This paper presents a new communication interface for the DareFightingICE platform, a Java-based fighting game focused on implementing AI for controlling a non-player character. The interface uses an open-source remote procedure call, gRPC to improve the efficiency of data transfer between the game and the AI, reducing the time spent on receiving information from the game server. This is important because the main challenge of implementing AI in a fighting game is the need for the AI to select an action to perform within a short response time. The DareFightingICE platform has been integrated with Py4J, allowing developers to create AIs using Python. However, Py4J is less efficient at handling large amounts of data, resulting in excessive latency. In contrast, gRPC is well-suited for transmitting large amounts of data. To evaluate the effectiveness of the new communication interface, we conducted an experiment comparing the latency of gRPC and Py4J, using a rule-based AI that sends a kick command regardless of the information received from the game server. The experiment results showed not only a 65\% reduction in latency but also improved stability and eliminated missed frames compared to the current interface.
Conventionally, federated learning aims to optimize a single objective, typically the utility. However, for a federated learning system to be trustworthy, it needs to simultaneously satisfy multiple/many objectives, such as maximizing model performance, minimizing privacy leakage and training cost, and being robust to malicious attacks. Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) aiming to optimize multiple conflicting objectives at the same time is quite suitable for solving the optimization problem of Trustworthy Federated Learning (TFL). In this paper, we unify MOO and TFL by formulating the problem of constrained multi-objective federated learning (CMOFL). Under this formulation, existing MOO algorithms can be adapted to TFL straightforwardly. Different from existing CMOFL works focusing on utility, efficiency, fairness, and robustness, we consider optimizing privacy leakage along with utility loss and training cost, the three primary objectives of a TFL system. We develop two improved CMOFL algorithms based on NSGA-II and PSL, respectively, for effectively and efficiently finding Pareto optimal solutions, and we provide theoretical analysis on their convergence. We design specific measurements of privacy leakage, utility loss, and training cost for three privacy protection mechanisms: Randomization, BatchCrypt (An efficient version of homomorphic encryption), and Sparsification. Empirical experiments conducted under each of the three protection mechanisms demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
The recent rise in popularity of Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) for deep learning has highlighted the role that good hyperparameter (HP) space design can play in training strong models. In turn, designing a good HP space is critically dependent on understanding the role of different HPs. This motivates research on HP Importance (HPI), e.g., with the popular method of functional ANOVA (f-ANOVA). However, the original f-ANOVA formulation is inapplicable to the subspaces most relevant to algorithm designers, such as those defined by top performance. To overcome this issue, we derive a novel formulation of f-ANOVA for arbitrary subspaces and propose an algorithm that uses Pearson divergence (PED) to enable a closed-form calculation of HPI. We demonstrate that this new algorithm, dubbed PED-ANOVA, is able to successfully identify important HPs in different subspaces while also being extremely computationally efficient.
Relation extraction (RE) is the core NLP task of inferring semantic relationships between entities from text. Standard supervised RE techniques entail training modules to tag tokens comprising entity spans and then predict the relationship between them. Recent work has instead treated the problem as a \emph{sequence-to-sequence} task, linearizing relations between entities as target strings to be generated conditioned on the input. Here we push the limits of this approach, using larger language models (GPT-3 and Flan-T5 large) than considered in prior work and evaluating their performance on standard RE tasks under varying levels of supervision. We address issues inherent to evaluating generative approaches to RE by doing human evaluations, in lieu of relying on exact matching. Under this refined evaluation, we find that: (1) Few-shot prompting with GPT-3 achieves near SOTA performance, i.e., roughly equivalent to existing fully supervised models; (2) Flan-T5 is not as capable in the few-shot setting, but supervising and fine-tuning it with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) style explanations (generated via GPT-3) yields SOTA results. We release this model as a new baseline for RE tasks.
In recent years, various companies started to shift their data services from traditional data centers onto cloud. One of the major motivations is to save operation costs with the aid of cloud elasticity. This paper discusses an emerging need from financial services to reduce idle servers retaining very few user connections, without disconnecting them from the server side. This paper considers this need as a bi-objective online load balancing problem. A neural network based scalable policy is designed to route user requests to varied numbers of servers for elasticity. An evolutionary multi-objective training framework is proposed to optimize the weights of the policy. Not only the new objective of idleness is reduced by over 130% more than traditional industrial solutions, but the original load balancing objective is slightly improved. Extensive simulations help reveal the detailed applicability of the proposed method to the emerging problem of reducing idleness in financial services.
Achieving resource efficiency while preserving end-user experience is non-trivial for cloud application operators. As cloud applications progressively adopt microservices, resource managers are faced with two distinct levels of system behavior: the end-to-end application latency and per-service resource usage. Translation between these two levels, however, is challenging because user requests traverse heterogeneous services that collectively (but unevenly) contribute to the end-to-end latency. This paper presents Autothrottle, a bi-level learning-assisted resource management framework for SLO-targeted microservices. It architecturally decouples mechanisms of application SLO feedback and service resource control, and bridges them with the notion of performance targets. This decoupling enables targeted control policies for these two mechanisms, where we combine lightweight heuristics and learning techniques. We evaluate Autothrottle on three microservice applications, with workload traces from production scenarios. Results show its superior CPU resource saving, up to 26.21% over the best-performing baseline, and up to 93.84% over all baselines.
To learn how to behave, the current revolutionary generation of AIs must be trained on vast quantities of published images, written works, and sounds, many of which fall within the core subject matter of copyright law. To some, the use of copyrighted works as training sets for AI is merely a transitory and non-consumptive use that does not materially interfere with owners' content or copyrights protecting it. Companies that use such content to train their AI engine often believe such usage should be considered "fair use" under United States law (sometimes known as "fair dealing" in other countries). By contrast, many copyright owners, as well as their supporters, consider the incorporation of copyrighted works into training sets for AI to constitute misappropriation of owners' intellectual property, and, thus, decidedly not fair use under the law. This debate is vital to the future trajectory of AI and its applications. In this article, we analyze the arguments in favor of, and against, viewing the use of copyrighted works in training sets for AI as fair use. We call this form of fair use "fair training". We identify both strong and spurious arguments on both sides of this debate. In addition, we attempt to take a broader perspective, weighing the societal costs (e.g., replacement of certain forms of human employment) and benefits (e.g., the possibility of novel AI-based approaches to global issues such as environmental disruption) of allowing AI to make easy use of copyrighted works as training sets to facilitate the development, improvement, adoption, and diffusion of AI. Finally, we suggest that the debate over AI and copyrighted works may be a tempest in a teapot when placed in the wider context of massive societal challenges such as poverty, equality, climate change, and loss of biodiversity, to which AI may be part of the solution.
Over the past half century, there have been several false dawns during which the "arrival" of world-changing artificial intelligence (AI) has been heralded. Tempting fate, the authors believe the age of AI has, indeed, finally arrived. Powerful image generators, such as DALL-E2 and Midjourney have suddenly allowed anyone with access the ability easily to create rich and complex art. In a similar vein, text generators, such as GPT3.5 (including ChatGPT) and BLOOM, allow users to compose detailed written descriptions of many topics of interest. And, it is even possible now for a person without extensive expertise in writing software to use AI to generate code capable of myriad applications. While AI will continue to evolve and improve, probably at a rapid rate, the current state of AI is already ushering in profound changes to many different sectors of society. Every new technology challenges the ability of humanity to govern it wisely. However, governance is usually viewed as both possible and necessary due to the disruption new technology often poses to social structures, industries, the environment, and other important human concerns. In this article, we offer an analysis of a range of interactions between AI and governance, with the hope that wise decisions may be made that maximize benefits and minimize costs. The article addresses two main aspects of this relationship: the governance of AI by humanity, and the governance of humanity by AI. The approach we have taken is itself informed by AI, as this article was written collaboratively by the authors and ChatGPT.
Domain generalization (DG), i.e., out-of-distribution generalization, has attracted increased interests in recent years. Domain generalization deals with a challenging setting where one or several different but related domain(s) are given, and the goal is to learn a model that can generalize to an unseen test domain. For years, great progress has been achieved. This paper presents the first review for recent advances in domain generalization. First, we provide a formal definition of domain generalization and discuss several related fields. Next, we thoroughly review the theories related to domain generalization and carefully analyze the theory behind generalization. Then, we categorize recent algorithms into three classes and present them in detail: data manipulation, representation learning, and learning strategy, each of which contains several popular algorithms. Third, we introduce the commonly used datasets and applications. Finally, we summarize existing literature and present some potential research topics for the future.
Multi-label text classification refers to the problem of assigning each given document its most relevant labels from the label set. Commonly, the metadata of the given documents and the hierarchy of the labels are available in real-world applications. However, most existing studies focus on only modeling the text information, with a few attempts to utilize either metadata or hierarchy signals, but not both of them. In this paper, we bridge the gap by formalizing the problem of metadata-aware text classification in a large label hierarchy (e.g., with tens of thousands of labels). To address this problem, we present the MATCH solution -- an end-to-end framework that leverages both metadata and hierarchy information. To incorporate metadata, we pre-train the embeddings of text and metadata in the same space and also leverage the fully-connected attentions to capture the interrelations between them. To leverage the label hierarchy, we propose different ways to regularize the parameters and output probability of each child label by its parents. Extensive experiments on two massive text datasets with large-scale label hierarchies demonstrate the effectiveness of MATCH over state-of-the-art deep learning baselines.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.