Oceania
Symbol Correctness in Deep Neural Networks Containing Symbolic Layers
We identify puzzles (Yang et al., 2020; Li et al., 2023b; Wang et al., and formalize an intuitive, high-level principle 2023; Topan et al., 2021) and performing commonsense that can guide the design and analysis of NS-reasoning about images (Yang et al., 2020; Li et al., 2023a). DNNs: symbol correctness, the correctness of the intermediate symbols predicted by the neural When a NS-DNN forward pass reaches the boundary between layers with respect to a (generally unknown) a neural layer and a symbolic layer, the neural layer's ground-truth symbolic representation of the input real-valued predictions are instantiated as symbols for the data. We demonstrate that symbol correctness is subsequent symbolic layer to operate over. Because training a necessary property for NS-DNN explainability is end-to-end, the neural layers need to learn a mapping from and transfer learning (despite being in general impossible raw input data to these intermediate symbols without any to train for). Moreover, we show that supervision of the symbols. For example, in visual addition, the framework of symbol correctness provides a a pair of handwritten digits is labeled with the mathematical precise way to reason and communicate about sum of the digits, not the individual summands.
Transductive Reward Inference on Graph
Qu, Bohao, Cao, Xiaofeng, Guo, Qing, Chang, Yi, Tsang, Ivor W., Zhang, Chengqi
In this study, we present a transductive inference approach on that reward information propagation graph, which enables the effective estimation of rewards for unlabelled data in offline reinforcement learning. Reward inference is the key to learning effective policies in practical scenarios, while direct environmental interactions are either too costly or unethical and the reward functions are rarely accessible, such as in healthcare and robotics. Our research focuses on developing a reward inference method based on the contextual properties of information propagation on graphs that capitalizes on a constrained number of human reward annotations to infer rewards for unlabelled data. We leverage both the available data and limited reward annotations to construct a reward propagation graph, wherein the edge weights incorporate various influential factors pertaining to the rewards. Subsequently, we employ the constructed graph for transductive reward inference, thereby estimating rewards for unlabelled data. Furthermore, we establish the existence of a fixed point during several iterations of the transductive inference process and demonstrate its at least convergence to a local optimum. Empirical evaluations on locomotion and robotic manipulation tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach. The application of our inferred rewards improves the performance in offline reinforcement learning tasks.
CAMBranch: Contrastive Learning with Augmented MILPs for Branching
Lin, Jiacheng, Xu, Meng, Xiong, Zhihua, Wang, Huangang
Recent advancements have introduced machine learning frameworks to enhance the Branch and Bound (B\&B) branching policies for solving Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). These methods, primarily relying on imitation learning of Strong Branching, have shown superior performance. However, collecting expert samples for imitation learning, particularly for Strong Branching, is a time-consuming endeavor. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{C}ontrastive Learning with \textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{M}ILPs for \textbf{Branch}ing (CAMBranch), a framework that generates Augmented MILPs (AMILPs) by applying variable shifting to limited expert data from their original MILPs. This approach enables the acquisition of a considerable number of labeled expert samples. CAMBranch leverages both MILPs and AMILPs for imitation learning and employs contrastive learning to enhance the model's ability to capture MILP features, thereby improving the quality of branching decisions. Experimental results demonstrate that CAMBranch, trained with only 10\% of the complete dataset, exhibits superior performance. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our method.
Stanceosaurus 2.0: Classifying Stance Towards Russian and Spanish Misinformation
Lavrouk, Anton, Ligon, Ian, Naous, Tarek, Zheng, Jonathan, Ritter, Alan, Xu, Wei
The Stanceosaurus corpus (Zheng et al., 2022) was designed to provide high-quality, annotated, 5-way stance data extracted from Twitter, suitable for analyzing cross-cultural and cross-lingual misinformation. In the Stanceosaurus 2.0 iteration, we extend this framework to encompass Russian and Spanish. The former is of current significance due to prevalent misinformation amid escalating tensions with the West and the violent incursion into Ukraine. The latter, meanwhile, represents an enormous community that has been largely overlooked on major social media platforms. By incorporating an additional 3,874 Spanish and Russian tweets over 41 misinformation claims, our objective is to support research focused on these issues. To demonstrate the value of this data, we employed zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on multilingual BERT, yielding results on par with the initial Stanceosaurus study with a macro F1 score of 43 for both languages. This underlines the viability of stance classification as an effective tool for identifying multicultural misinformation.
Bayesian Factorised Granger-Causal Graphs For Multivariate Time-series Data
We study the problem of automatically discovering Granger causal relations from observational multivariate time-series data. Vector autoregressive (VAR) models have been time-tested for this problem, including Bayesian variants and more recent developments using deep neural networks. Most existing VAR methods for Granger causality use sparsity-inducing penalties/priors or post-hoc thresholds to interpret their coefficients as Granger causal graphs. Instead, we propose a new Bayesian VAR model with a hierarchical graph prior over binary Granger causal graphs, separately from the VAR coefficients. We develop an efficient algorithm to infer the posterior over binary Granger causal graphs. Our method provides better uncertainty quantification, has less hyperparameters, and achieves better performance than competing approaches, especially on sparse multivariate time-series data.
RAP: Retrieval-Augmented Planning with Contextual Memory for Multimodal LLM Agents
Kagaya, Tomoyuki, Yuan, Thong Jing, Lou, Yuxuan, Karlekar, Jayashree, Pranata, Sugiri, Kinose, Akira, Oguri, Koki, Wick, Felix, You, Yang
Owing to recent advancements, Large Language Models (LLMs) can now be deployed as agents for increasingly complex decision-making applications in areas including robotics, gaming, and API integration. However, reflecting past experiences in current decision-making processes, an innate human behavior, continues to pose significant challenges. Addressing this, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Planning (RAP) framework, designed to dynamically leverage past experiences corresponding to the current situation and context, thereby enhancing agents' planning capabilities. RAP distinguishes itself by being versatile: it excels in both text-only and multimodal environments, making it suitable for a wide range of tasks. Empirical evaluations demonstrate RAP's effectiveness, where it achieves SOTA performance in textual scenarios and notably enhances multimodal LLM agents' performance for embodied tasks. These results highlight RAP's potential in advancing the functionality and applicability of LLM agents in complex, real-world applications.
Improving Contextual Congruence Across Modalities for Effective Multimodal Marketing using Knowledge-infused Learning
Padhi, Trilok, Kursuncu, Ugur, Kumar, Yaman, Shalin, Valerie L., Fronczek, Lane Peterson
The prevalence of smart devices with the ability to capture moments in multiple modalities has enabled users to experience multimodal information online. However, large Language (LLMs) and Vision models (LVMs) are still limited in capturing holistic meaning with cross-modal semantic relationships. Without explicit, common sense knowledge (e.g., as a knowledge graph), Visual Language Models (VLMs) only learn implicit representations by capturing high-level patterns in vast corpora, missing essential contextual cross-modal cues. In this work, we design a framework to couple explicit commonsense knowledge in the form of knowledge graphs with large VLMs to improve the performance of a downstream task, predicting the effectiveness of multi-modal marketing campaigns. While the marketing application provides a compelling metric for assessing our methods, our approach enables the early detection of likely persuasive multi-modal campaigns and the assessment and augmentation of marketing theory.
Revisiting the Dataset Bias Problem from a Statistical Perspective
Do, Kien, Nguyen, Dung, Le, Hung, Le, Thao, Nguyen, Dang, Harikumar, Haripriya, Tran, Truyen, Rana, Santu, Venkatesh, Svetha
In this paper, we study the "dataset bias" problem from a statistical standpoint, and identify the main cause of the problem as the strong correlation between a class attribute u and a non-class attribute b in the input x, represented by p(u|b) differing significantly from p(u). Since p(u|b) appears as part of the sampling distributions in the standard maximum log-likelihood (MLL) objective, a model trained on a biased dataset via MLL inherently incorporates such correlation into its parameters, leading to poor generalization to unbiased test data. From this observation, we propose to mitigate dataset bias via either weighting the objective of each sample n by \frac{1}{p(u_{n}|b_{n})} or sampling that sample with a weight proportional to \frac{1}{p(u_{n}|b_{n})}. While both methods are statistically equivalent, the former proves more stable and effective in practice. Additionally, we establish a connection between our debiasing approach and causal reasoning, reinforcing our method's theoretical foundation. However, when the bias label is unavailable, computing p(u|b) exactly is difficult. To overcome this challenge, we propose to approximate \frac{1}{p(u|b)} using a biased classifier trained with "bias amplification" losses. Extensive experiments on various biased datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing debiasing techniques in most settings, validating our theoretical analysis.
Distinguishing the Knowable from the Unknowable with Language Models
Ahdritz, Gustaf, Qin, Tian, Vyas, Nikhil, Barak, Boaz, Edelman, Benjamin L.
We study the feasibility of identifying epistemic uncertainty (reflecting a lack of knowledge), as opposed to aleatoric uncertainty (reflecting entropy in the underlying distribution), in the outputs of large language models (LLMs) over free-form text. In the absence of ground-truth probabilities, we explore a setting where, in order to (approximately) disentangle a given LLM's uncertainty, a significantly larger model stands in as a proxy for the ground truth. We show that small linear probes trained on the embeddings of frozen, pretrained models accurately predict when larger models will be more confident at the token level and that probes trained on one text domain generalize to others. Going further, we propose a fully unsupervised method that achieves non-trivial accuracy on the same task. Taken together, we interpret these results as evidence that LLMs naturally contain internal representations of different types of uncertainty that could potentially be leveraged to devise more informative indicators of model confidence in diverse practical settings.
Path Signatures and Graph Neural Networks for Slow Earthquake Analysis: Better Together?
Riess, Hans, Veveakis, Manolis, Zavlanos, Michael M.
The prediction of earthquakes has long been considered to be cumbersome due to its random and stochastic nature (Vere-Jones, 2011). The identification of frequently occurring slow slip events (SSE), otherwise known as slow earthquakes (Obara, 2002), at subduction interfaces has led to the premise that GPS time series measuring land surface displacement can recover the true nonlinear or even chaotic signal underpinning the occurrence of earthquakes (Poulet et al., 2014). Since we currently have dense networks of such GPS sensors, the spatio-temporal analysis of the signals requires the development of space-sensitive reduction tools. In this work, we emphasize the slow earthquake sequences of the north island of New Zealand (Wallace, 2020). This area features a dense network of GPS stations with displacement measurements recorded continuously for over a decade (see Figure 1). The north island of New Zealand sits at the intersection of three slow earthquake sequences (see Figure 2 of Wallace (2020)) caused by the shallow subducting Hikurangi trench on the east, the deep signal under the Taupo volcanic area in the west, and the alpine fault system in the south. These three sequences have distinctly different nonlinear time-sequences (i.e.