We propose MusicRL, the first music generation system finetuned from human feedback. Appreciation of text-to-music models is particularly subjective since the concept of musicality as well as the specific intention behind a caption are user-dependent (e.g. a caption such as "upbeat work-out music" can map to a retro guitar solo or a techno pop beat). Not only this makes supervised training of such models challenging, but it also calls for integrating continuous human feedback in their post-deployment finetuning. MusicRL is a pretrained autoregressive MusicLM (Agostinelli et al., 2023) model of discrete audio tokens finetuned with reinforcement learning to maximise sequence-level rewards. We design reward functions related specifically to text-adherence and audio quality with the help from selected raters, and use those to finetune MusicLM into MusicRL-R. We deploy MusicLM to users and collect a substantial dataset comprising 300,000 pairwise preferences. Using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), we train MusicRL-U, the first text-to-music model that incorporates human feedback at scale. Human evaluations show that both MusicRL-R and MusicRL-U are preferred to the baseline. Ultimately, MusicRL-RU combines the two approaches and results in the best model according to human raters. Ablation studies shed light on the musical attributes influencing human preferences, indicating that text adherence and quality only account for a part of it. This underscores the prevalence of subjectivity in musical appreciation and calls for further involvement of human listeners in the finetuning of music generation models.

The NLP research community has devoted increased attention to languages beyond English, resulting in considerable improvements for multilingual NLP. However, these improvements only apply to a small subset of the world's languages. Aiming to extend this, an increasing number of papers aspires to enhance generalizable multilingual performance across languages. To this end, linguistic typology is commonly used to motivate language selection, on the basis that a broad typological sample ought to imply generalization across a broad range of languages. These selections are often described as being 'typologically diverse'. In this work, we systematically investigate NLP research that includes claims regarding 'typological diversity'. We find there are no set definitions or criteria for such claims. We introduce metrics to approximate the diversity of language selection along several axes and find that the results vary considerably across papers. Furthermore, we show that skewed language selection can lead to overestimated multilingual performance. We recommend future work to include an operationalization of 'typological diversity' that empirically justifies the diversity of language samples.

Shapley values have emerged as a foundational tool in machine learning (ML) for elucidating model decision-making processes. Despite their widespread adoption and unique ability to satisfy essential explainability axioms, computational challenges persist in their estimation when ($i$) evaluating a model over all possible subset of input feature combinations, ($ii$) estimating model marginals, and ($iii$) addressing variability in explanations. We introduce a novel, self-explaining method that simplifies the computation of Shapley values significantly, requiring only a single forward pass. Recognizing the deterministic treatment of Shapley values as a limitation, we explore incorporating a probabilistic framework to capture the inherent uncertainty in explanations. Unlike alternatives, our technique does not rely directly on the observed data space to estimate marginals; instead, it uses adaptable baseline values derived from a latent, feature-specific embedding space, generated by a novel masked neural network architecture. Evaluations on simulated and real datasets underscore our technique's robust predictive and explanatory performance.

The dominance of social media has added to the channels of bullying for perpetrators. Unfortunately, cyberbullying (CB) is the most prevalent phenomenon in todays cyber world, and is a severe threat to the mental and physical health of citizens. This opens the need to develop a robust system to prevent bullying content from online forums, blogs, and social media platforms to manage the impact in our society. Several machine learning (ML) algorithms have been proposed for this purpose. However, their performances are not consistent due to high class imbalance and generalisation issues. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) like BERT and RoBERTa have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in several natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Unfortunately, the LLMs have not been applied extensively for CB detection. In our paper, we explored the use of these models for cyberbullying (CB) detection. We have prepared a new dataset (D2) from existing studies (Formspring and Twitter). Our experimental results for dataset D1 and D2 showed that RoBERTa outperformed other models.

An accurate prediction of house prices is a fundamental requirement for various sectors including real estate and mortgage lending. It is widely recognized that a property value is not solely determined by its physical attributes but is significantly influenced by its surrounding neighbourhood. Meeting the diverse housing needs of individuals while balancing budget constraints is a primary concern for real estate developers. To this end, we addressed the house price prediction problem as a regression task and thus employed various machine learning techniques capable of expressing the significance of independent variables. We made use of the housing dataset of Ames City in Iowa, USA to compare support vector regressor, random forest regressor, XGBoost, multilayer perceptron and multiple linear regression algorithms for house price prediction. Afterwards, we identified the key factors that influence housing costs. Our results show that XGBoost is the best performing model for house price prediction.

Link prediction with knowledge graphs has been thoroughly studied in graph machine learning, leading to a rich landscape of graph neural network architectures with successful applications. Nonetheless, it remains challenging to transfer the success of these architectures to link prediction with relational hypergraphs. The presence of relational hyperedges makes link prediction a task between $k$ nodes for varying choices of $k$, which is substantially harder than link prediction with knowledge graphs, where every relation is binary ($k=2$). In this paper, we propose two frameworks for link prediction with relational hypergraphs and conduct a thorough analysis of the expressive power of the resulting model architectures via corresponding relational Weisfeiler-Leman algorithms, and also via some natural logical formalisms. Through extensive empirical analysis, we validate the power of the proposed model architectures on various relational hypergraph benchmarks. The resulting model architectures substantially outperform every baseline for inductive link prediction, and lead to state-of-the-art results for transductive link prediction. Our study therefore unlocks applications of graph neural networks to fully relational structures.

We revisit the classical result of Morris et al.~(AAAI'19) that message-passing graphs neural networks (MPNNs) are equal in their distinguishing power to the Weisfeiler--Leman (WL) isomorphism test. Morris et al.~show their simulation result with ReLU activation function and $O(n)$-dimensional feature vectors, where $n$ is the number of nodes of the graph. Recently, by introducing randomness into the architecture, Aamand et al.~(NeurIPS'22) were able to improve this bound to $O(\log n)$-dimensional feature vectors, although at the expense of guaranteeing perfect simulation only with high probability. In all these constructions, to guarantee equivalence to the WL test, the dimension of feature vectors in the MPNN has to increase with the size of the graphs. However, architectures used in practice have feature vectors of constant dimension. Thus, there is a gap between the guarantees provided by these results and the actual characteristics of architectures used in practice. In this paper we close this gap by showing that, for \emph{any} non-polynomial analytic (like the sigmoid) activation function, to guarantee that MPNNs are equivalent to the WL test, feature vectors of dimension $d=1$ is all we need, independently of the size of the graphs. Our main technical insight is that for simulating multi-sets in the WL-test, it is enough to use linear independence of feature vectors over rationals instead of reals. Countability of the set of rationals together with nice properties of analytic functions allow us to carry out the simulation invariant over the iterations of the WL test without increasing the dimension of the feature vectors.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used for compressing a teacher model to a smaller student model, reducing its inference cost and memory footprint while preserving model capabilities. However, current KD methods for auto-regressive sequence models (e.g., large language models) suffer from missing a standardized objective function. Moreover, the recent use of student-generated outputs to address training-inference mismatches has significantly escalated computational costs. To tackle these issues, we introduce DistiLLM, a more effective and efficient KD framework for auto-regressive language models. DistiLLM comprises two components: (1) a novel skew Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where we unveil and leverage its theoretical properties, and (2) an adaptive off-policy approach designed to enhance the efficiency in utilizing student-generated outputs. Extensive experiments, including instruction-following tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of DistiLLM in building high-performing student models while achieving up to 4.3$\times$ speedup compared to recent KD methods.

Time-series analysis is an important field encompassing a wide range of applications ranging from forecasting weather patterns Schneider and Dickinson [1974] or detecting irregular heartbeats using Electrocardiograms Goswami et al. [2021], to identifying anomalous software deployments Xu et al. [2018]. Due to its significant practical value and the unique challenges that modeling time-series data poses, time-series analysis continues to receive substantial interest from academia and industry alike. However, modeling such data typically requires substantial domain expertise, time, and task-specific design. Large pre-trained language Touvron et al. [2023], Devlin et al. [2019], Chung et al. [2022], vision Li et al. [2023a], and video Day et al. [2023] models, typically perform well on a variety of tasks on data from diverse domains, with little or no supervision, and they can be specialized to perform well on specific tasks. We unlock these key capabilities for time-series data and release the first family of open-source large pre-trained time-series models, which we call MOMENT. The models in this family (1) serve as a building block for diverse time-series analysis tasks (e.g., forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, and imputation, etc.), (2) are effective out-of-the-box, i.e., with no (or few) particular task-specific exemplars (enabling e.g., zero-shot forecasting, few-shot classification, etc.), and (3) are tunable using in-distribution and task-specific data to improve performance. MOMENT is a family of high-capacity transformer models, pre-trained using a masked time-series prediction task on large amounts of time-series data drawn from diverse domains. Below we summarize our key contributions.

The NK hybrid genetic algorithm for clustering is proposed in this paper. In order to evaluate the solutions, the hybrid algorithm uses the NK clustering validation criterion 2 (NKCV2). NKCV2 uses information about the disposition of $N$ small groups of objects. Each group is composed of $K+1$ objects of the dataset. Experimental results show that density-based regions can be identified by using NKCV2 with fixed small $K$. In NKCV2, the relationship between decision variables is known, which in turn allows us to apply gray box optimization. Mutation operators, a partition crossover, and a local search strategy are proposed, all using information about the relationship between decision variables. In partition crossover, the evaluation function is decomposed into $q$ independent components; partition crossover then deterministically returns the best among $2^q$ possible offspring with computational complexity $O(N)$. The NK hybrid genetic algorithm allows the detection of clusters with arbitrary shapes and the automatic estimation of the number of clusters. In the experiments, the NK hybrid genetic algorithm produced very good results when compared to another genetic algorithm approach and to state-of-art clustering algorithms.