A fundamental question in interpretability research is to what extent neural networks, particularly language models, implement reusable functions via subnetworks that can be composed to perform more complex tasks. Recent developments in mechanistic interpretability have made progress in identifying subnetworks, often referred to as circuits, which represent the minimal computational subgraph responsible for a model's behavior on specific tasks. However, most studies focus on identifying circuits for individual tasks without investigating how functionally similar circuits relate to each other. To address this gap, we examine the modularity of neural networks by analyzing circuits for highly compositional subtasks within a transformer-based language model. Specifically, given a probabilistic context-free grammar, we identify and compare circuits responsible for ten modular string-edit operations. Our results indicate that functionally similar circuits exhibit both notable node overlap and cross-task faithfulness. Moreover, we demonstrate that the circuits identified can be reused and combined through subnetwork set operations to represent more complex functional capabilities of the model.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) relies heavily on distributed training strategies, among which pipeline parallelism plays a crucial role. As LLMs' training sequence length extends to 32k or even 128k, the current pipeline parallel methods face severe bottlenecks, including high memory footprints and substantial pipeline bubbles, greatly hindering model scalability and training throughput. To enhance memory efficiency and training throughput, in this work, we introduce an efficient sequence-level one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) pipeline scheduling method tailored for training LLMs on long sequences named Seq1F1B. Seq1F1B decomposes batch-level schedulable units into finer sequence-level units, reducing bubble size and memory footprint. Considering that Seq1F1B may produce slight extra bubbles if sequences are split evenly, we design a computation-wise strategy to partition input sequences and mitigate this side effect. Compared to competitive pipeline baseline methods such as Megatron 1F1B pipeline parallelism, our method achieves higher training throughput with less memory footprint. Notably, Seq1F1B efficiently trains a LLM with 30B parameters on sequences up to 64k using 64 NVIDIA A100 GPUs without recomputation strategies, a feat unachievable with existing methods. Our source code is based on Megatron-LM, and now is avaiable at: //github.com/MayDomine/Seq1F1B.git.
The burgeoning field of brain health research increasingly leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret and analyze neurological data. This study introduces a novel approach towards the creation of medical foundation models by integrating a large-scale multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset derived from 41,400 participants in its own. Our method involves a novel two-stage pretraining approach using vision transformers. The first stage is dedicated to encoding anatomical structures in generally healthy brains, identifying key features such as shapes and sizes of different brain regions. The second stage concentrates on spatial information, encompassing aspects like location and the relative positioning of brain structures. We rigorously evaluate our model, BrainFounder, using the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge and Anatomical Tracings of Lesions After Stroke v2.0 (ATLAS v2.0) datasets. BrainFounder demonstrates a significant performance gain, surpassing the achievements of the previous winning solutions using fully supervised learning. Our findings underscore the impact of scaling up both the complexity of the model and the volume of unlabeled training data derived from generally healthy brains, which enhances the accuracy and predictive capabilities of the model in complex neuroimaging tasks with MRI. The implications of this research provide transformative insights and practical applications in healthcare and make substantial steps towards the creation of foundation models for Medical AI. Our pretrained models and training code can be found at //github.com/lab-smile/GatorBrain.
Question answering is a natural language understanding task that involves reasoning over both explicit context and unstated, relevant domain knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), which underpin most contemporary question answering systems, struggle to induce how concepts relate in specialized domains such as medicine. Existing medical LLMs are also costly to train. In this work, we present MEG, a parameter-efficient approach for medical knowledge-augmented LLMs. MEG uses a lightweight mapping network to integrate graph embeddings into the LLM, enabling it to leverage external knowledge in a cost-effective way. We evaluate our method on four popular medical multiple-choice datasets and show that LLMs greatly benefit from the factual grounding provided by knowledge graph embeddings. MEG attains an average of +10.2% accuracy over the Mistral-Instruct baseline, and +6.7% over specialized models like BioMistral. We also show results based on Llama-3. Finally, we show that MEG's performance remains robust to the choice of graph encoder.
Vision-language models (VLMs) have improved significantly in multi-modal tasks, but their more complex architecture makes their safety alignment more challenging than the alignment of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we reveal an unfair distribution of safety across the layers of VLM's vision encoder, with earlier and middle layers being disproportionately vulnerable to malicious inputs compared to the more robust final layers. This 'cross-layer' vulnerability stems from the model's inability to generalize its safety training from the default architectural settings used during training to unseen or out-of-distribution scenarios, leaving certain layers exposed. We conduct a comprehensive analysis by projecting activations from various intermediate layers and demonstrate that these layers are more likely to generate harmful outputs when exposed to malicious inputs. Our experiments with LLaVA-1.5 and Llama 3.2 show discrepancies in attack success rates and toxicity scores across layers, indicating that current safety alignment strategies focused on a single default layer are insufficient.
Accurate, efficient, and robust state estimation is more important than ever in robotics as the variety of platforms and complexity of tasks continue to grow. Historically, discrete-time filters and smoothers have been the dominant approach, in which the estimated variables are states at discrete sample times. The paradigm of continuous-time state estimation proposes an alternative strategy by estimating variables that express the state as a continuous function of time, which can be evaluated at any query time. Not only can this benefit downstream tasks such as planning and control, but it also significantly increases estimator performance and flexibility, as well as reduces sensor preprocessing and interfacing complexity. Despite this, continuous-time methods remain underutilized, potentially because they are less well-known within robotics. To remedy this, this work presents a unifying formulation of these methods and the most exhaustive literature review to date, systematically categorizing prior work by methodology, application, state variables, historical context, and theoretical contribution to the field. By surveying splines and Gaussian processes together and contextualizing works from other research domains, this work identifies and analyzes open problems in continuous-time state estimation and suggests new research directions.
Identifying the relationship between healthcare attributes, lifestyles, and personality is vital for understanding and improving physical and mental well-being. Machine learning approaches are promising for modeling their relationships and offering actionable suggestions. In this paper, we propose Virtual Human Generative Model (VHGM), a machine learning model for estimating healthcare, lifestyles, and personality attributes. VHGM is a deep generative model trained with masked modeling to learn the joint distribution of attributes conditioned on known ones. Using heterogeneous tabular datasets, VHGM learns more than 2,000 attributes efficiently. We numerically evaluate the performance of VHGM and its training techniques and have deployed VHGM as a Web service, enabling various healthcare applications.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
There is increasing evidence suggesting neural networks' sensitivity to distribution shifts, so that research on out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization comes into the spotlight. Nonetheless, current endeavors mostly focus on Euclidean data, and its formulation for graph-structured data is not clear and remains under-explored, given two-fold fundamental challenges: 1) the inter-connection among nodes in one graph, which induces non-IID generation of data points even under the same environment, and 2) the structural information in the input graph, which is also informative for prediction. In this paper, we formulate the OOD problem on graphs and develop a new invariant learning approach, Explore-to-Extrapolate Risk Minimization (EERM), that facilitates graph neural networks to leverage invariance principles for prediction. EERM resorts to multiple context explorers (specified as graph structure editers in our case) that are adversarially trained to maximize the variance of risks from multiple virtual environments. Such a design enables the model to extrapolate from a single observed environment which is the common case for node-level prediction. We prove the validity of our method by theoretically showing its guarantee of a valid OOD solution and further demonstrate its power on various real-world datasets for handling distribution shifts from artificial spurious features, cross-domain transfers and dynamic graph evolution.
Pre-trained language representation models, such as BERT, capture a general language representation from large-scale corpora, but lack domain-specific knowledge. When reading a domain text, experts make inferences with relevant knowledge. For machines to achieve this capability, we propose a knowledge-enabled language representation model (K-BERT) with knowledge graphs (KGs), in which triples are injected into the sentences as domain knowledge. However, too much knowledge incorporation may divert the sentence from its correct meaning, which is called knowledge noise (KN) issue. To overcome KN, K-BERT introduces soft-position and visible matrix to limit the impact of knowledge. K-BERT can easily inject domain knowledge into the models by equipped with a KG without pre-training by-self because it is capable of loading model parameters from the pre-trained BERT. Our investigation reveals promising results in twelve NLP tasks. Especially in domain-specific tasks (including finance, law, and medicine), K-BERT significantly outperforms BERT, which demonstrates that K-BERT is an excellent choice for solving the knowledge-driven problems that require experts.
Graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an important learning problem where the goal is to assign labels to initially unlabeled nodes in a graph. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been shown to be effective for graph-based SSL problems. GCNs inherently assume existence of pairwise relationships in the graph-structured data. However, in many real-world problems, relationships go beyond pairwise connections and hence are more complex. Hypergraphs provide a natural modeling tool to capture such complex relationships. In this work, we explore the use of GCNs for hypergraph-based SSL. In particular, we propose HyperGCN, an SSL method which uses a layer-wise propagation rule for convolutional neural networks operating directly on hypergraphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first principled adaptation of GCNs to hypergraphs. HyperGCN is able to encode both the hypergraph structure and hypernode features in an effective manner. Through detailed experimentation, we demonstrate HyperGCN's effectiveness at hypergraph-based SSL.