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@misc{skryagin2024asn,
Anote = {./images/answer_set_networks.png},
title={Answer Set Networks: Casting Answer Set Programming into Deep Learning},
author={Arseny Skryagin and Daniel Ochs and Phillip Deibert and Simon Kohaut and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
Note={Although Answer Set Programming (ASP) allows constraining neural-symbolic (NeSy) systems, its employment is hindered by the prohibitive costs of computing stable models and the CPU-bound nature of state-of-the-art solvers. To this end, we propose Answer Set Networks (ASN), a NeSy solver. Based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN), ASNs are a scalable approach to ASP-based Deep Probabilistic Logic Programming (DPPL). Specifically, we show how to translate ASPs into ASNs and demonstrate how ASNs can efficiently solve the encoded problem by leveraging GPU's batching and parallelization capabilities. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that ASNs outperform state-of-the-art CPU-bound NeSy systems on multiple tasks. Simultaneously, we make the following two contributions based on the strengths of ASNs. Namely, we are the first to show the finetuning of Large Language Models (LLM) with DPPLs, employing ASNs to guide the training with logic. Further, we show the "constitutional navigation" of drones, i.e., encoding public aviation laws in an ASN for routing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in uncertain environments.},
Keywords={Answer Set Programming, Deep Learning, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Large Language Models},
Crossref={https://github.com/ml-research/answersetnetworks},
year={2024},
eprint={2412.14814},
Howbulished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.14814},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.AI},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14814},
}
@article{helff2024vlol,
Anote = {./images/helff2024vlol.png},
title = {V-LoL: A Diagnostic Dataset for Visual Logical Learning},
author={Lukas Helff and Wolfgang Stammer and Hikaru Shindo and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
journal = {Journal of Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR)},
Note = {Despite the successes of recent developments in visual AI, different shortcomings still exist; from missing exact logical reasoning, to abstract generalization abilities, to understanding complex and noisy scenes. Unfortunately, existing benchmarks, were not designed to cap- ture more than a few of these aspects. Whereas deep learning datasets focus on visually complex data but simple visual reasoning tasks, inductive logic datasets involve complex logical learning tasks, however, lack the visual component. To address this, we propose the diagnostic visual logical learning dataset, V-LoL, that seamlessly combines visual and logical challenges. Notably, we introduce the first instantiation of V-LoL, V-LoL-Train, -- a visual rendition of a classic benchmark in symbolic AI, the Michalski train problem. By incorporating intricate visual scenes and flexible logical reasoning tasks within a versatile framework, V-LoL-Train provides a platform for investigating a wide range of visual logical learning challenges. We evaluate a variety of AI systems including traditional symbolic AI, neural AI, as well as neuro-symbolic AI. Our evaluations demonstrate that even SOTA AI faces difficulties in dealing with visual logical learning challenges, highlighting unique advantages and limitations of each methodology. Overall, V-LoL opens up new avenues for understanding and enhancing current abilities in visual logical learning for AI systems.},
Keywords = {Neuro-symbolic AI, Deep Learning, Object-centric Learning, Benchmark, Michalski Train},
year={2024},
pages={},
crossref = {https://sites.google.com/view/v-lol},
url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=IkbFIPiqFe}
}
@misc{divo2024forecastingCF,
anote = {./images/company-fundamentals-forecast.png},
title={Forecasting Company Fundamentals},
author={Felix Divo and Eric Endress and Kevin Endler and Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami},
year={2024},
eprint={2411.05791},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05791},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.05152},
keywords = {Forecasting, Company Fundamentals, Financial Machine Learning, Quantitative Finance, Value Investing, Factor Investing},
Note = {Company fundamentals are key to assessing companies' financial and overall success and stability. Forecasting them is important in multiple fields, including investing and econometrics. While statistical and contemporary machine learning methods have been applied to many time series tasks, there is a lack of comparison of these approaches on this particularly challenging data regime. To this end, we try to bridge this gap and thoroughly evaluate the theoretical properties and practical performance of 22 deterministic and probabilistic company fundamentals forecasting models on real company data. We observe that deep learning models provide superior forcasting performance to classical models, in particular when considering uncertainty estimation. To validate the findings, we compare them to human analyst expectations and find that their accuracy is comparable to the automatic forecasts. We further show how these high-quality forecasts can benefit automated stock allocation. We close by presenting possible ways of integrating domain experts to further improve performance and increase reliability.},
}
@misc{kraus2024unitedpretrain,
anote = {./images/xit-overview.png},
title={United We Pretrain, Divided We Fail! Representation Learning for Time Series by Pretraining on 75 Datasets at Once},
author={Maurice Kraus and Felix Divo and David Steinmann and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
eprint={2402.15404},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.05152},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15404},
keywords = {machine learning, representation learning, pretraining, time series, multi-dataset training},
Note = {In natural language processing and vision, pretraining is utilized to learn effective representations. Unfortunately, the success of pretraining does not easily carry over to time series due to potential mismatch between sources and target. Actually, common belief is that multi-dataset pretraining does not work for time series! Au contraire, we introduce a new self-supervised contrastive pretraining approach to learn one encoding from many unlabeled and diverse time series datasets, so that the single learned representation can then be reused in several target domains for, say, classification. Specifically, we propose the XD-MixUp interpolation method and the Soft Interpolation Contextual Contrasting (SICC) loss. Empirically, this outperforms both supervised training and other self-supervised pretraining methods when finetuning on low-data regimes. This disproves the common belief: We can actually learn from multiple time series datasets, even from 75 at once.},
}
@article{strem2025multialarm,
Anote={./images/strem2025multialarm.png},
title = {Multimodal transformer for early alarm prediction},
journal = {Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence},
volume = {139},
pages = {109643},
year = {2025},
issn = {0952-1976},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2024.109643},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952197624018013},
author = {Nika Strem and Devendra Singh Dhami and Benedikt Schmidt and Kristian Kersting},
keywords = {Multimodal transformer, Multimodal fusion, Industrial processes, Alarm management, Alarm prediction},
Note = {Alarms are an essential part of distributed control systems designed to help plant operators keep the processes stable and safe. In reality, however, alarms are often noisy and thus can be easily overlooked. Early alarm prediction can give the operator more time to assess the situation and introduce corrective actions to avoid downtime and negative impact on human safety and environment. Existing studies on alarm prediction typically rely on signals directly coupled with these alarms. However, using more sources of information could benefit early prediction by letting the model learn characteristic patterns in the interactions of signals and events. Meanwhile, multimodal deep learning has recently seen impressive developments. Combination (or fusion) of modalities has been shown to be a key success factor, yet choosing the best fusion method for a given task introduces a new degree of complexity, in addition to existing architectural choices and hyperparameter tuning. This is one of the reasons why real-world problems are still typically tackled with unimodal approaches. To bridge this gap, we introduce a multimodal Transformer model for early alarm prediction based on a combination of recent events and signal data. The model learns the optimal representation of data from multiple fusion strategies automatically. The model is validated on real-world industrial data. We show that our model is capable of predicting alarms with the given horizon and that the proposed multimodal fusion method yields state-of-the-art predictive performance while eliminating the need to choose among conventional fusion techniques, thus reducing tuning costs and training time.},
Crossref={}
}
@misc{steinmann2024navigatingshortcutsspuriouscorrelations,
anote = {./images/steinmann2024navigatingshortcuts.png},
title={Navigating Shortcuts, Spurious Correlations, and Confounders: From Origins via Detection to Mitigation},
author={David Steinmann and Felix Divo and Maurice Kraus and Antonia Wüst and Lukas Struppek and Felix Friedrich and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
eprint={2412.05152},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.05152},
primaryClass={cs.LG},
Keywords = {Shortcuts, Spurious Correlations, Clever Hans, Confounder, Detection, Mitigation},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05152},
Note = {Shortcuts, also described as Clever Hans behavior, spurious correlations, or confounders, present a significant challenge in machine learning and AI, critically affecting model generalization and robustness. Research in this area, however, remains fragmented across various terminologies, hindering the progress of the field as a whole. Consequently, we introduce a unifying taxonomy of shortcut learning by providing a formal definition of shortcuts and bridging the diverse terms used in the literature. In doing so, we further establish important connections between shortcuts and related fields, including bias, causality, and security, where parallels exist but are rarely discussed. Our taxonomy organizes existing approaches for shortcut detection and mitigation, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state of the field and revealing underexplored areas and open challenges. Moreover, we compile and classify datasets tailored to study shortcut learning. Altogether, this work provides a holistic perspective to deepen understanding and drive the development of more effective strategies for addressing shortcuts in machine learning.}
}
@misc{kraus2024xlstmmixermultivariatetimeseries,
anote = {./images/xlstm-mixer.png},
title={xLSTM-Mixer: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting by Mixing via Scalar Memories},
author={Maurice Kraus and Felix Divo and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
eprint={2410.16928},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.LG},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.16928},
Keywords = {Time Series, Forecasting, xLSTM},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16928},
Crossref={https://github.com/mauricekraus/xlstm-mixer},
Note = {Time series data is prevalent across numerous fields, necessitating the development of robust and accurate forecasting models. Capturing patterns both within and between temporal and multivariate components is crucial for reliable predictions. We introduce xLSTM-Mixer, a model designed to effectively integrate temporal sequences, joint time-variate information, and multiple perspectives for robust forecasting. Our approach begins with a linear forecast shared across variates, which is then refined by xLSTM blocks. These blocks serve as key elements for modeling the complex dynamics of challenging time series data. xLSTM-Mixer ultimately reconciles two distinct views to produce the final forecast. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate xLSTM-Mixer's superior long-term forecasting performance compared to recent state-of-the-art methods. A thorough model analysis provides further insights into its key components and confirms its robustness and effectiveness. This work contributes to the resurgence of recurrent models in time series forecasting.}
}
@misc{shindo2024blendrl_arxiv,
Anote={./images/shindo2024blendrl.png},
author = {Hikaru Shindo and Quentin Delfosse and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
title = {BlendRL: A Framework for Merging Symbolic and Neural Policy Learning},
Keywords = {Reinforcement Learning, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Differentiable Reasoning, Interpretable and Explainable AI},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.11689},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11689},
Pages = {},
Crossref={https://github.com/ml-research/blendrl},
Note = {Humans can leverage both abstract reasoning and intuitive reactions. In contrast, reinforcement learning policies are typically encoded in either opaque systems like neural networks or symbolic systems that rely on predefined symbols and rules. This disjointed approach severely limits the agents’ capabilities, as they often lack either the flexible low-level reaction characteristic of neural agents or the interpretable reasoning of symbolic agents. To overcome this challenge, we introduce BlendRL, a neuro-symbolic RL framework that harmoniously integrates both paradigms within RL agents that use mixtures of both logic and neural policies. We empirically demonstrate that BlendRL agents outperform both neural and symbolic baselines in standard Atari environments, and showcase their robustness to environmental changes. Additionally, we analyze the interaction between neural and symbolic policies, illustrating how their hybrid use helps agents overcome each other's limitations.}
}
@inproceedings{hintersdorf2024balancingtransparency,
anote = {./images/hintersdorf2024balancingtransparency.png},
author = {Dominik Hintersdorf and Lukas Struppek and Kristian Kersting},
title = {Balancing Transparency and Risk: An Overview of the Security and Privacy Risks of Open-Source Machine Learning Models},
year = {2024},
url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-73741-1_16},
booktitle = {Bridging the Gap Between AI and Reality: First International Conference (AISoLA)},
pages = {269–283},
keywords = {Machine Learning, Security, Privacy, Open-Source},
note = {The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced remarkable progress in recent years, driven by the widespread adoption of open-source machine learning models in both research and industry. Considering the resource-intensive nature of training on vast datasets, many applications opt for models that have already been trained. Hence, a small number of key players undertake the responsibility of training and publicly releasing large pre-trained models, providing a crucial foundation for a wide range of applications. However, the adoption of these open-source models carries inherent privacy and security risks that are often overlooked. To provide a concrete example, an inconspicuous model may conceal hidden functionalities that, when triggered by specific input patterns, can manipulate the behavior of the system, such as instructing self-driving cars to ignore the presence of other vehicles. The implications of successful privacy and security attacks encompass a broad spectrum, ranging from relatively minor damage like service interruptions to highly alarming scenarios, including physical harm or the exposure of sensitive user data. In this work, we present a comprehensive overview of common privacy and security threats associated with the use of open-source models. By raising awareness of these dangers, we strive to promote the responsible and secure use of AI systems.},
}
@misc{haerle2024scarsparseconditionedautoencoders,
anote={./images/haerle2024scar.png},
title={SCAR: Sparse Conditioned Autoencoders for Concept Detection and Steering in LLMs},
author={Ruben Härle and Felix Friedrich and Manuel Brack and Björn Deiseroth and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.07122},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07122},
Keywords = {Large Language Models, Concept Steering, Sparse Autoencoder, AI Safety, SAEs, Mechanistic Interpretability},
Note = {Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating human-like text, but their output may not be aligned with the user or even produce harmful content.
This paper presents a novel approach to detect and steer concepts such as toxicity before generation. We introduce the Sparse Conditioned Autoencoder (SCAR), a single trained module that
extends the otherwise untouched LLM. SCAR ensures full steerability, towards and away from concepts (e.g., toxic content),
without compromising the quality of the model's text generation on standard evaluation benchmarks. We demonstrate the effective
application of our approach through a variety of concepts, including toxicity, safety, and writing style alignment. As such, this work establishes a robust framework for
controlling LLM generations, ensuring their ethical and safe deployment in real-world applications.}
}
@incollection{wuest2024bongard,
Anote={./images/wuest2024bongard.png},
title = {Bongard in Wonderland: Visual Puzzles That Still Make AI Go Mad?},
author = {Wuest, Antonia and Tobiasch, Tim and Helff, Lukas and Dhami, Devendra S. and Rothkopf, Constantin A. and Kersting, Kristian},
booktitle = {Working Notes of the NeurIPS Workshop on System-2 Reasoning at Scale},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=4Yv9tFHDwX},
Keywords = {Cognitive Science, Benchmark, Bongrads, Vision-Language Models},
Note = {Recently, newly developed Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, have
emerged, seemingly demonstrating advanced reasoning capabilities across text and image modalities.
Yet, the depth of these advances in language-guided perception and abstract reasoning remains
underexplored, and it is unclear whether these models can truly live up to their ambitious promises.
To assess the progress and identify shortcomings, we enter the wonderland of Bongard problems, a
set of classical visual reasoning puzzles that require human-like abilities of pattern recognition and
abstract reasoning. While VLMs occasionally succeed in identifying discriminative concepts and
solving some of the problems, they frequently falter, failing to understand and reason about visual
concepts. Surprisingly, even elementary concepts that may seem trivial to humans, such as simple
spirals, pose significant challenges. Moreover, even when asked to explicitly focus on and analyze
these concepts, they continue to falter, suggesting not only a lack of understanding of these elementary
visual concepts but also an inability to generalize to unseen concepts. These observations underscore
the current limitations of VLMs, emphasize that a significant gap remains between human-like visual
reasoning and machine cognition, and highlight the ongoing need for innovation in this area.}
}
@article{strem2025apt,
Anote={./images/strem2025apt.png},
title = {APT: Alarm Prediction Transformer},
author = {Nika Strem and Devendra Singh Dhami and Benedikt Schmidt and Benjamin Kloepper and Kristian Kersting},
Journal = {Expert System Application},
year = {2025},
Note = {Distributed control systems (DCS) are essential to operate complex industrial processes. A major part of a DCS is the alarm system, which helps plant operators to keep the processes stable and safe. Alarms are defined as threshold values on individual signals taking into account minimum reaction time of the human operator. In reality, however, alarms are often noisy and overwhelming, and thus can be easily overlooked by the operators. Early alarm prediction can give the operator more time to react and introduce corrective actions to avoid downtime and negative impact on human safety and the environment. In this context, we introduce Alarm Prediction Transformer (APT), a multimodal Transformer-based machine learning model for early alarm prediction based on the combination of recent events and signal data. Specifically, we propose two novel fusion strategies and three methods of label encoding with various levels of granularity. Given a window of several minutes of event logs and signal data, our model predicts whether an alarm is going to be triggered after a few minutes and, if yes, it also predicts its location. Our experiments on two novel real industrial plant data sets and a simulated data set show that the model is capable of predicting alarms with the given horizon and that our proposed fusion technique combining inputs from different modalities, i. e. events and signals, yields more accurate results than any of the modalities alone or conventional fusion techniques.},
Publisher = {Springer},
Keywords = {Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Industrial Processes, Alarm Management, Multimodal Transformer, Multimodal Fusion},
Url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417424023881},
Crossref={}
}
@inproceedings{shindo2024deisam,
Anote={./images/shindo2024deisam.png},
author = {Hikaru Shindo and Manuel Brack and Gopika Sudhakaran and Devendra Singh Dhami and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting},
title = {DeiSAM: Segment Anything with Deictic Prompting},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14123},
Pages = {},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
Note = {Large-scale, pre-trained neural networks have demonstrated strong capabilities in various tasks, including zero-shot image segmentation. To identify concrete objects in complex scenes, humans instinctively rely on deictic descriptions in natural language, i.e. , referring to something depending on the con- text, e.g. ”The object that is on the desk and behind the cup.”. However, deep learning approaches cannot reliably interpret these deictic representations due to their lack of reasoning capabilities in complex scenarios. To remedy this issue, we propose DeiSAM, which integrates large pre-trained neural networks with differentiable logic reasoners. Given a complex, textual segmentation description, DeiSAM leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate first-order logic rules and performs differentiable forward reasoning on generated scene graphs. Subsequently, DeiSAM segments objects by matching them to the logically inferred image regions. As part of our evaluation, we propose the Deictic Visual Genome (DeiVG) dataset, containing paired visual input and complex, deictic textual prompts. Our empirical results demonstrate that DeiSAM is a substantial improvement over data-driven neural baselines on deictic segmentation tasks.},
Keywords = {Neuro-Symbolic AI, Differentiable Reasoning, Segmentation, Textual Grounding}
}
@inproceedings{hintersdorf24nemo,
Anote={./images/hintersdorf2024nemo.png},
author = {Dominik Hintersdorf and Lukas Struppek and Kristian Kersting and Adam Dziedzic and Franziska Boenisch},
title = {Finding NeMo: Localizing Neurons Responsible For Memorization in Diffusion Models},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02366},
Pages = {},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
Note = {Diffusion models (DMs) produce very detailed and high-quality images, achieved through rigorous training on huge datasets. Unfortunately, this practice raises privacy and intellectual property concerns, as DMs can memorize and later reproduce their potentially sensitive or copyrighted training images at inference time. Prior efforts to prevent this issue are viable when the DM is developed and deployed in a secure and constantly monitored environment. However, they hold the risk of adversaries circumventing the safeguards and are not effective when the DM itself is publicly released. To solve the problem, we introduce NeMo, the first method to localize memorization of individual data samples down to the level of neurons in DMs' cross-attention layers. Through our experiments, we make the intriguing finding that in many cases, single neurons are responsible for memorizing particular training samples. By deactivating these memorization neurons, we avoid replication of training data at inference time, increase the diversity in the generated outputs, and mitigate the leakage of sensitive data.},
Keywords = {Memorization, Diffusion Models, Stable Diffusion}
}
@inproceedings{stammer2024ncb,
anote={./images/stammer2024neural.png},
title={Neural Concept Binder},
author={Wolfgang Stammer and Antonia Wüst and David Steinmann and Kristian Kersting},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
Pages={},
Crossref={https://github.com/ml-research/neuralconceptbinder},
Url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.09949},
year={2024},
note={The challenge in object-based visual reasoning lies in generating descriptive yet distinct concept representations. Moreover, doing this in an unsupervised fashion requires human users to understand a model's learned concepts and potentially revise false concepts. In addressing this challenge, we introduce the Neural Concept Binder, a new framework for deriving discrete concept representations resulting in what we term "concept-slot encodings". These encodings leverage both "soft binding" via object-centric block-slot encodings and "hard binding" via retrieval-based inference. The Neural Concept Binder facilitates straightforward concept inspection and direct integration of external knowledge, such as human input or insights from other AI models like GPT-4. Additionally, we demonstrate that incorporating the hard binding mechanism does not compromise performance; instead, it enables seamless integration into both neural and symbolic modules for intricate reasoning tasks, as evidenced by evaluations on our newly introduced CLEVR-Sudoku dataset.},
Keywords={Concept Discovery, Interpretable Artificial Intelligence, Interactive Machine Learning, Disentanglement}
}
@inproceedings{delfosse2024interpretable,
Anote = {./images/delfosse2024interpretable.png},
title={Interpretable concept bottlenecks to align reinforcement learning agents},
author={Quentin Delfosse and Sebastian Sztwiertnia and Wolfgang Stammer and Mark Rothermel and Kristian Kersting},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05821v2.pdf},
Pages = {},
Note = {Goal misalignment, reward sparsity and difficult credit assignment are only a few of the many issues that make it difficult for deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn optimal policies. Unfortunately, the black-box nature of deep neural networks impedes the inclusion of domain experts for inspecting the model and revising suboptimal policies. To this end, we introduce *Successive Concept Bottleneck Agents* (SCoBots), that integrate consecutive concept bottleneck (CB) layers. In contrast to current CB models, SCoBots do not just represent concepts as properties of individual objects, but also as relations between objects which is crucial for many RL tasks. Our experimental results provide evidence of SCoBots' competitive performances, but also of their potential for domain experts to understand and regularize their behavior. Among other things, SCoBots enabled us to identify a previously unknown misalignment problem in the iconic video game, Pong, and resolve it. Overall, SCoBots thus result in more human-aligned RL agents.},
Keywords = {Reinforcement Learning, Transparent agents, Interpretability, Concept Bottlebecks}
}
@inproceedings{skryagin2024cna,
Anote={./images/skryagin2024cna.png},
author = {Arseny Skryagin and Felix Divo and Mohammad Amin Ali and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
title = {Graph Neural Networks Need Cluster-Normalize-Activate Modules},
year = {2024},
Url = {},
Pages = {},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
Note = {Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are non-Euclidean deep learning models for graph-structured data. Despite their successful and diverse applications, oversmoothing prohibits deep architectures due to node features converging to a single fixed point. This severely limits their potential to solve complex tasks. To counteract this tendency, we propose a plug-and-play module consisting of three steps: Cluster→Normalize→Activate (CNA). By applying CNA modules, GNNs search and form super nodes in each layer, which are normalized and activated individually. We demonstrate in node classification and property prediction tasks that CNA significantly improves the accuracy over the state-of-the-art. Particularly, CNA reaches 94.18% and 95.75% accuracy on Cora and Citeseer, respectively. It further benefits GNNs in regression tasks as well, reducing the mean squared error compared to all baselines. At the same time, GNNs with CNA require substantially fewer learnable parameters than competing architectures.},
Crossref={https://github.com/ml-research/cna_modules},
Keywords = {Graph Neural Networks, Deep Geometric Learning, Learnable Activation Functions, Oversmoothing}
}
@inproceedings{deiseroth2024emnlp,
title={T-FREE: Subword Tokenizer-Free Generative LLMs via Sparse Representations for Memory-Efficient Embeddings},
author={Björn Deiseroth and Manuel Brack and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting and Samuel Weinbach},
year={2024},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
Keywords={Large Language Models, Tokenizers, Sparse Representations, Memory-Efficient Embeddings},
Note={Tokenizers are crucial for encoding information in Large Language Models, but their development has recently stagnated, and they contain inherent weaknesses. Major limitations include computational overhead, ineffective vocabulary use, and unnecessarily large embedding and head layers. Additionally, their performance is biased towards a reference corpus, leading to reduced effectiveness for underrepresented languages.
To remedy these issues, we propose T-FREE, which directly embeds words through sparse activation patterns over character triplets, and does not require a reference corpus. T-FREE inherently exploits morphological similarities and allows for strong compression of embedding layers. In our exhaustive experimental evaluation, we achieve competitive downstream performance with a parameter reduction of more than 85% on these layers. Further, T-FREE shows significant improvements in cross-lingual transfer learning.},
Anote={./images/deiseroth2024tfree.png},
url={../../papers/deiseroth2024emnlp.pdf}
}
@inproceedings{nakamura2024aurora,
author={Taishi Nakamura and Mayank Mishra and Simone Tedeschi and Yekun Chai and Jason T. Stillerman and Felix Friedrich and Prateek Yadav and Tanmay Laud and Vu Minh Chien and Terry Yue Zhuo and Diganta Misra and Ben Bogin and Xuan-Son Vu and Marzena Karpinska and Arnav Varma Dantuluri and Wojciech Kusa and Tommaso Furlanello and Rio Yokota and Niklas Muennighoff and Suhas Pai and Tosin Adewumi and Veronika Laippala and Xiaozhe Yao and Adalberto Junior and Alpay Ariyak and Aleksandr Drozd and Jordan Clive and Kshitij Gupta and Liangyu Chen and Qi Sun and Ken Tsui and Noah Persaud and Nour Fahmy and Tianlong Chen and Mohit Bansal and Nicolo Monti and Tai Dang and Ziyang Luo and Tien-Tung Bui and Roberto Navigli and Virendra Mehta and Matthew Blumberg and Victor May and Huu Nguyen and Sampo Pyysalo},
title = {Aurora-M: Open Source Continual Pre-training for Multilingual Language and Code},
year = {2024},
booktitle = {The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)},
keywords = {Multilingual, Continual, Pre-training, Safety, Fairness, Dataset, Red Teaming, Alignment, Regulations, Policy},
Note = {Pretrained language models underpin several AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as BLOOM and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. However, such existing models face challenges: limited multilingual capabilities, continual pretraining causing catastrophic forgetting, whereas pretraining from scratch is computationally expensive, and compliance with AI safety and development laws. This paper presents Aurora-M, a 15B parameter multilingual open-source model trained on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. Continually pretrained from StarCoderPlus on 435 billion additional tokens, Aurora-M surpasses 2 trillion tokens in total training token count. It is the first open-source multilingual model fine-tuned on human-reviewed safety instructions, thus aligning its development not only with conventional red-teaming considerations, but also with the specific concerns articulated in the Biden-Harris Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Aurora-M is rigorously evaluated across various tasks and languages, demonstrating robustness against catastrophic forgetting and outperforming alternatives in multilingual settings, particularly in safety evaluations. To promote responsible open-source LLM development, Aurora-M and its variants are released publicly.},
Anote = {./images/aurora.png},
url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00399}
}
@misc{tedeschi2024redteam,
author = {Simone Tedeschi and Felix Friedrich and Dung Nguyen and Nam Pham and Tanmay Laud and Chien Vu and Terry Yue Zhuo and Ziyang Luo and Ben Bogin and Tien-Tung Bui and Xuan-Son Vu and Paulo Villegas and Victor May and Huu Nguyen},
title = {Biden-Harris Redteam Dataset: A red-teaming dataset focusing on concerns in the Biden-Harris AI Executive Order},
year = 2024,
keywords = {Safety, Fairness, Dataset, Red Teaming, Alignment, Regulations, Policy},
Anote = {./images/aurora.png},
Howpublished = {Available at Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/datasets/aurora-m/biden-harris-redteam},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/aurora-m/biden-harris-redteam}
}
@inproceedings{busch2024net,
title={Phi-net: Efficient Causal Modeling at Scale},
author={Florian Peter Busch and Moritz Willig and Jonas Seng and Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM)},
pages={452--469},
year={2024},
publisher={PMLR},
Keywords={Causal ML, Probabilistic Circuits, Neural Causal Models, Large-Scale Inference},
Anote={./images/busch2024net.png},
url={https://www.socsci.ru.nl/johank/pgm2024/busch24.pdf},
note={Being a ubiquitous aspect of human cognition, causality has made its way into modern-day machine-learning research. Despite its importance in real-world applications, contemporary research still struggles with high-dimensional causal problems. Leveraging the efficiency of probabilistic circuits, which offer tractable computation of marginal probabilities, we introduce net, a probabilistic model designed for large-scale causal inference. net is a type of sum-product network where layering and the einsum operation allow for efficient parallelization. By incorporating interventional data into the learning process, the model can learn the effects of interventions and make predictions based on the specific interventional setting. Overall, net is a causal probabilistic circuit that efficiently answers causal queries in large-scale problems. We present evaluations conducted on both synthetic data and a substantial real-world dataset.}
}
@misc{brack2024communityoscar,
title={Community OSCAR: A Community Effort for Multilingual Web Data},
author={Manuel Brack and Malte Ostendorff and Pedro Ortiz Suarez and José Javier Saiz and Iñaki Lacunza Castilla and Jorge Palomar-Giner and Patrick Schramowski and Georg Rehm and Marta Villegas and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Howpublished={Technical Report / Preprint},
Keywords={Large-scale Data, Dataset, LLM training, LLM, Multilingual},
Note={The development of large language models (LLMs) relies heavily on extensive, high-quality datasets. Publicly available datasets focus predominantly on English, leaving other language communities behind. To address this issue, we introduce Community OSCAR, a multilingual dataset initiative designed to address the gap between English and non-English data availability. Through a collective effort, Community OSCAR covers over 150 languages with 45 billion documents, totaling over 345 TiB of data. Initial results indicate that Community OSCAR provides valuable raw data for training LLMs and enhancing the performance of multilingual models. This work aims to contribute to the ongoing advancements in multilingual NLP and to support a more inclusive AI ecosystem by making high-quality, multilingual data more accessible to those working with low-resource languages.},
Anote={./images/brack2024communityoscar.png},
url={https://occiglot.eu/papers/Community_Oscar.pdf}
}
@article{shindo2024neumann,
Anote={./images/shindo2023neumann.png},
title = {Learning Differentiable Logic Programs for Abstract Visual Reasoning},
author = {Hikaru Shindo and Viktor Pfanschilling and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
Journal = {Machine Learning Journal (MLJ)},
year = {2024},
Note = {Visual reasoning is essential for building intelligent agents that understand the world and perform problem-solving beyond perception. Differentiable forward reasoning has been developed to integrate reasoning with gradient-based machine learning paradigms. However, due to the memory intensity, most existing approaches do not bring the best of the expressivity of first-order logic, excluding a crucial ability to solve abstract visual reasoning, where agents need to perform reasoning by using analogies on abstract concepts in different scenarios. To overcome this problem, we propose NEUro-symbolic Message-pAssiNg reasoNer (NEUMANN), which is a graph-based differentiable forward reasoner, passing messages in a memory-efficient manner and handling structured programs with functors. Moreover, we propose a computationally-efficient structure learning algorithm to perform explanatory program induction on complex visual scenes. To evaluate, in addition to conventional visual reasoning tasks, we propose a new task, visual reasoning behind-the-scenes, where agents need to learn abstract programs and then answer queries by imagining scenes that are not observed. We empirically demonstrate that NEUMANN solves visual reasoning tasks efficiently, outperforming neural, symbolic, and neuro-symbolic baselines.},
Publisher = {Springer},
Keywords = {Differentiable Reasoning, Inductive Logic Programming, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Object-centric Learning, Graph Neural Network},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.00928},
Crossref={https://sites.google.com/view/neumann-tuda}
}
@misc{brack2024unleashing,
title={Unleashing Creativity: Generalizing Semantic Control for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models},
author={Manuel Brack and Marlon May and Linoy Tsaban and Felix Friedrich and Patrick Schramowski and Apolinaros Passos and Kristian Kersting },
year={2024},
Howpublished={Technical Report / Preprint},
Keywords={Text-to-Image Synthesis, Text-Guided Image Generation, SEGA, Semantic Control, Diffusion Transformers},
Note={The recent surge in popularity of text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) can largely be attributed to the versatile, expressive, and intuitive user interfaces provided through textual prompts. These models enable inexperienced people to explore artistic ventures easily and provide exciting new opportunities to experienced artists. However, the semantic control offered through text prompts alone is limited and rather fragile, and overall lacks the fine granularity necessary for creative applications. The majority of methods addressing this issue are restricted to specific DM architectures, severely limiting the creative workflow instead of generalizing it to arbitrary models. In contrast, we demonstrate that semantic guidance (SEGA) generalizes to any DM architecture. Importantly, SEGA is natively compatible with state-of-the-art diffusion transformers. Our empirical results show strong model-agnostic performance, and we highlight new creative possibilities enabled by SEGA, such as enhanced typographic manipulations. This work underscores SEGA’s potential to provide consistent, high-quality semantic guidance in a rapidly evolving generative model landscape.},
Anote={./images/brack2024unleashing.png},
url={https://www.aiml.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/papers/brack2024unleashing.pdf}},
}
@misc{deiseroth2024tfree,
title={T-FREE: Tokenizer-Free Generative LLMs via Sparse Representations for Memory-Efficient Embeddings},
author={Björn Deiseroth and Manuel Brack and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting and Samuel Weinbach},
year={2024},
Howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.19223},
Keywords={Large Language Models, Tokenizers, Sparse Representations, Memory-Efficient Embeddings},
Note={Tokenizers are crucial for encoding information in Large Language Models, but their development has recently stagnated, and they contain inherent weaknesses. Major limitations include computational overhead, ineffective vocabulary use, and unnecessarily large embedding and head layers. Additionally, their performance is biased towards a reference corpus, leading to reduced effectiveness for underrepresented languages.
To remedy these issues, we propose T-FREE, which directly embeds words through sparse activation patterns over character triplets, and does not require a reference corpus. T-FREE inherently exploits morphological similarities and allows for strong compression of embedding layers. In our exhaustive experimental evaluation, we achieve competitive downstream performance with a parameter reduction of more than 85% on these layers. Further, T-FREE shows significant improvements in cross-lingual transfer learning.},
Anote={./images/deiseroth2024tfree.png},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19223},
}
@article{friedrich2024fair,
Anote = {./images/ffriedrich_fair_2023.png},
title={Auditing and Instructing Text-to-Image Generation Models on Fairness},
author={Felix Friedrich and Manuel Brack and Dominik Hintersdorf and Lukas Struppek and Patrick Schramowski and Sasha Luccioni and Kristian Kersting},
Journal = {AI and Ethics},
year = {2024},
Note = {Generative AI models have recently achieved astonishing results in quality and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. However, since they are highly data-driven, relying on billion-sized datasets randomly scraped from the internet, they also suffer from degenerated and biased human behavior, as we demonstrate. In fact, they may even reinforce such biases. To not only uncover but also combat these undesired effects, we present a novel strategy, called Fair Diffusion, to attenuate biases after the deployment of generative text-to-image models. Specifically, we demonstrate shifting a bias, based on human instructions, in any direction yielding arbitrarily new proportions for, e.g., identity groups. As our empirical evaluation demonstrates, this introduced control enables instructing generative image models on fairness, with no data filtering and additional training required.},
Publisher = {Springer},
Keywords = {Fairness, Text-to-Image Synthesis, Text-Guided Image Generation, Stable Diffusion, AI Ethics},
Url={https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s43681-024-00531-5.pdf},
doi={https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00531-5}
}
@incollection{struppeknemofmw,
Anote={./images/hintersdorf2024nemo.png},
author = {Lukas Struppek and Dominik Hintersdorf and Kristian Kersting and Adam Dziedzic and Franziska Boenisch},
title = {Finding NeMo: Localizing Neurons Responsible For Memorization in Diffusion Models},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=5wOrSneuwe},
Pages = {},
booktitle={Working Notes of the ICML 2024 Workshop on Foundation Models in the Wild},
Note = {Diffusion models (DMs) produce very detailed and high-quality images, achieved through rigorous training on huge datasets. Unfortunately, this practice raises privacy and intellectual property concerns, as DMs can memorize and later reproduce their potentially sensitive or copyrighted training images at inference time. Prior efforts to prevent this issue are viable when the DM is developed and deployed in a secure and constantly monitored environment. However, they hold the risk of adversaries circumventing the safeguards and are not effective when the DM itself is publicly released. To solve the problem, we introduce NeMo, the first method to localize memorization of individual data samples down to the level of neurons in DMs' cross-attention layers. Through our experiments, we make the intriguing finding that in many cases, single neurons are responsible for memorizing particular training samples. By deactivating these memorization neurons, we avoid replication of training data at inference time, increase the diversity in the generated outputs, and mitigate the leakage of sensitive data.},
Keywords = {Memorization, Diffusion Models, Stable Diffusion}
}
@misc{solaiman2024evaluatingsocialimpactgenerative,
Anote={./images/defending_with_backdoors.png},
title={Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society},
author={Irene Solaiman and Zeerak Talat and William Agnew and Lama Ahmad and Dylan Baker and Su Lin Blodgett and Canyu Chen and Hal Daumé III au2 and Jesse Dodge and Isabella Duan and Ellie Evans and Felix Friedrich and Avijit Ghosh and Usman Gohar and Sara Hooker and Yacine Jernite and Ria Kalluri and Alberto Lusoli and Alina Leidinger and Michelle Lin and Xiuzhu Lin and Sasha Luccioni and Jennifer Mickel and Margaret Mitchell and Jessica Newman and Anaelia Ovalle and Marie-Therese Png and Shubham Singh and Andrew Strait and Lukas Struppek and Arjun Subramonian},
year={2024},
Howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05949 and to appear in Hacker, Engel, Hammer, Mittelstadt (eds), Oxford Handbook on the Foundations and Regulation of Generative AI. Oxford University Press.},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05949},
Note = {Generative AI systems across modalities, ranging from text (including code), image, audio, and video, have broad social impacts, but there is no official standard for means of evaluating those impacts or for which impacts should be evaluated. In this paper, we present a guide that moves toward a standard approach in evaluating a base generative AI system for any modality in two overarching categories: what can be evaluated in a base system independent of context and what can be evaluated in a societal context. Importantly, this refers to base systems that have no predetermined application or deployment context, including a model itself, as well as system components, such as training data. Our framework for a base system defines seven categories of social impact: bias, stereotypes, and representational harms; cultural values and sensitive content; disparate performance; privacy and data protection; financial costs; environmental costs; and data and content moderation labor costs. Suggested methods for evaluation apply to listed generative modalities and analyses of the limitations of existing evaluations serve as a starting point for necessary investment in future evaluations. We offer five overarching categories for what can be evaluated in a broader societal context, each with its own subcategories: trustworthiness and autonomy; inequality, marginalization, and violence; concentration of authority; labor and creativity; and ecosystem and environment. Each subcategory includes recommendations for mitigating harm.},
Keywords = {Generative AI, Social Impact, Ethical AI, Fairness, Accountability, Transparency}
}
@incollection{delfosse2024ocalm,
Anote={./images/delfosse2024ocalm.png},
title={OCALM: Object-Centric Assessment with Language Models},
author={Timo Kaufmann and Jannis Blüml and Antonia Wüst and Quentin Delfosse and Kristian Kersting and Eyke Hüllermeier},
year={2024},
booktitle={Working Notes of the RLC 2024 Workshop on Reinforcement Learning Beyond Rewards},
url={https://rlbrew-workshop.github.io/papers/40_ocalm_object_centric_assessmen.pdf},
Note = {Properly defining a reward signal to efficiently train a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is a challenging task. Designing balanced objective functions from which a desired behavior can emerge requires expert knowledge, especially for complex environments. Learning rewards from human feedback or using large language models (LLMs) to directly provide rewards are promising alternatives, allowing non-experts to specify goals for the agent. However, black-box reward models make it difficult to debug the reward. In this work, we propose Object-Centric Assessment with Language Models (OCALM) to derive inherently interpretable reward functions for RL agents from natural language task descriptions. OCALM uses the extensive world-knowledge of LLMs while leveraging the object-centric nature common to many environments to derive reward functions focused on relational concepts, providing RL agents with the ability to derive policies from task descriptions.},
Keywords = {Deep Reinforcement Learning, LLM, Atari, Arcade Games, Reward Modification}
}
@incollection{delfosse2024hackatari,
Anote={./images/delfosse2024hackatari.png},
title={HackAtari: Atari Learning Environments for Robust and Continual Reinforcement Learning},
author={Quentin Delfosse and Jannis Blüml and Bjarne Gregori and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
booktitle={Working Notes of the RLC 2024 Worskhop on Interpretable Policies in Reinforcement Learning},
url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Th5OOmiHVo},
Crossref = {https://github.com/k4ntz/HackAtari},
Note = {Artificial agents' adaptability to novelty and alignment with intended behavior is crucial for their effective deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) leverages novelty as a means of exploration, yet agents often struggle to handle novel situations, hindering generalization. To address these issues, we propose HackAtari, a framework introducing controlled novelty to the most common RL benchmark, the Atari Learning Environment. HackAtari allows us to create novel game scenarios (including simplification for curriculum learning), to swap the game elements' colors, as well as to introduce different reward signals for the agent. We demonstrate that current agents trained on the original environments include robustness failures, and evaluate HackAtari's efficacy in enhancing RL agents' robustness and aligning behavior through experiments using C51 and PPO. Overall, HackAtari can be used to improve the robustness of current and future RL algorithms, allowing Neuro-Symbolic RL, curriculum RL, causal RL, as well as LLM-driven RL. Our work underscores the significance of developing interpretable in RL agents.},
Keywords = {Deep Reinforcement Learning, Object-centric Deep Learning, Atari, Arcade Games, Novelty, Continual Learning, Robustness}
}
@inproceedings{hintersdorf24defending,
Anote={./images/defending_with_backdoors.png},
title={Defending Our Privacy With Backdoors},
author={Dominik Hintersdorf and Lukas Struppek and Daniel Neider and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.08320.pdf},
Note = {The proliferation of large AI models trained on uncurated, often sensitive web-scraped data has raised significant privacy concerns. One of the concerns is that adversaries can extract information about the training data using privacy attacks. Unfortunately, the task of removing specific information from the models without sacrificing performance is not straightforward and has proven to be challenging. We propose a rather easy yet effective defense based on backdoor attacks to remove private information such as names and faces of individuals from vision-language models by fine-tuning them for only a few minutes instead of re-training them from scratch. Specifically, through strategic insertion of backdoors into text encoders, we align the embeddings of sensitive phrases with those of neutral terms-"a person" instead of the person's actual name. For image encoders, we map embeddings of individuals to be removed from the model to a universal, anonymous embedding. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our backdoor-based defense on CLIP by assessing its performance using a specialized privacy attack for zero-shot classifiers. Our approach provides not only a new "dual-use" perspective on backdoor attacks, but also presents a promising avenue to enhance the privacy of individuals within models trained on uncurated web-scraped data.},
Keywords = {Security, Privacy, Backdoor Attacks, CLIP, Identity Inference Attacks}
}
@inproceedings{czech24representation,
Anote={./images/czech24representation.png},
title={Representation Matters for Mastering Chess: Improved Feature Representation in AlphaZero Outperforms Switching to Transformers},
author={Johannes Czech and Jannis Blüml and Kristian Kersting and Hedinn Steingrimsson},
year={2024},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)},
url={https://www.aiml.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/papers/czech24representation.pdf},
Note = {While transformers have gained recognition as a versatile tool for artificial intelligence(AI), an unexplored challenge arises in the context of chess - a classical AI benchmark. Here, incorporating Vision Transformers (ViTs) into AlphaZero is insufficient for chess mastery, mainly due to ViTs' computational limitations. The attempt to optimize their efficiency by combining MobileNet and NextViT could not outperform AlphaZero. Instead, we propose a practical improvement that involves a simple change in the input representation and value loss functions. As a result, we achieve a significant performance boost of up to 180 Elo points beyond what is currently achievable with AlphaZero in chess and chess variants.
In addition to these improvements, our experimental results using the Integrated Gradient technique confirm the effectiveness of the newly introduced features.},
Keywords = {Chess, Decision Transformer, MCTS, Input Representation}
}
@incollection{seng2024ibohpc,
Anote = {./images/seng2024ibohpc.png},
title={Hyperparameter Optimization via Interacting with Probabilistic Circuits},
author={Jonas Seng and Fabrizio Ventola and Zhongjie Yu and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=k1xrK8l3d2},
booktitle = {Working Notes of the Workshop Track of the International Conference on Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)},
Note = {Despite the growing interest in designing truly interactive hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods, to date, only a few allow to include feedback from experts. However, these methods add friction to the interactive process, rigidly requiring to fully specify the expert input as prior distribution ex ante and often imposing additional constraints on the optimization framework. This hinders the flexible incorporation of expertise and valuable knowledge of domain experts, which might provide partial feedback at any time during optimization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel Bayesian optimization approach leveraging tractable probabilistic models named probabilistic circuits (PCs) as surrogate model. PCs encode a tractable joint distribution over the hybrid hyperparameter space and enable exact conditional inference and sampling, allowing users to provide valuable insights interactively and generate configurations adhering to their feedback. We demonstrate the benefits of the resulting interactive HPO through an extensive empirical evaluation of diverse benchmarks, including the challenging setting of neural architecture search.},
Keywords = {Automated ML, Interactive Optimization, Neural Architecture Search, Hyperparameter Optimization, Probabilistic Circuits}
}
@inproceedings{poli2024mad,
Anote={./images/poli2024mad.png},
title={Mechanistic Design and Scaling of Hybrid Architectures},
author={Michael Poli and Armin W. Thomas and Eric Nguyen and Stefano Massaroli and Pragaash Ponnusamy and Björn Deiseroth and Kristian Kersting and Taiji Suzuki and Brian Hie and Stefano Ermon and Christopher Re and Ce Zhang},
year={2024},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.17844},
Note = {The development of deep learning architectures is a resource-demanding process, due to a vast design space, long prototyping times, and high compute costs associated with at-scale model training and
evaluation. We set out to simplify this process by grounding it in an end-to-end mechanistic architecture design (MAD) pipeline, encompassing small-scale capability unit tests predictive of scaling laws.
Through a suite of synthetic token manipulation tasks such as compression and recall, designed to probe
capabilities, we identify and test new hybrid architectures constructed from a variety of computational
primitives. We experimentally validate the resulting architectures via an extensive compute-optimal
and a new state-optimal scaling law analysis, training over 500 language models between 70M to 7B
parameters. Surprisingly, we find MAD synthetics to correlate with compute-optimal perplexity, enabling
accurate evaluation of new architectures via isolated proxy tasks. The new architectures found via
MAD, based on simple ideas such as hybridization and sparsity, outperform state-of-the-art Transformer,
convolutional, and recurrent architectures (Transformer++, Hyena, Mamba) in scaling, both at computeoptimal budgets and in overtrained regimes. Overall, these results provide evidence that performance
on curated synthetic tasks can be predictive of scaling laws, and that an optimal architecture should
leverage specialized layers via a hybrid topology.},
Keywords = {Mechanistic Architecture Design, Hybrid Architectures, Transformer, Convolutional Architectures, Recurrent Architectures}
}
@inproceedings{steinmann2024intervene,
Anote={./images/steinemann2024intervene.png},
title={Learning to Intervene on Concept Bottlenecks},
author={David Steinmann and Wolfgang Stammer and Felix Friedrich and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/steinmann24a.html},
Note = {While traditional deep learning models often lack interpretability, concept bottleneck models (CBMs) provide inherent explanations via their concept representations. Specifically, they allow users to perform interventional interactions on these concepts by updating the concept values and thus correcting the predictive output of the model. Traditionally, however, these interventions are applied to the model only once and discarded afterward. To rectify this, we present concept bottleneck memory models (CB2M), an extension to CBMs. Specifically, a CB2M learns to generalize interventions to appropriate novel situations via a two-fold memory with which it can learn to detect mistakes and to reapply previous interventions. In this way, a CB2M learns to automatically improve model performance from a few initially obtained interventions. If no prior human interventions are available, a CB2M can detect potential mistakes of the CBM bottleneck and request targeted interventions. In our experimental evaluations on challenging scenarios like handling distribution shifts and confounded training data, we illustrate that CB2M are able to successfully generalize interventions to unseen data and can indeed identify wrongly inferred concepts. Overall, our results show that CB2M is a great tool for users to provide interactive feedback on CBMs, e.g., by guiding a user's interaction and requiring fewer interventions.},
Keywords = {Concept Bottleneck, Interventions, Two-Fold Memory, Learning}
}
@inproceedings{braun2024cake,
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) },
title={Deep Classifier Mimicry without Data Access},
author={Steven Braun and Martin Mundt and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Keywords={Deep Learning, model-agnostic transfer, Knowledge distillation, Student-Teacher},
Anote={./images/braun2024cake.png},
Key = {Outstanding Student Paper Highlight Award at AISTATS 2024},
Note={Access to pre-trained models has recently emerged as a standard across numerous machine learning domains. Unfortunately, access to the original data the models were trained on may not equally be granted. This makes it tremendously challenging to fine-tune, compress models, adapt continually, or to do any other type of data-driven update. We posit that original data access may however not be required. Specifically, we propose Contrastive Abductive Knowledge Extraction (CAKE), a model-agnostic knowledge distillation procedure that mimics deep classifiers without access to the original data. To this end, CAKE generates pairs of noisy synthetic samples and diffuses them contrastively toward a model’s decision boundary. We empirically corroborate CAKE's effectiveness using several benchmark datasets and various architectural choices, paving the way for broad application.},
Url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v238/braun24b/braun24b.pdf}
}
@inproceedings{delfosse2024raRL,
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Representation Learning (ICLR) },
title={Adaptive Rational Activations to Boost Deep Reinforcement Learning},
author={Quentin Delfosse and Patrick Schramowski and Martin Mundt and Alejandro Molina and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Keywords={Neural Plasticity, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Rational Activations},
Anote={./images/delfosse2024ratRL.png},
Note={Latest insights from biology show that intelligence not only emerges from the connections between neurons, but that individual neurons shoulder more computational responsibility than previously anticipated. Specifically, neural plasticity should be critical in the context of constantly changing reinforcement learning (RL) environments, yet current approaches still primarily employ static activation functions. In this work, we motivate the use of adaptable activation functions in RL and show that rational activation functions are particularly suitable for augmenting plasticity. Inspired by residual networks, we derive a condition under which rational units are closed under residual connections and formulate a naturally regularised version. The proposed joint-rational activation allows for desirable degrees of flexibility, yet regularises plasticity to an extent that avoids overfitting by leveraging a mutual set of activation function parameters across layers. We demonstrate that equipping popular algorithms with (joint) rational activations leads to consistent improvements on different games from the Atari Learning Environment benchmark, notably making DQN competitive to DDQN and Rainbow.},
Url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=g90ysX1sVs}
}
@inproceedings{struppek2024iclr,
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Representation Learning (ICLR) },
title={Be Careful What You Smooth For: Label Smoothing Can Be a Privacy Shield but Also a Catalyst for Model Inversion Attacks},
author={Lukas Struppek and Dominik Hintersdorf and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Keywords={Label Smoothing, Privacy, Model Inversion Attacks, Defense},
Anote={./images/struppek2024iclr.png},
Note={Label smoothing – using softened labels instead of hard ones – is a widely adopted regularization method for deep learning, showing diverse benefits such as enhanced generalization and calibration. Its implications for preserving model privacy, however, have remained unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate the impact of label smoothing on model inversion attacks (MIAs), which aim to generate class-representative samples by exploiting the knowledge encoded in a classifier, thereby inferring sensitive information about its training data. Through extensive analyses, we uncover that traditional label smoothing fosters MIAs, thereby increasing a model's privacy leakage. Even more, we reveal that smoothing with negative factors counters this trend, impeding the extraction of class-related information and leading to privacy preservation, beating state-of-the-art defenses. This establishes a practical and powerful novel way for enhancing model resilience against MIAs.},
Url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=1SbkubNdbW}
}
@inproceedings{seng2024iclr,
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Representation Learning (ICLR) },
title={Learning Large DAGs is Harder than you Think: Many Losses are Minimal for the Wrong DAG},
author={Jonas Seng and Matej Zečević and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Keywords={Structure Learning, DAG, Differentiable, Square-based Losses, Scale},
Anote={./images/seng2024iclr.png},
Note={Structure learning is a crucial task in science, especially in fields such as medicine and biology, where the wrong identification of (in)dependencies among random variables can have significant implications. The primary objective of structure learning is to learn a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that represents the underlying probability distribution of the data. Many prominent DAG learners rely on least square losses or log-likelihood losses for optimization. It is well-known from regression models that least square losses are heavily influenced by the scale of the variables. Recently it has been demonstrated that the scale of data also affects performance of structure learning algorithms, though with a strong focus on linear 2-node systems and simulated data. Moving beyond these results, we provide conditions under which square-based losses are minimal for wrong DAGs in
-dimensional cases. Furthermore, we also show that scale can impair performance of structure learners if relations among variables are non-linear for both square based and log-likelihood based losses. We confirm our theoretical findings through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data.},
Url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=gwbQ2YwLhD}
}
@inproceedings{wuest2024pix2code,
Anote={./images/wuest_pix2code.png},
title={Pix2Code: Learning to Compose Neural Visual Concepts as Programs},
author={Antonia Wüst and Wolfgang Stammer and Quentin Delfosse and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.08280.pdf},
Note = {The challenge in learning abstract concepts from images in an unsupervised fashion lies in the required integration of visual perception and generalizable relational reasoning. Moreover, the unsupervised nature of this task makes it necessary for human users to be able to understand a model’s learnt concepts and potentially revise false behaviours. To tackle both the generalizability and interpretability constraints of visual concept learning, we propose Pix2Code, a framework that extends program synthesis to visual relational reasoning by utilizing the abilities of both explicit, compositional symbolic and implicit neural representations. This is achieved by retrieving object representations from images and synthesizing relational concepts as λ-calculus programs. We evaluate the diverse properties of Pix2Code on the challenging reasoning domains, Kandinsky Patterns and CURI, thereby testing its ability to identify compositional visual concepts that generalize to novel data and concept configurations. Particularly, in stark contrast to neural approaches, we show that Pix2Code’s representations remain human interpretable and can be easily revised for improved performance.},
Keywords = {Concept Learning, Program Synthesis, Neuro-Symbolic, Meta-Learning}
}
@inproceedings{poonia2024chiSPN,
Anote={./images/poonia2024chiSPN.png},
title={chiSPN: Characteristic Interventional Sum-Product Networks for Causal Inference in Hybrid Domains},
author={Harsh Poonia and Moritz Willig and Zhongjie Yu and Matej Zecevic and Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami},
year={2024},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)},
url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=s3kqfH5KBI},
Note = {Causal inference in hybrid domains, characterized by a mixture of discrete and continuous variables, presents a formidable challenge. We take a step towards this direction and propose Characteristic Interventional Sum-Product Network
(chiSPN) that is capable of estimating interventional distributions in presence of random variables drawn from mixed distributions. chiSPN uses characteristic functions in the leaves of an interventional SPN (iSPN) thereby providing a unified
view for discrete and continuous random variables through the Fourier–Stieltjes transform of the probability measures. A neural network is used to estimate the parameters of the learned iSPN using the intervened data.
Our experiments on 3 synthetic heterogeneous datasets suggest that SPN can effectively capture the interventional distributions for both discrete and continuous variables while being expressive and causally adequate. We also show that chiSPN generalize
to multiple interventions while being trained only on a single intervention data.},
Keywords = {Causal Model, Interventional SPN, Hybrid Domain, Fourier-Stieltjes Transform, Neural Network}
}
@inproceedings{brack2024ledits,
Anote = {./images/mbrack_ledits_pp.png},
title={LEDITS++: Limitless Image Editing using Text-to-Image Models},
author={Manuel Brack and Felix Friedrich and Katharina Kornmeier and Linoy Tsaban and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting and Apolinaros Passos},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
year = {2024},
Note = {Text-to-image diffusion models have recently received a lot of interest for their astonishing ability to produce high-fidelity images from text only. Subsequent research efforts are aiming to exploit the capabilities of these models and leverage them for intuitive, textual image editing. However, existing methods often require time-consuming fine-tuning and lack native support for performing multiple edits simultaneously. To address these issues, we introduce LEDITS++ , an efficient yet versatile technique for image editing using text-to-image models. LEDITS++ requires no tuning nor optimization, runs in a few diffusion steps, natively supports multiple simultaneous edits, inherently limits changes to relevant image regions, and is architecture agnostic.},
Pages = {},
Keywords = {Image Editing, Text-to-Image Synthesis, Text-Guided Image Generation, Stable Diffusion, Semantics},
Url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=bPiTOXLRRQ}
}
@inproceedings{delfosse2024ocatari,
Anote={./images/delfosse2024ocatari.png},
title={OCAtari: Object-Centric Atari 2600 Reinforcement Learning Environments},
author={Quentin Delfosse and Jannis Blüml and Bjarne Gregori and Sebastian Sztwiertnia and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
booktitle={Proceedings of the First Conference on Reinforcement Learning (RLC)},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.08649},
Note = {Cognitive science and psychology suggest that object-centric representations of complex scenes are a promising step towards enabling efficient abstract reasoning from low-level perceptual features. Yet, most deep reinforcement learning approaches only rely on pixel-based representations that do not capture the compositional properties of natural scenes. For this, we need environments and datasets that allow us to work and evaluate object-centric approaches. In our work, we extend the Atari Learning Environments, the most-used evaluation framework for deep RL approaches, by introducing OCAtari, that performs resource-efficient extractions of the object-centric states for these games. Our framework allows for object discovery, object representation learning, as well as object-centric RL. We evaluate OCAtari's detection capabilities and resource efficiency.},
Keywords = {Deep Reinforcement Learning, Object-centric Deep Learning, Atari, Arcade Games, RAM Extraction method (REM), Vision Extraction method (VEM)}
}
@inproceedings{kalter2024bilevel,
Anote={./images/kalter2024bilevel.png},
title={Bi-Level One-Shot Architecture Search for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting},
author={Fabian Kalter and Jonas Seng and Zhongjie Yu and Fabrizio Ventola and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)},
url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=AaPhnfFQYn},
Note = {Time series forecasting is ubiquitous in many disciplines. A recent hybrid architecture named predictive Whittle networks (PWNs) tackles this task by employing two distinct modules, a tractable probabilistic model and a neural forecaster, with the former guiding the latter by providing likelihoods about predictions during training. Although PWNs achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, finding the optimal type of probabilistic model and neural forecaster (macro-architecture search) and the architecture of each module (micro-architecture search) of such hybrid models remains difficult and time-consuming. Current one-shot neural architecture search (NAS) methods approach this challenge by focusing on either the micro or the macro aspect, overlooking mutual impact, and could attain the overall optimization only sequentially. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a bi-level one-shot NAS method that optimizes such hybrid architectures simultaneously, leveraging the relationships between the micro and the macro architectural levels. We empirically demonstrate that the hybrid architectures found by our method outperform human-designed and overparameterized ones on various challenging datasets. Furthermore, we unveil insights about underlying connections between architectural choices and temporal features.},
Keywords = {Automated ML, Time Series Forecasting, Neural Architecture Search, Whittle Networks, Bi-Level Program}
}
@inproceedings{paul2024collas,
Anote = {./images/paul2024collas.png},
Author = {Subarnaduti Paul and Lars-Joel Frey and Roshni Ramanna Kamath and Kristian Kersting and Martin Mundt},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Third Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs)},
title = {Masked Autoencoders are Efficient Continual Federated Learners},
Keywords = {Federated Learning, Masked Autoencoders, Continual Learning},
Pages = {},
Note = {Machine learning is typically framed from a perspective of i.i.d., and more importantly, isolated data. In parts, federated learning lifts this assumption, as it sets out to solve the real-world challenge of collaboratively learning a shared model from data distributed across clients. However, motivated primarily by privacy and computational constraints, the fact that data may change, distributions drift, or even tasks advance individually on clients, is seldom taken into account. The field of continual learning addresses this separate challenge and first steps have recently been taken to leverage synergies in distributed settings of a purely supervised nature. Motivated by these prior works, we posit that such federated continual learning should be grounded in unsupervised learning of representations that are shared across clients; in the loose spirit of how humans can indirectly leverage others' experience without exposure to a specific task. For this purpose, we demonstrate that masked autoencoders for distribution estimation are particularly amenable to this setup. Specifically, their masking strategy can be seamlessly integrated with task attention mechanisms to enable selective knowledge transfer between clients. We empirically corroborate the latter statement through several continual federated scenarios on both image and binary datasets.},
Url = {},
Crossref = {},
Year = {2024}
}
@inproceedings{mathur2024aime,
Anote = {./images/mathur2024aime.png},
Author = {Saurabh Mathur and Veerendra Gadekar and Rashika Ramola and Avery Wang and Ramachandran Thiruvengadam and David Haas and Shinjini Bhatnagar and Nitya Wadhwa and Garbhini Study Group and Predrag Radivojac and Himanshu Sinha and Kristian Kersting and Sriraam Natarajan},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME)},
title = {Modeling multiple adverse pregnancy outcomes: Learning from diverse data sources},
Keywords = {Bayesian Networks, Large Language Models, Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes, Preterm Birth, New Hypertension, Preeclampsia},
Pages = {},
Note = {We consider the problem of modeling adverse pregnancy outcomes (APOs) from diverse data sets and aim to understand what is common between them and what is unique for each of these data sets. To this effect, we consider three different data sets (a clinical study from the US, EHRs from a US hospital, and a clinical study in India) and model three specific APOs - preterm birth, new hypertension, and preeclampsia. Since LLMs can efficiently summarize the scientific literature, we use them to generate initial hypotheses and use the different data sets to refine the hypotheses to create joint probabilistic models (as Bayesian networks). Our analyses show that there are eight relationships between risk factors common to all three populations and some unique relationships for specific populations.},
Url = {../../papers/mathur2024aime.pdf},
Crossref = {},
Year = {2024}
}
@inproceedings{moritz2024ratio,
Anote = {./images/moritz2024ratio.png},
Author = {Moritz Willig and Matej Zecevic and Kristian Kersting},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Recent Advances in Robust Argumentation Machines (RATIO)},
title = {"Do not disturb my circles!" Identifying the Type of Counterfactual at Hand},
Keywords = {Explanations, Causality, Interventions, Backtracking},
Pages = {},
Note = {When the phenomena of interest are in need of explanation, we are often in search of the underlying root causes. Causal inference provides tools for identifying these root causes---by performing interventions on suitably chosen variables we can observe down-stream effects in the outcome variable of interest. On the other hand, argumentation as an approach of attributing observed outcomes to specific factors, naturally lends itself as a tool for determining the most plausible explanation. We can further improve the robustness of such explanations by measuring their likelihood within a mutually agreed-upon causal model. For this, typically one of in-principle two distinct types of counterfactual explanations is used: interventional counterfactuals, which treat changes as deliberate interventions to the causal system, and backtracking counterfactuals, which attribute changes exclusively to exogenous factors. Although both frameworks share the common goal of inferring true causal factors, they fundamentally differ in their conception of counterfactuals. Here, we present the first approach that decides when to expect interventional and when to opt for backtracking counterfactuals.},
Url = {},
Crossref = {},
Year = {2024}
}
@incollection{helff2024llavaguard,
Anote={./images/llavaguard_pipe.png},
title={LLAVAGUARD: VLM-based Safeguard for Vision Dataset Curation and Safety Assessment},
author={Lukas Helff and Felix Friedrich and Manuel Brack and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
booktitle={Working Notes of the CVPR 2024 Workshop on Responsible Generative AI (ReGenAI), preprint at arxiv:2406.05113},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05113},
Note = {We introduce LlavaGuard, a family of multimodal safeguard models based on Llava, offering a robust framework for evaluating the safety compliance of vision datasets and models. Our models come with a new taxonomy designed for assessing safety risks within visual data. With this safety taxonomy, we have collected and annotated a high-quality dataset to guide Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in safety. We present models in two sizes, namely LlavaGuard-7b and LlavaGuard-13b, both safety-tuned on our novel, annotated dataset to perform policy-based safety assessments of visual content. In this context, LlavaGuard goes beyond binary safety classification by providing information on the violated safety categories, a detailed explanation, and a final assessment. In our evaluations, our models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with LlavaGuard-13b exhibiting the best results, while the much smaller LlavaGuard-7b model outperforms the much larger Llava-34b baseline. Furthermore, LlavaGuard is designed to allow for customization of the safety taxonomy to align with specific use cases, facilitating zero-shot prompting with individual policies for tailored content moderation},
Keywords = {AI Safety, Safety Evaluation, Multimodal, Vision Language Model}
}
@misc{tedeschi2024alert,
Anote={./images/tedeschi2024alert.png},
title={ALERT: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models' Safety through Red Teaming},
author={Simone Tedeschi and Felix Friedrich and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting and Roberto Navigli and Huu Nguyen and Bo Li},
year={2024},
Howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.08676},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.08676},
Note = {When building Large Language Models (LLMs), it is paramount to bear safety in mind and protect them with guardrails. Indeed, LLMs should never generate content promoting or normalizing harmful, illegal, or unethical behavior that may contribute to harm to individuals or society. This principle applies to both normal and adversarial use. In response, we introduce ALERT, a large-scale benchmark to assess safety based on a novel fine-grained risk taxonomy. It is designed to evaluate the safety of LLMs through red teaming methodologies and consists of more than 45k instructions categorized using our novel taxonomy. By subjecting LLMs to adversarial testing scenarios, ALERT aims to identify vulnerabilities, inform improvements, and enhance the overall safety of the language models. Furthermore, the fine-grained taxonomy enables researchers to perform an in-depth evaluation that also helps one to assess the alignment with various policies. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate 10 popular open- and closed-source LLMs and demonstrate that many of them still struggle to attain reasonable levels of safety.},
Keywords = {Red Teaming, Large Language Model, AI Safety, Benchmark, Evaluation, Risk Taxonomy}
}
@misc{busch2024conconarxiv,
Anote={./images/busch_whereisthetruth.png},
title={Where is the Truth? The Risk of Getting Confounded in a Continual World},
author={Florian Peter Busch and Roshni Kamath and Rupert Mitchell and Wolfgang Stammer and Kristian Kersting and Martin Mundt},
year={2024},
Howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.06434},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.06434.pdf},
Note = {A dataset is confounded if it is most easily solved via a spurious correlation which fails to generalize to new data. We will show that, in a continual learning setting where confounders may vary in time across tasks, the resulting challenge far exceeds the standard forgetting problem normally considered. In particular, we derive mathematically the effect of such confounders on the space of valid joint solutions to sets of confounded tasks. Interestingly, our theory predicts that for many such continual datasets, spurious correlations are easily ignored when the tasks are trained on jointly, but it is far harder to avoid confounding when they are considered sequentially. We construct such a dataset and demonstrate empirically that standard continual learning methods fail to ignore confounders, while training jointly on all tasks is successful. Our continually confounded dataset, ConCon, is based on CLEVR images and demonstrates the need for continual learning methods with more robust behavior with respect to confounding.},
Keywords = {Continual Learning, Confounders, Dataset}
}
@misc{wuest2024pix2codearxiv,
Anote={./images/wuest_pix2code.png},
title={Pix2Code: Learning to Compose Neural Visual Concepts as Programs},
author={Antonia Wüst and Wolfgang Stammer and Quentin Delfosse and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.08280},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.08280.pdf},
Note = {The challenge in learning abstract concepts from images in an unsupervised fashion lies in the required integration of visual perception and generalizable relational reasoning. Moreover, the unsupervised nature of this task makes it necessary for human users to be able to understand a model’s learnt concepts and potentially revise false behaviours. To tackle both the generalizability and interpretability constraints of visual concept learning, we propose Pix2Code, a framework that extends program synthesis to visual relational reasoning by utilizing the abilities of both explicit, compositional symbolic and implicit neural representations. This is achieved by retrieving object representations from images and synthesizing relational concepts as λ-calculus programs. We evaluate the diverse properties of Pix2Code on the challenging reasoning domains, Kandinsky Patterns and CURI, thereby testing its ability to identify compositional visual concepts that generalize to novel data and concept configurations. Particularly, in stark contrast to neural approaches, we show that Pix2Code’s representations remain human interpretable and can be easily revised for improved performance.},
Keywords = {Concept Learning, Program Synthesis, Neuro-Symbolic, Meta-Learning}
}
@misc{nakamura2024auroram,
Anote={./images/aurora.png},
title={Aurora-M: The First Open Source Multilingual Language Model Red-teamed according to the U.S. Executive Order},
author={Taishi Nakamura and Mayank Mishra and Simone Tedeschi and Yekun Chai and Jason T Stillerman and Felix Friedrich and Prateek Yadav and Tanmay Laud and Vu Minh Chien and Terry Yue Zhuo and Diganta Misra and Ben Bogin and Xuan-Son Vu and Marzena Karpinska and Arnav Varma Dantuluri and Wojciech Kusa and Tommaso Furlanello and Rio Yokota and Niklas Muennighoff and Suhas Pai and Tosin Adewumi and Veronika Laippala and Xiaozhe Yao and Adalberto Junior and Alpay Ariyak and Aleksandr Drozd and Jordan Clive and Kshitij Gupta and Liangyu Chen and Qi Sun and Ken Tsui and Noah Persaud and Nour Fahmy and Tianlong Chen and Mohit Bansal and Nicolo Monti and Tai Dang and Ziyang Luo and Tien-Tung Bui and Roberto Navigli and Virendra Mehta and Matthew Blumberg and Victor May and Huu Nguyen and Sampo Pyysalo},
year={2024},
Howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.00399},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00399.pdf},
Note = {Pretrained language models underpin several AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as BLOOM and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. However, such existing models face challenges: limited multilingual capabilities, continual pretraining causing catastrophic forgetting, whereas pretraining from scratch is computationally expensive, and compliance with AI safety and development laws. This paper presents Aurora-M, a 15B parameter multilingual open-source model trained on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. Continually pretrained from StarCoderPlus on 435 billion additional tokens, Aurora-M surpasses 2 trillion tokens in total training token count. It is the first open-source multilingual model fine-tuned on human-reviewed safety instructions, thus aligning its development not only with conventional red-teaming considerations, but also with the specific concerns articulated in the Biden-Harris Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Aurora-M is rigorously evaluated across various tasks and languages, demonstrating robustness against catastrophic forgetting and outperforming alternatives in multilingual settings, particularly in safety evaluations. To promote responsible open-source LLM development, Aurora-M and its variants are released publicly.},
Keywords = {Multilingual Model, Safety, Read-teaming, Policy, Multilingual}
}
@misc{delfosse2024interpretablearxiv,
Anote = {./images/delfosse2024interpretable.png},
title={Interpretable concept bottlenecks to align reinforcement learning agents},
author={Quentin Delfosse and Sebastian Sztwiertnia and Wolfgang Stammer and Mark Rothermel and Kristian Kersting},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.05821},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05821v2.pdf},
Pages = {},
Note = {Goal misalignment, reward sparsity and difficult credit assignment are only a few of the many issues that make it difficult for deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn optimal policies. Unfortunately, the black-box nature of deep neural networks impedes the inclusion of domain experts for inspecting the model and revising suboptimal policies. To this end, we introduce *Successive Concept Bottleneck Agents* (SCoBots), that integrate consecutive concept bottleneck (CB) layers. In contrast to current CB models, SCoBots do not just represent concepts as properties of individual objects, but also as relations between objects which is crucial for many RL tasks. Our experimental results provide evidence of SCoBots' competitive performances, but also of their potential for domain experts to understand and regularize their behavior. Among other things, SCoBots enabled us to identify a previously unknown misalignment problem in the iconic video game, Pong, and resolve it. Overall, SCoBots thus result in more human-aligned RL agents.},
Keywords = {Reinforcement Learning, Transparent agents, Interpretability, Concept Bottlebecks}
}
@inproceedings{keshmirian2024cogsci,
Anote = {./images/keshmirian2024realign.png},
Author = {Anita Keshmirian and Moritz Willig and Babak Hemmatian and Ulrike Hahn and Kristian Kersting and Tobias Gerstenberg},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci)},
Keywords = {Causal Cognition, Mechanistic Reasoning, Large Language Models, Causal Chain, Bias in Causal Judgment, Common Cause, Bayesian networks, Causal argumentation},
Pages = {},
Note = {Causal reasoning is a critical aspect of both human cognition and artificial intelligence (AI), playing a prominent role in understanding the relationships between events. Causal Bayesian Networks (CBNs) have been instrumental in modeling such relationships, using directed, acyclic links between nodes in a network to depict probabilistic associations between variables. Deviations from these graphical models’ edicts would result in biased judgments. This study explores one such bias in the causal judgments of humans and Large Language Models (LLMs) by examining two structures in CBNs: Canonical Chain (A→B→C) and Common Cause (A←B→C) networks. In these structures, once the intermediate variable (B) is known, the probability of the outcome (C) is normatively independent of the initial cause (A). However, studies have shown that humans often ignore this independence. We tested the mutually exclusive predictions of three theories that could account for this bias (N=300). Using hierarchical mixed-effect models, we found that humans tend to perceive causes in Chain structures as significantly stronger, providing support for only one of the hypotheses. This increase in perceived causal power might reflect a view of intermediate causes as more reflective of reliable mechanisms, which could, in turn, stem from our interactions with the world or the way we communicate causality to others. LLMs are primarily trained on language data. Therefore, examining whether they exhibit similar biases in causal reasoning can help us understand the origins of canonical Chain structures’ perceived causal power while also shedding light on whether LLMs can abstract causal principles. To investigate this, we subjected three LLMs, GPT3.5-Turbo, GPT4, and Luminous Supreme Control, to the same queries as our human subjects, adjusting a key ‘temperature’ hyperparameter. Our findings show that, particularly with higher temperatures (i.e., greater randomness), LLMs exhibit a similar boost in the perceived causal power of Chains, suggesting the bias is at least partly reflected in language use. Similar results across items suggest a degree of causal principle abstraction in the studied models. Implications for causal representation in humans and LLMs are discussed.},
Title = {Biased Causal Strength Judgments in Humans and Large Language Models},
Url = {},
Crossref = {},
Year = {2024}
}
@inproceedings{deiseroth2024dtm,
Anote = {./images/deiseroth2024dtm.png},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2024) },
title={Divergent Token Metrics: Measuring degradation to prune away LLM components – and optimize quantization},
author={Björn Deiseroth and Max Meuer and Nikolas Gritsch and Constantin Eichenberg and Patrick Schramowski and Matthias Aßenmacher and Kristian Kersting},
Note = {Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped natural language processing with their impressive capabilities. Their ever-increasing size, however, have raised concerns about their effective deployment and the need for LLM compression. This study introduces the Divergent Token Metrics (DTMs), a novel approach for assessing compressed LLMs, addressing the limitations of traditional perplexity or accuracy measures that fail to accurately reflect text generation quality. DTMs focus on token divergence, that allow deeper insights into the subtleties of model compression, in particular when evaluating components' impacts individually. Utilizing the First Divergent Token Metric (FDTM) in model sparsification reveals that 25% of all attention components can be pruned beyond 90% on the Llama-2 model family, still keeping SOTA performance. For quantization FDTM suggests that over 80% of parameters can naively be transformed to int8 without special outlier management. These evaluations indicate the necessity of choosing appropriate compressions for parameters individually---and that FDTM can identify those---while standard metrics result in deteriorated outcomes.},
year={2024},
Pages = {},
Keywords = {Quantization, Model Analysdis, Interpretability, Low Compute Setting, Efficiency, Deep Learning},
Url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.01544}
}
@inproceedings{kohaut2024icuas,
Anote = {./images/kohaut2024icuas.png},
Author = {Simon Kohaut and Benedict Flade and Devendra Singh Dhami and Eggert Julian and Kristian Kersting},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)},
title={Towards Probabilistic Clearance, Explanation and Optimization},
Keywords = {Mission Design, Probabilistic Inference, Logic},
Pages = {},
Note = {The employment of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) beyond
visual line of sight (BVLOS) is both an endearing and
challenging task. While UAS have the potential to greatly
enhance today's logistics and emergency response
capabilities, unmanned flying objects above the heads of
unprotected pedestrians induce similarly great safety
risks. In this work, we make strides towards improved
safety in the application of UAS by introducing clearance,
explanation and optimization strategies of UAS missions
grounded in a probabilistic logic framework. Our approach
encapsulates critical domain knowledge, legal requirements
and safety assertions in Hybrid Probabilistic Logic
Programs (HPLP), meaning we encode the agents navigation
space in a mix of discrete and continuous distributions
over spatial relations. As a key contribution, we formalize
how safe and legal trajectories are planned, and remote
pilots informed, within this Probabilistic Mission (ProMis)
framework. Based on real crowd-sourced map data and a
synthetic scenario, we demonstrate the application and
utility of our methods in UAS navigation.},
Url = {https://www.aiml.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/papers/kohaut2024ceo.pdf},
Crossref = {},
Year = {2024}
}
@inproceedings{zipperling24collafuse,
author = {Domenique Zipperling and Simeon Allmendinger and Lukas Struppek and Niklas Kühl},
title = {CollaFuse: Navigating Limited Resources and Privacy in Collaborative Generative AI},
year = {2024},
booktitle = {European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS)},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19105},
Note = {In the landscape of generative artificial intelligence, diffusion-based models present challenges for socio-technical systems in data requirements and privacy. Traditional approaches like federated learning distribute the learning process but strain individual clients, especially with constrained resources (e.g., edge devices). In response to these challenges, we introduce CollaFuse, a novel framework inspired by split learning. Tailored for efficient and collaborative use of denoising diffusion probabilistic models, CollaFuse enables shared server training and inference, alleviating client computational burdens. This is achieved by retaining data and computationally inexpensive GPU processes locally at each client while outsourcing the computationally expensive processes to the shared server. Demonstrated in a healthcare context, CollaFuse enhances privacy by highly reducing the need for sensitive information sharing. These capabilities hold the potential to impact various application areas, such as the design of edge computing solutions, healthcare research, or autonomous driving. In essence, our work advances distributed machine learning, shaping the future of collaborative GenAI networks.},
Anote={./images/struppek_collafuse.png},
Keywords = {Collaborative Learning, Split Learning, Diffusion Models}
}
@misc{helfenstein2024checkmating,
Anote={./images/helfenstein2024checkmating.png},
author = {Felix Helfenstein and Jannis Blüml and Johannes Czech and Kristian Kersting},
title = {Checkmating One, by Using Many: Combining Mixture of Experts with MCTS to Improve in Chess},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16852},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16852},
Pages = {},
Crossref = {https://github.com/HelpstoneX/CrazyAra},
Note = {This paper presents a new approach that integrates deep learning with computational chess, using both the Mixture of Experts (MoE) method and Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Our methodology employs a suite of specialized models, each designed to respond to specific changes in the game's input data. This results in a framework with sparsely activated models, which provides significant computational benefits. Our framework combines the MoE method with MCTS, in order to align it with the strategic phases of chess, thus departing from the conventional ``one-for-all'' model. Instead, we utilize distinct game phase definitions to effectively distribute computational tasks across multiple expert neural networks. Our empirical research shows a substantial improvement in playing strength, surpassing the traditional single-model framework. This validates the efficacy of our integrated approach and highlights the potential of incorporating expert knowledge and strategic principles into neural network design. The fusion of MoE and MCTS offers a promising avenue for advancing machine learning architectures.},
Keywords = {Mixture of Experts, Game Phases, Chess, Monte-Carlo Tree Search, AlphaZero}
}
@incollection{struppek2024adversarialllm,
title={Exploring the Adversarial Capabilities of Large Language Models},
author={Lukas Struppek and Minh Hieu Le and Dominik Hintersdorf and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.09132.pdf},
Pages = {},
booktitle={ICLR 2024 Workshop on Secure and Trustworthy Large Language Models (SeT LLM)},
Note = {The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has sparked widespread and general interest due to their strong language generation capabilities, offering great potential for both industry and research. While previous research delved into the security and privacy issues of LLMs, the extent to which these models can exhibit adversarial behavior remains largely unexplored. Addressing this gap, we investigate whether common publicly available LLMs have inherent capabilities to perturb text samples to fool safety measures, so-called adversarial examples resp. attacks. More specifically, we investigate whether LLMs are inherently able to craft adversarial examples out of benign samples to fool existing safe rails. Our experiments, which focus on hate speech detection, reveal that LLMs succeed in finding adversarial perturbations, effectively undermining hate speech detection systems. Our findings carry significant implications for (semi-)autonomous systems relying on LLMs, highlighting potential challenges in their interaction with existing systems and safety measures.},
Anote = {./images/struppek_adv_llm.png},
Keywords = {Large Language Models, Adversarial Examples}
}
@incollection{struppek2024homoglyphs,
Anote = {./images/struppek2023jair.png},
Author = {Lukas Struppek and Dominik Hintersdorf and Felix Friedrich and Manuel Brack and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting},
booktitle={ICLR 2024 Workshop on Navigating and Addressing Data Problems for Foundation Models (DPFM)},
Keywords = {Generative AI, Text-guided image generation, Text-to-image synthesis, Multimodal Systems, Cultural
biases},
Pages = {},
Note = {Models for text-to-image synthesis have recently drawn a lot of interest. They are capable of producing high-quality images that depict a variety of concepts and styles when conditioned on textual descriptions. However, these models adopt cultural characteristics associated with specific Unicode scripts from their vast amount of training data, which may not be immediately apparent. We show that by simply inserting single non-Latin characters in the textual description, common models reflect cultural biases in their generated images. We analyze this behavior both qualitatively and quantitatively, and identify a model's text encoder as the root cause of the phenomenon. Such behavior can be interpreted as a model feature, offering users a simple way to customize the image generation and reflect their own cultural background. Yet, malicious users or service providers may also try to intentionally bias the image generation. One goal might be to create racist stereotypes by replacing Latin characters with similarly-looking characters from non-Latin scripts, so-called homoglyphs.},
Title = {Exploiting Cultural Biases via Homoglyphs in Text-to-Image Synthesis},
Url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=VeCTgo5f9q},
Key = {Best Paper Award at DPFM 2024},
Crossref = {},
Year = {2024}
}
@incollection{keshmirian2024realign,
Anote = {./images/keshmirian2024realign.png},
Author = {Anita Keshmirian and Moritz Willig and Babak Hemmatian and Ulrike Hahn and Kristian Kersting and Tobias Gerstenberg},
booktitle={Working Notes of the ICLR 2024 Workshop on Representational Alignment (Re-Align)},
Keywords = {Causal Cognition, Mechanistic Reasoning, Large Language Models, Causal Chain, Bias in Causal Judgment, Common Cause, Bayesian networks, Causal argumentation},
Pages = {},
Note = {Causal reasoning is a critical aspect of both human cognition and artificial intelligence (AI), playing a prominent role in understanding the relationships between events. Causal Bayesian Networks (CBNs) have been instrumental in modeling such relationships, using directed, acyclic links between nodes in a network to depict probabilistic associations between variables. Deviations from these graphical models’ edicts would result in biased judgments. This study explores one such bias in the causal judgments of humans and Large Language Models (LLMs) by examining two structures in CBNs: Canonical Chain (A→B→C) and Common Cause (A←B→C) networks. In these structures, once the intermediate variable (B) is known, the probability of the outcome (C) is normatively independent of the initial cause (A). However, studies have shown that humans often ignore this independence. We tested the mutually exclusive predictions of three theories that could account for this bias (N=300). Using hierarchical mixed-effect models, we found that humans tend to perceive causes in Chain structures as significantly stronger, providing support for only one of the hypotheses. This increase in perceived causal power might reflect a view of intermediate causes as more reflective of reliable mechanisms, which could, in turn, stem from our interactions with the world or the way we communicate causality to others. LLMs are primarily trained on language data. Therefore, examining whether they exhibit similar biases in causal reasoning can help us understand the origins of canonical Chain structures’ perceived causal power while also shedding light on whether LLMs can abstract causal principles. To investigate this, we subjected three LLMs, GPT3.5-Turbo, GPT4, and Luminous Supreme Control, to the same queries as our human subjects, adjusting a key ‘temperature’ hyperparameter. Our findings show that, particularly with higher temperatures (i.e., greater randomness), LLMs exhibit a similar boost in the perceived causal power of Chains, suggesting the bias is at least partly reflected in language use. Similar results across items suggest a degree of causal principle abstraction in the studied models. Implications for causal representation in humans and LLMs are discussed.},
Title = {Biased Causal Strength Judgments in Humans and Large Language Models},
Url = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=544P6YidFk},
Crossref = {},
Year = {2024}
}
@misc{derstroff2024amplifying,
title={Amplifying Exploration in Monte-Carlo Tree Search by Focusing on the Unknown},
author={Cedric Derstroff and Jannis Brugger and Jannis Blüml and Mira Mezini and Stefan Kramer and Kristian Kersting},
year={2024},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint 2402.08511},
Note = {Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) is an effective anytime algorithm with a vast amount of applications. It strategically allocates computational resources to focus on promising segments of the search tree, making it a very attractive search algorithm in large search spaces. However, it often expends its limited resources on reevaluating previously explored regions when they remain the most promising path. Our proposed methodology, denoted as AmEx-MCTS, solves this problem by introducing a novel MCTS formulation. Central to AmEx-MCTS is the decoupling of value updates, visit count updates, and the selected path during the tree search, thereby enabling the exclusion of already explored subtrees or leaves. This segregation preserves the utility of visit counts for both exploration-exploitation balancing and quality metrics within MCTS. The resultant augmentation facilitates in a considerably broader search using identical computational resources, preserving the essential characteristics of MCTS. The expanded coverage not only yields more precise estimations but also proves instrumental in larger and more complex problems. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the superior performance of AmEx-MCTS, surpassing classical MCTS and related approaches by a substantial margin.},
Anote = {./images/AmEx.png},
Keywords = {Monte-Carlo Tree Search, Exploration vs Exploitation, Upper Confidence Bounds for Trees}
}
@inproceedings{derstroff2023peer,
title={Peer Learning: Learning Complex Policies in Groups from Scratch via Action Recommendations},
volume={38},
url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/29061},
DOI={10.1609/aaai.v38i10.29061},
Note={Peer learning is a novel high-level reinforcement learning framework for agents learning in groups. While standard reinforcement learning trains an individual agent in trial-and-error fashion, all on its own, peer learning addresses a related setting in which a group of agents, i.e., peers, learns to master a task simultaneously together from scratch. Peers are allowed to communicate only about their own states and actions recommended by others: "What would you do in my situation?". Our motivation is to study the learning behavior of these agents.
We formalize the teacher selection process in the action advice setting as a multi-armed bandit problem and therefore highlight the need for exploration. Eventually, we analyze the learning behavior of the peers and observe their ability to rank the agents’ performance within the study group and understand which agents give reliable advice. Further, we compare peer learning with single agent learning and a state-of-the-art action advice baseline. We show that peer learning is able to outperform single-agent learning and the baseline in several challenging discrete and continuous OpenAI Gym domains. Doing so, we also show that within such a framework complex policies from action recommendations beyond discrete action spaces can evolve.},
number={10},
booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
author={Cedric Derstroff and Mattia Cerrato and Jannis Brugger and Jan Peters and Stefan Kramer},
year={2024}, month={Mar.}, pages={11766-11774},
Anote = {./images/peerlearning_paper.png},
Keywords = {Reinforcement Learning, Imitation Learning & Inverse Reinforcement Learning, Adversarial Agents, Agent Communication, Multiagent Learning},
}
@misc{friedrich2024multilingual,
Anote={./images/magbig.png},
author = {Felix Friedrich and Katharina Hämmerl and Patrick Schramowski and Manuel Brack and Jindrich Libovicky and Kristian Kersting and Alexander Fraser},
title={Multilingual Text-to-Image Generation Magnifies Gender Stereotypes and Prompt Engineering May Not Help You},
Howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16092},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.16092},
Pages = {},
Note = {Text-to-image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality, flexibility, and text alignment and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Through improvements in multilingual abilities, a larger community now has access to this kind of technology. Yet, as we will show, multilingual models suffer similarly from (gender) biases as monolingual models. Furthermore, the natural expectation is that these models will provide similar results across languages, but this is not the case and there are important differences between languages. Thus, we propose a novel benchmark MAGBIG intending to foster research in multilingual models without gender bias. We investigate whether multilingual T2I models magnify gender bias with MAGBIG. To this end, we use multilingual prompts requesting portrait images of persons of a certain occupation or trait (using adjectives). Our results show not only that models deviate from the normative assumption that each gender should be equally likely to be generated, but that there are also big differences across languages. Furthermore, we investigate prompt engineering strategies, i.e. the use of indirect, neutral formulations, as a possible remedy for these biases. Unfortunately, they help only to a limited extent and result in worse text-to-image alignment. Consequently, this work calls for more research into diverse representations across languages in image generators.},
Keywords = {AI Ethics, Generative AI, Text-to-Image Models}
}
@article{thomas2024decisions,
Anote = {./images/thomas2023decisions.png},
title = {Modeling dataset bias in machine-learned theories of economic decision making},
author={Tobias Thomas and Dominik Straub and Fabian Tatai and Megan Shene and Tümer Tosik and Kristian Kersting and Constantin Rothkopf},
Journal = {Nature Human Behaviour},
Note = {Normative and descriptive models have long vied for explaining and predicting human risky choices, such as those between goods or gambles. A recent study (Peterson et al., 2021, Science) reports the discovery of a new, more accurate model of human decision-making by training neural networks on a new online large-scale dataset, choices13k. Here, we systematically analyze the relationships between several models and datasets using machine learning methods and find evidence for dataset bias. Because participants’ choices in stochastically dominated gambles were consistently skewed towards equipreference in the choices13k dataset, we hypothesized that this reflected increased decision noise. Indeed, a probabilistic generative model adding structured decision noise to a neural network trained on data from a laboratory study transferred best, i.e. outperformed all models apart from those trained on choices13k. We conclude that a careful combination of theory and data analysis is still required to understand the complex interactions of machine learning models and data of human risky choices.},
Keywords = {choices13k, economic decisions, deep learning, data-driven, no free lunch, model-driven, computational cognitive science, no end of theory},
Publisher = {Nature Publishing Group},
url={../../papers/thomas2024decisions.pdf},
year={2024},
volume={},
pages={},
issn={},
doi={},
url={}
}
@article{hintersdorf2024clip_privacy,
Anote = {./images/hintersdorf2022clipping_privacy.png},
title = {Does CLIP Know My Face?},
author={Dominik Hintersdorf and Lukas Struppek and Manuel Brack and Felix Friedrich and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting},
Journal = {Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)},
Note = {With the rise of deep learning in various applications, privacy concerns around the protection of training data has become a critical area of research. Whereas prior studies have focused on privacy risks in single-modal models, we introduce a novel method to assess privacy for multi-modal models, specifically vision-language models like CLIP. The proposed Identity Inference Attack (IDIA) reveals whether an individual was included in the training data by querying the model with images of the same person. Letting the model choose from a wide variety of possible text labels, the model reveals whether it recognizes the person and, therefore, was used for training. Our large-scale experiments on CLIP demonstrate that individuals used for training can be identified with very high accuracy. We confirm that the model has learned to associate names with depicted individuals, implying the existence of sensitive information that can be extracted by adversaries. Our results highlight the need for stronger privacy protection in large-scale models and suggest that IDIAs can be used to prove the unauthorized use of data for training and to enforce privacy laws.},
Keywords = {Identity Inference Attacks, Privacy, Computer Vision, Pre-trained models, CLIP, Deep Learning},
Publisher = {},
url={https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07341.pdf},
year={2024},
volume={},
pages={},
issn={},
doi={},
url={}
}
@article{otto2024mlst,
Anote={./images/otto2024mlst.png},
author={Kevin Otto and Simon Burgis and Kristian Kersting and Reinhold Bertrand and Devendra Singh Dhami},
Journal = {Machine Learning: Science and Technology (MLST)},
note = {The number of satellites in orbit around Earth is increasing rapidly, with the risk of collision rising accordingly. Trends of the global population of satellites
need to be analyzed to test the viability and impact of proposed rules and laws affecting the satellite population and collision avoidance strategies. This requires
large scale simulations of satellites that are propagated on long timescales to compute the large amounts of actionable close encounters (called conjunctions), which could
lead to collisions. Rigorously checking for conjunctions by computing future states of orbits is computationally expensive due to the large amount of objects involved and
conjunction filters are thus used to remove non-conjuncting orbit pairs from the list of possible conjunctions. In this work, we explore the possibility of machine learning
(ML) based conjunction filters using several algorithms such as eXtreme Gradient Boosting, TabNet and (physics-informed) neural networks and deep operator networks.
To show the viability and the potential of ML based filters, these algorithms are trained to predict the future state of orbits. For the physics-informed approaches,
multiple partial differential equations are set up using the Kepler equation as a basis. The empirical results demonstrate that physics-informed deep operator networks are
capable of predicting the future state of orbits using these equations (RMSE: 0.136) and outperform eXtreme Gradient Boosting (RMSE: 0.568) and TabNet (RMSE: 0.459).
We also propose a filter based on the trained deep operator network which is shown to outperforms the filter capability of the commonly used perigee-apogee test and the
orbit path filter on a synthetic dataset, while being on average 3.2 times faster to compute than a rigorous conjunction check.},
title={Machine Learning meets Kepler: Inverting Kepler’s Equation for All vs All Conjunction Analysis},
Publisher = {Springer},
year={2024},
Crossref = {},
url={},
keywords={Gradient Boosting, TabNet, Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Satelite Conjunctions, Kepler Equation}
}
@article{zecevic2024acml,
Anote={./images/zecevic2023acml.png},
author={Matej Zecevic and Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting},
note = {The recent years have been marked by extended research on adversarial attacks, especially on deep neural networks. With this work we intend on posing and investigating the question of whether the phenomenon might be more general in nature, that is, adversarial-style attacks outside classical classification tasks. Specifically, we investigate optimization problems as they constitute a fundamental part of modern AI research. To this end, we consider the base class of optimizers namely Linear Programs (LPs). On our initial attempt of a naïve mapping between the formalism of adversarial examples and LPs, we quickly identify the key ingredients missing for making sense of a reasonable notion of adversarial examples for LPs. Intriguingly, the formalism of Pearl's notion to causality allows for the right description of adversarial like examples for LPs. Characteristically, we show the direct influence of the Structural Causal Model (SCM) onto the subsequent LP optimization, which ultimately exposes a notion of confounding in LPs (inherited by said SCM) that allows for adversarial-style attacks. We provide both the general proof formally alongside existential proofs of such intriguing LP-parameterizations based on SCM for three combinatorial problems, namely Linear Assignment, Shortest Path and a real world problem of energy systems.},
journal={Machine Learning Journal (MLJ)},
title={Structural Causal Models Reveal Confounder Bias in Linear Program Modelling},
Publisher = {Springer},
year={2024},
Crossref = {},
url={../../papers/zecevic2024acml.pdf},
keywords={Adversarial Attack, Linear Programs, Causal Link, Structural Causal Model}
}
@article{sha2024nai,
Anote = {./images/sha2023nesypi.png},
title = {Neuro-Symbolic Predicate Invention: Learning Relational Concepts from Visual Scenes},
author = {Jingyuan Sha and Hikaru Shindo and Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami},
Journal = {Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence Journal (NAIJ)},
Note = {The predicates used for Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) systems are usually elusive and need to be hand-crafted in advance, which limits the generalization of the system when learning new rules without sufficient background knowledge. Predicate Invention (PI) for ILP is the problem of discovering new concepts that describe hidden relationships in the domain. PI can mitigate the generalization problem for ILP by inferring new concepts, giving the system a better vocabulary to compose logic ruless. Although there are several PI approaches for symbolic ILP systems, PI for NeSy ILP systems that can handle visual input to learn logical rules using differentiable reasoning is relatively unaddressed. To this end, we propose a neural-symbolic approach, NeSy-𝜋, to invent predicates from visual scenes for NeSy ILP systems based on clustering and extension of relational concepts. (𝜋 denotes the abbrivation of Predicate Invention). NeSy-𝜋 processes visual scenes as input using deep neural networks for the visual perception and invents new concepts that support the task of classifying complex visual scenes. The invented concepts can be used by any NeSy ILP systems instead of hand-crafted background knowledge. Our experiments show that the PI model is capable of inventing high-level concepts and solving complex visual logic patterns more efficiently and accurately in the absence of explicit background knowledge.Moreover, the invented concepts are explainable and interpretable, while also providing competitive results with state-of-the-art NeSy ILP systems based on given knowledge.},
Keywords = {Differentiable Reasoning, Inductive Logic Programming, Neuro-Symbolic AI, Object-centric Learning},
Publisher = {IOS Press},
url={https://neurosymbolic-ai-journal.com/system/files/nai-paper-712.pdf},
year={2024},
volume={712-1692},
pages={},
issn={},
doi={}
}
@article{ochs2024remote,
Anote = {./images/ochs2024remote.png},
title = {Effective Risk Detection for Natural Gas Pipelines using Low Resolution Satellite Images},
author={Daniel Ochs and Karsten Wiertz and Sebastian Bußmann and Kristian
Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami},
Journal = {Remote Sensing},
Note = {Natural gas pipelines represent a critical infrastructure for most countries and thus their
safety is of paramount importance. To report potential risks along pipelines, several steps are taken
such as manual inspection and helicopter flights; however, these solutions are expensive and the
flights are environmentally unfriendly. Deep learning has demonstrated considerable potential in
handling a number of tasks in recent years as models rely on huge datasets to learn a specific task.
With the increasing number of satellites orbiting the Earth, remote sensing data have become widely
available, thus paving the way for automated pipeline monitoring via deep learning. This can result
in effective risk detection, thereby reducing monitoring costs while being more precise and accurate.
A major hindrance here is the low resolution of images obtained from the satellites, which makes
it difficult to detect smaller changes. To this end, we propose to use transformers trained with
low-resolution images in a change detection setting to detect pipeline risks. We collect PlanetScope
satellite imagery (3 m resolution) that captures certain risks associated with the pipelines and present
how we collected the data. Furthermore, we compare various state-of-the-art models, among which
ChangeFormer, a transformer architecture for change detection, achieves the best performance with a
70% F1 score. As part of our evaluation, we discuss the specific performance requirements in pipeline
monitoring and show how the model’s predictions can be shifted accordingly during training.},
Keywords = {Remote Sensing, Satelite Images, Change Transformer, Chance Detection, Pipeline Monitoring},
Publisher = {MDPI},
year={2024},
volume={16},
pages={},
issn={2072-4292},
doi={10.3390/rs16020266},
url={https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/16/2/266}
}
@incollection{shindo2024deisam,
Anote={./images/shindo2024deisam.png},
author = {Hikaru Shindo and Manuel Brack and Gopika Sudhakaran and Devendra Singh Dhami and Patrick Schramowski and Kristian Kersting},
title = {DeiSAM: Segment Anything with Deictic Prompting},
year = {2024},
Url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14123},
Pages = {},
booktitle={AAAI 2024 Workshop on Neuro-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning
in the Era of Large Language Models (NucLeaR)},
Note = {Large-scale, pre-trained neural networks have demonstrated strong capabilities in various tasks, including zero-shot image segmentation. To identify concrete objects in complex scenes, humans instinctively rely on deictic descriptions in natural language, i.e. , referring to something depending on the context, e.g. ”The object that is on the desk and behind the cup.”. However, deep learning approaches cannot reliably interpret these deictic representations due to their lack of reasoning capabilities in complex scenarios. To remedy this issue, we propose DeiSAM, which integrates large pre-trained neural networks with differentiable logic reasoners. Given a complex, textual segmentation description, DeiSAM leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate first-order logic rules and performs differentiable forward reasoning on generated scene graphs. Subsequently, DeiSAM segments objects by matching them to the logically inferred image regions. As part of our evaluation, we propose the Deictic Visual Genome (DeiVG) dataset, containing paired visual input and complex, deictic textual prompts. Our empirical results demonstrate that DeiSAM is a substantial improvement over data-driven neural baselines on deictic segmentation tasks.},
Keywords = {Neuro-Symbolic AI, Differentiable Reasoning, Segmentation, Textual Grounding}
}
@incollection{mathur2024dai,
Anote={./images/mathur2024dai.png},
author = {Saurabh Mathur and Sahil Sidheekh and Pranuthi Tenali and Eric Blasch and Kristian Kersting and Sriraam Natarajan},
title = {Credibility-aware Reliable Multi-Modal Fusion Using Probabilistic Circuits},