Oceania
Use of Parallel Explanatory Models to Enhance Transparency of Neural Network Configurations for Cell Degradation Detection
Mulvey, David, Foh, Chuan Heng, Imran, Muhammad Ali, Tafazolli, Rahim
Abstract--In a previous paper, we have shown that a recurrent neural network (RNN) can be used to detect cellular network radio signal degradations accurately. We unexpectedly fou nd, though, that accuracy gains diminished as we added layers to the RNN. T o investigate this, in this paper, we build a parall el model to illuminate and understand the internal operation o f neural networks, such as the RNN, which store their internal state in order to process sequential inputs. This model is wi dely applicable in that it can be used with any input domain where the inputs can be represented by a Gaussian mixture. By looki ng at the RNN processing from a probability density function perspective, we are able to show how each layer of the RNN transforms the input distributions to increase detection a ccuracy. At the same time we also discover a side effect acting to limit the improvement in accuracy. T o demonstrate the fidelity of t he model we validate it against each stage of RNN processing as well as the output predictions. As a result, we have been able to explain the reasons for the RNN performance limits with usef ul insights for future designs for RNNs and similar types of neu ral network. In the latest generation of cellular networks, 5G, the emergence of sophisticated new techniques such as large scale MIMO and multicarrier operation has resulted in rapid growth in the total number of radio access network (RAN) configuration parameters. This carries with it a considerab le risk in terms of potential misconfiguration and is likely to significantly add to the workload for network management teams. Fortunately the recent emergence of powerful machin e learning techniques has the potential to counter this by ale rting operators to issues which might not otherwise be apparent an d providing assistance to resolve them in a timely manner. In our earlier work [1], we showed that it is possible to apply a recurrent neural network (RNN) to address an issue of particular concern to mobile network operators, namely how to detect cell performance degradations which are not being reported to the network control centre but are impairi ng the quality of service perceived by the users.
A Preference-driven Paradigm for Enhanced Translation with Large Language Models
Zhu, Dawei, Trenous, Sony, Shen, Xiaoyu, Klakow, Dietrich, Byrne, Bill, Hasler, Eva
Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) can achieve remarkable translation performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using only a small amount of parallel data. However, SFT simply instructs the model to imitate the reference translations at the token level, making it vulnerable to the noise present in the references. Hence, the assistance from SFT often reaches a plateau once the LLMs have achieved a certain level of translation capability, and further increasing the size of parallel data does not provide additional benefits. To overcome this plateau associated with imitation-based SFT, we propose a preference-based approach built upon the Plackett-Luce model. The objective is to steer LLMs towards a more nuanced understanding of translation preferences from a holistic view, while also being more resilient in the absence of gold translations. We further build a dataset named MAPLE to verify the effectiveness of our approach, which includes multiple translations of varying quality for each source sentence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in "breaking the plateau" across diverse LLMs and test settings. Our in-depth analysis underscores the pivotal role of diverse translations and accurate preference scores in the success of our approach.
Using a Local Surrogate Model to Interpret Temporal Shifts in Global Annual Data
This paper focuses on explaining changes over time in globally-sourced, annual temporal data, with the specific objective of identifying pivotal factors that contribute to these temporal shifts. Leveraging such analytical frameworks can yield transformative impacts, including the informed refinement of public policy and the identification of key drivers affecting a country's economic evolution. We employ Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) to shed light on national happiness indices, economic freedom, and population metrics, spanning variable time frames. Acknowledging the presence of missing values, we employ three imputation approaches to generate robust multivariate time-series datasets apt for LIME's input requirements. Our methodology's efficacy is substantiated through a series of empirical evaluations involving multiple datasets. These evaluations include comparative analyses against random feature selection, correlation with real-world events as elucidated by LIME, and validation through Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) plots, a state-of-the-art technique proficient in feature importance detection.
Variational quantization for state space models
David, Etienne, Bellot, Jean, Corff, Sylvain Le
Forecasting tasks using large datasets gathering thousands of heterogeneous time series is a crucial statistical problem in numerous sectors. The main challenge is to model a rich variety of time series, leverage any available external signals and provide sharp predictions with statistical guarantees. In this work, we propose a new forecasting model that combines discrete state space hidden Markov models with recent neural network architectures and training procedures inspired by vector quantized variational autoencoders. We introduce a variational discrete posterior distribution of the latent states given the observations and a two-stage training procedure to alternatively train the parameters of the latent states and of the emission distributions. By learning a collection of emission laws and temporarily activating them depending on the hidden process dynamics, the proposed method allows to explore large datasets and leverage available external signals. We assess the performance of the proposed method using several datasets and show that it outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions.
MemLLM: Finetuning LLMs to Use An Explicit Read-Write Memory
Modarressi, Ali, Kรถksal, Abdullatif, Imani, Ayyoob, Fayyaz, Mohsen, Schรผtze, Hinrich
While current large language models (LLMs) demonstrate some capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, they are limited by relying on their parameters as an implicit storage mechanism. As a result, they struggle with infrequent knowledge and temporal degradation. In addition, the uninterpretable nature of parametric memorization makes it challenging to understand and prevent hallucination. Parametric memory pools and model editing are only partial solutions. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) $\unicode{x2013}$ though non-parametric $\unicode{x2013}$ has its own limitations: it lacks structure, complicates interpretability and makes it hard to effectively manage stored knowledge. In this paper, we introduce MemLLM, a novel method of enhancing LLMs by integrating a structured and explicit read-and-write memory module. MemLLM tackles the aforementioned challenges by enabling dynamic interaction with the memory and improving the LLM's capabilities in using stored knowledge. Our experiments indicate that MemLLM enhances the LLM's performance and interpretability, in language modeling in general and knowledge-intensive tasks in particular. We see MemLLM as an important step towards making LLMs more grounded and factual through memory augmentation.
Enhancing Length Extrapolation in Sequential Models with Pointer-Augmented Neural Memory
Le, Hung, Nguyen, Dung, Do, Kien, Venkatesh, Svetha, Tran, Truyen
We propose Pointer-Augmented Neural Memory (PANM) to help neural networks understand and apply symbol processing to new, longer sequences of data. PANM integrates an external neural memory that uses novel physical addresses and pointer manipulation techniques to mimic human and computer symbol processing abilities. PANM facilitates pointer assignment, dereference, and arithmetic by explicitly using physical pointers to access memory content. Remarkably, it can learn to perform these operations through end-to-end training on sequence data, powering various sequential models. Our experiments demonstrate PANM's exceptional length extrapolating capabilities and improved performance in tasks that require symbol processing, such as algorithmic reasoning and Dyck language recognition. PANM helps Transformer achieve up to 100% generalization accuracy in compositional learning tasks and significantly better results in mathematical reasoning, question answering and machine translation tasks.
GenFighter: A Generative and Evolutive Textual Attack Removal
Islam, Md Athikul, Serra, Edoardo, Jajodia, Sushil
Adversarial attacks pose significant challenges to deep neural networks (DNNs) such as Transformer models in natural language processing (NLP). This paper introduces a novel defense strategy, called GenFighter, which enhances adversarial robustness by learning and reasoning on the training classification distribution. GenFighter identifies potentially malicious instances deviating from the distribution, transforms them into semantically equivalent instances aligned with the training data, and employs ensemble techniques for a unified and robust response. By conducting extensive experiments, we show that GenFighter outperforms state-of-the-art defenses in accuracy under attack and attack success rate metrics. Additionally, it requires a high number of queries per attack, making the attack more challenging in real scenarios. The ablation study shows that our approach integrates transfer learning, a generative/evolutive procedure, and an ensemble method, providing an effective defense against NLP adversarial attacks.
CelluloTactix: Towards Empowering Collaborative Online Learning through Tangible Haptic Interaction with Cellulo Robots
Kariyawasam, Hasaru, Johal, Wafa
Online learning has soared in popularity in the educational landscape of COVID-19 and carries the benefits of increased flexibility and access to far-away training resources. However, it also restricts communication between peers and teachers, limits physical interactions and confines learning to the computer screen and keyboard. In this project, we designed a novel way to engage students in collaborative online learning by using haptic-enabled tangible robots, Cellulo. We built a library which connects two robots remotely for a learning activity based around the structure of a biological cell. To discover how separate modes of haptic feedback might differentially affect collaboration, two modes of haptic force-feedback were implemented (haptic co-location and haptic consensus). With a case study, we found that the haptic co-location mode seemed to stimulate collectivist behaviour to a greater extent than the haptic consensus mode, which was associated with individualism and less interaction. While the haptic co-location mode seemed to encourage information pooling, participants using the haptic consensus mode tended to focus more on technical co-ordination. This work introduces a novel system that can provide interesting insights on how to integrate haptic feedback into collaborative remote learning activities in future.
Energy-Efficient Uncertainty-Aware Biomass Composition Prediction at the Edge
Zawish, Muhammad, Albert, Paul, Esposito, Flavio, Davy, Steven, Abraham, Lizy
Clover fixates nitrogen from the atmosphere to the ground, making grass-clover mixtures highly desirable to reduce external nitrogen fertilization. Herbage containing clover additionally promotes higher food intake, resulting in higher milk production. Herbage probing however remains largely unused as it requires a time-intensive manual laboratory analysis. Without this information, farmers are unable to perform localized clover sowing or take targeted fertilization decisions. Deep learning algorithms have been proposed with the goal to estimate the dry biomass composition from images of the grass directly in the fields. The energy-intensive nature of deep learning however limits deployment to practical edge devices such as smartphones. This paper proposes to fill this gap by applying filter pruning to reduce the energy requirement of existing deep learning solutions. We report that although pruned networks are accurate on controlled, high-quality images of the grass, they struggle to generalize to real-world smartphone images that are blurry or taken from challenging angles. We address this challenge by training filter-pruned models using a variance attenuation loss so they can predict the uncertainty of their predictions. When the uncertainty exceeds a threshold, we re-infer using a more accurate unpruned model. This hybrid approach allows us to reduce energy consumption while retaining a high accuracy. We evaluate our algorithm on two datasets: the GrassClover and the Irish clover using an NVIDIA Jetson Nano edge device. We find that we reduce energy reduction with respect to state-of-the-art solutions by 50% on average with only 4% accuracy loss.
Improvement in Semantic Address Matching using Natural Language Processing
Gupta, Vansh, Gupta, Mohit, Garg, Jai, Garg, Nitesh
Address matching is an important task for many businesses especially delivery and take out companies which help them to take out a certain address from their data warehouse. Existing solution uses similarity of strings, and edit distance algorithms to find out the similar addresses from the address database, but these algorithms could not work effectively with redundant, unstructured, or incomplete address data. This paper discuss semantic Address matching technique, by which we can find out a particular address from a list of possible addresses. We have also reviewed existing practices and their shortcoming. Semantic address matching is an essentially NLP task in the field of deep learning. Through this technique We have the ability to triumph the drawbacks of existing methods like redundant or abbreviated data problems. The solution uses the OCR on invoices to extract the address and create the data pool of addresses. Then this data is fed to the algorithm BM-25 for scoring the best matching entries. Then to observe the best result, this will pass through BERT for giving the best possible result from the similar queries. Our investigation exhibits that our methodology enormously improves both accuracy and review of cutting-edge technology existing techniques.