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Hao He

Publications and source records attributed to Hao He.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Chain-of-Thought Tuning: Masked Language Models can also Think Step By Step in Natural Language Understanding

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning through intermediate steps in natural language form. Briefly, CoT enables LLMs to think step by step. However, although many Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks also require thinking step by step, LLMs perform less well than small-scale Masked Language Models (MLMs). To migrate CoT from LLMs to MLMs, we propose Chain-of-Thought Tuning (CoTT), a two-step reasoning framework based on prompt tuning, to implement step-by-step thinking for MLMs on NLU tasks. From the perspective of CoT, CoTT's two-step framework enables MLMs to implement task decomposition; CoTT's prompt tuning allows intermediate steps to be used in natural language form. Thereby, the success of CoT can be extended to NLU tasks through MLMs. To verify the effectiveness of CoTT, we conduct experiments on two NLU tasks: hierarchical classification and relation extraction, and the results show that CoTT outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CL↗

Accurate Use of Label Dependency in Multi-Label Text Classification Through the Lens of Causality

Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC) aims to assign the most relevant labels to each given text. Existing methods demonstrate that label dependency can help to improve the model's performance. However, the introduction of label dependency may cause the model to suffer from unwanted prediction bias. In this study, we attribute the bias to the model's misuse of label dependency, i.e., the model tends to utilize the correlation shortcut in label dependency rather than fusing text information and label dependency for prediction. Motivated by causal inference, we propose a CounterFactual Text Classifier (CFTC) to eliminate the correlation bias, and make causality-based predictions. Specifically, our CFTC first adopts the predict-then-modify backbone to extract precise label information embedded in label dependency, then blocks the correlation shortcut through the counterfactual de-bias technique with the help of the human causal graph. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our CFTC significantly outperforms the baselines and effectively eliminates the correlation bias in datasets.

cs.CL↗

Unlock the Potential of Counterfactually-Augmented Data in Out-Of-Distribution Generalization

Counterfactually-Augmented Data (CAD) -- minimal editing of sentences to flip the corresponding labels -- has the potential to improve the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization capability of language models, as CAD induces language models to exploit domain-independent causal features and exclude spurious correlations. However, the empirical results of CAD's OOD generalization are not as efficient as anticipated. In this study, we attribute the inefficiency to the myopia phenomenon caused by CAD: language models only focus on causal features that are edited in the augmentation operation and exclude other non-edited causal features. Therefore, the potential of CAD is not fully exploited. To address this issue, we analyze the myopia phenomenon in feature space from the perspective of Fisher's Linear Discriminant, then we introduce two additional constraints based on CAD's structural properties (dataset-level and sentence-level) to help language models extract more complete causal features in CAD, thereby mitigating the myopia phenomenon and improving OOD generalization capability. We evaluate our method on two tasks: Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Inference, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method could unlock the potential of CAD and improve the OOD generalization performance of language models by 1.0% to 5.9%.

cs.CL↗

How Early Participation Determines Long-Term Sustained Activity in GitHub Projects?

Although the open source model bears many advantages in software development, open source projects are always hard to sustain. Previous research on open source sustainability mainly focuses on projects that have already reached a certain level of maturity (e.g., with communities, releases, and downstream projects). However, limited attention is paid to the development of (sustainable) open source projects in their infancy, and we believe an understanding of early sustainability determinants is crucial for project initiators, incubators, newcomers, and users. In this paper, we aim to explore the relationship between early participation factors and long-term project sustainability. We leverage a novel methodology combining the Blumberg model of performance and machine learning to predict the sustainability of 290,255 GitHub projects. Specificially, we train an XGBoost model based on early participation (first three months of activity) in 290,255 GitHub projects and we interpret the model using LIME. We quantitatively show that early participants have a positive effect on project's future sustained activity if they have prior experience in OSS project incubation and demonstrate concentrated focus and steady commitment. Participation from non-code contributors and detailed contribution documentation also promote project's sustained activity. Compared with individual projects, building a community that consists of more experienced core developers and more active peripheral developers is important for organizational projects. This study provides unique insights into the incubation and recognition of sustainable open source projects, and our interpretable prediction approach can also offer guidance to open source project initiators and newcomers.

cs.SE↗

Personalized First Issue Recommender for Newcomers in Open Source Projects

Many open source projects provide good first issues (GFIs) to attract and retain newcomers. Although several automated GFI recommenders have been proposed, existing recommenders are limited to recommending generic GFIs without considering differences between individual newcomers. However, we observe mismatches between generic GFIs and the diverse background of newcomers, resulting in failed attempts, discouraged onboarding, and delayed issue resolution. To address this problem, we assume that personalized first issues (PFIs) for newcomers could help reduce the mismatches. To justify the assumption, we empirically analyze 37 newcomers and their first issues resolved across multiple projects. We find that the first issues resolved by the same newcomer share similarities in task type, programming language, and project domain. These findings underscore the need for a PFI recommender to improve over state-of-the-art approaches. For that purpose, we identify features that influence newcomers' personalized selection of first issues by analyzing the relationship between possible features of the newcomers and the characteristics of the newcomers' chosen first issues. We find that the expertise preference, OSS experience, activeness, and sentiment of newcomers drive their personalized choice of the first issues. Based on these findings, we propose a Personalized First Issue Recommender (PFIRec), which employs LamdaMART to rank candidate issues for a given newcomer by leveraging the identified influential features. We evaluate PFIRec using a dataset of 68,858 issues from 100 GitHub projects. The evaluation results show that PFIRec outperforms existing first issue recommenders, potentially doubling the probability that the top recommended issue is suitable for a specific newcomer and reducing one-third of a newcomer's unsuccessful attempts to identify suitable first issues, in the median.

cs.SE↗

Summary of ChatGPT-Related Research and Perspective Towards the Future of Large Language Models

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of ChatGPT-related (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) research, state-of-the-art large language models (LLM) from the GPT series, and their prospective applications across diverse domains. Indeed, key innovations such as large-scale pre-training that captures knowledge across the entire world wide web, instruction fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have played significant roles in enhancing LLMs' adaptability and performance. We performed an in-depth analysis of 194 relevant papers on arXiv, encompassing trend analysis, word cloud representation, and distribution analysis across various application domains. The findings reveal a significant and increasing interest in ChatGPT-related research, predominantly centered on direct natural language processing applications, while also demonstrating considerable potential in areas ranging from education and history to mathematics, medicine, and physics. This study endeavors to furnish insights into ChatGPT's capabilities, potential implications, ethical concerns, and offer direction for future advancements in this field.

cs.CL↗

Understanding and Remediating Open-Source License Incompatibilities in the PyPI Ecosystem

The reuse and distribution of open-source software must be in compliance with its accompanying open-source license. In modern packaging ecosystems, maintaining such compliance is challenging because a package may have a complex multi-layered dependency graph with many packages, any of which may have an incompatible license. Although prior research finds that license incompatibilities are prevalent, empirical evidence is still scarce in some modern packaging ecosystems (e.g., PyPI). It also remains unclear how developers remediate the license incompatibilities in the dependency graphs of their packages (including direct and transitive dependencies), let alone any automated approaches. To bridge this gap, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of license incompatibilities and their remediation practices in the PyPI ecosystem. We find that 7.27% of the PyPI package releases have license incompatibilities and 61.3% of them are caused by transitive dependencies, causing challenges in their remediation; for remediation, developers can apply one of the five strategies: migration, removal, pinning versions, changing their own licenses, and negotiation. Inspired by our findings, we propose SILENCE, an SMT-solver-based approach to recommend license incompatibility remediations with minimal costs in package dependency graph. Our evaluation shows that the remediations proposed by SILENCE can match 19 historical real-world cases (except for migrations not covered by an existing knowledge base) and have been accepted by five popular PyPI packages whose developers were previously unaware of their license incompatibilities.

cs.SE↗

Taxonomy-Structured Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation aims to mitigate distribution shifts among different domains. However, traditional formulations are mostly limited to categorical domains, greatly simplifying nuanced domain relationships in the real world. In this work, we tackle a generalization with taxonomy-structured domains, which formalizes domains with nested, hierarchical similarity structures such as animal species and product catalogs. We build on the classic adversarial framework and introduce a novel taxonomist, which competes with the adversarial discriminator to preserve the taxonomy information. The equilibrium recovers the classic adversarial domain adaptation's solution if given a non-informative domain taxonomy (e.g., a flat taxonomy where all leaf nodes connect to the root node) while yielding non-trivial results with other taxonomies. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets with successful adaptation. Code is available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/TSDA.

cs.LG↗

Domain-Indexing Variational Bayes: Interpretable Domain Index for Domain Adaptation

Previous studies have shown that leveraging domain index can significantly boost domain adaptation performance (arXiv:2007.01807, arXiv:2202.03628). However, such domain indices are not always available. To address this challenge, we first provide a formal definition of domain index from the probabilistic perspective, and then propose an adversarial variational Bayesian framework that infers domain indices from multi-domain data, thereby providing additional insight on domain relations and improving domain adaptation performance. Our theoretical analysis shows that our adversarial variational Bayesian framework finds the optimal domain index at equilibrium. Empirical results on both synthetic and real data verify that our model can produce interpretable domain indices which enable us to achieve superior performance compared to state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/VDI.

cs.LG↗

Automating Dependency Updates in Practice: An Exploratory Study on GitHub Dependabot

Dependency management bots automatically open pull requests to update software dependencies on behalf of developers. Early research shows that developers are suspicious of updates performed by dependency management bots and feel tired of overwhelming notifications from these bots. Despite this, dependency management bots are becoming increasingly popular. Such contrast motivates us to investigate Dependabot, currently the most visible bot on GitHub, to reveal the effectiveness and limitations of state-of-art dependency management bots. We use exploratory data analysis and a developer survey to evaluate the effectiveness of Dependabot in keeping dependencies up-to-date, interacting with developers, reducing update suspicion, and reducing notification fatigue. We obtain mixed findings. On the positive side, projects do reduce technical lag after Dependabot adoption and developers are highly receptive to its pull requests. On the negative side, its compatibility scores are too scarce to be effective in reducing update suspicion; developers tend to configure Dependabot toward reducing the number of notifications; and 11.3% of projects have deprecated Dependabot in favor of other alternatives. The survey confirms our findings and provides insights into the key missing features of Dependabot. Based on our findings, we derive and summarize the key characteristics of an ideal dependency management bot which can be grouped into four dimensions: configurability, autonomy, transparency, and self-adaptability.

cs.SE↗

Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks

To design fast neural networks, many works have been focusing on reducing the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs). We observe that such reduction in FLOPs, however, does not necessarily lead to a similar level of reduction in latency. This mainly stems from inefficiently low floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). To achieve faster networks, we revisit popular operators and demonstrate that such low FLOPS is mainly due to frequent memory access of the operators, especially the depthwise convolution. We hence propose a novel partial convolution (PConv) that extracts spatial features more efficiently, by cutting down redundant computation and memory access simultaneously. Building upon our PConv, we further propose FasterNet, a new family of neural networks, which attains substantially higher running speed than others on a wide range of devices, without compromising on accuracy for various vision tasks. For example, on ImageNet-1k, our tiny FasterNet-T0 is $2.8\times$, $3.3\times$, and $2.4\times$ faster than MobileViT-XXS on GPU, CPU, and ARM processors, respectively, while being $2.9\%$ more accurate. Our large FasterNet-L achieves impressive $83.5\%$ top-1 accuracy, on par with the emerging Swin-B, while having $36\%$ higher inference throughput on GPU, as well as saving $37\%$ compute time on CPU. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/JierunChen/FasterNet}.

cs.CV↗

Graph-Relational Domain Adaptation

Existing domain adaptation methods tend to treat every domain equally and align them all perfectly. Such uniform alignment ignores topological structures among different domains; therefore it may be beneficial for nearby domains, but not necessarily for distant domains. In this work, we relax such uniform alignment by using a domain graph to encode domain adjacency, e.g., a graph of states in the US with each state as a domain and each edge indicating adjacency, thereby allowing domains to align flexibly based on the graph structure. We generalize the existing adversarial learning framework with a novel graph discriminator using encoding-conditioned graph embeddings. Theoretical analysis shows that at equilibrium, our method recovers classic domain adaptation when the graph is a clique, and achieves non-trivial alignment for other types of graphs. Empirical results show that our approach successfully generalizes uniform alignment, naturally incorporates domain information represented by graphs, and improves upon existing domain adaptation methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Code will soon be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/GRDA.

cs.LG↗

Molecular gas and star formation in nearby starburst galaxy mergers

We employ the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE-2) physics model to study how the properties of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) evolve during galaxy mergers. We conduct a pixel-by-pixel analysis of molecular gas properties in both the simulated control galaxies and galaxy major mergers. The simulated GMC-pixels in the control galaxies follow a similar trend in a diagram of velocity dispersion ($σ_v$) versus gas surface density ($Σ_{\mathrm{mol}}$) to the one observed in local spiral galaxies in the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) survey. For GMC-pixels in simulated mergers, we see a significant increase of factor of 5 - 10 in both $Σ_{\mathrm{mol}}$ and $σ_v$, which puts these pixels above the trend of PHANGS galaxies in the $σ_v$ vs $Σ_{\mathrm{mol}}$ diagram. This deviation may indicate that GMCs in the simulated mergers are much less gravitationally bound compared with simulated control galaxies with virial parameter ($α_{\mathrm{vir}}$) reaching 10 - 100. Furthermore, we find that the increase in $α_{\mathrm{vir}}$ happens at the same time as the increase in global star formation rate (SFR), which suggests stellar feedback is responsible for dispersing the gas. We also find that the gas depletion time is significantly lower for high $α_{\mathrm{vir}}$ GMCs during a starburst event. This is in contrast to the simple physical picture that low $α_{\mathrm{vir}}$ GMCs are easier to collapse and form stars on shorter depletion times. This might suggest that some other physical mechanisms besides self-gravity are helping the GMCs in starbursting mergers collapse and form stars.

astro-ph.GA↗

Label Name is Mantra: Unifying Point Cloud Segmentation across Heterogeneous Datasets

Point cloud segmentation is a fundamental task in 3D vision that serves a wide range of applications. Although great progresses have been made these years, its practical usability is still limited by the availability of training data. Existing approaches cannot make full use of multiple datasets on hand due to the label mismatch among different datasets. In this paper, we propose a principled approach that supports learning from heterogeneous datasets with different label sets. Our idea is to utilize a pre-trained language model to embed discrete labels to a continuous latent space with the help of their label names. This unifies all labels of different datasets, so that joint training is doable. Meanwhile, classifying points in the continuous 3D space by their vocabulary tokens significantly increase the generalization ability of the model in comparison with existing approaches that have fixed decoder architecture. Besides, we also integrate prompt learning in our framework to alleviate data shifts among different data sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin.

cs.CV↗

Indiscriminate Poisoning Attacks on Unsupervised Contrastive Learning

Indiscriminate data poisoning attacks are quite effective against supervised learning. However, not much is known about their impact on unsupervised contrastive learning (CL). This paper is the first to consider indiscriminate poisoning attacks of contrastive learning. We propose Contrastive Poisoning (CP), the first effective such attack on CL. We empirically show that Contrastive Poisoning, not only drastically reduces the performance of CL algorithms, but also attacks supervised learning models, making it the most generalizable indiscriminate poisoning attack. We also show that CL algorithms with a momentum encoder are more robust to indiscriminate poisoning, and propose a new countermeasure based on matrix completion. Code is available at: https://github.com/kaiwenzha/contrastive-poisoning.

cs.LG↗

Improving the Out-Of-Distribution Generalization Capability of Language Models: Counterfactually-Augmented Data is not Enough

Counterfactually-Augmented Data (CAD) has the potential to improve language models' Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization capability, as CAD induces language models to exploit causal features and exclude spurious correlations. However, the empirical results of OOD generalization on CAD are not as efficient as expected. In this paper, we attribute the inefficiency to Myopia Phenomenon caused by CAD: language models only focus on causal features that are edited in the augmentation and exclude other non-edited causal features. As a result, the potential of CAD is not fully exploited. Based on the structural properties of CAD, we design two additional constraints to help language models extract more complete causal features contained in CAD, thus improving the OOD generalization capability. We evaluate our method on two tasks: Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Inference, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method could unlock CAD's potential and improve language models' OOD generalization capability.

cs.CL↗

MaxGNR: A Dynamic Weight Strategy via Maximizing Gradient-to-Noise Ratio for Multi-Task Learning

When modeling related tasks in computer vision, Multi-Task Learning (MTL) can outperform Single-Task Learning (STL) due to its ability to capture intrinsic relatedness among tasks. However, MTL may encounter the insufficient training problem, i.e., some tasks in MTL may encounter non-optimal situation compared with STL. A series of studies point out that too much gradient noise would lead to performance degradation in STL, however, in the MTL scenario, Inter-Task Gradient Noise (ITGN) is an additional source of gradient noise for each task, which can also affect the optimization process. In this paper, we point out ITGN as a key factor leading to the insufficient training problem. We define the Gradient-to-Noise Ratio (GNR) to measure the relative magnitude of gradient noise and design the MaxGNR algorithm to alleviate the ITGN interference of each task by maximizing the GNR of each task. We carefully evaluate our MaxGNR algorithm on two standard image MTL datasets: NYUv2 and Cityscapes. The results show that our algorithm outperforms the baselines under identical experimental conditions.

cs.CV↗

Contrast with Major Classifier Vectors for Federated Medical Relation Extraction with Heterogeneous Label Distribution

Federated medical relation extraction enables multiple clients to train a deep network collaboratively without sharing their raw medical data. In order to handle the heterogeneous label distribution across clients, most of the existing works only involve enforcing regularization between local and global models during optimization. In this paper, we fully utilize the models of all clients and propose a novel concept of \textit{major classifier vectors}, where a group of class vectors is obtained in an ensemble rather than the weighted average method on the server. The major classifier vectors are then distributed to all clients and the local training of each client is Contrasted with Major Classifier vectors (FedCMC), so the local model is not prone to overfitting to the local label distribution. FedCMC requires only a small amount of additional transfer of classifier parameters without any leakage of raw data, extracted representations, and label distributions. Our extensive experiments show that FedCMC outperforms the other state-of-the-art FL algorithms on three medical relation extraction datasets.

cs.AI↗