Counterfactual explanations provide a popular method for analyzing the predictions of black-box systems, and they can offer the opportunity for computational recourse by suggesting actionable changes on how to change the input to obtain a different (i.e.\ more favorable) system output. However, recent work highlighted their vulnerability to different types of manipulations. This work studies the vulnerability of counterfactual explanations to data poisoning. We formally introduce and investigate data poisoning in the context of counterfactual explanations for increasing the cost of recourse on three different levels: locally for a single instance, or a sub-group of instances, or globally for all instances. In this context, we characterize and prove the correctness of several different data poisonings. We also empirically demonstrate that state-of-the-art counterfactual generation methods and toolboxes are vulnerable to such data poisoning.
Video sequences offer valuable temporal information, but existing large multimodal models (LMMs) fall short in understanding extremely long videos. Many works address this by reducing the number of visual tokens using visual resamplers. Alternatively, in this paper, we approach this problem from the perspective of the language model. By simply extrapolating the context length of the language backbone, we enable LMMs to comprehend orders of magnitude more visual tokens without any video training. We call this phenomenon long context transfer and carefully ablate its properties. To effectively measure LMMs' ability to generalize to long contexts in the vision modality, we develop V-NIAH (Visual Needle-In-A-Haystack), a purely synthetic long vision benchmark inspired by the language model's NIAH test. Our proposed Long Video Assistant (LongVA) can process 2000 frames or over 200K visual tokens without additional complexities. With its extended context length, LongVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on Video-MME among 7B-scale models by densely sampling more input frames. Our work is open-sourced at //github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/LongVA.
Formalization of real analysis offers a chance to rebuild traditional proofs of important theorems as unambiguous theories that can be interactively explored. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the Lebesgue Differentiation Theorem formalized in the Coq proof assistant, from which the first Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (FTC) for the Lebesgue integral is obtained as a corollary. Proving the first FTC in this way has the advantage of decomposing into loosely-coupled theories of moderate size and of independent interest that lend themselves well to incremental and collaborative development. We explain how we formalize all the topological constructs and all the standard lemmas needed to eventually relate the definitions of derivability and of Lebesgue integration of MathComp-Analysis, a formalization of analysis developed on top of the Mathematical Components library. In the course of this experiment, we substantially enrich MathComp-Analysis and even devise a new proof for Urysohn's lemma.
Existing debiasing methods inevitably make unreasonable or undesired predictions as they are designated and evaluated to achieve parity across different social groups but leave aside individual facts, resulting in modified existing knowledge. In this paper, we first establish a new bias mitigation benchmark BiasKE leveraging existing and additional constructed datasets, which systematically assesses debiasing performance by complementary metrics on fairness, specificity, and generalization. Meanwhile, we propose a novel debiasing method, Fairness Stamp (FAST), which enables editable fairness through fine-grained calibration on individual biased knowledge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FAST surpasses state-of-the-art baselines with remarkable debiasing performance while not hampering overall model capability for knowledge preservation, highlighting the prospect of fine-grained debiasing strategies for editable fairness in LLMs.
We prove impossibility results for adaptivity in non-smooth stochastic convex optimization. Given a set of problem parameters we wish to adapt to, we define a "price of adaptivity" (PoA) that, roughly speaking, measures the multiplicative increase in suboptimality due to uncertainty in these parameters. When the initial distance to the optimum is unknown but a gradient norm bound is known, we show that the PoA is at least logarithmic for expected suboptimality, and double-logarithmic for median suboptimality. When there is uncertainty in both distance and gradient norm, we show that the PoA must be polynomial in the level of uncertainty. Our lower bounds nearly match existing upper bounds, and establish that there is no parameter-free lunch. En route, we also establish tight upper and lower bounds for (known-parameter) high-probability stochastic convex optimization with heavy-tailed and bounded noise, respectively.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
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.
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.
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.
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 propose a novel method for automatic reasoning on knowledge graphs based on debate dynamics. The main idea is to frame the task of triple classification as a debate game between two reinforcement learning agents which extract arguments -- paths in the knowledge graph -- with the goal to promote the fact being true (thesis) or the fact being false (antithesis), respectively. Based on these arguments, a binary classifier, called the judge, decides whether the fact is true or false. The two agents can be considered as sparse, adversarial feature generators that present interpretable evidence for either the thesis or the antithesis. In contrast to other black-box methods, the arguments allow users to get an understanding of the decision of the judge. Since the focus of this work is to create an explainable method that maintains a competitive predictive accuracy, we benchmark our method on the triple classification and link prediction task. Thereby, we find that our method outperforms several baselines on the benchmark datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and Hetionet. We also conduct a survey and find that the extracted arguments are informative for users.