In this work, we leverage pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance time-series forecasting. Mirroring the growing interest in unifying models for Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, we envision creating an analogous model for long-term time-series forecasting. Due to limited large-scale time-series data for building robust foundation models, our approach LLM4TS focuses on leveraging the strengths of pre-trained LLMs. By combining time-series patching with temporal encoding, we have enhanced the capability of LLMs to handle time-series data effectively. Inspired by the supervised fine-tuning in chatbot domains, we prioritize a two-stage fine-tuning process: first conducting supervised fine-tuning to orient the LLM towards time-series data, followed by task-specific downstream fine-tuning. Furthermore, to unlock the flexibility of pre-trained LLMs without extensive parameter adjustments, we adopt several Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques. Drawing on these innovations, LLM4TS has yielded state-of-the-art results in long-term forecasting. Our model has also shown exceptional capabilities as both a robust representation learner and an effective few-shot learner, thanks to the knowledge transferred from the pre-trained LLM.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have already been widely used in various graph mining tasks. However, recent works reveal that the learned weights (channels) in well-trained GNNs are highly redundant, which inevitably limits the performance of GNNs. Instead of removing these redundant channels for efficiency consideration, we aim to reactivate them to enlarge the representation capacity of GNNs for effective graph learning. In this paper, we propose to substitute these redundant channels with other informative channels to achieve this goal. We introduce a novel GNN learning framework named AKE-GNN, which performs the Adaptive Knowledge Exchange strategy among multiple graph views generated by graph augmentations. AKE-GNN first trains multiple GNNs each corresponding to one graph view to obtain informative channels. Then, AKE-GNN iteratively exchanges redundant channels in the weight parameter matrix of one GNN with informative channels of another GNN in a layer-wise manner. Additionally, existing GNNs can be seamlessly incorporated into our framework. AKE-GNN achieves superior performance compared with various baselines across a suite of experiments on node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. In particular, we conduct a series of experiments on 15 public benchmark datasets, 8 popular GNN models, and 3 graph tasks and show that AKE-GNN consistently outperforms existing popular GNN models and even their ensembles. Extensive ablation studies and analyses on knowledge exchange methods validate the effectiveness of AKE-GNN.
In this paper, we study the problem of temporal video grounding (TVG), which aims to predict the starting/ending time points of moments described by a text sentence within a long untrimmed video. Benefiting from fine-grained 3D visual features, the TVG techniques have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, the high complexity of 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) makes extracting dense 3D visual features time-consuming, which calls for intensive memory and computing resources. Towards efficient TVG, we propose a novel text-visual prompting (TVP) framework, which incorporates optimized perturbation patterns (that we call 'prompts') into both visual inputs and textual features of a TVG model. In sharp contrast to 3D CNNs, we show that TVP allows us to effectively co-train vision encoder and language encoder in a 2D TVG model and improves the performance of crossmodal feature fusion using only low-complexity sparse 2D visual features. Further, we propose a Temporal-Distance IoU (TDIoU) loss for efficient learning of TVG. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets, empirically show that the proposed TVP significantly boosts the performance of 2D TVG (e.g., 9.79% improvement on Charades-STA and 30.77% improvement on ActivityNet Captions) and achieves 5x inference acceleration over TVG using 3D visual features. Codes are available at Open.Intel.
In this work, we explore Parameter-Efficient-Learning (PEL) techniques to repurpose a General-Purpose-Speech (GSM) model for Arabic dialect identification (ADI). Specifically, we investigate different setups to incorporate trainable features into a multi-layer encoder-decoder GSM formulation under frozen pre-trained settings. Our architecture includes residual adapter and model reprogramming (input-prompting). We design a token-level label mapping to condition the GSM for Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI). This is challenging due to the high variation in vocabulary and pronunciation among the numerous regional dialects. We achieve new state-of-the-art accuracy on the ADI-17 dataset by vanilla fine-tuning. We further reduce the training budgets with the PEL method, which performs within 1.86% accuracy to fine-tuning using only 2.5% of (extra) network trainable parameters. Our study demonstrates how to identify Arabic dialects using a small dataset and limited computation with open source code and pre-trained models.
In this work, we present novel protocols over rings for semi-honest secure three-party computation (3-PC) and malicious four-party computation (4-PC) with one corruption. Compared to state-of-the-art protocols in the same setting, our protocols require fewer low-latency and high-bandwidth links between the parties to achieve high throughput. Our protocols also reduce the computational complexity by requiring up to 50 percent fewer basic instructions per gate. Further, our protocols achieve the currently best-known communication complexity (3/5 elements per multiplication gate) with an optional preprocessing phase to reduce the communication complexity of the online phase to 2/3 elements per multiplication gate. In homogeneous network settings, i.e. all links between the parties share similar network bandwidth and latency, our protocols achieve up to two times higher throughput than state-of-the-art protocols. In heterogeneous network settings, i.e. all links between the parties share different network bandwidth and latency, our protocols achieve even larger performance improvements. We implemented our protocols and multiple other state-of-the-art protocols in a novel open-source C++ framework optimized for achieving high throughput. All our protocols achieve more than one billion 32-bit multiplication or more than 40 billion AND gates per second. This is the highest throughput achieved in 3-PC and 4-PC so far and more than three orders of magnitude higher than the throughput MP-SPDZ achieves in the same settings.
In this report, we describe the vision, challenges, and scientific contributions of the Task Wizard team, TWIZ, in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2022. Our vision, is to build TWIZ bot as an helpful, multimodal, knowledgeable, and engaging assistant that can guide users towards the successful completion of complex manual tasks. To achieve this, we focus our efforts on three main research questions: (1) Humanly-Shaped Conversations, by providing information in a knowledgeable way; (2) Multimodal Stimulus, making use of various modalities including voice, images, and videos; and (3) Zero-shot Conversational Flows, to improve the robustness of the interaction to unseen scenarios. TWIZ is an assistant capable of supporting a wide range of tasks, with several innovative features such as creative cooking, video navigation through voice, and the robust TWIZ-LLM, a Large Language Model trained for dialoguing about complex manual tasks. Given ratings and feedback provided by users, we observed that TWIZ bot is an effective and robust system, capable of guiding users through tasks while providing several multimodal stimuli.
In this study, we explore the potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in improving embodied decision-making processes for agents. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used due to their advanced reasoning skills and vast world knowledge, MLLMs like GPT4-Vision offer enhanced visual understanding and reasoning capabilities. We investigate whether state-of-the-art MLLMs can handle embodied decision-making in an end-to-end manner and whether collaborations between LLMs and MLLMs can enhance decision-making. To address these questions, we introduce a new benchmark called PCA-EVAL, which evaluates embodied decision-making from the perspectives of Perception, Cognition, and Action. Additionally, we propose HOLMES, a multi-agent cooperation framework that allows LLMs to leverage MLLMs and APIs to gather multimodal information for informed decision-making. We compare end-to-end embodied decision-making and HOLMES on our benchmark and find that the GPT4-Vision model demonstrates strong end-to-end embodied decision-making abilities, outperforming GPT4-HOLMES in terms of average decision accuracy (+3%). However, this performance is exclusive to the latest GPT4-Vision model, surpassing the open-source state-of-the-art MLLM by 26%. Our results indicate that powerful MLLMs like GPT4-Vision hold promise for decision-making in embodied agents, offering new avenues for MLLM research.
In this work we pre-train a DINO-ViT based model using two Synthetic Aperture Radar datasets (S1GRD or GSSIC) across three regions (China, Conus, Europe). We fine-tune the models on smaller labeled datasets to predict vegetation percentage, and empirically study the connection between the embedding space of the models and their ability to generalize across diverse geographic regions and to unseen data. For S1GRD, embedding spaces of different regions are clearly separated, while GSSIC's overlaps. Positional patterns remain during fine-tuning, and greater distances in embeddings often result in higher errors for unfamiliar regions. With this, our work increases our understanding of generalizability for self-supervised models applied to remote sensing.
In recent years, there have been remarkable advancements in the performance of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains. As these LLMs are deployed for increasingly complex domains, they often face the need to follow longer user prompts or generate longer texts. In these situations, the $\textit{length generalization failure}$ of LLMs on long sequences becomes more prominent. Most pre-training schemes truncate training sequences to a fixed length. LLMs often struggle to generate fluent and coherent texts after longer contexts, even with relative positional encoding specifically designed to cope with this problem. Common solutions such as finetuning on longer corpora often involve daunting hardware and time costs and require careful training process design. To more efficiently extrapolate existing LLMs' generation quality to longer texts, we theoretically and empirically investigate the main out-of-distribution (OOD) factors contributing to this problem. Inspired by this diagnosis, we propose a simple yet effective solution for on-the-fly length generalization, LM-Infinite. It involves only a $\mathbf{\Lambda}$-shaped attention mask (to avoid excessive attended tokens) and a distance limit (to avoid unseen distances) while requiring no parameter updates or learning. We find it applicable to a variety of LLMs using relative-position encoding methods. LM-Infinite is computationally efficient with $O(n)$ time and space, and demonstrates consistent text generation fluency and quality to as long as 128k tokens on ArXiv and OpenWebText2 datasets, with 2.72x decoding speedup. We will make the codes publicly available following publication.
The rapid advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) refresh the state-of-the-art performances in various vision tasks, overshadowing the conventional CNN-based models. This ignites a few recent striking-back research in the CNN world showing that pure CNN models can achieve as good performance as ViT models when carefully tuned. While encouraging, designing such high-performance CNN models is challenging, requiring non-trivial prior knowledge of network design. To this end, a novel framework termed Mathematical Architecture Design for Deep CNN (DeepMAD) is proposed to design high-performance CNN models in a principled way. In DeepMAD, a CNN network is modeled as an information processing system whose expressiveness and effectiveness can be analytically formulated by their structural parameters. Then a constrained mathematical programming (MP) problem is proposed to optimize these structural parameters. The MP problem can be easily solved by off-the-shelf MP solvers on CPUs with a small memory footprint. In addition, DeepMAD is a pure mathematical framework: no GPU or training data is required during network design. The superiority of DeepMAD is validated on multiple large-scale computer vision benchmark datasets. Notably on ImageNet-1k, only using conventional convolutional layers, DeepMAD achieves 0.7% and 1.5% higher top-1 accuracy than ConvNeXt and Swin on Tiny level, and 0.8% and 0.9% higher on Small level.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. With large quantities of parameters, PLMs are computation-intensive and resource-hungry. Hence, model pruning has been introduced to compress large-scale PLMs. However, most prior approaches only consider task-specific knowledge towards downstream tasks, but ignore the essential task-agnostic knowledge during pruning, which may cause catastrophic forgetting problem and lead to poor generalization ability. To maintain both task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge in our pruned model, we propose ContrAstive Pruning (CAP) under the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning. It is designed as a general framework, compatible with both structured and unstructured pruning. Unified in contrastive learning, CAP enables the pruned model to learn from the pre-trained model for task-agnostic knowledge, and fine-tuned model for task-specific knowledge. Besides, to better retain the performance of the pruned model, the snapshots (i.e., the intermediate models at each pruning iteration) also serve as effective supervisions for pruning. Our extensive experiments show that adopting CAP consistently yields significant improvements, especially in extremely high sparsity scenarios. With only 3% model parameters reserved (i.e., 97% sparsity), CAP successfully achieves 99.2% and 96.3% of the original BERT performance in QQP and MNLI tasks. In addition, our probing experiments demonstrate that the model pruned by CAP tends to achieve better generalization ability.