Distributions on integers are ubiquitous in probabilistic modeling but remain challenging for many of today's probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). The core challenge comes from discrete structure: many of today's PPL inference strategies rely on enumeration, sampling, or differentiation in order to scale, which fail for high-dimensional complex discrete distributions involving integers. Our insight is that there is structure in arithmetic that these approaches are not using. We present a binary encoding strategy for discrete distributions that exploits the rich logical structure of integer operations like summation and comparison. We leverage this structured encoding with knowledge compilation to perform exact probabilistic inference, and show that this approach scales to much larger integer distributions with arithmetic.
Deep neural networks have shown impressive performance for image-based disease detection. Performance is commonly evaluated through clinical validation on independent test sets to demonstrate clinically acceptable accuracy. Reporting good performance metrics on test sets, however, is not always a sufficient indication of the generalizability and robustness of an algorithm. In particular, when the test data is drawn from the same distribution as the training data, the iid test set performance can be an unreliable estimate of the accuracy on new data. In this paper, we employ stress testing to assess model robustness and subgroup performance disparities in disease detection models. We design progressive stress testing using five different bidirectional and unidirectional image perturbations with six different severity levels. As a use case, we apply stress tests to measure the robustness of disease detection models for chest X-ray and skin lesion images, and demonstrate the importance of studying class and domain-specific model behaviour. Our experiments indicate that some models may yield more robust and equitable performance than others. We also find that pretraining characteristics play an important role in downstream robustness. We conclude that progressive stress testing is a viable and important tool and should become standard practice in the clinical validation of image-based disease detection models.
Despite the promising progress in multi-modal tasks, current large multi-modal models (LMM) are prone to hallucinating inconsistent descriptions with respect to the associated image and human instructions. This paper addresses this issue by introducing the first large and diverse visual instruction tuning dataset, named Large-scale Robust Visual (LRV)-Instruction. Our dataset consists of 120k visual instructions generated by GPT4, covering 16 vision-and-language tasks with open-ended instructions and answers. Unlike existing studies that primarily focus on positive instruction samples, we design LRV-Instruction to include both positive and negative instructions for more robust visual instruction tuning. Our negative instructions are designed at two semantic levels: (i) Nonexistent Element Manipulation and (ii) Existent Element Manipulation. To efficiently measure the hallucination generated by LMMs, we propose GPT4-Assisted Visual Instruction Evaluation (GAVIE), a novel approach to evaluate visual instruction tuning without the need for human-annotated groundtruth answers and can adapt to diverse instruction formats. We conduct comprehensive experiments to investigate the hallucination of LMMs. Our results demonstrate that existing LMMs exhibit significant hallucination when presented with our negative instructions, particularly with Existent Element Manipulation instructions. Moreover, by finetuning MiniGPT4 on LRV-Instruction, we successfully mitigate hallucination while improving performance on public datasets using less training data compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we observed that a balanced ratio of positive and negative instances in the training data leads to a more robust model. Updates of our project are available at //fuxiaoliu.github.io/LRV/.
The analysis of structured complex data, such as clustered graph based datasets, usually applies a variety of visual representation techniques and formats. The majority of currently available tools and approaches to exploratory visualization are built on integrated schemes for simultaneous displaying of multiple aspects of studying objects and processes. Usually, such schemes partition screen space that is composed of multiple views and adopt interaction patterns to focus on data-driven items. Widely known concepts as overview plus-detail and focus-plus-context are ambiguous in interpretation by means of technical terms. Therefore, their implementation by UI design practitioners need reviews and a classification of the basic approaches to visual composition of graphical representation modules. We propose a description of basic components of the view and focus and an overview of their multiple combinations.
This thesis explores challenges in semantic parsing, specifically focusing on scenarios with limited data and computational resources. It offers solutions using techniques like automatic data curation, knowledge transfer, active learning, and continual learning. For tasks with no parallel training data, the thesis proposes generating synthetic training examples from structured database schemas. When there is abundant data in a source domain but limited parallel data in a target domain, knowledge from the source is leveraged to improve parsing in the target domain. For multilingual situations with limited data in the target languages, the thesis introduces a method to adapt parsers using a limited human translation budget. Active learning is applied to select source-language samples for manual translation, maximizing parser performance in the target language. In addition, an alternative method is also proposed to utilize machine translation services, supplemented by human-translated data, to train a more effective parser. When computational resources are limited, a continual learning approach is introduced to minimize training time and computational memory. This maintains the parser's efficiency in previously learned tasks while adapting it to new tasks, mitigating the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Overall, the thesis provides a comprehensive set of methods to improve semantic parsing in resource-constrained conditions.
We show a cancellation property for probabilistic choice. If distributions mu + rho and nu + rho are branching probabilistic bisimilar, then distributions mu and nu are also branching probabilistic bisimilar. We do this in the setting of a basic process language involving non-deterministic and probabilistic choice and define branching probabilistic bisimilarity on distributions. Despite the fact that the cancellation property is very elegant and concise, we failed to provide a short and natural combinatorial proof. Instead we provide a proof using metric topology. Our major lemma is that every distribution can be unfolded into an equivalent stable distribution, where the topological arguments are required to deal with uncountable branching.
Neural implicit modeling permits to achieve impressive 3D reconstruction results on small objects, while it exhibits significant limitations in large indoor scenes. In this work, we propose a novel neural implicit modeling method that leverages multiple regularization strategies to achieve better reconstructions of large indoor environments, while relying only on images. A sparse but accurate depth prior is used to anchor the scene to the initial model. A dense but less accurate depth prior is also introduced, flexible enough to still let the model diverge from it to improve the estimated geometry. Then, a novel self-supervised strategy to regularize the estimated surface normals is presented. Finally, a learnable exposure compensation scheme permits to cope with challenging lighting conditions. Experimental results show that our approach produces state-of-the-art 3D reconstructions in challenging indoor scenarios.
Various categories have been proposed as targets for the denotational semantics of higher-order probabilistic programming languages. One such proposal involves joint probability distributions (couplings) used in Bayesian statistical models with conditioning. In previous treatments, composition of joint measures was performed by disintegrating to obtain Markov kernels, composing the kernels, then reintegrating to obtain a joint measure. Disintegrations exist only under certain restrictions on the underlying spaces. In this paper we propose a category whose morphisms are joint finite measures in which composition is defined without reference to disintegration, allowing its application to a broader class of spaces. The category is symmetric monoidal with a pleasing symmetry in which the dagger structure is a simple transpose.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
The notion of "in-domain data" in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision -- suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and by precision and recall of sentence selection with respect to an oracle.
The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the last decade and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, in order to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learning workload across multiple machines, and turning the centralized into a distributed system. These distributed systems present new challenges, first and foremost the efficient parallelization of the training process and the creation of a coherent model. This article provides an extensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges and opportunities of distributed machine learning over conventional (centralized) machine learning, discussing the techniques used for distributed machine learning, and providing an overview of the systems that are available.