Although the synthesis of programs encoding policies often carries the promise of interpretability, systematic evaluations were never performed to assess the interpretability of these policies, likely because of the complexity of such an evaluation. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric that uses large-language models (LLM) to assess the interpretability of programmatic policies. For our metric, an LLM is given both a program and a description of its associated programming language. The LLM then formulates a natural language explanation of the program. This explanation is subsequently fed into a second LLM, which tries to reconstruct the program from the natural-language explanation. Our metric then measures the behavioral similarity between the reconstructed program and the original. We validate our approach with synthesized and human-crafted programmatic policies for playing a real-time strategy game, comparing the interpretability scores of these programmatic policies to obfuscated versions of the same programs. Our LLM-based interpretability score consistently ranks less interpretable programs lower and more interpretable ones higher. These findings suggest that our metric could serve as a reliable and inexpensive tool for evaluating the interpretability of programmatic policies.
Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) mechanisms have been a core part of protocol stacks for vehicular networks since their inception and standardization. The ETSI ITS-G5 protocol stack for vehicular communications considers the usage of DCC not only in the network or access layers, but also as a part of the cross-layer architecture that influences how often messages are generated and transmitted. ETSI DCC mechanisms have evolved from a reactive approach based on a finite state machine, to an adaptive approach that relies on a linear control algorithm. This linear control algorithm, called LIMERIC, is the basis of the mechanism used in the ETSI DCC Adaptive Approach. The behavior of this algorithm depends on a set of parameters. Different values for these parameters have been proposed in the literature, including those defined in the ETSI specification. A recent proposal is Dual-$\alpha$, which chooses parameters to improve convergence and fairness when the algorithm has to react to fast changes in the use of the shared medium (transitory situations). This article evaluates, by means of simulations, the performance of the ETSI DCC Adaptive Approach and related algorithms, considering both steady state and transitory situations. Results show that a bad selection of parameters can make a DCC algorithm ineffective, that the ETSI DCC Adaptive algorithm performs well in steady state conditions, and that Dual-$\alpha$ performs as well in steady state conditions and outperforms the ETSI DCC Adaptive Approach in transitory scenarios.
In a sequential decision-making problem, the information structure is the description of how events in the system occurring at different points in time affect each other. Classical models of reinforcement learning (e.g., MDPs, POMDPs, Dec-POMDPs, and POMGs) assume a very simple and highly regular information structure, while more general models like predictive state representations do not explicitly model the information structure. By contrast, real-world sequential decision-making problems typically involve a complex and time-varying interdependence of system variables, requiring a rich and flexible representation of information structure. In this paper, we argue for the perspective that explicit representation of information structures is an important component of analyzing and solving reinforcement learning problems. We propose novel reinforcement learning models with an explicit representation of information structure, capturing classical models as special cases. We show that this leads to a richer analysis of sequential decision-making problems and enables more tailored algorithm design. In particular, we characterize the "complexity" of the observable dynamics of any sequential decision-making problem through a graph-theoretic analysis of the DAG representation of its information structure. The central quantity in this analysis is the minimal set of variables that $d$-separates the past observations from future observations. Furthermore, through constructing a generalization of predictive state representations, we propose tailored reinforcement learning algorithms and prove that the sample complexity is in part determined by the information structure. This recovers known tractability results and gives a novel perspective on reinforcement learning in general sequential decision-making problems, providing a systematic way of identifying new tractable classes of problems.
Human forecasting accuracy in practice relies on the 'wisdom of the crowd' effect, in which predictions about future events are significantly improved by aggregating across a crowd of individual forecasters. Past work on the forecasting ability of large language models (LLMs) suggests that frontier LLMs, as individual forecasters, underperform compared to the gold standard of a human crowd forecasting tournament aggregate. In Study 1, we expand this research by using an LLM ensemble approach consisting of a crowd of twelve LLMs. We compare the aggregated LLM predictions on 31 binary questions to that of a crowd of 925 human forecasters from a three-month forecasting tournament. Our main analysis shows that the LLM crowd outperforms a simple no-information benchmark and is statistically equivalent to the human crowd. We also observe an acquiescence effect, with mean model predictions being significantly above 50%, despite an almost even split of positive and negative resolutions. Moreover, in Study 2, we test whether LLM predictions (of GPT-4 and Claude 2) can be improved by drawing on human cognitive output. We find that both models' forecasting accuracy benefits from exposure to the median human prediction as information, improving accuracy by between 17% and 28%: though this leads to less accurate predictions than simply averaging human and machine forecasts. Our results suggest that LLMs can achieve forecasting accuracy rivaling that of human crowd forecasting tournaments: via the simple, practically applicable method of forecast aggregation. This replicates the 'wisdom of the crowd' effect for LLMs, and opens up their use for a variety applications throughout society.
For the problem of inferring a Gaussian graphical model (GGM), this work explores the application of a recent approach from the multiple testing literature for graph inference. The main idea of the method by Rebafka et al. (2022) is to model the data by a latent variable model, the so-called noisy stochastic block model (NSBM), and then use the associated ${\ell}$-values to infer the graph. The inferred graph controls the false discovery rate, that means that the proportion of falsely declared edges does not exceed a user-defined nominal level. Here it is shown that any test statistic from the GGM literature can be used as input for the NSBM approach to perform GGM inference. To make the approach feasible in practice, a new, computationally efficient inference algorithm for the NSBM is developed relying on a greedy approach to maximize the integrated complete-data likelihood. Then an extensive numerical study illustrates that the NSBM approach outperforms the state of the art for any of the here considered GGM-test statistics. In particular in sparse settings and on real datasets a significant gain in power is observed.
As the role of artificial intelligence becomes increasingly pivotal in modern society, the efficient training and deployment of deep neural networks have emerged as critical areas of focus. Recent advancements in attention-based large neural architectures have spurred the development of AI accelerators, facilitating the training of extensive, multi-billion parameter models. Despite their effectiveness, these powerful networks often incur high execution costs in production environments. Neuromorphic computing, inspired by biological neural processes, offers a promising alternative. By utilizing temporally-sparse computations, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer to enhance energy efficiency through a reduced and low-power hardware footprint. However, the training of SNNs can be challenging due to their recurrent nature which cannot as easily leverage the massive parallelism of modern AI accelerators. To facilitate the investigation of SNN architectures and dynamics researchers have sought to bridge Python-based deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow with custom-implemented compute kernels. This paper introduces Spyx, a new and lightweight SNN simulation and optimization library designed in JAX. By pre-staging data in the expansive vRAM of contemporary accelerators and employing extensive JIT compilation, Spyx allows for SNN optimization to be executed as a unified, low-level program on NVIDIA GPUs or Google TPUs. This approach achieves optimal hardware utilization, surpassing the performance of many existing SNN training frameworks while maintaining considerable flexibility.
Recently, graph neural networks have been gaining a lot of attention to simulate dynamical systems due to their inductive nature leading to zero-shot generalizability. Similarly, physics-informed inductive biases in deep-learning frameworks have been shown to give superior performance in learning the dynamics of physical systems. There is a growing volume of literature that attempts to combine these two approaches. Here, we evaluate the performance of thirteen different graph neural networks, namely, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian graph neural networks, graph neural ODE, and their variants with explicit constraints and different architectures. We briefly explain the theoretical formulation highlighting the similarities and differences in the inductive biases and graph architecture of these systems. We evaluate these models on spring, pendulum, gravitational, and 3D deformable solid systems to compare the performance in terms of rollout error, conserved quantities such as energy and momentum, and generalizability to unseen system sizes. Our study demonstrates that GNNs with additional inductive biases, such as explicit constraints and decoupling of kinetic and potential energies, exhibit significantly enhanced performance. Further, all the physics-informed GNNs exhibit zero-shot generalizability to system sizes an order of magnitude larger than the training system, thus providing a promising route to simulate large-scale realistic systems.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.