The remarkable efficacy of text-to-image diffusion models has motivated extensive exploration of their potential application in video domains. Zero-shot methods seek to extend image diffusion models to videos without necessitating model training. Recent methods mainly focus on incorporating inter-frame correspondence into attention mechanisms. However, the soft constraint imposed on determining where to attend to valid features can sometimes be insufficient, resulting in temporal inconsistency. In this paper, we introduce FRESCO, intra-frame correspondence alongside inter-frame correspondence to establish a more robust spatial-temporal constraint. This enhancement ensures a more consistent transformation of semantically similar content across frames. Beyond mere attention guidance, our approach involves an explicit update of features to achieve high spatial-temporal consistency with the input video, significantly improving the visual coherence of the resulting translated videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in producing high-quality, coherent videos, marking a notable improvement over existing zero-shot methods.
In the realm of formal theorem proving, the Coq proof assistant stands out for its rigorous approach to verifying mathematical assertions and software correctness. Despite the advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the specialized nature of Coq syntax and semantics poses unique challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs). Addressing this gap, we present a comprehensive dataset specifically designed to enhance LLMs' proficiency in interpreting and generating Coq code. This dataset, derived from a collection of over 10,000 Coq source files, encompasses a wide array of propositions, proofs, and definitions, enriched with metadata including source references and licensing information. Our primary aim is to facilitate the development of LLMs capable of generating syntactically correct and semantically meaningful Coq constructs, thereby advancing the frontier of automated theorem proving. Initial experiments with this dataset have showcased its significant potential; models trained on this data exhibited enhanced accuracy in Coq code generation. Notably, a particular experiment revealed that a fine-tuned LLM was capable of generating 141 valid proofs for a basic lemma, highlighting the dataset's utility in facilitating the discovery of diverse and valid proof strategies. This paper discusses the dataset's composition, the methodology behind its creation, and the implications of our findings for the future of machine learning in formal verification. The dataset is accessible for further research and exploration: https://huggingface.co/datasets/florath/coq-facts-props-proofs-gen0-v1
Deep learning methods have been widely used in robotic applications, making learning-enabled control design for complex nonlinear systems a promising direction. Although deep reinforcement learning methods have demonstrated impressive empirical performance, they lack the stability guarantees that are important in safety-critical situations. One way to provide these guarantees is to learn Lyapunov certificates alongside control policies. There are three related problems: 1) verify that a given Lyapunov function candidate satisfies the conditions for a given controller on a region, 2) find a valid Lyapunov function and controller on a given region, and 3) find a valid Lyapunov function and a controller such that the region of attraction is as large as possible. Previous work has shown that if the dynamics are piecewise linear, it is possible to solve problems 1) and 2) by solving a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP). In this work, we build upon this method by proposing a Lyapunov neural network that considers monotonicity over half spaces in different directions. We 1) propose a specific choice of Lyapunov function architecture that ensures non-negativity and a unique global minimum by construction, and 2) show that this can be leveraged to find the controller and Lyapunov certificates faster and with a larger valid region by maximizing the size of a square inscribed in a given level set. We apply our method to a 2D inverted pendulum, unicycle path following, a 3-D feedback system, and a 4-D cart pole system, and demonstrate it can shorten the training time by half compared to the baseline, as well as find a larger ROA.
Conventional text-to-SQL parsers are not good at synthesizing complex SQL queries that involve multiple tables or columns, due to the challenges inherent in identifying the correct schema items and performing accurate alignment between question and schema items. To address the above issue, we present a schema-aware multi-task learning framework (named MTSQL) for complicated SQL queries. Specifically, we design a schema linking discriminator module to distinguish the valid question-schema linkings, which explicitly instructs the encoder by distinctive linking relations to enhance the alignment quality. On the decoder side, we define 6-type relationships to describe the connections between tables and columns (e.g., WHERE_TC), and introduce an operator-centric triple extractor to recognize those associated schema items with the predefined relationship. Also, we establish a rule set of grammar constraints via the predicted triples to filter the proper SQL operators and schema items during the SQL generation. On Spider, a cross-domain challenging text-to-SQL benchmark, experimental results indicate that MTSQL is more effective than baselines, especially in extremely hard scenarios. Moreover, further analyses verify that our approach leads to promising improvements for complicated SQL queries.
An essential requirement for a real-world Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) system is the ability to detect the answerability of questions when generating logical forms. However, state-of-the-art KBQA models assume all questions to be answerable. Recent research has found that such models, when superficially adapted to detect answerability, struggle to satisfactorily identify the different categories of unanswerable questions, and simultaneously preserve good performance for answerable questions. Towards addressing this issue, we propose RetinaQA, a new KBQA model that unifies two key ideas in a single KBQA architecture: (a) discrimination over candidate logical forms, rather than generating these, for handling schema-related unanswerability, and (b) sketch-filling-based construction of candidate logical forms for handling data-related unaswerability. Our results show that RetinaQA significantly outperforms adaptations of state-of-the-art KBQA models in handling both answerable and unanswerable questions and demonstrates robustness across all categories of unanswerability. Notably, RetinaQA also sets a new state-of-the-art for answerable KBQA, surpassing existing models.
We propose a novel quaternionic time-series compression methodology where we divide a long time-series into segments of data, extract the min, max, mean and standard deviation of these chunks as representative features and encapsulate them in a quaternion, yielding a quaternion valued time-series. This time-series is processed using quaternion valued neural network layers, where we aim to preserve the relation between these features through the usage of the Hamilton product. To train this quaternion neural network, we derive quaternion backpropagation employing the GHR calculus, which is required for a valid product and chain rule in quaternion space. Furthermore, we investigate the connection between the derived update rules and automatic differentiation. We apply our proposed compression method on the Tennessee Eastman Dataset, where we perform fault classification using the compressed data in two settings: a fully supervised one and in a semi supervised, contrastive learning setting. Both times, we were able to outperform real valued counterparts as well as two baseline models: one with the uncompressed time-series as the input and the other with a regular downsampling using the mean. Further, we could improve the classification benchmark set by SimCLR-TS from 81.43% to 83.90%.
Biclustering, also called co-clustering, block clustering, or two-way clustering, involves the simultaneous clustering of both the rows and columns of a data matrix into distinct groups, such that the rows and columns within a group display similar patterns. As a model problem for biclustering, we consider the $k$-densest-disjoint biclique problem, whose goal is to identify $k$ disjoint complete bipartite subgraphs (called bicliques) of a given weighted complete bipartite graph such that the sum of their densities is maximized. To address this problem, we present a tailored branch-and-cut algorithm. For the upper bound routine, we consider a semidefinite programming relaxation and propose valid inequalities to strengthen the bound. We solve this relaxation in a cutting-plane fashion using a first-order method. For the lower bound, we design a maximum weight matching rounding procedure that exploits the solution of the relaxation solved at each node. Computational results on both synthetic and real-world instances show that the proposed algorithm can solve instances approximately 20 times larger than those handled by general-purpose solvers.
Line features are valid complements for point features in man-made environments. 3D-2D constraints provided by line features have been widely used in Visual Odometry (VO) and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) systems. However, how to accurately solve three-view relative motion only with 2D observations of points and lines in real time has not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel three-view pose solver based on rotation-translation decoupled estimation. First, a high-precision rotation estimation method based on normal vector coplanarity constraints that consider the uncertainty of observations is proposed, which can be solved by Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm efficiently. Second, a robust linear translation constraint that minimizes the degree of the rotation components and feature observation components in equations is elaborately designed for estimating translations accurately. Experiments on synthetic data and real-world data show that the proposed approach improves both rotation and translation accuracy compared to the classical trifocal-tensor-based method and the state-of-the-art two-view algorithm in outdoor and indoor environments.
Explaining outliers occurrence and mechanism of their occurrence can be extremely important in a variety of domains. Malfunctions, frauds, threats, in addition to being correctly identified, oftentimes need a valid explanation in order to effectively perform actionable counteracts. The ever more widespread use of sophisticated Machine Learning approach to identify anomalies make such explanations more challenging. We present the Decision Tree Outlier Regressor (DTOR), a technique for producing rule-based explanations for individual data points by estimating anomaly scores generated by an anomaly detection model. This is accomplished by first applying a Decision Tree Regressor, which computes the estimation score, and then extracting the relative path associated with the data point score. Our results demonstrate the robustness of DTOR even in datasets with a large number of features. Additionally, in contrast to other rule-based approaches, the generated rules are consistently satisfied by the points to be explained. Furthermore, our evaluation metrics indicate comparable performance to Anchors in outlier explanation tasks, with reduced execution time.
Audio-visual segmentation (AVS) aims to segment the sounding objects in video frames. Although great progress has been witnessed, we experimentally reveal that current methods reach marginal performance gain within the use of the unlabeled frames, leading to the underutilization issue. To fully explore the potential of the unlabeled frames for AVS, we explicitly divide them into two categories based on their temporal characteristics, i.e., neighboring frame (NF) and distant frame (DF). NFs, temporally adjacent to the labeled frame, often contain rich motion information that assists in the accurate localization of sounding objects. Contrary to NFs, DFs have long temporal distances from the labeled frame, which share semantic-similar objects with appearance variations. Considering their unique characteristics, we propose a versatile framework that effectively leverages them to tackle AVS. Specifically, for NFs, we exploit the motion cues as the dynamic guidance to improve the objectness localization. Besides, we exploit the semantic cues in DFs by treating them as valid augmentations to the labeled frames, which are then used to enrich data diversity in a self-training manner. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the versatility and superiority of our method, unleashing the power of the abundant unlabeled frames.
We present variational inference with sequential sample-average approximation (VISA), a method for approximate inference in computationally intensive models, such as those based on numerical simulations. VISA extends importance-weighted forward-KL variational inference by employing a sequence of sample-average approximations, which are considered valid inside a trust region. This makes it possible to reuse model evaluations across multiple gradient steps, thereby reducing computational cost. We perform experiments on high-dimensional Gaussians, Lotka-Volterra dynamics, and a Pickover attractor, which demonstrate that VISA can achieve comparable approximation accuracy to standard importance-weighted forward-KL variational inference with computational savings of a factor two or more for conservatively chosen learning rates.
Safety analysis is used to identify hazards and build knowledge during the design phase of safety-relevant functions. This is especially true for complex AI-enabled and software intensive systems such as Autonomous Drive (AD). System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) is a novel method applied in safety-related fields like defense and aerospace, which is also becoming popular in the automotive industry. However, STPA assumes prerequisites that are not fully valid in the automotive system engineering with distributed system development and multi-abstraction design levels. This would inhibit software developers from using STPA to analyze their software as part of a bigger system, resulting in a lack of traceability. This can be seen as a maintainability challenge in continuous development and deployment (DevOps). In this paper, STPA's different guidelines for the automotive industry, e.g. J31887/ISO21448/STPA handbook, are firstly compared to assess their applicability to the distributed development of complex AI-enabled systems like AD. Further, an approach to overcome the challenges of using STPA in a multi-level design context is proposed. By conducting an interview study with automotive industry experts for the development of AD, the challenges are validated and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated.
I develop a methodology to partially identify linear combinations of conditional mean outcomes when the researcher only has access to aggregate data. Unlike the existing literature, I only allow for marginal, not joint, distributions of covariates in my model of aggregate data. Identified sets are very wide in an empirical illustration, suggesting that in order to obtain useful results when only using aggregate data, researchers may have no option other than to impose strong assumptions.
We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy evaluation methodology differs from most existing methods that focus on off-policy performance evaluation of contextual bandit algorithms. Cramming utilizes an entire bandit sequence through a single pass of data, leading to both statistically and computationally efficient evaluation. We prove that if a bandit algorithm satisfies a certain stability condition, the resulting crammed evaluation estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal under mild regularity conditions. Furthermore, we show that this stability condition holds for commonly used linear contextual bandit algorithms, including epsilon-greedy, Thompson Sampling, and Upper Confidence Bound algorithms. Using both synthetic and publicly available datasets, we compare the empirical performance of cramming with the state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed cram method reduces the evaluation standard error by approximately 40% relative to off-policy evaluation methods while preserving unbiasedness and valid confidence interval coverage.
Barrier functions are a general framework for establishing a safety guarantee for a system. However, there is no general method for finding these functions. To address this shortcoming, recent approaches use self-supervised learning techniques to learn these functions using training data that are periodically generated by a verification procedure, leading to a verification-aided learning framework. Despite its immense potential in automating barrier function synthesis, the verification-aided learning framework does not have termination guarantees and may suffer from a low success rate of finding a valid barrier function in practice. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach to address these drawbacks. With a convex formulation of the barrier function synthesis, we propose to first learn an empirically well-behaved NN basis function and then apply a fine-tuning algorithm that exploits the convexity and counterexamples from the verification failure to find a valid barrier function with finite-step termination guarantees: if there exist valid barrier functions, the fine-tuning algorithm is guaranteed to find one in a finite number of iterations. We demonstrate that our fine-tuning method can significantly boost the performance of the verification-aided learning framework on examples of different scales and using various neural network verifiers.
Landmarks are facts or actions that appear in all valid solutions of a planning problem. They have been used successfully to calculate heuristics that guide the search for a plan. We investigate an extension to this concept by defining a novel "relevance score" that helps identify facts or actions that appear in most but not all plans to achieve any given goal. We describe an approach to compute this relevance score and use it as a heuristic in the search for a plan. We experimentally compare the performance of our approach with that of a state of the art landmark-based heuristic planning approach using benchmark planning problems. While the original landmark-based heuristic leads to better performance on problems with well-defined landmarks, our approach substantially improves performance on problems that lack non-trivial landmarks.
This paper develops a general asymptotic theory for nonparametric kernel regression in the presence of cluster dependence. We examine nonparametric density estimation, Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression, and local linear estimation. Our theory accommodates growing and heterogeneous cluster sizes. We derive asymptotic conditional bias and variance, establish uniform consistency, and prove asymptotic normality. Our findings reveal that under heterogeneous cluster sizes, the asymptotic variance includes a new term reflecting within-cluster dependence, which is overlooked when cluster sizes are presumed to be bounded. We propose valid approaches for bandwidth selection and inference, introduce estimators of the asymptotic variance, and demonstrate their consistency. In simulations, we verify the effectiveness of the cluster-robust bandwidth selection and show that the derived cluster-robust confidence interval improves the coverage ratio. We illustrate the application of these methods using a policy-targeting dataset in development economics.
Automated theorem provers and formal proof assistants are general reasoning systems that are in theory capable of proving arbitrarily hard theorems, thus solving arbitrary problems reducible to mathematics and logical reasoning. In practice, such systems however face large combinatorial explosion, and therefore include many heuristics and choice points that considerably influence their performance. This is an opportunity for trained machine learning predictors, which can guide the work of such reasoning systems. Conversely, deductive search supported by the notion of logically valid proof allows one to train machine learning systems on large reasoning corpora. Such bodies of proof are usually correct by construction and when combined with more and more precise trained guidance they can be boostrapped into very large corpora, with increasingly long reasoning chains and possibly novel proof ideas. In this paper we provide an overview of several automated reasoning and theorem proving domains and the learning and AI methods that have been so far developed for them. These include premise selection, proof guidance in several settings, AI systems and feedback loops iterating between reasoning and learning, and symbolic classification problems.
In this paper, we study a facility location problem within a competitive market context, where customer demand is predicted by a random utility choice model. Unlike prior research, which primarily focuses on simple constraints such as a cardinality constraint on the number of selected locations, we introduce routing constraints that necessitate the selection of locations in a manner that guarantees the existence of a tour visiting all chosen locations while adhering to a specified tour length upper bound. Such routing constraints find crucial applications in various real-world scenarios. The problem at hand features a non-linear objective function, resulting from the utilization of random utilities, together with complex routing constraints, making it computationally challenging. To tackle this problem, we explore three types of valid cuts, namely, outer-approximation and submodular cuts to handle the nonlinear objective function, as well as sub-tour elimination cuts to address the complex routing constraints. These lead to the development of two exact solution methods: a nested cutting plane and nested branch-and-cut algorithms, where these valid cuts are iteratively added to a master problem through two nested loops. We also prove that our nested cutting plane method always converges to optimality after a finite number of iterations. Furthermore, we develop a local search-based metaheuristic tailored for solving large-scale instances and show its pros and cons compared to exact methods. Extensive experiments are conducted on problem instances of varying sizes, demonstrating that our approach excels in terms of solution quality and computation time when compared to other baseline approaches.
The contrast between companies' "fleshy" promises and the "skeletal" performance in digital transformation may lead to a higher risk of stock price crash. This paper selects a sample of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2021, empirically analyses the specific impact of the gap between words and deeds in digital transformation (GDT) on the stock price crash risk, and explores the possible causes of GDT. We found that GDT significantly increases the stock price crash risk, and this finding is still valid after a series of robustness tests. In a further study, a deeper examination of the causes of GDT reveals that firms' perceptions of economic policy uncertainty significantly increase GDT, and the effect is more pronounced in the sample of loss-making firms. At the same time, the results of the heterogeneity test suggest that investors are more tolerant of state-owned enterprises when they are in the GDT situation. Taken together, we provide a concrete bridge between the two measures of digital transformation - digital text frequency and digital technology share - and offer new insights to enhance capital market stability.