pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent: Unified Theory and New Efficient Methods
Authors: Aleksandr Beznosikov, Eduard Gorbunov, Hugo Berard, Nicolas Loizou
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00

Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) is one of the most prominent algorithms for solving min-max optimization and variational inequalities problems (VIP) appearing in various machine learning tasks. The success of the method led to several advanced extensions of the classical SGDA, including variants with arbitrary sampling, variance reduction, coordinate randomization, and distributed variants with compression, which were extensively studied in the literature, especially during the last few years. In this paper, we propose a unified convergence analysis that covers a large variety of stochastic gradient descent-ascent methods, which so far have required different intuitions, have different applications and have been developed separately in various communities. A key to our unified framework is a parametric assumption on the stochastic estimates. Via our general theoretical framework, we either recover the sharpest known rates for the known special cases or tighten them. Moreover, to illustrate the flexibility of our approach we develop several new variants of SGDA such as a new variance-reduced method (L-SVRGDA), new distributed methods with compression (QSGDA, DIANA-SGDA, VR-DIANA-SGDA), and a new method with coordinate randomization (SEGA-SGDA). Although variants of the new methods are known for solving minimization problems, they were never considered or analyzed for solving min-max problems and VIPs. We also demonstrate the most important properties of the new methods through extensive numerical experiments.
Learning Disentangled Behaviour Patterns for Wearable-based Human Activity Recognition
Authors: Jie Su, Zhenyu Wen, Tao Lin, Yu Guan
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Disentanglement, Human Activity Recognition

In wearable-based human activity recognition (HAR) research, one of the major challenges is the large intra-class variability problem. The collected activity signal is often, if not always, coupled with noises or bias caused by personal, environmental, or other factors, making it difficult to learn effective features for HAR tasks, especially when with inadequate data. To address this issue, in this work, we proposed a Behaviour Pattern Disentanglement (BPD) framework, which can disentangle the behavior patterns from the irrelevant noises such as personal styles or environmental noises, etc. Based on a disentanglement network, we designed several loss functions and used an adversarial training strategy for optimization, which can disentangle activity signals from the irrelevant noises with the least dependency (between them) in the feature space. Our BPD framework is flexible, and it can be used on top of existing deep learning (DL) approaches for feature refinement. Extensive experiments were conducted on four public HAR datasets, and the promising results of our proposed BPD scheme suggest its flexibility and effectiveness. This is an open-source project, and the code can be found at http://github.com/Jie-su/BPD
Accelerating Non-Negative and Bounded-Variable Linear Regression Algorithms with Safe Screening
Authors: Cassio F. Dantas, Emmanuel Soubies, Cédric Févotte
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Non-negative and bounded-variable linear regression problems arise in a variety of applications in machine learning and signal processing. In this paper, we propose a technique to accelerate existing solvers for these problems by identifying saturated coordinates in the course of iterations. This is akin to safe screening techniques previously proposed for sparsity-regularized regression problems. The proposed strategy is provably safe as it provides theoretical guarantees that the identified coordinates are indeed saturated in the optimal solution. Experimental results on synthetic and real data show compelling accelerations for both non-negative and bounded-variable problems.
Federated Graph Neural Networks: Overview, Techniques and Challenges
Authors: Rui Liu, Pengwei Xing, Zichao Deng, Anran Li, Cuntai Guan, Han Yu
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Survey

With its capability to deal with graph data, which is widely found in practical applications, graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted significant research attention in recent years. As societies become increasingly concerned with the need for data privacy protection, GNNs face the need to adapt to this new normal. Besides, as clients in Federated Learning (FL) may have relationships, more powerful tools are required to utilize such implicit information to boost performance. This has led to the rapid development of the emerging research field of federated graph neural networks (FedGNNs). This promising interdisciplinary field is highly challenging for interested researchers to grasp. The lack of an insightful survey on this topic further exacerbates the entry difficulty. In this paper, we bridge this gap by offering a comprehensive survey of this emerging field. We propose a 2-dimensional taxonomy of the FedGNNs literature: 1) the main taxonomy provides a clear perspective on the integration of GNNs and FL by analyzing how GNNs enhance FL training as well as how FL assists GNNs training, and 2) the auxiliary taxonomy provides a view on how FedGNNs deal with heterogeneity across FL clients. Through discussions of key ideas, challenges, and limitations of existing works, we envision future research directions that can help build more robust, explainable, efficient, fair, inductive, and comprehensive FedGNNs.
REPID: Regional Effect Plots with implicit Interaction Detection
Authors: Julia Herbinger, Bernd Bischl, Giuseppe Casalicchio
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Interpretable Machine Learning

Machine learning models can automatically learn complex relationships, such as non-linear and interaction effects. Interpretable machine learning methods such as partial dependence plots visualize marginal feature effects but may lead to misleading interpretations when feature interactions are present. Hence, employing additional methods that can detect and measure the strength of interactions is paramount to better understand the inner workings of machine learning models. We demonstrate several drawbacks of existing global interaction detection approaches, characterize them theoretically, and evaluate them empirically. Furthermore, we introduce regional effect plots with implicit interaction detection, a novel framework to detect interactions between a feature of interest and other features. The framework also quantifies the strength of interactions and provides interpretable and distinct regions in which feature effects can be interpreted more reliably, as they are less confounded by interactions. We prove the theoretical eligibility of our method and show its applicability on various simulation and real-world examples.
Exploiting Data Sparsity in Secure Cross-Platform Social Recommendation
Authors: Jamie Cui, Chaochao Chen, Lingjuan Lyu, Carl Yang, Li Wang
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Social recommendation has shown promising improvements over traditional systems since it leverages social correlation data as an additional input. Most existing work assumes that all data are available to the recommendation platform. However, in practice, user-item interaction data (e.g.,rating) and user-user social data are usually generated by different platforms, and both of which contain sensitive information. Therefore, "How to perform secure and efficient social recommendation across different platforms, where the data are highly-sparse in nature" remains an important challenge. In this work, we bring secure computation techniques into social recommendation, and propose S3Rec, a sparsity-aware secure cross-platform social recommendation framework. As a result, our model can not only improve the recommendation performance of the rating platform by incorporating the sparse social data on the social platform, but also protect data privacy of both platforms. Moreover, to further improve model training efficiency, we propose two secure sparse matrix multiplication protocols based on homomorphic encryption and private information retrieval. Our experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of S3Rec.
Geometrically Equivariant Graph Neural Networks: A Survey
Authors: Jiaqi Han, Yu Rong, Tingyang Xu, Wenbing Huang
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Survey

Many scientific problems require to process data in the form of geometric graphs. Unlike generic graph data, geometric graphs exhibit symmetries of translations, rotations, and/or reflections. Researchers have leveraged such inductive bias and developed geometrically equivariant Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to better characterize the geometry and topology of geometric graphs. Despite fruitful achievements, it still lacks a survey to depict how equivariant GNNs are progressed, which in turn hinders the further development of equivariant GNNs. To this end, based on the necessary but concise mathematical preliminaries, we analyze and classify existing methods into three groups regarding how the message passing and aggregation in GNNs are represented. We also summarize the benchmarks as well as the related datasets to facilitate later researches for methodology development and experimental evaluation. The prospect for future potential directions is also provided.
Navigating Local Minima in Quantized Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Jason K. Eshraghian, Corey Lammie, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi, Wei D. Lu
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Spiking and Quantized Neural Networks (NNs) are becoming exceedingly important for hyper-efficient implementations of Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. However, these networks face challenges when trained using error backpropagation, due to the absence of gradient signals when applying hard thresholds. The broadly accepted trick to overcoming this is through the use of biased gradient estimators: surrogate gradients which approximate thresholding in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), and Straight-Through Estimators (STEs), which completely bypass thresholding in Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs). While noisy gradient feedback has enabled reasonable performance on simple supervised learning tasks, it is thought that such noise increases the difficulty of finding optima in loss landscapes, especially during the later stages of optimization. By periodically boosting the Learning Rate (LR) during training, we expect the network can navigate unexplored solution spaces that would otherwise be difficult to reach due to local minima, barriers, or flat surfaces. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of a cosine-annealed LR schedule coupled with weight-independent adaptive moment estimation as applied to Quantized SNNs (QSNNs). We provide a rigorous empirical evaluation of this technique on high precision and 4-bit quantized SNNs across three datasets, demonstrating (close to) state-of-the-art performance on the more complex datasets. Our source code is available at this link: https://github.com/jeshraghian/QSNNs.
Multi-style Training for South African Call Centre Audio
Authors: Walter Heymans, Marelie H. Davel, Charl van Heerden
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Data Augmentation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Mismatched data is a challenging problem for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. One of the most common techniques used to address mismatched data is multi-style training (MTR), a form of data augmentation that attempts to transform the training data to be more representative of the testing data; and to learn robust representations applicable to different conditions. This task can be very challenging if the test conditions are unknown. We explore the impact of different MTR styles on system performance when testing conditions are different from training conditions in the context of deep neural network hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM) ASR systems. A controlled environment is created using the LibriSpeech corpus, where we isolate the effect of different MTR styles on final system performance. We evaluate our findings on a South African call centre dataset that contains noisy, WAV49-encoded audio.
One-bit Submission for Locally Private Quasi-MLE: Its Asymptotic Normality and Limitation
Authors: Hajime Ono, Kazuhiro Minami, Hideitsu Hino
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Local differential privacy~(LDP) is an information-theoretic privacy definition suitable for statistical surveys that involve an untrusted data curator. An LDP version of quasi-maximum likelihood estimator~(QMLE) has been developed, but the existing method to build LDP QMLE is difficult to implement for a large-scale survey system in the real world due to long waiting time, expensive communication cost, and the boundedness assumption of derivative of a log-likelihood function. We provided an alternative LDP protocol without those issues, which is potentially much easily deployable to a large-scale survey. We also provided sufficient conditions for the consistency and asymptotic normality and limitations of our protocol. Our protocol is less burdensome for the users, and the theoretical guarantees cover more realistic cases than those for the existing method.
On the Origins of the Block Structure Phenomenon in Neural Network Representations
Authors: Thao Nguyen, Maithra Raghu, Simon Kornblith
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00

Recent work has uncovered a striking phenomenon in large-capacity neural networks: they contain blocks of contiguous hidden layers with highly similar representations. This block structure has two seemingly contradictory properties: on the one hand, its constituent layers exhibit highly similar dominant first principal components (PCs), but on the other hand, their representations, and their common first PC, are highly dissimilar across different random seeds. Our work seeks to reconcile these discrepant properties by investigating the origin of the block structure in relation to the data and training methods. By analyzing properties of the dominant PCs, we find that the block structure arises from dominant datapoints - a small group of examples that share similar image statistics (e.g. background color). However, the set of dominant datapoints, and the precise shared image statistic, can vary across random seeds. Thus, the block structure reflects meaningful dataset statistics, but is simultaneously unique to each model. Through studying hidden layer activations and creating synthetic datapoints, we demonstrate that these simple image statistics dominate the representational geometry of the layers inside the block structure. We explore how the phenomenon evolves through training, finding that the block structure takes shape early in training, but the underlying representations and the corresponding dominant datapoints continue to change substantially. Finally, we study the interplay between the block structure and different training mechanisms, introducing a targeted intervention to eliminate the block structure, as well as examining the effects of pretraining and Shake-Shake regularization.
Federated Learning with Sparsified Model Perturbation: Improving Accuracy under Client-Level Differential Privacy
Authors: Rui Hu, Yanmin Gong, Yuanxiong Guo
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) that enables edge devices to collaboratively learn a shared model while keeping their training data locally has received great attention recently and can protect privacy in comparison with the traditional centralized learning paradigm. However, sensitive information about the training data can still be inferred from model parameters shared in FL. Differential privacy (DP) is the state-of-the-art technique to defend against those attacks. The key challenge to achieving DP in FL lies in the adverse impact of DP noise on model accuracy, particularly for deep learning models with large numbers of parameters. This paper develops a novel differentially-private FL scheme named Fed-SMP that provides a client-level DP guarantee while maintaining high model accuracy. To mitigate the impact of privacy protection on model accuracy, Fed-SMP leverages a new technique called Sparsified Model Perturbation (SMP) where local models are sparsified first before being perturbed by Gaussian noise. We provide a tight end-to-end privacy analysis for Fed-SMP using Renyi DP and prove the convergence of Fed-SMP with both unbiased and biased sparsifications. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of Fed-SMP in improving model accuracy with the same DP guarantee and saving communication cost simultaneously.
DeepONet-Grid-UQ: A Trustworthy Deep Operator Framework for Predicting the Power Grid's Post-Fault Trajectories
Authors: Christian Moya, Shiqi Zhang, Meng Yue, Guang Lin
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

This paper proposes a new data-driven method for the reliable prediction of power system post-fault trajectories. The proposed method is based on the fundamentally new concept of Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets). Compared to traditional neural networks that learn to approximate functions, DeepONets are designed to approximate nonlinear operators. Under this operator framework, we design a DeepONet to (1) take as inputs the fault-on trajectories collected, for example, via simulation or phasor measurement units, and (2) provide as outputs the predicted post-fault trajectories. In addition, we endow our method with a much-needed ability to balance efficiency with reliable/trustworthy predictions via uncertainty quantification. To this end, we propose and compare two methods that enable quantifying the predictive uncertainty. First, we propose a \textit{Bayesian DeepONet} (B-DeepONet) that uses stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo to sample from the posterior distribution of the DeepONet parameters. Then, we propose a \textit{Probabilistic DeepONet} (Prob-DeepONet) that uses a probabilistic training strategy to equip DeepONets with a form of automated uncertainty quantification, at virtually no extra computational cost. Finally, we validate the predictive power and uncertainty quantification capability of the proposed B-DeepONet and Prob-DeepONet using the IEEE 16-machine 68-bus system.
TURF: A Two-factor, Universal, Robust, Fast Distribution Learning Algorithm
Authors: Yi Hao, Ayush Jain, Alon Orlitsky, Vaishakh Ravindrakumar
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Approximating distributions from their samples is a canonical statistical-learning problem. One of its most powerful and successful modalities approximates every distribution to an $\ell_1$ distance essentially at most a constant times larger than its closest $t$-piece degree-$d$ polynomial, where $t\ge1$ and $d\ge0$. Letting $c_{t,d}$ denote the smallest such factor, clearly $c_{1,0}=1$, and it can be shown that $c_{t,d}\ge 2$ for all other $t$ and $d$. Yet current computationally efficient algorithms show only $c_{t,1}\le 2.25$ and the bound rises quickly to $c_{t,d}\le 3$ for $d\ge 9$. We derive a near-linear-time and essentially sample-optimal estimator that establishes $c_{t,d}=2$ for all $(t,d)\ne(1,0)$. Additionally, for many practical distributions, the lowest approximation distance is achieved by polynomials with vastly varying number of pieces. We provide a method that estimates this number near-optimally, hence helps approach the best possible approximation. Experiments combining the two techniques confirm improved performance over existing methodologies.
OLIVE: Oblivious Federated Learning on Trusted Execution Environment against the risk of sparsification
Authors: Fumiyuki Kato, Yang Cao, Masatoshi Yoshikawa
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Inference Attack, Privacy Preserving

Combining Federated Learning (FL) with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is a promising approach for realizing privacy-preserving FL, which has garnered significant academic attention in recent years. Implementing the TEE on the server side enables each round of FL to proceed without exposing the client's gradient information to untrusted servers. This addresses usability gaps in existing secure aggregation schemes as well as utility gaps in differentially private FL. However, to address the issue using a TEE, the vulnerabilities of server-side TEEs need to be considered -- this has not been sufficiently investigated in the context of FL. The main technical contribution of this study is the analysis of the vulnerabilities of TEE in FL and the defense. First, we theoretically analyze the leakage of memory access patterns, revealing the risk of sparsified gradients, which are commonly used in FL to enhance communication efficiency and model accuracy. Second, we devise an inference attack to link memory access patterns to sensitive information in the training dataset. Finally, we propose an oblivious yet efficient aggregation algorithm to prevent memory access pattern leakage. Our experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method functions efficiently in practical scales.
L2C2: Locally Lipschitz Continuous Constraint towards Stable and Smooth Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Taisuke Kobayashi
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper proposes a new regularization technique for reinforcement learning (RL) towards making policy and value functions smooth and stable. RL is known for the instability of the learning process and the sensitivity of the acquired policy to noise. Several methods have been proposed to resolve these problems, and in summary, the smoothness of policy and value functions learned mainly in RL contributes to these problems. However, if these functions are extremely smooth, their expressiveness would be lost, resulting in not obtaining the global optimal solution. This paper therefore considers RL under local Lipschitz continuity constraint, so-called L2C2. By designing the spatio-temporal locally compact space for L2C2 from the state transition at each time step, the moderate smoothness can be achieved without loss of expressiveness. Numerical noisy simulations verified that the proposed L2C2 outperforms the task performance while smoothing out the robot action generated from the learned policy.
Machine Learning in Aerodynamic Shape Optimization
Authors: Jichao Li, Xiaosong Du, Joaquim R. R. A. Martins
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) has been increasingly used to aid aerodynamic shape optimization (ASO), thanks to the availability of aerodynamic data and continued developments in deep learning. We review the applications of ML in ASO to date and provide a perspective on the state-of-the-art and future directions. We first introduce conventional ASO and current challenges. Next, we introduce ML fundamentals and detail ML algorithms that have been successful in ASO. Then, we review ML applications to ASO addressing three aspects: compact geometric design space, fast aerodynamic analysis, and efficient optimization architecture. In addition to providing a comprehensive summary of the research, we comment on the practicality and effectiveness of the developed methods. We show how cutting-edge ML approaches can benefit ASO and address challenging demands, such as interactive design optimization. Practical large-scale design optimizations remain a challenge because of the high cost of ML training. Further research on coupling ML model construction with prior experience and knowledge, such as physics-informed ML, is recommended to solve large-scale ASO problems.