Existing analyses of the expressive capacity of Transformer models have required excessively deep layers for data memorization, leading to a discrepancy with the Transformers actually used in practice. This is primarily due to the interpretation of the softmax function as an approximation of the hardmax function. By clarifying the connection between the softmax function and the Boltzmann operator, we prove that a single layer of self-attention with low-rank weight matrices possesses the capability to perfectly capture the context of an entire input sequence. As a consequence, we show that one-layer and single-head Transformers have a memorization capacity for finite samples, and that Transformers consisting of one self-attention layer with two feed-forward neural networks are universal approximators for continuous permutation equivariant functions on a compact domain.
Advances in reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on massive compute resources and remain notoriously sample inefficient. In contrast, the human brain is able to efficiently learn effective control strategies using limited resources. This raises the question whether insights from neuroscience can be used to improve current RL methods. Predictive processing is a popular theoretical framework which maintains that the human brain is actively seeking to minimize surprise. We show that recurrent neural networks which predict their own sensory states can be leveraged to minimise surprise, yielding substantial gains in cumulative reward. Specifically, we present the Predictive Processing Proximal Policy Optimization (P4O) agent; an actor-critic reinforcement learning agent that applies predictive processing to a recurrent variant of the PPO algorithm by integrating a world model in its hidden state. Even without hyperparameter tuning, P4O significantly outperforms a baseline recurrent variant of the PPO algorithm on multiple Atari games using a single GPU. It also outperforms other state-of-the-art agents given the same wall-clock time and exceeds human gamer performance on multiple games including Seaquest, which is a particularly challenging environment in the Atari domain. Altogether, our work underscores how insights from the field of neuroscience may support the development of more capable and efficient artificial agents.
Recently, AI assistants based on large language models (LLMs) show surprising performance in many tasks, such as dialogue, solving math problems, writing code, and using tools. Although LLMs possess intensive world knowledge, they still make factual errors when facing some knowledge intensive tasks, like open-domain question answering. These untruthful responses from the AI assistant may cause significant risks in practical applications. We believe that an AI assistant's refusal to answer questions it does not know is a crucial method for reducing hallucinations and making the assistant truthful. Therefore, in this paper, we ask the question "Can AI assistants know what they don't know and express them through natural language?" To answer this question, we construct a model-specific "I don't know" (Idk) dataset for an assistant, which contains its known and unknown questions, based on existing open-domain question answering datasets. Then we align the assistant with its corresponding Idk dataset and observe whether it can refuse to answer its unknown questions after alignment. Experimental results show that after alignment with Idk datasets, the assistant can refuse to answer most its unknown questions. For questions they attempt to answer, the accuracy is significantly higher than before the alignment.
Modeling of non-rigid object launching and manipulation is complex considering the wide range of dynamics affecting trajectory, many of which may be unknown. Using physics models can be inaccurate because they cannot account for unknown factors and the effects of the deformation of the object as it is launched; moreover, deriving force coefficients for these models is not possible without extensive experimental testing. Recently, advancements in data-powered artificial intelligence methods have allowed learnable models and systems to emerge. It is desirable to train a model for launch prediction on a robot, as deep neural networks can account for immeasurable dynamics. However, the inability to collect large amounts of experimental data decreases performance of deep neural networks. Through estimating force coefficients, the accepted physics models can be leveraged to produce adequate supplemental data to artificially increase the size of the training set, yielding improved neural networks. In this paper, we introduce a new framework for algorithmic estimation of force coefficients for non-rigid object launching, which can be generalized to other domains, in order to generate large datasets. We implement a novel training algorithm and objective for our deep neural network to accurately model launch trajectory of non-rigid objects and predict whether they will hit a series of targets. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of using simulated data from force coefficient estimation and shows the importance of simulated data for training an effective neural network.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate tasks like natural language processing and computer vision, harnessing their power for spatial-temporal forecasting remains challenging. The disparity between sequential text and complex spatial-temporal data hinders this application. To address this issue, this paper introduces STG-LLM, an innovative approach empowering LLMs for spatial-temporal forecasting. We tackle the data mismatch by proposing: 1) STG-Tokenizer: This spatial-temporal graph tokenizer transforms intricate graph data into concise tokens capturing both spatial and temporal relationships; 2) STG-Adapter: This minimalistic adapter, consisting of linear encoding and decoding layers, bridges the gap between tokenized data and LLM comprehension. By fine-tuning only a small set of parameters, it can effectively grasp the semantics of tokens generated by STG-Tokenizer, while preserving the original natural language understanding capabilities of LLMs. Extensive experiments on diverse spatial-temporal benchmark datasets show that STG-LLM successfully unlocks LLM potential for spatial-temporal forecasting. Remarkably, our approach achieves competitive performance on par with dedicated SOTA methods.
A common explanation for negative user impacts of content recommender systems is misalignment between the platform's objective and user welfare. In this work, we show that misalignment in the platform's objective is not the only potential cause of unintended impacts on users: even when the platform's objective is fully aligned with user welfare, the platform's learning algorithm can induce negative downstream impacts on users. The source of these user impacts is that different pieces of content may generate observable user reactions (feedback information) at different rates; these feedback rates may correlate with content properties, such as controversiality or demographic similarity of the creator, that affect the user experience. Since differences in feedback rates can impact how often the learning algorithm engages with different content, the learning algorithm may inadvertently promote content with certain such properties. Using the multi-armed bandit framework with probabilistic feedback, we examine the relationship between feedback rates and a learning algorithm's engagement with individual arms for different no-regret algorithms. We prove that no-regret algorithms can exhibit a wide range of dependencies: if the feedback rate of an arm increases, some no-regret algorithms engage with the arm more, some no-regret algorithms engage with the arm less, and other no-regret algorithms engage with the arm approximately the same number of times. From a platform design perspective, our results highlight the importance of looking beyond regret when measuring an algorithm's performance, and assessing the nature of a learning algorithm's engagement with different types of content as well as their resulting downstream impacts.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the local geometry and update iteratively. Even though solving non-convex functions is NP-hard in the worst case, the optimization quality in practice is often not an issue -- optimizers are largely believed to find approximate global minima. Researchers hypothesize a unified explanation for this intriguing phenomenon: most of the local minima of the practically-used objectives are approximately global minima. We rigorously formalize it for concrete instances of machine learning problems.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
Learning similarity functions between image pairs with deep neural networks yields highly correlated activations of embeddings. In this work, we show how to improve the robustness of such embeddings by exploiting the independence within ensembles. To this end, we divide the last embedding layer of a deep network into an embedding ensemble and formulate training this ensemble as an online gradient boosting problem. Each learner receives a reweighted training sample from the previous learners. Further, we propose two loss functions which increase the diversity in our ensemble. These loss functions can be applied either for weight initialization or during training. Together, our contributions leverage large embedding sizes more effectively by significantly reducing correlation of the embedding and consequently increase retrieval accuracy of the embedding. Our method works with any differentiable loss function and does not introduce any additional parameters during test time. We evaluate our metric learning method on image retrieval tasks and show that it improves over state-of-the-art methods on the CUB 200-2011, Cars-196, Stanford Online Products, In-Shop Clothes Retrieval and VehicleID datasets.