Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays an important role in personalized recommendations. Recently, sample-level retrieval-based models (e.g., RIM) have achieved remarkable performance by retrieving and aggregating relevant samples. However, their inefficiency at the inference stage makes them impractical for industrial applications. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a universal plug-and-play Retrieval-Oriented Knowledge (ROK) framework. Specifically, a knowledge base, consisting of a retrieval-oriented embedding layer and a knowledge encoder, is designed to preserve and imitate the retrieved & aggregated representations in a decomposition-reconstruction paradigm. Knowledge distillation and contrastive learning methods are utilized to optimize the knowledge base, and the learned retrieval-enhanced representations can be integrated with arbitrary CTR models in both instance-wise and feature-wise manners. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets show that ROK achieves competitive performance with the retrieval-based CTR models while reserving superior inference efficiency and model compatibility.
Data plays a fundamental role in the training of Large Language Models (LLMs). Effective data management, particularly in the formulation of a well-suited training dataset, holds significance for enhancing model performance and improving training efficiency during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning phases. Despite the considerable importance of data management, the current research community still falls short in providing a systematic analysis of the rationale behind management strategy selection, its consequential effects, methodologies for evaluating curated datasets, and the ongoing pursuit of improved strategies. Consequently, the exploration of data management has attracted more and more attention among the research community. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of current research in data management within both the pretraining and supervised fine-tuning stages of LLMs, covering various noteworthy aspects of data management strategy design: data quantity, data quality, domain/task composition, etc. Looking toward the future, we extrapolate existing challenges and outline promising directions for development in this field. Therefore, this survey serves as a guiding resource for practitioners aspiring to construct powerful LLMs through effective data management practices. The collection of the latest papers is available at //github.com/ZigeW/data_management_LLM.
Human-centric perception plays a vital role in vision and graphics. But their data annotations are prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is desirable to have a versatile pre-train model that serves as a foundation for data-efficient downstream tasks transfer. To this end, we propose the Human-Centric Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning framework HCMoCo that leverages the multi-modal nature of human data (e.g. RGB, depth, 2D keypoints) for effective representation learning. The objective comes with two main challenges: dense pre-train for multi-modality data, efficient usage of sparse human priors. To tackle the challenges, we design the novel Dense Intra-sample Contrastive Learning and Sparse Structure-aware Contrastive Learning targets by hierarchically learning a modal-invariant latent space featured with continuous and ordinal feature distribution and structure-aware semantic consistency. HCMoCo provides pre-train for different modalities by combining heterogeneous datasets, which allows efficient usage of existing task-specific human data. Extensive experiments on four downstream tasks of different modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of HCMoCo, especially under data-efficient settings (7.16% and 12% improvement on DensePose Estimation and Human Parsing). Moreover, we demonstrate the versatility of HCMoCo by exploring cross-modality supervision and missing-modality inference, validating its strong ability in cross-modal association and reasoning.
In recent years, larger and deeper models are springing up and continuously pushing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across various fields like natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). However, despite promising results, it needs to be noted that the computations required by SOTA models have been increased at an exponential rate. Massive computations not only have a surprisingly large carbon footprint but also have negative effects on research inclusiveness and deployment on real-world applications. Green deep learning is an increasingly hot research field that appeals to researchers to pay attention to energy usage and carbon emission during model training and inference. The target is to yield novel results with lightweight and efficient technologies. Many technologies can be used to achieve this goal, like model compression and knowledge distillation. This paper focuses on presenting a systematic review of the development of Green deep learning technologies. We classify these approaches into four categories: (1) compact networks, (2) energy-efficient training strategies, (3) energy-efficient inference approaches, and (4) efficient data usage. For each category, we discuss the progress that has been achieved and the unresolved challenges.
Effective multi-robot teams require the ability to move to goals in complex environments in order to address real-world applications such as search and rescue. Multi-robot teams should be able to operate in a completely decentralized manner, with individual robot team members being capable of acting without explicit communication between neighbors. In this paper, we propose a novel game theoretic model that enables decentralized and communication-free navigation to a goal position. Robots each play their own distributed game by estimating the behavior of their local teammates in order to identify behaviors that move them in the direction of the goal, while also avoiding obstacles and maintaining team cohesion without collisions. We prove theoretically that generated actions approach a Nash equilibrium, which also corresponds to an optimal strategy identified for each robot. We show through extensive simulations that our approach enables decentralized and communication-free navigation by a multi-robot system to a goal position, and is able to avoid obstacles and collisions, maintain connectivity, and respond robustly to sensor noise.
Machine learning plays a role in many deployed decision systems, often in ways that are difficult or impossible to understand by human stakeholders. Explaining, in a human-understandable way, the relationship between the input and output of machine learning models is essential to the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems. A burgeoning body of research seeks to define the goals and methods of explainability in machine learning. In this paper, we seek to review and categorize research on counterfactual explanations, a specific class of explanation that provides a link between what could have happened had input to a model been changed in a particular way. Modern approaches to counterfactual explainability in machine learning draw connections to the established legal doctrine in many countries, making them appealing to fielded systems in high-impact areas such as finance and healthcare. Thus, we design a rubric with desirable properties of counterfactual explanation algorithms and comprehensively evaluate all currently-proposed algorithms against that rubric. Our rubric provides easy comparison and comprehension of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and serves as an introduction to major research themes in this field. We also identify gaps and discuss promising research directions in the space of counterfactual explainability.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Interest in the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence has been growing for decades and has accelerated recently. As Artificial Intelligence models have become more complex, and often more opaque, with the incorporation of complex machine learning techniques, explainability has become more critical. Recently, researchers have been investigating and tackling explainability with a user-centric focus, looking for explanations to consider trustworthiness, comprehensibility, explicit provenance, and context-awareness. In this chapter, we leverage our survey of explanation literature in Artificial Intelligence and closely related fields and use these past efforts to generate a set of explanation types that we feel reflect the expanded needs of explanation for today's artificial intelligence applications. We define each type and provide an example question that would motivate the need for this style of explanation. We believe this set of explanation types will help future system designers in their generation and prioritization of requirements and further help generate explanations that are better aligned to users' and situational needs.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.