Overview
Enhancing Hardware Fault Tolerance in Machines with Reinforcement Learning Policy Gradient Algorithms
Schoepp, Sheila, Taghian, Mehran, Miwa, Shotaro, Mitsuka, Yoshihiro, Golestan, Shadan, Zaïane, Osmar
Industry is rapidly moving towards fully autonomous and interconnected systems that can detect and adapt to changing conditions, including machine hardware faults. Traditional methods for adding hardware fault tolerance to machines involve duplicating components and algorithmically reconfiguring a machine's processes when a fault occurs. However, the growing interest in reinforcement learning-based robotic control offers a new perspective on achieving hardware fault tolerance. However, limited research has explored the potential of these approaches for hardware fault tolerance in machines. This paper investigates the potential of two state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), to enhance hardware fault tolerance into machines. We assess the performance of these algorithms in two OpenAI Gym simulated environments, Ant-v2 and FetchReach-v1. Robot models in these environments are subjected to six simulated hardware faults. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to determine the optimal method for transferring an agent's knowledge, acquired through learning in a normal (pre-fault) environment, to a (post-)fault environment in a continual learning setting. Our results demonstrate that reinforcement learning-based approaches can enhance hardware fault tolerance in simulated machines, with adaptation occurring within minutes. Specifically, PPO exhibits the fastest adaptation when retaining the knowledge within its models, while SAC performs best when discarding all acquired knowledge. Overall, this study highlights the potential of reinforcement learning-based approaches, such as PPO and SAC, for hardware fault tolerance in machines. These findings pave the way for the development of robust and adaptive machines capable of effectively operating in real-world scenarios.
Text Style Transfer: An Introductory Overview
Mukherjee, Sourabrata, Dušek, Ondrej
Text Style Transfer (TST) is a pivotal task in natural language generation to manipulate text style attributes while preserving style-independent content. The attributes targeted in TST can vary widely, including politeness, authorship, mitigation of offensive language, modification of feelings, and adjustment of text formality. TST has become a widely researched topic with substantial advancements in recent years. This paper provides an introductory overview of TST, addressing its challenges, existing approaches, datasets, evaluation measures, subtasks, and applications. This fundamental overview improves understanding of the background and fundamentals of text style transfer.
A Measure for Level of Autonomy Based on Observable System Behavior
Contemporary artificial intelligence systems are pivotal in enhancing human efficiency and safety across various domains. One such domain is autonomous systems, especially in automotive and defense use cases. Artificial intelligence brings learning and enhanced decision-making to autonomy system goal-oriented behaviors and human independence. However, the lack of clear understanding of autonomy system capabilities hampers human-machine or machine-machine interaction and interdiction. This necessitates varying degrees of human involvement for safety, accountability, and explainability purposes. Yet, measuring the level autonomous capability in an autonomous system presents a challenge. Two scales of measurement exist, yet measuring autonomy presupposes a variety of elements not available in the wild. This is why existing measures for level of autonomy are operationalized only during design or test and evaluation phases. No measure for level of autonomy based on observed system behavior exists at this time. To address this, we outline a potential measure for predicting level of autonomy using observable actions. We also present an algorithm incorporating the proposed measure. The measure and algorithm have significance to researchers and practitioners interested in a method to blind compare autonomous systems at runtime. Defense-based implementations are likewise possible because counter-autonomy depends on robust identification of autonomous systems.
Operationalizing a Threat Model for Red-Teaming Large Language Models (LLMs)
Verma, Apurv, Krishna, Satyapriya, Gehrmann, Sebastian, Seshadri, Madhavan, Pradhan, Anu, Ault, Tom, Barrett, Leslie, Rabinowitz, David, Doucette, John, Phan, NhatHai
Creating secure and resilient applications with large language models (LLM) requires anticipating, adjusting to, and countering unforeseen threats. Red-teaming has emerged as a critical technique for identifying vulnerabilities in real-world LLM implementations. This paper presents a detailed threat model and provides a systematization of knowledge (SoK) of red-teaming attacks on LLMs. We develop a taxonomy of attacks based on the stages of the LLM development and deployment process and extract various insights from previous research. In addition, we compile methods for defense and practical red-teaming strategies for practitioners. By delineating prominent attack motifs and shedding light on various entry points, this paper provides a framework for improving the security and robustness of LLM-based systems.
Enhancing Incremental Summarization with Structured Representations
Hwang, EunJeong, Zhou, Yichao, Wendt, James Bradley, Gunel, Beliz, Vo, Nguyen, Xie, Jing, Tata, Sandeep
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with processing extensive input contexts, which can lead to redundant, inaccurate, or incoherent summaries. Recent methods have used unstructured memory to incrementally process these contexts, but they still suffer from information overload due to the volume of unstructured data handled. In our study, we introduce structured knowledge representations ($GU_{json}$), which significantly improve summarization performance by 40% and 14% across two public datasets. Most notably, we propose the Chain-of-Key strategy ($CoK_{json}$) that dynamically updates or augments these representations with new information, rather than recreating the structured memory for each new source. This method further enhances performance by 7% and 4% on the datasets.
PERCORE: A Deep Learning-Based Framework for Persian Spelling Correction with Phonetic Analysis
Dashti, Seyed Mohammad Sadegh, Bardsiri, Amid Khatibi, Shahbazzadeh, Mehdi Jafari
This research introduces a state-of-the-art Persian spelling correction system that seamlessly integrates deep learning techniques with phonetic analysis, significantly enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of natural language processing (NLP) for Persian. Utilizing a fine-tuned language representation model, our methodology effectively combines deep contextual analysis with phonetic insights, adeptly correcting both non-word and real-word spelling errors. This strategy proves particularly effective in tackling the unique complexities of Persian spelling, including its elaborate morphology and the challenge of homophony. A thorough evaluation on a wide-ranging dataset confirms our system's superior performance compared to existing methods, with impressive F1-Scores of 0.890 for detecting real-word errors and 0.905 for correcting them. Additionally, the system demonstrates a strong capability in non-word error correction, achieving an F1-Score of 0.891. These results illustrate the significant benefits of incorporating phonetic insights into deep learning models for spelling correction. Our contributions not only advance Persian language processing by providing a versatile solution for a variety of NLP applications but also pave the way for future research in the field, emphasizing the critical role of phonetic analysis in developing effective spelling correction system.
Intelligent Artistic Typography: A Comprehensive Review of Artistic Text Design and Generation
Bai, Yuhang, Huang, Zichuan, Gao, Wenshuo, Yang, Shuai, Liu, Jiaying
Artistic text generation aims to amplify the aesthetic qualities of text while maintaining readability. It can make the text more attractive and better convey its expression, thus enjoying a wide range of application scenarios such as social media display, consumer electronics, fashion, and graphic design. Artistic text generation includes artistic text stylization and semantic typography. Artistic text stylization concentrates on the text effect overlaid upon the text, such as shadows, outlines, colors, glows, and textures. By comparison, semantic typography focuses on the deformation of the characters to strengthen their visual representation by mimicking the semantic understanding within the text. This overview paper provides an introduction to both artistic text stylization and semantic typography, including the taxonomy, the key ideas of representative methods, and the applications in static and dynamic artistic text generation. Furthermore, the dataset and evaluation metrics are introduced, and the future directions of artistic text generation are discussed. A comprehensive list of artistic text generation models studied in this review is available at https://github.com/williamyang1991/Awesome-Artistic-Typography/.
Riemannian Geometry-Based EEG Approaches: A Literature Review
Tibermacine, Imad Eddine, Russo, Samuele, Tibermacine, Ahmed, Rabehi, Abdelaziz, Nail, Bachir, Kadri, Kamel, Napoli, Christian
The application of Riemannian geometry in the decoding of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has swiftly garnered attention because of its straightforwardness, precision, and resilience, along with its aptitude for transfer learning, which has been demonstrated through significant achievements in global BCI competitions. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent advancements in the integration of deep learning with Riemannian geometry to enhance EEG signal decoding in BCIs. Our review updates the findings since the last major review in 2017, comparing modern approaches that utilize deep learning to improve the handling of non-Euclidean data structures inherent in EEG signals. We discuss how these approaches not only tackle the traditional challenges of noise sensitivity, non-stationarity, and lengthy calibration times but also introduce novel classification frameworks and signal processing techniques to reduce these limitations significantly. Furthermore, we identify current shortcomings and propose future research directions in manifold learning and riemannian-based classification, focusing on practical implementations and theoretical expansions, such as feature tracking on manifolds, multitask learning, feature extraction, and transfer learning. This review aims to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical, real-world applications, making sophisticated mathematical approaches accessible and actionable for BCI enhancements.
Enhancing Variable Importance in Random Forests: A Novel Application of Global Sensitivity Analysis
Vannucci, Giulia, Siciliano, Roberta, Saltelli, Andrea
The present work provides an application of Global Sensitivity Analysis to supervised machine learning methods such as Random Forests. These methods act as black boxes, selecting features in high--dimensional data sets as to provide accurate classifiers in terms of prediction when new data are fed into the system. In supervised machine learning, predictors are generally ranked by importance based on their contribution to the final prediction. Global Sensitivity Analysis is primarily used in mathematical modelling to investigate the effect of the uncertainties of the input variables on the output. We apply it here as a novel way to rank the input features by their importance to the explainability of the data generating process, shedding light on how the response is determined by the dependence structure of its predictors. A simulation study shows that our proposal can be used to explore what advances can be achieved either in terms of efficiency, explanatory ability, or simply by way of confirming existing results.
Causal Inference with Complex Treatments: A Survey
Wang, Yingrong, Li, Haoxuan, Zhu, Minqin, Wu, Anpeng, Xiong, Ruoxuan, Wu, Fei, Kuang, Kun
Causal inference plays an important role in explanatory analysis and decision making across various fields like statistics, marketing, health care, and education. Its main task is to estimate treatment effects and make intervention policies. Traditionally, most of the previous works typically focus on the binary treatment setting that there is only one treatment for a unit to adopt or not. However, in practice, the treatment can be much more complex, encompassing multi-valued, continuous, or bundle options. In this paper, we refer to these as complex treatments and systematically and comprehensively review the causal inference methods for addressing them. First, we formally revisit the problem definition, the basic assumptions, and their possible variations under specific conditions. Second, we sequentially review the related methods for multi-valued, continuous, and bundled treatment settings. In each situation, we tentatively divide the methods into two categories: those conforming to the unconfoundedness assumption and those violating it. Subsequently, we discuss the available datasets and open-source codes. Finally, we provide a brief summary of these works and suggest potential directions for future research.