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This paper investigates synthetic data generation strategies in developing generative retrieval models for domain-specific corpora, thereby addressing the scalability challenges inherent in manually annotating in-domain queries. We study the data strategies for a two-stage training framework: in the first stage, which focuses on learning to decode document identifiers from queries, we investigate LLM-generated queries across multiple granularity (e.g. chunks, sentences) and domain-relevant search constraints that can better capture nuanced relevancy signals. In the second stage, which aims to refine document ranking through preference learning, we explore the strategies for mining hard negatives based on the initial model's predictions. Experiments on public datasets over diverse domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthetic data generation and hard negative sampling approach.

In the field of digital signal processing, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is a fundamental algorithm, with its processors being implemented using either the pipelined architecture, well-known for high-throughput applications but weak in hardware utilization, or the memory-based architecture, designed for area-constrained scenarios but failing to meet stringent throughput requirements. Therefore, we propose an adaptive hybrid FFT, which leverages the strengths of both pipelined and memory-based architectures. In this paper, we propose an adaptive hybrid FFT processor that combines the advantages of both architectures, and it has the following features. First, a set of radix-$2^k$ multi-path delay commutators (MDC) units are developed to support high-performance large-size processing. Second, a conflict-free memory access scheme is formulated to ensure a continuous data flow without data contention. Third, We demonstrate the existence of a series of bit-dimension permutations for reordering input data, satisfying the generalized constraints of variable-length, high-radix, and any level of parallelism for wide adaptivity. Furthermore, the proposed FFT processor has been implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). As a result, the proposed work outperforms conventional memory-based FFT processors by requiring fewer computation cycles. It achieves higher hardware utilization than pipelined FFT architectures, making it suitable for highly demanding applications.

The determination of molecular orientations is crucial for the three-dimensional reconstruction of Cryo-EM images. Traditionally addressed using the common-line method, this challenge is reformulated as a self-consistency error minimization problem constrained to rotation groups. In this paper, we consider the least-squared deviation (LUD) formulation and employ a Riemannian subgradient method to effectively solve the orientation determination problem. To enhance computational efficiency, a block stochastic version of the method is proposed, and its convergence properties are rigorously established. Extensive numerical evaluations reveal that our method not only achieves accuracy comparable to that of state-of-the-art methods but also delivers an average 20-fold speedup. Additionally, we implement a modified formulation and algorithm specifically designed to address scenarios characterized by very low SNR.

Previous text-to-SQL datasets and systems have primarily focused on user questions with clear intentions that can be answered. However, real user questions can often be ambiguous with multiple interpretations or unanswerable due to a lack of relevant data. In this work, we construct a practical conversational text-to-SQL dataset called PRACTIQ, consisting of ambiguous and unanswerable questions inspired by real-world user questions. We first identified four categories of ambiguous questions and four categories of unanswerable questions by studying existing text-to-SQL datasets. Then, we generate conversations with four turns: the initial user question, an assistant response seeking clarification, the user's clarification, and the assistant's clarified SQL response with the natural language explanation of the execution results. For some ambiguous queries, we also directly generate helpful SQL responses, that consider multiple aspects of ambiguity, instead of requesting user clarification. To benchmark the performance on ambiguous, unanswerable, and answerable questions, we implemented large language model (LLM)-based baselines using various LLMs. Our approach involves two steps: question category classification and clarification SQL prediction. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art systems struggle to handle ambiguous and unanswerable questions effectively. We will release our code for data generation and experiments on GitHub.

Inferring network topology from smooth signals is a significant problem in data science and engineering. A common challenge in real-world scenarios is the availability of only partially observed nodes. While some studies have considered hidden nodes and proposed various optimization frameworks, existing methods often lack the practical efficiency needed for large-scale networks or fail to provide theoretical convergence guarantees. In this paper, we address the problem of inferring network topologies from smooth signals with partially observed nodes. We propose a first-order algorithmic framework that includes two variants: one based on column sparsity regularization and the other on a low-rank constraint. We establish theoretical convergence guarantees and demonstrate the linear convergence rate of our algorithms. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our results align with theoretical predictions, exhibiting not only linear convergence but also superior speed compared to existing methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a first-order algorithmic framework for inferring network structures from smooth signals under partial observability, offering both guaranteed linear convergence and practical effectiveness for large-scale networks.

While significant progress has been made on the text-to-SQL task, recent solutions repeatedly encode the same database schema for every question, resulting in unnecessary high inference cost and often overlooking crucial database knowledge. To address these issues, we propose You Only Read Once (YORO), a novel paradigm that directly internalizes database knowledge into the parametric knowledge of a text-to-SQL model during training and eliminates the need for schema encoding during inference. YORO significantly reduces the input token length by 66%-98%. Despite its shorter inputs, our empirical results demonstrate YORO's competitive performances with traditional systems on three benchmarks as well as its significant outperformance on large databases. Furthermore, YORO excels in handling questions with challenging value retrievals such as abbreviation.

Despite Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) showing promising capability in leveraging external knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation of RAG systems is still challenging due to the modular nature of RAG, evaluation of long-form responses and reliability of measurements. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework, RAGChecker, that incorporates a suite of diagnostic metrics for both the retrieval and generation modules. Meta evaluation verifies that RAGChecker has significantly better correlations with human judgments than other evaluation metrics. Using RAGChecker, we evaluate 8 RAG systems and conduct an in-depth analysis of their performance, revealing insightful patterns and trade-offs in the design choices of RAG architectures. The metrics of RAGChecker can guide researchers and practitioners in developing more effective RAG systems. This work has been open sourced at https://github.com/amazon-science/RAGChecker., Comment: Under Review. Github Repo: https://github.com/amazon-science/RAGChecker

With built-in eye-tracking cameras, the recently released Apple Vision Pro (AVP) mixed reality (MR) headset features gaze-based interaction, eye image rendering on external screens, and iris recognition for device unlocking. One of the technological advancements of the AVP is its heavy reliance on gaze- and gesture-based interaction. However, limited information is available regarding the technological specifications of the eye-tracking capability of the AVP, and raw gaze data is inaccessible to developers. This study evaluates the eye-tracking accuracy of the AVP with two sets of tests spanning both MR and virtual reality (VR) applications. This study also examines how eye-tracking accuracy relates to user-reported usability. The results revealed an overall eye-tracking accuracy of 1.11{\deg} and 0.93{\deg} in two testing setups, within a field of view (FOV) of approximately 34{\deg} x 18{\deg}. The usability and learnability scores of the AVP, measured using the standard System Usability Scale (SUS), were 75.24 and 68.26, respectively. Importantly, no statistically reliable correlation was found between eye-tracking accuracy and usability scores. These results suggest that eye-tracking accuracy is critical for gaze-based interaction, but it is not the sole determinant of user experience in VR/AR., Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures and 3 tables

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on a variety of NLP tasks, and are being rapidly adopted in a wide range of use cases. It is therefore of vital importance to holistically evaluate the factuality of their generated outputs, as hallucinations remain a challenging issue. In this work, we focus on assessing LLMs' ability to recall factual knowledge learned from pretraining, and the factors that affect this ability. To that end, we construct FACT-BENCH, a representative benchmark covering 20 domains, 134 property types, 3 answer types, and different knowledge popularity levels. We benchmark 31 models from 10 model families and provide a holistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. We observe that instruction-tuning hurts knowledge recall, as pretraining-only models consistently outperform their instruction-tuned counterparts, and positive effects of model scaling, as larger models outperform smaller ones for all model families. However, the best performance from GPT-4 still represents a large gap with the upper-bound. We additionally study the role of in-context exemplars using counterfactual demonstrations, which lead to significant degradation of factual knowledge recall for large models. By further decoupling model known and unknown knowledge, we find the degradation is attributed to exemplars that contradict a model's known knowledge, as well as the number of such exemplars. Lastly, we fine-tune LLaMA-7B in different settings of known and unknown knowledge. In particular, fine-tuning on a model's known knowledge is beneficial, and consistently outperforms fine-tuning on unknown and mixed knowledge. We will make our benchmark publicly available.

We investigate the ground-state phase diagram of a binary mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with competing interspecies $s$- and $p$-wave interactions. Exploiting a pseudopotential model for the $l=1$ partial wave, we derive an extended Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation for the BEC mixture that incorporates both $s$- and $p$-wave interactions. Based on it, we study the miscible-immiscible transition of a binary BEC mixture in the presence of interspecies $p$-wave interaction, by combining numerical solution of the GP equation and Gaussian variational analysis. Our study uncovers a dual effect -- either enhance or reduce miscibility -- of positive interspecies $p$-wave interaction, which can be precisely controlled by adjusting relevant experimental parameters. By complete characterizing the miscibility phase diagram, we establish a promising avenue towards experimental control of the miscibility of binary BEC mixtures via high partial-wave interactions., Comment: 10+3 pages, 6 figures, Phys. Rev. A (2024)

In this paper, we propose a multi-input multi-output transmit beamforming optimization model for joint radar sensing and multi-user communications, where the design of the beamformers is formulated as an optimization problem whose objective is a weighted combination of the sum rate and the Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound, subject to the transmit power budget. Obtaining the global solution for the formulated nonconvex problem is a challenging task, since the sum-rate maximization problem itself (even without considering the sensing metric) is known to be NP-hard. The main contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly, we derive an optimal closed-form solution to the formulated problem in the single-user case and the multi-user case where the channel vectors of different users are orthogonal. Secondly, for the general multi-user case, we propose a novel branch and bound (B\&B) algorithm based on the McCormick envelope relaxation. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find the globally optimal solution to the formulated problem. Thirdly, we design a graph neural network (GNN) based pruning policy to determine irrelevant nodes that can be directly pruned in the proposed B\&B algorithm, thereby significantly reducing the number of unnecessary enumerations therein and improving its computational efficiency. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed vanilla and GNN-based accelerated B\&B algorithms., Comment: Submitted for possible publication

This paper establishes an extreme $C^k$ reducibility theorem of quasi-periodic $SL(2, \mathbb{R})$ cocycles in the local perturbative region, revealing both the essence of Eliasson [Commun.Math.Phys.1992] and Hou-You [Invent.Math.2012] in respectively the non-resonant and resonant cases. By paralleling further the reducibility process with the almost reducibility, we are able to acquire the least initial regularity as well as the least loss of regularity for the whole KAM iterations. This, in return, makes various spectral applications of quasi-periodic Schr\"odinger operators wide open.

In this paper, we propose a unified framework of inexact stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonconvex problems subject to linear constraints, whose objective comprises an average of finite-sum smooth functions and a nonsmooth but possibly nonconvex function. The new framework is highly versatile. Firstly, it not only covers several existing algorithms such as SADMM, SVRG-ADMM, and SPIDER-ADMM but also guides us to design a novel accelerated hybrid stochastic ADMM algorithm, which utilizes a new hybrid estimator to trade-off variance and bias. Second, it enables us to exploit a more flexible dual stepsize in the convergence analysis. Under some mild conditions, our unified framework preserves $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$ sublinear convergence. Additionally, we establish the linear convergence under error bound conditions. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the new algorithm for some nonsmooth and nonconvex problems.

Current approaches of knowledge editing struggle to effectively propagate updates to interconnected facts. In this work, we delve into the barriers that hinder the appropriate propagation of updated knowledge within these models for accurate reasoning. To support our analysis, we introduce a novel reasoning-based benchmark -- ReCoE (Reasoning-based Counterfactual Editing dataset) -- which covers six common reasoning schemes in real world. We conduct a thorough analysis of existing knowledge editing techniques, including input augmentation, finetuning, and locate-and-edit. We found that all model editing methods show notably low performance on this dataset, especially in certain reasoning schemes. Our analysis over the chain-of-thought generation of edited models further uncover key reasons behind the inadequacy of existing knowledge editing methods from a reasoning standpoint, involving aspects on fact-wise editing, fact recall ability, and coherence in generation. We will make our benchmark publicly available., Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, 5 tables

We investigate E1 radiative transitions within charmonium in a relativistic approach based on light-front QCD. In quantum field theory, two sets of processes are pure E1: $\chi_{c0} \to J/\psi \gamma$ ($\psi\to \chi_{c0}\gamma$) and $h_c \to \eta_c\gamma$ ($\eta_c' \to h_c\gamma$), both involving the $P$-wave charmonia. We compute the E1 radiative decay widths as well as the corresponding transition form factors of various processes including those involving $2P$ states. These observables provide an access to the microscopic structures of the $P$-wave charmonium. We show that our parameter-free predictions are in excellent agreement with the experimental measurements as well as lattice simulations whenever available., Comment: Values of decay widths are provided in the supplementary file

Gaussian processes (GPs) stand as crucial tools in machine learning and signal processing, with their effectiveness hinging on kernel design and hyper-parameter optimization. This paper presents a novel GP linear multiple kernel (LMK) and a generic sparsity-aware distributed learning framework to optimize the hyper-parameters. The newly proposed grid spectral mixture product (GSMP) kernel is tailored for multi-dimensional data, effectively reducing the number of hyper-parameters while maintaining good approximation capability. We further demonstrate that the associated hyper-parameter optimization of this kernel yields sparse solutions. To exploit the inherent sparsity of the solutions, we introduce the Sparse LInear Multiple Kernel Learning (SLIM-KL) framework. The framework incorporates a quantized alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) scheme for collaborative learning among multiple agents, where the local optimization problem is solved using a distributed successive convex approximation (DSCA) algorithm. SLIM-KL effectively manages large-scale hyper-parameter optimization for the proposed kernel, simultaneously ensuring data privacy and minimizing communication costs. Theoretical analysis establishes convergence guarantees for the learning framework, while experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the superior prediction performance and efficiency of our proposed methods.

In this paper, we propose a multi-input multi-output beamforming transmit optimization model for joint radar sensing and multi-user communications, where the design of the beamformers is formulated as an optimization problem whose objective is a weighted combination of the sum rate and the Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound, subject to the transmit power budget constraint. Obtaining a global solution for the formulated problem is a challenging task, because the sum rate maximization problem itself (even without considering the sensing metric) is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose an efficient global branch-and-bound algorithm for solving the formulated problem based on the McCormick envelope relaxation and the semidefinite relaxation technique. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find the global solution for the considered problem, and thus serves as an important benchmark for performance evaluation of the existing local or suboptimal algorithms for solving the same problem., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, the paper has been accepted by ICASSP 2024

We present a novel approach for structured data-to-text generation that addresses the limitations of existing methods that primarily focus on specific types of structured data. Our proposed method aims to improve performance in multi-task training, zero-shot and few-shot scenarios by providing a unified representation that can handle various forms of structured data such as tables, knowledge graph triples, and meaning representations. We demonstrate that our proposed approach can effectively adapt to new structured forms, and can improve performance in comparison to current methods. For example, our method resulted in a 66% improvement in zero-shot BLEU scores when transferring models trained on table inputs to a knowledge graph dataset. Our proposed method is an important step towards a more general data-to-text generation framework.

Federated learning (FL), a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning, has been rapidly applied in wireless communication networks. FL enables Internet of Things (IoT) clients to obtain well-trained models while preventing privacy leakage. Person detection can be deployed on edge devices with limited computing power if combined with FL to process the video data directly at the edge. However, due to the different hardware and deployment scenarios of different cameras, the data collected by the camera present non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), and the global model derived from FL aggregation is less effective. Meanwhile, existing research lacks public data set for real-world FL object detection, which is not conducive to studying the non-IID problem on IoT cameras. Therefore, we open source a non-IID IoT person detection (NIPD) data set, which is collected from five different cameras. To our knowledge, this is the first true device-based non-IID person detection data set. Based on this data set, we explain how to establish a FL experimental platform and provide a benchmark for non-IID person detection. NIPD is expected to promote the application of FL and the security of smart city., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, FL-IJCAI 23 conference

The nonconvex and nonsmooth finite-sum optimization problem with linear constraint has attracted much attention in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer, and mathematics, due to its wide applications in machine learning and the lack of efficient algorithms with convincing convergence theories. A popular approach to solve it is the stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), but most stochastic ADMM-type methods focus on convex models. In addition, the variance reduction (VR) and acceleration techniques are useful tools in the development of stochastic methods due to their simplicity and practicability in providing acceleration characteristics of various machine learning models. However, it remains unclear whether accelerated SVRG-ADMM algorithm (ASVRG-ADMM), which extends SVRG-ADMM by incorporating momentum techniques, exhibits a comparable acceleration characteristic or convergence rate in the nonconvex setting. To fill this gap, we consider a general nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problem and study the convergence of ASVRG-ADMM. By utilizing a well-defined potential energy function, we establish its sublinear convergence rate $O(1/T)$, where $T$ denotes the iteration number. Furthermore, under the additional Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property which is less stringent than the frequently used conditions for showcasing linear convergence rates, such as strong convexity, we show that the ASVRG-ADMM sequence has a finite length and converges to a stationary solution with a linear convergence rate. Several experiments on solving the graph-guided fused lasso problem and regularized logistic regression problem validate that the proposed ASVRG-ADMM performs better than the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 40 Pages, 8 figures