Education
DPO Kernels: A Semantically-Aware, Kernel-Enhanced, and Divergence-Rich Paradigm for Direct Preference Optimization
Das, Amitava, Trivedy, Suranjana, Khanna, Danush, Roy, Rajarshi, Singh, Gurpreet, Ghosh, Basab, Narsupalli, Yaswanth, Jain, Vinija, Sharma, Vasu, Reganti, Aishwarya Naresh, Chadha, Aman
The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked many applications but also underscores the challenge of aligning them with diverse values and preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is central to alignment but constrained by fixed divergences and limited feature transformations. We propose DPO-Kernels, which integrates kernel methods to address these issues through four key contributions: (i) Kernelized Representations with polynomial, RBF, Mahalanobis, and spectral kernels for richer transformations, plus a hybrid loss combining embedding-based and probability-based objectives; (ii) Divergence Alternatives (Jensen-Shannon, Hellinger, Renyi, Bhattacharyya, Wasserstein, and f-divergences) for greater stability; (iii) Data-Driven Selection metrics that automatically choose the best kernel-divergence pair; and (iv) a Hierarchical Mixture of Kernels for both local precision and global modeling. Evaluations on 12 datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in factuality, safety, reasoning, and instruction following. Grounded in Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization, DPO-Kernels maintains robust generalization for LLMs, offering a comprehensive resource for further alignment research.
AGGA: A Dataset of Academic Guidelines for Generative AI and Large Language Models
Jiao, Junfeng, Afroogh, Saleh, Chen, Kevin, Atkinson, David, Dhurandhar, Amit
This study introduces AGGA, a dataset comprising 80 academic guidelines for the use of Generative AIs (GAIs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in academic settings, meticulously collected from official university websites. The dataset contains 188,674 words and serves as a valuable resource for natural language processing tasks commonly applied in requirements engineering, such as model synthesis, abstraction identification, and document structure assessment. Additionally, AGGA can be further annotated to function as a benchmark for various tasks, including ambiguity detection, requirements categorization, and the identification of equivalent requirements. Our methodologically rigorous approach ensured a thorough examination, with a selection of universities that represent a diverse range of global institutions, including top-ranked universities across six continents.
Multi-Scenario Reasoning: Unlocking Cognitive Autonomy in Humanoid Robots for Multimodal Understanding
To improve the cognitive autonomy of humanoid robots, this research proposes a multi-scenario reasoning architecture to solve the technical shortcomings of multi-modal understanding in this field. It draws on simulation based experimental design that adopts multi-modal synthesis (visual, auditory, tactile) and builds a simulator "Maha" to perform the experiment. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of this architecture in multimodal data. It provides reference experience for the exploration of cross-modal interaction strategies for humanoid robots in dynamic environments. In addition, multi-scenario reasoning simulates the high-level reasoning mechanism of the human brain to humanoid robots at the cognitive level. This new concept promotes cross-scenario practical task transfer and semantic-driven action planning. It heralds the future development of self-learning and autonomous behavior of humanoid robots in changing scenarios.
Probably Correct Optimal Stable Matching for Two-Sided Markets Under Uncertainty
Athanasopoulos, Andreas, George, Anne-Marie, Dimitrakakis, Christos
We consider a learning problem for the stable marriage model under unknown preferences for the left side of the market. We focus on the centralized case, where at each time step, an online platform matches the agents, and obtains a noisy evaluation reflecting their preferences. Our aim is to quickly identify the stable matching that is left-side optimal, rendering this a pure exploration problem with bandit feedback. We specifically aim to find Probably Correct Optimal Stable Matchings and present several bandit algorithms to do so. Our findings provide a foundational understanding of how to efficiently gather and utilize preference information to identify the optimal stable matching in two-sided markets under uncertainty. An experimental analysis on synthetic data complements theoretical results on sample complexities for the proposed methods.
Optimizing Value of Learning in Task-Oriented Federated Meta-Learning Systems
Wu, Bibo, Fang, Fang, Wang, Xianbin
Federated Learning (FL) has gained significant attention in recent years due to its distributed nature and privacy preserving benefits. However, a key limitation of conventional FL is that it learns and distributes a common global model to all participants, which fails to provide customized solutions for diverse task requirements. Federated meta-learning (FML) offers a promising solution to this issue by enabling devices to finetune local models after receiving a shared meta-model from the server. In this paper, we propose a task-oriented FML framework over non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. A novel metric, termed value of learning (VoL), is introduced to assess the individual training needs across devices. Moreover, a task-level weight (TLW) metric is defined based on task requirements and fairness considerations, guiding the prioritization of edge devices during FML training. The formulated problem, to maximize the sum of TLW-based VoL across devices, forms a non-convex mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) challenge, addressed here using a parameterized deep Q-network (PDQN) algorithm to handle both discrete and continuous variables. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline schemes, underscoring the advantages of the proposed framework.
Effects of Robot Competency and Motion Legibility on Human Correction Feedback
Wang, Shuangge, Wang, Anjiabei, Goncharova, Sofiya, Scassellati, Brian, Fitzgerald, Tesca
As robot deployments become more commonplace, people are likely to take on the role of supervising robots (i.e., correcting their mistakes) rather than directly teaching them. Prior works on Learning from Corrections (LfC) have relied on three key assumptions to interpret human feedback: (1) people correct the robot only when there is significant task objective divergence; (2) people can accurately predict if a correction is necessary; and (3) people trade off precision and physical effort when giving corrections. In this work, we study how two key factors (robot competency and motion legibility) affect how people provide correction feedback and their implications on these existing assumptions. We conduct a user study ($N=60$) under an LfC setting where participants supervise and correct a robot performing pick-and-place tasks. We find that people are more sensitive to suboptimal behavior by a highly competent robot compared to an incompetent robot when the motions are legible ($p=0.0015$) and predictable ($p=0.0055$). In addition, people also tend to withhold necessary corrections ($p < 0.0001$) when supervising an incompetent robot and are more prone to offering unnecessary ones ($p = 0.0171$) when supervising a highly competent robot. We also find that physical effort positively correlates with correction precision, providing empirical evidence to support this common assumption. We also find that this correlation is significantly weaker for an incompetent robot with legible motions than an incompetent robot with predictable motions ($p = 0.0075$). Our findings offer insights for accounting for competency and legibility when designing robot interaction behaviors and learning task objectives from corrections.
Hyperbolic Binary Neural Network
Chen, Jun, Xiang, Jingyang, Huang, Tianxin, Zhao, Xiangrui, Liu, Yong
Binary Neural Network (BNN) converts full-precision weights and activations into their extreme 1-bit counterparts, making it particularly suitable for deployment on lightweight mobile devices. While binary neural networks are typically formulated as a constrained optimization problem and optimized in the binarized space, general neural networks are formulated as an unconstrained optimization problem and optimized in the continuous space. This paper introduces the Hyperbolic Binary Neural Network (HBNN) by leveraging the framework of hyperbolic geometry to optimize the constrained problem. Specifically, we transform the constrained problem in hyperbolic space into an unconstrained one in Euclidean space using the Riemannian exponential map. On the other hand, we also propose the Exponential Parametrization Cluster (EPC) method, which, compared to the Riemannian exponential map, shrinks the segment domain based on a diffeomorphism. This approach increases the probability of weight flips, thereby maximizing the information gain in BNNs. Experimental results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet classification datasets with VGGsmall, ResNet18, and ResNet34 models illustrate the superior performance of our HBNN over state-of-the-art methods.
Infinity-MM: Scaling Multimodal Performance with Large-Scale and High-Quality Instruction Data
Gu, Shuhao, Zhang, Jialing, Zhou, Siyuan, Yu, Kevin, Xing, Zhaohu, Wang, Liangdong, Cao, Zhou, Jia, Jintao, Zhang, Zhuoyi, Wang, Yixuan, Hu, Zhenchong, Zhang, Bo-Wen, Li, Jijie, Liang, Dong, Zhao, Yingli, Wang, Songjing, Ao, Yulong, Ju, Yiming, Ma, Huanhuan, Li, Xiaotong, Diao, Haiwen, Cui, Yufeng, Wang, Xinlong, Liu, Yaoqi, Feng, Fangxiang, Liu, Guang
Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal tasks, and multimodal instruction data serves as the foundation for enhancing VLM capabilities. Despite the availability of several open-source multimodal datasets, limitations in the scale and quality of open-source instruction data hinder the performance of VLMs trained on these datasets, leading to a significant gap compared to models trained on closed-source data. To address this challenge, we introduce Infinity-MM, a large-scale multimodal instruction dataset. We collected the available multimodal instruction datasets and performed unified preprocessing, resulting in a dataset with over 40 million samples that ensures diversity and accuracy. Furthermore, to enable large-scale expansion of instruction data and support the continuous acquisition of high-quality data, we propose a synthetic instruction generation method based on a tagging system and open-source VLMs. By establishing correspondences between different types of images and associated instruction types, this method can provide essential guidance during data synthesis. Leveraging this high-quality data, we have trained a 2-billion-parameter Vision-Language Model, Aquila-VL-2B, which achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among models of similar scale. The data is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/Infinity-MM.
CLIX: Cross-Lingual Explanations of Idiomatic Expressions
Gluck, Aaron, von der Wense, Katharina, Pacheco, Maria
One of that obtaining explanations of idiomatic expressions the main areas of interest for the proponents of in the learner's first language removes many technology-assisted language learning is vocabulary of the barriers to understanding introduced by traditional expansion, where recent studies have demonstrated definition generation systems. We choose a significant impact in student engagement to focus on idiomatic expressions as they are an and increased vocabulary knowledge (Fisher, 2016; important element of language learning that is particularly Guaqueta and Castro-Gárces, 2018; Tao Hao and challenging for learners and automated Ardasheva, 2021). To support the development systems alike. Consider the utterance, he and I of these technologies, considerable work has been don't see eye to eye on a variety of topics. The idiomatic devoted to the study of automated definition generation expression contained within this sentence (Ni and Wang, 2017; Gadetsky et al., 2018; is not composed of particularly challenging words, Ishiwatari et al., 2019; Bevilacqua et al., 2020).
DAMAGE: Detecting Adversarially Modified AI Generated Text
Masrour, Elyas, Emi, Bradley, Spero, Max
AI humanizers are a new class of online software tools meant to paraphrase and rewrite AI-generated text in a way that allows them to evade AI detection software. We study 19 AI humanizer and paraphrasing tools and qualitatively assess their effects and faithfulness in preserving the meaning of the original text. We show that many existing AI detectors fail to detect humanized text. Finally, we demonstrate a robust model that can detect humanized AI text while maintaining a low false positive rate using a data-centric augmentation approach. We attack our own detector, training our own fine-tuned model optimized against our detector's predictions, and show that our detector's cross-humanizer generalization is sufficient to remain robust to this attack.