In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLM's response, such as hallucination, have also been actively discussed. Existing works have been devoted to quantifying the uncertainty in LLM's response, but they often overlook the complex nature of LLMs and the uniqueness of in-context learning. In this work, we delve into the predictive uncertainty of LLMs associated with in-context learning, highlighting that such uncertainties may stem from both the provided demonstrations (aleatoric uncertainty) and ambiguities tied to the model's configurations (epistemic uncertainty). We propose a novel formulation and corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the decomposition. The code and data are available at: \url{//github.com/lingchen0331/UQ_ICL}.
Pseudo log-likelihood is a type of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method used in various fields including contextual bandits, influence maximization of social networks, and causal bandits. However, in previous literature \citep{li2017provably, zhang2022online, xiong2022combinatorial, feng2023combinatorial1, feng2023combinatorial2}, the log-likelihood function may not be bounded, which may result in the algorithm they proposed not well-defined. In this paper, we give a counterexample that the maximum pseudo log-likelihood estimation fails and then provide a solution to correct the algorithms in \citep{li2017provably, zhang2022online, xiong2022combinatorial, feng2023combinatorial1, feng2023combinatorial2}.
Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful tool for pretraining deep networks on unlabeled data, prior to transfer learning of target tasks with limited annotation. The relevance between the pretraining pretext and target tasks is crucial to the success of transfer learning. Various pretext tasks have been proposed to utilize properties of medical image data (e.g., three dimensionality), which are more relevant to medical image analysis than generic ones for natural images. However, previous work rarely paid attention to data with anatomy-oriented imaging planes, e.g., standard cardiac magnetic resonance imaging views. As these imaging planes are defined according to the anatomy of the imaged organ, pretext tasks effectively exploiting this information can pretrain the networks to gain knowledge on the organ of interest. In this work, we propose two complementary pretext tasks for this group of medical image data based on the spatial relationship of the imaging planes. The first is to learn the relative orientation between the imaging planes and implemented as regressing their intersecting lines. The second exploits parallel imaging planes to regress their relative slice locations within a stack. Both pretext tasks are conceptually straightforward and easy to implement, and can be combined in multitask learning for better representation learning. Thorough experiments on two anatomical structures (heart and knee) and representative target tasks (semantic segmentation and classification) demonstrate that the proposed pretext tasks are effective in pretraining deep networks for remarkably boosted performance on the target tasks, and superior to other recent approaches.
The integration of an ensemble of deep learning models has been extensively explored to enhance defense against adversarial attacks. The diversity among sub-models increases the attack cost required to deceive the majority of the ensemble, thereby improving the adversarial robustness. While existing approaches mainly center on increasing diversity in feature representations or dispersion of first-order gradients with respect to input, the limited correlation between these diversity metrics and adversarial robustness constrains the performance of ensemble adversarial defense. In this work, we aim to enhance ensemble diversity by reducing attack transferability. We identify second-order gradients, which depict the loss curvature, as a key factor in adversarial robustness. Computing the Hessian matrix involved in second-order gradients is computationally expensive. To address this, we approximate the Hessian-vector product using differential approximation. Given that low curvature provides better robustness, our ensemble model was designed to consider the influence of curvature among different sub-models. We introduce a novel regularizer to train multiple more-diverse low-curvature network models. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that our ensemble model exhibits superior robustness against a range of attacks, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe RL approaches have predominantly focused on incorporating predefined safety constraints into the policy learning process. However, this reliance on predefined safety constraints poses limitations in dynamic and unpredictable real-world settings where such constraints may not be available or sufficiently adaptable. Bridging this gap, we propose a novel approach that concurrently learns a safe RL control policy and identifies the unknown safety constraint parameters of a given environment. Initializing with a parametric signal temporal logic (pSTL) safety specification and a small initial labeled dataset, we frame the problem as a bilevel optimization task, intricately integrating constrained policy optimization, using a Lagrangian-variant of the twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) algorithm, with Bayesian optimization for optimizing parameters for the given pSTL safety specification. Through experimentation in comprehensive case studies, we validate the efficacy of this approach across varying forms of environmental constraints, consistently yielding safe RL policies with high returns. Furthermore, our findings indicate successful learning of STL safety constraint parameters, exhibiting a high degree of conformity with true environmental safety constraints. The performance of our model closely mirrors that of an ideal scenario that possesses complete prior knowledge of safety constraints, demonstrating its proficiency in accurately identifying environmental safety constraints and learning safe policies that adhere to those constraints.
Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is used to approach the achievable information rates (AIRs) of joint detection and decoding for long-haul optical fiber links. The AIRs of memoryless ring constellations are compared to those of circularly symmetric complex Gaussian modulation for surrogate channel models with correlated phase noise. Simulations are performed for 1000 km of standard single-mode fiber with ideal Raman amplification. In this setup, 32 rings and 16 SIC-stages with Gaussian message-passing receivers achieve the AIR peaks of previous work. The computational complexity scales in proportion to the number of SIC-stages, where one stage has the complexity of separate detection and decoding.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.
Neural machine translation (NMT) is a deep learning based approach for machine translation, which yields the state-of-the-art translation performance in scenarios where large-scale parallel corpora are available. Although the high-quality and domain-specific translation is crucial in the real world, domain-specific corpora are usually scarce or nonexistent, and thus vanilla NMT performs poorly in such scenarios. Domain adaptation that leverages both out-of-domain parallel corpora as well as monolingual corpora for in-domain translation, is very important for domain-specific translation. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques for NMT.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.