios reducing performance sharply exist. Third, performance degradation by fault synapses depends on fault types. Finally, SA1 fault synapses improve performance when they appear in important positions.
In this paper, we study the problem of publishing a stream of real-valued data satisfying differential privacy (DP). One major challenge is that the maximal possible value can be quite large; thus it is necessary to estimate a threshold so that numbers above it are truncated to reduce the amount of noise that is required to all the data. The estimation must be done based on the data in a private fashion. We develop such a method that uses the Exponential Mechanism with a quality function that approximates well the utility goal while maintaining a low sensitivity. Given the threshold, we then propose a novel online hierarchical method and several post-processing techniques. Building on these ideas, we formalize the steps into a framework for private publishing of stream data. Our framework consists of three components: a threshold optimizer that privately estimates the threshold, a perturber that adds calibrated noises to the stream, and a smoother that improves the result using post-processing. Within our framework, we design an algorithm satisfying the more stringent setting of DP called local DP (LDP). To our knowledge, this is the first LDP algorithm for publishing streaming data. Using four real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our mechanism outperforms the state-of-the-art by a factor of 6-10 orders of magnitude in terms of utility (measured by the mean squared error of answering a random range query).
This paper offers a comprehensive review of the research on Natural Language Generation (NLG) over the past two decades, especially in relation to data-to-text generation and text-to-text generation deep learning methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey aims to (a) give the latest synthesis of deep learning research on the NLG core tasks, as well as the architectures adopted in the field; (b) detail meticulously and comprehensively various NLG tasks and datasets, and draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, focusing on different evaluation methods and their relationships; (c) highlight some future emphasis and relatively recent research issues that arise due to the increasing synergy between NLG and other artificial intelligence areas, such as computer vision, text and computational creativity.
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.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.