Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Integrative data analysis where partial covariates have complex non-linear effects by using summary information from a real-world data

A full parametric and linear specification may be insufficient to capture complicated patterns in studies exploring complex features, such as those investigating age-related changes in brain functional abilities. Alternatively, a partially linear model (PLM) consisting of both parametric and non-parametric elements may have a better fit. This model has been widely applied in economics, environmental science, and biomedical studies. In this paper, we introduce a novel statistical inference framework that equips PLM with high estimation efficiency by effectively synthesizing summary information from external data into the main analysis. Such an integrative scheme is versatile in assimilating various types of reduced models from the external study. The proposed method is shown to be theoretically valid and numerically convenient, and it ensures a high-efficiency gain compared to classic methods in PLM. Our method is further validated using two data applications by evaluating the risk factors of brain imaging measures and blood pressure.
Sampling-based Exploration for Reinforcement Learning of Dexterous Manipulation

In this paper, we present a novel method for achieving dexterous manipulation of complex objects, while simultaneously securing the object without the use of passive support surfaces. We posit that a key difficulty for training such policies in a Reinforcement Learning framework is the difficulty of exploring the problem state space, as the accessible regions of this space form a complex structure along manifolds of a high-dimensional space. To address this challenge, we use two versions of the non-holonomic Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees algorithm; one version is more general, but requires explicit use of the environment's transition function, while the second version uses manipulation-specific kinematic constraints to attain better sample efficiency. In both cases, we use states found via sampling-based exploration to generate reset distributions that enable training control policies under full dynamic constraints via model-free Reinforcement Learning. We show that these policies are effective at manipulation problems of higher difficulty than previously shown, and also transfer effectively to real robots. Videos of the real-hand demonstrations can be found on the project website: https://sbrl.cs.columbia.edu/
ISC-FLAT: On the Conflict Between Control Flow Attestation and Real-Time Operations

The wide adoption of IoT gadgets and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) makes embedded devices increasingly important. While some of these devices perform mission-critical tasks, they are usually implemented using Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) that lack security mechanisms on par with those available to general-purpose computers, making them more susceptible to remote exploits that could corrupt their software integrity. Motivated by this problem, prior work has proposed techniques to remotely assess the trustworthiness of embedded MCU software. Among them, Control Flow Attestation (CFA) enables remote detection of runtime abuses that illegally modify the program's control flow during execution. Despite these advances, current CFA methods share a fundamental limitation: they preclude interrupts during the execution of the software operation being attested. Simply put, existing CFA techniques are insecure unless interrupts are disabled on the MCU. On the other hand, we argue that the lack of interruptability can obscure CFA usefulness, as most embedded applications depend on interrupts to process asynchronous events in real-time. To address this limitation, we propose Interrupt-Safe Control Flow Attestation (ISC-FLAT): a CFA technique that is compatible with existing MCUs and enables interrupt handling without compromising the authenticity of CFA reports. Similar to other CFA techniques that do not require customized hardware modifications, ISC-FLAT leverages a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) (in particular, our prototype is built on ARM TrustZone-M) to securely generate unforgeable CFA reports without precluding applications from processing interrupts. We implement a fully functional ISC-FLAT prototype on the ARM Cortex-M33 MCU and demonstrate that it incurs minimal runtime overhead when compared to existing TEE-based CFA methods that do not support interrupts.
Quantum algorithm for position weight matrix matching

We propose two quantum algorithms for a problem in bioinformatics, position weight matrix (PWM) matching, which aims to find segments (sequence motifs) in a biological sequence such as DNA and protein that have high scores defined by the PWM and are thus of informational importance related to biological function. The two proposed algorithms, the naive iteration method and the Monte-Carlo-based method, output matched segments, given the oracular accesses to the entries in the biological sequence and the PWM. The former uses quantum amplitude amplification (QAA) for sequence motif search, resulting in the query complexity scaling on the sequence length $n$, the sequence motif length $m$ and the number of the PWMs $K$ as $\widetilde{O}\left(m\sqrt{Kn}\right)$, which means speedup over existing classical algorithms with respect to $n$ and $K$. The latter also uses QAA, and further, quantum Monte Carlo integration for segment score calculation, instead of iteratively operating quantum circuits for arithmetic in the naive iteration method; then it provides the additional speedup with respect to $m$ in some situation. As a drawback, these algorithms use quantum random access memories and their initialization takes $O(n)$ time. Nevertheless, our algorithms keep the advantage especially when we search matches in a sequence for many PWMs in parallel.
Geometry-Aware Coverage Path Planning for Depowdering on Complex 3D Surfaces

This paper presents a new approach to obtaining nearly complete coverage paths (CP) with low overlapping on 3D general surfaces using mesh models. The CP is obtained by segmenting the mesh model into a given number of clusters using constrained centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CCVT) and finding the shortest path from cluster centroids using the geodesic metric efficiently. We introduce a new cost function to harmoniously achieve uniform areas of the obtained clusters and a restriction on the variation of triangle normals during the construction of CCVTs. The obtained clusters can be used to construct high-quality viewpoints (VP) for visual coverage tasks. Here, we utilize the planned VPs as cleaning configurations to perform residual powder removal in additive manufacturing using manipulator robots. The self-occlusion of VPs and ensuring collision-free robot configurations are addressed by integrating a proposed optimization-based strategy to find a set of candidate rays for each VP into the motion planning phase. CP planning benchmarks and physical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We show that our approach can compute the CPs and VPs of various mesh models with a massive number of triangles within a reasonable time.
Variational quantum state discriminator for supervised machine learning

Quantum state discrimination (QSD) is a fundamental task in quantum information processing with numerous applications. We present a variational quantum algorithm that performs the minimum-error QSD, called the variational quantum state discriminator (VQSD). The VQSD uses a parameterized quantum circuit that is trained by minimizing a cost function derived from the QSD, and finds the optimal positive-operator valued measure (POVM) for distinguishing target quantum states. The VQSD is capable of discriminating even unknown states, eliminating the need for expensive quantum state tomography. Our numerical simulations and comparisons with semidefinite programming demonstrate the effectiveness of the VQSD in finding optimal POVMs for minimum-error QSD of both pure and mixed states. In addition, the VQSD can be utilized as a supervised machine learning algorithm for multi-class classification. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve obtained in numerical simulations with the Iris flower dataset ranges from 0.97 to 1 with an average of 0.985, demonstrating excellent performance of the VQSD classifier.
Generative Modeling with Flow-Guided Density Ratio Learning

We present Flow-Guided Density Ratio Learning (FDRL), a simple and scalable approach to generative modeling which builds on the stale (time-independent) approximation of the gradient flow of entropy-regularized f-divergences introduced in DGflow. In DGflow, the intractable time-dependent density ratio is approximated by a stale estimator given by a GAN discriminator. This is sufficient in the case of sample refinement, where the source and target distributions of the flow are close to each other. However, this assumption is invalid for generation and a naive application of the stale estimator fails due to the large chasm between the two distributions. FDRL proposes to train a density ratio estimator such that it learns from progressively improving samples during the training process. We show that this simple method alleviates the density chasm problem, allowing FDRL to generate images of dimensions as high as $128\times128$, as well as outperform existing gradient flow baselines on quantitative benchmarks. We also show the flexibility of FDRL with two use cases. First, unconditional FDRL can be easily composed with external classifiers to perform class-conditional generation. Second, FDRL can be directly applied to unpaired image-to-image translation with no modifications needed to the framework. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ajrheng/FDRL.
Daml: A Smart Contract Language for Securely Automating Real-World Multi-Party Business Workflows

Distributed ledger technologies, also known as blockchains for enterprises, promise to significantly reduce the high cost of automating multi-party business workflows. We argue that a programming language for writing such on-ledger logic should satisfy three desiderata: (1) Provide concepts to capture the legal rules that govern real-world business workflows. (2) Include simple means for specifying policies for access and authorization. (3) Support the composition of simple workflows into complex ones, even when the simple workflows have already been deployed. We present the open-source smart contract language Daml based on Haskell with strict evaluation. Daml achieves these desiderata by offering novel primitives for representing, accessing, and modifying data on the ledger, which are mimicking the primitives of today's legal systems. Robust access and authorization policies are specified as part of these primitives, and Daml's built-in authorization rules enable delegation, which is key for workflow composability. These properties make Daml well-suited for orchestrating business workflows across multiple, otherwise heterogeneous parties. Daml contracts run (1) on centralized ledgers backed by a database, (2) on distributed deployments with Byzantine fault tolerant consensus, and (3) on top of conventional blockchains, as a second layer via an atomic commit protocol.
DLT: Conditioned layout generation with Joint Discrete-Continuous Diffusion Layout Transformer

Generating visual layouts is an essential ingredient of graphic design. The ability to condition layout generation on a partial subset of component attributes is critical to real-world applications that involve user interaction. Recently, diffusion models have demonstrated high-quality generative performances in various domains. However, it is unclear how to apply diffusion models to the natural representation of layouts which consists of a mix of discrete (class) and continuous (location, size) attributes. To address the conditioning layout generation problem, we introduce DLT, a joint discrete-continuous diffusion model. DLT is a transformer-based model which has a flexible conditioning mechanism that allows for conditioning on any given subset of all the layout component classes, locations, and sizes. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art generative models on various layout generation datasets with respect to different metrics and conditioning settings. Additionally, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed conditioning mechanism and the joint continuous-diffusion process. This joint process can be incorporated into a wide range of mixed discrete-continuous generative tasks.
Automatically Classifying Kano Model Factors in App Reviews

[Context and motivation] Requirements assessment by means of the Kano model is common practice. As suggested by the original authors, these assessments are done by interviewing stakeholders and asking them about the level of satisfaction if a certain feature is well implemented and the level of dissatisfaction if a feature is not or not well implemented. [Question/problem] Assessments via interviews are time-consuming, expensive, and can only capture the opinion of a limited set of stakeholders. [Principal ideas/results] We investigate the possibility to extract Kano model factors (basic needs, performance factors, and delighters) from a large set of user feedback (i.e., app reviews). We implemented, trained, and tested several classifiers on a set of 2,592 reviews. In a 10-fold cross-validation, a BERT-based classifier performed best with an accuracy of 0.928. To assess the classifiers' generalization, we additionally tested them on another independent set of 1,622 app reviews. The accuracy of the best classifier dropped to 0.725. We also show that misclassifications correlate with human disagreement on the labels. [Contribution] Our approach is a lightweight and automated alternative for identifying Kano model factors from a large set of user feedback. The limited accuracy of the approach is an inherent problem of missing information about the context in app reviews compared to comprehensive interviews, which also makes it hard for humans to extract the factors correctly.
On the existence of optimal shallow feedforward networks with ReLU activation

We prove existence of global minima in the loss landscape for the approximation of continuous target functions using shallow feedforward artificial neural networks with ReLU activation. This property is one of the fundamental artifacts separating ReLU from other commonly used activation functions. We propose a kind of closure of the search space so that in the extended space minimizers exist. In a second step, we show under mild assumptions that the newly added functions in the extension perform worse than appropriate representable ReLU networks. This then implies that the optimal response in the extended target space is indeed the response of a ReLU network.
Robust Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarially Learned Continuous Noise Corruption

Anomaly detection is the task of recognising novel samples which deviate significantly from pre-establishednormality. Abnormal classes are not present during training meaning that models must learn effective rep-resentations solely across normal class data samples. Deep Autoencoders (AE) have been widely used foranomaly detection tasks, but suffer from overfitting to a null identity function. To address this problem, weimplement a training scheme applied to a Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) which introduces an efficient methodof producing Adversarially Learned Continuous Noise (ALCN) to maximally globally corrupt the input priorto denoising. Prior methods have applied similar approaches of adversarial training to increase the robustnessof DAE, however they exhibit limitations such as slow inference speed reducing their real-world applicabilityor producing generalised obfuscation which is more trivial to denoise. We show through rigorous evaluationthat our ALCN method of regularisation during training improves AUC performance during inference whileremaining efficient over both classical, leave-one-out novelty detection tasks with the variations-: 9 (normal)vs. 1 (abnormal) & 1 (normal) vs. 9 (abnormal); MNIST - AUCavg: 0.890 & 0.989, CIFAR-10 - AUCavg: 0.670& 0.742, in addition to challenging real-world anomaly detection tasks: industrial inspection (MVTEC-AD -AUCavg: 0.780) and plant disease detection (Plant Village - AUC: 0.770) when compared to prior approaches.
Group conditional validity via multi-group learning

We consider the problem of distribution-free conformal prediction and the criterion of group conditional validity. This criterion is motivated by many practical scenarios including hidden stratification and group fairness. Existing methods achieve such guarantees under either restrictive grouping structure or distributional assumptions, or they are overly-conservative under heteroskedastic noise. We propose a simple reduction to the problem of achieving validity guarantees for individual populations by leveraging algorithms for a problem called multi-group learning. This allows us to port theoretical guarantees from multi-group learning to obtain obtain sample complexity guarantees for conformal prediction. We also provide a new algorithm for multi-group learning for groups with hierarchical structure. Using this algorithm in our reduction leads to improved sample complexity guarantees with a simpler predictor structure.
ELODIN: Naming Concepts in Embedding Spaces

Despite recent advancements, the field of text-to-image synthesis still suffers from lack of fine-grained control. Using only text, it remains challenging to deal with issues such as concept coherence and concept contamination. We propose a method to enhance control by generating specific concepts that can be reused throughout multiple images, effectively expanding natural language with new words that can be combined much like a painter's palette. Unlike previous contributions, our method does not copy visuals from input data and can generate concepts through text alone. We perform a set of comparisons that finds our method to be a significant improvement over text-only prompts.
GATE: A Challenge Set for Gender-Ambiguous Translation Examples

Although recent years have brought significant progress in improving translation of unambiguously gendered sentences, translation of ambiguously gendered input remains relatively unexplored. When source gender is ambiguous, machine translation models typically default to stereotypical gender roles, perpetuating harmful bias. Recent work has led to the development of "gender rewriters" that generate alternative gender translations on such ambiguous inputs, but such systems are plagued by poor linguistic coverage. To encourage better performance on this task we present and release GATE, a linguistically diverse corpus of gender-ambiguous source sentences along with multiple alternative target language translations. We also provide tools for evaluation and system analysis when using GATE and use them to evaluate our translation rewriter system.
Breast simulation pipeline: from medical imaging to patient-specific simulations

Breast-conserving surgery is the most acceptable operation for breast cancer removal from an invasive and psychological point of view. Before the surgical procedure, a preoperative MRI is performed in the prone configuration, while the surgery is achieved in the supine position. This leads to a considerable movement of the breast, including the tumor, between the two poses, complicating the surgeon's task. In this work, a simulation pipeline allowing the computation of patient-specific geometry and the prediction of personalized breast material properties was put forward. Through image segmentation, a finite element model including the subject-specific geometry is established. By first computing an undeformed state of the breast, the geometrico-material model is calibrated by surface acquisition in the intra-operative stance. Using an elastic corotational formulation, the patient-specific mechanical properties of the breast and skin were identified to obtain the best estimates of the supine configuration. The final results are a Mean Absolute Error of 4.00mm for the mechanical parameters E_breast = 0.32 kPa and E_skin = 22.72 kPa, congruent with the current state-of-the-art. The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy optimizer converges on average between 5 to 30 min depending on the initial parameters, reaching a simulation speed of 20s. To our knowledge, our model offers one of the best compromises between accuracy and speed. Satisfactory results were obtained for the estimation of breast deformation from preoperative to intra-operative configuration. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the clinical feasibility of such applications using a simulation framework that aims at the smallest disturbance of the actual surgical pipeline.
A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Container Engines

Containerization is a virtualization technique that allows one to create and run executables consistently on any infrastructure. Compared to virtual machines, containers are lighter since they do not bundle a (guest) operating system but they share its kernel, and they only include the files, libraries, and dependencies that are required to properly execute a process. In the past few years, multiple container engines (i.e., tools for configuring, executing, and managing containers) have been developed ranging from some that are ``general purpose'', and mostly employed for Cloud executions, to others that are built for specific contexts, namely Internet of Things and High-Performance Computing. Given the importance of this technology for many practitioners and researchers, this paper analyses six state-of-the-art container engines and compares them through a comprehensive study of their characteristics and performance. The results are organized around 10 findings that aim to help the readers understand the differences among the technologies and help them choose the best approach for their needs.
Benign Overfitting for Two-layer ReLU Convolutional Neural Networks

Modern deep learning models with great expressive power can be trained to overfit the training data but still generalize well. This phenomenon is referred to as \textit{benign overfitting}. Recently, a few studies have attempted to theoretically understand benign overfitting in neural networks. However, these works are either limited to neural networks with smooth activation functions or to the neural tangent kernel regime. How and when benign overfitting can occur in ReLU neural networks remains an open problem. In this work, we seek to answer this question by establishing algorithm-dependent risk bounds for learning two-layer ReLU convolutional neural networks with label-flipping noise. We show that, under mild conditions, the neural network trained by gradient descent can achieve near-zero training loss and Bayes optimal test risk. Our result also reveals a sharp transition between benign and harmful overfitting under different conditions on data distribution in terms of test risk. Experiments on synthetic data back up our theory.