The recent introduction of the Least-Squares Support Vector Regression (LS-SVR) algorithm for solving differential and integral equations has sparked interest. In this study, we expand the application of this algorithm to address systems of differential-algebraic equations (DAEs). Our work presents a novel approach to solving general DAEs in an operator format by establishing connections between the LS-SVR machine learning model, weighted residual methods, and Legendre orthogonal polynomials. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct simulations involving various DAE scenarios, such as nonlinear systems, fractional-order derivatives, integro-differential, and partial DAEs. Finally, we carry out comparisons between our proposed method and currently established state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating its reliability and effectiveness.
Current reinforcement learning algorithms struggle in sparse and complex environments, most notably in long-horizon manipulation tasks entailing a plethora of different sequences. In this work, we propose the Intrinsically Guided Exploration from Large Language Models (IGE-LLMs) framework. By leveraging LLMs as an assistive intrinsic reward, IGE-LLMs guides the exploratory process in reinforcement learning to address intricate long-horizon with sparse rewards robotic manipulation tasks. We evaluate our framework and related intrinsic learning methods in an environment challenged with exploration, and a complex robotic manipulation task challenged by both exploration and long-horizons. Results show IGE-LLMs (i) exhibit notably higher performance over related intrinsic methods and the direct use of LLMs in decision-making, (ii) can be combined and complement existing learning methods highlighting its modularity, (iii) are fairly insensitive to different intrinsic scaling parameters, and (iv) maintain robustness against increased levels of uncertainty and horizons.
The pursuit of accurate 3D hand pose estimation stands as a keystone for understanding human activity in the realm of egocentric vision. The majority of existing estimation methods still rely on single-view images as input, leading to potential limitations, e.g., limited field-of-view and ambiguity in depth. To address these problems, adding another camera to better capture the shape of hands is a practical direction. However, existing multi-view hand pose estimation methods suffer from two main drawbacks: 1) Requiring multi-view annotations for training, which are expensive. 2) During testing, the model becomes inapplicable if camera parameters/layout are not the same as those used in training. In this paper, we propose a novel Single-to-Dual-view adaptation (S2DHand) solution that adapts a pre-trained single-view estimator to dual views. Compared with existing multi-view training methods, 1) our adaptation process is unsupervised, eliminating the need for multi-view annotation. 2) Moreover, our method can handle arbitrary dual-view pairs with unknown camera parameters, making the model applicable to diverse camera settings. Specifically, S2DHand is built on certain stereo constraints, including pair-wise cross-view consensus and invariance of transformation between both views. These two stereo constraints are used in a complementary manner to generate pseudo-labels, allowing reliable adaptation. Evaluation results reveal that S2DHand achieves significant improvements on arbitrary camera pairs under both in-dataset and cross-dataset settings, and outperforms existing adaptation methods with leading performance. Project page: //github.com/MickeyLLG/S2DHand.
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms represent a suite of robust computational methodologies utilized for state estimation and parameter inference within dynamical systems, particularly in real-time or online environments where data arrives sequentially over time. In this research endeavor, we propose an integrated framework that combines a stochastic epidemic simulator with a sequential importance sampling (SIS) scheme to dynamically infer model parameters, which evolve due to social as well as biological processes throughout the progression of an epidemic outbreak and are also influenced by evolving data measurement bias. Through iterative updates of a set of weighted simulated trajectories based on observed data, this framework enables the estimation of posterior distributions for these parameters, thereby capturing their temporal variability and associated uncertainties. Through simulation studies, we showcase the efficacy of SMC in accurately tracking the evolving dynamics of epidemics while appropriately accounting for uncertainties. Moreover, we delve into practical considerations and challenges inherent in implementing SMC for parameter estimation within dynamic epidemiological settings, areas where the substantial computational capabilities of high-performance computing resources can be usefully brought to bear.
The main objective of the Multiple Kernel k-Means (MKKM) algorithm is to extract non-linear information and achieve optimal clustering by optimizing base kernel matrices. Current methods enhance information diversity and reduce redundancy by exploiting interdependencies among multiple kernels based on correlations or dissimilarities. Nevertheless, relying solely on a single metric, such as correlation or dissimilarity, to define kernel relationships introduces bias and incomplete characterization. Consequently, this limitation hinders efficient information extraction, ultimately compromising clustering performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel method that systematically integrates both kernel correlation and dissimilarity. Our approach comprehensively captures kernel relationships, facilitating more efficient classification information extraction and improving clustering performance. By emphasizing the coherence between kernel correlation and dissimilarity, our method offers a more objective and transparent strategy for extracting non-linear information and significantly improving clustering precision, supported by theoretical rationale. We assess the performance of our algorithm on 13 challenging benchmark datasets, demonstrating its superiority over contemporary state-of-the-art MKKM techniques.
State-of-the-art decentralized learning algorithms typically require the data distribution to be Independent and Identically Distributed (IID). However, in practical scenarios, the data distribution across the agents can have significant heterogeneity. In this work, we propose averaging rate scheduling as a simple yet effective way to reduce the impact of heterogeneity in decentralized learning. Our experiments illustrate the superiority of the proposed method (~3% improvement in test accuracy) compared to the conventional approach of employing a constant averaging rate.
Automatic Text Summarization (ATS), utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, aims to create concise and accurate summaries, thereby significantly reducing the human effort required in processing large volumes of text. ATS has drawn considerable interest in both academic and industrial circles. Many studies have been conducted in the past to survey ATS methods; however, they generally lack practicality for real-world implementations, as they often categorize previous methods from a theoretical standpoint. Moreover, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has altered conventional ATS methods. In this survey, we aim to 1) provide a comprehensive overview of ATS from a ``Process-Oriented Schema'' perspective, which is best aligned with real-world implementations; 2) comprehensively review the latest LLM-based ATS works; and 3) deliver an up-to-date survey of ATS, bridging the two-year gap in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey to specifically investigate LLM-based ATS methods.
We consider the fundamental problem of decomposing a large-scale approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) problem into smaller sub-problems. The goal is to partition the input points into neighborhood-preserving shards, so that the nearest neighbors of any point are contained in only a few shards. When a query arrives, a routing algorithm is used to identify the shards which should be searched for its nearest neighbors. This approach forms the backbone of distributed ANNS, where the dataset is so large that it must be split across multiple machines. In this paper, we design simple and highly efficient routing methods, and prove strong theoretical guarantees on their performance. A crucial characteristic of our routing algorithms is that they are inherently modular, and can be used with any partitioning method. This addresses a key drawback of prior approaches, where the routing algorithms are inextricably linked to their associated partitioning method. In particular, our new routing methods enable the use of balanced graph partitioning, which is a high-quality partitioning method without a naturally associated routing algorithm. Thus, we provide the first methods for routing using balanced graph partitioning that are extremely fast to train, admit low latency, and achieve high recall. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of our full partitioning and routing pipeline on billion-scale datasets, where it outperforms existing scalable partitioning methods by significant margins, achieving up to 2.14x higher QPS at 90% recall$@10$ than the best competitor.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Cold-start problems are long-standing challenges for practical recommendations. Most existing recommendation algorithms rely on extensive observed data and are brittle to recommendation scenarios with few interactions. This paper addresses such problems using few-shot learning and meta learning. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. To accomplish this, we combine the scenario-specific learning with a model-agnostic sequential meta-learning and unify them into an integrated end-to-end framework, namely Scenario-specific Sequential Meta learner (or s^2 meta). By doing so, our meta-learner produces a generic initial model through aggregating contextual information from a variety of prediction tasks while effectively adapting to specific tasks by leveraging learning-to-learn knowledge. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve significant gains over the state-of-the-arts for cold-start problems in online recommendation. Deployment is at the Guess You Like session, the front page of the Mobile Taobao.
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, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.