In the last decade, recent successes in deep clustering majorly involved the Mutual Information (MI) as an unsupervised objective for training neural networks with increasing regularisations. While the quality of the regularisations have been largely discussed for improvements, little attention has been dedicated to the relevance of MI as a clustering objective. In this paper, we first highlight how the maximisation of MI does not lead to satisfying clusters. We identified the Kullback-Leibler divergence as the main reason of this behaviour. Hence, we generalise the mutual information by changing its core distance, introducing the Generalised Mutual Information (GEMINI): a set of metrics for unsupervised neural network training. Unlike MI, some GEMINIs do not require regularisations when training as they are geometry-aware thanks to distances or kernels in the data space. Finally, we highlight that GEMINIs can automatically select a relevant number of clusters, a property that has been little studied in deep discriminative clustering context where the number of clusters is a priori unknown.
Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be compromised with manual jailbreak attacks and (automatic) adversarial attacks. Recent work suggests that patching LLMs against these attacks is possible: manual jailbreak attacks are human-readable but often limited and public, making them easy to block; adversarial attacks generate gibberish prompts that can be detected using perplexity-based filters. In this paper, we show that these solutions may be too optimistic. We propose an interpretable adversarial attack, \texttt{AutoDAN}, that combines the strengths of both types of attacks. It automatically generates attack prompts that bypass perplexity-based filters while maintaining a high attack success rate like manual jailbreak attacks. These prompts are interpretable and diverse, exhibiting strategies commonly used in manual jailbreak attacks, and transfer better than their non-readable counterparts when using limited training data or a single proxy model. We also customize \texttt{AutoDAN}'s objective to leak system prompts, another jailbreak application not addressed in the adversarial attack literature. %, demonstrating the versatility of the approach. We can also customize the objective of \texttt{AutoDAN} to leak system prompts, beyond the ability to elicit harmful content from the model, demonstrating the versatility of the approach. Our work provides a new way to red-team LLMs and to understand the mechanism of jailbreak attacks.
Prompt Tuning is emerging as a scalable and cost-effective method to fine-tune Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), which are often referred to as Large Language Models (LLMs). This study benchmarks the performance and computational efficiency of Prompt Tuning and baselines for multi-label text classification. This is applied to the challenging task of classifying companies into an investment firm's proprietary industry taxonomy, supporting their thematic investment strategy. Text-to-text classification is frequently reported to outperform task-specific classification heads, but has several limitations when applied to a multi-label classification problem where each label consists of multiple tokens: (a) Generated labels may not match any label in the label taxonomy; (b) The fine-tuning process lacks permutation invariance and is sensitive to the order of the provided labels; (c) The model provides binary decisions rather than appropriate confidence scores. Limitation (a) is addressed by applying constrained decoding using Trie Search, which slightly improves classification performance. All limitations (a), (b), and (c) are addressed by replacing the PLM's language head with a classification head, which is referred to as Prompt Tuned Embedding Classification (PTEC). This improves performance significantly, while also reducing computational costs during inference. In our industrial application, the training data is skewed towards well-known companies. We confirm that the model's performance is consistent across both well-known and less-known companies. Our overall results indicate the continuing need to adapt state-of-the-art methods to domain-specific tasks, even in the era of PLMs with strong generalization abilities. We release our codebase and a benchmarking dataset at //github.com/EQTPartners/PTEC.
Diminished Reality (DR) is considered as the conceptual counterpart to Augmented Reality (AR), and has recently gained increasing attention from both industry and academia. Unlike AR which adds virtual objects to the real world, DR allows users to remove physical content from the real world. When combined with object replacement technology, it presents an further exciting avenue for exploration within the metaverse. Although a few researches have been conducted on the intersection of object substitution and DR, there is no real-time object substitution for mobile diminished reality architecture with high quality. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end architecture to facilitate immersive and real-time scene construction for mobile devices with edge computing.
We present an implementation of a Web3 platform that leverages the Groth16 Zero-Knowledge Proof schema to verify the validity of questionnaire results within Smart Contracts. Our approach ensures that the answer key of the questionnaire remains undisclosed throughout the verification process, while ensuring that the evaluation is done fairly. To accomplish this, users respond to a series of questions, and their answers are encoded and securely transmitted to a hidden backend. The backend then performs an evaluation of the user's answers, generating the overall result of the questionnaire. Additionally, it generates a Zero-Knowledge Proof, attesting that the answers were appropriately evaluated against a valid set of constraints. Next, the user submits their result along with the proof to a Smart Contract, which verifies their validity and issues a non-fungible token (NFT) as an attestation of the user's test result. In this research, we implemented the Zero-Knowledge functionality using Circom 2 and deployed the Smart Contract using Solidity, thereby showcasing a practical and secure solution for questionnaire validity verification in the context of Smart Contracts.
Data Augmentation (DA) has emerged as an indispensable strategy in Time Series Classification (TSC), primarily due to its capacity to amplify training samples, thereby bolstering model robustness, diversifying datasets, and curtailing overfitting. However, the current landscape of DA in TSC is plagued with fragmented literature reviews, nebulous methodological taxonomies, inadequate evaluative measures, and a dearth of accessible, user-oriented tools. In light of these challenges, this study embarks on an exhaustive dissection of DA methodologies within the TSC realm. Our initial approach involved an extensive literature review spanning a decade, revealing that contemporary surveys scarcely capture the breadth of advancements in DA for TSC, prompting us to meticulously analyze over 100 scholarly articles to distill more than 60 unique DA techniques. This rigorous analysis precipitated the formulation of a novel taxonomy, purpose-built for the intricacies of DA in TSC, categorizing techniques into five principal echelons: Transformation-Based, Pattern-Based, Generative, Decomposition-Based, and Automated Data Augmentation. Our taxonomy promises to serve as a robust navigational aid for scholars, offering clarity and direction in method selection. Addressing the conspicuous absence of holistic evaluations for prevalent DA techniques, we executed an all-encompassing empirical assessment, wherein upwards of 15 DA strategies were subjected to scrutiny across 8 UCR time-series datasets, employing ResNet and a multi-faceted evaluation paradigm encompassing Accuracy, Method Ranking, and Residual Analysis, yielding a benchmark accuracy of 88.94 +- 11.83%. Our investigation underscored the inconsistent efficacies of DA techniques, with...
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods. For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, in the last few years, a large research effort has been devoted to image captioning, i.e. the task of describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoding step and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, and relationships and the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fusion strategies. However, regardless of the impressive results obtained, research in image captioning has not reached a conclusive answer yet. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview and categorization of image captioning approaches, from visual encoding and text generation to training strategies, used datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this respect, we quantitatively compare many relevant state-of-the-art approaches to identify the most impactful technical innovations in image captioning architectures and training strategies. Moreover, many variants of the problem and its open challenges are analyzed and discussed. The final goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing state-of-the-art and highlighting the future directions for an area of research where Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing can find an optimal synergy.
Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of such perception system especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, collision avoidance, etc. Generally, stereo or monocular images with corresponding 3D point clouds are already standard layout for 3D object detection, out of which point clouds are increasingly prevalent with accurate depth information being provided. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection on point clouds is still in its infancy due to high sparseness and irregularity of point clouds by nature, misalignment view between camera view and LiDAR bird's eye of view for modality synergies, occlusions and scale variations at long distances, etc. Recently, profound progress has been made in 3D object detection, with a large body of literature being investigated to address this vision task. As such, we present a comprehensive review of the latest progress in this field covering all the main topics including sensors, fundamentals, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we introduce metrics and provide quantitative comparisons on popular public datasets. The avenues for future work are going to be judiciously identified after an in-deep analysis of the surveyed works. Finally, we conclude this paper.