In this thought-provoking article, we discuss certain myths and legends that are folklore among members of the high-performance computing community. We gathered these myths from conversations at conferences and meetings, product advertisements, papers, and other communications such as tweets, blogs, and news articles within and beyond our community. We believe they represent the zeitgeist of the current era of massive change, driven by the end of many scaling laws such as Dennard scaling and Moore's law. While some laws end, new directions are emerging, such as algorithmic scaling or novel architecture research. Nevertheless, these myths are rarely based on scientific facts, but rather on some evidence or argumentation. In fact, we believe that this is the very reason for the existence of many myths and why they cannot be answered clearly. While it feels like there should be clear answers for each, some may remain endless philosophical debates, such as whether Beethoven was better than Mozart. We would like to see our collection of myths as a discussion of possible new directions for research and industry investment.
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Knowledge Representation (KR) and facet-analytical Knowledge Organization (KO) have been the two most prominent methodologies of data and knowledge modelling in the Artificial Intelligence community and the Information Science community, respectively. KR boasts of a robust and scalable ecosystem of technologies to support knowledge modelling while, often, underemphasizing the quality of its models (and model-based data). KO, on the other hand, is less technology-driven but has developed a robust framework of guiding principles (canons) for ensuring modelling (and model-based data) quality. This paper elucidates both the KR and facet-analytical KO methodologies in detail and provides a functional mapping between them. Out of the mapping, the paper proposes an integrated KO-enriched KR methodology with all the standard components of a KR methodology plus the guiding canons of modelling quality provided by KO. The practical benefits of the methodological integration has been exemplified through a prominent case study of KR-based image annotation exercise.
The cybersecurity landscape evolves rapidly and poses threats to organizations. To enhance resilience, one needs to track the latest developments and trends in the domain. It has been demonstrated that standard bibliometrics approaches show their limits in such a fast-evolving domain. For this purpose, we use large language models (LLMs) to extract relevant knowledge entities from cybersecurity-related texts. We use a subset of arXiv preprints on cybersecurity as our data and compare different LLMs in terms of entity recognition (ER) and relevance. The results suggest that LLMs do not produce good knowledge entities that reflect the cybersecurity context, but our results show some potential for noun extractors. For this reason, we developed a noun extractor boosted with some statistical analysis to extract specific and relevant compound nouns from the domain. Later, we tested our model to identify trends in the LLM domain. We observe some limitations, but it offers promising results to monitor the evolution of emergent trends.
Perception of offensiveness is inherently subjective, shaped by the lived experiences and socio-cultural values of the perceivers. Recent years have seen substantial efforts to build AI-based tools that can detect offensive language at scale, as a means to moderate social media platforms, and to ensure safety of conversational AI technologies such as ChatGPT and Bard. However, existing approaches treat this task as a technical endeavor, built on top of data annotated for offensiveness by a global crowd workforce without any attention to the crowd workers' provenance or the values their perceptions reflect. We argue that cultural and psychological factors play a vital role in the cognitive processing of offensiveness, which is critical to consider in this context. We re-frame the task of determining offensiveness as essentially a matter of moral judgment -- deciding the boundaries of ethically wrong vs. right language within an implied set of socio-cultural norms. Through a large-scale cross-cultural study based on 4309 participants from 21 countries across 8 cultural regions, we demonstrate substantial cross-cultural differences in perceptions of offensiveness. More importantly, we find that individual moral values play a crucial role in shaping these variations: moral concerns about Care and Purity are significant mediating factors driving cross-cultural differences. These insights are of crucial importance as we build AI models for the pluralistic world, where the values they espouse should aim to respect and account for moral values in diverse geo-cultural contexts.
Ranking and selection (R&S) aims to select the best alternative with the largest mean performance from a finite set of alternatives. Recently, considerable attention has turned towards the large-scale R&S problem which involves a large number of alternatives. Ideal large-scale R&S procedures should be sample optimal, i.e., the total sample size required to deliver an asymptotically non-zero probability of correct selection (PCS) grows at the minimal order (linear order) in the number of alternatives, $k$. Surprisingly, we discover that the na\"ive greedy procedure, which keeps sampling the alternative with the largest running average, performs strikingly well and appears sample optimal. To understand this discovery, we develop a new boundary-crossing perspective and prove that the greedy procedure is sample optimal for the scenarios where the best mean maintains at least a positive constant away from all other means as $k$ increases. We further show that the derived PCS lower bound is asymptotically tight for the slippage configuration of means with a common variance. For other scenarios, we consider the probability of good selection and find that the result depends on the growth behavior of the number of good alternatives: if it remains bounded as $k$ increases, the sample optimality still holds; otherwise, the result may change. Moreover, we propose the explore-first greedy procedures by adding an exploration phase to the greedy procedure. The procedures are proven to be sample optimal and consistent under the same assumptions. Last, we numerically investigate the performance of our greedy procedures in solving large-scale R&S problems.
Chatbots have been studied for more than half a century. With the rapid development of natural language processing (NLP) technologies in recent years, chatbots using large language models (LLMs) have received much attention nowadays. Compared with traditional ones, modern chatbots are more powerful and have been used in real-world applications. There are however, bias and fairness concerns in modern chatbot design. Due to the huge amounts of training data, extremely large model sizes, and lack of interpretability, bias mitigation and fairness preservation of modern chatbots are challenging. Thus, a comprehensive overview on bias and fairness in chatbot systems is given in this paper. The history of chatbots and their categories are first reviewed. Then, bias sources and potential harms in applications are analyzed. Considerations in designing fair and unbiased chatbot systems are examined. Finally, future research directions are discussed.
In this paper, we present JADE, a targeted linguistic fuzzing platform which strengthens the linguistic complexity of seed questions to simultaneously and consistently break a wide range of widely-used LLMs categorized in three groups: eight open-sourced Chinese, six commercial Chinese and four commercial English LLMs. JADE generates three safety benchmarks for the three groups of LLMs, which contain unsafe questions that are highly threatening: the questions simultaneously trigger harmful generation of multiple LLMs, with an average unsafe generation ratio of $70\%$ (please see the table below), while are still natural questions, fluent and preserving the core unsafe semantics. We release the benchmark demos generated for commercial English LLMs and open-sourced English LLMs in the following link: //github.com/whitzard-ai/jade-db. For readers who are interested in evaluating on more questions generated by JADE, please contact us. JADE is based on Noam Chomsky's seminal theory of transformational-generative grammar. Given a seed question with unsafe intention, JADE invokes a sequence of generative and transformational rules to increment the complexity of the syntactic structure of the original question, until the safety guardrail is broken. Our key insight is: Due to the complexity of human language, most of the current best LLMs can hardly recognize the invariant evil from the infinite number of different syntactic structures which form an unbound example space that can never be fully covered. Technically, the generative/transformative rules are constructed by native speakers of the languages, and, once developed, can be used to automatically grow and transform the parse tree of a given question, until the guardrail is broken. For more evaluation results and demo, please check our website: //whitzard-ai.github.io/jade.html.
Nanopore sequencing, superior to other sequencing technologies for DNA storage in multiple aspects, has recently attracted considerable attention. Its high error rates, however, demand thorough research on practical and efficient coding schemes to enable accurate recovery of stored data. To this end, we consider a simplified model of a nanopore sequencer inspired by Mao \emph{et al.}, incorporating intersymbol interference and measurement noise. Essentially, our channel model passes a sliding window of length \(\ell\) over a \(q\)-ary input sequence that outputs the \textit{composition} of the enclosed \(\ell\) bits and shifts by \(\delta\) positions with each time step. In this context, the composition of a \(q\)-ary vector $\bfx$ specifies the number of occurrences in \(\bfx\) of each symbol in \(\lbrace 0,1,\ldots, q-1\rbrace\). The resulting compositions vector, termed the \emph{read vector}, may also be corrupted by \(t\) substitution errors. By employing graph-theoretic techniques, we deduce that for \(\delta=1\), at least \(\log \log n\) symbols of redundancy are required to correct a single (\(t=1\)) substitution. Finally, for \(\ell \geq 3\), we exploit some inherent characteristics of read vectors to arrive at an error-correcting code that is of optimal redundancy up to a (small) additive constant for this setting. This construction is also found to be optimal for the case of reconstruction from two noisy read vectors.
The growth and progression of brain tumors is governed by patient-specific dynamics. Even when the tumor appears well-delineated in medical imaging scans, tumor cells typically already have infiltrated the surrounding brain tissue beyond the visible lesion boundaries. Quantifying and understanding these growth dynamics promises to reveal this otherwise hidden spread and is key to individualized therapies. Current treatment plans for brain tumors, such as radiotherapy, typically involve delineating a standard uniform margin around the visible tumor on imaging scans to target this invisible tumor growth. This "one size fits all" approach is derived from population studies and often fails to account for the nuances of individual patient conditions. Here, we present the framework GliODIL which infers the full spatial distribution of tumor cell concentration from available imaging data based on PDE-constrained optimization. The framework builds on the newly introduced method of Optimizing the Discrete Loss (ODIL), data are assimilated in the solution of the Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by optimizing a cost function that combines the discrete form of the equations and data as penalty terms. By utilizing consistent and stable discrete approximations of the PDEs, employing a multigrid method, and leveraging automatic differentiation, we achieve computation times suitable for clinical application such as radiotherapy planning. Our method performs parameter estimation in a manner that is consistent with the PDEs. Through a harmonious blend of physics-based constraints and data-driven approaches, GliODIL improves the accuracy of estimating tumor cell distribution and, clinically highly relevant, also predicting tumor recurrences, outperforming all other studied benchmarks.
We propose a unified framework aimed at enhancing the diffusion priors for 3D generation tasks. Despite the critical importance of these tasks, existing methodologies often struggle to generate high-caliber results. We begin by examining the inherent limitations in previous diffusion priors. We identify a divergence between the diffusion priors and the training procedures of diffusion models that substantially impairs the quality of 3D generation. To address this issue, we propose a novel, unified framework that iteratively optimizes both the 3D model and the diffusion prior. Leveraging the different learnable parameters of the diffusion prior, our approach offers multiple configurations, affording various trade-offs between performance and implementation complexity. Notably, our experimental results demonstrate that our method markedly surpasses existing techniques, establishing new state-of-the-art in the realm of text-to-3D generation. Furthermore, our approach exhibits impressive performance on both NeRF and the newly introduced 3D Gaussian Splatting backbones. Additionally, our framework yields insightful contributions to the understanding of recent score distillation methods, such as the VSD and DDS loss.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
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