pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sectioning of Biomedical Abstracts: A Sequence of Sequence Classification Task
Authors: Mehmet Efruz Karabulut, K. Vijay-Shanker
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Classification, Word Embeddings

Rapid growth of the biomedical literature has led to many advances in the biomedical text mining field. Among the vast amount of information, biomedical article abstracts are the easily accessible sources. However, the number of the structured abstracts, describing the rhetorical sections with one of Background, Objective, Method, Result and Conclusion categories is still not considerable. Exploration of valuable information in the biomedical abstracts can be expedited with the improvements in the sequential sentence classification task. Deep learning based models has great performance/potential in achieving significant results in this task. However, they can often be overly complex and overfit to specific data. In this project, we study a state-of-the-art deep learning model, which we called SSN-4 model here. We investigate different components of the SSN-4 model to study the trade-off between the performance and complexity. We explore how well this model generalizes to a new data set beyond Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) dataset. We address the question that whether word embeddings can be adjusted to the task to improve the performance. Furthermore, we develop a second model that addresses the confusion pairs in the first model. Results show that SSN-4 model does not appear to generalize well beyond RCT dataset.
What Makes the Story Forward? Inferring Commonsense Explanations as Prompts for Future Event Generation
Authors: Li Lin, Yixin Cao, Lifu Huang, Shu'ang Li, Xuming Hu, Lijie Wen, Jianmin Wang
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Generation

Prediction over event sequences is critical for many real-world applications in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. Future Event Generation (FEG) is a challenging task in event sequence prediction because it requires not only fluent text generation but also commonsense reasoning to maintain the logical coherence of the entire event story. In this paper, we propose a novel explainable FEG framework, Coep. It highlights and integrates two types of event knowledge, sequential knowledge of direct event-event relations and inferential knowledge that reflects the intermediate character psychology between events, such as intents, causes, reactions, which intrinsically pushes the story forward. To alleviate the knowledge forgetting issue, we design two modules, Im and Gm, for each type of knowledge, which are combined via prompt tuning. First, Im focuses on understanding inferential knowledge to generate commonsense explanations and provide a soft prompt vector for Gm. We also design a contrastive discriminator for better generalization ability. Second, Gm generates future events by modeling direct sequential knowledge with the guidance of Im. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our approach can generate more coherent, specific, and logical future events.
A Short Tutorial on The Weisfeiler-Lehman Test And Its Variants
Authors: Ningyuan Huang, Soledad Villar
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph neural networks are designed to learn functions on graphs. Typically, the relevant target functions are invariant with respect to actions by permutations. Therefore the design of some graph neural network architectures has been inspired by graph-isomorphism algorithms. The classical Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm (WL) -- a graph-isomorphism test based on color refinement -- became relevant to the study of graph neural networks. The WL test can be generalized to a hierarchy of higher-order tests, known as $k$-WL. This hierarchy has been used to characterize the expressive power of graph neural networks, and to inspire the design of graph neural network architectures. A few variants of the WL hierarchy appear in the literature. The goal of this short note is pedagogical and practical: We explain the differences between the WL and folklore-WL formulations, with pointers to existing discussions in the literature. We illuminate the differences between the formulations by visualizing an example.
How to Backdoor HyperNetwork in Personalized Federated Learning?
Authors: Phung Lai, NhatHai Phan, Issa Khalil, Abdallah Khreishah, Xintao Wu
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning, Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

This paper explores previously unknown backdoor risks in HyperNet-based personalized federated learning (HyperNetFL) through poisoning attacks. Based upon that, we propose a novel model transferring attack (called HNTroj), i.e., the first of its kind, to transfer a local backdoor infected model to all legitimate and personalized local models, which are generated by the HyperNetFL model, through consistent and effective malicious local gradients computed across all compromised clients in the whole training process. As a result, HNTroj reduces the number of compromised clients needed to successfully launch the attack without any observable signs of sudden shifts or degradation regarding model utility on legitimate data samples making our attack stealthy. To defend against HNTroj, we adapted several backdoor-resistant FL training algorithms into HyperNetFL. An extensive experiment that is carried out using several benchmark datasets shows that HNTroj significantly outperforms data poisoning and model replacement attacks and bypasses robust training algorithms even with modest numbers of compromised clients.
Differentially Private Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation
Authors: Xingyu Zhou
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Motivated by the wide adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world personalized services, where users' sensitive and private information needs to be protected, we study regret minimization in finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the constraints of differential privacy (DP). Compared to existing private RL algorithms that work only on tabular finite-state, finite-actions MDPs, we take the first step towards privacy-preserving learning in MDPs with large state and action spaces. Specifically, we consider MDPs with linear function approximation (in particular linear mixture MDPs) under the notion of joint differential privacy (JDP), where the RL agent is responsible for protecting users' sensitive data. We design two private RL algorithms that are based on value iteration and policy optimization, respectively, and show that they enjoy sub-linear regret performance while guaranteeing privacy protection. Moreover, the regret bounds are independent of the number of states, and scale at most logarithmically with the number of actions, making the algorithms suitable for privacy protection in nowadays large-scale personalized services. Our results are achieved via a general procedure for learning in linear mixture MDPs under changing regularizers, which not only generalizes previous results for non-private learning, but also serves as a building block for general private reinforcement learning.
System-Agnostic Meta-Learning for MDP-based Dynamic Scheduling via Descriptive Policy
Authors: Hyun-Suk Lee
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Meta-Learning, Scheduling

Dynamic scheduling is an important problem in applications from queuing to wireless networks. It addresses how to choose an item among multiple scheduling items in each timestep to achieve a long-term goal. Conventional approaches for dynamic scheduling find the optimal policy for a given specific system so that the policy from these approaches is usable only for the corresponding system characteristics. Hence, it is hard to use such approaches for a practical system in which system characteristics dynamically change. This paper proposes a novel policy structure for MDP-based dynamic scheduling, a descriptive policy, which has a system-agnostic capability to adapt to unseen system characteristics for an identical task (dynamic scheduling). To this end, the descriptive policy learns a system-agnostic scheduling principle--in a nutshell, "which condition of items should have a higher priority in scheduling". The scheduling principle can be applied to any system so that the descriptive policy learned in one system can be used for another system. Experiments with simple explanatory and realistic application scenarios demonstrate that it enables system-agnostic meta-learning with very little performance degradation compared with the system-specific conventional policies.
Socioeconomic disparities and COVID-19: the causal connections
Authors: Tannista Banerjee, Ayan Paul, Vishak Srikanth, Inga Strümke
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The analysis of causation is a challenging task that can be approached in various ways. With the increasing use of machine learning based models in computational socioeconomics, explaining these models while taking causal connections into account is a necessity. In this work, we advocate the use of an explanatory framework from cooperative game theory augmented with $do$ calculus, namely causal Shapley values. Using causal Shapley values, we analyze socioeconomic disparities that have a causal link to the spread of COVID-19 in the USA. We study several phases of the disease spread to show how the causal connections change over time. We perform a causal analysis using random effects models and discuss the correspondence between the two methods to verify our results. We show the distinct advantages a non-linear machine learning models have over linear models when performing a multivariate analysis, especially since the machine learning models can map out non-linear correlations in the data. In addition, the causal Shapley values allow for including the causal structure in the variable importance computed for the machine learning model.
Adversarial vulnerability of powerful near out-of-distribution detection
Authors: Stanislav Fort
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

There has been a significant progress in detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs in neural networks recently, primarily due to the use of large models pretrained on large datasets, and an emerging use of multi-modality. We show a severe adversarial vulnerability of even the strongest current OOD detection techniques. With a small, targeted perturbation to the input pixels, we can change the image assignment from an in-distribution to an out-distribution, and vice versa, easily. In particular, we demonstrate severe adversarial vulnerability on the challenging near OOD CIFAR-100 vs CIFAR-10 task, as well as on the far OOD CIFAR-100 vs SVHN. We study the adversarial robustness of several post-processing techniques, including the simple baseline of Maximum of Softmax Probabilities (MSP), the Mahalanobis distance, and the newly proposed \textit{Relative} Mahalanobis distance. By comparing the loss of OOD detection performance at various perturbation strengths, we demonstrate the beneficial effect of using ensembles of OOD detectors, and the use of the \textit{Relative} Mahalanobis distance over other post-processing methods. In addition, we show that even strong zero-shot OOD detection using CLIP and multi-modality suffers from a severe lack of adversarial robustness as well. Our code is available at https://github.com/stanislavfort/adversaries_to_OOD_detection
Knock Detection in Combustion Engine Time Series Using a Theory-Guided 1D Convolutional Neural Network Approach
Authors: Andreas B. Ofner, Achilles Kefalas, Stefan Posch, Bernhard C. Geiger
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

This paper introduces a method for the detection of knock occurrences in an internal combustion engine (ICE) using a 1D convolutional neural network trained on in-cylinder pressure data. The model architecture was based on considerations regarding the expected frequency characteristics of knocking combustion. To aid the feature extraction, all cycles were reduced to 60{\deg} CA long windows, with no further processing applied to the pressure traces. The neural networks were trained exclusively on in-cylinder pressure traces from multiple conditions and labels provided by human experts. The best-performing model architecture achieves an accuracy of above 92% on all test sets in a tenfold cross-validation when distinguishing between knocking and non-knocking cycles. In a multi-class problem where each cycle was labeled by the number of experts who rated it as knocking, 78% of cycles were labeled perfectly, while 90% of cycles were classified at most one class from ground truth. They thus considerably outperform the broadly applied MAPO (Maximum Amplitude of Pressure Oscillation) detection method, as well as other references reconstructed from previous works. Our analysis indicates that the neural network learned physically meaningful features connected to engine-characteristic resonance frequencies, thus verifying the intended theory-guided data science approach. Deeper performance investigation further shows remarkable generalization ability to unseen operating points. In addition, the model proved to classify knocking cycles in unseen engines with increased accuracy of 89% after adapting to their features via training on a small number of exclusively non-knocking cycles. The algorithm takes below 1 ms (on CPU) to classify individual cycles, effectively making it suitable for real-time engine control.
On the Equivalence of Causal Models: A Category-Theoretic Approach
Authors: Jun Otsuka, Hayato Saigo
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00

We develop a category-theoretic criterion for determining the equivalence of causal models having different but homomorphic directed acyclic graphs over discrete variables. Following Jacobs et al. (2019), we define a causal model as a probabilistic interpretation of a causal string diagram, i.e., a functor from the ``syntactic'' category $\textsf{Syn}_G$ of graph $G$ to the category $\textsf{Stoch}$ of finite sets and stochastic matrices. The equivalence of causal models is then defined in terms of a natural transformation or isomorphism between two such functors, which we call a $\Phi$-abstraction and $\Phi$-equivalence, respectively. It is shown that when one model is a $\Phi$-abstraction of another, the intervention calculus of the former can be consistently translated into that of the latter. We also identify the condition under which a model accommodates a $\Phi$-abstraction, when transformations are deterministic.
ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization
Authors: Hanwei Xu, Yujun Chen, Yulun Du, Nan Shao, Yanggang Wang, Haiyu Li, Zhilin Yang
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-shot Generalization, Zero-Shot Learning

We propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization, focusing on task scaling and zero-shot prompting. While previous models are trained on only a few dozen tasks, we scale to 1,000 tasks for the first time using real-world data. This leads to a crucial discovery that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling; i.e., the model size has little impact on performance with an extremely large number of tasks. Our results show that task scaling can substantially improve training efficiency by 30 times in FLOPs. Moreover, we present a prompting method that incorporates a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for unseen tasks, along with a few other improvements. Empirically, ZeroPrompt substantially improves both the efficiency and the performance of zero-shot learning across a variety of academic and production datasets.
Continual Learning for CTR Prediction: A Hybrid Approach
Authors: Ke Hu, Yi Qi, Jianqiang Huang, Jia Cheng, Jun Lei
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Continual Learning, Prediction

Click-through rate(CTR) prediction is a core task in cost-per-click(CPC) advertising systems and has been studied extensively by machine learning practitioners. While many existing methods have been successfully deployed in practice, most of them are built upon i.i.d.(independent and identically distributed) assumption, ignoring that the click data used for training and inference is collected through time and is intrinsically non-stationary and drifting. This mismatch will inevitably lead to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, we formulate CTR prediction as a continual learning task and propose COLF, a hybrid COntinual Learning Framework for CTR prediction, which has a memory-based modular architecture that is designed to adapt, learn and give predictions continuously when faced with non-stationary drifting click data streams. Married with a memory population method that explicitly controls the discrepancy between memory and target data, COLF is able to gain positive knowledge from its historical experience and makes improved CTR predictions. Empirical evaluations on click log collected from a major shopping app in China demonstrate our method's superiority over existing methods. Additionally, we have deployed our method online and observed significant CTR and revenue improvement, which further demonstrates our method's efficacy.
Temperature Field Inversion of Heat-Source Systems via Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Authors: Xu Liu, Wei Peng, Zhiqiang Gong, Weien Zhou, Wen Yao
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00

Temperature field inversion of heat-source systems (TFI-HSS) with limited observations is essential to monitor the system health. Although some methods such as interpolation have been proposed to solve TFI-HSS, those existing methods ignore correlations between data constraints and physics constraints, causing the low precision. In this work, we develop a physics-informed neural network-based temperature field inversion (PINN-TFI) method to solve the TFI-HSS task and a coefficient matrix condition number based position selection of observations (CMCN-PSO) method to select optima positions of noise observations. For the TFI-HSS task, the PINN-TFI method encodes constrain terms into the loss function, thus the task is transformed into an optimization problem of minimizing the loss function. In addition, we have found that noise observations significantly affect reconstruction performances of the PINN-TFI method. To alleviate the effect of noise observations, the CMCN-PSO method is proposed to find optimal positions, where the condition number of observations is used to evaluate positions. The results demonstrate that the PINN-TFI method can significantly improve prediction precisions and the CMCN-PSO method can find good positions to acquire a more robust temperature field.
Hardware-Efficient Deconvolution-Based GAN for Edge Computing
Authors: Azzam Alhussain, Mingjie Lin
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, High-Level Synthesis

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are cutting-edge algorithms for generating new data samples based on the learned data distribution. However, its performance comes at a significant cost in terms of computation and memory requirements. In this paper, we proposed an HW/SW co-design approach for training quantized deconvolution GAN (QDCGAN) implemented on FPGA using a scalable streaming dataflow architecture capable of achieving higher throughput versus resource utilization trade-off. The developed accelerator is based on an efficient deconvolution engine that offers high parallelism with respect to scaling factors for GAN-based edge computing. Furthermore, various precisions, datasets, and network scalability were analyzed for low-power inference on resource-constrained platforms. Lastly, an end-to-end open-source framework is provided for training, implementation, state-space exploration, and scaling the inference using Vivado high-level synthesis for Xilinx SoC-FPGAs, and a comparison testbed with Jetson Nano.
Syntax-based data augmentation for Hungarian-English machine translation
Authors: Attila Nagy, Patrick Nanys, Balázs Frey Konrád, Bence Bial, Judit Ács
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, Translation

We train Transformer-based neural machine translation models for Hungarian-English and English-Hungarian using the Hunglish2 corpus. Our best models achieve a BLEU score of 40.0 on HungarianEnglish and 33.4 on English-Hungarian. Furthermore, we present results on an ongoing work about syntax-based augmentation for neural machine translation. Both our code and models are publicly available.
Deep Graph Convolutional Network and LSTM based approach for predicting drug-target binding affinity
Authors: Shrimon Mukherjee, Madhusudan Ghosh, Partha Basuchowdhuri
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Development of new drugs is an expensive and time-consuming process. Due to the world-wide SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, it is essential that new drugs for SARS-CoV-2 are developed as soon as possible. Drug repurposing techniques can reduce the time span needed to develop new drugs by probing the list of existing FDA-approved drugs and their properties to reuse them for combating the new disease. We propose a novel architecture DeepGLSTM, which is a Graph Convolutional network and LSTM based method that predicts binding affinity values between the FDA-approved drugs and the viral proteins of SARS-CoV-2. Our proposed model has been trained on Davis, KIBA (Kinase Inhibitor Bioactivity), DTC (Drug Target Commons), Metz, ToxCast and STITCH datasets. We use our novel architecture to predict a Combined Score (calculated using Davis and KIBA score) of 2,304 FDA-approved drugs against 5 viral proteins. On the basis of the Combined Score, we prepare a list of the top-18 drugs with the highest binding affinity for 5 viral proteins present in SARS-CoV-2. Subsequently, this list may be used for the creation of new useful drugs.
High-Level Synthesis Performance Prediction using GNNs: Benchmarking, Modeling, and Advancing
Authors: Nan Wu, Hang Yang, Yuan Xie, Pan Li, Cong Hao
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Feature Engineering, High-Level Synthesis, Prediction, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Agile hardware development requires fast and accurate circuit quality evaluation from early design stages. Existing work of high-level synthesis (HLS) performance prediction usually needs extensive feature engineering after the synthesis process. To expedite circuit evaluation from as earlier design stage as possible, we propose a rapid and accurate performance modeling, exploiting the representation power of graph neural networks (GNNs) by representing C/C++ programs as graphs. The contribution of this work is three-fold. First, we build a standard benchmark containing 40k C synthesizable programs, which includes both synthetic programs and three sets of real-world HLS benchmarks. Each program is implemented on FPGA to generate ground-truth performance metrics. Second, we formally formulate the HLS performance prediction problem on graphs, and propose multiple modeling strategies with GNNs that leverage different trade-offs between prediction timeliness (early/late prediction) and accuracy. Third, we further propose a novel hierarchical GNN that does not sacrifice timeliness but largely improves prediction accuracy, significantly outperforming HLS tools. We apply extensive evaluations for both synthetic and unseen real-case programs; our proposed predictor largely outperforms HLS by up to 40X and excels existing predictors by 2X to 5X in terms of resource usage and timing prediction.