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To enhance the computational efficiency of quantized Transformers, we replace the dot-product and Softmax-based attention with an alternative mechanism involving addition and ReLU activation only. This side-steps the expansion to double precision often required by matrix multiplication and avoids costly Softmax evaluations but maintains much of the core functionality of conventional dot-product attention. It can enable more efficient execution and support larger quantized Transformer models on resource-constrained hardware or alternative arithmetic systems like homomorphic encryption. Training experiments on four common benchmark tasks show test set prediction scores comparable to those of conventional Transformers with dot-product attention. Our scaling experiments also suggest significant computational savings, both in plaintext and under encryption. 
In particular, we believe that the ReLU and addition-based attention mechanism introduced in this paper may enable privacy-preserving AI applications operating under homomorphic encryption by avoiding the costly multiplication of encrypted variables.

AAAI 2024

The Inhibitor: ReLU and Addition-Based Attention for Efficient Transformers (Student Abstract)

quantized transformers

privacy-aware ml

homomorphic encryption

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

The Transformer architecture has seen a lot of attention in recent years also thanks to its ability to scale well and allow massive parallelism during training. This has made possible the development of Language Models (LMs) of increasing size and the discovery of latent abilities that completely outclass traditional methods e.g. rule-based systems. However, they also introduced new issues, like their inability to retain the history of previous interactions due to their stateless nature or the difficulty in controlling their generation. Different attempts have been made to address these issues, e.g. a `brute force' approach to solving the memory issue is to include the full conversation history in the context window, a solution that is limited by the quadratic scalability of Transformers. In this work, we explore computationally practical solutions to the memory problem. We propose to augment the decoder-only architecture of (most) Large LMs with a (relatively small) memory encoder. Its output is prepended to the decoder's input in a similar fashion to recent works in Adapters and the original Transformer architecture. Initial experiments show promising results, however future work is needed to compare with State-of-the-Art methods.

Memory-Augmenting Decoder-Only Language Models through Encoders (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

We present a novel tool BertRLFuzzer, a BERT and Reinforcement Learning (RL) based fuzzer aimed at finding security vulnerabilities for Web applications. BertRLFuzzer works as follows: given a set of seed inputs, the fuzzer performs grammar-adhering and attack-provoking mutation operations on them to generate candidate attack vectors. The key insight of BertRLFuzzer is the use of RL with a BERT model as an agent to guide the fuzzer to efficiently learn grammar-adhering and attack-provoking mutation operators. In order to establish the efficacy of BertRLFuzzer we compare it against a total of 13 black box and white box fuzzers over a benchmark of 9 victim websites with over 16K LOC. We observed a significant improvement, relative to the nearest competing tool in terms of time to first attack (54% less), new vulnerabilities found (17 new vulnerabilities), and attack rate (4.4% more attack vectors generated).

BertRLFuzzer: A BERT and Reinforcement Learning Based Fuzzer (Student Abstract)

The maritime industry's continuous commitment to sustainability has led to a dedicated exploration of methods to reduce vessel fuel consumption. This paper undertakes this challenge through a machine learning approach, leveraging a real-world dataset spanning two years of a passenger vessel in west coast Canada. Our  focus centers on the creation of a time series forecasting model given the dynamic and static states, actions, and disturbances. This model is designed to predict dynamic states based on the actions provided, subsequently serving as an evaluative tool to assess the proficiency of the vessel's operation under the captain's guidance. Additionally, it lays the foundation for future optimization algorithms, providing valuable feedback on decision-making processes. To facilitate future studies, our code is available at https://github.com/pagand/model_optimze_vessel/tree/AAAI.

Sequential Modeling of Complex Marine Navigation: Case Study on a Passenger Vessel (Student Abstract)

Cyberattacks on power grids pose significant risks to national security. Power grid attacks typically lead to abnormal readings in power output, frequency, current, and voltage. Due to the interconnected structure of power grids, abnormalities can spread throughout the system and cause widespread power outages if not detected and dealt with promptly. Our research proposes a novel anomaly detection system for power grids that prevents overfitting. We created a network graph to represent the structure of the power grid, where nodes represent power grid components like generators and edges represent connections between nodes such as overhead power lines. We combine the capabilities of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models with a Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN) in a hybrid model to pinpoint anomalies in the grid. We train our model on each category of nodes that serves a similar structural purpose to prevent overfitting of the model. We then assign each node in the graph a unique signature using a GIN. Our model achieved a 99.92% accuracy rate, which is significantly higher than a version of our model without structural encoding, which had an accuracy level of 97.30%. Our model allows us to capture structural and temporal components of power grids and develop an attack detection system with high accuracy without overfitting.

Power Grid Anomaly Detection via Hybrid LSTM-GIN Model (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

This research focuses on improving the robustness of machine learning systems to natural variations and distribution shifts. A design trade space is presented, and various methods are compared, including adversarial training, data augmentation techniques, and novel approaches inspired by model-based robust optimization formulations.

Towards Robustness to Natural Variations and Distribution Shift (Student Abstract)

Generative Flow Networks, known as GFlowNets, have been introduced in recent times, presenting an exciting possibility for neural networks to model distributions across various data structures. In this paper, we broaden their applicability to encompass scenarios where the data structures are optimal solutions of a combinatorial problem. Concretely, we propose the use of GFlowNets to learn the distribution of optimal solutions for kidney exchange problems (KEPs), a generalized form of matching problems involving cycles.

Learning to Build Solutions in Stochastic Matching Problems Using Flows (Student Abstract)

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) challenge reinforcement learning agents due to incomplete knowledge of the environment. Even assuming monotonicity in uncertainty, it is difficult for an agent to know how and when to stop exploring for a given task. In this abstract, we discuss how to use hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) and AI Planning (AIP) to improve exploration when the agent knows possible valuations of unknown predicates and how to discover them. By encoding the uncertainty in an abstract planning model, the agent can derive a high-level plan which is then used to decompose the overall POMDP into a tree of semi-POMDPs for training. We evaluate our agent's performance on the MiniGrid domain and show how guided exploration may improve agent performance.

Partially Observable Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with AI Planning (Student Abstract)

Topological and node noise filtration are typically considered separately. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) are commonly used for node noise filtration, as they offer high efficiency and low exploitation costs. This paper explores the solution of joint node and topological noise filtration through the use of graph neural networks. Since treating a 3D mesh as a graph is challenging, an indicator function grid representation is employed as input for GNNs to perform the joint filtering. The resulting machine learning model is inspired by point cloud to mesh reconstruction algorithms and demonstrates low computational requirements during inference, producing successful results for smooth, watertight 3D models. The demo and code is available on Hugging Face.

Topological and Node Noise Filtering on 3D Meshes Using Graph Neural Networks (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

The Ramsey problem R(3,8) asks for the smallest n such that every red/blue coloring of the complete graph on n vertices must contain either a blue triangle or a red 8-clique. We provide the first certifiable proof that R(3,8) = 28, automatically generated by a combination of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver and a computer algebra system (CAS). This SAT+CAS combination is significantly faster than a SAT-only approach. While the R(3,8) problem was first computationally solved by McKay and Min in 1992, it was not a verifiable proof. The SAT+CAS method that we use for our proof is very general and can be applied to a wide variety of combinatorial problems.

A SAT + Computer Algebra System Verification of the Ramsey Problem R(3, 8) (Student Abstract)

We develop a method of adapting the AlphaZero model to General Game Playing (GGP) that focuses on faster model generation and requires less knowledge to be extracted from the game rules. The dataset generation uses MCTS playing instead of self-play; only the value network is used, and attention layers replace the convolutional ones. This allows us to abandon any assumptions about the action space and board topology. We implement the method within the Regular Boardgames GGP system and show that we can build models outperforming the UCT baseline for most games efficiently.

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The Inhibitor: ReLU and Addition-Based Attention for Efficient Transformers (Student Abstract)

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The Inhibitor: ReLU and Addition-Based Attention for Efficient Transformers (Student Abstract)

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