Adversarial text attack research is useful for testing the robustness of NLP models, however, the rise of transformers has greatly increased the time required to test attacks. Especially when researchers do not have access to adequate resources (e.g. GPUs). This can hinder attack research, as modifying one example for an attack can require hundreds of queries to a model, especially for black-box attacks. Often these attacks remove one token at a time to find the ideal one to change, requiring $n$ queries (the length of the text) right away. We propose a more efficient selection method called BinarySelect which combines binary search and attack selection methods to greatly reduce the number of queries needed to find a token. We find that BinarySelect only needs $\text{log}_2(n) * 2$ queries to find the first token compared to $n$ queries. We also test BinarySelect in an attack setting against 5 classifiers across 3 datasets and find a viable tradeoff between number of queries saved and attack effectiveness. For example, on the Yelp dataset, the number of queries is reduced by 32% (72 less) with a drop in attack effectiveness of only 5 points. We believe that BinarySelect can help future researchers study adversarial attacks and black-box problems more efficiently and opens the door for researchers with access to less resources.
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating pre-trained LLMs into dynamic data distributions, task structures, and user preferences. Pre-trained LLMs, when tailored for specific needs, often experience significant performance degradation in previous knowledge domains -- a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". While extensively studied in the continual learning (CL) community, it presents new manifestations in the realm of LLMs. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current research progress on LLMs within the context of CL. This survey is structured into four main sections: we first describe an overview of continually learning LLMs, consisting of two directions of continuity: vertical continuity (or vertical continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation from general to specific capabilities, and horizontal continuity (or horizontal continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation across time and domains (Section 3). We then summarize three stages of learning LLMs in the context of modern CL: Continual Pre-Training (CPT), Domain-Adaptive Pre-training (DAP), and Continual Fine-Tuning (CFT) (Section 4). Then we provide an overview of evaluation protocols for continual learning with LLMs, along with the current available data sources (Section 5). Finally, we discuss intriguing questions pertaining to continual learning for LLMs (Section 6). The full list of papers examined in this survey is available at //github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/llm-continual-learning-survey.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Intelligent transportation systems play a crucial role in modern traffic management and optimization, greatly improving traffic efficiency and safety. With the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) technologies in the fields of image generation and natural language processing, generative AI has also played a crucial role in addressing key issues in intelligent transportation systems, such as data sparsity, difficulty in observing abnormal scenarios, and in modeling data uncertainty. In this review, we systematically investigate the relevant literature on generative AI techniques in addressing key issues in different types of tasks in intelligent transportation systems. First, we introduce the principles of different generative AI techniques, and their potential applications. Then, we classify tasks in intelligent transportation systems into four types: traffic perception, traffic prediction, traffic simulation, and traffic decision-making. We systematically illustrate how generative AI techniques addresses key issues in these four different types of tasks. Finally, we summarize the challenges faced in applying generative AI to intelligent transportation systems, and discuss future research directions based on different application scenarios.
The fusion of causal models with deep learning introducing increasingly intricate data sets, such as the causal associations within images or between textual components, has surfaced as a focal research area. Nonetheless, the broadening of original causal concepts and theories to such complex, non-statistical data has been met with serious challenges. In response, our study proposes redefinitions of causal data into three distinct categories from the standpoint of causal structure and representation: definite data, semi-definite data, and indefinite data. Definite data chiefly pertains to statistical data used in conventional causal scenarios, while semi-definite data refers to a spectrum of data formats germane to deep learning, including time-series, images, text, and others. Indefinite data is an emergent research sphere inferred from the progression of data forms by us. To comprehensively present these three data paradigms, we elaborate on their formal definitions, differences manifested in datasets, resolution pathways, and development of research. We summarize key tasks and achievements pertaining to definite and semi-definite data from myriad research undertakings, present a roadmap for indefinite data, beginning with its current research conundrums. Lastly, we classify and scrutinize the key datasets presently utilized within these three paradigms.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
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.
We address the task of automatically scoring the competency of candidates based on textual features, from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions in the asynchronous video job interview (AVI). The key challenge is how to construct the dependency relation between questions and answers, and conduct the semantic level interaction for each question-answer (QA) pair. However, most of the recent studies in AVI focus on how to represent questions and answers better, but ignore the dependency information and interaction between them, which is critical for QA evaluation. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Reasoning Graph Neural Network (HRGNN) for the automatic assessment of question-answer pairs. Specifically, we construct a sentence-level relational graph neural network to capture the dependency information of sentences in or between the question and the answer. Based on these graphs, we employ a semantic-level reasoning graph attention network to model the interaction states of the current QA session. Finally, we propose a gated recurrent unit encoder to represent the temporal question-answer pairs for the final prediction. Empirical results conducted on CHNAT (a real-world dataset) validate that our proposed model significantly outperforms text-matching based benchmark models. Ablation studies and experimental results with 10 random seeds also show the effectiveness and stability of our models.
This paper surveys the machine learning literature and presents machine learning as optimization models. Such models can benefit from the advancement of numerical optimization techniques which have already played a distinctive role in several machine learning settings. Particularly, mathematical optimization models are presented for commonly used machine learning approaches for regression, classification, clustering, and deep neural networks as well new emerging applications in machine teaching and empirical model learning. The strengths and the shortcomings of these models are discussed and potential research directions are highlighted.
Neural machine translation (NMT) is a deep learning based approach for machine translation, which yields the state-of-the-art translation performance in scenarios where large-scale parallel corpora are available. Although the high-quality and domain-specific translation is crucial in the real world, domain-specific corpora are usually scarce or nonexistent, and thus vanilla NMT performs poorly in such scenarios. Domain adaptation that leverages both out-of-domain parallel corpora as well as monolingual corpora for in-domain translation, is very important for domain-specific translation. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques for NMT.