We propose a unifying framework for smoothed analysis of combinatorial local optimization problems, and show how a diverse selection of problems within the complexity class PLS can be cast within this model. This abstraction allows us to identify key structural properties, and corresponding parameters, that determine the smoothed running time of local search dynamics. We formalize this via a black-box tool that provides concrete bounds on the expected maximum number of steps needed until local search reaches an exact local optimum. This bound is particularly strong, in the sense that it holds for any starting feasible solution, any choice of pivoting rule, and does not rely on the choice of specific noise distributions that are applied on the input, but it is parameterized by just a global upper bound $\phi$ on the probability density. The power of this tool can be demonstrated by instantiating it for various PLS-hard problems of interest to derive efficient smoothed running times (as a function of $\phi$ and the input size). Most notably, we focus on the important local optimization problem of finding pure Nash equilibria in Congestion Games, that has not been studied before from a smoothed analysis perspective. Specifically, we propose novel smoothed analysis models for general and Network Congestion Games, under various representations, including explicit, step-function, and polynomial resource latencies. We study PLS-hard instances of these problems and show that their standard local search algorithms run in polynomial smoothed time. Finally, we present further applications of our framework to a wide range of additional combinatorial problems, including local Max-Cut in weighted graphs, the Travelling Salesman problem (TSP) under the $k$-opt local heuristic, and finding pure equilibria in Network Coordination Games.
This work uniquely identifies and characterizes four prevalent multimodal model architectural patterns in the contemporary multimodal landscape. Systematically categorizing models by architecture type facilitates monitoring of developments in the multimodal domain. Distinct from recent survey papers that present general information on multimodal architectures, this research conducts a comprehensive exploration of architectural details and identifies four specific architectural types. The types are distinguished by their respective methodologies for integrating multimodal inputs into the deep neural network model. The first two types (Type A and B) deeply fuses multimodal inputs within the internal layers of the model, whereas the following two types (Type C and D) facilitate early fusion at the input stage. Type-A employs standard cross-attention, whereas Type-B utilizes custom-designed layers for modality fusion within the internal layers. On the other hand, Type-C utilizes modality-specific encoders, while Type-D leverages tokenizers to process the modalities at the model's input stage. The identified architecture types aid the monitoring of any-to-any multimodal model development. Notably, Type-C and Type-D are currently favored in the construction of any-to-any multimodal models. Type-C, distinguished by its non-tokenizing multimodal model architecture, is emerging as a viable alternative to Type-D, which utilizes input-tokenizing techniques. To assist in model selection, this work highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each architecture type based on data and compute requirements, architecture complexity, scalability, simplification of adding modalities, training objectives, and any-to-any multimodal generation capability.
Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful algorithmic model in broad application fields for their effectiveness in learning over graphs. To scale GNN training up for large-scale and ever-growing graphs, the most promising solution is distributed training which distributes the workload of training across multiple computing nodes. However, the workflows, computational patterns, communication patterns, and optimization techniques of distributed GNN training remain preliminarily understood. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of distributed GNN training by investigating various optimization techniques used in distributed GNN training. First, distributed GNN training is classified into several categories according to their workflows. In addition, their computational patterns and communication patterns, as well as the optimization techniques proposed by recent work are introduced. Second, the software frameworks and hardware platforms of distributed GNN training are also introduced for a deeper understanding. Third, distributed GNN training is compared with distributed training of deep neural networks, emphasizing the uniqueness of distributed GNN training. Finally, interesting issues and opportunities in this field are discussed.
The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of comparable size? Furthermore, from among all solutions that fit the training data, how does GD find one that generalizes well (when such a well-generalizing solution exists)? We argue that the answer to both questions lies in the interaction of the gradients of different examples during training. Intuitively, if the per-example gradients are well-aligned, that is, if they are coherent, then one may expect GD to be (algorithmically) stable, and hence generalize well. We formalize this argument with an easy to compute and interpretable metric for coherence, and show that the metric takes on very different values on real and random datasets for several common vision networks. The theory also explains a number of other phenomena in deep learning, such as why some examples are reliably learned earlier than others, why early stopping works, and why it is possible to learn from noisy labels. Moreover, since the theory provides a causal explanation of how GD finds a well-generalizing solution when one exists, it motivates a class of simple modifications to GD that attenuate memorization and improve generalization. Generalization in deep learning is an extremely broad phenomenon, and therefore, it requires an equally general explanation. We conclude with a survey of alternative lines of attack on this problem, and argue that the proposed approach is the most viable one on this basis.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.
We propose a novel approach to multimodal sentiment analysis using deep neural networks combining visual analysis and natural language processing. Our goal is different than the standard sentiment analysis goal of predicting whether a sentence expresses positive or negative sentiment; instead, we aim to infer the latent emotional state of the user. Thus, we focus on predicting the emotion word tags attached by users to their Tumblr posts, treating these as "self-reported emotions." We demonstrate that our multimodal model combining both text and image features outperforms separate models based solely on either images or text. Our model's results are interpretable, automatically yielding sensible word lists associated with emotions. We explore the structure of emotions implied by our model and compare it to what has been posited in the psychology literature, and validate our model on a set of images that have been used in psychology studies. Finally, our work also provides a useful tool for the growing academic study of images - both photographs and memes - on social networks.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.