Congestion pricing is used to raise revenues and reduce traffic and pollution. However, people have heterogeneous spatial demand patterns and willingness (or ability) to pay tolls, and so pricing may have substantial equity implications. We develop a data-driven approach to design congestion pricing given policymakers' equity and efficiency objectives. First, algorithmically, we extend the Markovian traffic equilibrium setting introduced by Baillon & Cominetti (2008) to model heterogeneous populations and incorporate prices and outside options such as public transit. Second, we empirically evaluate various pricing schemes using data collected by an industry partner in the city of Bogota, one of the most congested cities in the world. We find that pricing personalized to each economic stratum can be substantially more efficient and equitable than uniform pricing; however, non-personalized but area-based pricing can recover much of the gap.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), generative large language models (LLMs) stand at the forefront, revolutionizing how we interact with our data. However, the computational intensity and memory consumption of deploying these models present substantial challenges in terms of serving efficiency, particularly in scenarios demanding low latency and high throughput. This survey addresses the imperative need for efficient LLM serving methodologies from a machine learning system (MLSys) research perspective, standing at the crux of advanced AI innovations and practical system optimizations. We provide in-depth analysis, covering a spectrum of solutions, ranging from cutting-edge algorithmic modifications to groundbreaking changes in system designs. The survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state and future directions in efficient LLM serving, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in overcoming the barriers of effective LLM deployment, thereby reshaping the future of AI.
As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within this expanding field.
Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.
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.
Following unprecedented success on the natural language tasks, Transformers have been successfully applied to several computer vision problems, achieving state-of-the-art results and prompting researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as {de facto} operators. Capitalizing on these advances in computer vision, the medical imaging field has also witnessed growing interest for Transformers that can capture global context compared to CNNs with local receptive fields. Inspired from this transition, in this survey, we attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the applications of Transformers in medical imaging covering various aspects, ranging from recently proposed architectural designs to unsolved issues. Specifically, we survey the use of Transformers in medical image segmentation, detection, classification, reconstruction, synthesis, registration, clinical report generation, and other tasks. In particular, for each of these applications, we develop taxonomy, identify application-specific challenges as well as provide insights to solve them, and highlight recent trends. Further, we provide a critical discussion of the field's current state as a whole, including the identification of key challenges, open problems, and outlining promising future directions. We hope this survey will ignite further interest in the community and provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of Transformer models in medical imaging. Finally, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to regularly update the relevant latest papers and their open-source implementations at \url{//github.com/fahadshamshad/awesome-transformers-in-medical-imaging}.
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods. For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.
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.
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.