Learning Graphical Models
ICDM: Interference Cancellation Diffusion Models for Wireless Semantic Communications
Wu, Tong, Chen, Zhiyong, He, Dazhi, Yang, Feng, Tao, Meixia, Xu, Xiaodong, Zhang, Wenjun, Zhang, Ping
--Diffusion models (DMs) have recently achieved significant success in wireless communications systems due to their denoising capabilities. The broadcast nature of wireless signals makes them susceptible not only to Gaussian noise, but also to unaware interference. This raises the question of whether DMs can effectively mitigate interference in wireless semantic communication systems. In this paper, we model the interference cancellation problem as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem over the joint posterior probability of the signal and interference, and theoretically prove that the solution provides excellent estimates for the signal and interference. T o solve this problem, we develop an interference cancellation diffusion model (ICDM), which decomposes the joint posterior into independent prior probabilities of the signal and interference, along with the channel transition probablity. The log-gradients of these distributions at each time step are learned separately by DMs and accurately estimated through deriving. ICDM further integrates these gradients with advanced numerical iteration method, achieving accurate and rapid interference cancellation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ICDM significantly reduces the mean square error (MSE) and enhances perceptual quality compared to schemes without ICDM. For example, on the CelebA dataset under the Rayleigh fading channel with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 20 dB and signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of 0 dB, ICDM reduces the MSE by 4 . Diffusion models (DMs) [1]-[4], which utilize a score function to model the gradient of the conditional data distribution, have recently achieved remarkable success in the field of artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC). These models are capable of generating controllable and high-quality content in various domains, including long-form text generation, controllable image generation, and consistent video generation. They have also become a fundamental technology for large language models (LLMs) such as GPT -4o. The inherent controllability of the content generated by diffusion models has significantly driven their application across diverse fields [5]-[7].
Causal Bayesian Networks for Data-driven Safety Analysis of Complex Systems
Gansch, Roman, Putze, Lina, Koopmann, Tjark, Reich, Jan, Neurohr, Christian
Ensuring safe operation of safety-critical complex systems interacting with their environment poses significant challenges, particularly when the system's world model relies on machine learning algorithms to process the perception input. A comprehensive safety argumentation requires knowledge of how faults or functional insufficiencies propagate through the system and interact with external factors, to manage their safety impact. While statistical analysis approaches can support the safety assessment, associative reasoning alone is neither sufficient for the safety argumentation nor for the identification and investigation of safety measures. A causal understanding of the system and its interaction with the environment is crucial for safeguarding safety-critical complex systems. It allows to transfer and generalize knowledge, such as insights gained from testing, and facilitates the identification of potential improvements. This work explores using causal Bayesian networks to model the system's causalities for safety analysis, and proposes measures to assess causal influences based on Pearl's framework of causal inference. We compare the approach of causal Bayesian networks to the well-established fault tree analysis, outlining advantages and limitations. In particular, we examine importance metrics typically employed in fault tree analysis as foundation to discuss suitable causal metrics. An evaluation is performed on the example of a perception system for automated driving. Overall, this work presents an approach for causal reasoning in safety analysis that enables the integration of data-driven and expert-based knowledge to account for uncertainties arising from complex systems operating in open environments.
RFTF: Reinforcement Fine-tuning for Embodied Agents with Temporal Feedback
Shu, Junyang, Lin, Zhiwei, Wang, Yongtao
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential in the field of embodied intelligence, enabling agents to follow human instructions to complete complex tasks in physical environments. Existing embodied agents are often trained through behavior cloning, which requires expensive data and computational resources and is constrained by human demonstrations. To address this issue, many researchers explore the application of reinforcement fine-tuning to embodied agents. However, typical reinforcement fine-tuning methods for embodied agents usually rely on sparse, outcome-based rewards, which struggle to provide fine-grained feedback for specific actions within an episode, thus limiting the model's manipulation capabilities and generalization performance. In this paper, we propose RFTF, a novel reinforcement fine-tuning method that leverages a value model to generate dense rewards in embodied scenarios. Specifically, our value model is trained using temporal information, eliminating the need for costly robot action labels. In addition, RFTF incorporates a range of techniques, such as GAE and sample balance to enhance the effectiveness of the fine-tuning process. By addressing the sparse reward problem in reinforcement fine-tuning, our method significantly improves the performance of embodied agents, delivering superior generalization and adaptation capabilities across diverse embodied tasks. Experimental results show that embodied agents fine-tuned with RFTF achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the challenging CALVIN ABC-D with an average success length of 4.296. Moreover, RFTF enables rapid adaptation to new environments. After fine-tuning in the D environment of CALVIN for a few episodes, RFTF achieved an average success length of 4.301 in this new environment.
Segment First or Comprehend First? Explore the Limit of Unsupervised Word Segmentation with Large Language Models
Zhang, Zihong, He, Liqi, Li, Zuchao, Zhang, Lefei, Zhao, Hai, Du, Bo
Word segmentation stands as a cornerstone of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Based on the concept of "comprehend first, segment later", we propose a new framework to explore the limit of unsupervised word segmentation with Large Language Models (LLMs) and evaluate the semantic understanding capabilities of LLMs based on word segmentation. We employ current mainstream LLMs to perform word segmentation across multiple languages to assess LLMs' "comprehension". Our findings reveal that LLMs are capable of following simple prompts to segment raw text into words. There is a trend suggesting that models with more parameters tend to perform better on multiple languages. Additionally, we introduce a novel unsupervised method, termed LLACA ($\textbf{L}$arge $\textbf{L}$anguage Model-Inspired $\textbf{A}$ho-$\textbf{C}$orasick $\textbf{A}$utomaton). Leveraging the advanced pattern recognition capabilities of Aho-Corasick automata, LLACA innovatively combines these with the deep insights of well-pretrained LLMs. This approach not only enables the construction of a dynamic $n$-gram model that adjusts based on contextual information but also integrates the nuanced understanding of LLMs, offering significant improvements over traditional methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/hkr04/LLACA
SEL-BALD: Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Selective Labels
Machine learning systems are widely used in many high-stakes contexts in which experimental designs for assigning treatments are infeasible. When evaluating decisions is costly, such as investigating fraud cases, or evaluating biopsy decisions, a sample-efficient strategy is needed. However, while existing active learning methods assume humans will always label the instances selected by the machine learning model, in many critical applications, humans may decline to label instances selected by the machine learning model due to reasons such as regulation constraint, domain knowledge, or algorithmic aversion, thus not sample efficient. In this paper, we study the Active Learning with Instance Rejection (ALIR) problem, which considers the human discretion behavior for high-stakes decision making problems. We propose new active learning algorithms under deep bayesian active learning for selective labeling (SEL-BALD) to address the ALIR problem. Our algorithms consider how to acquire information for both the machine learning model and the human discretion model.
Uncertainty-based Offline Variational Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Robustness under Diverse Data Corruptions
Real-world offline datasets are often subject to data corruptions (such as noise or adversarial attacks) due to sensor failures or malicious attacks. Despite advances in robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), existing methods struggle to learn robust agents under high uncertainty caused by the diverse corrupted data (i.e., corrupted states, actions, rewards, and dynamics), leading to performance degradation in clean environments. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel robust variational Bayesian inference for offline RL (TRACER). It introduces Bayesian inference for the first time to capture the uncertainty via offline data for robustness against all types of data corruptions. Then, to capture such uncertainty, it uses all offline data as the observations to approximate the posterior distribution of the action-value function under a Bayesian inference framework. An appealing feature of TRACER is that it can distinguish corrupted data from clean data using an entropy-based uncertainty measure, since corrupted data often induces higher uncertainty and entropy.
Empirical Gateaux Derivatives for Causal Inference
We study a constructive procedure that approximates Gateaux derivatives for statistical functionals by finite-differencing, with attention to causal inference functionals. We focus on the case where probability distributions are not known a priori but need also to be estimated from data, leading to empirical Gateaux derivatives, and study relationships between empirical, numerical, and analytical Gateaux derivatives. Starting with a case study of counterfactual mean estimation, we verify the exact relationship between finite-differences and the analytical Gateaux derivative. We then derive requirements on the rates of numerical approximation in perturbation and smoothing that preserve statistical benefits. We study more complicated functionals such as dynamic treatment regimes and the linear-programming formulation for policy optimization infinite-horizon Markov decision processes.
Gated Inference Network: Inference and Learning State-Space Models
This paper advances temporal reasoning within dynamically changing high-dimensional noisy observations, focusing on a latent space that characterizes the nonlinear dynamics of objects in their environment. We introduce the Gated Inference Network (GIN), an efficient approximate Bayesian inference algorithm for state space models (SSMs) with nonlinear state transitions and emissions. GIN disentangles two latent representations: one representing the object derived from a nonlinear mapping model, and another representing the latent state describing its dynamics. This disentanglement enables direct state estimation and missing data imputation as the world evolves. To infer the latent state, we utilize a deep extended Kalman filter (EKF) approach that integrates a novel compact RNN structure to compute both the Kalman Gain (KG) and smoothing gain (SG), completing the data flow.
A Bayesian Approach to Data Point Selection
Data point selection (DPS) is becoming a critical topic in deep learning due to the ease of acquiring uncurated training data compared to the difficulty of obtaining curated or processed data. Existing approaches to DPS are predominantly based on a bi-level optimisation (BLO) formulation, which is demanding in terms of memory and computation, and exhibits some theoretical defects regarding minibatches.Thus, we propose a novel Bayesian approach to DPS. We view the DPS problem as posterior inference in a novel Bayesian model where the posterior distributions of the instance-wise weights and the main neural network parameters are inferred under a reasonable prior and likelihood model.We employ stochastic gradient Langevin MCMC sampling to learn the main network and instance-wise weights jointly, ensuring convergence even with minibatches. Our update equation is comparable to the widely used SGD and much more efficient than existing BLO-based methods. Through controlled experiments in both the vision and language domains, we present the proof-of-concept.
Nonconvex Sparse Graph Learning under Laplacian Constrained Graphical Model
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a sparse graph from the Laplacian constrained Gaussian graphical model. This problem can be formulated as a penalized maximum likelihood estimation of the precision matrix under Laplacian structural constraints. Like in the classical graphical lasso problem, recent works made use of the \ell_1 -norm with the goal of promoting sparsity in the Laplacian constrained precision matrix estimation. However, through empirical evidence, we observe that the \ell_1 -norm is not effective in imposing a sparse solution in this problem. From a theoretical perspective, we prove that a large regularization parameter will surprisingly lead to a solution representing a fully connected graph instead of a sparse graph.