Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emergent in-context learning capabilities, where they adapt to new tasks based on example demonstrations. However, in-context learning has seen limited effectiveness in many settings, is difficult to quantitatively control and takes up context window space. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative approach that recasts in-context learning as in-context vectors (ICV). Using ICV has two steps. We first use a forward pass on demonstration examples to create the in-context vector from the latent embedding of the LLM. This vector captures essential information about the intended task. On a new query, instead of adding demonstrations to the prompt, we shift the latent states of the LLM using the ICV. The ICV approach has several benefits: 1) it enables the LLM to more effectively follow the demonstration examples; 2) it's easy to control by adjusting the magnitude of the ICV; 3) it reduces the length of the prompt by removing the in-context demonstrations; 4) ICV is computationally much more efficient than fine-tuning. We demonstrate that ICV achieves better performance compared to standard in-context learning and fine-tuning on diverse tasks including safety, style transfer, role-playing and formatting. Moreover, we show that we can flexibly teach LLM to simultaneously follow different types of instructions by simple vector arithmetics on the corresponding ICVs.

Temporal commonsense reasoning refers to the ability to understand the typical temporal context of phrases, actions, and events, and use it to reason over problems requiring such knowledge. This trait is essential in temporal natural language processing tasks, with possible applications such as timeline summarization, temporal question answering, and temporal natural language inference. Recent research on the performance of large language models suggests that, although they are adept at generating syntactically correct sentences and solving classification tasks, they often take shortcuts in their reasoning and fall prey to simple linguistic traps. This article provides an overview of research in the domain of temporal commonsense reasoning, particularly focusing on enhancing language model performance through a variety of augmentations and their evaluation across a growing number of datasets. However, these augmented models still struggle to approach human performance on reasoning tasks over temporal common sense properties, such as the typical occurrence times, orderings, or durations of events. We further emphasize the need for careful interpretation of research to guard against overpromising evaluation results in light of the shallow reasoning present in transformers. This can be achieved by appropriately preparing datasets and suitable evaluation metrics.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown to be effective to boost the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs), where the typical objective is to distill knowledge from a deeper teacher GNN into a shallower student GNN. However, it is often quite challenging to train a satisfactory deeper GNN due to the well-known over-parametrized and over-smoothing issues, leading to invalid knowledge transfer in practical applications. In this paper, we propose the first Free-direction Knowledge Distillation framework via reinforcement learning for GNNs, called FreeKD, which is no longer required to provide a deeper well-optimized teacher GNN. Our core idea is to collaboratively learn two shallower GNNs to exchange knowledge between them. As we observe that one typical GNN model often exhibits better and worse performances at different nodes during training, we devise a dynamic and free-direction knowledge transfer strategy that involves two levels of actions: 1) node-level action determines the directions of knowledge transfer between the corresponding nodes of two networks; and then 2) structure-level action determines which of the local structures generated by the node-level actions to be propagated. Additionally, considering that different augmented graphs can potentially capture distinct perspectives of the graph data, we propose FreeKD-Prompt that learns undistorted and diverse augmentations based on prompt learning for exchanging varied knowledge. Furthermore, instead of confining knowledge exchange within two GNNs, we develop FreeKD++ to enable free-direction knowledge transfer among multiple GNNs. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate our approaches outperform the base GNNs in a large margin. More surprisingly, our FreeKD has comparable or even better performance than traditional KD algorithms that distill knowledge from a deeper and stronger teacher GNN.

With a long history of traditional Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) algorithms and recently popular Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it is still not clear (1) how they perform under a standard comprehensive setting, (2) whether GNNs can outperform traditional algorithms such as tree ensembles, and (3) how about their efficiency on large-scale graphs. In response, we introduce GADBench -- a benchmark tool dedicated to supervised anomalous node detection in static graphs. GADBench facilitates a detailed comparison across 29 distinct models on ten real-world GAD datasets, encompassing thousands to millions ($\sim$6M) nodes. Our main finding is that tree ensembles with simple neighborhood aggregation can outperform the latest GNNs tailored for the GAD task. We shed light on the current progress of GAD, setting a robust groundwork for subsequent investigations in this domain. GADBench is open-sourced at https://github.com/squareRoot3/GADBench.

Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. We observe that a high-quality catalogue-guided generation process can effectively alleviate this problem. Therefore, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review as the first step for review generation, which aims to produce a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. We construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset with 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. To accurately assess the model performance, we design two evaluation metrics for informativeness and similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure.Our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. We further benchmark diverse experiments on state-of-the-art summarization models like BART and large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate their capabilities. We further discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.

From classical HPC to deep learning, MatMul is at the heart of today's computing. The recent Maddness method approximates MatMul without the need for multiplication by using a hash-based version of product quantization (PQ) indexing into a look-up table (LUT). Stella Nera is the first Maddness accelerator and it achieves 15x higher area efficiency (GMAC/s/mm^2) and more than 25x higher energy efficiency (TMAC/s/W) than direct MatMul accelerators implemented in the same technology. The hash function is a decision tree, which allows for an efficient hardware implementation as the multiply-accumulate operations are replaced by decision tree passes and LUT lookups. The entire Maddness MatMul can be broken down into parts that allow an effective implementation with small computing units and memories, allowing it to reach extreme efficiency while remaining generically applicable for MatMul tasks. In a commercial 14nm technology and scaled to 3nm, we achieve an energy efficiency of 161 TOp/s/W@0.55V with a Top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 of more than 92.5% using ResNet9.

While Gaussian processes are a mainstay for various engineering and scientific applications, the uncertainty estimates don't satisfy frequentist guarantees and can be miscalibrated in practice. State-of-the-art approaches for designing calibrated models rely on inflating the Gaussian process posterior variance, which yields confidence intervals that are potentially too coarse. To remedy this, we present a calibration approach that generates predictive quantiles using a computation inspired by the vanilla Gaussian process posterior variance but using a different set of hyperparameters chosen to satisfy an empirical calibration constraint. This results in a calibration approach that is considerably more flexible than existing approaches, which we optimize to yield tight predictive quantiles. Our approach is shown to yield a calibrated model under reasonable assumptions. Furthermore, it outperforms existing approaches in sharpness when employed for calibrated regression.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are fueling a new paradigm of discoveries in natural sciences. Today, AI has started to advance natural sciences by improving, accelerating, and enabling our understanding of natural phenomena at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, giving rise to a new area of research known as AI for science (AI4Science). Being an emerging research paradigm, AI4Science is unique in that it is an enormous and highly interdisciplinary area. Thus, a unified and technical treatment of this field is needed yet challenging. This work aims to provide a technically thorough account of a subarea of AI4Science; namely, AI for quantum, atomistic, and continuum systems. These areas aim at understanding the physical world from the subatomic (wavefunctions and electron density), atomic (molecules, proteins, materials, and interactions), to macro (fluids, climate, and subsurface) scales and form an important subarea of AI4Science. A unique advantage of focusing on these areas is that they largely share a common set of challenges, thereby allowing a unified and foundational treatment. A key common challenge is how to capture physics first principles, especially symmetries, in natural systems by deep learning methods. We provide an in-depth yet intuitive account of techniques to achieve equivariance to symmetry transformations. We also discuss other common technical challenges, including explainability, out-of-distribution generalization, knowledge transfer with foundation and large language models, and uncertainty quantification. To facilitate learning and education, we provide categorized lists of resources that we found to be useful. We strive to be thorough and unified and hope this initial effort may trigger more community interests and efforts to further advance AI4Science.

In the backdrop of an increasingly pressing need for effective urban and highway transportation systems, this work explores the synergy between model-based and learning-based strategies to enhance traffic flow management by use of an innovative approach to the problem of highway ramp metering control that embeds Reinforcement Learning techniques within the Model Predictive Control framework. The control problem is formulated as an RL task by crafting a suitable stage cost function that is representative of the traffic conditions, variability in the control action, and violations of a safety-critical constraint on the maximum number of vehicles in queue. An MPC-based RL approach, which merges the advantages of the two paradigms in order to overcome the shortcomings of each framework, is proposed to learn to efficiently control an on-ramp and to satisfy its constraints despite uncertainties in the system model and variable demands. Finally, simulations are performed on a benchmark from the literature consisting of a small-scale highway network. Results show that, starting from an MPC controller that has an imprecise model and is poorly tuned, the proposed methodology is able to effectively learn to improve the control policy such that congestion in the network is reduced and constraints are satisfied, yielding an improved performance compared to the initial controller.

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) has gained traction in an attempt to fix the black-box nature of Deep Learning. Specifically (medical) biosignals such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), electroocculography (EOG) and electromyography (EMG) could benefit from good UQ, since these suffer from a poor signal to noise ratio, and good human interpretability is pivotal for medical applications and Brain Computer Interfaces. In this paper, we review the state of the art at the intersection of Uncertainty Quantification and Biosignal with Machine Learning. We present various methods, shortcomings, uncertainty measures and theoretical frameworks that currently exist in this application domain. Overall it can be concluded that promising UQ methods are available, but that research is needed on how people and systems may interact with an uncertainty model in a (clinical) environment.