Linearizability is a standard correctness criterion for concurrent algorithms, typically proved by establishing the algorithms' linearization points (LP). However, LPs often hinder abstraction, and for some algorithms such as the timestamped stack, it is unclear how to even identify their LPs. In this paper, we show how to develop declarative proofs of linearizability by foregoing LPs and instead employing axiomatization of so-called visibility relations. While visibility relations have been considered before for the timestamped stack, our study is the first to show how to derive the axiomatization systematically and intuitively from the sequential specification of the stack. In addition to the visibility relation, a novel separability relation emerges to generalize real-time precedence of procedure invocation. The visibility and separability relations have natural definitions for the timestamped stack, and enable a novel proof that reduces the algorithm to a simplified form where the timestamps are generated atomically.
Recently, it was posited that disparate optimization algorithms may be coalesced in terms of a central source emanating from optimal control theory. Here we further this proposition by showing how coordinate descent algorithms may be derived from this emerging new principle. In particular, we show that basic coordinate descent algorithms can be derived using a maximum principle and a collection of max functions as "control" Lyapunov functions. The convergence of the resulting coordinate descent algorithms is thus connected to the controlled dissipation of their corresponding Lyapunov functions. The operational metric for the search vector in all cases is given by the Hessian of the convex objective function.
Deepfakes have become a growing concern in recent years, prompting researchers to develop benchmark datasets and detection algorithms to tackle the issue. However, existing datasets suffer from significant drawbacks that hamper their effectiveness. Notably, these datasets fail to encompass the latest deepfake videos produced by state-of-the-art methods that are being shared across various platforms. This limitation impedes the ability to keep pace with the rapid evolution of generative AI techniques employed in real-world deepfake production. Our contributions in this IRB-approved study are to bridge this knowledge gap from current real-world deepfakes by providing in-depth analysis. We first present the largest and most diverse and recent deepfake dataset (RWDF-23) collected from the wild to date, consisting of 2,000 deepfake videos collected from 4 platforms targeting 4 different languages span created from 21 countries: Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and Bilibili. By expanding the dataset's scope beyond the previous research, we capture a broader range of real-world deepfake content, reflecting the ever-evolving landscape of online platforms. Also, we conduct a comprehensive analysis encompassing various aspects of deepfakes, including creators, manipulation strategies, purposes, and real-world content production methods. This allows us to gain valuable insights into the nuances and characteristics of deepfakes in different contexts. Lastly, in addition to the video content, we also collect viewer comments and interactions, enabling us to explore the engagements of internet users with deepfake content. By considering this rich contextual information, we aim to provide a holistic understanding of the {evolving} deepfake phenomenon and its impact on online platforms.
In multimodal-aware recommendation, the extraction of meaningful multimodal features is at the basis of high-quality recommendations. Generally, each recommendation framework implements its multimodal extraction procedures with specific strategies and tools. This is limiting for two reasons: (i) different extraction strategies do not ease the interdependence among multimodal recommendation frameworks; thus, they cannot be efficiently and fairly compared; (ii) given the large plethora of pre-trained deep learning models made available by different open source tools, model designers do not have access to shared interfaces to extract features. Motivated by the outlined aspects, we propose \framework, a unified framework for the extraction of multimodal features in recommendation. By integrating three widely-adopted deep learning libraries as backends, namely, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Transformers, we provide a shared interface to extract and process features where each backend's specific methods are abstracted to the end user. Noteworthy, the extraction pipeline is easily configurable with a YAML-based file where the user can specify, for each modality, the list of models (and their specific backends/parameters) to perform the extraction. Finally, to make \framework accessible to the community, we build a public Docker image equipped with a ready-to-use CUDA environment and propose three demos to test its functionalities for different scenarios and tasks. The GitHub repository and the documentation are accessible at this link: //github.com/sisinflab/Ducho.
The aim of latent variable disentanglement is to infer the multiple informative latent representations that lie behind a data generation process and is a key factor in controllable data generation. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network-based self-supervised learning method to infer the disentangled rhythmic and harmonic representations behind music audio generation. We train a variational autoencoder that generates an audio mel-spectrogram from two latent features representing the rhythmic and harmonic content. In the training phase, the variational autoencoder is trained to reconstruct the input mel-spectrogram given its pitch-shifted version. At each forward computation in the training phase, a vector rotation operation is applied to one of the latent features, assuming that the dimensions of the feature vectors are related to pitch intervals. Therefore, in the trained variational autoencoder, the rotated latent feature represents the pitch-related information of the mel-spectrogram, and the unrotated latent feature represents the pitch-invariant information, i.e., the rhythmic content. The proposed method was evaluated using a predictor-based disentanglement metric on the learned features. Furthermore, we demonstrate its application to the automatic generation of music remixes.
Learning causal effects from data is a fundamental and well-studied problem across science, especially when the cause-effect relationship is static in nature. However, causal effect is less explored when there are dynamical dependencies, i.e., when dependencies exist between entities across time. Identifying dynamic causal effects from time-series observations is computationally expensive when compared to the static scenario. We demonstrate that the computational complexity of recovering the causation structure for the vector auto-regressive (VAR) model is $O(Tn^3N^2)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes, $T$ is the number of samples, and $N$ is the largest time-lag in the dependency between entities. We report a method, with a reduced complexity of $O(Tn^3 \log N)$, to recover the causation structure to obtain frequency-domain (FD) representations of time-series. Since FFT accumulates all the time dependencies on every frequency, causal inference can be performed efficiently by considering the state variables as random variables at any given frequency. We additionally show that, for systems with interactions that are LTI, do-calculus machinery can be realized in the FD resulting in versions of the classical single-door (with cycles), front and backdoor criteria. We demonstrate, for a large class of problems, graph reconstruction using multivariate Wiener projections results in a significant computational advantage with $O(n)$ complexity over reconstruction algorithms such as the PC algorithm which has $O(n^q)$ complexity, where $q$ is the maximum neighborhood size. This advantage accrues due to some remarkable properties of the phase response of the frequency-dependent Wiener coefficients which is not present in any time-domain approach.
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.
Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI bound, which in turn weakens the information theoretic explanation for generalization. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a probabilistic representation of DNNs for accurately estimating the MI. Leveraging the proposed MI estimator, we validate the information theoretic explanation for generalization, and derive a tighter generalization bound than the state-of-the-art relaxations.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.