Albrecht and Stone (2018) state that modeling of changing behaviors remains an open problem "due to the essentially unconstrained nature of what other agents may do". In this work we evaluate the adaptability of neural artificial agents towards assumed partner behaviors in a collaborative reference game. In this game success is achieved when a knowledgeable Guide can verbally lead a Follower to the selection of a specific puzzle piece among several distractors. We frame this language grounding and coordination task as a reinforcement learning problem and measure to which extent a common reinforcement training algorithm (PPO) is able to produce neural agents (the Guides) that perform well with various heuristic Follower behaviors that vary along the dimensions of confidence and autonomy. We experiment with a learning signal that in addition to the goal condition also respects an assumed communicative effort. Our results indicate that this novel ingredient leads to communicative strategies that are less verbose (staying silent in some of the steps) and that with respect to that the Guide's strategies indeed adapt to the partner's level of confidence and autonomy. Figure 1: An exemplary interaction between a Guide and a Follower that controls the gripper (the black dot).

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLM) in a wide range of Natural Language Processing applications opens the path towards novel Question Answering Systems over Knowledge Graphs leveraging LLMs. However, one of the main obstacles preventing their implementation is the scarcity of training data for the task of translating questions into corresponding SPARQL queries, particularly in the case of domain-specific KGs. To overcome this challenge, in this study, we evaluate several strategies for fine-tuning the OpenLlama LLM for question answering over life science knowledge graphs. In particular, we propose an end-to-end data augmentation approach for extending a set of existing queries over a given knowledge graph towards a larger dataset of semantically enriched question-to-SPARQL query pairs, enabling fine-tuning even for datasets where these pairs are scarce. In this context, we also investigate the role of semantic "clues" in the queries, such as meaningful variable names and inline comments. Finally, we evaluate our approach over the real-world Bgee gene expression knowledge graph and we show that semantic clues can improve model performance by up to 33% compared to a baseline with random variable names and no comments included.

Developing a generalist agent is a longstanding objective in artificial intelligence. Previous efforts utilizing extensive offline datasets from various tasks demonstrate remarkable performance in multitasking scenarios within Reinforcement Learning. However, these works encounter challenges in extending their capabilities to new tasks. Recent approaches integrate textual guidance or visual trajectory into decision networks to provide task-specific contextual cues, representing a promising direction. However, it is observed that relying solely on textual guidance or visual trajectory is insufficient for accurately conveying the contextual information of tasks. This paper explores enhanced forms of task guidance for agents, enabling them to comprehend gameplay instructions, thereby facilitating a "read-to-play" capability. Drawing inspiration from the success of multimodal instruction tuning in visual tasks, we treat the visual-based RL task as a long-horizon vision task and construct a set of multimodal game instructions to incorporate instruction tuning into a decision transformer. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating multimodal game instructions significantly enhances the decision transformer's multitasking and generalization capabilities.

Humans have a tendency to see 'human'-like qualities in objects around them. We name our cars, and talk to pets and even household appliances, as if they could understand us as other humans do. This behavior, called anthropomorphism, is also seeing traction in Machine Learning (ML), where human-like intelligence is claimed to be perceived in Large Language Models (LLMs). In this position paper, considering professional incentives, human biases, and general methodological setups, we discuss how the current search for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a perfect storm for over-attributing human-like qualities to LLMs. In several experiments, we demonstrate that the discovery of human-interpretable patterns in latent spaces should not be a surprising outcome. Also in consideration of common AI portrayal in the media, we call for the academic community to exercise extra caution, and to be extra aware of principles of academic integrity, in interpreting and communicating about AI research outcomes.

With the rise of complex cyber devices Cyber Forensics (CF) is facing many new challenges. For example, there are dozens of systems running on smartphones, each with more than millions of downloadable applications. Sifting through this large amount of data and making sense requires new techniques, such as from the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). To apply these techniques successfully in CF, we need to justify and explain the results to the stakeholders of CF, such as forensic analysts and members of the court, for them to make an informed decision. If we want to apply AI successfully in CF, there is a need to develop trust in AI systems. Some other factors in accepting the use of AI in CF are to make AI authentic, interpretable, understandable, and interactive. This way, AI systems will be more acceptable to the public and ensure alignment with legal standards. An explainable AI (XAI) system can play this role in CF, and we call such a system XAI-CF. XAI-CF is indispensable and is still in its infancy. In this paper, we explore and make a case for the significance and advantages of XAI-CF. We strongly emphasize the need to build a successful and practical XAI-CF system and discuss some of the main requirements and prerequisites of such a system. We present a formal definition of the terms CF and XAI-CF and a comprehensive literature review of previous works that apply and utilize XAI to build and increase trust in CF. We discuss some challenges facing XAI-CF. We also provide some concrete solutions to these challenges. We identify key insights and future research directions for building XAI applications for CF. This paper is an effort to explore and familiarize the readers with the role of XAI applications in CF, and we believe that our work provides a promising basis for future researchers interested in XAI-CF.

We introduce TopoX, a Python software suite that provides reliable and user-friendly building blocks for computing and machine learning on topological domains that extend graphs: hypergraphs, simplicial, cellular, path and combinatorial complexes. TopoX consists of three packages: TopoNetX facilitates constructing and computing on these domains, including working with nodes, edges and higher-order cells; TopoEmbedX provides methods to embed topological domains into vector spaces, akin to popular graph-based embedding algorithms such as node2vec; TopoModelX is built on top of PyTorch and offers a comprehensive toolbox of higher-order message passing functions for neural networks on topological domains. The extensively documented and unit-tested source code of TopoX is available under MIT license at https://github.com/pyt-team.

In this work we study the enhancement of Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning procedure by introducing a Riemannian preconditioner in its optimization step. Specifically, we introduce an $r\times r$ preconditioner in each gradient step where $r$ is the LoRA rank. This preconditioner requires a small change to existing optimizer code and creates virtually minuscule storage and runtime overhead. Our experimental results with both large language models and text-to-image diffusion models show that with our preconditioner, the convergence and reliability of SGD and AdamW can be significantly enhanced. Moreover, the training process becomes much more robust to hyperparameter choices such as learning rate. Theoretically, we show that fine-tuning a two-layer ReLU network in the convex paramaterization with our preconditioner has convergence rate independent of condition number of the data matrix. This new Riemannian preconditioner, previously explored in classic low-rank matrix recovery, is introduced to deep learning tasks for the first time in our work. We release our code at https://github.com/pilancilab/Riemannian_Preconditioned_LoRA.

LLMs are seeing growing use for applications such as document analysis and summarization which require large context windows, and with these large context windows KV cache activations surface as the dominant contributor to memory consumption during inference. Quantization is a promising approach for compressing KV cache activations; however, existing solutions fail to represent activations accurately in ultra-low precisions, such as sub-4-bit. In this work, we present KVQuant, which addresses this problem by incorporating novel methods for quantizing cached KV activations, including: (i) Per-Channel Key Quantization, where we adjust the dimension along which we quantize the Key activations to better match the distribution; (ii) Pre-RoPE Key Quantization, where we quantize Key activations before the rotary positional embedding to mitigate its impact on quantization; (iii) Non-Uniform KV Cache Quantization, where we derive per-layer sensitivity-weighted non-uniform datatypes that better represent the distributions; (iv) Per-Vector Dense-and-Sparse Quantization, where we isolate outliers separately for each vector to minimize skews in quantization ranges; and (v) Q-Norm, where we normalize quantization centroids in order to mitigate distribution shift, providing additional benefits for 2-bit quantization. By applying our method to the LLaMA, LLaMA-2, and Mistral models, we achieve $<0.1$ perplexity degradation with 3-bit quantization on both Wikitext-2 and C4, outperforming existing approaches. Our method enables serving the LLaMA-7B model with a context length of up to 1 million on a single A100-80GB GPU and up to 10 million on an 8-GPU system.

The rapid advancement of the automotive industry towards automated and semi-automated vehicles has rendered traditional methods of vehicle interaction, such as touch-based and voice command systems, inadequate for a widening range of non-driving related tasks, such as referencing objects outside of the vehicle. Consequently, research has shifted toward gestural input (e.g., hand, gaze, and head pose gestures) as a more suitable mode of interaction during driving. However, due to the dynamic nature of driving and individual variation, there are significant differences in drivers' gestural input performance. While, in theory, this inherent variability could be moderated by substantial data-driven machine learning models, prevalent methodologies lean towards constrained, single-instance trained models for object referencing. These models show a limited capacity to continuously adapt to the divergent behaviors of individual drivers and the variety of driving scenarios. To address this, we propose \textit{IcRegress}, a novel regression-based incremental learning approach that adapts to changing behavior and the unique characteristics of drivers engaged in the dual task of driving and referencing objects. We suggest a more personalized and adaptable solution for multimodal gestural interfaces, employing continuous lifelong learning to enhance driver experience, safety, and convenience. Our approach was evaluated using an outside-the-vehicle object referencing use case, highlighting the superiority of the incremental learning models adapted over a single trained model across various driver traits such as handedness, driving experience, and numerous driving conditions. Finally, to facilitate reproducibility, ease deployment, and promote further research, we offer our approach as an open-source framework at \url{https://github.com/amrgomaaelhady/IcRegress}.

Good arm identification (GAI) is a pure-exploration bandit problem in which a single learner outputs an arm as soon as it is identified as a good arm. A good arm is defined as an arm with an expected reward greater than or equal to a given threshold. This paper focuses on the GAI problem under a small threshold gap, which refers to the distance between the expected rewards of arms and the given threshold. We propose a new algorithm called lil'HDoC to significantly improve the total sample complexity of the HDoC algorithm. We demonstrate that the sample complexity of the first $\lambda$ output arm in lil'HDoC is bounded by the original HDoC algorithm, except for one negligible term, when the distance between the expected reward and threshold is small. Extensive experiments confirm that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in both synthetic and real-world datasets.