Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to an emergent ability of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, a prompt reasoning strategy that adds intermediate rationale steps between questions and answers to construct prompts. Conditioned on these prompts, LLMs can effectively learn in context to generate rationales that lead to more accurate answers than when answering the same question directly. To design LLM prompts, one important setting, called demonstration selection, considers selecting demonstrations from an example bank. Existing methods use various heuristics for this selection, but for CoT prompting, which involves unique rationales, it is essential to base the selection upon the intrinsic skills that CoT rationales need, for instance, the skills of addition or subtraction for math word problems. To address this requirement, we introduce a novel approach named Reasoning Skill Discovery (RSD) that use unsupervised learning to create a latent space representation of rationales, called a reasoning skill. Simultaneously, RSD learns a reasoning policy to determine the required reasoning skill for a given question. This can then guide the selection of examples that demonstrate the required reasoning skills. Our approach offers several desirable properties: it is (1) theoretically grounded, (2) sample-efficient, requiring no LLM inference or manual prompt design, and (3) LLM-agnostic. Empirically, RSD outperforms existing methods by up to 6% in terms of the answer accuracy across multiple reasoning tasks.
During the past decade, deep neural networks have led to fast-paced progress and significant achievements in computer vision problems, for both academia and industry. Yet despite their success, state-of-the-art image classification approaches fail to generalize well in previously unseen visual contexts, as required by many real-world applications. In this paper, we focus on this domain generalization (DG) problem and argue that the generalization ability of deep convolutional neural networks can be improved by taking advantage of multi-layer and multi-scaled representations of the network. We introduce a framework that aims at improving domain generalization of image classifiers by combining both low-level and high-level features at multiple scales, enabling the network to implicitly disentangle representations in its latent space and learn domain-invariant attributes of the depicted objects. Additionally, to further facilitate robust representation learning, we propose a novel objective function, inspired by contrastive learning, which aims at constraining the extracted representations to remain invariant under distribution shifts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by evaluating on the domain generalization datasets of PACS, VLCS, Office-Home and NICO. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our model is able to surpass the performance of previous DG methods and consistently produce competitive and state-of-the-art results in all datasets.
The widespread adoption of REST APIs, coupled with their growing complexity and size, has led to the need for automated REST API testing tools. Current tools focus on the structured data in REST API specifications but often neglect valuable insights available in unstructured natural-language descriptions in the specifications, which leads to suboptimal test coverage. Recently, to address this gap, researchers have developed techniques that extract rules from these human-readable descriptions and query knowledge bases to derive meaningful input values. However, these techniques are limited in the types of rules they can extract and prone to produce inaccurate results. This paper presents RESTGPT, an innovative approach that leverages the power and intrinsic context-awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve REST API testing. RESTGPT takes as input an API specification, extracts machine-interpretable rules, and generates example parameter values from natural-language descriptions in the specification. It then augments the original specification with these rules and values. Our evaluations indicate that RESTGPT outperforms existing techniques in both rule extraction and value generation. Given these promising results, we outline future research directions for advancing REST API testing through LLMs.
To ensure that Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively support user productivity, they need to be adjusted. Existing Code Readability (CR) models can guide this alignment. However, there are concerns about their relevance in modern software engineering since they often miss the developers' notion of readability and rely on outdated code. This research assesses existing Java CR models for LLM adjustments, measuring the correlation between their and developers' evaluations of AI-generated Java code. Using the Repertory Grid Technique with 15 developers, we identified 12 key code aspects influencing CR that were consequently assessed by 390 programmers when labeling 120 AI-generated snippets. Our findings indicate that when AI generates concise and executable code, it is often considered readable by CR models and developers. However, a limited correlation between these evaluations underscores the importance of future research on learning objectives for adjusting LLMs and on the aspects influencing CR evaluations included in predictive models.
Active soft bodies can affect their shape through an internal actuation mechanism that induces a deformation. Similar to recent work, this paper utilizes a differentiable, quasi-static, and physics-based simulation layer to optimize for actuation signals parameterized by neural networks. Our key contribution is a general and implicit formulation to control active soft bodies by defining a function that enables a continuous mapping from a spatial point in the material space to the actuation value. This property allows us to capture the signal's dominant frequencies, making the method discretization agnostic and widely applicable. We extend our implicit model to mandible kinematics for the particular case of facial animation and show that we can reliably reproduce facial expressions captured with high-quality capture systems. We apply the method to volumetric soft bodies, human poses, and facial expressions, demonstrating artist-friendly properties, such as simple control over the latent space and resolution invariance at test time.
It is well known that it is impossible to construct useful confidence intervals (CIs) about the mean or median of a response $Y$ conditional on features $X = x$ without making strong assumptions about the joint distribution of $X$ and $Y$. This paper introduces a new framework for reasoning about problems of this kind by casting the conditional problem at different levels of resolution, ranging from coarse to fine localization. In each of these problems, we consider local quantiles defined as the marginal quantiles of $Y$ when $(X,Y)$ is resampled in such a way that samples $X$ near $x$ are up-weighted while the conditional distribution $Y \mid X$ does not change. We then introduce the Weighted Quantile method, which asymptotically produces the uniformly most accurate confidence intervals for these local quantiles no matter the (unknown) underlying distribution. Another method, namely, the Quantile Rejection method, achieves finite sample validity under no assumption whatsoever. We conduct extensive numerical studies demonstrating that both of these methods are valid. In particular, we show that the Weighted Quantile procedure achieves nominal coverage as soon as the effective sample size is in the range of 10 to 20.
The success of artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning models in particular, has led to their widespread adoption across various industries due to their ability to process huge amounts of data and learn complex patterns. However, due to their lack of explainability, there are significant concerns regarding their use in critical sectors, such as finance and healthcare, where decision-making transparency is of paramount importance. In this paper, we provide a comparative survey of methods that aim to improve the explainability of deep learning models within the context of finance. We categorize the collection of explainable AI methods according to their corresponding characteristics, and we review the concerns and challenges of adopting explainable AI methods, together with future directions we deemed appropriate and important.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown excellent generalization capabilities that have led to the development of numerous models. These models propose various new architectures, tweaking existing architectures with refined training strategies, increasing context length, using high-quality training data, and increasing training time to outperform baselines. Analyzing new developments is crucial for identifying changes that enhance training stability and improve generalization in LLMs. This survey paper comprehensively analyses the LLMs architectures and their categorization, training strategies, training datasets, and performance evaluations and discusses future research directions. Moreover, the paper also discusses the basic building blocks and concepts behind LLMs, followed by a complete overview of LLMs, including their important features and functions. Finally, the paper summarizes significant findings from LLM research and consolidates essential architectural and training strategies for developing advanced LLMs. Given the continuous advancements in LLMs, we intend to regularly update this paper by incorporating new sections and featuring the latest LLM models.
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.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.