pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Method for Controlling Extrapolation when Visualizing and Optimizing the Prediction Profiles of Statistical and Machine Learning Models
Authors: Jeremy Ash, Laura Lancaster, Chris Gotwalt
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

We present a novel method for controlling extrapolation in the prediction profiler in the JMP software. The prediction profiler is a graphical tool for exploring high dimensional prediction surfaces for statistical and machine learning models. The profiler contains interactive cross-sectional views, or profile traces, of the prediction surface of a model. Our method helps users avoid exploring predictions that should be considered extrapolation. It also performs optimization over a constrained factor region that avoids extrapolation using a genetic algorithm. In simulations and real world examples, we demonstrate how optimal factor settings without constraint in the profiler are frequently extrapolated, and how extrapolation control helps avoid these solutions with invalid factor settings that may not be useful to the user.
Contextual Bandits for Advertising Campaigns: A Diffusion-Model Independent Approach (Extended Version)
Authors: Alexandra Iacob, Bogdan Cautis, Silviu Maniu
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

Motivated by scenarios of information diffusion and advertising in social media, we study an influence maximization problem in which little is assumed to be known about the diffusion network or about the model that determines how information may propagate. In such a highly uncertain environment, one can focus on multi-round diffusion campaigns, with the objective to maximize the number of distinct users that are influenced or activated, starting from a known base of few influential nodes. During a campaign, spread seeds are selected sequentially at consecutive rounds, and feedback is collected in the form of the activated nodes at each round. A round's impact (reward) is then quantified as the number of newly activated nodes. Overall, one must maximize the campaign's total spread, as the sum of rounds' rewards. In this setting, an explore-exploit approach could be used to learn the key underlying diffusion parameters, while running the campaign. We describe and compare two methods of contextual multi-armed bandits, with upper-confidence bounds on the remaining potential of influencers, one using a generalized linear model and the Good-Turing estimator for remaining potential (GLM-GT-UCB), and another one that directly adapts the LinUCB algorithm to our setting (LogNorm-LinUCB). We show that they outperform baseline methods using state-of-the-art ideas, on synthetic and real-world data, while at the same time exhibiting different and complementary behavior, depending on the scenarios in which they are deployed.
Examining and Mitigating the Impact of Crossbar Non-idealities for Accurate Implementation of Sparse Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Abhiroop Bhattacharjee, Lakshya Bhatnagar, Priyadarshini Panda
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00

Recently several structured pruning techniques have been introduced for energy-efficient implementation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with lesser number of crossbars. Although, these techniques have claimed to preserve the accuracy of the sparse DNNs on crossbars, none have studied the impact of the inexorable crossbar non-idealities on the actual performance of the pruned networks. To this end, we perform a comprehensive study to show how highly sparse DNNs, that result in significant crossbar-compression-rate, can lead to severe accuracy losses compared to unpruned DNNs mapped onto non-ideal crossbars. We perform experiments with multiple structured-pruning approaches (such as, C/F pruning, XCS and XRS) on VGG11 and VGG16 DNNs with benchmark datasets (CIFAR10 and CIFAR100). We propose two mitigation approaches - Crossbar column rearrangement and Weight-Constrained-Training (WCT) - that can be integrated with the crossbar-mapping of the sparse DNNs to minimize accuracy losses incurred by the pruned models. These help in mitigating non-idealities by increasing the proportion of low conductance synapses on crossbars, thereby improving their computational accuracies.
Towards a Data Privacy-Predictive Performance Trade-off
Authors: Tânia Carvalho, Nuno Moniz, Pedro Faria, Luís Antunes
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: De-identification, Privacy Preserving

Machine learning is increasingly used in the most diverse applications and domains, whether in healthcare, to predict pathologies, or in the financial sector to detect fraud. One of the linchpins for efficiency and accuracy in machine learning is data utility. However, when it contains personal information, full access may be restricted due to laws and regulations aiming to protect individuals' privacy. Therefore, data owners must ensure that any data shared guarantees such privacy. Removal or transformation of private information (de-identification) are among the most common techniques. Intuitively, one can anticipate that reducing detail or distorting information would result in losses for model predictive performance. However, previous work concerning classification tasks using de-identified data generally demonstrates that predictive performance can be preserved in specific applications. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the existence of a trade-off between data privacy and predictive performance in classification tasks. We leverage a large set of privacy-preserving techniques and learning algorithms to provide an assessment of re-identification ability and the impact of transformed variants on predictive performance. Unlike previous literature, we confirm that the higher the level of privacy (lower re-identification risk), the higher the impact on predictive performance, pointing towards clear evidence of a trade-off.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the curse of dimensionality: an appraisal of cluster validation in high-dimensional spaces
Authors: Brian A. Powell
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

The failure of the Euclidean norm to reliably distinguish between nearby and distant points in high dimensional space is well-known. This phenomenon of distance concentration manifests in a variety of data distributions, with iid or correlated features, including centrally-distributed and clustered data. Unsupervised learning based on Euclidean nearest-neighbors and more general proximity-oriented data mining tasks like clustering, might therefore be adversely affected by distance concentration for high-dimensional applications. While considerable work has been done developing clustering algorithms with reliable high-dimensional performance, the problem of cluster validation--of determining the natural number of clusters in a dataset--has not been carefully examined in high-dimensional problems. In this work we investigate how the sensitivities of common Euclidean norm-based cluster validity indices scale with dimension for a variety of synthetic data schemes, including well-separated and noisy clusters, and find that the overwhelming majority of indices have improved or stable sensitivity in high dimensions. The curse of dimensionality is therefore dispelled for this class of fairly generic data schemes.
Parallel Neural Local Lossless Compression
Authors: Mingtian Zhang, James Townsend, Ning Kang, David Barber
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

The recently proposed Neural Local Lossless Compression (NeLLoC), which is based on a local autoregressive model, has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization performance in the image compression task. In addition to the encouragement of OOD generalization, the local model also allows parallel inference in the decoding stage. In this paper, we propose two parallelization schemes for local autoregressive models. We discuss the practicalities of implementing the schemes and provide experimental evidence of significant gains in compression runtime compared to the previous, non-parallel implementation.
Reproducible, incremental representation learning with Rosetta VAE
Authors: Miles Martinez, John Pearson
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, scientific discovery

Variational autoencoders are among the most popular methods for distilling low-dimensional structure from high-dimensional data, making them increasingly valuable as tools for data exploration and scientific discovery. However, unlike typical machine learning problems in which a single model is trained once on a single large dataset, scientific workflows privilege learned features that are reproducible, portable across labs, and capable of incrementally adding new data. Ideally, methods used by different research groups should produce comparable results, even without sharing fully trained models or entire data sets. Here, we address this challenge by introducing the Rosetta VAE (R-VAE), a method of distilling previously learned representations and retraining new models to reproduce and build on prior results. The R-VAE uses post hoc clustering over the latent space of a fully-trained model to identify a small number of Rosetta Points (input, latent pairs) to serve as anchors for training future models. An adjustable hyperparameter, $\rho$, balances fidelity to the previously learned latent space against accommodation of new data. We demonstrate that the R-VAE reconstructs data as well as the VAE and $\beta$-VAE, outperforms both methods in recovery of a target latent space in a sequential training setting, and dramatically increases consistency of the learned representation across training runs.
`Next Generation' Reservoir Computing: an Empirical Data-Driven Expression of Dynamical Equations in Time-Stepping Form
Authors: Tse-Chun Chen, Stephen G. Penny, Timothy A. Smith, Jason A. Platt
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Numerical Integration

Next generation reservoir computing based on nonlinear vector autoregression (NVAR) is applied to emulate simple dynamical system models and compared to numerical integration schemes such as Euler and the $2^\text{nd}$ order Runge-Kutta. It is shown that the NVAR emulator can be interpreted as a data-driven method used to recover the numerical integration scheme that produced the data. It is also shown that the approach can be extended to produce high-order numerical schemes directly from data. The impacts of the presence of noise and temporal sparsity in the training set is further examined to gauge the potential use of this method for more realistic applications.
Making a (Counterfactual) Difference One Rationale at a Time
Authors: Mitchell Plyler, Michael Green, Min Chi
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: counterfactual, Data Augmentation

Rationales, snippets of extracted text that explain an inference, have emerged as a popular framework for interpretable natural language processing (NLP). Rationale models typically consist of two cooperating modules: a selector and a classifier with the goal of maximizing the mutual information (MMI) between the "selected" text and the document label. Despite their promises, MMI-based methods often pick up on spurious text patterns and result in models with nonsensical behaviors. In this work, we investigate whether counterfactual data augmentation (CDA), without human assistance, can improve the performance of the selector by lowering the mutual information between spurious signals and the document label. Our counterfactuals are produced in an unsupervised fashion using class-dependent generative models. From an information theoretic lens, we derive properties of the unaugmented dataset for which our CDA approach would succeed. The effectiveness of CDA is empirically evaluated by comparing against several baselines including an improved MMI-based rationale schema on two multi aspect datasets. Our results show that CDA produces rationales that better capture the signal of interest.
Jamming Attacks on Federated Learning in Wireless Networks
Authors: Yi Shi, Yalin E. Sagduyu
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) offers a decentralized learning environment so that a group of clients can collaborate to train a global model at the server, while keeping their training data confidential. This paper studies how to launch over-the-air jamming attacks to disrupt the FL process when it is executed over a wireless network. As a wireless example, FL is applied to learn how to classify wireless signals collected by clients (spectrum sensors) at different locations (such as in cooperative sensing). An adversary can jam the transmissions for the local model updates from clients to the server (uplink attack), or the transmissions for the global model updates the server to clients (downlink attack), or both. Given a budget imposed on the number of clients that can be attacked per FL round, clients for the (uplink/downlink) attack are selected according to their local model accuracies that would be expected without an attack or ranked via spectrum observations. This novel attack is extended to general settings by accounting different processing speeds and attack success probabilities for clients. Compared to benchmark attack schemes, this attack approach degrades the FL performance significantly, thereby revealing new vulnerabilities of FL to jamming attacks in wireless networks.
Towards Quantum Graph Neural Networks: An Ego-Graph Learning Approach
Authors: Xing Ai, Zhihong Zhang, Luzhe Sun, Junchi Yan, Edwin Hancock
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network, Quantum Machine Learning, Unity

Quantum machine learning is a fast-emerging field that aims to tackle machine learning using quantum algorithms and quantum computing. Due to the lack of physical qubits and an effective means to map real-world data from Euclidean space to Hilbert space, most of these methods focus on quantum analogies or process simulations rather than devising concrete architectures based on qubits. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for graph-structured data, which we refer to as the Ego-graph based Quantum Graph Neural Network (egoQGNN). egoQGNN implements the GNN theoretical framework using the tensor product and unity matrix representation, which greatly reduces the number of model parameters required. When controlled by a classical computer, egoQGNN can accommodate arbitrarily sized graphs by processing ego-graphs from the input graph using a modestly-sized quantum device. The architecture is based on a novel mapping from real-world data to Hilbert space. This mapping maintains the distance relations present in the data and reduces information loss. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms competitive state-of-the-art models with only 1.68\% parameters compared to those models.
Fast and accurate waveform modeling of long-haul multi-channel optical fiber transmission using a hybrid model-data driven scheme
Authors: Hang Yang, Zekun Niu, Haochen Zhao, Shilin Xiao, Weisheng Hu, Lilin Yi
Date: 2022-01-12 00:00:00

The modeling of optical wave propagation in optical fiber is a task of fast and accurate solving the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE), and can enable the optical system design, digital signal processing verification and fast waveform calculation. Traditional waveform modeling of full-time and full-frequency information is the split-step Fourier method (SSFM), which has long been regarded as challenging in long-haul wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical fiber communication systems because it is extremely time-consuming. Here we propose a linear-nonlinear feature decoupling distributed (FDD) waveform modeling scheme to model long-haul WDM fiber channel, where the channel linear effects are modelled by the NLSE-derived model-driven methods and the nonlinear effects are modelled by the data-driven deep learning methods. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme only focuses on one-span fiber distance fitting, and then recursively transmits the model to achieve the required transmission distance. The proposed modeling scheme is demonstrated to have high accuracy, high computing speeds, and robust generalization abilities for different optical launch powers, modulation formats, channel numbers and transmission distances. The total running time of FDD waveform modeling scheme for 41-channel 1040-km fiber transmission is only 3 minutes versus more than 2 hours using SSFM for each input condition, which achieves a 98% reduction in computing time. Considering the multi-round optimization by adjusting system parameters, the complexity reduction is significant. The results represent a remarkable improvement in nonlinear fiber modeling and open up novel perspectives for solution of NLSE-like partial differential equations and optical fiber physics problems.
Study of Frequency domain exponential functional link network filters
Authors: T. Yu, S. Tana, R. C. de Lamareb, Y. Yu
Date: 2022-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic echo cancellation, Computational Efficiency

The exponential functional link network (EFLN) filter has attracted tremendous interest due to its enhanced nonlinear modeling capability. However, the computational complexity will dramatically increase with the dimension growth of the EFLN-based filter. To improve the computational efficiency, we propose a novel frequency domain exponential functional link network (FDEFLN) filter in this paper. The idea is to organize the samples in blocks of expanded input data, transform them from time domain to frequency domain, and thus execute the filtering and adaptation procedures in frequency domain with the overlap-save method. A FDEFLN-based nonlinear active noise control (NANC) system has also been developed to form the frequency domain exponential filtered-s least mean-square (FDEFsLMS) algorithm. Moreover, the stability, steady-state performance and computational complexity of algorithms are analyzed. Finally, several numerical experiments corroborate the proposed FDEFLN-based algorithms in nonlinear system identification, acoustic echo cancellation and NANC implementations, which demonstrate much better computational efficiency.
Multilingual Open Text Release 1: Public Domain News in 44 Languages
Authors: Chester Palen-Michel, June Kim, Constantine Lignos
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Articles

We present Multilingual Open Text (MOT), a new multilingual corpus containing text in 44 languages, many of which have limited existing text resources for natural language processing. The first release of the corpus contains over 2.8 million news articles and an additional 1 million short snippets (photo captions, video descriptions, etc.) published between 2001--2022 and collected from Voice of America's news websites. We describe our process for collecting, filtering, and processing the data. The source material is in the public domain, our collection is licensed using a creative commons license (CC BY 4.0), and all software used to create the corpus is released under the MIT License. The corpus will be regularly updated as additional documents are published.
A Warm Start and a Clean Crawled Corpus -- A Recipe for Good Language Models
Authors: Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson, Haukur Barri Símonarson, Pétur Orri Ragnarsson, Svanhvít Lilja Ingólfsdóttir, Haukur Páll Jónsson, Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson, Hafsteinn Einarsson
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Constituency Parsing, Grammatical Error Detection, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part-Of-Speech Tagging, Winogrande

We train several language models for Icelandic, including IceBERT, that achieve state-of-the-art performance in a variety of downstream tasks, including part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, grammatical error detection and constituency parsing. To train the models we introduce a new corpus of Icelandic text, the Icelandic Common Crawl Corpus (IC3), a collection of high quality texts found online by targeting the Icelandic top-level-domain (TLD). Several other public data sources are also collected for a total of 16GB of Icelandic text. To enhance the evaluation of model performance and to raise the bar in baselines for Icelandic, we translate and adapt the WinoGrande dataset for co-reference resolution. Through these efforts we demonstrate that a properly cleaned crawled corpus is sufficient to achieve state-of-the-art results in NLP applications for low to medium resource languages, by comparison with models trained on a curated corpus. We further show that initializing models using existing multilingual models can lead to state-of-the-art results for some downstream tasks.
Czech Grammar Error Correction with a Large and Diverse Corpus
Authors: Jakub Náplava, Milan Straka, Jana Straková, Alexandr Rosen
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Grammatical Error Correction

We introduce a large and diverse Czech corpus annotated for grammatical error correction (GEC) with the aim to contribute to the still scarce data resources in this domain for languages other than English. The Grammar Error Correction Corpus for Czech (GECCC) offers a variety of four domains, covering error distributions ranging from high error density essays written by non-native speakers, to website texts, where errors are expected to be much less common. We compare several Czech GEC systems, including several Transformer-based ones, setting a strong baseline to future research. Finally, we meta-evaluate common GEC metrics against human judgements on our data. We make the new Czech GEC corpus publicly available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license at http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-4639 .
Eliciting Knowledge from Pretrained Language Models for Prototypical Prompt Verbalizer
Authors: Yinyi Wei, Tong Mo, Yongtao Jiang, Weiping Li, Wen Zhao
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, text-classification, Text Classification

Recent advances on prompt-tuning cast few-shot classification tasks as a masked language modeling problem. By wrapping input into a template and using a verbalizer which constructs a mapping between label space and label word space, prompt-tuning can achieve excellent results in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. However, typical prompt-tuning needs a manually designed verbalizer which requires domain expertise and human efforts. And the insufficient label space may introduce considerable bias into the results. In this paper, we focus on eliciting knowledge from pretrained language models and propose a prototypical prompt verbalizer for prompt-tuning. Labels are represented by prototypical embeddings in the feature space rather than by discrete words. The distances between the embedding at the masked position of input and prototypical embeddings are used as classification criterion. For zero-shot settings, knowledge is elicited from pretrained language models by a manually designed template to form initial prototypical embeddings. For few-shot settings, models are tuned to learn meaningful and interpretable prototypical embeddings. Our method optimizes models by contrastive learning. Extensive experimental results on several many-class text classification datasets with low-resource settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared with other verbalizer construction methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Ydongd/prototypical-prompt-verbalizer.