Africa
The challenge of redundancy on multi-agent value factorisation
Singh, Siddarth, Rosman, Benjamin
In the field of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the standard paradigm is the use of centralised training and decentralised execution where a central critic conditions the policies of the cooperative agents based on a central state. It has been shown, that in cases with large numbers of redundant agents these methods become less effective. In a more general case, there is likely to be a larger number of agents in an environment than is required to solve the task. These redundant agents reduce performance by enlarging the dimensionality of both the state space and and increasing the size of the joint policy used to solve the environment. We propose leveraging layerwise relevance propagation (LRP) to instead separate the learning of the joint value function and generation of local reward signals and create a new MARL algorithm: relevance decomposition network (RDN). We find that although the performance of both baselines VDN and Qmix degrades with the number of redundant agents, RDN is unaffected.
CoReS: Compatible Representations via Stationarity
Biondi, Niccolo, Pernici, Federico, Bruni, Matteo, Del Bimbo, Alberto
Abstract--Compatible features enable the direct comparison of old and new learned features allowing to use them interchangeably over time. In visual search systems, this eliminates the need to extract new features from the gallery-set when the representation model is upgraded with novel data. This has a big value in real applications as re-indexing the gallery-set can be computationally expensive when the gallery-set is large, or even infeasible due to privacy or other concerns of the application. In this paper, we propose CoReS, a new training procedure to learn representations that are compatible with those previously learned, grounding on the stationarity of the features as provided by fixed classifiers based on polytopes. With this solution, classes are maximally separated in the representation space and maintain their spatial configuration stationary as new classes are added, so that there is no need to learn any mappings between representations nor to impose pairwise training with the previously learned model. We demonstrate that our training procedure largely outperforms the current state of the art and is particularly effective in the case of multiple upgrades of the training-set, which is the typical case in real applications. Upgrading the DCNN representation model with novel data, typically requires the gallery-set to be re-indexed.
HyT-NAS: Hybrid Transformers Neural Architecture Search for Edge Devices
Mecharbat, Lotfi Abdelkrim, Benmeziane, Hadjer, Ouarnoughi, Hamza, Niar, Smail
Vision Transformers have enabled recent attention-based Deep Learning (DL) architectures to achieve remarkable results in Computer Vision (CV) tasks. However, due to the extensive computational resources required, these architectures are rarely implemented on resource-constrained platforms. Current research investigates hybrid handcrafted convolution-based and attention-based models for CV tasks such as image classification and object detection. In this paper, we propose HyT-NAS, an efficient Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (HW-NAS) including hybrid architectures targeting vision tasks on tiny devices. HyT-NAS improves state-of-the-art HW-NAS by enriching the search space and enhancing the search strategy as well as the performance predictors. Our experiments show that HyT-NAS achieves a similar hypervolume with less than ~5x training evaluations. Our resulting architecture outperforms MLPerf MobileNetV1 by 6.3% accuracy improvement with 3.5x less number of parameters on Visual Wake Words.
Hallucinations in Large Multilingual Translation Models
Guerreiro, Nuno M., Alves, Duarte, Waldendorf, Jonas, Haddow, Barry, Birch, Alexandra, Colombo, Pierre, Martins, André F. T.
Large-scale multilingual machine translation systems have demonstrated remarkable ability to translate directly between numerous languages, making them increasingly appealing for real-world applications. However, when deployed in the wild, these models may generate hallucinated translations which have the potential to severely undermine user trust and raise safety concerns. Existing research on hallucinations has primarily focused on small bilingual models trained on high-resource languages, leaving a gap in our understanding of hallucinations in massively multilingual models across diverse translation scenarios. In this work, we fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis on both the M2M family of conventional neural machine translation models and ChatGPT, a general-purpose large language model~(LLM) that can be prompted for translation. Our investigation covers a broad spectrum of conditions, spanning over 100 translation directions across various resource levels and going beyond English-centric language pairs. We provide key insights regarding the prevalence, properties, and mitigation of hallucinations, paving the way towards more responsible and reliable machine translation systems.
Multi-lingual Evaluation of Code Generation Models
Athiwaratkun, Ben, Gouda, Sanjay Krishna, Wang, Zijian, Li, Xiaopeng, Tian, Yuchen, Tan, Ming, Ahmad, Wasi Uddin, Wang, Shiqi, Sun, Qing, Shang, Mingyue, Gonugondla, Sujan Kumar, Ding, Hantian, Kumar, Varun, Fulton, Nathan, Farahani, Arash, Jain, Siddhartha, Giaquinto, Robert, Qian, Haifeng, Ramanathan, Murali Krishna, Nallapati, Ramesh, Ray, Baishakhi, Bhatia, Parminder, Sengupta, Sudipta, Roth, Dan, Xiang, Bing
We present new benchmarks on evaluation code generation models: MBXP and Multilingual HumanEval, and MathQA-X. These datasets cover over 10 programming languages and are generated using a scalable conversion framework that transpiles prompts and test cases from the original Python datasets into the corresponding data in the target language. Using these benchmarks, we are able to assess the performance of code generation models in a multi-lingual fashion, and discovered generalization ability of language models on out-of-domain languages, advantages of multi-lingual models over mono-lingual, the ability of few-shot prompting to teach the model new languages, and zero-shot translation abilities even on mono-lingual settings. Furthermore, we use our code generation model to perform large-scale bootstrapping to obtain synthetic canonical solutions in several languages, which can be used for other code-related evaluations such as code insertion, robustness, or summarization tasks. Overall, our benchmarks represents a significant step towards a deeper understanding of language models' code generation abilities. We publicly release our code and datasets at https://github.com/amazon-research/mxeval.
Maximum likelihood smoothing estimation in state-space models: An incomplete-information based approach
This paper revisits classical works of Rauch (1963, et al. 1965) and develops a novel method for maximum likelihood (ML) smoothing estimation from incomplete information/data of stochastic state-space systems. Score function and conditional observed information matrices of incomplete data are introduced and their distributional identities are established. Using these identities, the ML smoother $\widehat{x}_{k\vert n}^s =\argmax_{x_k} \log f(x_k,\widehat{x}_{k+1\vert n}^s, y_{0:n}\vert\theta)$, $k\leq n-1$, is presented. The result shows that the ML smoother gives an estimate of state $x_k$ with more adherence of loglikehood having less standard errors than that of the ML state estimator $\widehat{x}_k=\argmax_{x_k} \log f(x_k,y_{0:k}\vert\theta)$, with $\widehat{x}_{n\vert n}^s=\widehat{x}_n$. Recursive estimation is given in terms of an EM-gradient-particle algorithm which extends the work of \cite{Lange} for ML smoothing estimation. The algorithm has an explicit iteration update which lacks in (\cite{Ramadan}) EM-algorithm for smoothing. A sequential Monte Carlo method is developed for valuation of the score function and observed information matrices. A recursive equation for the covariance matrix of estimation error is developed to calculate the standard errors. In the case of linear systems, the method shows that the Rauch-Tung-Striebel (RTS) smoother is a fully efficient smoothing state-estimator whose covariance matrix coincides with the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound, the inverse of expected information matrix. Furthermore, the RTS smoother coincides with the Kalman filter having less covariance matrix. Numerical studies are performed, confirming the accuracy of the main results.
Link Prediction with Non-Contrastive Learning
Shiao, William, Guo, Zhichun, Zhao, Tong, Papalexakis, Evangelos E., Liu, Yozen, Shah, Neil
A recent focal area in the space of graph neural networks (GNNs) is graph self-supervised learning (SSL), which aims to derive useful node representations without labeled data. Notably, many state-of-the-art graph SSL methods are contrastive methods, which use a combination of positive and negative samples to learn node representations. Owing to challenges in negative sampling (slowness and model sensitivity), recent literature introduced non-contrastive methods, which instead only use positive samples. Though such methods have shown promising performance in node-level tasks, their suitability for link prediction tasks, which are concerned with predicting link existence between pairs of nodes (and have broad applicability to recommendation systems contexts) is yet unexplored. In this work, we extensively evaluate the performance of existing non-contrastive methods for link prediction in both transductive and inductive settings. While most existing non-contrastive methods perform poorly overall, we find that, surprisingly, BGRL generally performs well in transductive settings. However, it performs poorly in the more realistic inductive settings where the model has to generalize to links to/from unseen nodes. We find that non-contrastive models tend to overfit to the training graph and use this analysis to propose T-BGRL, a novel non-contrastive framework that incorporates cheap corruptions to improve the generalization ability of the model. This simple modification strongly improves inductive performance in 5/6 of our datasets, with up to a 120% improvement in Hits@50--all with comparable speed to other non-contrastive baselines and up to 14x faster than the best-performing contrastive baseline. Our work imparts interesting findings about non-contrastive learning for link prediction and paves the way for future researchers to further expand upon this area.
Forecasting localized weather impacts on vegetation as seen from space with meteo-guided video prediction
Benson, Vitus, Requena-Mesa, Christian, Robin, Claire, Alonso, Lazaro, Cortés, José, Gao, Zhihan, Linscheid, Nora, Weynants, Mélanie, Reichstein, Markus
We present a novel approach for modeling vegetation response to weather in Europe as measured by the Sentinel 2 satellite. Existing satellite imagery forecasting approaches focus on photorealistic quality of the multispectral images, while derived vegetation dynamics have not yet received as much attention. We leverage both spatial and temporal context by extending state-of-the-art video prediction methods with weather guidance. We extend the EarthNet2021 dataset to be suitable for vegetation modeling by introducing a learned cloud mask and an appropriate evaluation scheme. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate superior performance of our approach over a wide variety of baseline methods, including leading approaches to satellite imagery forecasting. Additionally, we show how our modeled vegetation dynamics can be leveraged in a downstream task: inferring gross primary productivity for carbon monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first models for continental-scale vegetation modeling at fine resolution able to capture anomalies beyond the seasonal cycle, thereby paving the way for predictive assessments of vegetation status.
Deep Convolutional Pooling Transformer for Deepfake Detection
Wang, Tianyi, Cheng, Harry, Chow, Kam Pui, Nie, Liqiang
Recently, Deepfake has drawn considerable public attention due to security and privacy concerns in social media digital forensics. As the wildly spreading Deepfake videos on the Internet become more realistic, traditional detection techniques have failed in distinguishing between real and fake. Most existing deep learning methods mainly focus on local features and relations within the face image using convolutional neural networks as a backbone. However, local features and relations are insufficient for model training to learn enough general information for Deepfake detection. Therefore, the existing Deepfake detection methods have reached a bottleneck to further improve the detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a deep convolutional Transformer to incorporate the decisive image features both locally and globally. Specifically, we apply convolutional pooling and re-attention to enrich the extracted features and enhance efficacy. Moreover, we employ the barely discussed image keyframes in model training for performance improvement and visualize the feature quantity gap between the key and normal image frames caused by video compression. We finally illustrate the transferability with extensive experiments on several Deepfake benchmark datasets. The proposed solution consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines on both within- and cross-dataset experiments.
Beyond RMSE: Do machine-learned models of road user interaction produce human-like behavior?
Srinivasan, Aravinda Ramakrishnan, Lin, Yi-Shin, Antonello, Morris, Knittel, Anthony, Hasan, Mohamed, Hawasly, Majd, Redford, John, Ramamoorthy, Subramanian, Leonetti, Matteo, Billington, Jac, Romano, Richard, Markkula, Gustav
Autonomous vehicles use a variety of sensors and machine-learned models to predict the behavior of surrounding road users. Most of the machine-learned models in the literature focus on quantitative error metrics like the root mean square error (RMSE) to learn and report their models' capabilities. This focus on quantitative error metrics tends to ignore the more important behavioral aspect of the models, raising the question of whether these models really predict human-like behavior. Thus, we propose to analyze the output of machine-learned models much like we would analyze human data in conventional behavioral research. We introduce quantitative metrics to demonstrate presence of three different behavioral phenomena in a naturalistic highway driving dataset: 1) The kinematics-dependence of who passes a merging point first 2) Lane change by an on-highway vehicle to accommodate an on-ramp vehicle 3) Lane changes by vehicles on the highway to avoid lead vehicle conflicts. Then, we analyze the behavior of three machine-learned models using the same metrics. Even though the models' RMSE value differed, all the models captured the kinematic-dependent merging behavior but struggled at varying degrees to capture the more nuanced courtesy lane change and highway lane change behavior. Additionally, the collision aversion analysis during lane changes showed that the models struggled to capture the physical aspect of human driving: leaving adequate gap between the vehicles. Thus, our analysis highlighted the inadequacy of simple quantitative metrics and the need to take a broader behavioral perspective when analyzing machine-learned models of human driving predictions.