The Gaussian process latent variable model (GPLVM) is a popular probabilistic method used for nonlinear dimension reduction, matrix factorization, and state-space modeling. Inference for GPLVMs is computationally tractable only when the data likelihood is Gaussian. Moreover, inference for GPLVMs has typically been restricted to obtaining maximum a posteriori point estimates, which can lead to overfitting, or variational approximations, which mischaracterize the posterior uncertainty. Here, we present a method to perform Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference for generalized Bayesian nonlinear latent variable modeling. The crucial insight necessary to generalize GPLVMs to arbitrary observation models is that we approximate the kernel function in the Gaussian process mappings with random Fourier features; this allows us to compute the gradient of the posterior in closed form with respect to the latent variables. We show that we can generalize GPLVMs to non-Gaussian observations, such as Poisson, negative binomial, and multinomial distributions, using our random feature latent variable model (RFLVM). Our generalized RFLVMs perform on par with state-of-the-art latent variable models on a wide range of applications, including motion capture, images, and text data for the purpose of estimating the latent structure and imputing the missing data of these complex data sets.
Extracting level sets from scalar data is a fundamental operation in visualization with many applications. Recently, the concept of level set extraction has been extended to bivariate scalar fields. Prior work on vector field equivalence, wherein an analyst marks a region in the domain and is shown other regions in the domain with similar vector values, pointed out the need to make this extraction operation fast, so that analysts can work interactively. To date, the fast extraction of level sets from bivariate scalar fields has not been researched as extensively as for the univariate case. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that extracts fiber lines, i.e., the preimages of so called control polygons (FSCP), for bivariate 2D data by joint traversal of bounding volume hierarchies for both grid and FSCP elements. We performed an extensive evaluation, comparing our method to a two-dimensional adaptation of the method proposed by Klacansky et al., as well as to the naive approach for fiber line extraction. The evaluation incorporates a vast array of configurations in several datasets. We found that our method provides a speedup of several orders of magnitudes compared to the naive algorithm and requires two thirds of the computation time compared to Klacansky et al. adapted for 2D.
The derivation of mathematical results in specialised fields, using Large Language Models (LLMs), is an emerging research direction that can help identify models' limitations, and potentially support mathematical discovery. In this paper, we leverage a symbolic engine to generate derivations of equations at scale, and investigate the capabilities of LLMs when deriving goal equations from premises. Specifically, we employ in-context learning for GPT and fine-tune a range of T5 models to compare the robustness and generalisation of pre-training strategies to specialised models. Empirical results show that fine-tuned FLAN-T5-large (MathT5) outperforms GPT models on all static and out-of-distribution test sets in conventional scores. However, an in-depth analysis reveals that the fine-tuned models are more sensitive to perturbations involving unseen symbols and (to a lesser extent) changes to equation structure. In addition, we analyse 1.7K equations, and over 200 derivations, to highlight common reasoning errors such as the inclusion of incorrect, irrelevant, and redundant equations. Finally, we explore the suitability of existing metrics for evaluating mathematical derivations and find evidence that, while they can capture general properties such as sensitivity to perturbations, they fail to highlight fine-grained reasoning errors and essential differences between models. Overall, this work demonstrates that training models on synthetic data may improve their math capabilities beyond much larger LLMs, but current metrics are not appropriately assessing the quality of generated mathematical text.
Reconstructing interacting hands from monocular RGB data is a challenging task, as it involves many interfering factors, e.g. self- and mutual occlusion and similar textures. Previous works only leverage information from a single RGB image without modeling their physically plausible relation, which leads to inferior reconstruction results. In this work, we are dedicated to explicitly exploiting spatial-temporal information to achieve better interacting hand reconstruction. On one hand, we leverage temporal context to complement insufficient information provided by the single frame, and design a novel temporal framework with a temporal constraint for interacting hand motion smoothness. On the other hand, we further propose an interpenetration detection module to produce kinetically plausible interacting hands without physical collisions. Extensive experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks.
There is rising interest in differentiable rendering, which allows explicitly modeling geometric priors and constraints in optimization pipelines using first-order methods such as backpropagation. Incorporating such domain knowledge can lead to deep neural networks that are trained more robustly and with limited data, as well as the capability to solve ill-posed inverse problems. Existing efforts in differentiable rendering have focused on imagery from electro-optical sensors, particularly conventional RGB-imagery. In this work, we propose an approach for differentiable rendering of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, which combines methods from 3D computer graphics with neural rendering. We demonstrate the approach on the inverse graphics problem of 3D Object Reconstruction from limited SAR imagery using high-fidelity simulated SAR data.
Formal method-based analysis of the 5G Wireless Communication Protocol is crucial for identifying logical vulnerabilities and facilitating an all-encompassing security assessment, especially in the design phase. Natural Language Processing (NLP) assisted techniques and most of the tools are not widely adopted by the industry and research community. Traditional formal verification through a mathematics approach heavily relied on manual logical abstraction prone to being time-consuming, and error-prone. The reason that the NLP-assisted method did not apply in industrial research may be due to the ambiguity in the natural language of the protocol designs nature is controversial to the explicitness of formal verification. To address the challenge of adopting the formal methods in protocol designs, targeting (3GPP) protocols that are written in natural language, in this study, we propose a hybrid approach to streamline the analysis of protocols. We introduce a two-step pipeline that first uses NLP tools to construct data and then uses constructed data to extract identifiers and formal properties by using the NLP model. The identifiers and formal properties are further used for formal analysis. We implemented three models that take different dependencies between identifiers and formal properties as criteria. Our results of the optimal model reach valid accuracy of 39% for identifier extraction and 42% for formal properties predictions. Our work is proof of concept for an efficient procedure in performing formal analysis for largescale complicate specification and protocol analysis, especially for 5G and nextG communications.
We introduce Compartmentalized Diffusion Models (CDM), a method to train different diffusion models (or prompts) on distinct data sources and arbitrarily compose them at inference time. The individual models can be trained in isolation, at different times, and on different distributions and domains and can be later composed to achieve performance comparable to a paragon model trained on all data simultaneously. Furthermore, each model only contains information about the subset of the data it was exposed to during training, enabling several forms of training data protection. In particular, CDMs are the first method to enable both selective forgetting and continual learning for large-scale diffusion models, as well as allowing serving customized models based on the user's access rights. CDMs also allow determining the importance of a subset of the data in generating particular samples.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
As a crucial component in task-oriented dialog systems, the Natural Language Generation (NLG) module converts a dialog act represented in a semantic form into a response in natural language. The success of traditional template-based or statistical models typically relies on heavily annotated data, which is infeasible for new domains. Therefore, it is pivotal for an NLG system to generalize well with limited labelled data in real applications. To this end, we present FewShotWoz, the first NLG benchmark to simulate the few-shot learning setting in task-oriented dialog systems. Further, we develop the SC-GPT model. It is pre-trained on a large set of annotated NLG corpus to acquire the controllable generation ability, and fine-tuned with only a few domain-specific labels to adapt to new domains. Experiments on FewShotWoz and the large Multi-Domain-WOZ datasets show that the proposed SC-GPT significantly outperforms existing methods, measured by various automatic metrics and human evaluations.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.