pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sparse Federated Learning with Hierarchical Personalized Models
Authors: Xiaofeng Liu, Qing Wang, Yunfeng Shao, Yinchuan Li
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) can achieve privacy-safe and reliable collaborative training without collecting users' private data. Its excellent privacy security potential promotes a wide range of FL applications in Internet-of-Things (IoT), wireless networks, mobile devices, autonomous vehicles, and cloud medical treatment. However, the FL method suffers from poor model performance on non-i.i.d. data and excessive traffic volume. To this end, we propose a personalized FL algorithm using a hierarchical proximal mapping based on the moreau envelop, named sparse federated learning with hierarchical personalized models (sFedHP), which significantly improves the global model performance facing diverse data. A continuously differentiable approximated L1-norm is also used as the sparse constraint to reduce the communication cost. Convergence analysis shows that sFedHP's convergence rate is state-of-the-art with linear speedup and the sparse constraint only reduces the convergence rate to a small extent while significantly reducing the communication cost. Experimentally, we demonstrate the benefits of sFedHP compared with the FedAvg, HierFAVG (hierarchical FedAvg), and personalized FL methods based on local customization, including FedAMP, FedProx, Per-FedAvg, pFedMe, and pFedGP.
Generalization bounds for learning under graph-dependence: A survey
Authors: Rui-Ray Zhang, Massih-Reza Amini
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Learning Theory, Survey

Traditional statistical learning theory relies on the assumption that data are identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.). However, this assumption often does not hold in many real-life applications. In this survey, we explore learning scenarios where examples are dependent and their dependence relationship is described by a dependency graph, a commonly utilized model in probability and combinatorics. We collect various graph-dependent concentration bounds, which are then used to derive Rademacher complexity and stability generalization bounds for learning from graph-dependent data. We illustrate this paradigm through practical learning tasks and provide some research directions for future work. To our knowledge, this survey is the first of this kind on this subject.
Feature extraction using Spectral Clustering for Gene Function Prediction using Hierarchical Multi-label Classification
Authors: Miguel Romero, Oscar Ramírez, Jorge Finke, Camilo Rocha
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Hierarchical Multi-label Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Gene annotation addresses the problem of predicting unknown associations between gene and functions (e.g., biological processes) of a specific organism. Despite recent advances, the cost and time demanded by annotation procedures that rely largely on in vivo biological experiments remain prohibitively high. This paper presents a novel in silico approach for to the annotation problem that combines cluster analysis and hierarchical multi-label classification (HMC). The approach uses spectral clustering to extract new features from the gene co-expression network (GCN) and enrich the prediction task. HMC is used to build multiple estimators that consider the hierarchical structure of gene functions. The proposed approach is applied to a case study on Zea mays, one of the most dominant and productive crops in the world. The results illustrate how in silico approaches are key to reduce the time and costs of gene annotation. More specifically, they highlight the importance of: (i) building new features that represent the structure of gene relationships in GCNs to annotate genes; and (ii) taking into account the structure of biological processes to obtain consistent predictions.
Preprocessing Reward Functions for Interpretability
Authors: Erik Jenner, Adam Gleave
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00

In many real-world applications, the reward function is too complex to be manually specified. In such cases, reward functions must instead be learned from human feedback. Since the learned reward may fail to represent user preferences, it is important to be able to validate the learned reward function prior to deployment. One promising approach is to apply interpretability tools to the reward function to spot potential deviations from the user's intention. Existing work has applied general-purpose interpretability tools to understand learned reward functions. We propose exploiting the intrinsic structure of reward functions by first preprocessing them into simpler but equivalent reward functions, which are then visualized. We introduce a general framework for such reward preprocessing and propose concrete preprocessing algorithms. Our empirical evaluation shows that preprocessed rewards are often significantly easier to understand than the original reward.
An Intelligent End-to-End Neural Architecture Search Framework for Electricity Forecasting Model Development
Authors: Jin Yang, Guangxin Jiang, Yinan Wang, Ying Chen
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Recent years have witnessed exponential growth in developing deep learning (DL) models for time-series electricity forecasting in power systems. However, most of the proposed models are designed based on the designers' inherent knowledge and experience without elaborating on the suitability of the proposed neural architectures. Moreover, these models cannot be self-adjusted to dynamically changed data patterns due to the inflexible design of their structures. Although several recent studies have considered the application of the neural architecture search (NAS) technique for obtaining a network with an optimized structure in the electricity forecasting sector, their training process is computationally expensive and their search strategies are not flexible, indicating that the NAS application in this area is still at an infancy stage. In this study, we propose an intelligent automated architecture search (IAAS) framework for the development of time-series electricity forecasting models. The proposed framework contains three primary components, i.e., network function-preserving transformation operation, reinforcement learning (RL)-based network transformation control, and heuristic network screening, which aim to improve the search quality of a network structure. After conducting comprehensive experiments on two publicly-available electricity load datasets and two wind power datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed IAAS framework significantly outperforms the ten existing models or methods in terms of forecasting accuracy and stability. Finally, we perform an ablation experiment to showcase the importance of critical components in the proposed IAAS framework in improving forecasting accuracy.
Improving Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Graph Summarization
Authors: Sirui Li, Kok Kai Wong, Dengya Zhu, Chun Che Fung
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Embeddings, Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering

Question Answering (QA) systems over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) (KGQA) automatically answer natural language questions using triples contained in a KG. The key idea is to represent questions and entities of a KG as low-dimensional embeddings. Previous KGQAs have attempted to represent entities using Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) and Deep Learning (DL) methods. However, KGEs are too shallow to capture the expressive features and DL methods process each triple independently. Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has shown to be excellent in providing entity embeddings. However, using GCNs to KGQAs is inefficient because GCNs treat all relations equally when aggregating neighbourhoods. Also, a problem could occur when using previous KGQAs: in most cases, questions often have an uncertain number of answers. To address the above issues, we propose a graph summarization technique using Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) and GCN. The combination of GCN and RCNN ensures that the embeddings are propagated together with the relations relevant to the question, and thus better answers. The proposed graph summarization technique can be used to tackle the issue that KGQAs cannot answer questions with an uncertain number of answers. In this paper, we demonstrated the proposed technique on the most common type of questions, which is single-relation questions. Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed graph summarization technique using RCNN and GCN can provide better results when compared to the GCN. The proposed graph summarization technique significantly improves the recall of actual answers when the questions have an uncertain number of answers.
Fast and computationally efficient generative adversarial network algorithm for unmanned aerial vehicle-based network coverage optimization
Authors: Marek Ružička, Marcel Vološin, Juraj Gazda, Taras Maksymyuk, Longzhe Han, Mischa Dohler
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

The challenge of dynamic traffic demand in mobile networks is tackled by moving cells based on unmanned aerial vehicles. Considering the tremendous potential of unmanned aerial vehicles in the future, we propose a new heuristic algorithm for coverage optimization. The proposed algorithm is implemented based on a conditional generative adversarial neural network, with a unique multilayer sum-pooling loss function. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, we compare it with the optimal core-set algorithm and quasi-optimal spiral algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed approach converges to the quasi-optimal solution with a negligible difference from the global optimum while maintaining a quadratic complexity regardless of the number of users.
Repairing Group-Level Errors for DNNs Using Weighted Regularization
Authors: Ziyuan Zhong, Yuchi Tian, Conor J. Sweeney, Vicente Ordonez, Baishakhi Ray
Date: 2022-03-24 00:00:00

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely used in software making decisions impacting people's lives. However, they have been found to exhibit severe erroneous behaviors that may lead to unfortunate outcomes. Previous work shows that such misbehaviors often occur due to class property violations rather than errors on a single image. Although methods for detecting such errors have been proposed, fixing them has not been studied so far. Here, we propose a generic method called Weighted Regularization (WR) consisting of five concrete methods targeting the error-producing classes to fix the DNNs. In particular, it can repair confusion error and bias error of DNN models for both single-label and multi-label image classifications. A confusion error happens when a given DNN model tends to confuse between two classes. Each method in WR assigns more weights at a stage of DNN retraining or inference to mitigate the confusion between target pair. A bias error can be fixed similarly. We evaluate and compare the proposed methods along with baselines on six widely-used datasets and architecture combinations. The results suggest that WR methods have different trade-offs but under each setting at least one WR method can greatly reduce confusion/bias errors at a very limited cost of the overall performance.
Lightweight Graph Convolutional Networks with Topologically Consistent Magnitude Pruning
Authors: Hichem Sahbi
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00

Graph convolution networks (GCNs) are currently mainstream in learning with irregular data. These models rely on message passing and attention mechanisms that capture context and node-to-node relationships. With multi-head attention, GCNs become highly accurate but oversized, and their deployment on cheap devices requires their pruning. However, pruning at high regimes usually leads to topologically inconsistent networks with weak generalization. In this paper, we devise a novel method for lightweight GCN design. Our proposed approach parses and selects subnetworks with the highest magnitudes while guaranteeing their topological consistency. The latter is obtained by selecting only accessible and co-accessible connections which actually contribute in the evaluation of the selected subnetworks. Experiments conducted on the challenging FPHA dataset show the substantial gain of our topologically consistent pruning method especially at very high pruning regimes.
On the Role of Fixed Points of Dynamical Systems in Training Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Authors: Franz M. Rohrhofer, Stefan Posch, Clemens Gößnitzer, Bernhard C. Geiger
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00

This paper empirically studies commonly observed training difficulties of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) on dynamical systems. Our results indicate that fixed points which are inherent to these systems play a key role in the optimization of the in PINNs embedded physics loss function. We observe that the loss landscape exhibits local optima that are shaped by the presence of fixed points. We find that these local optima contribute to the complexity of the physics loss optimization which can explain common training difficulties and resulting nonphysical predictions. Under certain settings, e.g., initial conditions close to fixed points or long simulations times, we show that those optima can even become better than that of the desired solution.
HYDRA: Competing convolutional kernels for fast and accurate time series classification
Authors: Angus Dempster, Daniel F. Schmidt, Geoffrey I. Webb
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection, Time Series Classification

We demonstrate a simple connection between dictionary methods for time series classification, which involve extracting and counting symbolic patterns in time series, and methods based on transforming input time series using convolutional kernels, namely ROCKET and its variants. We show that by adjusting a single hyperparameter it is possible to move by degrees between models resembling dictionary methods and models resembling ROCKET. We present HYDRA, a simple, fast, and accurate dictionary method for time series classification using competing convolutional kernels, combining key aspects of both ROCKET and conventional dictionary methods. HYDRA is faster and more accurate than the most accurate existing dictionary methods, and can be combined with ROCKET and its variants to further improve the accuracy of these methods.
Gransformer: Transformer-based Graph Generation
Authors: Ahmad Khajenezhad, Seyed Ali Osia, Mahmood Karimian, Hamid Beigy
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Graph Generation

Transformers have become widely used in modern models for various tasks such as natural language processing and machine vision. This paper proposes Gransformer, an algorithm for generating graphs based on the Transformer. We extend a simple autoregressive Transformer encoder to exploit the structural information of the given graph through efficient modifications. The attention mechanism is modified to consider the presence or absence of edges between each pair of nodes. We also introduce a graph-based familiarity measure between node pairs that applies to both the attention and the positional encoding. This measure of familiarity is based on message passing algorithms and contains structural information about the graph. Furthermore, the proposed measure is autoregressive, which allows our mode to acquire the necessary conditional probabilities in a single forward pass. In the output layer, we also use a masked autoencoder for density estimation to efficiently model the sequential generation of dependent edges. Moreover, since we use BFS node orderings, we propose a technique to prevent the model from generating isolated nodes without connection to preceding nodes. We evaluate this method on two real-world datasets and compare it with other state-of-the-art autoregressive graph generation methods. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method performs comparatively to these methods, including recurrent models and graph convolutional networks.
Common Failure Modes of Subcluster-based Sampling in Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Models -- and a Deep-learning Solution
Authors: Vlad Winter, Or Dinari, Oren Freifeld
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00

The Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model (DPGMM) is often used to cluster data when the number of clusters is unknown. One main DPGMM inference paradigm relies on sampling. Here we consider a known state-of-art sampler (proposed by Chang and Fisher III (2013) and improved by Dinari et al. (2019)), analyze its failure modes, and show how to improve it, often drastically. Concretely, in that sampler, whenever a new cluster is formed it is augmented with two subclusters whose labels are initialized at random. Upon their evolution, the subclusters serve to propose a split of the parent cluster. We show that the random initialization is often problematic and hurts the otherwise-effective sampler. Specifically, we demonstrate that this initialization tends to lead to poor split proposals and/or too many iterations before a desired split is accepted. This slows convergence and can damage the clustering. As a remedy, we propose two drop-in-replacement options for the subcluster-initialization subroutine. The first is an intuitive heuristic while the second is based on deep learning. We show that the proposed approach yields better splits, which in turn translate to substantial improvements in performance, results, and stability.
FedGradNorm: Personalized Federated Gradient-Normalized Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Matin Mortaheb, Cemil Vahapoglu, Sennur Ulukus
Date: 2022-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a novel framework to learn several tasks simultaneously with a single shared network where each task has its distinct personalized header network for fine-tuning. MTL can be implemented in federated learning settings as well, in which tasks are distributed across clients. In federated settings, the statistical heterogeneity due to different task complexities and data heterogeneity due to non-iid nature of local datasets can both degrade the learning performance of the system. In addition, tasks can negatively affect each other's learning performance due to negative transference effects. To cope with these challenges, we propose FedGradNorm which uses a dynamic-weighting method to normalize gradient norms in order to balance learning speeds among different tasks. FedGradNorm improves the overall learning performance in a personalized federated learning setting. We provide convergence analysis for FedGradNorm by showing that it has an exponential convergence rate. We also conduct experiments on multi-task facial landmark (MTFL) and wireless communication system dataset (RadComDynamic). The experimental results show that our framework can achieve faster training performance compared to equal-weighting strategy. In addition to improving training speed, FedGradNorm also compensates for the imbalanced datasets among clients.
Image Compression and Actionable Intelligence With Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Matthew Ciolino
Date: 2022-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, object-detection, Object Detection

If a unit cannot receive intelligence from a source due to external factors, we consider them disadvantaged users. We categorize this as a preoccupied unit working on a low connectivity device on the edge. This case requires that we use a different approach to deliver intelligence, particularly satellite imagery information, than normally employed. To address this, we propose a survey of information reduction techniques to deliver the information from a satellite image in a smaller package. We investigate four techniques to aid in the reduction of delivered information: traditional image compression, neural network image compression, object detection image cutout, and image to caption. Each of these mechanisms have their benefits and tradeoffs when considered for a disadvantaged user.
LAMBDA: Covering the Solution Set of Black-Box Inequality by Search Space Quantization
Authors: Lihao Liu, Tianyue Feng, Xingyu Xing, Junyi Chen
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Quantization

Black-box functions are broadly used to model complex problems that provide no explicit information but the input and output. Despite existing studies of black-box function optimization, the solution set satisfying an inequality with a black-box function plays a more significant role than only one optimum in many practical situations. Covering as much as possible of the solution set through limited evaluations to the black-box objective function is defined as the Black-Box Coverage (BBC) problem in this paper. We formalized this problem in a sample-based search paradigm and constructed a coverage criterion with Confusion Matrix Analysis. Further, we propose LAMBDA (Latent-Action Monte-Carlo Beam Search with Density Adaption) to solve BBC problems. LAMBDA can focus around the solution set quickly by recursively partitioning the search space into accepted and rejected sub-spaces. Compared with La-MCTS, LAMBDA introduces density information to overcome the sampling bias of optimization and obtain more exploration. Benchmarking shows, LAMBDA achieved state-of-the-art performance among all baselines and was at most 33x faster to get 95% coverage than Random Search. Experiments also demonstrate that LAMBDA has a promising future in the verification of autonomous systems in virtual tests.
Efficient-VDVAE: Less is more
Authors: Louay Hazami, Rayhane Mama, Ragavan Thurairatnam
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Quantization

Hierarchical VAEs have emerged in recent years as a reliable option for maximum likelihood estimation. However, instability issues and demanding computational requirements have hindered research progress in the area. We present simple modifications to the Very Deep VAE to make it converge up to $2.6\times$ faster, save up to $20\times$ in memory load and improve stability during training. Despite these changes, our models achieve comparable or better negative log-likelihood performance than current state-of-the-art models on all $7$ commonly used image datasets we evaluated on. We also make an argument against using 5-bit benchmarks as a way to measure hierarchical VAE's performance due to undesirable biases caused by the 5-bit quantization. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate that roughly $3\%$ of the hierarchical VAE's latent space dimensions is sufficient to encode most of the image information, without loss of performance, opening up the doors to efficiently leverage the hierarchical VAEs' latent space in downstream tasks. We release our source code and models at https://github.com/Rayhane-mamah/Efficient-VDVAE .