arXiv subjects

Ali Payani

Publications and source records attributed to Ali Payani.

69 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Temporal Inductive Logic Reasoning over Hypergraphs

Inductive logic reasoning is a fundamental task in graph analysis, which aims to generalize patterns from data. This task has been extensively studied for traditional graph representations, such as knowledge graphs (KGs), using techniques like inductive logic programming (ILP). Existing ILP methods assume learning from KGs with static facts and binary relations. Beyond KGs, graph structures are widely present in other applications such as procedural instructions, scene graphs, and program executions. While ILP is beneficial for these applications, applying it to those graphs is nontrivial: they are more complex than KGs, which usually involve timestamps and n-ary relations, effectively a type of hypergraph with temporal events. In this work, we propose temporal inductive logic reasoning (TILR), an ILP method that reasons on temporal hypergraphs. To enable hypergraph reasoning, we introduce the multi-start random B-walk, a novel graph traversal method for hypergraphs. By combining it with a path-consistency algorithm, TILR learns logic rules by generalizing from both temporal and relational data. To address the lack of hypergraph benchmarks, we create and release two temporal hypergraph datasets: YouCook2-HG and nuScenes-HG. Experiments on these benchmarks demonstrate that TILR achieves superior reasoning capability over various strong baselines.

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arXiv2024

Not All Federated Learning Algorithms Are Created Equal: A Performance Evaluation Study

Federated Learning (FL) emerged as a practical approach to training a model from decentralized data. The proliferation of FL led to the development of numerous FL algorithms and mechanisms. Many prior efforts have given their primary focus on accuracy of those approaches, but there exists little understanding of other aspects such as computational overheads, performance and training stability, etc. To bridge this gap, we conduct extensive performance evaluation on several canonical FL algorithms (FedAvg, FedProx, FedYogi, FedAdam, SCAFFOLD, and FedDyn) by leveraging an open-source federated learning framework called Flame. Our comprehensive measurement study reveals that no single algorithm works best across different performance metrics. A few key observations are: (1) While some state-of-the-art algorithms achieve higher accuracy than others, they incur either higher computation overheads (FedDyn) or communication overheads (SCAFFOLD). (2) Recent algorithms present smaller standard deviation in accuracy across clients than FedAvg, indicating that the advanced algorithms' performances are stable. (3) However, algorithms such as FedDyn and SCAFFOLD are more prone to catastrophic failures without the support of additional techniques such as gradient clipping. We hope that our empirical study can help the community to build best practices in evaluating FL algorithms.

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arXiv2024

Data-Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining: Prioritizing Data Quality over Quantity

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) on large-scale image-caption datasets learns representations that can achieve remarkable zero-shot generalization. However, such models require a massive amount of pre-training data. Improving the quality of the pre-training data has been shown to be much more effective in improving CLIP's performance than increasing its volume. Nevertheless, finding small subsets of training data that provably generalize the best has remained an open question. In this work, we propose the first theoretically rigorous data selection method for CLIP. We show that subsets that closely preserve the cross-covariance of the images and captions of the full data provably achieve a superior generalization performance. Our extensive experiments on ConceptualCaptions3M and ConceptualCaptions12M demonstrate that subsets found by \method\ achieve over 2.7x and 1.4x the accuracy of the next best baseline on ImageNet and its shifted versions. Moreover, we show that our subsets obtain 1.5x the average accuracy across 11 downstream datasets, of the next best baseline. The code is available at: https://github.com/BigML-CS-UCLA/clipcov-data-efficient-clip.

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arXiv2024

Prompt Mining for Language-based Human Mobility Forecasting

With the advancement of large language models, language-based forecasting has recently emerged as an innovative approach for predicting human mobility patterns. The core idea is to use prompts to transform the raw mobility data given as numerical values into natural language sentences so that the language models can be leveraged to generate the description for future observations. However, previous studies have only employed fixed and manually designed templates to transform numerical values into sentences. Since the forecasting performance of language models heavily relies on prompts, using fixed templates for prompting may limit the forecasting capability of language models. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for prompt mining in language-based mobility forecasting, aiming to explore diverse prompt design strategies. Specifically, the framework includes a prompt generation stage based on the information entropy of prompts and a prompt refinement stage to integrate mechanisms such as the chain of thought. Experimental results on real-world large-scale data demonstrate the superiority of generated prompts from our prompt mining pipeline. Additionally, the comparison of different prompt variants shows that the proposed prompt refinement process is effective. Our study presents a promising direction for further advancing language-based mobility forecasting.

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arXiv2024

TEILP: Time Prediction over Knowledge Graphs via Logical Reasoning

Conventional embedding-based models approach event time prediction in temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) as a ranking problem. However, they often fall short in capturing essential temporal relationships such as order and distance. In this paper, we propose TEILP, a logical reasoning framework that naturally integrates such temporal elements into knowledge graph predictions. We first convert TKGs into a temporal event knowledge graph (TEKG) which has a more explicit representation of time in term of nodes of the graph. The TEKG equips us to develop a differentiable random walk approach to time prediction. Finally, we introduce conditional probability density functions, associated with the logical rules involving the query interval, using which we arrive at the time prediction. We compare TEILP with state-of-the-art methods on five benchmark datasets. We show that our model achieves a significant improvement over baselines while providing interpretable explanations. In particular, we consider several scenarios where training samples are limited, event types are imbalanced, and forecasting the time of future events based on only past events is desired. In all these cases, TEILP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness.

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arXiv2023

Investigating the Impact of Weight Sharing Decisions on Knowledge Transfer in Continual Learning

Continual Learning (CL) has generated attention as a method of avoiding Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) in the sequential training of neural networks, improving network efficiency and adaptability to different tasks. Additionally, CL serves as an ideal setting for studying network behavior and Forward Knowledge Transfer (FKT) between tasks. Pruning methods for CL train subnetworks to handle the sequential tasks which allows us to take a structured approach to investigating FKT. Sharing prior subnetworks' weights leverages past knowledge for the current task through FKT. Understanding which weights to share is important as sharing all weights can yield sub-optimal accuracy. This paper investigates how different sharing decisions affect the FKT between tasks. Through this lens we demonstrate how task complexity and similarity influence the optimal weight sharing decisions, giving insights into the relationships between tasks and helping inform decision making in similar CL methods. We implement three sequential datasets designed to emphasize variation in task complexity and similarity, reporting results for both ResNet-18 and VGG-16. By sharing in accordance with the decisions supported by our findings, we show that we can improve task accuracy compared to other sharing decisions.

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arXiv2023

Beyond Detection: Unveiling Fairness Vulnerabilities in Abusive Language Models

This work investigates the potential of undermining both fairness and detection performance in abusive language detection. In a dynamic and complex digital world, it is crucial to investigate the vulnerabilities of these detection models to adversarial fairness attacks to improve their fairness robustness. We propose a simple yet effective framework FABLE that leverages backdoor attacks as they allow targeted control over the fairness and detection performance. FABLE explores three types of trigger designs (i.e., rare, artificial, and natural triggers) and novel sampling strategies. Specifically, the adversary can inject triggers into samples in the minority group with the favored outcome (i.e., "non-abusive") and flip their labels to the unfavored outcome, i.e., "abusive". Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FABLE attacking fairness and utility in abusive language detection.

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arXiv2023

When Fairness Meets Privacy: Fair Classification with Semi-Private Sensitive Attributes

Machine learning models have demonstrated promising performance in many areas. However, the concerns that they can be biased against specific demographic groups hinder their adoption in high-stake applications. Thus, it is essential to ensure fairness in machine learning models. Most previous efforts require direct access to sensitive attributes for mitigating bias. Nonetheless, it is often infeasible to obtain large-scale users' sensitive attributes considering users' concerns about privacy in the data collection process. Privacy mechanisms such as local differential privacy (LDP) are widely enforced on sensitive information in the data collection stage due to legal compliance and people's increasing awareness of privacy. Therefore, a critical problem is how to make fair predictions under privacy. We study a novel and practical problem of fair classification in a semi-private setting, where most of the sensitive attributes are private and only a small amount of clean ones are available. To this end, we propose a novel framework FairSP that can achieve Fair prediction under the Semi-Private setting. First, FairSP learns to correct the noise-protected sensitive attributes by exploiting the limited clean sensitive attributes. Then, it jointly models the corrected and clean data in an adversarial way for debiasing and prediction. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed model can ensure fairness under mild assumptions in the semi-private setting. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for making fair predictions under privacy and maintaining high accuracy.

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arXiv2023

Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code

Despite recent progress in text-to-SQL parsing, current semantic parsers are still not accurate enough for practical use. In this paper, we investigate how to build automatic text-to-SQL error correction models. Noticing that token-level edits are out of context and sometimes ambiguous, we propose building clause-level edit models instead. Besides, while most language models of code are not specifically pre-trained for SQL, they know common data structures and their operations in programming languages such as Python. Thus, we propose a novel representation for SQL queries and their edits that adheres more closely to the pre-training corpora of language models of code. Our error correction model improves the exact set match accuracy of different parsers by 2.4-6.5 and obtains up to 4.3 point absolute improvement over two strong baselines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/Auto-SQL-Correction.

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arXiv2023

Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Natural Language to First-Order Logic Translation

Translating natural language sentences to first-order logic (NL-FOL translation) is a longstanding challenge in the NLP and formal logic literature. This paper introduces LogicLLaMA, a LLaMA-7B model fine-tuned for NL-FOL translation using LoRA on a single GPU. LogicLLaMA is capable of directly translating natural language into FOL rules, which outperforms GPT-3.5. LogicLLaMA is also equipped to correct FOL rules predicted by GPT-3.5, and can achieve similar performance as GPT-4 with a fraction of the cost. This correction ability was achieved by a novel supervised fine-tuning (SFT) + reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, which initially trains on synthetically perturbed NL-FOL pairs to encourage chain-of-thought reasoning and then fine-tunes with RLHF on GPT-3.5 outputs using a FOL verifier as the reward model. To train LogicLLaMA, we present MALLS (large language $\textbf{M}$odel gener$\textbf{A}$ted N$\textbf{L}$-FO$\textbf{L}$ pair$\textbf{S}$), a dataset of 34K high-quality and diverse sentence-level NL-FOL pairs collected from GPT-4. The dataset was created by implementing a pipeline that prompts GPT-4 for pairs, and dynamically adjusts the prompts to ensure the collection of pairs with rich and diverse contexts at different levels of complexity, and verifies the validity of the generated FOL rules. Codes, weights, and data are available at $\href{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}{\small \text{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}}$.

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arXiv2023

Mitigating Group Bias in Federated Learning: Beyond Local Fairness

The issue of group fairness in machine learning models, where certain sub-populations or groups are favored over others, has been recognized for some time. While many mitigation strategies have been proposed in centralized learning, many of these methods are not directly applicable in federated learning, where data is privately stored on multiple clients. To address this, many proposals try to mitigate bias at the level of clients before aggregation, which we call locally fair training. However, the effectiveness of these approaches is not well understood. In this work, we investigate the theoretical foundation of locally fair training by studying the relationship between global model fairness and local model fairness. Additionally, we prove that for a broad class of fairness metrics, the global model's fairness can be obtained using only summary statistics from local clients. Based on that, we propose a globally fair training algorithm that directly minimizes the penalized empirical loss. Real-data experiments demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed approach for enhancing fairness while retaining high accuracy compared to locally fair training methods.

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arXiv2021

Visual Question Answering based on Formal Logic

Visual question answering (VQA) has been gaining a lot of traction in the machine learning community in the recent years due to the challenges posed in understanding information coming from multiple modalities (i.e., images, language). In VQA, a series of questions are posed based on a set of images and the task at hand is to arrive at the answer. To achieve this, we take a symbolic reasoning based approach using the framework of formal logic. The image and the questions are converted into symbolic representations on which explicit reasoning is performed. We propose a formal logic framework where (i) images are converted to logical background facts with the help of scene graphs, (ii) the questions are translated to first-order predicate logic clauses using a transformer based deep learning model, and (iii) perform satisfiability checks, by using the background knowledge and the grounding of predicate clauses, to obtain the answer. Our proposed method is highly interpretable and each step in the pipeline can be easily analyzed by a human. We validate our approach on the CLEVR and the GQA dataset. We achieve near perfect accuracy of 99.6% on the CLEVR dataset comparable to the state of art models, showcasing that formal logic is a viable tool to tackle visual question answering. Our model is also data efficient, achieving 99.1% accuracy on CLEVR dataset when trained on just 10% of the training data.

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arXiv2020

Incorporating Relational Background Knowledge into Reinforcement Learning via Differentiable Inductive Logic Programming

Relational Reinforcement Learning (RRL) can offers various desirable features. Most importantly, it allows for incorporating expert knowledge into the learning, and hence leading to much faster learning and better generalization compared to the standard deep reinforcement learning. However, most of the existing RRL approaches are either incapable of incorporating expert background knowledge (e.g., in the form of explicit predicate language) or are not able to learn directly from non-relational data such as image. In this paper, we propose a novel deep RRL based on a differentiable Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) that can effectively learn relational information from image and present the state of the environment as first order logic predicates. Additionally, it can take the expert background knowledge and incorporate it into the learning problem using appropriate predicates. The differentiable ILP allows an end to end optimization of the entire framework for learning the policy in RRL. We show the efficacy of this novel RRL framework using environments such as BoxWorld, GridWorld as well as relational reasoning for the Sort-of-CLEVR dataset.

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arXiv2019

Inductive Logic Programming via Differentiable Deep Neural Logic Networks

We propose a novel paradigm for solving Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) problems via deep recurrent neural networks. This proposed ILP solver is designed based on differentiable implementation of the deduction via forward chaining. In contrast to the majority of past methods, instead of searching through the space of possible first-order logic rules by using some restrictive rule templates, we directly learn the symbolic logical predicate rules by introducing a novel differentiable Neural Logic (dNL) network. The proposed dNL network is able to learn and represent Boolean functions efficiently and in an explicit manner. We show that the proposed dNL-ILP solver supports desirable features such as recursion and predicate invention. Further, we investigate the performance of the proposed ILP solver in classification tasks involving benchmark relational datasets. In particular, we show that our proposed method outperforms the state of the art ILP solvers in classification tasks for Mutagenesis, Cora and IMDB datasets.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Learning Algorithms via Neural Logic Networks

We propose a novel learning paradigm for Deep Neural Networks (DNN) by using Boolean logic algebra. We first present the basic differentiable operators of a Boolean system such as conjunction, disjunction and exclusive-OR and show how these elementary operators can be combined in a simple and meaningful way to form Neural Logic Networks (NLNs). We examine the effectiveness of the proposed NLN framework in learning Boolean functions and discrete-algorithmic tasks. We demonstrate that, in contrast to the implicit learning in MLP approach, the proposed neural logic networks can learn the logical functions explicitly that can be verified and interpreted by human. In particular, we propose a new framework for learning the inductive logic programming (ILP) problems by exploiting the explicit representational power of NLN. We show the proposed neural ILP solver is capable of feats such as predicate invention and recursion and can outperform the current state of the art neural ILP solvers using a variety of benchmark tasks such as decimal addition and multiplication, and sorting on ordered list.

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