pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Weightless Neural Networks for Efficient Edge Inference
Authors: Zachary Susskind, Aman Arora, Igor Dantas Dos Santos Miranda, Luis Armando Quintanilla Villon, Rafael Fontella Katopodis, Leandro Santiago de Araujo, Diego Leonel Cadette Dutra, Priscila Machado Vieira Lima, Felipe Maia Galvao Franca, Mauricio Breternitz Jr., Lizy K. John
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Weightless Neural Networks (WNNs) are a class of machine learning model which use table lookups to perform inference. This is in contrast with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which use multiply-accumulate operations. State-of-the-art WNN architectures have a fraction of the implementation cost of DNNs, but still lag behind them on accuracy for common image recognition tasks. Additionally, many existing WNN architectures suffer from high memory requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel WNN architecture, BTHOWeN, with key algorithmic and architectural improvements over prior work, namely counting Bloom filters, hardware-friendly hashing, and Gaussian-based nonlinear thermometer encodings to improve model accuracy and reduce area and energy consumption. BTHOWeN targets the large and growing edge computing sector by providing superior latency and energy efficiency to comparable quantized DNNs. Compared to state-of-the-art WNNs across nine classification datasets, BTHOWeN on average reduces error by more than than 40% and model size by more than 50%. We then demonstrate the viability of the BTHOWeN architecture by presenting an FPGA-based accelerator, and compare its latency and resource usage against similarly accurate quantized DNN accelerators, including Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and convolutional models. The proposed BTHOWeN models consume almost 80% less energy than the MLP models, with nearly 85% reduction in latency. In our quest for efficient ML on the edge, WNNs are clearly deserving of additional attention.
Successful Recovery of an Observed Meteorite Fall Using Drones and Machine Learning
Authors: Seamus L. Anderson, Martin C. Towner, John Fairweather, Philip A. Bland, Hadrien A. R. Devillepoix, Eleanor K. Sansom, Martin Cupak, Patrick M. Shober, Gretchen K. Benedix
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We report the first-time recovery of a fresh meteorite fall using a drone and a machine learning algorithm. A fireball on the 1st April 2021 was observed over Western Australia by the Desert Fireball Network, for which a fall area was calculated for the predicted surviving mass. A search team arrived on site and surveyed 5.1 km2 area over a 4-day period. A convolutional neural network, trained on previously-recovered meteorites with fusion crusts, processed the images on our field computer after each flight. meteorite candidates identified by the algorithm were sorted by team members using two user interfaces to eliminate false positives. Surviving candidates were revisited with a smaller drone, and imaged in higher resolution, before being eliminated or finally being visited in-person. The 70 g meteorite was recovered within 50 m of the calculated fall line using, demonstrating the effectiveness of this methodology which will facilitate the efficient collection of many more observed meteorite falls.
Scalable Bayesian Optimization Using Vecchia Approximations of Gaussian Processes
Authors: Felix Jimenez, Matthias Katzfuss
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Gaussian Processes, Thompson Sampling

Bayesian optimization is a technique for optimizing black-box target functions. At the core of Bayesian optimization is a surrogate model that predicts the output of the target function at previously unseen inputs to facilitate the selection of promising input values. Gaussian processes (GPs) are commonly used as surrogate models but are known to scale poorly with the number of observations. We adapt the Vecchia approximation, a popular GP approximation from spatial statistics, to enable scalable high-dimensional Bayesian optimization. We develop several improvements and extensions, including training warped GPs using mini-batch gradient descent, approximate neighbor search, and selecting multiple input values in parallel. We focus on the use of our warped Vecchia GP in trust-region Bayesian optimization via Thompson sampling. On several test functions and on two reinforcement-learning problems, our methods compared favorably to the state of the art.
Label Leakage and Protection from Forward Embedding in Vertical Federated Learning
Authors: Jiankai Sun, Xin Yang, Yuanshun Yao, Chong Wang
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning (vFL) has gained much attention and been deployed to solve machine learning problems with data privacy concerns in recent years. However, some recent work demonstrated that vFL is vulnerable to privacy leakage even though only the forward intermediate embedding (rather than raw features) and backpropagated gradients (rather than raw labels) are communicated between the involved participants. As the raw labels often contain highly sensitive information, some recent work has been proposed to prevent the label leakage from the backpropagated gradients effectively in vFL. However, these work only identified and defended the threat of label leakage from the backpropagated gradients. None of these work has paid attention to the problem of label leakage from the intermediate embedding. In this paper, we propose a practical label inference method which can steal private labels effectively from the shared intermediate embedding even though some existing protection methods such as label differential privacy and gradients perturbation are applied. The effectiveness of the label attack is inseparable from the correlation between the intermediate embedding and corresponding private labels. To mitigate the issue of label leakage from the forward embedding, we add an additional optimization goal at the label party to limit the label stealing ability of the adversary by minimizing the distance correlation between the intermediate embedding and corresponding private labels. We conducted massive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed protection methods.
Learning Stochastic Parametric Differentiable Predictive Control Policies
Authors: Ján Drgoňa, Sayak Mukherjee, Aaron Tuor, Mahantesh Halappanavar, Draguna Vrabie
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Model Predictive Control

The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present a scalable alternative called stochastic parametric differentiable predictive control (SP-DPC) for unsupervised learning of neural control policies governing stochastic linear systems subject to nonlinear chance constraints. SP-DPC is formulated as a deterministic approximation to the stochastic parametric constrained optimal control problem. This formulation allows us to directly compute the policy gradients via automatic differentiation of the problem's value function, evaluated over sampled parameters and uncertainties. In particular, the computed expectation of the SP-DPC problem's value function is backpropagated through the closed-loop system rollouts parametrized by a known nominal system dynamics model and neural control policy which allows for direct model-based policy optimization. We provide theoretical probabilistic guarantees for policies learned via the SP-DPC method on closed-loop stability and chance constraints satisfaction. Furthermore, we demonstrate the computational efficiency and scalability of the proposed policy optimization algorithm in three numerical examples, including systems with a large number of states or subject to nonlinear constraints.
Continuous-Time Meta-Learning with Forward Mode Differentiation
Authors: Tristan Deleu, David Kanaa, Leo Feng, Giancarlo Kerg, Yoshua Bengio, Guillaume Lajoie, Pierre-Luc Bacon
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Meta-Learning

Drawing inspiration from gradient-based meta-learning methods with infinitely small gradient steps, we introduce Continuous-Time Meta-Learning (COMLN), a meta-learning algorithm where adaptation follows the dynamics of a gradient vector field. Specifically, representations of the inputs are meta-learned such that a task-specific linear classifier is obtained as a solution of an ordinary differential equation (ODE). Treating the learning process as an ODE offers the notable advantage that the length of the trajectory is now continuous, as opposed to a fixed and discrete number of gradient steps. As a consequence, we can optimize the amount of adaptation necessary to solve a new task using stochastic gradient descent, in addition to learning the initial conditions as is standard practice in gradient-based meta-learning. Importantly, in order to compute the exact meta-gradients required for the outer-loop updates, we devise an efficient algorithm based on forward mode differentiation, whose memory requirements do not scale with the length of the learning trajectory, thus allowing longer adaptation in constant memory. We provide analytical guarantees for the stability of COMLN, we show empirically its efficiency in terms of runtime and memory usage, and we illustrate its effectiveness on a range of few-shot image classification problems.
Near-Optimal Correlation Clustering with Privacy
Authors: Vincent Cohen-Addad, Chenglin Fan, Silvio Lattanzi, Slobodan Mitrović, Ashkan Norouzi-Fard, Nikos Parotsidis, Jakub Tarnawski
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection

Correlation clustering is a central problem in unsupervised learning, with applications spanning community detection, duplicate detection, automated labelling and many more. In the correlation clustering problem one receives as input a set of nodes and for each node a list of co-clustering preferences, and the goal is to output a clustering that minimizes the disagreement with the specified nodes' preferences. In this paper, we introduce a simple and computationally efficient algorithm for the correlation clustering problem with provable privacy guarantees. Our approximation guarantees are stronger than those shown in prior work and are optimal up to logarithmic factors.
Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects with Missing Treatment Information
Authors: Milan Kuzmanovic, Tobias Hatt, Stefan Feuerriegel
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) is challenging, especially when treatment information is missing. Although this is a widespread problem in practice, CATE estimation with missing treatments has received little attention. In this paper, we analyze CATE estimation in the setting with missing treatments where unique challenges arise in the form of covariate shifts. We identify two covariate shifts in our setting: (i) a covariate shift between the treated and control population; and (ii) a covariate shift between the observed and missing treatment population. We first theoretically show the effect of these covariate shifts by deriving a generalization bound for estimating CATE in our setting with missing treatments. Then, motivated by our bound, we develop the missing treatment representation network (MTRNet), a novel CATE estimation algorithm that learns a balanced representation of covariates using domain adaptation. By using balanced representations, MTRNet provides more reliable CATE estimates in the covariate domains where the data are not fully observed. In various experiments with semi-synthetic and real-world data, we show that our algorithm improves over the state-of-the-art by a substantial margin.
Adaptive Gradient Methods with Local Guarantees
Authors: Zhou Lu, Wenhan Xia, Sanjeev Arora, Elad Hazan
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Adaptive gradient methods are the method of choice for optimization in machine learning and used to train the largest deep models. In this paper we study the problem of learning a local preconditioner, that can change as the data is changing along the optimization trajectory. We propose an adaptive gradient method that has provable adaptive regret guarantees vs. the best local preconditioner. To derive this guarantee, we prove a new adaptive regret bound in online learning that improves upon previous adaptive online learning methods. We demonstrate the robustness of our method in automatically choosing the optimal learning rate schedule for popular benchmarking tasks in vision and language domains. Without the need to manually tune a learning rate schedule, our method can, in a single run, achieve comparable and stable task accuracy as a fine-tuned optimizer.
Skew-Symmetric Adjacency Matrices for Clustering Directed Graphs
Authors: Koby Hayashi, Sinan G. Aksoy, Haesun Park
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Clustering

Cut-based directed graph (digraph) clustering often focuses on finding dense within-cluster or sparse between-cluster connections, similar to cut-based undirected graph clustering methods. In contrast, for flow-based clusterings the edges between clusters tend to be oriented in one direction and have been found in migration data, food webs, and trade data. In this paper we introduce a spectral algorithm for finding flow-based clusterings. The proposed algorithm is based on recent work which uses complex-valued Hermitian matrices to represent digraphs. By establishing an algebraic relationship between a complex-valued Hermitian representation and an associated real-valued, skew-symmetric matrix the proposed algorithm produces clusterings while remaining completely in the real field. Our algorithm uses less memory and asymptotically less computation while provably preserving solution quality. We also show the algorithm can be easily implemented using standard computational building blocks, possesses better numerical properties, and loans itself to a natural interpretation via an objective function relaxation argument.
Nemo: Guiding and Contextualizing Weak Supervision for Interactive Data Programming
Authors: Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Jieyu Zhang, Alexander Ratner
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00

Weak Supervision (WS) techniques allow users to efficiently create large training datasets by programmatically labeling data with heuristic sources of supervision. While the success of WS relies heavily on the provided labeling heuristics, the process of how these heuristics are created in practice has remained under-explored. In this work, we formalize the development process of labeling heuristics as an interactive procedure, built around the existing workflow where users draw ideas from a selected set of development data for designing the heuristic sources. With the formalism, we study two core problems of how to strategically select the development data to guide users in efficiently creating informative heuristics, and how to exploit the information within the development process to contextualize and better learn from the resultant heuristics. Building upon two novel methodologies that effectively tackle the respective problems considered, we present Nemo, an end-to-end interactive system that improves the overall productivity of WS learning pipeline by an average 20% (and up to 47% in one task) compared to the prevailing WS approach.
Stable and Semi-stable Sampling Approaches for Continuously Used Samples
Authors: Nikita Astrakhantsev, Deepak Chittajallu, Nabeel Kaushal, Vladislav Mokeev
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Information retrieval systems are usually measured by labeling the relevance of results corresponding to a sample of user queries. In practical search engines, such measurement needs to be performed continuously, such as daily or weekly. This creates a trade-off between (a) representativeness of query sample to current query traffic of the product; (b) labeling cost: if we keep the same query sample, results would be similar allowing us to reuse their labels; and (c) overfitting caused by continuous usage of same query sample. In this paper we explicitly formulate this tradeoff, propose two new variants -- Stable and Semi-stable -- to simple and weighted random sampling and show that they outperform existing approaches for the continuous usage settings, including monitoring/debugging search engine or comparing ranker candidates.
Faking feature importance: A cautionary tale on the use of differentially-private synthetic data
Authors: Oscar Giles, Kasra Hosseini, Grigorios Mingas, Oliver Strickson, Louise Bowler, Camila Rangel Smith, Harrison Wilde, Jen Ning Lim, Bilal Mateen, Kasun Amarasinghe, Rayid Ghani, Alison Heppenstall, Nik Lomax, Nick Malleson, Martin O'Reilly, Sebastian Vollmerteke
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Privacy Preserving

Synthetic datasets are often presented as a silver-bullet solution to the problem of privacy-preserving data publishing. However, for many applications, synthetic data has been shown to have limited utility when used to train predictive models. One promising potential application of these data is in the exploratory phase of the machine learning workflow, which involves understanding, engineering and selecting features. This phase often involves considerable time, and depends on the availability of data. There would be substantial value in synthetic data that permitted these steps to be carried out while, for example, data access was being negotiated, or with fewer information governance restrictions. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the agreement between the feature importance obtained from raw and from synthetic data, on a range of artificially generated and real-world datasets (where feature importance represents how useful each feature is when predicting a the outcome). We employ two differentially-private methods to produce synthetic data, and apply various utility measures to quantify the agreement in feature importance as this varies with the level of privacy. Our results indicate that synthetic data can sometimes preserve several representations of the ranking of feature importance in simple settings but their performance is not consistent and depends upon a number of factors. Particular caution should be exercised in more nuanced real-world settings, where synthetic data can lead to differences in ranked feature importance that could alter key modelling decisions. This work has important implications for developing synthetic versions of highly sensitive data sets in fields such as finance and healthcare.
Neural Galerkin Schemes with Active Learning for High-Dimensional Evolution Equations
Authors: Joan Bruna, Benjamin Peherstorfer, Eric Vanden-Eijnden
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Deep neural networks have been shown to provide accurate function approximations in high dimensions. However, fitting network parameters requires informative training data that are often challenging to collect in science and engineering applications. This work proposes Neural Galerkin schemes based on deep learning that generate training data with active learning for numerically solving high-dimensional partial differential equations. Neural Galerkin schemes build on the Dirac-Frenkel variational principle to train networks by minimizing the residual sequentially over time, which enables adaptively collecting new training data in a self-informed manner that is guided by the dynamics described by the partial differential equations. This is in contrast to other machine learning methods that aim to fit network parameters globally in time without taking into account training data acquisition. Our finding is that the active form of gathering training data of the proposed Neural Galerkin schemes is key for numerically realizing the expressive power of networks in high dimensions. Numerical experiments demonstrate that Neural Galerkin schemes have the potential to enable simulating phenomena and processes with many variables for which traditional and other deep-learning-based solvers fail, especially when features of the solutions evolve locally such as in high-dimensional wave propagation problems and interacting particle systems described by Fokker-Planck and kinetic equations.
Understanding microbiome dynamics via interpretable graph representation learning
Authors: Kateryna Melnyk, Kuba Weimann, Tim O. F. Conrad
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Large-scale perturbations in the microbiome constitution are strongly correlated, whether as a driver or a consequence, with the health and functioning of human physiology. However, understanding the difference in the microbiome profiles of healthy and ill individuals can be complicated due to the large number of complex interactions among microbes. We propose to model these interactions as a time-evolving graph whose nodes are microbes and edges are interactions among them. Motivated by the need to analyse such complex interactions, we develop a method that learns a low-dimensional representation of the time-evolving graph and maintains the dynamics occurring in the high-dimensional space. Through our experiments, we show that we can extract graph features such as clusters of nodes or edges that have the highest impact on the model to learn the low-dimensional representation. This information can be crucial to identify microbes and interactions among them that are strongly correlated with clinical diseases. We conduct our experiments on both synthetic and real-world microbiome datasets.
Precise Stock Price Prediction for Optimized Portfolio Design Using an LSTM Model
Authors: Jaydip Sen, Sidra Mehtab, Abhishek Dutta, Saikat Mondal
Date: 2022-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Stock Price Prediction

Accurate prediction of future prices of stocks is a difficult task to perform. Even more challenging is to design an optimized portfolio of stocks with the identification of proper weights of allocation to achieve the optimized values of return and risk. We present optimized portfolios based on the seven sectors of the Indian economy. The past prices of the stocks are extracted from the web from January 1, 2016, to December 31, 2020. Optimum portfolios are designed on the selected seven sectors. An LSTM regression model is also designed for predicting future stock prices. Five months after the construction of the portfolios, i.e., on June 1, 2021, the actual and predicted returns and risks of each portfolio are computed. The predicted and the actual returns indicate the very high accuracy of the LSTM model.
A Brief Overview of Unsupervised Neural Speech Representation Learning
Authors: Lasse Borgholt, Jakob Drachmann Havtorn, Joakim Edin, Lars Maaløe, Christian Igel
Date: 2022-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Speech Representation Learning

Unsupervised representation learning for speech processing has matured greatly in the last few years. Work in computer vision and natural language processing has paved the way, but speech data offers unique challenges. As a result, methods from other domains rarely translate directly. We review the development of unsupervised representation learning for speech over the last decade. We identify two primary model categories: self-supervised methods and probabilistic latent variable models. We describe the models and develop a comprehensive taxonomy. Finally, we discuss and compare models from the two categories.