Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Hao Cheng

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Cheng.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

DOS: Diverse Outlier Sampling for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Modern neural networks are known to give overconfident prediction for out-of-distribution inputs when deployed in the open world. It is common practice to leverage a surrogate outlier dataset to regularize the model during training, and recent studies emphasize the role of uncertainty in designing the sampling strategy for outlier dataset. However, the OOD samples selected solely based on predictive uncertainty can be biased towards certain types, which may fail to capture the full outlier distribution. In this work, we empirically show that diversity is critical in sampling outliers for OOD detection performance. Motivated by the observation, we propose a straightforward and novel sampling strategy named DOS (Diverse Outlier Sampling) to select diverse and informative outliers. Specifically, we cluster the normalized features at each iteration, and the most informative outlier from each cluster is selected for model training with absent category loss. With DOS, the sampled outliers efficiently shape a globally compact decision boundary between ID and OOD data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DOS, reducing the average FPR95 by up to 25.79% on CIFAR-100 with TI-300K.

cs.LG↗

Does Collaborative Human-LM Dialogue Generation Help Information Extraction from Human Dialogues?

The capabilities of pretrained language models have opened opportunities to explore new application areas, but applications involving human-human interaction are limited by the fact that most data is protected from public release for privacy reasons. Problem-solving human dialogues in real applications can be much more complex than existing Wizard-of-Oz collections, preventing successful domain transfer. To support information extraction (IE) for a private call center dataset, we introduce a human-in-the-loop dialogue generation framework capable of synthesizing realistic dialogues. In IE experiments with auto insurance call center dialogues, we observe 25\% relative improvement in $F_1$ after augmenting a small set of real human conversations with synthetic data. We release code and our synthetic dataset to illustrate the complexity of real-world call center conversations and encourage development of complex dialogue datasets that are more representative of natural data.

cs.CL↗

Thermal Stress Analysis of the LNG Corrugated Cryogenic Hose During Gas Pre-Cooling Process

In this study, thermal-fluid-solid coupled simulations on the gas-phase pre-cooling operation of the corrugated cryogenic hoses were performed. Attention was focused on the temporal evolution and spatial distribution of transient thermal stress in the hose structure caused by convective heat transfer of the cooling medium, Liquefied Natural Gas Boil-Off Gas (BOG). The effects of different corrugated hose parameters, i.e., boundary conditions, hose lengths, BOG inlet flow rates, and corrugation shapes (C-type and U-type), on the transient thermal stress behavior were thoroughly assessed. The thermal stress developed at different locations of the corrugated hoses with these parameters is found to be governed by two major factors: the boundary constraint and local temperature gradient. The objective of this study is to offer practical insights for the structural strength design of corrugated cryogenic hoses and effective pre-cooling strategies, aiming to mitigate structural safety risks caused by excessive thermal stress.

physics.flu-dyn↗

Controllable Diverse Sampling for Diffusion Based Motion Behavior Forecasting

In autonomous driving tasks, trajectory prediction in complex traffic environments requires adherence to real-world context conditions and behavior multimodalities. Existing methods predominantly rely on prior assumptions or generative models trained on curated data to learn road agents' stochastic behavior bounded by scene constraints. However, they often face mode averaging issues due to data imbalance and simplistic priors, and could even suffer from mode collapse due to unstable training and single ground truth supervision. These issues lead the existing methods to a loss of predictive diversity and adherence to the scene constraints. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel trajectory generator named Controllable Diffusion Trajectory (CDT), which integrates map information and social interactions into a Transformer-based conditional denoising diffusion model to guide the prediction of future trajectories. To ensure multimodality, we incorporate behavioral tokens to direct the trajectory's modes, such as going straight, turning right or left. Moreover, we incorporate the predicted endpoints as an alternative behavioral token into the CDT model to facilitate the prediction of accurate trajectories. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 benchmark demonstrate that CDT excels in generating diverse and scene-compliant trajectories in complex urban settings.

cs.CV↗

Language Models as Inductive Reasoners

Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. In the past research of inductive reasoning within computer science, formal language is used as representations of knowledge (facts and rules, more specifically). However, formal language can cause systematic problems for inductive reasoning such as disability of handling raw input such as natural language, sensitiveness to mislabeled data, and incapacity to handle ambiguous input. To this end, we propose a new paradigm (task) for inductive reasoning, which is to induce natural language rules from natural language facts, and create a dataset termed DEER containing 1.2k rule-fact pairs for the task, where rules and facts are written in natural language. New automatic metrics are also proposed and analysed for the evaluation of this task. With DEER, we investigate a modern approach for inductive reasoning where we use natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language and use pretrained language models as ''reasoners''. Moreover, we provide the first and comprehensive analysis of how well pretrained language models can induce natural language rules from natural language facts. We also propose a new framework drawing insights from philosophy literature for this task, which we show in the experiment section that surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. We discuss about our future perspectives for inductive reasoning in Section 7. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ZonglinY/Inductive_Reasoning.

cs.CL↗

RobustTSF: Towards Theory and Design of Robust Time Series Forecasting with Anomalies

Time series forecasting is an important and forefront task in many real-world applications. However, most of time series forecasting techniques assume that the training data is clean without anomalies. This assumption is unrealistic since the collected time series data can be contaminated in practice. The forecasting model will be inferior if it is directly trained by time series with anomalies. Thus it is essential to develop methods to automatically learn a robust forecasting model from the contaminated data. In this paper, we first statistically define three types of anomalies, then theoretically and experimentally analyze the loss robustness and sample robustness when these anomalies exist. Based on our analyses, we propose a simple and efficient algorithm to learn a robust forecasting model. Extensive experiments show that our method is highly robust and outperforms all existing approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/haochenglouis/RobustTSF.

cs.LG↗

MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving skills in many tasks and domains, but their ability in mathematical reasoning in visual contexts has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we present MathVista, a benchmark designed to combine challenges from diverse mathematical and visual tasks. It consists of 6,141 examples, derived from 28 existing multimodal datasets involving mathematics and 3 newly created datasets (i.e., IQTest, FunctionQA, and PaperQA). Completing these tasks requires fine-grained, deep visual understanding and compositional reasoning, which all state-of-the-art foundation models find challenging. With MathVista, we have conducted a comprehensive, quantitative evaluation of 12 prominent foundation models. The best-performing GPT-4V model achieves an overall accuracy of 49.9%, substantially outperforming Bard, the second-best performer, by 15.1%. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the superiority of GPT-4V is mainly attributed to its enhanced visual perception and mathematical reasoning. However, GPT-4V still falls short of human performance by 10.4%, as it often struggles to understand complex figures and perform rigorous reasoning. This significant gap underscores the critical role that MathVista will play in the development of general-purpose AI agents capable of tackling mathematically intensive and visually rich real-world tasks. We further explore the new ability of self-verification, the application of self-consistency, and the interactive chatbot capabilities of GPT-4V, highlighting its promising potential for future research. The project is available at https://mathvista.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

FedCompetitors: Harmonious Collaboration in Federated Learning with Competing Participants

Federated learning (FL) provides a privacy-preserving approach for collaborative training of machine learning models. Given the potential data heterogeneity, it is crucial to select appropriate collaborators for each FL participant (FL-PT) based on data complementarity. Recent studies have addressed this challenge. Similarly, it is imperative to consider the inter-individual relationships among FL-PTs where some FL-PTs engage in competition. Although FL literature has acknowledged the significance of this scenario, practical methods for establishing FL ecosystems remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we extend a principle from the balance theory, namely ``the friend of my enemy is my enemy'', to ensure the absence of conflicting interests within an FL ecosystem. The extended principle and the resulting problem are formulated via graph theory and integer linear programming. A polynomial-time algorithm is proposed to determine the collaborators of each FL-PT. The solution guarantees high scalability, allowing even competing FL-PTs to smoothly join the ecosystem without conflict of interest. The proposed framework jointly considers competition and data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic data demonstrate its efficacy compared to five alternative approaches, and its ability to establish efficient collaboration networks among FL-PTs.

cs.AI↗

Exploring Leximin Principle for Fair Core-Selecting Combinatorial Auctions: Payment Rule Design and Implementation

Core-selecting combinatorial auctions (CAs) restrict the auction result in the core such that no coalitions could improve their utilities by engaging in collusion. The minimum-revenue-core (MRC) rule is a widely used core-selecting payment rule to maximize the total utilities of all bidders. However, the MRC rule can suffer from severe unfairness since it ignores individuals' utilities. To address this limitation, we propose to explore the leximin principle to achieve fairness in core-selecting CAs since the leximin principle prefers to maximize the utility of the worst-off; the resulting bidder-leximin-optimal (BLO) payment rule is then theoretically analyzed and an effective algorithm is further provided to compute the BLO outcome. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments to show that our algorithm returns fairer utility distributions and is faster than existing algorithms of core-selecting payment rules.

cs.GT↗

Spiking Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have ultra-low energy consumption and high biological plausibility due to their binary and bio-driven nature compared with artificial neural networks (ANNs). While previous research has primarily focused on enhancing the performance of SNNs in classification tasks, the generative potential of SNNs remains relatively unexplored. In our paper, we put forward Spiking Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (SDDPM), a new class of SNN-based generative models that achieve high sample quality. To fully exploit the energy efficiency of SNNs, we propose a purely Spiking U-Net architecture, which achieves comparable performance to its ANN counterpart using only 4 time steps, resulting in significantly reduced energy consumption. Extensive experimental results reveal that our approach achieves state-of-the-art on the generative tasks and substantially outperforms other SNN-based generative models, achieving up to 12x and 6x improvement on the CIFAR-10 and the CelebA datasets, respectively. Moreover, we propose a threshold-guided strategy that can further improve the performances by 2.69% in a training-free manner. The SDDPM symbolizes a significant advancement in the field of SNN generation, injecting new perspectives and potential avenues of exploration. Our code is available at https://github.com/AndyCao1125/SDDPM.

cs.NE↗

TrainerAgent: Customizable and Efficient Model Training through LLM-Powered Multi-Agent System

Training AI models has always been challenging, especially when there is a need for custom models to provide personalized services. Algorithm engineers often face a lengthy process to iteratively develop models tailored to specific business requirements, making it even more difficult for non-experts. The quest for high-quality and efficient model development, along with the emergence of Large Language Model (LLM) Agents, has become a key focus in the industry. Leveraging the powerful analytical, planning, and decision-making capabilities of LLM, we propose a TrainerAgent system comprising a multi-agent framework including Task, Data, Model and Server agents. These agents analyze user-defined tasks, input data, and requirements (e.g., accuracy, speed), optimizing them comprehensively from both data and model perspectives to obtain satisfactory models, and finally deploy these models as online service. Experimental evaluations on classical discriminative and generative tasks in computer vision and natural language processing domains demonstrate that our system consistently produces models that meet the desired criteria. Furthermore, the system exhibits the ability to critically identify and reject unattainable tasks, such as fantastical scenarios or unethical requests, ensuring robustness and safety. This research presents a significant advancement in achieving desired models with increased efficiency and quality as compared to traditional model development, facilitated by the integration of LLM-powered analysis, decision-making, and execution capabilities, as well as the collaboration among four agents. We anticipate that our work will contribute to the advancement of research on TrainerAgent in both academic and industry communities, potentially establishing it as a new paradigm for model development in the field of AI.

cs.AI↗

Pursing the Sparse Limitation of Spiking Deep Learning Structures

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), a novel brain-inspired algorithm, are garnering increased attention for their superior computation and energy efficiency over traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). To facilitate deployment on memory-constrained devices, numerous studies have explored SNN pruning. However, these efforts are hindered by challenges such as scalability challenges in more complex architectures and accuracy degradation. Amidst these challenges, the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) emerges as a promising pruning strategy. It posits that within dense neural networks, there exist winning tickets or subnetworks that are sparser but do not compromise performance. To explore a more structure-sparse and energy-saving model, we investigate the unique synergy of SNNs with LTH and design two novel spiking winning tickets to push the boundaries of sparsity within SNNs. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative algorithm capable of simultaneously identifying both weight and patch-level winning tickets, enabling the achievement of sparser structures without compromising on the final model's performance. Through comprehensive experiments on both RGB-based and event-based datasets, we demonstrate that our spiking lottery ticket achieves comparable or superior performance even when the model structure is extremely sparse.

cs.NE↗

LLaVA-Plus: Learning to Use Tools for Creating Multimodal Agents

LLaVA-Plus is a general-purpose multimodal assistant that expands the capabilities of large multimodal models. It maintains a skill repository of pre-trained vision and vision-language models and can activate relevant tools based on users' inputs to fulfill real-world tasks. LLaVA-Plus is trained on multimodal instruction-following data to acquire the ability to use tools, covering visual understanding, generation, external knowledge retrieval, and compositions. Empirical results show that LLaVA-Plus outperforms LLaVA in existing capabilities and exhibits new ones. It is distinct in that the image query is directly grounded and actively engaged throughout the entire human-AI interaction sessions, significantly improving tool use performance and enabling new scenarios.

cs.CV↗

Chameleon: Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in solving various natural language processing tasks due to emergent reasoning abilities. However, LLMs have inherent limitations as they are incapable of accessing up-to-date information (stored on the Web or in task-specific knowledge bases), using external tools, and performing precise mathematical and logical reasoning. In this paper, we present Chameleon, an AI system that mitigates these limitations by augmenting LLMs with plug-and-play modules for compositional reasoning. Chameleon synthesizes programs by composing various tools (e.g., LLMs, off-the-shelf vision models, web search engines, Python functions, and heuristic-based modules) for accomplishing complex reasoning tasks. At the heart of Chameleon is an LLM-based planner that assembles a sequence of tools to execute to generate the final response. We showcase the effectiveness of Chameleon on two multi-modal knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks: ScienceQA and TabMWP. Chameleon, powered by GPT-4, achieves an 86.54% overall accuracy on ScienceQA, improving the best published few-shot result by 11.37%. On TabMWP, GPT-4-powered Chameleon improves the accuracy by 17.0%, lifting the state of the art to 98.78%. Our analysis also shows that the GPT-4-powered planner exhibits more consistent and rational tool selection via inferring potential constraints from instructions, compared to a ChatGPT-powered planner. The project is available at https://chameleon-llm.github.io.

cs.CL↗

RGBlimp: Robotic Gliding Blimp -- Design, Modeling, Development, and Aerodynamics Analysis

A miniature robotic blimp, as one type of lighter-than-air aerial vehicle, has attracted increasing attention in the science and engineering field for its long flight duration and safe aerial locomotion. While a variety of miniature robotic blimps have been developed over the past decade, most of them utilize the buoyant lift and neglect the aerodynamic lift in their design, thus leading to a mediocre aerodynamic performance. This letter proposes a new design of miniature robotic blimp that combines desirable features of both a robotic blimp and a fixed-wing glider, named the Robotic Gliding Blimp, or RGBlimp. This robot, equipped with an envelope filled with helium and a pair of wings, uses an internal moving mass and a pair of propellers for its locomotion control. This letter presents the design, dynamic modeling, prototyping, and system identification of the RGBlimp. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first effort to systematically design and develop such a miniature robotic blimp with hybrid lifts and moving mass control. Experimental results are presented to validate the design and the dynamic model of the RGBlimp. Analysis of the RGBlimp aerodynamics is conducted which confirms the performance improvement of the proposed RGBlimp in aerodynamic efficiency and flight stability.

cs.RO↗

Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding

Scientific literature understanding tasks have gained significant attention due to their potential to accelerate scientific discovery. Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in these tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. However, jointly utilizing pre-training data across multiple heterogeneous tasks (e.g., extreme multi-label paper classification, citation prediction, and literature search) remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework, SciMult, with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. To be specific, we explore two techniques -- task-aware specialization and instruction tuning. The former adopts a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture with task-aware sub-layers; the latter prepends task-specific instructions to the input text so as to produce task-aware outputs. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive collection of benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our task-aware specialization strategy, where we outperform state-of-the-art scientific pre-trained LMs. Code, datasets, and pre-trained models can be found at https://scimult.github.io/.

cs.CL↗

Feature Pyramid biLSTM: Using Smartphone Sensors for Transportation Mode Detection

The widespread utilization of smartphones has provided extensive availability to Inertial Measurement Units, providing a wide range of sensory data that can be advantageous for the detection of transportation modes. The objective of this study is to propose a novel end-to-end approach to effectively explore a reduced amount of sensory data collected from a smartphone to achieve accurate mode detection in common daily traveling activities. Our approach, called Feature Pyramid biLSTM (FPbiLSTM), is characterized by its ability to reduce the number of sensors required and processing demands, resulting in a more efficient modeling process without sacrificing the quality of the outcomes than the other current models. FPbiLSTM extends an existing CNN biLSTM model with the Feature Pyramid Network, leveraging the advantages of both shallow layer richness and deeper layer feature resilience for capturing temporal moving patterns in various transportation modes. It exhibits an excellent performance by employing the data collected from only three out of seven sensors, i.e. accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, in the 2018 Sussex-Huawei Locomotion (SHL) challenge dataset, attaining a noteworthy accuracy of 95.1% and an F1-score of 94.7% in detecting eight different transportation modes.

cs.LG↗

Is Silent eHMI Enough? A Passenger-Centric Study on Effective eHMI for Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicles in the Field

Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicle (APMV) is a miniaturized autonomous vehicle designed to provide short-distance mobility to everyone in pedestrian-rich environments. By the characteristic of the open design, passengers on the APMV are exposed to the communication between the eHMI deployed on APMVs and pedestrians. Therefore, to ensure an optimal passenger experience, eHMI designs for APMVs must consider the potential impact of APMV-pedestrian communications on passengers' subjective feelings. To this end, this study discussed three external human-machine interface (eHMI) designs, i.e., 1) graphical user interface (GUI)-based eHMI with text message (eHMI-T), 2) multimodal user interface (MUI)-based eHMI with neutral voice (eHMI-NV), and 3) MUI-based eHMI with affective voice (eHMI-AV), from the perspective of APMV passengers in the communication between APMV and pedestrians. In the riding field experiment (N=24), we found that eHMI-T may be less suitable for APMVs. This conclusion was drawn based on passengers' feedback, as they expressed an awkward feeling during the "silent time" when the eHMI-T provided information only to pedestrians but not to passengers. Additionally, these two MUI-based eHMIs with voice cues had their own advantages, i.e., eHMI-NV has an advantage in pragmatic quality, while eHMI-AV has an advantage in hedonic quality. The study also highlights the necessity of considering passengers' personalities when desig

cs.HC↗