PLaD: Preference-based Large Language Model Distillation with Pseudo-Preference Pairs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in various tasks, yet their vast parameter sizes restrict their applicability in resource-constrained settings. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a viable solution by transferring expertise from large teacher models to compact student models. However, traditional KD techniques face specific challenges when applied to LLMs, including restricted access to LLM outputs, significant teacher-student capacity gaps, and the inherited mis-calibration issue. In this work, we present PLaD, a novel preference-based LLM distillation framework. PLaD exploits the teacher-student capacity discrepancy to generate pseudo-preference pairs where teacher outputs are preferred over student outputs. Then, PLaD leverages a ranking loss to re-calibrate student's estimation of sequence likelihood, which steers the student's focus towards understanding the relative quality of outputs instead of simply imitating the teacher. PLaD bypasses the need for access to teacher LLM's internal states, tackles the student's expressivity limitations, and mitigates the student mis-calibration issue. Through extensive experiments on two sequence generation tasks and with various LLMs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PLaD framework.

Multi-Scale Dilated Convolution Network for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting

Accurate forecasting of long-term time series has important applications for decision making and planning. However, it remains challenging to capture the long-term dependencies in time series data. To better extract long-term dependencies, We propose Multi Scale Dilated Convolution Network (MSDCN), a method that utilizes a shallow dilated convolution architecture to capture the period and trend characteristics of long time series. We design different convolution blocks with exponentially growing dilations and varying kernel sizes to sample time series data at different scales. Furthermore, we utilize traditional autoregressive model to capture the linear relationships within the data. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct experiments on eight challenging long-term time series forecasting benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the prior state-of-the-art approaches and shows significant inference speed improvements compared to several strong baseline methods.

Gaussian Process-Based Learning Control of Underactuated Balance Robots with an External and Internal Convertible Modeling Structure

External and internal convertible (EIC) form-based motion control is one of the effective designs of simultaneously trajectory tracking and balance for underactuated balance robots. Under certain conditions, the EIC-based control design however leads to uncontrolled robot motion. We present a Gaussian process (GP)-based data-driven learning control for underactuated balance robots with the EIC modeling structure. Two GP-based learning controllers are presented by using the EIC structure property. The partial EIC (PEIC)-based control design partitions the robotic dynamics into a fully actuated subsystem and one reduced-order underactuated system. The null-space EIC (NEIC)-based control compensates for the uncontrolled motion in a subspace, while the other closed-loop dynamics are not affected. Under the PEIC- and NEIC-based, the tracking and balance tasks are guaranteed and convergence rate and bounded errors are achieved without causing any uncontrolled motion by the original EIC-based control. We validate the results and demonstrate the GP-based learning control design performance using two inverted pendulum platforms.

Video Summarization: Towards Entity-Aware Captions

Existing popular video captioning benchmarks and models deal with generic captions devoid of specific person, place or organization named entities. In contrast, news videos present a challenging setting where the caption requires such named entities for meaningful summarization. As such, we propose the task of summarizing news video directly to entity-aware captions. We also release a large-scale dataset, VIEWS (VIdeo NEWS), to support research on this task. Further, we propose a method that augments visual information from videos with context retrieved from external world knowledge to generate entity-aware captions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three video captioning models. We also show that our approach generalizes to existing news image captions dataset. With all the extensive experiments and insights, we believe we establish a solid basis for future research on this challenging task.

NeRFTAP: Enhancing Transferability of Adversarial Patches on Face Recognition using Neural Radiance Fields

Face recognition (FR) technology plays a crucial role in various applications, but its vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses significant security concerns. Existing research primarily focuses on transferability to different FR models, overlooking the direct transferability to victim's face images, which is a practical threat in real-world scenarios. In this study, we propose a novel adversarial attack method that considers both the transferability to the FR model and the victim's face image, called NeRFTAP. Leveraging NeRF-based 3D-GAN, we generate new view face images for the source and target subjects to enhance transferability of adversarial patches. We introduce a style consistency loss to ensure the visual similarity between the adversarial UV map and the target UV map under a 0-1 mask, enhancing the effectiveness and naturalness of the generated adversarial face images. Extensive experiments and evaluations on various FR models demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing attack techniques. Our work provides valuable insights for enhancing the robustness of FR systems in practical adversarial settings.

Cascaded Nonlinear Control Design for Highly Underactuated Balance Robots

This paper presents a nonlinear control design for highly underactuated balance robots, which possess more numbers of unactuated degree-of-freedom (DOF) than actuated ones. To address the challenge of simultaneously trajectory tracking of actuated coordinates and balancing of unactuated coordinates, the proposed control converts a robot dynamics into a series of cascaded subsystems and each of them is considered virtually actuated. To achieve the control goal, we sequentially design and update the virtual and actual control inputs to incorporate the balance task such that the unactuated coordinates are balanced to their instantaneous equilibrium. The closed-loop dynamics are shown to be stable and the tracking errors exponentially converge towards a neighborhood near the origin. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control design by using a triple-inverted pendulum cart system.

Gaussian Process-Enhanced, External and Internal Convertible (EIC) Form-Based Control of Underactuated Balance Robots

External and internal convertible (EIC) form-based motion control (i.e., EIC-based control) is one of the effective approaches for underactuated balance robots. By sequentially controller design, trajectory tracking of the actuated subsystem and balance of the unactuated subsystem can be achieved simultaneously. However, with certain conditions, there exists uncontrolled robot motion under the EIC-based control. We first identify these conditions and then propose an enhanced EIC-based control with a Gaussian process data-driven robot dynamic model. Under the new enhanced EIC-based control, the stability and performance of the closed-loop system is guaranteed. We demonstrate the GP-enhanced EIC-based control experimentally using two examples of underactuated balance robots.

What do LLMs Know about Financial Markets? A Case Study on Reddit Market Sentiment Analysis

Market sentiment analysis on social media content requires knowledge of both financial markets and social media jargon, which makes it a challenging task for human raters. The resulting lack of high-quality labeled data stands in the way of conventional supervised learning methods. Instead, we approach this problem using semi-supervised learning with a large language model (LLM). Our pipeline generates weak financial sentiment labels for Reddit posts with an LLM and then uses that data to train a small model that can be served in production. We find that prompting the LLM to produce Chain-of-Thought summaries and forcing it through several reasoning paths helps generate more stable and accurate labels, while using a regression loss further improves distillation quality. With only a handful of prompts, the final model performs on par with existing supervised models. Though production applications of our model are limited by ethical considerations, the model's competitive performance points to the great potential of using LLMs for tasks that otherwise require skill-intensive annotation.

Scaling Multimodal Pre-Training via Cross-Modality Gradient Harmonization

Self-supervised pre-training recently demonstrates success on large-scale multimodal data, and state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods often enforce the feature consistency from cross-modality inputs, such as video/audio or video/text pairs. Despite its convenience to formulate and leverage in practice, such cross-modality alignment (CMA) is only a weak and noisy supervision, since two modalities can be semantically misaligned even they are temporally aligned. For example, even in the commonly adopted instructional videos, a speaker can sometimes refer to something that is not visually present in the current frame; and the semantic misalignment would only be more unpredictable for the raw videos from the internet. We conjecture that might cause conflicts and biases among modalities, and may hence prohibit CMA from scaling up to training with larger and more heterogeneous data. This paper first verifies our conjecture by observing that, even in the latest VATT pre-training using only instructional videos, there exist strong gradient conflicts between different CMA losses within the same video, audio, text triplet, indicating them as the noisy source of supervision. We then propose to harmonize such gradients, via two techniques: (i) cross-modality gradient realignment: modifying different CMA loss gradients for each sample triplet, so that their gradient directions are more aligned; and (ii) gradient-based curriculum learning: leveraging the gradient conflict information on an indicator of sample noisiness, to develop a curriculum learning strategy to prioritize training on less noisy sample triplets. Applying those techniques to pre-training VATT on the HowTo100M dataset, we consistently improve its performance on different downstream tasks. Moreover, we are able to scale VATT pre-training to more complicated non-narrative Youtube8M dataset to further improve the state-of-the-arts.

Minimum Efforts to Build an End-to-End Spatial-Temporal Action Detector

Spatial-temporal action detection is a vital part of video understanding. Current spatial-temporal action detection methods will first use an object detector to obtain person candidate proposals. Then, the model will classify the person candidates into different action categories. So-called two-stage methods are heavy and hard to apply in real-world applications. Some existing methods use a unified model structure, But they perform badly with the vanilla model and often need extra modules to boost the performance. In this paper, we explore the strategy to build an end-to-end spatial-temporal action detector with minimal modifications. To this end, we propose a new method named ME-STAD, which solves the spatial-temporal action detection problem in an end-to-end manner. Besides the model design, we propose a novel labeling strategy to deal with sparse annotations in spatial-temporal datasets. The proposed ME-STAD achieves better results (2.2% mAP boost) than original two-stage detectors and around 80% FLOPs reduction. Moreover, our proposed ME-STAD only has minimum modifications with previous methods and does not require extra components. Our code will be made public.