pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Adversarial Examples Might be Avoidable: The Role of Data Concentration in Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Ambar Pal, Jeremias Sulam, René Vidal
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

The susceptibility of modern machine learning classifiers to adversarial examples has motivated theoretical results suggesting that these might be unavoidable. However, these results can be too general to be applicable to natural data distributions. Indeed, humans are quite robust for tasks involving vision. This apparent conflict motivates a deeper dive into the question: Are adversarial examples truly unavoidable? In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that a key property of the data distribution -- concentration on small-volume subsets of the input space -- determines whether a robust classifier exists. We further demonstrate that, for a data distribution concentrated on a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces, utilizing structure in data naturally leads to classifiers that enjoy data-dependent polyhedral robustness guarantees, improving upon methods for provable certification in certain regimes.
TPE: Towards Better Compositional Reasoning over Conceptual Tools with Multi-persona Collaboration
Authors: Hongru Wang, Huimin Wang, Lingzhi Wang, Minda Hu, Rui Wang, Boyang Xue, Hongyuan Lu, Fei Mi, Kam-Fai Wong
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Response Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in planning the use of various functional tools, such as calculators and retrievers, particularly in question-answering tasks. In this paper, we expand the definition of these tools, centering on conceptual tools within the context of dialogue systems. A conceptual tool specifies a cognitive concept that aids systematic or investigative thought. These conceptual tools play important roles in practice, such as multiple psychological or tutoring strategies being dynamically applied in a single turn to compose helpful responses. To further enhance the reasoning and planning capability of LLMs with these conceptual tools, we introduce a multi-persona collaboration framework: Think-Plan-Execute (TPE). This framework decouples the response generation process into three distinct roles: Thinker, Planner, and Executor. Specifically, the Thinker analyzes the internal status exhibited in the dialogue context, such as user emotions and preferences, to formulate a global guideline. The Planner then generates executable plans to call different conceptual tools (e.g., sources or strategies), while the Executor compiles all intermediate results into a coherent response. This structured approach not only enhances the explainability and controllability of responses but also reduces token redundancy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TPE across various dialogue response generation tasks, including multi-source (FoCus) and multi-strategy interactions (CIMA and PsyQA). This reveals its potential to handle real-world dialogue interactions that require more complicated tool learning beyond just functional tools. The full code and data will be released for reproduction.
Forgetting Private Textual Sequences in Language Models via Leave-One-Out Ensemble
Authors: Zhe Liu, Ozlem Kalinli
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

Recent research has shown that language models have a tendency to memorize rare or unique token sequences in the training corpus. After deploying a model, practitioners might be asked to delete any personal information from the model by individuals' requests. Re-training the underlying model every time individuals would like to practice their rights to be forgotten is computationally expensive. We employ a teacher-student framework and propose a novel leave-one-out ensemble method to unlearn the targeted textual sequences that need to be forgotten from the model. In our approach, multiple teachers are trained on disjoint sets; for each targeted sequence to be removed, we exclude the teacher trained on the set containing this sequence and aggregate the predictions from remaining teachers to provide supervision during fine-tuning. Experiments on LibriSpeech and WikiText-103 datasets show that the proposed method achieves superior privacy-utility trade-offs than other counterparts.
Masked Autoencoders are Scalable Learners of Cellular Morphology
Authors: Oren Kraus, Kian Kenyon-Dean, Saber Saberian, Maryam Fallah, Peter McLean, Jess Leung, Vasudev Sharma, Ayla Khan, Jia Balakrishnan, Safiye Celik, Maciej Sypetkowski, Chi Vicky Cheng, Kristen Morse, Maureen Makes, Ben Mabey, Berton Earnshaw
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00

Inferring biological relationships from cellular phenotypes in high-content microscopy screens provides significant opportunity and challenge in biological research. Prior results have shown that deep vision models can capture biological signal better than hand-crafted features. This work explores how self-supervised deep learning approaches scale when training larger models on larger microscopy datasets. Our results show that both CNN- and ViT-based masked autoencoders significantly outperform weakly supervised baselines. At the high-end of our scale, a ViT-L/8 trained on over 3.5-billion unique crops sampled from 93-million microscopy images achieves relative improvements as high as 28% over our best weakly supervised baseline at inferring known biological relationships curated from public databases. Relevant code and select models released with this work can be found at: https://github.com/recursionpharma/maes_microscopy.
Towards Best Practices of Activation Patching in Language Models: Metrics and Methods
Authors: Fred Zhang, Neel Nanda
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand the internal mechanisms of machine learning models, where localization -- identifying the important model components -- is a key step. Activation patching, also known as causal tracing or interchange intervention, is a standard technique for this task (Vig et al., 2020), but the literature contains many variants with little consensus on the choice of hyperparameters or methodology. In this work, we systematically examine the impact of methodological details in activation patching, including evaluation metrics and corruption methods. In several settings of localization and circuit discovery in language models, we find that varying these hyperparameters could lead to disparate interpretability results. Backed by empirical observations, we give conceptual arguments for why certain metrics or methods may be preferred. Finally, we provide recommendations for the best practices of activation patching going forwards.
MKRAG: Medical Knowledge Retrieval Augmented Generation for Medical Question Answering
Authors: Yucheng Shi, Shaochen Xu, Tianze Yang, Zhengliang Liu, Tianming Liu, Quanzheng Li, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Medical Question Answering, MedQA, Model Editing, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs), although powerful in general domains, often perform poorly on domain-specific tasks such as medical question answering (QA). In addition, LLMs tend to function as "black-boxes", making it challenging to modify their behavior. To address the problem, our work employs a transparent process of retrieval augmented generation (RAG), aiming to improve LLM responses without the need for fine-tuning or retraining. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive retrieval strategy to extract medical facts from an external knowledge base, and then inject them into the LLM's query prompt. Focusing on medical QA, we evaluate the impact of different retrieval models and the number of facts on LLM performance using the MedQA-SMILE dataset. Notably, our retrieval-augmented Vicuna-7B model exhibited an accuracy improvement from 44.46% to 48.54%. This work underscores the potential of RAG to enhance LLM performance, offering a practical approach to mitigate the challenges posed by black-box LLMs.
Symbolic Imitation Learning: From Black-Box to Explainable Driving Policies
Authors: Iman Sharifi, Saber Fallah
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Imitation Learning, Inductive logic programming

Current methods of imitation learning (IL), primarily based on deep neural networks, offer efficient means for obtaining driving policies from real-world data but suffer from significant limitations in interpretability and generalizability. These shortcomings are particularly concerning in safety-critical applications like autonomous driving. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing Symbolic Imitation Learning (SIL), a groundbreaking method that employs Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to learn driving policies which are transparent, explainable and generalisable from available datasets. Utilizing the real-world highD dataset, we subject our method to a rigorous comparative analysis against prevailing neural-network-based IL methods. Our results demonstrate that SIL not only enhances the interpretability of driving policies but also significantly improves their applicability across varied driving situations. Hence, this work offers a novel pathway to more reliable and safer autonomous driving systems, underscoring the potential of integrating ILP into the domain of IL.
Clinical Trial Recommendations Using Semantics-Based Inductive Inference and Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Authors: Murthy V. Devarakonda, Smita Mohanty, Raja Rao Sunkishala, Nag Mallampalli, Xiong Liu
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Embeddings, text similarity

Designing a new clinical trial entails many decisions, such as defining a cohort and setting the study objectives to name a few, and therefore can benefit from recommendations based on exhaustive mining of past clinical trial records. Here, we propose a novel recommendation methodology, based on neural embeddings trained on a first-of-a-kind knowledge graph of clinical trials. We addressed several important research questions in this context, including designing a knowledge graph (KG) for clinical trial data, effectiveness of various KG embedding (KGE) methods for it, a novel inductive inference using KGE, and its use in generating recommendations for clinical trial design. We used publicly available data from clinicaltrials.gov for the study. Results show that our recommendations approach achieves relevance scores of 70%-83%, measured as the text similarity to actual clinical trial elements, and the most relevant recommendation can be found near the top of list. Our study also suggests potential improvement in training KGE using node semantics.
Unified Long-Term Time-Series Forecasting Benchmark
Authors: Jacek Cyranka, Szymon Haponiuk
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

In order to support the advancement of machine learning methods for predicting time-series data, we present a comprehensive dataset designed explicitly for long-term time-series forecasting. We incorporate a collection of datasets obtained from diverse, dynamic systems and real-life records. Each dataset is standardized by dividing it into training and test trajectories with predetermined lookback lengths. We include trajectories of length up to $2000$ to ensure a reliable evaluation of long-term forecasting capabilities. To determine the most effective model in diverse scenarios, we conduct an extensive benchmarking analysis using classical and state-of-the-art models, namely LSTM, DeepAR, NLinear, N-Hits, PatchTST, and LatentODE. Our findings reveal intriguing performance comparisons among these models, highlighting the dataset-dependent nature of model effectiveness. Notably, we introduce a custom latent NLinear model and enhance DeepAR with a curriculum learning phase. Both consistently outperform their vanilla counterparts.
Towards Efficient and Trustworthy AI Through Hardware-Algorithm-Communication Co-Design
Authors: Bipin Rajendran, Osvaldo Simeone, Bashir M. Al-Hashimi
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Uncertainty Quantification

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms based on neural networks have been designed for decades with the goal of maximising some measure of accuracy. This has led to two undesired effects. First, model complexity has risen exponentially when measured in terms of computation and memory requirements. Second, state-of-the-art AI models are largely incapable of providing trustworthy measures of their uncertainty, possibly `hallucinating' their answers and discouraging their adoption for decision-making in sensitive applications. With the goal of realising efficient and trustworthy AI, in this paper we highlight research directions at the intersection of hardware and software design that integrate physical insights into computational substrates, neuroscientific principles concerning efficient information processing, information-theoretic results on optimal uncertainty quantification, and communication-theoretic guidelines for distributed processing. Overall, the paper advocates for novel design methodologies that target not only accuracy but also uncertainty quantification, while leveraging emerging computing hardware architectures that move beyond the traditional von Neumann digital computing paradigm to embrace in-memory, neuromorphic, and quantum computing technologies. An important overarching principle of the proposed approach is to view the stochasticity inherent in the computational substrate and in the communication channels between processors as a resource to be leveraged for the purpose of representing and processing classical and quantum uncertainty.
Enhancing Cross-Category Learning in Recommendation Systems with Multi-Layer Embedding Training
Authors: Zihao Deng, Benjamin Ghaemmaghami, Ashish Kumar Singh, Benjamin Cho, Leo Orshansky, Mattan Erez, Michael Orshansky
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Recommendation Systems

Modern DNN-based recommendation systems rely on training-derived embeddings of sparse features. Input sparsity makes obtaining high-quality embeddings for rarely-occurring categories harder as their representations are updated infrequently. We demonstrate a training-time technique to produce superior embeddings via effective cross-category learning and theoretically explain its surprising effectiveness. The scheme, termed the multi-layer embeddings training (MLET), trains embeddings using factorization of the embedding layer, with an inner dimension higher than the target embedding dimension. For inference efficiency, MLET converts the trained two-layer embedding into a single-layer one thus keeping inference-time model size unchanged. Empirical superiority of MLET is puzzling as its search space is not larger than that of the single-layer embedding. The strong dependence of MLET on the inner dimension is even more surprising. We develop a theory that explains both of these behaviors by showing that MLET creates an adaptive update mechanism modulated by the singular vectors of embeddings. When tested on multiple state-of-the-art recommendation models for click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks, MLET consistently produces better models, especially for rare items. At constant model quality, MLET allows embedding dimension, and model size, reduction by up to 16x, and 5.8x on average, across the models.
Neuro-Inspired Hierarchical Multimodal Learning
Authors: Xiongye Xiao, Gengshuo Liu, Gaurav Gupta, Defu Cao, Shixuan Li, Yaxing Li, Tianqing Fang, Mingxi Cheng, Paul Bogdan
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00

Integrating and processing information from various sources or modalities are critical for obtaining a comprehensive and accurate perception of the real world. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, we develop the Information-Theoretic Hierarchical Perception (ITHP) model, which utilizes the concept of information bottleneck. Distinct from most traditional fusion models that aim to incorporate all modalities as input, our model designates the prime modality as input, while the remaining modalities act as detectors in the information pathway. Our proposed perception model focuses on constructing an effective and compact information flow by achieving a balance between the minimization of mutual information between the latent state and the input modal state, and the maximization of mutual information between the latent states and the remaining modal states. This approach leads to compact latent state representations that retain relevant information while minimizing redundancy, thereby substantially enhancing the performance of downstream tasks. Experimental evaluations on both the MUStARD and CMU-MOSI datasets demonstrate that our model consistently distills crucial information in multimodal learning scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks.
STAG: Enabling Low Latency and Low Staleness of GNN-based Services with Dynamic Graphs
Authors: Jiawen Wang, Quan Chen, Deze Zeng, Zhuo Song, Chen Chen, Minyi Guo
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00

Many emerging user-facing services adopt Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to improve serving accuracy. When the graph used by a GNN model changes, representations (embedding) of nodes in the graph should be updated accordingly. However, the node representation update is too slow, resulting in either long response latency of user queries (the inference is performed after the update completes) or high staleness problem (the inference is performed based on stale data). Our in-depth analysis shows that the slow update is mainly due to neighbor explosion problem in graphs and duplicated computation. Based on such findings, we propose STAG, a GNN serving framework that enables low latency and low staleness of GNN-based services. It comprises a collaborative serving mechanism and an additivity-based incremental propagation strategy. With the collaborative serving mechanism, only part of node representations are updated during the update phase, and the final representations are calculated in the inference phase. It alleviates the neighbor explosion problem. The additivity-based incremental propagation strategy reuses intermediate data during the update phase, eliminating duplicated computation problem. Experimental results show that STAG accelerates the update phase by 1.3x~90.1x, and greatly reduces staleness time with a slight increase in response latency.
ChatGPT & Mechanical Engineering: Examining performance on the FE Mechanical Engineering and Undergraduate Exams
Authors: Matthew Frenkel, Hebah Emara
Date: 2023-09-26 00:00:00

The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 generated large interest into possible applications of artificial intelligence in STEM education and among STEM professions. As a result many questions surrounding the capabilities of generative AI tools inside and outside of the classroom have been raised and are starting to be explored. This study examines the capabilities of ChatGPT within the discipline of mechanical engineering. It aims to examine use cases and pitfalls of such a technology in the classroom and professional settings. ChatGPT was presented with a set of questions from junior and senior level mechanical engineering exams provided at a large private university, as well as a set of practice questions for the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam (FE) in Mechanical Engineering. The responses of two ChatGPT models, one free to use and one paid subscription, were analyzed. The paper found that the subscription model (GPT-4) greatly outperformed the free version (GPT-3.5), achieving 76% correct vs 51% correct, but the limitation of text only input on both models makes neither likely to pass the FE exam. The results confirm findings in the literature with regards to types of errors and pitfalls made by ChatGPT. It was found that due to its inconsistency and a tendency to confidently produce incorrect answers the tool is best suited for users with expert knowledge.
Learning to Transform for Generalizable Instance-wise Invariance
Authors: Utkarsh Singhal, Carlos Esteves, Ameesh Makadia, Stella X. Yu
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Computer vision research has long aimed to build systems that are robust to spatial transformations found in natural data. Traditionally, this is done using data augmentation or hard-coding invariances into the architecture. However, too much or too little invariance can hurt, and the correct amount is unknown a priori and dependent on the instance. Ideally, the appropriate invariance would be learned from data and inferred at test-time. We treat invariance as a prediction problem. Given any image, we use a normalizing flow to predict a distribution over transformations and average the predictions over them. Since this distribution only depends on the instance, we can align instances before classifying them and generalize invariance across classes. The same distribution can also be used to adapt to out-of-distribution poses. This normalizing flow is trained end-to-end and can learn a much larger range of transformations than Augerino and InstaAug. When used as data augmentation, our method shows accuracy and robustness gains on CIFAR 10, CIFAR10-LT, and TinyImageNet.
Demystifying CLIP Data
Authors: Hu Xu, Saining Xie, Xiaoqing Ellen Tan, Po-Yao Huang, Russell Howes, Vasu Sharma, Shang-Wen Li, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Christoph Feichtenhofer
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is an approach that has advanced research and applications in computer vision, fueling modern recognition systems and generative models. We believe that the main ingredient to the success of CLIP is its data and not the model architecture or pre-training objective. However, CLIP only provides very limited information about its data and how it has been collected, leading to works that aim to reproduce CLIP's data by filtering with its model parameters. In this work, we intend to reveal CLIP's data curation approach and in our pursuit of making it open to the community introduce Metadata-Curated Language-Image Pre-training (MetaCLIP). MetaCLIP takes a raw data pool and metadata (derived from CLIP's concepts) and yields a balanced subset over the metadata distribution. Our experimental study rigorously isolates the model and training settings, concentrating solely on data. MetaCLIP applied to CommonCrawl with 400M image-text data pairs outperforms CLIP's data on multiple standard benchmarks. In zero-shot ImageNet classification, MetaCLIP achieves 70.8% accuracy, surpassing CLIP's 68.3% on ViT-B models. Scaling to 1B data, while maintaining the same training budget, attains 72.4%. Our observations hold across various model sizes, exemplified by ViT-H achieving 80.5%, without any bells-and-whistles. Curation code and training data distribution on metadata is made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/MetaCLIP.