This paper presents two efficient hierarchical clustering (HC) algorithms with respect to Dasgupta's cost function. For any input graph $G$ with a clear cluster-structure, our designed algorithms run in nearly-linear time in the input size of $G$, and return an $O(1)$-approximate HC tree with respect to Dasgupta's cost function. We compare the performance of our algorithm against the previous state-of-the-art on synthetic and real-world datasets and show that our designed algorithm produces comparable or better HC trees with much lower running time.
We apply program verification technology to the problem of specifying and verifying automatic differentiation (AD) algorithms. We focus on define-by-run, a style of AD where the program that must be differentiated is executed and monitored by the automatic differentiation algorithm. We begin by asking, "what is an implementation of AD?" and "what does it mean for an implementation of AD to be correct?" We answer these questions both at an informal level, in precise English prose, and at a formal level, using types and logical assertions. After answering these broad questions, we focus on a specific implementation of AD, which involves a number of subtle programming-language features, including dynamically allocated mutable state, first-class functions, and effect handlers. We present a machine-checked proof, expressed in a modern variant of Separation Logic, of its correctness. We view this result as an advanced exercise in program verification, with potential future applications to the verification of more realistic automatic differentiation systems and of other software components that exploit delimited-control effects.
This paper investigates the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) massive unsourced random access in an asynchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, with both timing and frequency offsets (TFO) and non-negligible user collisions. The proposed coding framework splits the data into two parts encoded by sparse regression code (SPARC) and low-density parity check (LDPC) code. Multistage orthogonal pilots are transmitted in the first part to reduce collision density. Unlike existing schemes requiring a quantization codebook with a large size for estimating TFO, we establish a \textit{graph-based channel reconstruction and collision resolution (GB-CR$^2$)} algorithm to iteratively reconstruct channels, resolve collisions, and compensate for TFO rotations on the formulated graph jointly among multiple stages. We further propose to leverage the geometric characteristics of signal constellations to correct TFO estimations. Exhaustive simulations demonstrate remarkable performance superiority in channel estimation and data recovery with substantial complexity reduction compared to state-of-the-art schemes.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models for neuromorphic computing. For training the non-differentiable SNN models, the backpropagation through time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients (SG) method has achieved high performance. However, this method suffers from considerable memory cost and training time during training. In this paper, we propose the Spatial Learning Through Time (SLTT) method that can achieve high performance while greatly improving training efficiency compared with BPTT. First, we show that the backpropagation of SNNs through the temporal domain contributes just a little to the final calculated gradients. Thus, we propose to ignore the unimportant routes in the computational graph during backpropagation. The proposed method reduces the number of scalar multiplications and achieves a small memory occupation that is independent of the total time steps. Furthermore, we propose a variant of SLTT, called SLTT-K, that allows backpropagation only at K time steps, then the required number of scalar multiplications is further reduced and is independent of the total time steps. Experiments on both static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate superior training efficiency and performance of our SLTT. In particular, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet, while the memory cost and training time are reduced by more than 70% and 50%, respectively, compared with BPTT.
We propose MM-Vet, an evaluation benchmark that examines large multimodal models (LMMs) on complicated multimodal tasks. Recent LMMs have shown various intriguing abilities, such as solving math problems written on the blackboard, reasoning about events and celebrities in news images, and explaining visual jokes. Rapid model advancements pose challenges to evaluation benchmark development. Problems include: (1) How to systematically structure and evaluate the complicated multimodal tasks; (2) How to design evaluation metrics that work well across question and answer types; and (3) How to give model insights beyond a simple performance ranking. To this end, we present MM-Vet, designed based on the insight that the intriguing ability to solve complicated tasks is often achieved by a generalist model being able to integrate different core vision-language (VL) capabilities. MM-Vet defines 6 core VL capabilities and examines the 16 integrations of interest derived from the capability combination. For evaluation metrics, we propose an LLM-based evaluator for open-ended outputs. The evaluator enables the evaluation across different question types and answer styles, resulting in a unified scoring metric. We evaluate representative LMMs on MM-Vet, providing insights into the capabilities of different LMM system paradigms and models. Code and data are available at //github.com/yuweihao/MM-Vet.
Graph-based kNN algorithms have garnered widespread popularity for machine learning tasks, due to their simplicity and effectiveness. However, the conventional kNN graph's reliance on a fixed value of k can hinder its performance, especially in scenarios involving complex data distributions. Moreover, like other classification models, the presence of ambiguous samples along decision boundaries often presents a challenge, as they are more prone to incorrect classification. To address these issues, we propose the Preferential Attached k-Nearest Neighbors Graph (paNNG), which combines adaptive kNN with distribution-based graph construction. By incorporating distribution information, paNNG can significantly improve performance for ambiguous samples by "pulling" them towards their original classes and hence enable enhanced overall accuracy and generalization capability. Through rigorous evaluations on diverse benchmark datasets, paNNG outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, showcasing its adaptability and efficacy across various real-world scenarios.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
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.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.
Cold-start problems are long-standing challenges for practical recommendations. Most existing recommendation algorithms rely on extensive observed data and are brittle to recommendation scenarios with few interactions. This paper addresses such problems using few-shot learning and meta learning. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. To accomplish this, we combine the scenario-specific learning with a model-agnostic sequential meta-learning and unify them into an integrated end-to-end framework, namely Scenario-specific Sequential Meta learner (or s^2 meta). By doing so, our meta-learner produces a generic initial model through aggregating contextual information from a variety of prediction tasks while effectively adapting to specific tasks by leveraging learning-to-learn knowledge. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve significant gains over the state-of-the-arts for cold-start problems in online recommendation. Deployment is at the Guess You Like session, the front page of the Mobile Taobao.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.