Emergent Communication in Interactive Sketch Question Answering

Vision-based emergent communication (EC) aims to learn to communicate through sketches and demystify the evolution of human communication. Ironically, previous works neglect multi-round interaction, which is indispensable in human communication. To fill this gap, we first introduce a novel Interactive Sketch Question Answering (ISQA) task, where two collaborative players are interacting through sketches to answer a question about an image in a multi-round manner. To accomplish this task, we design a new and efficient interactive EC system, which can achieve an effective balance among three evaluation factors, including the question answering accuracy, drawing complexity and human interpretability. Our experimental results including human evaluation demonstrate that multi-round interactive mechanism facilitates targeted and efficient communication between intelligent agents with decent human interpretability.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202

Model-Theoretic Logic for Mathematical Theory of Semantic Information and Communication

In this paper, we propose an advancement to Tarskian model-theoretic semantics, leading to a unified quantitative theory of semantic information and communication. We start with description of inductive logic and probabilities, which serve as notable tools in development of the proposed theory. Then, we identify two disparate kinds of uncertainty in semantic communication, that of physical and content, present refined interpretations of semantic information measures, and conclude with proposing a new measure for semantic content-information and entropy. Our proposition standardizes semantic information across different universes and systems, hence bringing measurability and comparability into semantic communication. We then proceed with introducing conditional and mutual semantic cont-information measures and point out to their utility in formulating practical and optimizable lossless and lossy semantic compression objectives. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the value of our theoretical propositions

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.Comment: AAAI24 (Oral

Lemur: Harmonizing Natural Language and Code for Language Agents

We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. https://github.com/OpenLemur/Lemu

Temporal Inductive Logic Reasoning

Inductive logic reasoning is one of the fundamental tasks on graphs, which seeks to generalize patterns from the data. This task has been studied extensively for traditional graph datasets such as knowledge graphs (KGs), with representative techniques such as inductive logic programming (ILP). Existing ILP methods typically assume learning from KGs with static facts and binary relations. Beyond KGs, graph structures are widely present in other applications such as video instructions, scene graphs and program executions. While inductive logic reasoning is also beneficial for these applications, applying ILP to the corresponding 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 study two of such applications and propose to represent them as hypergraphs with time intervals. To reason on this graph, we propose the multi-start random B-walk that traverses this hypergraph. Combining it with a path-consistency algorithm, we propose an efficient backward-chaining ILP method that learns logic rules by generalizing from both the temporal and the relational data

Hierarchical Spherical CNNs with Lifting-based Adaptive Wavelets for Pooling and Unpooling

Pooling and unpooling are two essential operations in constructing hierarchical spherical convolutional neural networks (HS-CNNs) for comprehensive feature learning in the spherical domain. Most existing models employ downsampling-based pooling, which will inevitably incur information loss and cannot adapt to different spherical signals and tasks. Besides, the preserved information after pooling cannot be well restored by the subsequent unpooling to characterize the desirable features for a task. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of HS-CNNs with a lifting structure to learn adaptive spherical wavelets for pooling and unpooling, dubbed LiftHS-CNN, which ensures a more efficient hierarchical feature learning for both image- and pixel-level tasks. Specifically, adaptive spherical wavelets are learned with a lifting structure that consists of trainable lifting operators (i.e., update and predict operators). With this learnable lifting structure, we can adaptively partition a signal into two sub-bands containing low- and high-frequency components, respectively, and thus generate a better down-scaled representation for pooling by preserving more information in the low-frequency sub-band. The update and predict operators are parameterized with graph-based attention to jointly consider the signal's characteristics and the underlying geometries. We further show that particular properties are promised by the learned wavelets, ensuring the spatial-frequency localization for better exploiting the signal's correlation in both spatial and frequency domains. We then propose an unpooling operation that is invertible to the lifting-based pooling, where an inverse wavelet transform is performed by using the learned lifting operators to restore an up-scaled representation. Extensive empirical evaluations on various spherical domain tasks validate the superiority of the proposed LiftHS-CNN

Task-Level Aware Scheduling of Energy-Constrained Applications on Heterogeneous Multi-Core System

Minimizing the schedule length of parallel applications, which run on a heterogeneous multi-core system and are subject to energy consumption constraints, has recently attracted much attention. The key point of this problem is the strategy to pre-allocate the energy consumption of unscheduled tasks. Previous articles used the minimum value, average value or a power consumption weight value as the pre-allocation energy consumption of tasks. However, they all ignored the different levels of tasks. The tasks in different task levels have different impact on the overall schedule length when they are allocated the same energy consumption. Considering the task levels, we designed a novel task energy consumption pre-allocation strategy that is conducive to minimizing the scheduling time and developed a novel task schedule algorithm based on it. After getting the preliminary scheduling results, we also proposed a task execution frequency re-adjustment mechanism that can re-adjust the execution frequency of tasks, to further reduce the overall schedule length. We carried out a considerable number of experiments with practical parallel application models. The results of the experiments show that our method can reach better performance compared with the existing algorithms