Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Agnostically Learning Multi-index Models with Queries

We study the power of query access for the task of agnostic learning under the Gaussian distribution. In the agnostic model, no assumptions are made on the labels and the goal is to compute a hypothesis that is competitive with the {\em best-fit} function in a known class, i.e., it achieves error $\mathrm{opt}+\epsilon$, where $\mathrm{opt}$ is the error of the best function in the class. We focus on a general family of Multi-Index Models (MIMs), which are $d$-variate functions that depend only on few relevant directions, i.e., have the form $g(\mathbf{W} \mathbf{x})$ for an unknown link function $g$ and a $k \times d$ matrix $\mathbf{W}$. Multi-index models cover a wide range of commonly studied function classes, including constant-depth neural networks with ReLU activations, and intersections of halfspaces. Our main result shows that query access gives significant runtime improvements over random examples for agnostically learning MIMs. Under standard regularity assumptions for the link function (namely, bounded variation or surface area), we give an agnostic query learner for MIMs with complexity $O(k)^{\mathrm{poly}(1/\epsilon)} \; \mathrm{poly}(d) $. In contrast, algorithms that rely only on random examples inherently require $d^{\mathrm{poly}(1/\epsilon)}$ samples and runtime, even for the basic problem of agnostically learning a single ReLU or a halfspace. Our algorithmic result establishes a strong computational separation between the agnostic PAC and the agnostic PAC+Query models under the Gaussian distribution. Prior to our work, no such separation was known -- even for the special case of agnostically learning a single halfspace, for which it was an open problem first posed by Feldman. Our results are enabled by a general dimension-reduction technique that leverages query access to estimate gradients of (a smoothed version of) the underlying label function.
Constrained quantization for a uniform distribution

Constrained quantization for a Borel probability measure refers to the idea of estimating a given probability by a discrete probability with a finite number of supporting points lying on a specific set. The specific set is known as the constraint of the constrained quantization. A quantization without a constraint is known as an unconstrained quantization, which traditionally in the literature is known as quantization. Constrained quantization has recently been introduced by Pandey and Roychowdhury. In this paper, for a uniform distribution with support lying on a side of an equilateral triangle, and the constraint as the union of the other two sides, we obtain the optimal sets of $n$-points and the $n$th constrained quantization errors for all positive integers $n$. We also calculate the constrained quantization dimension and the constrained quantization coefficient.
Fault-Tolerant Vertical Federated Learning on Dynamic Networks

Vertical Federated learning (VFL) is a class of FL where each client shares the same sample space but only holds a subset of the features. While VFL tackles key privacy challenges of distributed learning, it often assumes perfect hardware and communication capabilities. This assumption hinders the broad deployment of VFL, particularly on edge devices, which are heterogeneous in their in-situ capabilities and will connect/disconnect from the network over time. To address this gap, we define Internet Learning (IL) including its data splitting and network context and which puts good performance under extreme dynamic condition of clients as the primary goal. We propose VFL as a naive baseline and develop several extensions to handle the IL paradigm of learning. Furthermore, we implement new methods, propose metrics, and extensively analyze results based on simulating a sensor network. The results show that the developed methods are more robust to changes in the network than VFL baseline.
Rethinking Tabular Data Understanding with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be capable of various tasks, yet their capability in interpreting and reasoning over tabular data remains an underexplored area. In this context, this study investigates from three core perspectives: the robustness of LLMs to structural perturbations in tables, the comparative analysis of textual and symbolic reasoning on tables, and the potential of boosting model performance through the aggregation of multiple reasoning pathways. We discover that structural variance of tables presenting the same content reveals a notable performance decline, particularly in symbolic reasoning tasks. This prompts the proposal of a method for table structure normalization. Moreover, textual reasoning slightly edges out symbolic reasoning, and a detailed error analysis reveals that each exhibits different strengths depending on the specific tasks. Notably, the aggregation of textual and symbolic reasoning pathways, bolstered by a mix self-consistency mechanism, resulted in achieving SOTA performance, with an accuracy of 73.6% on WIKITABLEQUESTIONS, representing a substantial advancement over previous existing table processing paradigms of LLMs.
Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection

In this paper, we study the problem of generalizable synthetic image detection, aiming to detect forgery images from diverse generative methods, e.g., GANs and diffusion models. Cutting-edge solutions start to explore the benefits of pre-trained models, and mainly follow the fixed paradigm of solely training an attached classifier, e.g., combining frozen CLIP-ViT with a learnable linear layer in UniFD. However, our analysis shows that such a fixed paradigm is prone to yield detectors with insufficient learning regarding forgery representations. We attribute the key challenge to the lack of forgery adaptation, and present a novel forgery-aware adaptive transformer approach, namely FatFormer. Based on the pre-trained vision-language spaces of CLIP, FatFormer introduces two core designs for the adaption to build generalized forgery representations. First, motivated by the fact that both image and frequency analysis are essential for synthetic image detection, we develop a forgery-aware adapter to adapt image features to discern and integrate local forgery traces within image and frequency domains. Second, we find that considering the contrastive objectives between adapted image features and text prompt embeddings, a previously overlooked aspect, results in a nontrivial generalization improvement. Accordingly, we introduce language-guided alignment to supervise the forgery adaptation with image and text prompts in FatFormer. Experiments show that, by coupling these two designs, our approach tuned on 4-class ProGAN data attains a remarkable detection performance, achieving an average of 98% accuracy to unseen GANs, and surprisingly generalizes to unseen diffusion models with 95% accuracy.
Prompt Expansion for Adaptive Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation models are powerful but difficult to use. Users craft specific prompts to get better images, though the images can be repetitive. This paper proposes a Prompt Expansion framework that helps users generate high-quality, diverse images with less effort. The Prompt Expansion model takes a text query as input and outputs a set of expanded text prompts that are optimized such that when passed to a text-to-image model, generates a wider variety of appealing images. We conduct a human evaluation study that shows that images generated through Prompt Expansion are more aesthetically pleasing and diverse than those generated by baseline methods. Overall, this paper presents a novel and effective approach to improving the text-to-image generation experience.
The Fourth International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP 2023): Summary and Results

This report summarizes the 4th International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP 2023), held as a part of the 6th Workshop on Formal Methods for ML-Enabled Autonomous Systems (FoMLAS), that was collocated with the 35th International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV). VNN-COMP is held annually to facilitate the fair and objective comparison of state-of-the-art neural network verification tools, encourage the standardization of tool interfaces, and bring together the neural network verification community. To this end, standardized formats for networks (ONNX) and specification (VNN-LIB) were defined, tools were evaluated on equal-cost hardware (using an automatic evaluation pipeline based on AWS instances), and tool parameters were chosen by the participants before the final test sets were made public. In the 2023 iteration, 7 teams participated on a diverse set of 10 scored and 4 unscored benchmarks. This report summarizes the rules, benchmarks, participating tools, results, and lessons learned from this iteration of this competition.
Flock: A Low-Cost Streaming Query Engine on FaaS Platforms

In this paper, we present Flock, a cloud-native streaming query engine that leverages the on-demand elasticity of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms to perform real-time data analytics. Traditional server-centric deployments often suffer from resource under- or over-provisioning, leading to resource wastage or performance degradation. Flock addresses these issues by providing more fine-grained elasticity that can dynamically match the per-query basis with continuous scaling, and its billing methods are more fine-grained with millisecond granularity, making it a low-cost solution for stream processing. Our approach, payload invocation, eliminates the need for external storage services and eliminates the requirement for a query coordinator in the data architecture. Our evaluation shows that Flock significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in terms of cost, especially on ARM processors, making it a promising solution for real-time data analytics on FaaS platforms.
Unsupversied feature correlation model to predict breast abnormal variation maps in longitudinal mammograms

Breast cancer continues to be a significant cause of mortality among women globally. Timely identification and precise diagnosis of breast abnormalities are critical for enhancing patient prognosis. In this study, we focus on improving the early detection and accurate diagnosis of breast abnormalities, which is crucial for improving patient outcomes and reducing the mortality rate of breast cancer. To address the limitations of traditional screening methods, a novel unsupervised feature correlation network was developed to predict maps indicating breast abnormal variations using longitudinal 2D mammograms. The proposed model utilizes the reconstruction process of current year and prior year mammograms to extract tissue from different areas and analyze the differences between them to identify abnormal variations that may indicate the presence of cancer. The model is equipped with a feature correlation module, an attention suppression gate, and a breast abnormality detection module that work together to improve the accuracy of the prediction. The proposed model not only provides breast abnormal variation maps, but also distinguishes between normal and cancer mammograms, making it more advanced compared to the state-of the-art baseline models. The results of the study show that the proposed model outperforms the baseline models in terms of Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity, Dice score, and cancer detection rate.
Foundations of Reinforcement Learning and Interactive Decision Making

These lecture notes give a statistical perspective on the foundations of reinforcement learning and interactive decision making. We present a unifying framework for addressing the exploration-exploitation dilemma using frequentist and Bayesian approaches, with connections and parallels between supervised learning/estimation and decision making as an overarching theme. Special attention is paid to function approximation and flexible model classes such as neural networks. Topics covered include multi-armed and contextual bandits, structured bandits, and reinforcement learning with high-dimensional feedback.
RL-LOGO: Deep Reinforcement Learning Localization for Logo Recognition

This paper proposes a novel logo image recognition approach incorporating a localization technique based on reinforcement learning. Logo recognition is an image classification task identifying a brand in an image. As the size and position of a logo vary widely from image to image, it is necessary to determine its position for accurate recognition. However, because there is no annotation for the position coordinates, it is impossible to train and infer the location of the logo in the image. Therefore, we propose a deep reinforcement learning localization method for logo recognition (RL-LOGO). It utilizes deep reinforcement learning to identify a logo region in images without annotations of the positions, thereby improving classification accuracy. We demonstrated a significant improvement in accuracy compared with existing methods in several published benchmarks. Specifically, we achieved an 18-point accuracy improvement over competitive methods on the complex dataset Logo-2K+. This demonstrates that the proposed method is a promising approach to logo recognition in real-world applications.
Learning Scalable Structural Representations for Link Prediction with Bloom Signatures

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in learning on graphs, but they are known to perform sub-optimally on link prediction tasks. Existing GNNs are primarily designed to learn node-wise representations and usually fail to capture pairwise relations between target nodes, which proves to be crucial for link prediction. Recent works resort to learning more expressive edge-wise representations by enhancing vanilla GNNs with structural features such as labeling tricks and link prediction heuristics, but they suffer from high computational overhead and limited scalability. To tackle this issue, we propose to learn structural link representations by augmenting the message-passing framework of GNNs with Bloom signatures. Bloom signatures are hashing-based compact encodings of node neighborhoods, which can be efficiently merged to recover various types of edge-wise structural features. We further show that any type of neighborhood overlap-based heuristic can be estimated by a neural network that takes Bloom signatures as input. GNNs with Bloom signatures are provably more expressive than vanilla GNNs and also more scalable than existing edge-wise models. Experimental results on five standard link prediction benchmarks show that our proposed model achieves comparable or better performance than existing edge-wise GNN models while being 3-200 $\times$ faster and more memory-efficient for online inference.
The gravitational energy-momentum for the super-energy Bel-Robinson tensor

Describing the gravitational energy-momentum, the super-energy Bel-Robinson tensor is the best candidate. In the past, people seems only explore the lowest order: the electric part $E_{ab}$ and magnetic part $B_{ab}$ for the Riemann tensor. These two components are related with the static case, however, for the energy transfer situation, one may need to consider the time varying $\dot{E}_{ab}$ and $\dot{B}_{ab}$. Here we use $(\dot{E}_{ab},\dot{B}_{ab}$) to study the energy-momentum for the Bel-Robinson tensor in a small sphere limit. Meanwhile, our result illustrates how the gravitational field carries the 4-momentum including this extra information.
METER: A Dynamic Concept Adaptation Framework for Online Anomaly Detection

Real-time analytics and decision-making require online anomaly detection (OAD) to handle drifts in data streams efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, existing approaches are often constrained by their limited detection capacity and slow adaptation to evolving data streams, inhibiting their efficacy and efficiency in handling concept drift, which is a major challenge in evolving data streams. In this paper, we introduce METER, a novel dynamic concept adaptation framework that introduces a new paradigm for OAD. METER addresses concept drift by first training a base detection model on historical data to capture recurring central concepts, and then learning to dynamically adapt to new concepts in data streams upon detecting concept drift. Particularly, METER employs a novel dynamic concept adaptation technique that leverages a hypernetwork to dynamically generate the parameter shift of the base detection model, providing a more effective and efficient solution than conventional retraining or fine-tuning approaches. Further, METER incorporates a lightweight drift detection controller, underpinned by evidential deep learning, to support robust and interpretable concept drift detection. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation, and the results show that METER significantly outperforms existing OAD approaches in various application scenarios.
Quantum Algorithm for Searching of Two Sets Intersection

In the paper, we investigate Two Sets Intersection problem. Assume that we have two sets that are subsets of n objects. Sets are presented by two predicates that show which of n objects belong to these sets. We present a quantum algorithm that finds an element from the two sets intersection. It is a modification of the well-known Grover's search algorithm that uses two Oracles with access to the predicates. The algorithm is faster than the naive application of Grover's search.
Universal polynomials for tropical refined invariants in genus 0

In 2022, Brugall{\'e} and Jaramillo-Puentes showed that the coefficients of small codegree of the tropical refined invariant are polynomial in the Newton polygon. This raised the question of the existence of universal polynomials giving these coefficients, i.e. polynomials depending only on the genus and the codegree, and with variables the combinatorial data of the Newton polygon.In this paper we show that such universal polynomials exist for rational enumeration, and we give an explicit formula. The proof relies on the manipulation of floor diagrams.
Ensemble-based Interactive Imitation Learning

We study interactive imitation learning, where a learner interactively queries a demonstrating expert for action annotations, aiming to learn a policy that has performance competitive with the expert, using as few annotations as possible. We give an algorithmic framework named Ensemble-based Interactive Imitation Learning (EIIL) that achieves this goal. Theoretically, we prove that an oracle-efficient version of EIIL achieves sharp regret guarantee, given access to samples from some ``explorative'' distribution over states. Empirically, EIIL notably surpasses online and offline imitation learning benchmarks in continuous control tasks. Our work opens up systematic investigations on the benefit of using model ensembles for interactive imitation learning.
Block Pruning for Enhanced Efficiency in Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper presents a novel approach to network pruning, targeting block pruning in deep neural networks for edge computing environments. Our method diverges from traditional techniques that utilize proxy metrics, instead employing a direct block removal strategy to assess the impact on classification accuracy. This hands-on approach allows for an accurate evaluation of each block's importance. We conducted extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets using ResNet architectures. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our method, particularly on large-scale datasets like ImageNet with ResNet50, where it excelled in reducing model size while retaining high accuracy, even when pruning a significant portion of the network. The findings underscore our method's capability in maintaining an optimal balance between model size and performance, especially in resource-constrained edge computing scenarios.
Jeffreys divergence-based regularization of neural network output distribution applied to speaker recognition

A new loss function for speaker recognition with deep neural network is proposed, based on Jeffreys Divergence. Adding this divergence to the cross-entropy loss function allows to maximize the target value of the output distribution while smoothing the non-target values. This objective function provides highly discriminative features. Beyond this effect, we propose a theoretical justification of its effectiveness and try to understand how this loss function affects the model, in particular the impact on dataset types (i.e. in-domain or out-of-domain w.r.t the training corpus). Our experiments show that Jeffreys loss consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art for speaker recognition, especially on out-of-domain data, and helps limit false alarms.
Unified Lattice Graph Fusion for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Integrating lexicon into character-level sequence has been proven effective to leverage word boundary and semantic information in Chinese named entity recognition (NER). However, prior approaches usually utilize feature weighting and position coupling to integrate word information, but ignore the semantic and contextual correspondence between the fine-grained semantic units in the character-word space. To solve this issue, we propose a Unified Lattice Graph Fusion (ULGF) approach for Chinese NER. ULGF can explicitly capture various semantic and boundary relations across different semantic units with the adjacency matrix by converting the lattice structure into a unified graph. We stack multiple graph-based intra-source self-attention and inter-source cross-gating fusion layers that iteratively carry out semantic interactions to learn node representations. To alleviate the over-reliance on word information, we further propose to leverage lexicon entity classification as an auxiliary task. Experiments on four Chinese NER benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our ULGF approach.
Res-Attn : An Enhanced Res-Tuning Approach with Lightweight Attention Mechanism

Res-Tuning introduces a flexible and efficient paradigm for model tuning, showing that tuners decoupled from the backbone network can achieve performance comparable to traditional methods. Existing methods commonly construct the tuner as a set of trainable low-rank decomposition matrices, positing that a low-rank subspace suffices for adapting pre-trained foundational models to new scenarios. In this work, we present an advanced, efficient tuner augmented with low-rank attention, termed Res-Attn , which also adheres to the Res-Tuning framework. Res-Attn utilizes a parallel multi-head attention module equipped with low-rank projections for query, key, and value to execute streamlined attention operations. Through training this lightweight attention module, Res-Attn facilitates adaptation to new scenarios. Our extensive experiments across a range of discriminative and generative tasks showcase the superior performance of our method when compared to existing alternatives