Overview
GiGL: Large-Scale Graph Neural Networks at Snapchat
Zhao, Tong, Liu, Yozen, Kolodner, Matthew, Montemayor, Kyle, Ghazizadeh, Elham, Batra, Ankit, Fan, Zihao, Gao, Xiaobin, Guo, Xuan, Ren, Jiwen, Park, Serim, Yu, Peicheng, Yu, Jun, Vij, Shubham, Shah, Neil
Recent advances in graph machine learning (ML) with the introduction of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have led to a widespread interest in applying these approaches to business applications at scale. GNNs enable differentiable end-to-end (E2E) learning of model parameters given graph structure which enables optimization towards popular node, edge (link) and graph-level tasks. While the research innovation in new GNN layers and training strategies has been rapid, industrial adoption and utility of GNNs has lagged considerably due to the unique scale challenges that large-scale graph ML problems create. In this work, we share our approach to training, inference, and utilization of GNNs at Snapchat. To this end, we present GiGL (Gigantic Graph Learning), an open-source library to enable large-scale distributed graph ML to the benefit of researchers, ML engineers, and practitioners. We use GiGL internally at Snapchat to manage the heavy lifting of GNN workflows, including graph data preprocessing from relational DBs, subgraph sampling, distributed training, inference, and orchestration. GiGL is designed to interface cleanly with open-source GNN modeling libraries prominent in academia like PyTorch Geometric (PyG), while handling scaling and productionization challenges that make it easier for internal practitioners to focus on modeling. GiGL is used in multiple production settings, and has powered over 35 launches across multiple business domains in the last 2 years in the contexts of friend recommendation, content recommendation and advertising. This work details high-level design and tools the library provides, scaling properties, case studies in diverse business settings with industry-scale graphs, and several key lessons learned in employing graph ML at scale on large social data. GiGL is open-sourced at https://github.com/snap-research/GiGL.
P2W: From Power Traces to Weights Matrix -- An Unconventional Transfer Learning Approach
Siyadatzadeh, Roozbeh, Mehrafrooz, Fatemeh, Mentens, Nele, Stefanov, Todor
The rapid growth of deploying machine learning (ML) models within embedded systems on a chip (SoCs) has led to transformative shifts in fields like healthcare and autonomous vehicles. One of the primary challenges for training such embedded ML models is the lack of publicly available high-quality training data. Transfer learning approaches address this challenge by utilizing the knowledge encapsulated in an existing ML model as a starting point for training a new ML model. However, existing transfer learning approaches require direct access to the existing model which is not always feasible, especially for ML models deployed on embedded SoCs. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel unconventional transfer learning approach to train a new ML model by extracting and using weights from an existing ML model running on an embedded SoC without having access to the model within the SoC. Our approach captures power consumption measurements from the SoC while it is executing the ML model and translates them to an approximated weights matrix used to initialize the new ML model. This improves the learning efficiency and predictive performance of the new model, especially in scenarios with limited data available to train the model. Our novel approach can effectively increase the accuracy of the new ML model up to 3 times compared to classical training methods using the same amount of limited training data.
CyberSentinel: An Emergent Threat Detection System for AI Security
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly expanded the attack surface for AI-driven cybersecurity threats, necessitating adaptive defense strategies. This paper introduces CyberSentinel, a unified, single-agent system for emergent threat detection, designed to identify and mitigate novel security risks in real time. CyberSentinel integrates: (1) Brute-force attack detection through SSH log analysis, (2) Phishing threat assessment using domain blacklists and heuristic URL scoring, and (3) Emergent threat detection via machine learning-based anomaly detection. By continuously adapting to evolving adversarial tactics, CyberSentinel strengthens proactive cybersecurity defense, addressing critical vulnerabilities in AI security.
Interpretable Text Embeddings and Text Similarity Explanation: A Primer
Opitz, Juri, Mรถller, Lucas, Michail, Andrianos, Clematide, Simon
Text embeddings and text embedding models are a backbone of many AI and NLP systems, particularly those involving search. However, interpretability challenges persist, especially in explaining obtained similarity scores, which is crucial for applications requiring transparency. In this paper, we give a structured overview of interpretability methods specializing in explaining those similarity scores, an emerging research area. We study the methods' individual ideas and techniques, evaluating their potential for improving interpretability of text embeddings and explaining predicted similarities.
A Survey on Text-Driven 360-Degree Panorama Generation
Wang, Hai, Xiang, Xiaoyu, Xia, Weihao, Xue, Jing-Hao
The advent of text-driven 360-degree panorama generation, enabling the synthesis of 360-degree panoramic images directly from textual descriptions, marks a transformative advancement in immersive visual content creation. This innovation significantly simplifies the traditionally complex process of producing such content. Recent progress in text-to-image diffusion models has accelerated the rapid development in this emerging field. This survey presents a comprehensive review of text-driven 360-degree panorama generation, offering an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art algorithms and their expanding applications in 360-degree 3D scene generation. Furthermore, we critically examine current limitations and propose promising directions for future research. A curated project page with relevant resources and research papers is available at https://littlewhitesea.github.io/Text-Driven-Pano-Gen/.
Tree-of-Debate: Multi-Persona Debate Trees Elicit Critical Thinking for Scientific Comparative Analysis
Kargupta, Priyanka, Agarwal, Ishika, August, Tal, Han, Jiawei
With the exponential growth of research facilitated by modern technology and improved accessibility, scientific discoveries have become increasingly fragmented within and across fields. This makes it challenging to assess the significance, novelty, incremental findings, and equivalent ideas between related works, particularly those from different research communities. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong quantitative and qualitative reasoning abilities, and multi-agent LLM debates have shown promise in handling complex reasoning tasks by exploring diverse perspectives and reasoning paths. Inspired by this, we introduce Tree-of-Debate (ToD), a framework which converts scientific papers into LLM personas that debate their respective novelties. To emphasize structured, critical reasoning rather than focusing solely on outcomes, ToD dynamically constructs a debate tree, enabling fine-grained analysis of independent novelty arguments within scholarly articles. Through experiments on scientific literature across various domains, evaluated by expert researchers, we demonstrate that ToD generates informative arguments, effectively contrasts papers, and supports researchers in their literature review.
Multi-Agent Coordination across Diverse Applications: A Survey
Sun, Lijun, Yang, Yijun, Duan, Qiqi, Shi, Yuhui, Lyu, Chao, Chang, Yu-Cheng, Lin, Chin-Teng, Shen, Yang
Multi-agent coordination studies the underlying mechanism enabling the trending spread of diverse multi-agent systems (MAS) and has received increasing attention, driven by the expansion of emerging applications and rapid AI advances. This survey outlines the current state of coordination research across applications through a unified understanding that answers four fundamental coordination questions: (1) what is coordination; (2) why coordination; (3) who to coordinate with; and (4) how to coordinate. Our purpose is to explore existing ideas and expertise in coordination and their connections across diverse applications, while identifying and highlighting emerging and promising research directions. First, general coordination problems that are essential to varied applications are identified and analyzed. Second, a number of MAS applications are surveyed, ranging from widely studied domains, e.g., search and rescue, warehouse automation and logistics, and transportation systems, to emerging fields including humanoid and anthropomorphic robots, satellite systems, and large language models (LLMs). Finally, open challenges about the scalability, heterogeneity, and learning mechanisms of MAS are analyzed and discussed. In particular, we identify the hybridization of hierarchical and decentralized coordination, human-MAS coordination, and LLM-based MAS as promising future directions.
Towards a Perspectivist Turn in Argument Quality Assessment
Romberg, Julia, Maurer, Maximilian, Wachsmuth, Henning, Lapesa, Gabriella
The assessment of argument quality depends on well-established logical, rhetorical, and dialectical properties that are unavoidably subjective: multiple valid assessments may exist, there is no unequivocal ground truth. This aligns with recent paths in machine learning, which embrace the co-existence of different perspectives. However, this potential remains largely unexplored in NLP research on argument quality. One crucial reason seems to be the yet unexplored availability of suitable datasets. We fill this gap by conducting a systematic review of argument quality datasets. We assign them to a multi-layered categorization targeting two aspects: (a) What has been annotated: we collect the quality dimensions covered in datasets and consolidate them in an overarching taxonomy, increasing dataset comparability and interoperability. (b) Who annotated: we survey what information is given about annotators, enabling perspectivist research and grounding our recommendations for future actions. To this end, we discuss datasets suitable for developing perspectivist models (i.e., those containing individual, non-aggregated annotations), and we showcase the importance of a controlled selection of annotators in a pilot study.
CrossFuse: Learning Infrared and Visible Image Fusion by Cross-Sensor Top-K Vision Alignment and Beyond
Shi, Yukai, Shi, Cidan, Weng, Zhipeng, Tian, Yin, Xian, Xiaoyu, Lin, Liang
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is increasingly applied in critical fields such as video surveillance and autonomous driving systems. Significant progress has been made in deep learning-based fusion methods. However, these models frequently encounter out-of-distribution (OOD) scenes in real-world applications, which severely impact their performance and reliability. Therefore, addressing the challenge of OOD data is crucial for the safe deployment of these models in open-world environments. Unlike existing research, our focus is on the challenges posed by OOD data in real-world applications and on enhancing the robustness and generalization of models. In this paper, we propose an infrared-visible fusion framework based on Multi-View Augmentation. For external data augmentation, Top-k Selective Vision Alignment is employed to mitigate distribution shifts between datasets by performing RGB-wise transformations on visible images. This strategy effectively introduces augmented samples, enhancing the adaptability of the model to complex real-world scenarios. Additionally, for internal data augmentation, self-supervised learning is established using Weak-Aggressive Augmentation. This enables the model to learn more robust and general feature representations during the fusion process, thereby improving robustness and generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior performance and robustness across various conditions and environments. Our approach significantly enhances the reliability and stability of IVIF tasks in practical applications.
A Survey on Data Contamination for Large Language Models
Cheng, Yuxing, Chang, Yi, Wu, Yuan
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in various areas, such as text generation and code synthesis. However, the reliability of performance evaluation has come under scrutiny due to data contamination-the unintended overlap between training and test datasets. This overlap has the potential to artificially inflate model performance, as LLMs are typically trained on extensive datasets scraped from publicly available sources. These datasets often inadvertently overlap with the benchmarks used for evaluation, leading to an overestimation of the models' true generalization capabilities. In this paper, we first examine the definition and impacts of data contamination. Secondly, we review methods for contamination-free evaluation, focusing on three strategies: data updating-based methods, data rewriting-based methods, and prevention-based methods. Specifically, we highlight dynamic benchmarks and LLM-driven evaluation methods. Finally, we categorize contamination detecting methods based on model information dependency: white-Box, gray-Box, and black-Box detection approaches. Our survey highlights the requirements for more rigorous evaluation protocols and proposes future directions for addressing data contamination challenges.