Lei Lin

Jiayi Fu, Lei Lin, Xiaoyang Gao et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in handling a variety of natural language processing (NLP) downstream tasks, even on mathematical tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. In this report, we introduce the KwaiYiiMath which enhances the mathematical reasoning abilities of KwaiYiiBase1, by applying Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), including on both English and Chinese mathematical tasks. Meanwhile, we also constructed a small-scale Chinese primary school mathematics test set (named KMath), consisting of 188 examples to evaluate the correctness of the problem-solving process generated by the models. Empirical studies demonstrate that KwaiYiiMath can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on GSM8k, CMath, and KMath compared with the similar size models, respectively.

Liu Yang, Haihua Yang, Wenjun Cheng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to solve varieties of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including mathematical reasoning. In this work, we present SkyMath, a large language model for mathematics with 13 billion parameters. By applying self-compare fine-tuning, we have enhanced mathematical reasoning abilities of Skywork-13B-Base remarkably. On GSM8K, SkyMath outperforms all known open-source models of similar size and has established a new SOTA performance.

Runze Liu, Jiakang Wang, Yuling Shi et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Process-Supervised RL (PSRL) has emerged as a more effective paradigm compared to outcome-based RL. However, existing PSRL approaches suffer from limited exploration efficiency, both in terms of branching positions and sampling. In this paper, we introduce a novel PSRL framework (AttnRL), which enables efficient exploration for reasoning models. Motivated by preliminary observations that steps exhibiting high attention scores correlate with reasoning behaviors, we propose to branch from positions with high values. Furthermore, we develop an adaptive sampling strategy that accounts for problem difficulty and historical batch size, ensuring that the whole training batch maintains non-zero advantage values. To further improve sampling efficiency, we design a one-step off-policy training pipeline for PSRL. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches in terms of performance and sampling and training efficiency.

Zhongkai Shangguan, Zihe Zheng, Lei Lin

Nowadays social media platforms such as Twitter provide a great opportunity to understand public opinion of climate change compared to traditional survey methods. In this paper, we constructed a massive climate change Twitter dataset and conducted comprehensive analysis using machine learning. By conducting topic modeling and natural language processing, we show the relationship between the number of tweets about climate change and major climate events; the common topics people discuss climate change; and the trend of sentiment. Our dataset was published on Kaggle (\url{https://www.kaggle.com/leonshangguan/climate-change-tweets-ids-until-aug-2021}) and can be used in further research.

Han Sun, Lei Lin, Ningzhong Liu et al.

Recently, in order to address the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem, extensive studies have been proposed to achieve transferrable models. Among them, the most prevalent method is adversarial domain adaptation, which can shorten the distance between the source domain and the target domain. Although adversarial learning is very effective, it still leads to the instability of the network and the drawbacks of confusing category information. In this paper, we propose a Robust Ensembling Network (REN) for UDA, which applies a robust time ensembling teacher network to learn global information for domain transfer. Specifically, REN mainly includes a teacher network and a student network, which performs standard domain adaptation training and updates weights of the teacher network. In addition, we also propose a dual-network conditional adversarial loss to improve the ability of the discriminator. Finally, for the purpose of improving the basic ability of the student network, we utilize the consistency constraint to balance the error between the student network and the teacher network. Extensive experimental results on several UDA datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model by comparing with other state-of-the-art UDA algorithms.

Lei Lin

It is expensive to evaluate the results of Machine Translation(MT), which usually requires manual translation as a reference. Machine Translation Quality Estimation (QE) is a task of predicting the quality of machine translations without relying on any reference. Recently, the emergence of predictor-estimator framework which trains the predictor as a feature extractor and estimator as a QE predictor, and pre-trained language models(PLM) have achieved promising QE performance. However, we argue that there are still gaps between the predictor and the estimator in both data quality and training objectives, which preclude QE models from benefiting from a large number of parallel corpora more directly. Based on previous related work that have alleviated gaps to some extent, we propose a novel framework that provides a more accurate direct pretraining for QE tasks. In this framework, a generator is trained to produce pseudo data that is closer to the real QE data, and a estimator is pretrained on these data with novel objectives that are the same as the QE task. Experiments on widely used benchmarks show that our proposed framework outperforms existing methods, without using any pretraining models such as BERT.

Zhongkai Shangguan, Lei Lin, Wencheng Wu et al.

There are a large number of optimization problems in physical models where the relationships between model parameters and outputs are unknown or hard to track. These models are named as black-box models in general because they can only be viewed in terms of inputs and outputs, without knowledge of the internal workings. Optimizing the black-box model parameters has become increasingly expensive and time consuming as they have become more complex. Hence, developing effective and efficient black-box model optimization algorithms has become an important task. One powerful algorithm to solve such problem is Bayesian optimization, which can effectively estimates the model parameters that lead to the best performance, and Gaussian Process (GP) has been one of the most widely used surrogate model in Bayesian optimization. However, the time complexity of GP scales cubically with respect to the number of observed model outputs, and GP does not scale well with large parameter dimension either. Consequently, it has been challenging for GP to optimize black-box models that need to query many observations and/or have many parameters. To overcome the drawbacks of GP, in this study, we propose a general Bayesian optimization algorithm that employs a Neural Process (NP) as the surrogate model to perform black-box model optimization, namely, Neural Process for Bayesian Optimization (NPBO). In order to validate the benefits of NPBO, we compare NPBO with four benchmark approaches on a power system parameter optimization problem and a series of seven benchmark Bayesian optimization problems. The results show that the proposed NPBO performs better than the other four benchmark approaches on the power system parameter optimization problem and competitively on the seven benchmark problems.

Trevor W. Richardson, Wencheng Wu, Lei Lin et al.

We consider the topic of data imputation, a foundational task in machine learning that addresses issues with missing data. To that end, we propose MCFlow, a deep framework for imputation that leverages normalizing flow generative models and Monte Carlo sampling. We address the causality dilemma that arises when training models with incomplete data by introducing an iterative learning scheme which alternately updates the density estimate and the values of the missing entries in the training data. We provide extensive empirical validation of the effectiveness of the proposed method on standard multivariate and image datasets, and benchmark its performance against state-of-the-art alternatives. We demonstrate that MCFlow is superior to competing methods in terms of the quality of the imputed data, as well as with regards to its ability to preserve the semantic structure of the data.

Tao Li, Lei Lin

With billions of personal images being generated from social media and cameras of all sorts on a daily basis, security and privacy are unprecedentedly challenged. Although extensive attempts have been made, existing face image de-identification techniques are either insufficient in photo-reality or incapable of balancing privacy and usability qualitatively and quantitatively, i.e., they fail to answer counterfactual questions such as "is it private now?", "how private is it?", and "can it be more private?" In this paper, we propose a novel framework called AnonymousNet, with an effort to address these issues systematically, balance usability, and enhance privacy in a natural and measurable manner. The framework encompasses four stages: facial attribute estimation, privacy-metric-oriented face obfuscation, directed natural image synthesis, and adversarial perturbation. Not only do we achieve the state-of-the-arts in terms of image quality and attribute prediction accuracy, we are also the first to show that facial privacy is measurable, can be factorized, and accordingly be manipulated in a photo-realistic fashion to fulfill different requirements and application scenarios. Experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Lei Lin, Beilei Xu, Wencheng Wu et al.

Myotonia, which refers to delayed muscle relaxation after contraction, is the main symptom of myotonic dystrophy patients. We propose a hierarchical attention-based temporal convolutional network (HA-TCN) for myotonic dystrohpy diagnosis from handgrip time series data, and introduce mechanisms that enable model explainability. We compare the performance of the HA-TCN model against that of benchmark TCN models, LSTM models with and without attention mechanisms, and SVM approaches with handcrafted features. In terms of classification accuracy and F1 score, we found all deep learning models have similar levels of performance, and they all outperform SVM. Further, the HA-TCN model outperforms its TCN counterpart with regards to computational efficiency regardless of network depth, and in terms of performance particularly when the number of hidden layers is small. Lastly, HA-TCN models can consistently identify relevant time series segments in the relaxation phase of the handgrip time series, and exhibit increased robustness to noise when compared to attention-based LSTM models.

Tao Li, Minsoo Choi, Kaiming Fu et al.

Recommendation systems that automatically generate personalized music playlists for users have attracted tremendous attention in recent years. Nowadays, most music recommendation systems rely on item-based or user-based collaborative filtering or content-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel mixture hidden Markov model (HMM) for music play sequence prediction. We compare the mixture model with state-of-the-art methods and evaluate the predictions quantitatively and qualitatively on a large-scale real-world dataset in a Kaggle competition. Results show that our model significantly outperforms traditional methods as well as other competitors. We conclude by envisioning a next-generation music recommendation system that integrates our model with recent advances in deep learning, computer vision, and speech techniques, and has promising potential in both academia and industry.

Tao Li, Lei Lin, Minsoo Choi et al.

With one billion monthly viewers, and millions of users discussing and sharing opinions, comments below YouTube videos are rich sources of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. We introduce the YouTube AV 50K dataset, a freely-available collections of more than 50,000 YouTube comments and metadata below autonomous vehicle (AV)-related videos. We describe its creation process, its content and data format, and discuss its possible usages. Especially, we do a case study of the first self-driving car fatality to evaluate the dataset, and show how we can use this dataset to better understand public attitudes toward self-driving cars and public reactions to the accident. Future developments of the dataset are also discussed.

Lei Lin, Zhengbing He, Srinivas Peeta

This study proposes a novel Graph Convolutional Neural Network with Data-driven Graph Filter (GCNN-DDGF) model that can learn hidden heterogeneous pairwise correlations between stations to predict station-level hourly demand in a large-scale bike-sharing network. Two architectures of the GCNN-DDGF model are explored; GCNNreg-DDGF is a regular GCNN-DDGF model which contains the convolution and feedforward blocks, and GCNNrec-DDGF additionally contains a recurrent block from the Long Short-term Memory neural network architecture to capture temporal dependencies in the bike-sharing demand series. Furthermore, four types of GCNN models are proposed whose adjacency matrices are based on various bike-sharing system data, including Spatial Distance matrix (SD), Demand matrix (DE), Average Trip Duration matrix (ATD), and Demand Correlation matrix (DC). These six types of GCNN models and seven other benchmark models are built and compared on a Citi Bike dataset from New York City which includes 272 stations and over 28 million transactions from 2013 to 2016. Results show that the GCNNrec-DDGF performs the best in terms of the Root Mean Square Error, the Mean Absolute Error and the coefficient of determination (R2), followed by the GCNNreg-DDGF. They outperform the other models. Through a more detailed graph network analysis based on the learned DDGF, insights are obtained on the black box of the GCNN-DDGF model. It is found to capture some information similar to details embedded in the SD, DE and DC matrices. More importantly, it also uncovers hidden heterogeneous pairwise correlations between stations that are not revealed by any of those matrices.

Lei Lin, John Handley, Adel Sadek

Short-term traffic volume prediction models have been extensively studied in the past few decades. However, most of the previous studies only focus on single-value prediction. Considering the uncertain and chaotic nature of the transportation system, an accurate and reliable prediction interval with upper and lower bounds may be better than a single point value for transportation management. In this paper, we introduce a neural network model called Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) for interval prediction of short-term traffic volume and improve it with the heuristic particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO). The hybrid PSO-ELM model can generate the prediction intervals under different confidence levels and guarantee the quality by minimizing a multi-objective function which considers two criteria reliability and interval sharpness. The PSO-ELM models are built based on an hourly traffic dataset and compared with ARMA and Kalman Filter models. The results show that ARMA models are the worst for all confidence levels, and the PSO-ELM models are comparable with Kalman Filter from the aspects of reliability and narrowness of the intervals, although the parameters of PSO-ELM are fixed once the training is done while Kalman Filter is updated in an online approach. Additionally, only the PSO-ELMs are able to produce intervals with coverage probabilities higher than or equal to the confidence levels. For the points outside of the prediction levels given by PSO-ELMs, they lie very close to the bounds.

Zhenhua Zhang, Lei Lin

Border crossing delays cause problems like huge economics loss and heavy environmental pollutions. To understand more about the nature of border crossing delay, this study applies a dictionary-based compression algorithm to process the historical Niagara Frontier border wait times data. It can identify the abnormal spatial-temporal patterns for both passenger vehicles and trucks at three bridges connecting US and Canada. Furthermore, it provides a quantitate anomaly score to rank the wait times patterns across the three bridges for each vehicle type and each direction. By analyzing the top three most abnormal patterns, we find that there are at least two factors contributing the anomaly of the patterns. The weekends and holidays may cause unusual heave congestions at the three bridges at the same time, and the freight transportation demand may be uneven from Canada to the USA at Peace Bridge and Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, which may lead to a high anomaly score. By calculating the frequency of the top 5% abnormal patterns by hour of the day, the results show that for cars from the USA to Canada, the frequency of abnormal waiting time patterns is the highest during noon while for trucks in the same direction, it is the highest during the afternoon peak hours. For Canada to US direction, the frequency of abnormal border wait time patterns for both cars and trucks reaches to the peak during the afternoon. The analysis of abnormal spatial-temporal wait times patterns is promising to improve the border crossing management

Lei Lin, Qian Wang, Adel W. Sadek

Traffic accident data are usually noisy, contain missing values, and heterogeneous. How to select the most important variables to improve real-time traffic accident risk prediction has become a concern of many recent studies. This paper proposes a novel variable selection method based on the Frequent Pattern tree (FP tree) algorithm. First, all the frequent patterns in the traffic accident dataset are discovered. Then for each frequent pattern, a new criterion, called the Relative Object Purity Ratio (ROPR) which we proposed, is calculated. This ROPR is added to the importance score of the variables that differentiate one frequent pattern from the others. To test the proposed method, a dataset was compiled from the traffic accidents records detected by only one detector on interstate highway I-64 in Virginia in 2005. This dataset was then linked to other variables such as real-time traffic information and weather conditions. Both the proposed method based on the FP tree algorithm, as well as the widely utilized, random forest method, were then used to identify the important variables or the Virginia dataset. The results indicate that there are some differences between the variables deemed important by the FP tree and those selected by the random forest method. Following this, two baseline models (i.e. a nearest neighbor (k-NN) method and a Bayesian network) were developed to predict accident risk based on the variables identified by both the FP tree method and the random forest method. The results show that the models based on the variable selection using the FP tree performed better than those based on the random forest method for several versions of the k-NN and Bayesian network models.The best results were derived from a Bayesian network model using variables from FP tree. That model could predict 61.11% of accidents accurately while having a false alarm rate of 38.16%.

Yang Liu, Chengjie Sun, Lei Lin et al.

In this paper, we proposed a sentence encoding-based model for recognizing text entailment. In our approach, the encoding of sentence is a two-stage process. Firstly, average pooling was used over word-level bidirectional LSTM (biLSTM) to generate a first-stage sentence representation. Secondly, attention mechanism was employed to replace average pooling on the same sentence for better representations. Instead of using target sentence to attend words in source sentence, we utilized the sentence's first-stage representation to attend words appeared in itself, which is called "Inner-Attention" in our paper . Experiments conducted on Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) Corpus has proved the effectiveness of "Inner-Attention" mechanism. With less number of parameters, our model outperformed the existing best sentence encoding-based approach by a large margin.

Yaming Sun, Lei Lin, Duyu Tang et al.

We present a method to leverage radical for learning Chinese character embedding. Radical is a semantic and phonetic component of Chinese character. It plays an important role as characters with the same radical usually have similar semantic meaning and grammatical usage. However, existing Chinese processing algorithms typically regard word or character as the basic unit but ignore the crucial radical information. In this paper, we fill this gap by leveraging radical for learning continuous representation of Chinese character. We develop a dedicated neural architecture to effectively learn character embedding and apply it on Chinese character similarity judgement and Chinese word segmentation. Experiment results show that our radical-enhanced method outperforms existing embedding learning algorithms on both tasks.