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Zihan Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Zihan Wang.

At least 343 records · Page 19Linked to original sources

Evoke: Evoking Critical Thinking Abilities in LLMs via Reviewer-Author Prompt Editing

Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in natural language processing. These models rely on proper human instructions (or prompts) to generate suitable responses. However, the potential of LLMs are not fully harnessed by commonly-used prompting methods: many human-in-the-loop algorithms employ ad-hoc procedures for prompt selection; while auto prompt generation approaches are essentially searching all possible prompts randomly and inefficiently. We propose Evoke, an automatic prompt refinement framework. In Evoke, there are two instances of a same LLM: one as a reviewer (LLM-Reviewer), it scores the current prompt; the other as an author (LLM-Author), it edits the prompt by considering the edit history and the reviewer's feedback. Such an author-reviewer feedback loop ensures that the prompt is refined in each iteration. We further aggregate a data selection approach to Evoke, where only the hard samples are exposed to the LLM. The hard samples are more important because the LLM can develop deeper understanding of the tasks out of them, while the model may already know how to solve the easier cases. Experimental results show that Evoke significantly outperforms existing methods. For instance, in the challenging task of logical fallacy detection, Evoke scores above 80, while all other baseline methods struggle to reach 20.

cs.CL↗

Generalizing Few-Shot Named Entity Recognizers to Unseen Domains with Type-Related Features

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) has shown remarkable progress in identifying entities in low-resource domains. However, few-shot NER methods still struggle with out-of-domain (OOD) examples due to their reliance on manual labeling for the target domain. To address this limitation, recent studies enable generalization to an unseen target domain with only a few labeled examples using data augmentation techniques. Two important challenges remain: First, augmentation is limited to the training data, resulting in minimal overlap between the generated data and OOD examples. Second, knowledge transfer is implicit and insufficient, severely hindering model generalizability and the integration of knowledge from the source domain. In this paper, we propose a framework, prompt learning with type-related features (PLTR), to address these challenges. To identify useful knowledge in the source domain and enhance knowledge transfer, PLTR automatically extracts entity type-related features (TRFs) based on mutual information criteria. To bridge the gap between training and OOD data, PLTR generates a unique prompt for each unseen example by selecting relevant TRFs. We show that PLTR achieves significant performance improvements on in-domain and cross-domain datasets. The use of PLTR facilitates model adaptation and increases representation similarities between the source and unseen domains.

cs.IR↗

Neural Network-PSO-based Velocity Control Algorithm for Landing UAVs on a Boat

Precise landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) onto moving platforms like Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) is both important and challenging, especially in GPS-denied environments, for collaborative navigation of heterogeneous vehicles. UAVs need to land within a confined space onboard ASV to get energy replenishment, while ASV is subject to translational and rotational disturbances due to wind and water flow. Current solutions either rely on high-level waypoint navigation, which struggles to robustly land on varied-speed targets, or necessitate laborious manual tuning of controller parameters, and expensive sensors for target localization. Therefore, we propose an adaptive velocity control algorithm that leverages Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Neural Network (NN) to optimize PID parameters across varying flight altitudes and distinct speeds of a moving boat. The cost function of PSO includes the status change rates of UAV and proximity to the target. The NN further interpolates the PSO-founded PID parameters. The proposed method implemented on a water strider hexacopter design, not only ensures accuracy but also increases robustness. Moreover, this NN-PSO can be readily adapted to suit various mission requirements. Its ability to achieve precise landings extends its applicability to scenarios, including but not limited to rescue missions, package deliveries, and workspace inspections.

cs.RO↗

Robust and Interpretable Medical Image Classifiers via Concept Bottleneck Models

Medical image classification is a critical problem for healthcare, with the potential to alleviate the workload of doctors and facilitate diagnoses of patients. However, two challenges arise when deploying deep learning models to real-world healthcare applications. First, neural models tend to learn spurious correlations instead of desired features, which could fall short when generalizing to new domains (e.g., patients with different ages). Second, these black-box models lack interpretability. When making diagnostic predictions, it is important to understand why a model makes a decision for trustworthy and safety considerations. In this paper, to address these two limitations, we propose a new paradigm to build robust and interpretable medical image classifiers with natural language concepts. Specifically, we first query clinical concepts from GPT-4, then transform latent image features into explicit concepts with a vision-language model. We systematically evaluate our method on eight medical image classification datasets to verify its effectiveness. On challenging datasets with strong confounding factors, our method can mitigate spurious correlations thus substantially outperform standard visual encoders and other baselines. Finally, we show how classification with a small number of concepts brings a level of interpretability for understanding model decisions through case studies in real medical data.

cs.CV↗

Misusing Tools in Large Language Models With Visual Adversarial Examples

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being enhanced with the ability to use tools and to process multiple modalities. These new capabilities bring new benefits and also new security risks. In this work, we show that an attacker can use visual adversarial examples to cause attacker-desired tool usage. For example, the attacker could cause a victim LLM to delete calendar events, leak private conversations and book hotels. Different from prior work, our attacks can affect the confidentiality and integrity of user resources connected to the LLM while being stealthy and generalizable to multiple input prompts. We construct these attacks using gradient-based adversarial training and characterize performance along multiple dimensions. We find that our adversarial images can manipulate the LLM to invoke tools following real-world syntax almost always (~98%) while maintaining high similarity to clean images (~0.9 SSIM). Furthermore, using human scoring and automated metrics, we find that the attacks do not noticeably affect the conversation (and its semantics) between the user and the LLM.

cs.CR↗

Implicit bias of SGD in $L_{2}$-regularized linear DNNs: One-way jumps from high to low rank

The $L_{2}$-regularized loss of Deep Linear Networks (DLNs) with more than one hidden layers has multiple local minima, corresponding to matrices with different ranks. In tasks such as matrix completion, the goal is to converge to the local minimum with the smallest rank that still fits the training data. While rank-underestimating minima can be avoided since they do not fit the data, GD might get stuck at rank-overestimating minima. We show that with SGD, there is always a probability to jump from a higher rank minimum to a lower rank one, but the probability of jumping back is zero. More precisely, we define a sequence of sets $B_{1}\subset B_{2}\subset\cdots\subset B_{R}$ so that $B_{r}$ contains all minima of rank $r$ or less (and not more) that are absorbing for small enough ridge parameters $λ$ and learning rates $η$: SGD has prob. 0 of leaving $B_{r}$, and from any starting point there is a non-zero prob. for SGD to go in $B_{r}$.

cs.LG↗

PyPose v0.6: The Imperative Programming Interface for Robotics

PyPose is an open-source library for robot learning. It combines a learning-based approach with physics-based optimization, which enables seamless end-to-end robot learning. It has been used in many tasks due to its meticulously designed application programming interface (API) and efficient implementation. From its initial launch in early 2022, PyPose has experienced significant enhancements, incorporating a wide variety of new features into its platform. To satisfy the growing demand for understanding and utilizing the library and reduce the learning curve of new users, we present the fundamental design principle of the imperative programming interface, and showcase the flexible usage of diverse functionalities and modules using an extremely simple Dubins car example. We also demonstrate that the PyPose can be easily used to navigate a real quadruped robot with a few lines of code.

cs.RO↗

Guiding Pretraining in Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions, but these methods offer limited benefits in large environments where most discovered novelty is irrelevant for downstream tasks. We describe a method that uses background knowledge from text corpora to shape exploration. This method, called ELLM (Exploring with LLMs) rewards an agent for achieving goals suggested by a language model prompted with a description of the agent's current state. By leveraging large-scale language model pretraining, ELLM guides agents toward human-meaningful and plausibly useful behaviors without requiring a human in the loop. We evaluate ELLM in the Crafter game environment and the Housekeep robotic simulator, showing that ELLM-trained agents have better coverage of common-sense behaviors during pretraining and usually match or improve performance on a range of downstream tasks. Code available at https://github.com/yuqingd/ellm.

cs.LG↗

Iteratively Learning Representations for Unseen Entities with Inter-Rule Correlations

Recent work on knowledge graph completion (KGC) focused on learning embeddings of entities and relations in knowledge graphs. These embedding methods require that all test entities are observed at training time, resulting in a time-consuming retraining process for out-of-knowledge-graph (OOKG) entities. To address this issue, current inductive knowledge embedding methods employ graph neural networks (GNNs) to represent unseen entities by aggregating information of known neighbors. They face three important challenges: (i) data sparsity, (ii) the presence of complex patterns in knowledge graphs (e.g., inter-rule correlations), and (iii) the presence of interactions among rule mining, rule inference, and embedding. In this paper, we propose a virtual neighbor network with inter-rule correlations (VNC) that consists of three stages: (i) rule mining, (ii) rule inference, and (iii) embedding. In the rule mining process, to identify complex patterns in knowledge graphs, both logic rules and inter-rule correlations are extracted from knowledge graphs based on operations over relation embeddings. To reduce data sparsity, virtual neighbors for OOKG entities are predicted and assigned soft labels by optimizing a rule-constrained problem. We also devise an iterative framework to capture the underlying relations between rule learning and embedding learning. In our experiments, results on both link prediction and triple classification tasks show that the proposed VNC framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on four widely-used knowledge graphs. Further analysis reveals that VNC is robust to the proportion of unseen entities and effectively mitigates data sparsity.

cs.IR↗

BPKD: Boundary Privileged Knowledge Distillation For Semantic Segmentation

Current knowledge distillation approaches in semantic segmentation tend to adopt a holistic approach that treats all spatial locations equally. However, for dense prediction, students' predictions on edge regions are highly uncertain due to contextual information leakage, requiring higher spatial sensitivity knowledge than the body regions. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel approach called boundary-privileged knowledge distillation (BPKD). BPKD distills the knowledge of the teacher model's body and edges separately to the compact student model. Specifically, we employ two distinct loss functions: (i) edge loss, which aims to distinguish between ambiguous classes at the pixel level in edge regions; (ii) body loss, which utilizes shape constraints and selectively attends to the inner-semantic regions. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed BPKD method provides extensive refinements and aggregation for edge and body regions. Additionally, the method achieves state-of-the-art distillation performance for semantic segmentation on three popular benchmark datasets, highlighting its effectiveness and generalization ability. BPKD shows consistent improvements across a diverse array of lightweight segmentation structures, including both CNNs and transformers, underscoring its architecture-agnostic adaptability. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/AkideLiu/BPKD}.

cs.CV↗

Dual-Granularity Contrastive Learning for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation systems(SBRS) are more suitable for the current e-commerce and streaming media recommendation scenarios and thus have become a hot topic. The data encountered by SBRS is typically highly sparse, which also serves as one of the bottlenecks limiting the accuracy of recommendations. So Contrastive Learning(CL) is applied in SBRS owing to its capability of improving embedding learning under the condition of sparse data. However, existing CL strategies are limited in their ability to enforce finer-grained (e.g., factor-level) comparisons and, as a result, are unable to capture subtle differences between instances. More than that, these strategies usually use item or segment dropout as a means of data augmentation which may result in sparser data and thus ineffective self-supervised signals. By addressing the two aforementioned limitations, we introduce a novel multi-granularity CL framework. Specifically, two extra augmented embedding convolution channels with different granularities are constructed and the embeddings learned by them are compared with those learned from original view to complete the CL tasks. At factor-level, we employ Disentangled Representation Learning to obtain finer-grained data(e.g. factor-level embeddings), with which we can construct factor-level convolution channels. At item-level, the star graph is deployed as the augmented data and graph convolution on it can ensure the effectiveness of self-supervised signals. Compare the learned embeddings of these two views with the learned embeddings of the basic view to achieve CL at two granularities. Finally, the more precise item-level and factor-level embeddings obtained are referenced to generate personalized recommendations for the user. The proposed model is validated through extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, showcasing superior performance compared to existing methods.

cs.IR↗

GridMM: Grid Memory Map for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables the agent to navigate to a remote location following the natural language instruction in 3D environments. To represent the previously visited environment, most approaches for VLN implement memory using recurrent states, topological maps, or top-down semantic maps. In contrast to these approaches, we build the top-down egocentric and dynamically growing Grid Memory Map (i.e., GridMM) to structure the visited environment. From a global perspective, historical observations are projected into a unified grid map in a top-down view, which can better represent the spatial relations of the environment. From a local perspective, we further propose an instruction relevance aggregation method to capture fine-grained visual clues in each grid region. Extensive experiments are conducted on both the REVERIE, R2R, SOON datasets in the discrete environments, and the R2R-CE dataset in the continuous environments, showing the superiority of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

Breadcrumbs to the Goal: Goal-Conditioned Exploration from Human-in-the-Loop Feedback

Exploration and reward specification are fundamental and intertwined challenges for reinforcement learning. Solving sequential decision-making tasks requiring expansive exploration requires either careful design of reward functions or the use of novelty-seeking exploration bonuses. Human supervisors can provide effective guidance in the loop to direct the exploration process, but prior methods to leverage this guidance require constant synchronous high-quality human feedback, which is expensive and impractical to obtain. In this work, we present a technique called Human Guided Exploration (HuGE), which uses low-quality feedback from non-expert users that may be sporadic, asynchronous, and noisy. HuGE guides exploration for reinforcement learning not only in simulation but also in the real world, all without meticulous reward specification. The key concept involves bifurcating human feedback and policy learning: human feedback steers exploration, while self-supervised learning from the exploration data yields unbiased policies. This procedure can leverage noisy, asynchronous human feedback to learn policies with no hand-crafted reward design or exploration bonuses. HuGE is able to learn a variety of challenging multi-stage robotic navigation and manipulation tasks in simulation using crowdsourced feedback from non-expert users. Moreover, this paradigm can be scaled to learning directly on real-world robots, using occasional, asynchronous feedback from human supervisors.

cs.LG↗

Reconstructing Training Data from Model Gradient, Provably

Understanding when and how much a model gradient leaks information about the training sample is an important question in privacy. In this paper, we present a surprising result: even without training or memorizing the data, we can fully reconstruct the training samples from a single gradient query at a randomly chosen parameter value. We prove the identifiability of the training data under mild conditions: with shallow or deep neural networks and a wide range of activation functions. We also present a statistically and computationally efficient algorithm based on tensor decomposition to reconstruct the training data. As a provable attack that reveals sensitive training data, our findings suggest potential severe threats to privacy, especially in federated learning.

cs.LG↗

RETA-LLM: A Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Toolkit

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in many domains, they still have a tendency to hallucinate and generate fictitious responses to user requests. This problem can be alleviated by augmenting LLMs with information retrieval (IR) systems (also known as retrieval-augmented LLMs). Applying this strategy, LLMs can generate more factual texts in response to user input according to the relevant content retrieved by IR systems from external corpora as references. In addition, by incorporating external knowledge, retrieval-augmented LLMs can answer in-domain questions that cannot be answered by solely relying on the world knowledge stored in parameters. To support research in this area and facilitate the development of retrieval-augmented LLM systems, we develop RETA-LLM, a {RET}reival-{A}ugmented LLM toolkit. In RETA-LLM, we create a complete pipeline to help researchers and users build their customized in-domain LLM-based systems. Compared with previous retrieval-augmented LLM systems, RETA-LLM provides more plug-and-play modules to support better interaction between IR systems and LLMs, including {request rewriting, document retrieval, passage extraction, answer generation, and fact checking} modules. Our toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-IR/tree/main/RETA-LLM.

cs.IR↗

Spatio-Temporal AU Relational Graph Representation Learning For Facial Action Units Detection

This paper presents our Facial Action Units (AUs) detection submission to the fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild Competition (ABAW). Our approach consists of three main modules: (i) a pre-trained facial representation encoder which produce a strong facial representation from each input face image in the input sequence; (ii) an AU-specific feature generator that specifically learns a set of AU features from each facial representation; and (iii) a spatio-temporal graph learning module that constructs a spatio-temporal graph representation. This graph representation describes AUs contained in all frames and predicts the occurrence of each AU based on both the modeled spatial information within the corresponding face and the learned temporal dynamics among frames. The experimental results show that our approach outperformed the baseline and the spatio-temporal graph representation learning allows our model to generate the best results among all ablated systems. Our model ranks at the 4th place in the AU recognition track at the 5th ABAW Competition. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wzh125/ABAW-5.

cs.CV↗

Deep Neural Networks in Video Human Action Recognition: A Review

Currently, video behavior recognition is one of the most foundational tasks of computer vision. The 2D neural networks of deep learning are built for recognizing pixel-level information such as images with RGB, RGB-D, or optical flow formats, with the current increasingly wide usage of surveillance video and more tasks related to human action recognition. There are increasing tasks requiring temporal information for frames dependency analysis. The researchers have widely studied video-based recognition rather than image-based(pixel-based) only to extract more informative elements from geometry tasks. Our current related research addresses multiple novel proposed research works and compares their advantages and disadvantages between the derived deep learning frameworks rather than machine learning frameworks. The comparison happened between existing frameworks and datasets, which are video format data only. Due to the specific properties of human actions and the increasingly wide usage of deep neural networks, we collected all research works within the last three years between 2020 to 2022. In our article, the performance of deep neural networks surpassed most of the techniques in the feature learning and extraction tasks, especially video action recognition.

cs.CV↗

WavSpA: Wavelet Space Attention for Boosting Transformers' Long Sequence Learning Ability

Transformer and its variants are fundamental neural architectures in deep learning. Recent works show that learning attention in the Fourier space can improve the long sequence learning capability of Transformers. We argue that wavelet transform shall be a better choice because it captures both position and frequency information with linear time complexity. Therefore, in this paper, we systematically study the synergy between wavelet transform and Transformers. We propose Wavelet Space Attention (WavSpA) that facilitates attention learning in a learnable wavelet coefficient space which replaces the attention in Transformers by (1) applying forward wavelet transform to project the input sequences to multi-resolution bases, (2) conducting attention learning in the wavelet coefficient space, and (3) reconstructing the representation in input space via backward wavelet transform. Extensive experiments on the Long Range Arena demonstrate that learning attention in the wavelet space using either fixed or adaptive wavelets can consistently improve Transformer's performance and also significantly outperform learning in Fourier space. We further show our method can enhance Transformer's reasoning extrapolation capability over distance on the LEGO chain-of-reasoning task.

cs.CL↗