Many evolutionary algorithms (EAs) take advantage of parallel evaluation of candidates. However, if evaluation times vary significantly, many worker nodes (i.e.,\ compute clients) are idle much of the time, waiting for the next generation to be created. Evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS), a class of EAs that optimizes the architecture and hyperparameters of deep neural networks, is particularly vulnerable to this issue. This paper proposes a generic asynchronous evaluation strategy (AES) that is then adapted to work with ENAS. AES increases throughput by maintaining a queue of upto $K$ individuals ready to be sent to the workers for evaluation and proceeding to the next generation as soon as $M<<K$ individuals have been evaluated by the workers. A suitable value for $M$ is determined experimentally, balancing diversity and efficiency. To showcase the generality and power of AES, it was first evaluated in 11-bit multiplexer design (a single-population verifiable discovery task) and then scaled up to ENAS for image captioning (a multi-population open-ended-optimization task). In both problems, a multifold performance improvement was observed, suggesting that AES is a promising method for parallelizing the evolution of complex systems with long and variable evaluation times, such as those in ENAS.
Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) are a large class of computational optimisation problems. If the variables of a VCSP take values from a finite domain, then recent results in constraint satisfaction imply that the problem is in P or NP-complete, depending on the set of admitted cost functions. Here we study the larger class of cost functions over countably infinite domains that have an oligomorphic automorphism group. We present a hardness condition based on a generalisation of pp-constructability as known for (classical) CSPs. We also provide a universal-algebraic polynomial-time tractability condition, based on the concept of fractional polymorphisms. We apply our general theory to study the computational complexity of resilience problems in database theory (under bag semantics). We show how to construct, for every fixed conjunctive query (and more generally for every union of conjunctive queries), a set of cost functions with an oligomorphic automorphism group such that the resulting VCSP is polynomial-time equivalent to the resilience problem; we only require that the query is connected and show that this assumption can be made without loss of generality. For the case where the query is acylic, we obtain a complexity dichotomy of the resilience problem, based on the dichotomy for finite-domain VCSPs. To illustrate the utility of our methods, we exemplarily settle the complexity of a (non-acyclic) conjunctive query whose computational complexity remained open in the literature by verifying that it satisfies our tractability condition. We conjecture that for resilience problems, our hardness and tractability conditions match, which would establish a complexity dichotomy for resilience problems for (unions of) conjunctive queries.
We explore the ability of large language models (LLMs) to act as ASR post-processors that perform rescoring and error correction. Our focus is on instruction prompting to let LLMs perform these task without fine-tuning, for which we evaluate different prompting schemes, both zero- and few-shot in-context learning, and a novel task-activating prompting (TAP) method that combines instruction and demonstration. Using a pre-trained first-pass system and rescoring output on two out-of-domain tasks (ATIS and WSJ), we show that rescoring only by in-context learning with frozen LLMs achieves results that are competitive with rescoring by domain-tuned LMs. By combining prompting techniques with fine-tuning we achieve error rates below the N-best oracle level, showcasing the generalization power of the LLMs.
Since the origins of the Internet, various vulnerabilities exploiting the IP fragmentation process have plagued IPv4 protocol, many leading to a wide range of attacks. IPv6 modified the handling of fragmentations and introduced a specific extension header, not solving the related problems, as proved by extensive literature. One of the primary sources of problems has been the overlapping fragments, which result in unexpected or malicious packets when reassembled. To overcome the problem related to fragmentation, the authors of RFC 5722 decided that IPv6 hosts MUST silently drop overlapping fragments. Since then, several studies have proposed methodologies to check if IPv6 hosts accept overlapping fragments and are still vulnerable to related attacks. However, some of the above methodologies have not been proven complete or need to be more accurate. In this paper we propose a novel model to check IPv6 fragmentation handling specifically suited for the reassembling strategies of modern operating systems. Previous models, indeed, considered OS reassembly policy as byte-based. However, nowadays, reassembly policies are fragment-based, making previous models inadequate. Our model leverages the commutative property of the checksum, simplifying the whole assessing process. Starting with this new model, we were able to better evaluate the RFC-5722 and RFC-9099 compliance of modern operating systems against fragmentation handling. Our results suggest that IPv6 fragmentation can still be considered a threat and that more effort is needed to solve related security issues.
Current unsupervised 2D-3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods do not work in multi-person scenarios due to perspective ambiguity in monocular images. Therefore, we present one of the first studies investigating the feasibility of unsupervised multi-person 2D-3D HPE from just 2D poses alone, focusing on reconstructing human interactions. To address the issue of perspective ambiguity, we expand upon prior work by predicting the cameras' elevation angle relative to the subjects' pelvis. This allows us to rotate the predicted poses to be level with the ground plane, while obtaining an estimate for the vertical offset in 3D between individuals. Our method involves independently lifting each subject's 2D pose to 3D, before combining them in a shared 3D coordinate system. The poses are then rotated and offset by the predicted elevation angle before being scaled. This by itself enables us to retrieve an accurate 3D reconstruction of their poses. We present our results on the CHI3D dataset, introducing its use for unsupervised 2D-3D pose estimation with three new quantitative metrics, and establishing a benchmark for future research.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown excellent generalization capabilities that have led to the development of numerous models. These models propose various new architectures, tweaking existing architectures with refined training strategies, increasing context length, using high-quality training data, and increasing training time to outperform baselines. Analyzing new developments is crucial for identifying changes that enhance training stability and improve generalization in LLMs. This survey paper comprehensively analyses the LLMs architectures and their categorization, training strategies, training datasets, and performance evaluations and discusses future research directions. Moreover, the paper also discusses the basic building blocks and concepts behind LLMs, followed by a complete overview of LLMs, including their important features and functions. Finally, the paper summarizes significant findings from LLM research and consolidates essential architectural and training strategies for developing advanced LLMs. Given the continuous advancements in LLMs, we intend to regularly update this paper by incorporating new sections and featuring the latest LLM models.
2D-based Industrial Anomaly Detection has been widely discussed, however, multimodal industrial anomaly detection based on 3D point clouds and RGB images still has many untouched fields. Existing multimodal industrial anomaly detection methods directly concatenate the multimodal features, which leads to a strong disturbance between features and harms the detection performance. In this paper, we propose Multi-3D-Memory (M3DM), a novel multimodal anomaly detection method with hybrid fusion scheme: firstly, we design an unsupervised feature fusion with patch-wise contrastive learning to encourage the interaction of different modal features; secondly, we use a decision layer fusion with multiple memory banks to avoid loss of information and additional novelty classifiers to make the final decision. We further propose a point feature alignment operation to better align the point cloud and RGB features. Extensive experiments show that our multimodal industrial anomaly detection model outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both detection and segmentation precision on MVTec-3D AD dataset. Code is available at //github.com/nomewang/M3DM.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.