Daily Papers

We present Particulate, a feed-forward approach that, given a single static 3D mesh of an everyday object, directly infers all attributes of the underlying articulated structure, including its 3D parts, kinematic structure, and motion constraints. At its core is a transformer network, Part Articulation Transformer, which processes a point cloud of the input mesh using a flexible and scalable architecture to predict all the aforementioned attributes with native multi-joint support. We train the network end-to-end on a diverse collection of articulated 3D assets from public datasets. During inference, Particulate lifts the network's feed-forward prediction to the input mesh, yielding a fully articulated 3D model in seconds, much faster than prior approaches that require per-object optimization. Particulate can also accurately infer the articulated structure of AI-generated 3D assets, enabling full-fledged extraction of articulated 3D objects from a single (real or synthetic) image when combined with an off-the-shelf image-to-3D generator. We further introduce a new challenging benchmark for 3D articulation estimation curated from high-quality public 3D assets, and redesign the evaluation protocol to be more consistent with human preferences. Quantitative and qualitative results show that Particulate significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) addresses the critical challenge of matching untrimmed videos with text queries describing only partial content. Existing methods suffer from geometric distortion in Euclidean space that sometimes misrepresents the intrinsic hierarchical structure of videos and overlooks certain hierarchical semantics, ultimately leading to suboptimal temporal modeling. To address this issue, we propose the first hyperbolic modeling framework for PRVR, namely HLFormer, which leverages hyperbolic space learning to compensate for the suboptimal hierarchical modeling capabilities of Euclidean space. Specifically, HLFormer integrates the Lorentz Attention Block and Euclidean Attention Block to encode video embeddings in hybrid spaces, using the Mean-Guided Adaptive Interaction Module to dynamically fuse features. Additionally, we introduce a Partial Order Preservation Loss to enforce "text < video" hierarchy through Lorentzian cone constraints. This approach further enhances cross-modal matching by reinforcing partial relevance between video content and text queries. Extensive experiments show that HLFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is released at https://github.com/lijun2005/ICCV25-HLFormer.

Designing an efficient and effective neural network has remained a prominent topic in computer vision research. Depthwise onvolution (DWConv) is widely used in efficient CNNs or ViTs, but it needs frequent memory access during inference, which leads to low throughput. FasterNet attempts to introduce partial convolution (PConv) as an alternative to DWConv but compromises the accuracy due to underutilized channels. To remedy this shortcoming and consider the redundancy between feature map channels, we introduce a novel Partial visual ATtention mechanism (PAT) that can efficiently combine PConv with visual attention. Our exploration indicates that the partial attention mechanism can completely replace the full attention mechanism and reduce model parameters and FLOPs. Our PAT can derive three types of blocks: Partial Channel-Attention block (PAT_ch), Partial Spatial-Attention block (PAT_sp) and Partial Self-Attention block (PAT_sf). First, PAT_ch integrates the enhanced Gaussian channel attention mechanism to infuse global distribution information into the untouched channels of PConv. Second, we introduce the spatial-wise attention to the MLP layer to further improve model accuracy. Finally, we replace PAT_ch in the last stage with the self-attention mechanism to extend the global receptive field. Building upon PAT, we propose a novel hybrid network family, named PATNet, which achieves superior top-1 accuracy and inference speed compared to FasterNet on ImageNet-1K classification and excel in both detection and segmentation on the COCO dataset. Particularly, our PATNet-T2 achieves 1.3% higher accuracy than FasterNet-T2, while exhibiting 25% higher GPU throughput and 24% lower CPU latency.

The greatest ambition of mechanistic interpretability is to completely rewrite deep neural networks in a format that is more amenable to human understanding, while preserving their behavior and performance. In this paper, we attempt to partially rewrite a large language model using simple natural language explanations. We first approximate one of the feedforward networks in the LLM with a wider MLP with sparsely activating neurons - a transcoder - and use an automated interpretability pipeline to generate explanations for these neurons. We then replace the first layer of this sparse MLP with an LLM-based simulator, which predicts the activation of each neuron given its explanation and the surrounding context. Finally, we measure the degree to which these modifications distort the model's final output. With our pipeline, the model's increase in loss is statistically similar to entirely replacing the sparse MLP output with the zero vector. We employ the same protocol, this time using a sparse autoencoder, on the residual stream of the same layer and obtain similar results. These results suggest that more detailed explanations are needed to improve performance substantially above the zero ablation baseline.

The release of nuPlan marks a new era in vehicle motion planning research, offering the first large-scale real-world dataset and evaluation schemes requiring both precise short-term planning and long-horizon ego-forecasting. Existing systems struggle to simultaneously meet both requirements. Indeed, we find that these tasks are fundamentally misaligned and should be addressed independently. We further assess the current state of closed-loop planning in the field, revealing the limitations of learning-based methods in complex real-world scenarios and the value of simple rule-based priors such as centerline selection through lane graph search algorithms. More surprisingly, for the open-loop sub-task, we observe that the best results are achieved when using only this centerline as scene context (\ie, ignoring all information regarding the map and other agents). Combining these insights, we propose an extremely simple and efficient planner which outperforms an extensive set of competitors, winning the nuPlan planning challenge 2023.

AI's transformative impact on work, education, and everyday life makes it as much a political artifact as a technological one. Current AI models are opaque, centralized, and overly generic. The algorithmic automation they provide threatens human agency and democratic values in both workplaces and daily life. To confront such challenges, we turn to Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD), which was devised in the 1970s to face a similar threat from mechanical automation. In the PD tradition, technology is seen not just as an artifact, but as a locus of democracy. Drawing from this tradition, we propose Participatory AI as a PD approach to human-centered AI that applies five PD principles to four design challenges for algorithmic automation. We use concrete case studies to illustrate how to treat AI models less as proprietary products and more as shared socio-technical systems that enhance rather than diminish human agency, human dignity, and human values.

Modeling the dynamics of deformable objects is challenging due to their diverse physical properties and the difficulty of estimating states from limited visual information. We address these challenges with a neural dynamics framework that combines object particles and spatial grids in a hybrid representation. Our particle-grid model captures global shape and motion information while predicting dense particle movements, enabling the modeling of objects with varied shapes and materials. Particles represent object shapes, while the spatial grid discretizes the 3D space to ensure spatial continuity and enhance learning efficiency. Coupled with Gaussian Splattings for visual rendering, our framework achieves a fully learning-based digital twin of deformable objects and generates 3D action-conditioned videos. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model learns the dynamics of diverse objects -- such as ropes, cloths, stuffed animals, and paper bags -- from sparse-view RGB-D recordings of robot-object interactions, while also generalizing at the category level to unseen instances. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based and physics-based simulators, particularly in scenarios with limited camera views. Furthermore, we showcase the utility of our learned models in model-based planning, enabling goal-conditioned object manipulation across a range of tasks. The project page is available at https://kywind.github.io/pgnd .

Diacritization plays a pivotal role in improving readability and disambiguating the meaning of Arabic texts. Efforts have so far focused on marking every eligible character (Full Diacritization). Comparatively overlooked, Partial Diacritzation (PD) is the selection of a subset of characters to be marked to aid comprehension where needed. Research has indicated that excessive diacritic marks can hinder skilled readers--reducing reading speed and accuracy. We conduct a behavioral experiment and show that partially marked text is often easier to read than fully marked text, and sometimes easier than plain text. In this light, we introduce Context-Contrastive Partial Diacritization (CCPD)--a novel approach to PD which integrates seamlessly with existing Arabic diacritization systems. CCPD processes each word twice, once with context and once without, and diacritizes only the characters with disparities between the two inferences. Further, we introduce novel indicators for measuring partial diacritization quality (SR, PDER, HDER, ERE), essential for establishing this as a machine learning task. Lastly, we introduce TD2, a Transformer-variant of an established model which offers a markedly different per formance profile on our proposed indicators compared to all other known systems.

The design choices in Transformer feed-forward neural networks have resulted in significant computational and parameter overhead. In this work, we emphasize the importance of hidden dimension in designing lightweight FFNs, a factor often overlooked in previous architectures. Guided by this principle, we introduce PartialFormer, a parameter-efficient Transformer architecture utilizing multiple smaller FFNs to reduce parameters and computation while maintaining essential hidden dimensions. These smaller FFNs are integrated into a multi-head attention system to enable effective collaboration. We also propose a tailored head scaling strategy to enhance PartialFormer's capabilities. Furthermore, we present a residual-like attention calculation to improve depth scaling within PartialFormer. Extensive experiments on 9 translation tasks and 1 abstractive summarization task validate the effectiveness of our PartialFormer approach. Our code would be available at: https://github.com/zhengkid/PartialFormer.

Point cloud completion aims to recover the complete shape based on a partial observation. Existing methods require either complete point clouds or multiple partial observations of the same object for learning. In contrast to previous approaches, we present Partial2Complete (P2C), the first self-supervised framework that completes point cloud objects using training samples consisting of only a single incomplete point cloud per object. Specifically, our framework groups incomplete point clouds into local patches as input and predicts masked patches by learning prior information from different partial objects. We also propose Region-Aware Chamfer Distance to regularize shape mismatch without limiting completion capability, and devise the Normal Consistency Constraint to incorporate a local planarity assumption, encouraging the recovered shape surface to be continuous and complete. In this way, P2C no longer needs multiple observations or complete point clouds as ground truth. Instead, structural cues are learned from a category-specific dataset to complete partial point clouds of objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic ShapeNet data and real-world ScanNet data, showing that P2C produces comparable results to methods trained with complete shapes, and outperforms methods learned with multiple partial observations. Code is available at https://github.com/CuiRuikai/Partial2Complete.

PyPOTS is an open-source Python library dedicated to data mining and analysis on multivariate partially-observed time series with missing values. Particularly, it provides easy access to diverse algorithms categorized into five tasks: imputation, forecasting, anomaly detection, classification, and clustering. The included models represent a diverse set of methodological paradigms, offering a unified and well-documented interface suitable for both academic research and practical applications. With robustness and scalability in its design philosophy, best practices of software construction, for example, unit testing, continuous integration and continuous delivery, code coverage, maintainability evaluation, interactive tutorials, and parallelization, are carried out as principles during the development of PyPOTS. The toolbox is available on PyPI, Anaconda, and Docker. PyPOTS is open source and publicly available on GitHub https://github.com/WenjieDu/PyPOTS.

Particle gradient descent, which uses particles to represent a probability measure and performs gradient descent on particles in parallel, is widely used to optimize functions of probability measures. This paper considers particle gradient descent with a finite number of particles and establishes its theoretical guarantees to optimize functions that are displacement convex in measures. Concretely, for Lipschitz displacement convex functions defined on probability over R^d, we prove that O(1/epsilon^2) particles and O(d/epsilon^4) computations are sufficient to find the epsilon-optimal solutions. We further provide improved complexity bounds for optimizing smooth displacement convex functions. We demonstrate the application of our results for function approximation with specific neural architectures with two-dimensional inputs.

The Earth's atmosphere is an aerosol, it contains suspended particles. When air flows over an obstacle such as an aircraft wing or tree branch, these particles may not follow the same paths as the air flowing around the obstacle. Instead the particles in the air may deviate from the path of the air and so collide with the surface of the obstacle. It is known that particle inertia can drive this deposition, and that there is a critical value of this inertia, below which no point particles deposit. Particle inertia is measured by the Stokes number, St. We show that near the critical value of the Stokes number, St_c, the amount of deposition has the unusual scaling law of exp(-1/(St-St_c)^{1/2}). The scaling is controlled by the stagnation point of the flow. This scaling is determined by the time for the particle to reach the surface of the cylinder varying as 1/(St-St_c)^{1/2}, together with the distance away from the stagnation point (perpendicular to the flow direction) increasing exponentially with time. The scaling law applies to inviscid flow, a model for flow at high Reynolds numbers. The unusual scaling means that the amount of particles deposited increases only very slowly above the critical Stokes number. This has consequences for applications ranging from rime formation and fog harvesting to pollination.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are important tools to model physical systems, and including them into machine learning models is an important way of incorporating physical knowledge. Given any system of linear PDEs with constant coefficients, we propose a family of Gaussian process (GP) priors, which we call EPGP, such that all realizations are exact solutions of this system. We apply the Ehrenpreis-Palamodov fundamental principle, which works like a non-linear Fourier transform, to construct GP kernels mirroring standard spectral methods for GPs. Our approach can infer probable solutions of linear PDE systems from any data such as noisy measurements, or pointwise defined initial and boundary conditions. Constructing EPGP-priors is algorithmic, generally applicable, and comes with a sparse version (S-EPGP) that learns the relevant spectral frequencies and works better for big data sets. We demonstrate our approach on three families of systems of PDE, the heat equation, wave equation, and Maxwell's equations, where we improve upon the state of the art in computation time and precision, in some experiments by several orders of magnitude.

College students often face academic and life stressors affecting productivity, especially students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) who experience executive functioning challenges. Conventional productivity tools typically demand sustained self-discipline and consistent use, which many students struggle with, leading to disruptive app-switching behaviors. Socially Assistive Robots (SARs), known for their intuitive and interactive nature, offer promising potential to support productivity in academic environments, having been successfully utilized in domains like education, cognitive development, and mental health. To leverage SARs effectively in addressing student productivity, this study employed a Participatory Design (PD) approach, directly involving college students and a Student Success and Well-Being Coach in the design process. Through interviews and a collaborative workshop, we gathered detailed insights on productivity challenges and identified desirable features for a productivity-focused SAR. Importantly, ethical considerations were integrated from the onset, facilitating responsible and user-aligned design choices. Our contributions include comprehensive insights into student productivity challenges, SAR design preferences, and actionable recommendations for effective robot characteristics. Additionally, we present stakeholder-derived ethical guidelines to inform responsible future implementations of productivity-focused SARs in higher education.

Inference-Time Scaling (ITS) improves language models by allocating more computation at generation time. Particle Filtering (PF) has emerged as a strong ITS method for complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but it is vulnerable when guided by process reward models, which often assign overconfident scores early in the reasoning process. This causes PF to suffer from premature exploitation: it myopically commits to locally promising trajectories, prunes potentially correct hypotheses, and converges to suboptimal solutions. This failure mode, known as particle impoverishment, is especially severe under constrained computational budgets. To address this, we analyze the problem and identify two root causes: a lack of diversity in the particle set due to overconfident resampling and consequent inability to assess the potential of a reasoning path. We introduce Entropic Particle Filtering (ePF), an algorithm that integrates two new techniques to solve these issues. The first technique, Entropic Annealing (EA), directly mitigates particle impoverishment by monitoring search diversity via entropy; when diversity drops, it intervenes by dynamically annealing the resampling distribution to preserve exploration. The second, an enhancement called Look-ahead Modulation (LaM), adds a predictive guide to evaluate a state's potential based on its successors. On several challenging math benchmarks, ePF significantly outperforms strong baselines and achieves up to a 50 % relative improvement in task reward. Together, these methods improve PF's resilience by balancing the exploration of diverse solution spaces with the exploitation of high-reward regions, ultimately leading to higher-quality solutions.

Shared control is a form of video gaming accessibility support that allows players with disabilities to delegate inaccessible controls to another person. Through interviews involving 14 individuals with lived experience of accessible gaming in shared control, we explore the ways in which shared control technologies are adopted in practice, the accessibility challenges they address, and how the support currently provided in shared control can be automated to remove the need for a human assistant. Findings indicate that shared control is essential for enabling access to otherwise inaccessible games, but its reliance on human support is a key limitation. Participants welcomed the idea of automating the support with software agents, while also identifying limitations and design requirements. Accordingly, this work contributes insights into current practices and proposes guidelines for developing automated support systems.

Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation (ZSS) aims to segment both seen and unseen classes using supervision from only seen classes. Beyond adaptation-based methods, distillation-based approaches transfer vision-language alignment of vision-language model, e.g., CLIP, to segmentation models. However, such knowledge transfer remains challenging due to: (1) the difficulty of aligning vision-based features with the textual space, which requires combining spatial precision with vision-language alignment; and (2) the semantic gap between CLIP's global representations and the local, fine-grained features of segmentation models. To address challenge (1), we propose Chimera-Seg, which integrates a segmentation backbone as the body and a CLIP-based semantic head as the head, like the Chimera in Greek mythology, combining spatial precision with vision-language alignment. Specifically, Chimera-Seg comprises a trainable segmentation model and a CLIP Semantic Head (CSH), which maps dense features into the CLIP-aligned space. The CSH incorporates a frozen subnetwork and fixed projection layers from the CLIP visual encoder, along with lightweight trainable components. The partial module from CLIP visual encoder, paired with the segmentation model, retains segmentation capability while easing the mapping to CLIP's semantic space. To address challenge (2), we propose Selective Global Distillation (SGD), which distills knowledge from dense features exhibiting high similarity to the CLIP CLS token, while gradually reducing the number of features used for alignment as training progresses. Besides, we also use a Semantic Alignment Module (SAM) to further align dense visual features with semantic embeddings extracted from the frozen CLIP text encoder. Experiments on two benchmarks show improvements of 0.9% and 1.2% in hIoU.

We introduce ``Partition Generative Models'' (PGMs), a novel approach to masked generative modeling (MGMs), particularly effective for masked diffusion language modeling (MDLMs). PGM divides tokens into two distinct groups and employs sparse attention patterns to prevent cross-group information exchange. Hence, the model is trained to predict tokens in one group based solely on information from the other group. This partitioning strategy eliminates the need for MASK tokens entirely. While traditional MGMs inefficiently process MASK tokens during generation, PGMs achieve greater computational efficiency by operating exclusively on unmasked tokens. Our experiments on OpenWebText with a context length of 1024 tokens demonstrate that PGMs deliver at least 5x improvements in both latency and throughput compared to MDLM when using the same number of sampling steps, while generating samples with better generative perplexity than MDLM. Finally, we show that PGMs can be distilled with Self-Distillation Through Time (SDTT), a method originally devised for MDLM, in order to achieve further inference gains.

Partial perception deficits can compromise autonomous vehicle safety by disrupting environmental understanding. Current protocols typically respond with immediate stops or minimal-risk maneuvers, worsening traffic flow and lacking flexibility for rare driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose LLM-RCO, a framework leveraging large language models to integrate human-like driving commonsense into autonomous systems facing perception deficits. LLM-RCO features four key modules: hazard inference, short-term motion planner, action condition verifier, and safety constraint generator. These modules interact with the dynamic driving environment, enabling proactive and context-aware control actions to override the original control policy of autonomous agents. To improve safety in such challenging conditions, we construct DriveLM-Deficit, a dataset of 53,895 video clips featuring deficits of safety-critical objects, complete with annotations for LLM-based hazard inference and motion planning fine-tuning. Extensive experiments in adverse driving conditions with the CARLA simulator demonstrate that systems equipped with LLM-RCO significantly improve driving performance, highlighting its potential for enhancing autonomous driving resilience against adverse perception deficits. Our results also show that LLMs fine-tuned with DriveLM-Deficit can enable more proactive movements instead of conservative stops in the context of perception deficits.

Prior parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) algorithms reduce memory usage and computational costs of fine-tuning large neural network models by training only a few additional adapter parameters, rather than the entire model. However, the reduction in computational costs due to PEFT does not necessarily translate to a reduction in training time; although the computational costs of the adapter layers are much smaller than the pretrained layers, it is well known that those two types of layers are processed sequentially on GPUs, resulting in significant latency overhead. LoRA and its variants merge low-rank adapter matrices with pretrained weights during inference to avoid latency overhead, but during training, the pretrained weights remain frozen while the adapter matrices are continuously updated, preventing such merging. To mitigate this issue, we propose Partial Connection Adaptation (PaCA), which fine-tunes randomly selected partial connections within the pretrained weights instead of introducing adapter layers in the model. PaCA not only enhances training speed by eliminating the time overhead due to the sequential processing of the adapter and pretrained layers but also reduces activation memory since only partial activations, rather than full activations, need to be stored for gradient computation. Compared to LoRA, PaCA reduces training time by 22% and total memory usage by 16%, while maintaining comparable accuracy across various fine-tuning scenarios, such as fine-tuning on the MMLU dataset and instruction tuning on the Oasst1 dataset. PaCA can also be combined with quantization, enabling the fine-tuning of large models such as LLaMA3.1-70B. In addition, PaCA enables training with 23% longer sequence and improves throughput by 16% on both NVIDIA A100 GPU and INTEL Gaudi2 HPU compared to LoRA. The code is available at https://github.com/WooSunghyeon/paca.

Effective self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have been key to unlocking large datasets for representation learning. While many promising methods have been developed using online corpora and captioned photographs, their application to scientific domains, where data encodes highly specialized knowledge, remains a challenge. Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs) provide high-resolution 3D imaging for fundamental physics, but analysis of their sparse, complex point cloud data often relies on supervised methods trained on large simulations, introducing potential biases. We introduce the Point-based Liquid Argon Masked Autoencoder (PoLAr-MAE), applying masked point modeling to unlabeled LArTPC images using domain-specific volumetric tokenization and energy prediction. We show this SSL approach learns physically meaningful trajectory representations directly from data. This yields remarkable data efficiency: fine-tuning on just 100 labeled events achieves track/shower semantic segmentation performance comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised baseline trained on >100,000 events. Furthermore, internal attention maps exhibit emergent instance segmentation of particle trajectories. While challenges remain, particularly for fine-grained features, we make concrete SSL's potential for building a foundation model for LArTPC image analysis capable of serving as a common base for all data reconstruction tasks. To facilitate further progress, we release PILArNet-M, a large dataset of 1M LArTPC events. Project site: https://youngsm.com/polarmae.

Neural networks are a group of neurons stacked together in multiple layers to mimic the biological neurons in a human brain. Neural networks have been trained using the backpropagation algorithm based on gradient descent strategy for several decades. Several variants have been developed to improve the backpropagation algorithm. The loss function for the neural network is optimized through backpropagation, but several local minima exist in the manifold of the constructed neural network. We obtain several solutions matching the minima. The gradient descent strategy cannot avoid the problem of local minima and gets stuck in the minima due to the initialization. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) was proposed to select the best local minima among the search space of the loss function. The search space is limited to the instantiated particles in the PSO algorithm, and sometimes it cannot select the best solution. In the proposed approach, we overcome the problem of gradient descent and the limitation of the PSO algorithm by training individual neurons separately, capable of collectively solving the problem as a group of neurons forming a network. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/dipkmr/train-nn-wobp/

Diffusion models have exhibited exciting capabilities in generating images and are also very promising for video creation. However, the inference speed of diffusion models is limited by the slow sampling process, restricting its use cases. The sequential denoising steps required for generating a single sample could take tens or hundreds of iterations and thus have become a significant bottleneck. This limitation is more salient for applications that are interactive in nature or require small latency. To address this challenge, we propose Partially Conditioned Patch Parallelism (PCPP) to accelerate the inference of high-resolution diffusion models. Using the fact that the difference between the images in adjacent diffusion steps is nearly zero, Patch Parallelism (PP) leverages multiple GPUs communicating asynchronously to compute patches of an image in multiple computing devices based on the entire image (all patches) in the previous diffusion step. PCPP develops PP to reduce computation in inference by conditioning only on parts of the neighboring patches in each diffusion step, which also decreases communication among computing devices. As a result, PCPP decreases the communication cost by around 70% compared to DistriFusion (the state of the art implementation of PP) and achieves 2.36sim 8.02times inference speed-up using 4sim 8 GPUs compared to 2.32sim 6.71times achieved by DistriFusion depending on the computing device configuration and resolution of generation at the cost of a possible decrease in image quality. PCPP demonstrates the potential to strike a favorable trade-off, enabling high-quality image generation with substantially reduced latency.

Code executability plays a vital role in software debugging and testing (e.g., detecting runtime exceptions or assertion violations). However, code execution, especially partial or arbitrary code execution, is a non-trivial task due to missing definitions and complex third-party dependencies. To make partial code (such as code snippets posted on the web or code fragments deep inside complex software projects) executable, the existing study has proposed a machine learning model to predict the undefined element types and inject the pre-defined dummy values into execution. However, the performance of their tool is limited due to its simply designed dummy values and the inability to continue learning. In this paper, we design and implement a novel framework, named SelfPiCo (Self Guided Partial Code Executor), to dynamically guide partial code execution by incorporating the open-source LLM (i.e., Code Llama) within an interactive loop. Particularly, SelfPiCo leverages few-shot in-context learning and chain-of-thought reasoning to elicit human knowledge and logical reasoning based on fine-tuning the Code Llama model. SelfPiCo continuously learns from code execution results and refines its predictions step after step. Our evaluations demonstrate that SelfPiCo can execute 72.7% and 83.3% of all lines in the open-source code and Stack Overflow snippets, outperforming the most recent state-of-the-art Lexecutor by 37.9% and 33.5%, respectively. Moreover, SelfPiCo successfully detected 18 and 33 runtime type error issues by executing the partial code from eight GitHub software projects and 43 Stack Overflow posts, demonstrating the practical usage and potential application of our framework in practice.

Deep learning-based object recognition systems can be easily fooled by various adversarial perturbations. One reason for the weak robustness may be that they do not have part-based inductive bias like the human recognition process. Motivated by this, several part-based recognition models have been proposed to improve the adversarial robustness of recognition. However, due to the lack of part annotations, the effectiveness of these methods is only validated on small-scale nonstandard datasets. In this work, we propose PIN++, short for PartImageNet++, a dataset providing high-quality part segmentation annotations for all categories of ImageNet-1K (IN-1K). With these annotations, we build part-based methods directly on the standard IN-1K dataset for robust recognition. Different from previous two-stage part-based models, we propose a Multi-scale Part-supervised Model (MPM), to learn a robust representation with part annotations. Experiments show that MPM yielded better adversarial robustness on the large-scale IN-1K over strong baselines across various attack settings. Furthermore, MPM achieved improved robustness on common corruptions and several out-of-distribution datasets. The dataset, together with these results, enables and encourages researchers to explore the potential of part-based models in more real applications.

Particle-based representations of radiance fields such as 3D Gaussian Splatting have found great success for reconstructing and re-rendering of complex scenes. Most existing methods render particles via rasterization, projecting them to screen space tiles for processing in a sorted order. This work instead considers ray tracing the particles, building a bounding volume hierarchy and casting a ray for each pixel using high-performance GPU ray tracing hardware. To efficiently handle large numbers of semi-transparent particles, we describe a specialized rendering algorithm which encapsulates particles with bounding meshes to leverage fast ray-triangle intersections, and shades batches of intersections in depth-order. The benefits of ray tracing are well-known in computer graphics: processing incoherent rays for secondary lighting effects such as shadows and reflections, rendering from highly-distorted cameras common in robotics, stochastically sampling rays, and more. With our renderer, this flexibility comes at little cost compared to rasterization. Experiments demonstrate the speed and accuracy of our approach, as well as several applications in computer graphics and vision. We further propose related improvements to the basic Gaussian representation, including a simple use of generalized kernel functions which significantly reduces particle hit counts.

Relativistic magnetic turbulence has been proposed as a process for producing nonthermal particles in high-energy astrophysics. Particle energization may be contributed by both magnetic reconnection and turbulent fluctuations, but their interplay is poorly understood. It has been suggested that during magnetic reconnection the parallel electric field dominates particle acceleration up to the lower bound of the power-law particle spectrum, but recent studies show that electric fields perpendicular to magnetic field can play an important, if not dominant role. In this study, we carry out 2D fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of magnetically dominated decaying turbulence in a relativistic pair plasma. For a fixed magnetization parameter sigma_0=20, we find that the injection energy {varepsilon}_{rm inj} converges with increasing domain size to {varepsilon}_{rm inj}simeq 10m_ec^2. In contrast, the power-law index, the cut-off energy, and the power-law extent increase steadily with domain size. We trace a large number of particles and evaluate the contributions of the work done by the parallel (W_parallel) and perpendicular (W_perp) electric fields during both the injection phase and the post-injection phase. We find that during the injection phase, the W_perp contribution increases with domain size, suggesting that it may eventually dominate injection for a sufficiently large domain. In contrast, both components contribute equally during the post-injection phase, insensitive to the domain size. For high energy ({varepsilon}varepsilon_{rm inj}) particles, W_perp dominates the subsequent energization. These findings may improve our understanding of nonthermal particles and their emissions in astrophysical plasmas.

Randomly initialized dense networks contain subnetworks that achieve high accuracy without weight learning--strong lottery tickets (SLTs). Recently, Gadhikar et al. (2023) demonstrated that SLTs could also be found within a randomly pruned source network. This phenomenon can be exploited to further compress the small memory size required by SLTs. However, their method is limited to SLTs that are even sparser than the source, leading to worse accuracy due to unintentionally high sparsity. This paper proposes a method for reducing the SLT memory size without restricting the sparsity of the SLTs that can be found. A random subset of the initial weights is frozen by either permanently pruning them or locking them as a fixed part of the SLT, resulting in a smaller model size. Experimental results show that Edge-Popup (Ramanujan et al., 2020; Sreenivasan et al., 2022) finds SLTs with better accuracy-to-model size trade-off within frozen networks than within dense or randomly pruned source networks. In particular, freezing 70% of a ResNet on ImageNet provides 3.3 times compression compared to the SLT found within a dense counterpart, raises accuracy by up to 14.12 points compared to the SLT found within a randomly pruned counterpart, and offers a better accuracy-model size trade-off than both.

Particle tracking is crucial for almost all physics analysis programs at the Large Hadron Collider. Deep learning models are pervasively used in particle tracking related tasks. However, the current practice is to design and train one deep learning model for one task with supervised learning techniques. The trained models work well for tasks they are trained on but show no or little generalization capabilities. We propose to unify these models with a language model. In this paper, we present a tokenized detector representation that allows us to train a BERT model for particle tracking. The trained BERT model, namely TrackingBERT, offers latent detector module embedding that can be used for other tasks. This work represents the first step towards developing a foundational model for particle detector understanding.

The volumetric representation of human interactions is one of the fundamental domains in the development of immersive media productions and telecommunication applications. Particularly in the context of the rapid advancement of Extended Reality (XR) applications, this volumetric data has proven to be an essential technology for future XR elaboration. In this work, we present a new multimodal database to help advance the development of immersive technologies. Our proposed database provides ethically compliant and diverse volumetric data, in particular 27 participants displaying posed facial expressions and subtle body movements while speaking, plus 11 participants wearing head-mounted displays (HMDs). The recording system consists of a volumetric capture (VoCap) studio, including 31 synchronized modules with 62 RGB cameras and 31 depth cameras. In addition to textured meshes, point clouds, and multi-view RGB-D data, we use one Lytro Illum camera for providing light field (LF) data simultaneously. Finally, we also provide an evaluation of our dataset employment with regard to the tasks of facial expression classification, HMDs removal, and point cloud reconstruction. The dataset can be helpful in the evaluation and performance testing of various XR algorithms, including but not limited to facial expression recognition and reconstruction, facial reenactment, and volumetric video. HEADSET and its all associated raw data and license agreement will be publicly available for research purposes.

Bias mitigation in image classification has been widely researched, and existing methods have yielded notable results. However, most of these methods implicitly assume that a given image contains only one type of known or unknown bias, failing to consider the complexities of real-world biases. We introduce a more challenging scenario, agnostic biases mitigation, aiming at bias removal regardless of whether the type of bias or the number of types is unknown in the datasets. To address this difficult task, we present the Partition-and-Debias (PnD) method that uses a mixture of biases-specific experts to implicitly divide the bias space into multiple subspaces and a gating module to find a consensus among experts to achieve debiased classification. Experiments on both public and constructed benchmarks demonstrated the efficacy of the PnD. Code is available at: https://github.com/Jiaxuan-Li/PnD.

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) represents a promising solution for decentralized learning in heterogeneous data environments. Partial model personalization has been proposed to improve the efficiency of PFL by selectively updating local model parameters instead of aggregating all of them. However, previous work on partial model personalization has mainly focused on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), leaving a gap in understanding how it can be applied to other popular models such as Vision Transformers (ViTs). In this work, we investigate where and how to partially personalize a ViT model. Specifically, we empirically evaluate the sensitivity to data distribution of each type of layer. Based on the insights that the self-attention layer and the classification head are the most sensitive parts of a ViT, we propose a novel approach called FedPerfix, which leverages plugins to transfer information from the aggregated model to the local client as a personalization. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach on CIFAR-100, OrganAMNIST, and Office-Home datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the model's performance compared to several advanced PFL methods.

Deep Ensembles (DEs) demonstrate improved accuracy, calibration and robustness to perturbations over single neural networks partly due to their functional diversity. Particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods enhance diversity by formalizing a repulsion term based on a network similarity kernel. However, weight-space repulsion is inefficient due to over-parameterization, while direct function-space repulsion has been found to produce little improvement over DEs. To sidestep these difficulties, we propose First-order Repulsive Deep Ensemble (FoRDE), an ensemble learning method based on ParVI, which performs repulsion in the space of first-order input gradients. As input gradients uniquely characterize a function up to translation and are much smaller in dimension than the weights, this method guarantees that ensemble members are functionally different. Intuitively, diversifying the input gradients encourages each network to learn different features, which is expected to improve the robustness of an ensemble. Experiments on image classification datasets and transfer learning tasks show that FoRDE significantly outperforms the gold-standard DEs and other ensemble methods in accuracy and calibration under covariate shift due to input perturbations.

Recent years have witnessed an interesting phenomenon in which users come together to interrogate potentially harmful algorithmic behaviors they encounter in their everyday lives. Researchers have started to develop theoretical and empirical understandings of these user driven audits, with a hope to harness the power of users in detecting harmful machine behaviors. However, little is known about user participation and their division of labor in these audits, which are essential to support these collective efforts in the future. Through collecting and analyzing 17,984 tweets from four recent cases of user driven audits, we shed light on patterns of user participation and engagement, especially with the top contributors in each case. We also identified the various roles user generated content played in these audits, including hypothesizing, data collection, amplification, contextualization, and escalation. We discuss implications for designing tools to support user driven audits and users who labor to raise awareness of algorithm bias.

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are used to model environments where the full state cannot be perceived by an agent. As such the agent needs to reason taking into account the past observations and actions. However, simply remembering the full history is generally intractable due to the exponential growth in the history space. Maintaining a probability distribution that models the belief over what the true state is can be used as a sufficient statistic of the history, but its computation requires access to the model of the environment and is often intractable. While SOTA algorithms use Recurrent Neural Networks to compress the observation-action history aiming to learn a sufficient statistic, they lack guarantees of success and can lead to sub-optimal policies. To overcome this, we propose the Wasserstein Belief Updater, an RL algorithm that learns a latent model of the POMDP and an approximation of the belief update. Our approach comes with theoretical guarantees on the quality of our approximation ensuring that our outputted beliefs allow for learning the optimal value function.

Urine sediment examination (USE) is one of the main tests used in the evaluation of diseases such as kidney, urinary, metabolic, and diabetes and to determine the density and number of various cells in the urine. USE's manual microscopy is a labor-intensive and time-consuming, imprecise, subjective process. Recently, automatic analysis of urine sediment has become inevitable in the medical field. In this study, we propose a dataset that can be used by artificial intelligence techniques to automatically identify particles in urine sediment images. The data set consists of 8509 particle images obtained by examining the particles in the urine sediment obtained from 409 patients from the Biochemistry Clinics of Elazig Fethi Sekin Central Hospital. Particle images are collected in 8 classes in total and these are Erythrocyte, Leukocyte, Epithelial, Bacteria, Yeast, Cylinders, Crystals, and others (sperm, etc.).

The higher-order correlation clustering problem is an expressive model, and recently, local search heuristics have been proposed for several applications. Certifying optimality, however, is NP-hard and practically hampered already by the complexity of the problem statement. Here, we focus on establishing partial optimality conditions for the special case of complete graphs and cubic objective functions. In addition, we define and implement algorithms for testing these conditions and examine their effect numerically, on two datasets.

Machine learning models are often personalized with information that is protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. These models use information about people but do not facilitate nor inform their consent. Individuals cannot opt out of reporting personal information to a model, nor tell if they benefit from personalization in the first place. We introduce a family of classification models, called participatory systems, that let individuals opt into personalization at prediction time. We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for personalization with categorical group attributes. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of participatory systems in clinical prediction tasks, benchmarking them with common approaches for personalization and imputation. Our results demonstrate that participatory systems can facilitate and inform consent while improving performance and data use across all groups who report personal data.

Partitura is a lightweight Python package for handling symbolic musical information. It provides easy access to features commonly used in music information retrieval tasks, like note arrays (lists of timed pitched events) and 2D piano roll matrices, as well as other score elements such as time and key signatures, performance directives, and repeat structures. Partitura can load musical scores (in MEI, MusicXML, Kern, and MIDI formats), MIDI performances, and score-to-performance alignments. The package includes some tools for music analysis, such as automatic pitch spelling, key signature identification, and voice separation. Partitura is an open-source project and is available at https://github.com/CPJKU/partitura/.

Partial label learning (PLL) aims to train multiclass classifiers from the examples each annotated with a set of candidate labels where a fixed but unknown candidate label is correct. In the last few years, the instance-independent generation process of candidate labels has been extensively studied, on the basis of which many theoretical advances have been made in PLL. Nevertheless, the candidate labels are always instance-dependent in practice and there is no theoretical guarantee that the model trained on the instance-dependent PLL examples can converge to an ideal one. In this paper, a theoretically grounded and practically effective approach named POP, i.e. PrOgressive Purification for instance-dependent partial label learning, is proposed. Specifically, POP updates the learning model and purifies each candidate label set progressively in every epoch. Theoretically, we prove that POP enlarges the region appropriately fast where the model is reliable, and eventually approximates the Bayes optimal classifier with mild assumptions. Technically, POP is flexible with arbitrary PLL losses and could improve the performance of the previous PLL losses in the instance-dependent case. Experiments on the benchmark datasets and the real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Tracking pixels in videos is typically studied as an optical flow estimation problem, where every pixel is described with a displacement vector that locates it in the next frame. Even though wider temporal context is freely available, prior efforts to take this into account have yielded only small gains over 2-frame methods. In this paper, we revisit Sand and Teller's "particle video" approach, and study pixel tracking as a long-range motion estimation problem, where every pixel is described with a trajectory that locates it in multiple future frames. We re-build this classic approach using components that drive the current state-of-the-art in flow and object tracking, such as dense cost maps, iterative optimization, and learned appearance updates. We train our models using long-range amodal point trajectories mined from existing optical flow data that we synthetically augment with multi-frame occlusions. We test our approach in trajectory estimation benchmarks and in keypoint label propagation tasks, and compare favorably against state-of-the-art optical flow and feature tracking methods.

Jet tagging is a critical yet challenging classification task in particle physics. While deep learning has transformed jet tagging and significantly improved performance, the lack of a large-scale public dataset impedes further enhancement. In this work, we present JetClass, a new comprehensive dataset for jet tagging. The JetClass dataset consists of 100 M jets, about two orders of magnitude larger than existing public datasets. A total of 10 types of jets are simulated, including several types unexplored for tagging so far. Based on the large dataset, we propose a new Transformer-based architecture for jet tagging, called Particle Transformer (ParT). By incorporating pairwise particle interactions in the attention mechanism, ParT achieves higher tagging performance than a plain Transformer and surpasses the previous state-of-the-art, ParticleNet, by a large margin. The pre-trained ParT models, once fine-tuned, also substantially enhance the performance on two widely adopted jet tagging benchmarks. The dataset, code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/jet-universe/particle_transformer.

It is natural to represent objects in terms of their parts. This has the potential to improve the performance of algorithms for object recognition and segmentation but can also help for downstream tasks like activity recognition. Research on part-based models, however, is hindered by the lack of datasets with per-pixel part annotations. This is partly due to the difficulty and high cost of annotating object parts so it has rarely been done except for humans (where there exists a big literature on part-based models). To help address this problem, we propose PartImageNet, a large, high-quality dataset with part segmentation annotations. It consists of 158 classes from ImageNet with approximately 24,000 images. PartImageNet is unique because it offers part-level annotations on a general set of classes including non-rigid, articulated objects, while having an order of magnitude larger size compared to existing part datasets (excluding datasets of humans). It can be utilized for many vision tasks including Object Segmentation, Semantic Part Segmentation, Few-shot Learning and Part Discovery. We conduct comprehensive experiments which study these tasks and set up a set of baselines. The dataset and scripts are released at https://github.com/TACJu/PartImageNet.

Loss landscape is a useful tool to characterize and compare neural network models. The main challenge for analysis of loss landscape for the deep neural networks is that they are generally highly non-convex in very high dimensional space. In this paper, we develop "the roughness"concept for understanding such landscapes in high dimensions and apply this technique to study two neural network models arising from solving differential equations. Our main innovation is the proposal of a well-defined and easy-to-compute roughness index (RI) which is based on the mean and variance of the (normalized) total variation for one-dimensional functions projected on randomly sampled directions. A large RI at the local minimizer hints an oscillatory landscape profile and indicates a severe challenge for the first-order optimization method. Particularly, we observe the increasing-then-decreasing pattern for RI along the gradient descent path in most models. We apply our method to two types of loss functions used to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) when the solution of PDE is parametrized by neural networks. Our empirical results on these PDE problems reveal important and consistent observations that the landscapes from the deep Galerkin method around its local minimizers are less rough than the deep Ritz method.

In this work, we generalize the reaction-diffusion equation in statistical physics, Schr\"odinger equation in quantum mechanics, Helmholtz equation in paraxial optics into the neural partial differential equations (NPDE), which can be considered as the fundamental equations in the field of artificial intelligence research. We take finite difference method to discretize NPDE for finding numerical solution, and the basic building blocks of deep neural network architecture, including multi-layer perceptron, convolutional neural network and recurrent neural networks, are generated. The learning strategies, such as Adaptive moment estimation, L-BFGS, pseudoinverse learning algorithms and partial differential equation constrained optimization, are also presented. We believe it is of significance that presented clear physical image of interpretable deep neural networks, which makes it be possible for applying to analog computing device design, and pave the road to physical artificial intelligence.

Partial domain adaptation which assumes that the unknown target label space is a subset of the source label space has attracted much attention in computer vision. Despite recent progress, existing methods often suffer from three key problems: negative transfer, lack of discriminability, and domain invariance in the latent space. To alleviate the above issues, we develop a novel 'Select, Label, and Mix' (SLM) framework that aims to learn discriminative invariant feature representations for partial domain adaptation. First, we present an efficient "select" module that automatically filters out the outlier source samples to avoid negative transfer while aligning distributions across both domains. Second, the "label" module iteratively trains the classifier using both the labeled source domain data and the generated pseudo-labels for the target domain to enhance the discriminability of the latent space. Finally, the "mix" module utilizes domain mixup regularization jointly with the other two modules to explore more intrinsic structures across domains leading to a domain-invariant latent space for partial domain adaptation. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets for partial domain adaptation demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods.

Face recognition has been an active and vital topic among computer vision community for a long time. Previous researches mainly focus on loss functions used for facial feature extraction network, among which the improvements of softmax-based loss functions greatly promote the performance of face recognition. However, the contradiction between the drastically increasing number of face identities and the shortage of GPU memories is gradually becoming irreconcilable. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze the optimization goal of softmax-based loss functions and the difficulty of training massive identities. We find that the importance of negative classes in softmax function in face representation learning is not as high as we previously thought. The experiment demonstrates no loss of accuracy when training with only 10\% randomly sampled classes for the softmax-based loss functions, compared with training with full classes using state-of-the-art models on mainstream benchmarks. We also implement a very efficient distributed sampling algorithm, taking into account model accuracy and training efficiency, which uses only eight NVIDIA RTX2080Ti to complete classification tasks with tens of millions of identities. The code of this paper has been made available https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/recognition/partial_fc.

Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. In this paper, we focus on the task of Machine Translation (MT), that plays a crucial role for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite immense improvements in MT over the past decade, MT is centered around a few high-resourced languages. As MT researchers cannot solve the problem of low-resourcedness alone, we propose participatory research as a means to involve all necessary agents required in the MT development process. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of participatory research with a case study on MT for African languages. Its implementation leads to a collection of novel translation datasets, MT benchmarks for over 30 languages, with human evaluations for a third of them, and enables participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. Benchmarks, models, data, code, and evaluation results are released under https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt.

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) provided a fast solution in finding effective network architectures, but suffered from large memory and computing overheads in jointly training a super-network and searching for an optimal architecture. In this paper, we present a novel approach, namely, Partially-Connected DARTS, by sampling a small part of super-network to reduce the redundancy in exploring the network space, thereby performing a more efficient search without comprising the performance. In particular, we perform operation search in a subset of channels while bypassing the held out part in a shortcut. This strategy may suffer from an undesired inconsistency on selecting the edges of super-net caused by sampling different channels. We alleviate it using edge normalization, which adds a new set of edge-level parameters to reduce uncertainty in search. Thanks to the reduced memory cost, PC-DARTS can be trained with a larger batch size and, consequently, enjoys both faster speed and higher training stability. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, we achieve an error rate of 2.57% on CIFAR10 with merely 0.1 GPU-days for architecture search, and a state-of-the-art top-1 error rate of 24.2% on ImageNet (under the mobile setting) using 3.8 GPU-days for search. Our code has been made available at: https://github.com/yuhuixu1993/PC-DARTS.

Partial correlations quantify linear association between two variables adjusting for the influence of the remaining variables. They form the backbone for graphical models and are readily obtained from the inverse of the covariance matrix. For compositional data, the covariance structure is specified from log ratios of variables, so unless we try to "open" the data via a normalization, this implies changes in the definition and interpretation of partial correlations. In the present work, we elucidate how results derived by Aitchison (1986) lead to a natural definition of partial correlation that has a number of advantages over current measures of association. For this, we show that the residuals of log-ratios between a variable with a reference, when adjusting for all remaining variables including the reference, are reference-independent. Since the reference itself can be controlled for, correlations between residuals are defined for the variables directly without the necessity to recur to ratios except when specifying which variables are partialled out. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, partial correlations do not have the problems commonly found with measures of pairwise association on compositional data. They are well-defined between two variables, are properly scaled, and allow for negative association. By design, they are subcompositionally incoherent, but they share this property with conventional partial correlations (where results change when adjusting for the influence of fewer variables). We discuss the equivalence with normalization-based approaches whenever the normalizing variables are controlled for. We also discuss the partial variances and correlations we obtain from a previously studied data set of Roman glass cups.

Achieving good speed and accuracy trade-off on a target platform is very important in deploying deep neural networks in real world scenarios. However, most existing automatic architecture search approaches only concentrate on high performance. In this work, we propose an algorithm that can offer better speed/accuracy trade-off of searched networks, which is termed "Partial Order Pruning". It prunes the architecture search space with a partial order assumption to automatically search for the architectures with the best speed and accuracy trade-off. Our algorithm explicitly takes profile information about the inference speed on the target platform into consideration. With the proposed algorithm, we present several Dongfeng (DF) networks that provide high accuracy and fast inference speed on various application GPU platforms. By further searching decoder architectures, our DF-Seg real-time segmentation networks yield state-of-the-art speed/accuracy trade-off on both the target embedded device and the high-end GPU.

In this paper, we present a simple yet effective padding scheme that can be used as a drop-in module for existing convolutional neural networks. We call it partial convolution based padding, with the intuition that the padded region can be treated as holes and the original input as non-holes. Specifically, during the convolution operation, the convolution results are re-weighted near image borders based on the ratios between the padded area and the convolution sliding window area. Extensive experiments with various deep network models on ImageNet classification and semantic segmentation demonstrate that the proposed padding scheme consistently outperforms standard zero padding with better accuracy.

Design flows use graph partitioning both as a precursor to place and route for single devices, and to divide netlists or task graphs among multiple devices. Partitioners have accommodated FPGA heterogeneity via multi-resource constraints, but have not yet exploited the corresponding ability to implement some computations in multiple ways (e.g., LUTs vs. DSP blocks), which could enable a superior solution. This paper introduces multi-personality graph partitioning, which incorporates aspects of resource mapping into partitioning. We present a modified multi-level KLFM partitioning algorithm that also performs heterogeneous resource mapping for nodes with multiple potential implementations (multiple personalities). We evaluate several variants of our multi-personality FPGA circuit partitioner using 21 circuits and benchmark graphs, and show that dynamic resource mapping improves cut size on average by 27% over static mapping for these circuits. We further show that it improves deviation from target resource utilizations by 50% over post-partitioning resource mapping.

It is well known that there is a particle-hole symmetry for spin-polarized electrons with two-body interactions in a partially filled Landau level, which becomes exact in the limit where the cyclotron energy is large compared to the interaction strength, so one can ignore mixing between Landau levels. This symmetry is explicit in the description of a half-filled Landau level recently introduced by D. T. Son, using Dirac fermions, but it was thought to be absent in the older fermion-Chern- Simons approach, developed by Halperin, Lee, and Read and subsequent authors. We show here, however, that when properly evaluated, the Halperin, Lee, Read (HLR) theory gives results for long-wavelength low-energy physical properties, including the Hall conductance in the presence of impurities and the positions of minima in the magnetoroton spectra for fractional quantized Hall states close to half-filling, that are identical to predictions of the Dirac formulation. In fact, the HLR theory predicts an emergent particle-hole symmetry near half filling, even when the cyclotron energy is finite.

Inflation typically predicts a quasi scale-invariant spectrum of gravitational waves. In models of slow-roll inflation, the amplitude of such a background is too small to allow direct detection without a dedicated space-based experiment such as the proposed BBO or DECIGO. In this paper we note that particle production during inflation can generate a feature in the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves. We discuss the possibility that such a feature might be detected by ground-based laser interferometers such as Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, which will become operational in the next few years. We also discuss the prospects of detection by a space interferometer like LISA. We first study gravitational waves induced by nonperturbative, explosive particle production during inflation: while explosive production of scalar quanta does not generate a significant bump in the primordial tensor spectrum, production of vectors can. We also show that chiral gravitational waves produced by electromagnetic fields amplified by an axion-like inflaton could be detectable by Advanced LIGO.

Recent advances in autoregressive video diffusion have enabled real-time frame streaming, yet existing solutions still suffer from temporal repetition, drift, and motion deceleration. We find that naively applying StreamingLLM-style attention sinks to video diffusion leads to fidelity degradation and motion stagnation. To overcome this, we introduce Deep Forcing, which consists of two training-free mechanisms that address this without any fine-tuning. Specifically, 1) Deep Sink dedicates half of the sliding window to persistent sink tokens and re-aligns their temporal RoPE phase to the current timeline, stabilizing global context during long rollouts. 2) Participative Compression performs importance-aware KV cache pruning that preserves only tokens actively participating in recent attention while safely discarding redundant and degraded history, minimizing error accumulation under out-of-distribution length generation. Together, these components enable over 12x extrapolation (e.g. 5s-trained to 60s+ generation) with better imaging quality than LongLive, better aesthetic quality than RollingForcing, almost maintaining overall consistency, and substantial gains in dynamic degree, all while maintaining real-time generation. Our results demonstrate that training-free KV-cache management can match or exceed training-based approaches for autoregressively streaming long-video generation.

We introduce a general framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) using generative diffusion models. In particular, we focus on the scenarios where we do not have the full knowledge of the scene necessary to apply classical solvers. Most existing forward or inverse PDE approaches perform poorly when the observations on the data or the underlying coefficients are incomplete, which is a common assumption for real-world measurements. In this work, we propose DiffusionPDE that can simultaneously fill in the missing information and solve a PDE by modeling the joint distribution of the solution and coefficient spaces. We show that the learned generative priors lead to a versatile framework for accurately solving a wide range of PDEs under partial observation, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art methods for both forward and inverse directions.

Scaling Transformers to longer sequence lengths has been a major problem in the last several years, promising to improve performance in language modeling and high-resolution image understanding, as well as to unlock new applications in code, audio, and video generation. The attention layer is the main bottleneck in scaling to longer sequences, as its runtime and memory increase quadratically in the sequence length. FlashAttention exploits the asymmetric GPU memory hierarchy to bring significant memory saving (linear instead of quadratic) and runtime speedup (2-4times compared to optimized baselines), with no approximation. However, FlashAttention is still not nearly as fast as optimized matrix-multiply (GEMM) operations, reaching only 25-40\% of the theoretical maximum FLOPs/s. We observe that the inefficiency is due to suboptimal work partitioning between different thread blocks and warps on the GPU, causing either low-occupancy or unnecessary shared memory reads/writes. We propose FlashAttention-2, with better work partitioning to address these issues. In particular, we (1) tweak the algorithm to reduce the number of non-matmul FLOPs (2) parallelize the attention computation, even for a single head, across different thread blocks to increase occupancy, and (3) within each thread block, distribute the work between warps to reduce communication through shared memory. These yield around 2times speedup compared to FlashAttention, reaching 50-73\% of the theoretical maximum FLOPs/s on A100 and getting close to the efficiency of GEMM operations. We empirically validate that when used end-to-end to train GPT-style models, FlashAttention-2 reaches training speed of up to 225 TFLOPs/s per A100 GPU (72\% model FLOPs utilization).

Data and pipeline parallelism are ubiquitous for training of Large Language Models (LLM) on distributed nodes. Driven by the need for cost-effective training, recent work explores efficient communication arrangement for end to end training. Motivated by LLM's resistance to layer skipping and layer reordering, in this paper, we explore stage (several consecutive layers) skipping in pipeline training, and challenge the conventional practice of sequential pipeline execution. We derive convergence and throughput constraints (guidelines) for pipelining with skipping and swapping pipeline stages. Based on these constraints, we propose SkipPipe, the first partial pipeline framework to reduce the end-to-end training time for LLMs while preserving the convergence. The core of SkipPipe is a path scheduling algorithm that optimizes the paths for individual microbatches and reduces idle time (due to microbatch collisions) on the distributed nodes, complying with the given stage skipping ratio. We extensively evaluate SkipPipe on LLaMa models from 500M to 8B parameters on up to 20 nodes. Our results show that SkipPipe reduces training iteration time by up to 55% compared to full pipeline. Our partial pipeline training also improves resistance to layer omission during inference, experiencing a drop in perplexity of only 7% when running only half the model. Our code is available at https://github.com/gensyn-ai/skippipe.

Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Traditional analytic simulators sometimes struggle to capture sufficiently realistic simulation which can lead to problems including the well known "sim-to-real" gap in robotics. Learned simulators have emerged as an alternative for better capturing real-world physical dynamics, but require access to privileged ground truth physics information such as precise object geometry or particle tracks. Here we propose a method for learning simulators directly from observations. Visual Particle Dynamics (VPD) jointly learns a latent particle-based representation of 3D scenes, a neural simulator of the latent particle dynamics, and a renderer that can produce images of the scene from arbitrary views. VPD learns end to end from posed RGB-D videos and does not require access to privileged information. Unlike existing 2D video prediction models, we show that VPD's 3D structure enables scene editing and long-term predictions. These results pave the way for downstream applications ranging from video editing to robotic planning.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of simulating human behavior, offering cost-effective ways to estimate user responses during the early phases of survey design. While previous studies have examined whether models can reflect individual opinions or attitudes, we argue that a higher-order binding of virtual personas requires successfully approximating not only the opinions of a user as an identified member of a group, but also the nuanced ways in which that user perceives and evaluates those outside the group. In particular, faithfully simulating how humans perceive different social groups is critical for applying LLMs to various political science studies, including timely topics on polarization dynamics, inter-group conflict, and democratic backsliding. To this end, we propose a novel methodology for constructing virtual personas with synthetic user ``backstories" generated as extended, multi-turn interview transcripts. Our generated backstories are longer, rich in detail, and consistent in authentically describing a singular individual, compared to previous methods. We show that virtual personas conditioned on our backstories closely replicate human response distributions (up to an 87\% improvement as measured by Wasserstein Distance) and produce effect sizes that closely match those observed in the original studies. Altogether, our work extends the applicability of LLMs beyond estimating individual self-opinions, enabling their use in a broader range of human studies.

Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (EGNNs) have emerged as a promising approach in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), leveraging symmetry guarantees to greatly improve sample efficiency and generalization. However, real-world environments often exhibit inherent asymmetries arising from factors such as external forces, measurement inaccuracies, or intrinsic system biases. This paper introduces Partially Equivariant Graph NeUral Networks (PEnGUiN), a novel architecture specifically designed to address these challenges. We formally identify and categorize various types of partial equivariance relevant to MARL, including subgroup equivariance, feature-wise equivariance, regional equivariance, and approximate equivariance. We theoretically demonstrate that PEnGUiN is capable of learning both fully equivariant (EGNN) and non-equivariant (GNN) representations within a unified framework. Through extensive experiments on a range of MARL problems incorporating various asymmetries, we empirically validate the efficacy of PEnGUiN. Our results consistently demonstrate that PEnGUiN outperforms both EGNNs and standard GNNs in asymmetric environments, highlighting their potential to improve the robustness and applicability of graph-based MARL algorithms in real-world scenarios.

Differentiable particle filters are an emerging class of sequential Bayesian inference techniques that use neural networks to construct components in state space models. Existing approaches are mostly based on offline supervised training strategies. This leads to the delay of the model deployment and the obtained filters are susceptible to distribution shift of test-time data. In this paper, we propose an online learning framework for differentiable particle filters so that model parameters can be updated as data arrive. The technical constraint is that there is no known ground truth state information in the online inference setting. We address this by adopting an unsupervised loss to construct the online model updating procedure, which involves a sequence of filtering operations for online maximum likelihood-based parameter estimation. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and compare it with supervised learning methods in simulation settings including a multivariate linear Gaussian state-space model and a simulated object tracking experiment.

Dynamic imaging addresses the recovery of a time-varying 2D or 3D object at each time instant using its undersampled measurements. In particular, in the case of dynamic tomography, only a single projection at a single view angle may be available at a time, making the problem severely ill-posed. In this work, we propose an approach, RED-PSM, which combines for the first time two powerful techniques to address this challenging imaging problem. The first, are partially separable models, which have been used to efficiently introduce a low-rank prior for the spatio-temporal object. The second is the recent Regularization by Denoising (RED), which provides a flexible framework to exploit the impressive performance of state-of-the-art image denoising algorithms, for various inverse problems. We propose a partially separable objective with RED and a computationally efficient and scalable optimization scheme with variable splitting and ADMM. Theoretical analysis proves the convergence of our objective to a value corresponding to a stationary point satisfying the first-order optimality conditions. Convergence is accelerated by a particular projection-domain-based initialization. We demonstrate the performance and computational improvements of our proposed RED-PSM with a learned image denoiser by comparing it to a recent deep-prior-based method known as TD-DIP. Although the main focus is on dynamic tomography, we also show the performance advantages of RED-PSM in a cardiac dynamic MRI setting.

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.

Artistic style transfer has long been possible with the advancements of convolution- and transformer-based neural networks. Most algorithms apply the artistic style transfer to the whole image, but individual users may only need to apply a style transfer to a specific region in the image. The standard practice is to simply mask the image after the stylization. This work shows that this approach tends to improperly capture the style features in the region of interest. We propose a partial-convolution-based style transfer network that accurately applies the style features exclusively to the region of interest. Additionally, we present network-internal blending techniques that account for imperfections in the region selection. We show that this visually and quantitatively improves stylization using examples from the SA-1B dataset. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/davidmhart/StyleTransferMasked.

Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) involves using a textual query to search for multiple relevant videos in a large collection of unlabeled short videos. The main challenge of AVS is the visual diversity of relevant videos. A simple query such as "Find shots of a man and a woman dancing together indoors" can span a multitude of environments, from brightly lit halls and shadowy bars to dance scenes in black-and-white animations. It is therefore essential to retrieve relevant videos as comprehensively as possible. Current solutions for the AVS task primarily fuse multiple features into one or more common spaces, yet overlook the need for diverse spaces. To fully exploit the expressive capability of individual features, we propose LPD, short for Learning Partially Decorrelated common spaces. LPD incorporates two key innovations: feature-specific common space construction and the de-correlation loss. Specifically, LPD learns a separate common space for each video and text feature, and employs de-correlation loss to diversify the ordering of negative samples across different spaces. To enhance the consistency of multi-space convergence, we designed an entropy-based fair multi-space triplet ranking loss. Extensive experiments on the TRECVID AVS benchmarks (2016-2023) justify the effectiveness of LPD. Moreover, diversity visualizations of LPD's spaces highlight its ability to enhance result diversity.

Diffusion models have become widely adopted in image completion tasks, with text prompts commonly employed to ensure semantic coherence by providing high-level guidance. However, a persistent challenge arises when an object is partially obscured in the damaged region, yet its remaining parts are still visible in the background. While text prompts offer semantic direction, they often fail to precisely recover fine-grained structural details, such as the object's overall posture, ensuring alignment with the visible object information in the background. This limitation stems from the inability of text prompts to provide pixel-level specificity. To address this, we propose supplementing text-based guidance with a novel visual aid: a casual sketch, which can be roughly drawn by anyone based on visible object parts. This sketch supplies critical structural cues, enabling the generative model to produce an object structure that seamlessly integrates with the existing background. We introduce the Visual Sketch Self-Aware (VSSA) model, which integrates the casual sketch into each iterative step of the diffusion process, offering distinct advantages for partially corrupted scenarios. By blending sketch-derived features with those of the corrupted image, and leveraging text prompt guidance, the VSSA assists the diffusion model in generating images that preserve both the intended object semantics and structural consistency across the restored objects and original regions. To support this research, we created two datasets, CUB-sketch and MSCOCO-sketch, each combining images, sketches, and text. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

In physics, Lagrangians provide a systematic way to describe laws governing physical systems. In the context of particle physics, they encode the interactions and behavior of the fundamental building blocks of our universe. By treating Lagrangians as complex, rule-based constructs similar to linguistic expressions, we trained a transformer model -- proven to be effective in natural language tasks -- to predict the Lagrangian corresponding to a given list of particles. We report on the transformer's performance in constructing Lagrangians respecting the Standard Model SU(3)times SU(2)times U(1) gauge symmetries. The resulting model is shown to achieve high accuracies (over 90\%) with Lagrangians up to six matter fields, with the capacity to generalize beyond the training distribution, albeit within architectural constraints. We show through an analysis of input embeddings that the model has internalized concepts such as group representations and conjugation operations as it learned to generate Lagrangians. We make the model and training datasets available to the community. An interactive demonstration can be found at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/JoseEliel/generate-lagrangians.

For decades, researchers have developed task-specific models to address scientific challenges across diverse disciplines. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown enormous capabilities in handling general tasks; however, these models encounter difficulties in addressing real-world scientific problems, particularly in domains involving large-scale numerical data analysis, such as experimental high energy physics. This limitation is primarily due to BPE tokenization's inefficacy with numerical data. In this paper, we propose a task-agnostic architecture, BBT-Neutron, which employs a binary tokenization method to facilitate pretraining on a mixture of textual and large-scale numerical experimental data. We demonstrate the application of BBT-Neutron to Jet Origin Identification (JoI), a critical categorization challenge in high-energy physics that distinguishes jets originating from various quarks or gluons. Our results indicate that BBT-Neutron achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art task-specific JoI models. Furthermore, we examine the scaling behavior of BBT-Neutron's performance with increasing data volume, suggesting the potential for BBT-Neutron to serve as a foundational model for particle physics data analysis, with possible extensions to a broad spectrum of scientific computing applications for Big Science experiments, industrial manufacturing and spacial computing. The project code is available at https://github.com/supersymmetry-technologies/bbt-neutron.

How are we able to learn about complex current events just from short snippets of video? While natural language enables straightforward ways to represent under-specified, partially observable events, visual data does not facilitate analogous methods and, consequently, introduces unique challenges in event understanding. With the growing prevalence of vision-capable AI agents, these systems must be able to model events from collections of unstructured video data. To tackle robust event modeling in multimodal settings, we introduce a multimodal formulation for partially-defined events and cast the extraction of these events as a three-stage span retrieval task. We propose a corresponding benchmark for this task, MultiVENT-G, that consists of 14.5 hours of densely annotated current event videos and 1,168 text documents, containing 22.8K labeled event-centric entities. We propose a collection of LLM-driven approaches to the task of multimodal event analysis, and evaluate them on MultiVENT-G. Results illustrate the challenges that abstract event understanding poses and demonstrates promise in event-centric video-language systems.

Large participatory biomedical studies, studies that recruit individuals to join a dataset, are gaining popularity and investment, especially for analysis by modern AI methods. Because they purposively recruit participants, these studies are uniquely able to address a lack of historical representation, an issue that has affected many biomedical datasets. In this work, we define representativeness as the similarity to a target population distribution of a set of attributes and our goal is to mirror the U.S. population across distributions of age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Many participatory studies recruit at several institutions, so we introduce a computational approach to adaptively allocate recruitment resources among sites to improve representativeness. In simulated recruitment of 10,000-participant cohorts from medical centers in the STAR Clinical Research Network, we show that our approach yields a more representative cohort than existing baselines. Thus, we highlight the value of computational modeling in guiding recruitment efforts.

Text-to-image diffusion models have made significant progress in generating naturalistic images from textual inputs, and demonstrate the capacity to learn and represent complex visual-semantic relationships. While these diffusion models have achieved remarkable success, the underlying mechanisms driving their performance are not yet fully accounted for, with many unanswered questions surrounding what they learn, how they represent visual-semantic relationships, and why they sometimes fail to generalize. Our work presents Diffusion Partial Information Decomposition (DiffusionPID), a novel technique that applies information-theoretic principles to decompose the input text prompt into its elementary components, enabling a detailed examination of how individual tokens and their interactions shape the generated image. We introduce a formal approach to analyze the uniqueness, redundancy, and synergy terms by applying PID to the denoising model at both the image and pixel level. This approach enables us to characterize how individual tokens and their interactions affect the model output. We first present a fine-grained analysis of characteristics utilized by the model to uniquely localize specific concepts, we then apply our approach in bias analysis and show it can recover gender and ethnicity biases. Finally, we use our method to visually characterize word ambiguity and similarity from the model's perspective and illustrate the efficacy of our method for prompt intervention. Our results show that PID is a potent tool for evaluating and diagnosing text-to-image diffusion models.

We propose masked particle modeling (MPM) as a self-supervised method for learning generic, transferable, and reusable representations on unordered sets of inputs for use in high energy physics (HEP) scientific data. This work provides a novel scheme to perform masked modeling based pre-training to learn permutation invariant functions on sets. More generally, this work provides a step towards building large foundation models for HEP that can be generically pre-trained with self-supervised learning and later fine-tuned for a variety of down-stream tasks. In MPM, particles in a set are masked and the training objective is to recover their identity, as defined by a discretized token representation of a pre-trained vector quantized variational autoencoder. We study the efficacy of the method in samples of high energy jets at collider physics experiments, including studies on the impact of discretization, permutation invariance, and ordering. We also study the fine-tuning capability of the model, showing that it can be adapted to tasks such as supervised and weakly supervised jet classification, and that the model can transfer efficiently with small fine-tuning data sets to new classes and new data domains.

Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. This skill can be developed using supervised fine-tuning with extensive human preference data. However, obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks. In this paper, we explore a novel method to optimize LLMs using ranking metrics. This method trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a particular task. Rather than a traditional full ordering, we advocate for a partial ordering, as achieving consensus on the perfect order of candidate responses can be challenging. Our partial ordering is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods. We test our system's improved response generation ability using benchmark datasets, including textual entailment and multi-document question answering. We conduct ablation studies to understand crucial factors, such as how to gather candidate responses for a specific task, determine their most suitable order, and balance supervised fine-tuning with ranking metrics. Our approach, named Rescue, offers a promising avenue for enhancing the response generation and task accuracy of LLMs.

This paper studies generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to sample objects from the Boltzmann energy distribution via a sequence of actions. In particular, we focus on improving GFlowNet with partial inference: training flow functions with the evaluation of the intermediate states or transitions. To this end, the recently developed forward-looking GFlowNet reparameterizes the flow functions based on evaluating the energy of intermediate states. However, such an evaluation of intermediate energies may (i) be too expensive or impossible to evaluate and (ii) even provide misleading training signals under large energy fluctuations along the sequence of actions. To resolve this issue, we propose learning energy decompositions for GFlowNets (LED-GFN). Our main idea is to (i) decompose the energy of an object into learnable potential functions defined on state transitions and (ii) reparameterize the flow functions using the potential functions. In particular, to produce informative local credits, we propose to regularize the potential to change smoothly over the sequence of actions. It is also noteworthy that training GFlowNet with our learned potential can preserve the optimal policy. We empirically verify the superiority of LED-GFN in five problems including the generation of unstructured and maximum independent sets, molecular graphs, and RNA sequences.

The notion of shortcut partition, introduced recently by Chang, Conroy, Le, Milenkovi\'c, Solomon, and Than [CCLMST23], is a new type of graph partition into low-diameter clusters. Roughly speaking, the shortcut partition guarantees that for every two vertices u and v in the graph, there exists a path between u and v that intersects only a few clusters. They proved that any planar graph admits a shortcut partition and gave several applications, including a construction of tree cover for arbitrary planar graphs with stretch 1+varepsilon and O(1) many trees for any fixed varepsilon in (0,1). However, the construction heavily exploits planarity in multiple steps, and is thus inherently limited to planar graphs. In this work, we breach the "planarity barrier" to construct a shortcut partition for K_r-minor-free graphs for any r. To this end, we take a completely different approach -- our key contribution is a novel deterministic variant of the cop decomposition in minor-free graphs [And86, AGG14]. Our shortcut partition for K_r-minor-free graphs yields several direct applications. Most notably, we construct the first optimal distance oracle for K_r-minor-free graphs, with 1+varepsilon stretch, linear space, and constant query time for any fixed varepsilon in (0,1). The previous best distance oracle [AG06] uses O(nlog n) space and O(log n) query time, and its construction relies on Robertson-Seymour structural theorem and other sophisticated tools. We also obtain the first tree cover of O(1) size for minor-free graphs with stretch 1+varepsilon, while the previous best (1+varepsilon)-tree cover has size O(log^2 n) [BFN19].

Deep learning (DL) has proven highly effective for ultrasound-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of breast cancers. In an automaticCAD system, lesion detection is critical for the following diagnosis. However, existing DL-based methods generally require voluminous manually-annotated region of interest (ROI) labels and class labels to train both the lesion detection and diagnosis models. In clinical practice, the ROI labels, i.e. ground truths, may not always be optimal for the classification task due to individual experience of sonologists, resulting in the issue of coarse annotation that limits the diagnosis performance of a CAD model. To address this issue, a novel Two-Stage Detection and Diagnosis Network (TSDDNet) is proposed based on weakly supervised learning to enhance diagnostic accuracy of the ultrasound-based CAD for breast cancers. In particular, all the ROI-level labels are considered as coarse labels in the first training stage, and then a candidate selection mechanism is designed to identify optimallesion areas for both the fully and partially annotated samples. It refines the current ROI-level labels in the fully annotated images and the detected ROIs in the partially annotated samples with a weakly supervised manner under the guidance of class labels. In the second training stage, a self-distillation strategy further is further proposed to integrate the detection network and classification network into a unified framework as the final CAD model for joint optimization, which then further improves the diagnosis performance. The proposed TSDDNet is evaluated on a B-mode ultrasound dataset, and the experimental results show that it achieves the best performance on both lesion detection and diagnosis tasks, suggesting promising application potential.

Noisy partial label learning (noisy PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning. Unlike PLL where the ground-truth label must conceal in the candidate label set, noisy PLL relaxes this constraint and allows the ground-truth label may not be in the candidate label set. To address this challenging problem, most of the existing works attempt to detect noisy samples and estimate the ground-truth label for each noisy sample. However, detection errors are unavoidable. These errors can accumulate during training and continuously affect model optimization. To this end, we propose a novel framework for noisy PLL with theoretical guarantees, called ``Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism (ALIM)''. It aims to reduce the negative impact of detection errors by trading off the initial candidate set and model outputs. ALIM is a plug-in strategy that can be integrated with existing PLL approaches. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on noisy PLL. \textcolor[rgb]{0.93,0.0,0.47}{Our code can be found in Supplementary Material}.

Stochastic partial observability poses a major challenge for decentralized coordination in multi-agent reinforcement learning but is largely neglected in state-of-the-art research due to a strong focus on state-based centralized training for decentralized execution (CTDE) and benchmarks that lack sufficient stochasticity like StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC). In this paper, we propose Attention-based Embeddings of Recurrence In multi-Agent Learning (AERIAL) to approximate value functions under stochastic partial observability. AERIAL replaces the true state with a learned representation of multi-agent recurrence, considering more accurate information about decentralized agent decisions than state-based CTDE. We then introduce MessySMAC, a modified version of SMAC with stochastic observations and higher variance in initial states, to provide a more general and configurable benchmark regarding stochastic partial observability. We evaluate AERIAL in Dec-Tiger as well as in a variety of SMAC and MessySMAC maps, and compare the results with state-based CTDE. Furthermore, we evaluate the robustness of AERIAL and state-based CTDE against various stochasticity configurations in MessySMAC.

We show how the Schur-Weyl duality that exists between the partition algebra and the symmetric group results in a stronger theoretical foundation for characterising all of the possible permutation equivariant neural networks whose layers are some tensor power of the permutation representation M_n of the symmetric group S_n. In doing so, we unify two separate bodies of literature, and we correct some of the major results that are now widely quoted by the machine learning community. In particular, we find a basis of matrices for the learnable, linear, permutation equivariant layer functions between such tensor power spaces in the standard basis of M_n by using an elegant graphical representation of a basis of set partitions for the partition algebra and its related vector spaces. Also, we show how we can calculate the number of weights that must appear in these layer functions by looking at certain paths through the McKay quiver for M_n. Finally, we describe how our approach generalises to the construction of neural networks that are equivariant to local symmetries.

We study the problem of learning a Nash equilibrium (NE) in an imperfect information game (IIG) through self-play. Precisely, we focus on two-player, zero-sum, episodic, tabular IIG under the perfect-recall assumption where the only feedback is realizations of the game (bandit feedback). In particular, the dynamic of the IIG is not known -- we can only access it by sampling or interacting with a game simulator. For this learning setting, we provide the Implicit Exploration Online Mirror Descent (IXOMD) algorithm. It is a model-free algorithm with a high-probability bound on the convergence rate to the NE of order 1/T where T is the number of played games. Moreover, IXOMD is computationally efficient as it needs to perform the updates only along the sampled trajectory.

The classical development of neural networks has primarily focused on learning mappings between finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces. Recently, this has been generalized to neural operators that learn mappings between function spaces. For partial differential equations (PDEs), neural operators directly learn the mapping from any functional parametric dependence to the solution. Thus, they learn an entire family of PDEs, in contrast to classical methods which solve one instance of the equation. In this work, we formulate a new neural operator by parameterizing the integral kernel directly in Fourier space, allowing for an expressive and efficient architecture. We perform experiments on Burgers' equation, Darcy flow, and Navier-Stokes equation. The Fourier neural operator is the first ML-based method to successfully model turbulent flows with zero-shot super-resolution. It is up to three orders of magnitude faster compared to traditional PDE solvers. Additionally, it achieves superior accuracy compared to previous learning-based solvers under fixed resolution.

Clustering is a NP-hard problem. Thus, no optimal algorithm exists, heuristics are applied to cluster the data. Heuristics can be very resource-intensive, if not applied properly. For substantially large data sets computational efficiencies can be achieved by reducing the input space if a minimal loss of information can be achieved. Clustering algorithms, in general, face two common problems: 1) these converge to different settings with different initial conditions and; 2) the number of clusters has to be arbitrarily decided beforehand. This problem has become critical in the realm of big data. Recently, clustering algorithms have emerged which can speedup computations using parallel processing over the grid but face the aforementioned problems. Goals: Our goals are to find methods to cluster data which: 1) guarantee convergence to the same settings irrespective of the initial conditions; 2) eliminate the need to establish the number of clusters beforehand, and 3) can be applied to cluster large datasets. Methods: We introduce a method that combines probabilistic and combinatorial clustering methods to produce repeatable and compact clusters that are not sensitive to initial conditions. This method harnesses the power of k-means (a combinatorial clustering method) to cluster/partition very large dimensional datasets and uses the Gaussian Mixture Model (a probabilistic clustering method) to validate the k-means partitions. Results: We show that this method produces very compact clusters that are not sensitive to initial conditions. This method can be used to identify the most 'separable' set in a dataset which increases the 'clusterability' of a dataset. This method also eliminates the need to specify the number of clusters in advance.

Accurate particle identification (PID) is one of the most important aspects of the LHCb experiment. Modern machine learning techniques such as neural networks (NNs) are efficiently applied to this problem and are integrated into the LHCb software. In this research, we discuss novel applications of neural network speed-up techniques to achieve faster PID in LHC upgrade conditions. We show that the best results are obtained using variational dropout sparsification, which provides a prediction (feedforward pass) speed increase of up to a factor of sixteen even when compared to a model with shallow networks.

The Transformer architecture is widely used in natural language processing. Despite its success, the design principle of the Transformer remains elusive. In this paper, we provide a novel perspective towards understanding the architecture: we show that the Transformer can be mathematically interpreted as a numerical Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver for a convection-diffusion equation in a multi-particle dynamic system. In particular, how words in a sentence are abstracted into contexts by passing through the layers of the Transformer can be interpreted as approximating multiple particles' movement in the space using the Lie-Trotter splitting scheme and the Euler's method. Given this ODE's perspective, the rich literature of numerical analysis can be brought to guide us in designing effective structures beyond the Transformer. As an example, we propose to replace the Lie-Trotter splitting scheme by the Strang-Marchuk splitting scheme, a scheme that is more commonly used and with much lower local truncation errors. The Strang-Marchuk splitting scheme suggests that the self-attention and position-wise feed-forward network (FFN) sub-layers should not be treated equally. Instead, in each layer, two position-wise FFN sub-layers should be used, and the self-attention sub-layer is placed in between. This leads to a brand new architecture. Such an FFN-attention-FFN layer is "Macaron-like", and thus we call the network with this new architecture the Macaron Net. Through extensive experiments, we show that the Macaron Net is superior to the Transformer on both supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. The reproducible codes and pretrained models can be found at https://github.com/zhuohan123/macaron-net

With the emergence of increasingly powerful large language models, there is a burgeoning interest in leveraging these models for casual conversation and role-play applications. However, existing conversational and role-playing datasets often fail to capture the diverse and nuanced interactions typically exhibited by real-world role-play participants. To address this limitation and contribute to the rapidly growing field, we introduce a partially-synthetic dataset named PIPPA (Personal Interaction Pairs between People and AI). PIPPA is a result of a community-driven crowdsourcing effort involving a group of role-play enthusiasts. The dataset comprises over 1 million utterances that are distributed across 26,000 conversation sessions and provides a rich resource for researchers and AI developers to explore and refine conversational AI systems in the context of role-play scenarios.

This paper explores network binarization, a radical form of quantization, compressing model weights to a single bit, specifically for Large Language Models (LLMs) compression. Due to previous binarization methods collapsing LLMs, we propose a novel approach, Partially-Binarized LLM (PB-LLM), which can achieve extreme low-bit quantization while maintaining the linguistic reasoning capacity of quantized LLMs. Specifically, our exploration first uncovers the ineffectiveness of naive applications of existing binarization algorithms and highlights the imperative role of salient weights in achieving low-bit quantization. Thus, PB-LLM filters a small ratio of salient weights during binarization, allocating them to higher-bit storage, i.e., partially-binarization. PB-LLM is extended to recover the capacities of quantized LMMs, by analyzing from the perspective of post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT). Under PTQ, combining the concepts from GPTQ, we reconstruct the binarized weight matrix guided by the Hessian matrix and successfully recover the reasoning capacity of PB-LLM in low-bit. Under QAT, we freeze the salient weights during training, explore the derivation of optimal scaling factors crucial for minimizing the quantization error, and propose a scaling mechanism based on this derived scaling strategy for residual binarized weights. Those explorations and the developed methodologies significantly contribute to rejuvenating the performance of low-bit quantized LLMs and present substantial advancements in the field of network binarization for LLMs.The code is available at https://github.com/hahnyuan/BinaryLLM.

We present the contribution of the Unbabel team to the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Metrics. We intend to participate on the segment-level, document-level and system-level tracks on all language pairs, as well as the 'QE as a Metric' track. Accordingly, we illustrate results of our models in these tracks with reference to test sets from the previous year. Our submissions build upon the recently proposed COMET framework: We train several estimator models to regress on different human-generated quality scores and a novel ranking model trained on relative ranks obtained from Direct Assessments. We also propose a simple technique for converting segment-level predictions into a document-level score. Overall, our systems achieve strong results for all language pairs on previous test sets and in many cases set a new state-of-the-art.

In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models in such domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise supervisory signals from human labeling, larger models, or self-sampling, although at a high cost. Conversely, we develop a method that avoids external resources, relying instead on introducing perturbations to the input. Our training approach randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought, a technique we found to be particularly effective for reasoning tasks. When applied to fine-tuning with GSM8K, this method achieved a 5% improvement in accuracy over standard supervised fine-tuning with a few codes modified and no additional labeling effort. Furthermore, it is complementary to existing methods. When integrated with related data augmentation methods, it leads to an average improvement of 3% improvement in GSM8K accuracy and 1% improvement in MATH accuracy across five datasets of various quality and size, as well as two base models. We further investigate the mechanisms behind this improvement through case studies and quantitative analysis, suggesting that our approach may provide superior support for the model in capturing long-distance dependencies, especially those related to questions. This enhancement could deepen understanding of premises in questions and prior steps. Our code is available at Github.

Robust point cloud classification is crucial for real-world applications, as consumer-type 3D sensors often yield partial and noisy data, degraded by various artifacts. In this work we propose a general ensemble framework, based on partial point cloud sampling. Each ensemble member is exposed to only partial input data. Three sampling strategies are used jointly, two local ones, based on patches and curves, and a global one of random sampling. We demonstrate the robustness of our method to various local and global degradations. We show that our framework significantly improves the robustness of top classification netowrks by a large margin. Our experimental setting uses the recently introduced ModelNet-C database by Ren et al.[24], where we reach SOTA both on unaugmented and on augmented data. Our unaugmented mean Corruption Error (mCE) is 0.64 (current SOTA is 0.86) and 0.50 for augmented data (current SOTA is 0.57). We analyze and explain these remarkable results through diversity analysis. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yossilevii100/EPiC

The quantitative prediction of the intensity of rainfall events (light or heavy) has remained a challenge in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. For the first time the mean coefficient of diffusional growth rates are calculated using an Eulerian-Lagrangian particle-based small-scale model on in situ airborne measurement data of Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement Experiment (CAIPEEX) during monsoon over Indian sub-continent. The results show that diffusional growth rates varies in the range of 0.00025 - 0.0015(cm/s). The generic problem of the overestimation of light rain in NWP models might be related with the choice of cm in the model. It is also shown from DNS experiment using Eulerian-Lagrangian particle-based small-scale model that the relative dispersion is constrained with average values in the range of ~ 0.2 - 0.37 (~ 0.1- 0.26) in less humid (more humid) conditions. This is in agreement with in situ airborne observation (dispersion ~ 0.36) and previous study over Indian sub-continent. The linear relationship between relative dispersion and cloud droplet number concentration (NC) is obtained from this study using CAIPEEX observation over Indian subcontinent. The dispersion based autoconversion-scheme for Indian region must be useful for the Indian summer monsoon precipitation calculation in the general circulation model. The present study also provide valuable guidance for the parameterization of effective radius, important for radiation scheme.

Contribution from the USQCD Collaboration to the Proceedings of the US Community Study on the Future of Particle Physics (Snowmass 2021).

[This paper was initially published in PHME conference in 2016, selected for further publication in International Journal of Prognostics and Health Management.] This paper describes an Autoregressive Partially-hidden Markov model (ARPHMM) for fault detection and prognostics of equipments based on sensors' data. It is a particular dynamic Bayesian network that allows to represent the dynamics of a system by means of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and an autoregressive (AR) process. The Markov chain assumes that the system is switching back and forth between internal states while the AR process ensures a temporal coherence on sensor measurements. A sound learning procedure of standard ARHMM based on maximum likelihood allows to iteratively estimate all parameters simultaneously. This paper suggests a modification of the learning procedure considering that one may have prior knowledge about the structure which becomes partially hidden. The integration of the prior is based on the Theory of Weighted Distributions which is compatible with the Expectation-Maximization algorithm in the sense that the convergence properties are still satisfied. We show how to apply this model to estimate the remaining useful life based on health indicators. The autoregressive parameters can indeed be used for prediction while the latent structure can be used to get information about the degradation level. The interest of the proposed method for prognostics and health assessment is demonstrated on CMAPSS datasets.

Fair machine learning aims to prevent discrimination against individuals or sub-populations based on sensitive attributes such as gender and race. In recent years, causal inference methods have been increasingly used in fair machine learning to measure unfairness by causal effects. However, current methods assume that the true causal graph is given, which is often not true in real-world applications. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a framework for achieving causal fairness based on the notion of interventions when the true causal graph is partially known. The proposed approach involves modeling fair prediction using a Partially Directed Acyclic Graph (PDAG), specifically, a class of causal DAGs that can be learned from observational data combined with domain knowledge. The PDAG is used to measure causal fairness, and a constrained optimization problem is formulated to balance between fairness and accuracy. Results on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.

Neural fields, which represent signals as a function parameterized by a neural network, are a promising alternative to traditional discrete vector or grid-based representations. Compared to discrete representations, neural representations both scale well with increasing resolution, are continuous, and can be many-times differentiable. However, given a dataset of signals that we would like to represent, having to optimize a separate neural field for each signal is inefficient, and cannot capitalize on shared information or structures among signals. Existing generalization methods view this as a meta-learning problem and employ gradient-based meta-learning to learn an initialization which is then fine-tuned with test-time optimization, or learn hypernetworks to produce the weights of a neural field. We instead propose a new paradigm that views the large-scale training of neural representations as a part of a partially-observed neural process framework, and leverage neural process algorithms to solve this task. We demonstrate that this approach outperforms both state-of-the-art gradient-based meta-learning approaches and hypernetwork approaches.

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved success in various domains. However, multi-agent RL (MARL) remains a challenge in terms of decentralization, partial observability and scalability to many agents. Meanwhile, collective behavior requires resolution of the aforementioned challenges, and remains of importance to many state-of-the-art applications such as active matter physics, self-organizing systems, opinion dynamics, and biological or robotic swarms. Here, MARL via mean field control (MFC) offers a potential solution to scalability, but fails to consider decentralized and partially observable systems. In this paper, we enable decentralized behavior of agents under partial information by proposing novel models for decentralized partially observable MFC (Dec-POMFC), a broad class of problems with permutation-invariant agents allowing for reduction to tractable single-agent Markov decision processes (MDP) with single-agent RL solution. We provide rigorous theoretical results, including a dynamic programming principle, together with optimality guarantees for Dec-POMFC solutions applied to finite swarms of interest. Algorithmically, we propose Dec-POMFC-based policy gradient methods for MARL via centralized training and decentralized execution, together with policy gradient approximation guarantees. In addition, we improve upon state-of-the-art histogram-based MFC by kernel methods, which is of separate interest also for fully observable MFC. We evaluate numerically on representative collective behavior tasks such as adapted Kuramoto and Vicsek swarming models, being on par with state-of-the-art MARL. Overall, our framework takes a step towards RL-based engineering of artificial collective behavior via MFC.

We consider solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with Fourier neural operators (FNOs), which operate in the frequency domain. Since the laws of physics do not depend on the coordinate system used to describe them, it is desirable to encode such symmetries in the neural operator architecture for better performance and easier learning. While encoding symmetries in the physical domain using group theory has been studied extensively, how to capture symmetries in the frequency domain is under-explored. In this work, we extend group convolutions to the frequency domain and design Fourier layers that are equivariant to rotations, translations, and reflections by leveraging the equivariance property of the Fourier transform. The resulting G-FNO architecture generalizes well across input resolutions and performs well in settings with varying levels of symmetry. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).

Deep point cloud registration methods face challenges to partial overlaps and rely on labeled data. To address these issues, we propose UDPReg, an unsupervised deep probabilistic registration framework for point clouds with partial overlaps. Specifically, we first adopt a network to learn posterior probability distributions of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) from point clouds. To handle partial point cloud registration, we apply the Sinkhorn algorithm to predict the distribution-level correspondences under the constraint of the mixing weights of GMMs. To enable unsupervised learning, we design three distribution consistency-based losses: self-consistency, cross-consistency, and local contrastive. The self-consistency loss is formulated by encouraging GMMs in Euclidean and feature spaces to share identical posterior distributions. The cross-consistency loss derives from the fact that the points of two partially overlapping point clouds belonging to the same clusters share the cluster centroids. The cross-consistency loss allows the network to flexibly learn a transformation-invariant posterior distribution of two aligned point clouds. The local contrastive loss facilitates the network to extract discriminative local features. Our UDPReg achieves competitive performance on the 3DMatch/3DLoMatch and ModelNet/ModelLoNet benchmarks.

This paper focuses on the EmoWoz dataset, an extension of MultiWOZ that provides emotion labels for the dialogues. MultiWOZ was partitioned initially for another purpose, resulting in a distributional shift when considering the new purpose of emotion recognition. The emotion tags in EmoWoz are highly imbalanced and unevenly distributed across the partitions, which causes sub-optimal performance and poor comparison of models. We propose a stratified sampling scheme based on emotion tags to address this issue, improve the dataset's distribution, and reduce dataset shift. We also introduce a special technique to handle conversation (sequential) data with many emotional tags. Using our proposed sampling method, models built upon EmoWoz can perform better, making it a more reliable resource for training conversational agents with emotional intelligence. We recommend that future researchers use this new partitioning to ensure consistent and accurate performance evaluations.

Optimal transport (OT) has gained popularity due to its various applications in fields such as machine learning, statistics, and signal processing. However, the balanced mass requirement limits its performance in practical problems. To address these limitations, variants of the OT problem, including unbalanced OT, Optimal partial transport (OPT), and Hellinger Kantorovich (HK), have been proposed. In this paper, we propose the Linear optimal partial transport (LOPT) embedding, which extends the (local) linearization technique on OT and HK to the OPT problem. The proposed embedding allows for faster computation of OPT distance between pairs of positive measures. Besides our theoretical contributions, we demonstrate the LOPT embedding technique in point-cloud interpolation and PCA analysis.

Pre-trained diffusion models have been successfully used as priors in a variety of linear inverse problems, where the goal is to reconstruct a signal from noisy linear measurements. However, existing approaches require knowledge of the linear operator. In this paper, we propose GibbsDDRM, an extension of Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models (DDRM) to a blind setting in which the linear measurement operator is unknown. GibbsDDRM constructs a joint distribution of the data, measurements, and linear operator by using a pre-trained diffusion model for the data prior, and it solves the problem by posterior sampling with an efficient variant of a Gibbs sampler. The proposed method is problem-agnostic, meaning that a pre-trained diffusion model can be applied to various inverse problems without fine-tuning. In experiments, it achieved high performance on both blind image deblurring and vocal dereverberation tasks, despite the use of simple generic priors for the underlying linear operators.

Current opinion summarization systems simply generate summaries reflecting important opinions from customer reviews, but the generated summaries may not attract the reader's attention. Although it is helpful to automatically generate professional reviewer-like summaries from customer reviews, collecting many training pairs of customer and professional reviews is generally tricky. We propose a weakly supervised opinion summarization framework, Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision (NAPA) that can build a stylized opinion summarization system with no customer-professional review pairs. Experimental results show consistent improvements in automatic evaluation metrics, and qualitative analysis shows that our weakly supervised opinion summarization system can generate summaries that look more like those written by professional reviewers.

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a family of algorithms for training a sequential sampler of discrete objects under an unnormalized target density and have been successfully used for various probabilistic modeling tasks. Existing training objectives for GFlowNets are either local to states or transitions, or propagate a reward signal over an entire sampling trajectory. We argue that these alternatives represent opposite ends of a gradient bias-variance tradeoff and propose a way to exploit this tradeoff to mitigate its harmful effects. Inspired by the TD(lambda) algorithm in reinforcement learning, we introduce subtrajectory balance or SubTB(lambda), a GFlowNet training objective that can learn from partial action subsequences of varying lengths. We show that SubTB(lambda) accelerates sampler convergence in previously studied and new environments and enables training GFlowNets in environments with longer action sequences and sparser reward landscapes than what was possible before. We also perform a comparative analysis of stochastic gradient dynamics, shedding light on the bias-variance tradeoff in GFlowNet training and the advantages of subtrajectory balance.

As political attitudes have diverged ideologically in the United States, political speech has diverged lingusitically. The ever-widening polarization between the US political parties is accelerated by an erosion of mutual understanding between them. We aim to make these communities more comprehensible to each other with a framework that probes community-specific responses to the same survey questions using community language models CommunityLM. In our framework we identify committed partisan members for each community on Twitter and fine-tune LMs on the tweets authored by them. We then assess the worldviews of the two groups using prompt-based probing of their corresponding LMs, with prompts that elicit opinions about public figures and groups surveyed by the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Exploratory Testing Survey. We compare the responses generated by the LMs to the ANES survey results, and find a level of alignment that greatly exceeds several baseline methods. Our work aims to show that we can use community LMs to query the worldview of any group of people given a sufficiently large sample of their social media discussions or media diet.

Compared with full client participation, partial client participation is a more practical scenario in federated learning, but it may amplify some challenges in federated learning, such as data heterogeneity. The lack of inactive clients' updates in partial client participation makes it more likely for the model aggregation to deviate from the aggregation based on full client participation. Training with large batches on individual clients is proposed to address data heterogeneity in general, but their effectiveness under partial client participation is not clear. Motivated by these challenges, we propose to develop a novel federated learning framework, referred to as FedAMD, for partial client participation. The core idea is anchor sampling, which separates partial participants into anchor and miner groups. Each client in the anchor group aims at the local bullseye with the gradient computation using a large batch. Guided by the bullseyes, clients in the miner group steer multiple near-optimal local updates using small batches and update the global model. By integrating the results of the two groups, FedAMD is able to accelerate the training process and improve the model performance. Measured by epsilon-approximation and compared to the state-of-the-art methods, FedAMD achieves the convergence by up to O(1/epsilon) fewer communication rounds under non-convex objectives. Empirical studies on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of FedAMD and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm: Not only does it considerably save computation and communication costs, but also the test accuracy significantly improves.

We consider two federated learning algorithms for training partially personalized models, where the shared and personal parameters are updated either simultaneously or alternately on the devices. Both algorithms have been proposed in the literature, but their convergence properties are not fully understood, especially for the alternating variant. We provide convergence analyses of both algorithms in the general nonconvex setting with partial participation and delineate the regime where one dominates the other. Our experiments on real-world image, text, and speech datasets demonstrate that (a) partial personalization can obtain most of the benefits of full model personalization with a small fraction of personal parameters, and, (b) the alternating update algorithm often outperforms the simultaneous update algorithm by a small but consistent margin.

This is a survey on the recent theory of chaos in partial differential equations.