pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TS-MULE: Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations for Time Series Forecast Models
Authors: Udo Schlegel, Duy Vo Lam, Daniel A. Keim, Daniel Seebacher
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is a demanding task ranging from weather to failure forecasting with black-box models achieving state-of-the-art performances. However, understanding and debugging are not guaranteed. We propose TS-MULE, a local surrogate model explanation method specialized for time series extending the LIME approach. Our extended LIME works with various ways to segment and perturb the time series data. In our extension, we present six sampling segmentation approaches for time series to improve the quality of surrogate attributions and demonstrate their performances on three deep learning model architectures and three common multivariate time series datasets.
Coordinated Random Access for Industrial IoT With Correlated Traffic By Reinforcement-Learning
Authors: Alberto Rech, Stefano Tomasin
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a coordinated random access scheme for industrial internet-of-things (IIoT) scenarios, with machine-type devices (MTDs) generating sporadic correlated traffic. This occurs, e.g., when external events trigger data generation at multiple MTDs simultaneously. Time is divided into frames, each split into slots and each MTD randomly selects one slot for (re)transmission, with probability density functions (PDFs) specific of both the MTD and the number of the current retransmission. PDFs are locally optimized to minimize the probability of packet collision. The optimization problem is modeled as a repeated Markov game with incomplete information, and the linear reward-inaction algorithm is used at each MTD, which provably converges to a deterministic (suboptimal) slot assignment. We compare our solution with both the slotted ALOHA and the min-max pairwise correlation random access schemes, showing that our approach achieves a higher network throughput with moderate traffic intensity.
From Known to Unknown: Knowledge-guided Transformer for Time-Series Sales Forecasting in Alibaba
Authors: Xinyuan Qi, Kai Hou, Tong Liu, Zhongzhong Yu, Sihao Hu, Wenwu Ou
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting (TSF) is fundamentally required in many real-world applications, such as electricity consumption planning and sales forecasting. In e-commerce, accurate time-series sales forecasting (TSSF) can significantly increase economic benefits. TSSF in e-commerce aims to predict future sales of millions of products. The trend and seasonality of products vary a lot, and the promotion activity heavily influences sales. Besides the above difficulties, we can know some future knowledge in advance except for the historical statistics. Such future knowledge may reflect the influence of the future promotion activity on current sales and help achieve better accuracy. However, most existing TSF methods only predict the future based on historical information. In this work, we make up for the omissions of future knowledge. Except for introducing future knowledge for prediction, we propose Aliformer based on the bidirectional Transformer, which can utilize the historical information, current factor, and future knowledge to predict future sales. Specifically, we design a knowledge-guided self-attention layer that uses known knowledge's consistency to guide the transmission of timing information. And the future-emphasized training strategy is proposed to make the model focus more on the utilization of future knowledge. Extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets and one proposed large-scale industrial dataset from Tmall demonstrate that Aliformer can perform much better than state-of-the-art TSF methods. Aliformer has been deployed for goods selection on Tmall Industry Tablework, and the dataset will be released upon approval.
An Interpretable Framework for Drug-Target Interaction with Gated Cross Attention
Authors: Yeachan Kim, Bonggun Shin
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Prediction

In silico prediction of drug-target interactions (DTI) is significant for drug discovery because it can largely reduce timelines and costs in the drug development process. Specifically, deep learning-based DTI approaches have been shown promising results in terms of accuracy and low cost for the prediction. However, they pay little attention to the interpretability of their prediction results and feature-level interactions between a drug and a target. In this study, we propose a novel interpretable framework that can provide reasonable cues for the interaction sites. To this end, we elaborately design a gated cross-attention mechanism that crossly attends drug and target features by constructing explicit interactions between these features. The gating function in the method enables neural models to focus on salient regions over entire sequences of drugs and proteins, and the byproduct from the function, which is the attention map, could serve as interpretable factors. The experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed method in two DTI datasets. Additionally, we show that gated cross-attention can sensitively react to the mutation, and this result could provide insights into the identification of novel drugs targeting mutant proteins.
Accurate, Interpretable, and Fast Animation: An Iterative, Sparse, and Nonconvex Approach
Authors: Stevo Rackovic, Claudia Soares, Dusan Jakovetic, Zoranka Desnica
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Animation

Digital human animation relies on high-quality 3D models of the human face: rigs. A face rig must be accurate and, at the same time, fast to compute. One of the most common rigging models is the blendshape model. We propose a novel algorithm for solving the nonconvex inverse rig problem in facial animation. Our approach is model-based, but in contrast with previous model-based approaches, we use a quadratic instead of the linear approximation to the higher order rig model. This increases the accuracy of the solution by 8 percent on average and, confirmed by the empirical results, increases the sparsity of the resulting parameter vector -- an important feature for interpretability by animation artists. The proposed solution is based on a Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm, applied to a nonconvex constrained problem with sparsity regularization. In order to reduce the complexity of the iterates, a paradigm of Majorization Minimization (MM) is further invoked, which leads to an easy to solve problem that is separable in the parameters at each algorithm iteration. The algorithm is evaluated on a number of animation datasets, proprietary and open-source, and the results indicate the superiority of our method compared to the standard approach based on the linear rig approximation. Although our algorithm targets the specific problem, it might have additional signal processing applications.
Comfetch: Federated Learning of Large Networks on Constrained Clients via Sketching
Authors: Tahseen Rabbani, Brandon Feng, Marco Bornstein, Kyle Rui Sang, Yifan Yang, Arjun Rajkumar, Amitabh Varshney, Furong Huang
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a popular paradigm for private and collaborative model training on the edge. In centralized FL, the parameters of a global architecture (such as a deep neural network) are maintained and distributed by a central server/controller to clients who transmit model updates (gradients) back to the server based on local optimization. While many efforts have focused on reducing the communication complexity of gradient transmission, the vast majority of compression-based algorithms assume that each participating client is able to download and train the current and full set of parameters, which may not be a practical assumption depending on the resource constraints of smaller clients such as mobile devices. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective novel algorithm, Comfetch, which allows clients to train large networks using reduced representations of the global architecture via the count sketch, which reduces local computational and memory costs along with bi-directional communication complexity. We provide a nonconvex convergence guarantee and experimentally demonstrate that it is possible to learn large models, such as a deep convolutional network, through federated training on their sketched counterparts. The resulting global models exhibit competitive test accuracy over CIFAR10/100 classification when compared against un-compressed model training.
Achieving Model Fairness in Vertical Federated Learning
Authors: Changxin Liu, Zhenan Fan, Zirui Zhou, Yang Shi, Jian Pei, Lingyang Chu, Yong Zhang
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, Federated Learning, model, Privacy Preserving, Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning (VFL) has attracted greater and greater interest since it enables multiple parties possessing non-overlapping features to strengthen their machine learning models without disclosing their private data and model parameters. Similar to other machine learning algorithms, VFL faces demands and challenges of fairness, i.e., the learned model may be unfairly discriminatory over some groups with sensitive attributes. To tackle this problem, we propose a fair VFL framework in this work. First, we systematically formulate the problem of training fair models in VFL, where the learning task is modelled as a constrained optimization problem. To solve it in a federated and privacy-preserving manner, we consider the equivalent dual form of the problem and develop an asynchronous gradient coordinate-descent ascent algorithm, where some active data parties perform multiple parallelized local updates per communication round to effectively reduce the number of communication rounds. The messages that the server sends to passive parties are deliberately designed such that the information necessary for local updates is released without intruding on the privacy of data and sensitive attributes. We rigorously study the convergence of the algorithm when applied to general nonconvex-concave min-max problems. We prove that the algorithm finds a $\delta$-stationary point of the dual objective in $\mathcal{O}(\delta^{-4})$ communication rounds under mild conditions. Finally, the extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in training fair models.
Dropout's Dream Land: Generalization from Learned Simulators to Reality
Authors: Zac Wellmer, James T. Kwok
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00

A World Model is a generative model used to simulate an environment. World Models have proven capable of learning spatial and temporal representations of Reinforcement Learning environments. In some cases, a World Model offers an agent the opportunity to learn entirely inside of its own dream environment. In this work we explore improving the generalization capabilities from dream environments to real environments (Dream2Real). We present a general approach to improve a controller's ability to transfer from a neural network dream environment to reality at little additional cost. These improvements are gained by drawing on inspiration from Domain Randomization, where the basic idea is to randomize as much of a simulator as possible without fundamentally changing the task at hand. Generally, Domain Randomization assumes access to a pre-built simulator with configurable parameters but oftentimes this is not available. By training the World Model using dropout, the dream environment is capable of creating a nearly infinite number of different dream environments. Previous use cases of dropout either do not use dropout at inference time or averages the predictions generated by multiple sampled masks (Monte-Carlo Dropout). Dropout's Dream Land leverages each unique mask to create a diverse set of dream environments. Our experimental results show that Dropout's Dream Land is an effective technique to bridge the reality gap between dream environments and reality. Furthermore, we additionally perform an extensive set of ablation studies.
Accelerating Offline Reinforcement Learning Application in Real-Time Bidding and Recommendation: Potential Use of Simulation
Authors: Haruka Kiyohara, Kosuke Kawakami, Yuta Saito
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Offline RL, Off-policy evaluation, Position, Recommendation Systems, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

In recommender systems (RecSys) and real-time bidding (RTB) for online advertisements, we often try to optimize sequential decision making using bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. In these applications, offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) and off-policy evaluation (OPE) are beneficial because they enable safe policy optimization using only logged data without any risky online interaction. In this position paper, we explore the potential of using simulation to accelerate practical research of offline RL and OPE, particularly in RecSys and RTB. Specifically, we discuss how simulation can help us conduct empirical research of offline RL and OPE. We take a position to argue that we should effectively use simulations in the empirical research of offline RL and OPE. To refute the counterclaim that experiments using only real-world data are preferable, we first point out the underlying risks and reproducibility issue in real-world experiments. Then, we describe how these issues can be addressed by using simulations. Moreover, we show how to incorporate the benefits of both real-world and simulation-based experiments to defend our position. Finally, we also present an open challenge to further facilitate practical research of offline RL and OPE in RecSys and RTB, with respect to public simulation platforms. As a possible solution for the issue, we show our ongoing open source project and its potential use case. We believe that building and utilizing simulation-based evaluation platforms for offline RL and OPE will be of great interest and relevance for the RecSys and RTB community.
Hard to Forget: Poisoning Attacks on Certified Machine Unlearning
Authors: Neil G. Marchant, Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein, Scott Alfeld
Date: 2021-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Unlearning

The right to erasure requires removal of a user's information from data held by organizations, with rigorous interpretations extending to downstream products such as learned models. Retraining from scratch with the particular user's data omitted fully removes its influence on the resulting model, but comes with a high computational cost. Machine "unlearning" mitigates the cost incurred by full retraining: instead, models are updated incrementally, possibly only requiring retraining when approximation errors accumulate. Rapid progress has been made towards privacy guarantees on the indistinguishability of unlearned and retrained models, but current formalisms do not place practical bounds on computation. In this paper we demonstrate how an attacker can exploit this oversight, highlighting a novel attack surface introduced by machine unlearning. We consider an attacker aiming to increase the computational cost of data removal. We derive and empirically investigate a poisoning attack on certified machine unlearning where strategically designed training data triggers complete retraining when removed.
Assessments of epistemic uncertainty using Gaussian stochastic weight averaging for fluid-flow regression
Authors: Masaki Morimoto, Kai Fukami, Romit Maulik, Ricardo Vinuesa, Koji Fukagata
Date: 2021-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, State Estimation, Uncertainty Quantification

We use Gaussian stochastic weight averaging (SWAG) to assess the model-form uncertainty associated with neural-network-based function approximation relevant to fluid flows. SWAG approximates a posterior Gaussian distribution of each weight, given training data, and a constant learning rate. Having access to this distribution, it is able to create multiple models with various combinations of sampled weights, which can be used to obtain ensemble predictions. The average of such an ensemble can be regarded as the `mean estimation', whereas its standard deviation can be used to construct `confidence intervals', which enable us to perform uncertainty quantification (UQ) with regard to the training process of neural networks. We utilize representative neural-network-based function approximation tasks for the following cases: (i) a two-dimensional circular-cylinder wake; (ii) the DayMET dataset (maximum daily temperature in North America); (iii) a three-dimensional square-cylinder wake; and (iv) urban flow, to assess the generalizability of the present idea for a wide range of complex datasets. SWAG-based UQ can be applied regardless of the network architecture, and therefore, we demonstrate the applicability of the method for two types of neural networks: (i) global field reconstruction from sparse sensors by combining convolutional neural network (CNN) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP); and (ii) far-field state estimation from sectional data with two-dimensional CNN. We find that SWAG can obtain physically-interpretable confidence-interval estimates from the perspective of model-form uncertainty. This capability supports its use for a wide range of problems in science and engineering.
Strategic Ranking
Authors: Lydia T. Liu, Nikhil Garg, Christian Borgs
Date: 2021-09-16 00:00:00

Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the algorithm design. Motivated by constrained allocation settings such as college admissions, we introduce strategic ranking, in which the (designed) individual reward depends on an applicant's post-effort rank in a measurement of interest. Our results illustrate how competition among applicants affects the resulting equilibria and model insights. We analyze how various ranking reward designs, belonging to a family of step functions, trade off applicant, school, and societal utility, as well as how ranking design counters inequities arising from disparate access to resources. In particular, we find that randomization in the reward design can mitigate two measures of disparate impact, welfare gap and access.
Subtle Data Crimes: Naively training machine learning algorithms could lead to overly-optimistic results
Authors: Efrat Shimron, Jonathan I. Tamir, Ke Wang, Michael Lustig
Date: 2021-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Dictionary Learning, MRI Reconstruction

While open databases are an important resource in the Deep Learning (DL) era, they are sometimes used "off-label": data published for one task are used for training algorithms for a different one. This work aims to highlight that in some cases, this common practice may lead to biased, overly-optimistic results. We demonstrate this phenomenon for inverse problem solvers and show how their biased performance stems from hidden data preprocessing pipelines. We describe two preprocessing pipelines typical of open-access databases and study their effects on three well-established algorithms developed for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction: Compressed Sensing (CS), Dictionary Learning (DictL), and DL. In this large-scale study we performed extensive computations. Our results demonstrate that the CS, DictL and DL algorithms yield systematically biased results when naively trained on seemingly-appropriate data: the Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) improves consistently with the preprocessing extent, showing an artificial increase of 25%-48% in some cases. Since this phenomenon is generally unknown, biased results are sometimes published as state-of-the-art; we refer to that as subtle data crimes. This work hence raises a red flag regarding naive off-label usage of Big Data and reveals the vulnerability of modern inverse problem solvers to the resulting bias.
RAPID-RL: A Reconfigurable Architecture with Preemptive-Exits for Efficient Deep-Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Adarsh Kumar Kosta, Malik Aqeel Anwar, Priyadarshini Panda, Arijit Raychowdhury, Kaushik Roy
Date: 2021-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Drone navigation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Present-day Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems show great promise towards building intelligent agents surpassing human-level performance. However, the computational complexity associated with the underlying deep neural networks (DNNs) leads to power-hungry implementations. This makes deep RL systems unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this challenge, we propose a reconfigurable architecture with preemptive exits for efficient deep RL (RAPID-RL). RAPID-RL enables conditional activation of DNN layers based on the difficulty level of inputs. This allows to dynamically adjust the compute effort during inference while maintaining competitive performance. We achieve this by augmenting a deep Q-network (DQN) with side-branches capable of generating intermediate predictions along with an associated confidence score. We also propose a novel training methodology for learning the actions and branch confidence scores in a dynamic RL setting. Our experiments evaluate the proposed framework for Atari 2600 gaming tasks and a realistic Drone navigation task on an open-source drone simulator (PEDRA). We show that RAPID-RL incurs 0.34x (0.25x) number of operations (OPS) while maintaining performance above 0.88x (0.91x) on Atari (Drone navigation) tasks, compared to a baseline-DQN without any side-branches. The reduction in OPS leads to fast and efficient inference, proving to be highly beneficial for the resource-constrained edge where making quick decisions with minimal compute is essential.
Policy Choice and Best Arm Identification: Asymptotic Analysis of Exploration Sampling
Authors: Kaito Ariu, Masahiro Kato, Junpei Komiyama, Kenichiro McAlinn, Chao Qin
Date: 2021-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Experimental Design

We consider the "policy choice" problem -- otherwise known as best arm identification in the bandit literature -- proposed by Kasy and Sautmann (2021) for adaptive experimental design. Theorem 1 of Kasy and Sautmann (2021) provides three asymptotic results that give theoretical guarantees for exploration sampling developed for this setting. We first show that the proof of Theorem 1 (1) has technical issues, and the proof and statement of Theorem 1 (2) are incorrect. We then show, through a counterexample, that Theorem 1 (3) is false. For the former two, we correct the statements and provide rigorous proofs. For Theorem 1 (3), we propose an alternative objective function, which we call posterior weighted policy regret, and derive the asymptotic optimality of exploration sampling.