pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Benefit of the Doubt: Uncertainty Aware Sensing for Edge Computing Platforms
Authors: Lorena Qendro, Jagmohan Chauhan, Alberto Gil C. P. Ramos, Cecilia Mascolo
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Neural networks (NNs) lack measures of "reliability" estimation that would enable reasoning over their predictions. Despite the vital importance, especially in areas of human well-being and health, state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation techniques are computationally expensive when applied to resource-constrained devices. We propose an efficient framework for predictive uncertainty estimation in NNs deployed on embedded edge systems with no need for fine-tuning or re-training strategies. To meet the energy and latency requirements of these embedded platforms the framework is built from the ground up to provide predictive uncertainty based only on one forward pass and a negligible amount of additional matrix multiplications with theoretically proven correctness. Our aim is to enable already trained deep learning models to generate uncertainty estimates on resource-limited devices at inference time focusing on classification tasks. This framework is founded on theoretical developments casting dropout training as approximate inference in Bayesian NNs. Our layerwise distribution approximation to the convolution layer cascades through the network, providing uncertainty estimates in one single run which ensures minimal overhead, especially compared with uncertainty techniques that require multiple forwards passes and an equal linear rise in energy and latency requirements making them unsuitable in practice. We demonstrate that it yields better performance and flexibility over previous work based on multilayer perceptrons to obtain uncertainty estimates. Our evaluation with mobile applications datasets shows that our approach not only obtains robust and accurate uncertainty estimations but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of systems performance, reducing energy consumption (up to 28x), keeping the memory overhead at a minimum while still improving accuracy (up to 16%).
Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Approaches to Analyze and Predict the Covid-19 Outbreak
Authors: Muhammad Naeem, Jian Yu, Muhammad Aamir, Sajjad Ahmad Khan, Olayinka Adeleye, Zardad Khan
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Background. Forecasting the time of forthcoming pandemic reduces the impact of diseases by taking precautionary steps such as public health messaging and raising the consciousness of doctors. With the continuous and rapid increase in the cumulative incidence of COVID-19, statistical and outbreak prediction models including various machine learning (ML) models are being used by the research community to track and predict the trend of the epidemic, and also in developing appropriate strategies to combat and manage its spread. Methods. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of various ML approaches including Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor and Artificial Neural Network in predicting the COVID-19 outbreak in the epidemiological domain. We first apply the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method to identify and model the short and long-run relationships of the time-series COVID-19 datasets. That is, we determine the lags between a response variable and its respective explanatory time series variables as independent variables. Then, the resulting significant variables concerning their lags are used in the regression model selected by the ARDL for predicting and forecasting the trend of the epidemic. Results. Statistical measures i.e., Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) are used for model accuracy. The values of MAPE for the best selected models for confirmed, recovered and deaths cases are 0.407, 0.094 and 0.124 respectively, which falls under the category of highly accurate forecasts. In addition, we computed fifteen days ahead forecast for the daily deaths, recover, and confirm patients and the cases fluctuated across time in all aspects. Besides, the results reveal the advantages of ML algorithms for supporting decision making of evolving short term policies.
Investigating Trade-offs in Utility, Fairness and Differential Privacy in Neural Networks
Authors: Marlotte Pannekoek, Giacomo Spigler
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

To enable an ethical and legal use of machine learning algorithms, they must both be fair and protect the privacy of those whose data are being used. However, implementing privacy and fairness constraints might come at the cost of utility (Jayaraman & Evans, 2019; Gong et al., 2020). This paper investigates the privacy-utility-fairness trade-off in neural networks by comparing a Simple (S-NN), a Fair (F-NN), a Differentially Private (DP-NN), and a Differentially Private and Fair Neural Network (DPF-NN) to evaluate differences in performance on metrics for privacy (epsilon, delta), fairness (risk difference), and utility (accuracy). In the scenario with the highest considered privacy guarantees (epsilon = 0.1, delta = 0.00001), the DPF-NN was found to achieve better risk difference than all the other neural networks with only a marginally lower accuracy than the S-NN and DP-NN. This model is considered fair as it achieved a risk difference below the strict (0.05) and lenient (0.1) thresholds. However, while the accuracy of the proposed model improved on previous work from Xu, Yuan and Wu (2019), the risk difference was found to be worse.
Tackling Virtual and Real Concept Drifts: An Adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model
Authors: Gustavo Oliveira, Leandro Minku, Adriano Oliveira
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00

Real-world applications have been dealing with large amounts of data that arrive over time and generally present changes in their underlying joint probability distribution, i.e., concept drift. Concept drift can be subdivided into two types: virtual drift, which affects the unconditional probability distribution p(x), and real drift, which affects the conditional probability distribution p(y|x). Existing works focuses on real drift. However, strategies to cope with real drift may not be the best suited for dealing with virtual drift, since the real class boundaries remain unchanged. We provide the first in depth analysis of the differences between the impact of virtual and real drifts on classifiers' suitability. We propose an approach to handle both drifts called On-line Gaussian Mixture Model With Noise Filter For Handling Virtual and Real Concept Drifts (OGMMF-VRD). Experiments with 7 synthetic and 3 real-world datasets show that OGMMF-VRD obtained the best results in terms of average accuracy, G-mean and runtime compared to existing approaches. Moreover, its accuracy over time suffered less performance degradation in the presence of drifts.
Transparent FPGA Acceleration with TensorFlow
Authors: Simon Pfenning, Philipp Holzinger, Marc Reichenbach
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00

Today, artificial neural networks are one of the major innovators pushing the progress of machine learning. This has particularly affected the development of neural network accelerating hardware. However, since most of these architectures require specialized toolchains, there is a certain amount of additional effort for developers each time they want to make use of a new deep learning accelerator. Furthermore the flexibility of the device is bound to the architecture itself, as well as to the functionality of the runtime environment. In this paper we propose a toolflow using TensorFlow as frontend, thus offering developers the opportunity of using a familiar environment. On the backend we use an FPGA, which is addressable via an HSA runtime environment. In this way we are able to hide the complexity of controlling new hardware from the user, while at the same time maintaining a high amount of flexibility. This can be achieved by our HSA toolflow, since the hardware is not statically configured with the structure of the network. Instead, it can be dynamically reconfigured during runtime with the respective kernels executed by the network and simultaneously from other sources e.g. OpenCL/OpenMP.
Reinforcement Learning For Constraint Satisfaction Game Agents (15-Puzzle, Minesweeper, 2048, and Sudoku)
Authors: Anav Mehta
Date: 2021-02-09 00:00:00

In recent years, reinforcement learning has seen interest because of deep Q-Learning, where the model is a convolutional neural network. Deep Q-Learning has shown promising results in games such as Atari and AlphaGo. Instead of learning the entire Q-table, it learns an estimate of the Q function that determines a state's policy action. We use Q-Learning and deep Q-learning, to learn control policies of four constraint satisfaction games (15-Puzzle, Minesweeper, 2048, and Sudoku). 15-Puzzle is a sliding permutation puzzle and provides a challenge in addressing its large state space. Minesweeper and Sudoku involve partially observable states and guessing. 2048 is also a sliding puzzle but allows for easier state representation (compared to 15-Puzzle) and uses interesting reward shaping to solve the game. These games offer unique insights into the potential and limits of reinforcement learning. The Q agent is trained with no rules of the game, with only the reward corresponding to each state's action. Our unique contribution is in choosing the reward structure, state representation, and formulation of the deep neural network. For low shuffle, 15-Puzzle, achieves a 100% win rate, the medium and high shuffle achieve about 43% and 22% win rates respectively. On a standard 16x16 Minesweeper board, both low and high-density boards achieve close to 45% win rate, whereas medium density boards have a low win rate of 15%. For 2048, the 1024 win rate was achieved with significant ease (100%) with high win rates for 2048, 4096, 8192 and 16384 as 40%, 0.05%, 0.01% and 0.004% , respectively. The easy Sudoku games had a win rate of 7%, while medium and hard games had 2.1% and 1.2% win rates, respectively. This paper explores the environment complexity and behavior of a subset of constraint games using reward structures which can get us closer to understanding how humans learn.
Feature Selection for Multivariate Time Series via Network Pruning
Authors: Kang Gu, Soroush Vosoughi, Temiloluwa Prioleau
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Network Pruning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In recent years, there has been an ever increasing amount of multivariate time series (MTS) data in various domains, typically generated by a large family of sensors such as wearable devices. This has led to the development of novel learning methods on MTS data, with deep learning models dominating the most recent advancements. Prior literature has primarily focused on designing new network architectures for modeling temporal dependencies within MTS. However, a less studied challenge is associated with high dimensionality of MTS data. In this paper, we propose a novel neural component, namely Neural Feature Selector (NFS), as an end-2-end solution for feature selection in MTS data. Specifically, NFS is based on decomposed convolution design and includes two modules: firstly each feature stream (a stream corresponds to an univariate series of MTS) within MTS is processed by a temporal CNN independently; then an aggregating CNN combines the processed streams to produce input for other downstream networks. We evaluated the proposed NFS model on four real-world MTS datasets and found that it achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods while providing the benefit of feature selection. Our paper also highlights the robustness and effectiveness of feature selection with NFS compared to using recent autoencoder-based methods.
Modeling the Interaction between Agents in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xiaoteng Ma, Yiqin Yang, Chenghao Li, Yiwen Lu, Qianchuan Zhao, Yang Jun
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Value-based methods of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), especially the value decomposition methods, have been demonstrated on a range of challenging cooperative tasks. However, current methods pay little attention to the interaction between agents, which is essential to teamwork in games or real life. This limits the efficiency of value-based MARL algorithms in the two aspects: collaborative exploration and value function estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative MARL algorithm named as interactive actor-critic~(IAC), which models the interaction of agents from the perspectives of policy and value function. On the policy side, a multi-agent joint stochastic policy is introduced by adopting a collaborative exploration module, which is trained by maximizing the entropy-regularized expected return. On the value side, we use the shared attention mechanism to estimate the value function of each agent, which takes the impact of the teammates into consideration. At the implementation level, we extend the value decomposition methods to continuous control tasks and evaluate IAC on benchmark tasks including classic control and multi-agent particle environments. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and achieves better performance in terms of cooperation.
Artificial Intelligence based Autonomous Molecular Design for Medical Therapeutic: A Perspective
Authors: Rajendra P. Joshi, Neeraj Kumar
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design

Domain-aware machine learning (ML) models have been increasingly adopted for accelerating small molecule therapeutic design in the recent years. These models have been enabled by significant advancement in state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) and computing infrastructures. Several ML architectures are pre-dominantly and independently used either for predicting the properties of small molecules, or for generating lead therapeutic candidates. Synergetically using these individual components along with robust representation and data generation techniques autonomously in closed loops holds enormous promise for accelerated drug design which is a time consuming and expensive task otherwise. In this perspective, we present the most recent breakthrough achieved by each of the components, and how such autonomous AI and ML workflow can be realized to radically accelerate the hit identification and lead optimization. Taken together, this could significantly shorten the timeline for end-to-end antiviral discovery and optimization times to weeks upon the arrival of a novel zoonotic transmission event. Our perspective serves as a guide for researchers to practice autonomous molecular design in therapeutic discovery.
A Compositional Atlas of Tractable Circuit Operations: From Simple Transformations to Complex Information-Theoretic Queries
Authors: Antonio Vergari, YooJung Choi, Anji Liu, Stefano Teso, Guy Van Den Broeck
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Circuit representations are becoming the lingua franca to express and reason about tractable generative and discriminative models. In this paper, we show how complex inference scenarios for these models that commonly arise in machine learning -- from computing the expectations of decision tree ensembles to information-theoretic divergences of deep mixture models -- can be represented in terms of tractable modular operations over circuits. Specifically, we characterize the tractability of a vocabulary of simple transformations -- sums, products, quotients, powers, logarithms, and exponentials -- in terms of sufficient structural constraints of the circuits they operate on, and present novel hardness results for the cases in which these properties are not satisfied. Building on these operations, we derive a unified framework for reasoning about tractable models that generalizes several results in the literature and opens up novel tractable inference scenarios.
A Logic for Conditional Local Strategic Reasoning
Authors: Valentin Goranko, Fengkui Ju
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00

We consider systems of rational agents who act and interact in pursuit of their individual and collective objectives. We study and formalise the reasoning of an agent, or of an external observer, about the expected choices of action of the other agents based on their objectives, in order to assess the reasoner's ability, or expectation, to achieve their own objective. To formalize such reasoning we extend Pauly's Coalition Logic with three new modal operators of conditional strategic reasoning, thus introducing the Logic for Local Conditional Strategic Reasoning ConStR. We provide formal semantics for the new conditional strategic operators in concurrent game models, introduce the matching notion of bisimulation for each of them, prove bisimulation invariance and Hennessy-Milner property for each of them, and discuss and compare briefly their expressiveness. Finally, we also propose systems of axioms for each of the basic operators of ConStR and for the full logic.
Testing Framework for Black-box AI Models
Authors: Aniya Aggarwal, Samiulla Shaikh, Sandeep Hans, Swastik Haldar, Rema Ananthanarayanan, Diptikalyan Saha
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

With widespread adoption of AI models for important decision making, ensuring reliability of such models remains an important challenge. In this paper, we present an end-to-end generic framework for testing AI Models which performs automated test generation for different modalities such as text, tabular, and time-series data and across various properties such as accuracy, fairness, and robustness. Our tool has been used for testing industrial AI models and was very effective to uncover issues present in those models. Demo video link: https://youtu.be/984UCU17YZI
Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Context-based Representations
Authors: Shagun Sodhani, Amy Zhang, Joelle Pineau
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

The benefit of multi-task learning over single-task learning relies on the ability to use relations across tasks to improve performance on any single task. While sharing representations is an important mechanism to share information across tasks, its success depends on how well the structure underlying the tasks is captured. In some real-world situations, we have access to metadata, or additional information about a task, that may not provide any new insight in the context of a single task setup alone but inform relations across multiple tasks. While this metadata can be useful for improving multi-task learning performance, effectively incorporating it can be an additional challenge. We posit that an efficient approach to knowledge transfer is through the use of multiple context-dependent, composable representations shared across a family of tasks. In this framework, metadata can help to learn interpretable representations and provide the context to inform which representations to compose and how to compose them. We use the proposed approach to obtain state-of-the-art results in Meta-World, a challenging multi-task benchmark consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks.
Sequential change-point detection for mutually exciting point processes over networks
Authors: Haoyun Wang, Liyan Xie, Yao Xie, Alex Cuozzo, Simon Mak
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Change Point Detection, Point Processes

We present a new CUSUM procedure for sequentially detecting change-point in the self and mutual exciting processes, a.k.a. Hawkes networks using discrete events data. Hawkes networks have become a popular model for statistics and machine learning due to their capability in modeling irregularly observed data where the timing between events carries a lot of information. The problem of detecting abrupt changes in Hawkes networks arises from various applications, including neuronal imaging, sensor network, and social network monitoring. Despite this, there has not been a computationally and memory-efficient online algorithm for detecting such changes from sequential data. We present an efficient online recursive implementation of the CUSUM statistic for Hawkes processes, both decentralized and memory-efficient, and establish the theoretical properties of this new CUSUM procedure. We then show that the proposed CUSUM method achieves better performance than existing methods, including the Shewhart procedure based on count data, the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) in the existing literature, and the standard score statistic. We demonstrate this via a simulated example and an application to population code change-detection in neuronal networks.
Lenient Regret and Good-Action Identification in Gaussian Process Bandits
Authors: Xu Cai, Selwyn Gomes, Jonathan Scarlett
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we study the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits under relaxed optimization criteria stating that any function value above a certain threshold is "good enough". On the theoretical side, we study various {\em lenient regret} notions in which all near-optimal actions incur zero penalty, and provide upper bounds on the lenient regret for GP-UCB and an elimination algorithm, circumventing the usual $O(\sqrt{T})$ term (with time horizon $T$) resulting from zooming extremely close towards the function maximum. In addition, we complement these upper bounds with algorithm-independent lower bounds. On the practical side, we consider the problem of finding a single "good action" according to a known pre-specified threshold, and introduce several good-action identification algorithms that exploit knowledge of the threshold. We experimentally find that such algorithms can often find a good action faster than standard optimization-based approaches.
Differential Privacy Dynamics of Langevin Diffusion and Noisy Gradient Descent
Authors: Rishav Chourasia, Jiayuan Ye, Reza Shokri
Date: 2021-02-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

What is the information leakage of an iterative randomized learning algorithm about its training data, when the internal state of the algorithm is \emph{private}? How much is the contribution of each specific training epoch to the information leakage through the released model? We study this problem for noisy gradient descent algorithms, and model the \emph{dynamics} of R\'enyi differential privacy loss throughout the training process. Our analysis traces a provably \emph{tight} bound on the R\'enyi divergence between the pair of probability distributions over parameters of models trained on neighboring datasets. We prove that the privacy loss converges exponentially fast, for smooth and strongly convex loss functions, which is a significant improvement over composition theorems (which over-estimate the privacy loss by upper-bounding its total value over all intermediate gradient computations). For Lipschitz, smooth, and strongly convex loss functions, we prove optimal utility with a small gradient complexity for noisy gradient descent algorithms.