Deductive reasoning plays a pivotal role in the formulation of sound and cohesive arguments. It allows individuals to draw conclusions that logically follow, given the truth value of the information provided. Recent progress in the domain of large language models (LLMs) has showcased their capability in executing deductive reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, a significant portion of research primarily assesses the accuracy of LLMs in solving such tasks, often overlooking a deeper analysis of their reasoning behavior. In this study, we draw upon principles from cognitive psychology to examine inferential strategies employed by LLMs, through a detailed evaluation of their responses to propositional logic problems. Our findings indicate that LLMs display reasoning patterns akin to those observed in humans, including strategies like $\textit{supposition following}$ or $\textit{chain construction}$. Moreover, our research demonstrates that the architecture and scale of the model significantly affect its preferred method of reasoning, with more advanced models tending to adopt strategies more frequently than less sophisticated ones. Importantly, we assert that a model's accuracy, that is the correctness of its final conclusion, does not necessarily reflect the validity of its reasoning process. This distinction underscores the necessity for more nuanced evaluation procedures in the field.
Indoor localization plays a vital role in the era of the IoT and robotics, with WiFi technology being a prominent choice due to its ubiquity. We present a method for creating WiFi fingerprinting datasets to enhance indoor localization systems and address the gap in WiFi fingerprinting dataset creation. We used the Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithm and employed a robotic platform to construct precise maps and localize robots in indoor environments. We developed software applications to facilitate data acquisition, fingerprinting dataset collection, and accurate ground truth map building. Subsequently, we aligned the spatial information generated via the SLAM with the WiFi scans to create a comprehensive WiFi fingerprinting dataset. The created dataset was used to train a deep neural network (DNN) for indoor localization, which can prove the usefulness of grid density. We conducted experimental validation within our office environment to demonstrate the proposed method's effectiveness, including a heatmap from the dataset showcasing the spatial distribution of WiFi signal strengths for the testing access points placed within the environment. Notably, our method offers distinct advantages over existing approaches as it eliminates the need for a predefined map of the environment, requires no preparatory steps, lessens human intervention, creates a denser fingerprinting dataset, and reduces the WiFi fingerprinting dataset creation time. Our method achieves 26% more accurate localization than the other methods and can create a six times denser fingerprinting dataset in one-third of the time compared to the traditional method. In summary, using WiFi RSSI Fingerprinting data surveyed by the SLAM-Enabled Robotic Platform, we can adapt our trained DNN model to indoor localization in any dynamic environment and enhance its scalability and applicability in real-world scenarios.
Language Models (LMs) are increasingly used for a wide range of prediction tasks, but their training can often neglect rare edge cases, reducing their reliability. Here, we define a stringent standard of trustworthiness whereby the task algorithm and circuit implementation must be verified, accounting for edge cases, with no known failure modes. We show that a model can be trained to meet this standard if built using mathematically and logically specified frameworks. In this paper, we fully verify an auto-regressive transformer model for n-digit integer addition. To exhibit the reusability of verified modules, we insert the trained integer addition model into a larger untrained model and train the combined model to perform both addition and subtraction. We find extensive reuse of the addition circuits for both tasks, easing verification of the more complex subtractor model. We discuss how inserting verified task modules into LMs can leverage model reuse to improve verifiability and trustworthiness of language models built using them. The reuse of verified circuits reduces the effort to verify more complex composite models which we believe to be a significant step towards safety of language models.
We present a unified approach to obtain scaling limits of neural networks using the genus expansion technique from random matrix theory. This approach begins with a novel expansion of neural networks which is reminiscent of Butcher series for ODEs, and is obtained through a generalisation of Fa\`a di Bruno's formula to an arbitrary number of compositions. In this expansion, the role of monomials is played by random multilinear maps indexed by directed graphs whose edges correspond to random matrices, which we call operator graphs. This expansion linearises the effect of the activation functions, allowing for the direct application of Wick's principle to compute the expectation of each of its terms. We then determine the leading contribution to each term by embedding the corresponding graphs onto surfaces, and computing their Euler characteristic. Furthermore, by developing a correspondence between analytic and graphical operations, we obtain similar graph expansions for the neural tangent kernel as well as the input-output Jacobian of the original neural network, and derive their infinite-width limits with relative ease. Notably, we find explicit formulae for the moments of the limiting singular value distribution of the Jacobian. We then show that all of these results hold for networks with more general weights, such as general matrices with i.i.d. entries satisfying moment assumptions, complex matrices and sparse matrices.
Domain probe lists--used to determine which URLs to probe for Web censorship--play a critical role in Internet censorship measurement studies. Indeed, the size and accuracy of the domain probe list limits the set of censored pages that can be detected; inaccurate lists can lead to an incomplete view of the censorship landscape or biased results. Previous efforts to generate domain probe lists have been mostly manual or crowdsourced. This approach is time-consuming, prone to errors, and does not scale well to the ever-changing censorship landscape. In this paper, we explore methods for automatically generating probe lists that are both comprehensive and up-to-date for Web censorship measurement. We start from an initial set of 139,957 unique URLs from various existing test lists consisting of pages from a variety of languages to generate new candidate pages. By analyzing content from these URLs (i.e., performing topic and keyword extraction), expanding these topics, and using them as a feed to search engines, our method produces 119,255 new URLs across 35,147 domains. We then test the new candidate pages by attempting to access each URL from servers in eleven different global locations over a span of four months to check for their connectivity and potential signs of censorship. Our measurements reveal that our method discovered over 1,400 domains--not present in the original dataset--we suspect to be blocked. In short, automatically updating probe lists is possible, and can help further automate censorship measurements at scale.
Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly used to automate impactful decisions, which leads to concerns regarding their correctness, reliability, and fairness. We envision highly-automated software platforms to assist data scientists with developing, validating, monitoring, and analysing their ML pipelines. In contrast to existing work, our key idea is to extract "logical query plans" from ML pipeline code relying on popular libraries. Based on these plans, we automatically infer pipeline semantics and instrument and rewrite the ML pipelines to enable diverse use cases without requiring data scientists to manually annotate or rewrite their code. First, we developed such an abstract ML pipeline representation together with machinery to extract it from Python code. Next, we used this representation to efficiently instrument static ML pipelines and apply provenance tracking, which enables lightweight screening for common data preparation issues. Finally, we built machinery to automatically rewrite ML pipelines to perform more advanced what-if analyses and proposed using multi-query optimisation for the resulting workloads. In future work, we aim to interactively assist data scientists as they work on their ML pipelines.
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.
Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.