pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Large Language Models as Evolutionary Optimizers
Authors: Shengcai Liu, Caishun Chen, Xinghua Qu, Ke Tang, Yew-Soon Ong
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have achieved remarkable success in tackling complex combinatorial optimization problems. However, EAs often demand carefully-designed operators with the aid of domain expertise to achieve satisfactory performance. In this work, we present the first study on large language models (LLMs) as evolutionary combinatorial optimizers. The main advantage is that it requires minimal domain knowledge and human efforts, as well as no additional training of the model. This approach is referred to as LLM-driven EA (LMEA). Specifically, in each generation of the evolutionary search, LMEA instructs the LLM to select parent solutions from current population, and perform crossover and mutation to generate offspring solutions. Then, LMEA evaluates these new solutions and include them into the population for the next generation. LMEA is equipped with a self-adaptation mechanism that controls the temperature of the LLM. This enables it to balance between exploration and exploitation and prevents the search from getting stuck in local optima. We investigate the power of LMEA on the classical traveling salesman problems (TSPs) widely used in combinatorial optimization research. Notably, the results show that LMEA performs competitively to traditional heuristics in finding high-quality solutions on TSP instances with up to 20 nodes. Additionally, we also study the effectiveness of LLM-driven crossover/mutation and the self-adaptation mechanism in evolutionary search. In summary, our results reveal the great potentials of LLMs as evolutionary optimizers for solving combinatorial problems. We hope our research shall inspire future explorations on LLM-driven EAs for complex optimization challenges.
The hardware is the software
Authors: jeremie Laydevant, Logan G. Wright, Tianyu Wang, Peter L. McMahon
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00

Human brains and bodies are not hardware running software: the hardware is the software. We reason that because the microscopic physics of artificial-intelligence hardware and of human biological "hardware" is distinct, neuromorphic engineers need to be cautious (and yet also creative) in how we take inspiration from biological intelligence. We should focus primarily on principles and design ideas that respect -- and embrace -- the underlying hardware physics of non-biological intelligent systems, rather than abstracting it away. We see a major role for neuroscience in neuromorphic computing as identifying the physics-agnostic principles of biological intelligence -- that is the principles of biological intelligence that can be gainfully adapted and applied to any physical hardware.
Backward and Forward Inference in Interacting Independent-Cascade Processes: A Scalable and Convergent Message-Passing Approach
Authors: Nouman Khan, Kangle Mu, Mehrdad Moharrami, Vijay Subramanian
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00

We study the problems of estimating the past and future evolutions of two diffusion processes that spread concurrently on a network. Specifically, given a known network $G=(V, \overrightarrow{E})$ and a (possibly noisy) snapshot $\mathcal{O}_n$ of its state taken at (a possibly unknown) time $W$, we wish to determine the posterior distributions of the initial state of the network and the infection times of its nodes. These distributions are useful in finding source nodes of epidemics and rumors -- $\textit{backward inference}$ -- , and estimating the spread of a fixed set of source nodes -- $\textit{forward inference}$. To model the interaction between the two processes, we study an extension of the independent-cascade (IC) model where, when a node gets infected with either process, its susceptibility to the other one changes. First, we derive the exact joint probability of the initial state of the network and the observation-snapshot $\mathcal{O}_n$. Then, using the machinery of factor-graphs, factor-graph transformations, and the generalized distributive-law, we derive a Belief-Propagation (BP) based algorithm that is scalable to large networks and can converge on graphs of arbitrary topology (at a likely expense in approximation accuracy).
Reflection coupling for unadjusted generalized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in the nonconvex stochastic gradient case
Authors: Martin Chak, Pierre Monmarché
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00

Contraction in Wasserstein 1-distance with explicit rates is established for generalized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with stochastic gradients under possibly nonconvex conditions. The algorithms considered include splitting schemes of kinetic Langevin diffusion commonly used in molecular dynamics simulations. To accommodate the degenerate noise structure corresponding to inertia existing in the chain, a characteristically discrete-in-time coupling and contraction proof is devised. As consequence, quantitative Gaussian concentration bounds are provided for empirical averages. Convergence in Wasserstein 2-distance and total variation are also given, together with numerical bias estimates.
A Multimodal Ecological Civilization Pattern Recommendation Method Based on Large Language Models and Knowledge Graph
Authors: Zhihang Yu, Shu Wang, Yunqiang Zhu, Zhiqiang Zou
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00

The Ecological Civilization Pattern Recommendation System (ECPRS) aims to recommend suitable ecological civilization patterns for target regions, promoting sustainable development and reducing regional disparities. However, the current representative recommendation methods are not suitable for recommending ecological civilization patterns in a geographical context. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, regions have spatial heterogeneity, and the (ECPRS)needs to consider factors like climate, topography, vegetation, etc., to recommend civilization patterns adapted to specific ecological environments, ensuring the feasibility and practicality of the recommendations. Secondly, the abstract features of the ecological civilization patterns in the real world have not been fully utilized., resulting in poor richness in their embedding representations and consequently, lower performance of the recommendation system. Considering these limitations, we propose the ECPR-MML method. Initially, based on the novel method UGPIG, we construct a knowledge graph to extract regional representations incorporating spatial heterogeneity features. Following that, inspired by the significant progress made by Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we employ Large LLMs to generate multimodal features for ecological civilization patterns in the form of text and images. We extract and integrate these multimodal features to obtain semantically rich representations of ecological civilization. Through extensive experiments, we validate the performance of our ECPR-MML model. Our results show that F1@5 is 2.11% higher compared to state-of-the-art models, 2.02% higher than NGCF, and 1.16% higher than UGPIG. Furthermore, multimodal data can indeed enhance recommendation performance. However, the data generated by LLM is not as effective as real data to a certain extent.
The diminishing state of shared reality on US television news
Authors: Homa Hosseinmardi, Samuel Wolken, David M. Rothschild, Duncan J. Watts
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00

The potential for a large, diverse population to coexist peacefully is thought to depend on the existence of a ``shared reality:'' a public sphere in which participants are exposed to similar facts about similar topics. A generation ago, broadcast television news was widely considered to serve this function; however, since the rise of cable news in the 1990s, critics and scholars have worried that the corresponding fragmentation and segregation of audiences along partisan lines has caused this shared reality to be lost. Here we examine this concern using a unique combination of data sets tracking the production (since 2012) and consumption (since 2016) of television news content on the three largest cable and broadcast networks respectively. With regard to production, we find strong evidence for the ``loss of shared reality hypothesis:'' while broadcast continues to cover similar topics with similar language, cable news networks have become increasingly distinct, both from broadcast news and each other, diverging both in terms of content and language. With regard to consumption, we find more mixed evidence: while broadcast news has indeed declined in popularity, it remains the dominant source of news for roughly 50\% more Americans than does cable; moreover, its decline, while somewhat attributable to cable, appears driven more by a shift away from news consumption altogether than a growth in cable consumption. We conclude that shared reality on US television news is indeed diminishing, but is more robust than previously thought and is declining for somewhat different reasons.
Leveraging Multimodal Features and Item-level User Feedback for Bundle Construction
Authors: Yunshan Ma, Xiaohao Liu, Yinwei Wei, Zhulin Tao, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

Automatic bundle construction is a crucial prerequisite step in various bundle-aware online services. Previous approaches are mostly designed to model the bundling strategy of existing bundles. However, it is hard to acquire large-scale well-curated bundle dataset, especially for those platforms that have not offered bundle services before. Even for platforms with mature bundle services, there are still many items that are included in few or even zero bundles, which give rise to sparsity and cold-start challenges in the bundle construction models. To tackle these issues, we target at leveraging multimodal features, item-level user feedback signals, and the bundle composition information, to achieve a comprehensive formulation of bundle construction. Nevertheless, such formulation poses two new technical challenges: 1) how to learn effective representations by optimally unifying multiple features, and 2) how to address the problems of modality missing, noise, and sparsity problems induced by the incomplete query bundles. In this work, to address these technical challenges, we propose a Contrastive Learning-enhanced Hierarchical Encoder method (CLHE). Specifically, we use self-attention modules to combine the multimodal and multi-item features, and then leverage both item- and bundle-level contrastive learning to enhance the representation learning, thus to counter the modality missing, noise, and sparsity problems. Extensive experiments on four datasets in two application domains demonstrate that our method outperforms a list of SOTA methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Xiaohao-Liu/CLHE.
Using Adaptive Bandit Experiments to Increase and Investigate Engagement in Mental Health
Authors: Harsh Kumar, Tong Li, Jiakai Shi, Ilya Musabirov, Rachel Kornfield, Jonah Meyerhoff, Ananya Bhattacharjee, Chris Karr, Theresa Nguyen, David Mohr, Anna Rafferty, Sofia Villar, Nina Deliu, Joseph Jay Williams
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Thompson Sampling

Digital mental health (DMH) interventions, such as text-message-based lessons and activities, offer immense potential for accessible mental health support. While these interventions can be effective, real-world experimental testing can further enhance their design and impact. Adaptive experimentation, utilizing algorithms like Thompson Sampling for (contextual) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, can lead to continuous improvement and personalization. However, it remains unclear when these algorithms can simultaneously increase user experience rewards and facilitate appropriate data collection for social-behavioral scientists to analyze with sufficient statistical confidence. Although a growing body of research addresses the practical and statistical aspects of MAB and other adaptive algorithms, further exploration is needed to assess their impact across diverse real-world contexts. This paper presents a software system developed over two years that allows text-messaging intervention components to be adapted using bandit and other algorithms while collecting data for side-by-side comparison with traditional uniform random non-adaptive experiments. We evaluate the system by deploying a text-message-based DMH intervention to 1100 users, recruited through a large mental health non-profit organization, and share the path forward for deploying this system at scale. This system not only enables applications in mental health but could also serve as a model testbed for adaptive experimentation algorithms in other domains.
A Reinforcement Learning-Based Framework for Solving Physical Design Routing Problem in the Absence of Large Test Sets
Authors: Upma Gandhi, Ismail Bustany, William Swartz, Dr. Laleh Behjat
Date: 2019-09-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: Machine Learning for CAD (MLCAD), ACM/IEEE Workshop 2019 9
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Advances in Electronic Design Automation(EDA) methods have made the designers and programmers to search for new ways to solve the complex problems seen in today’s Very Large Scale Integration circuits. Machine learning (ML), especially supervised learning, has been used to predict design rule violations. However, supervised learning requires large amount of labeled data. With the competitive nature of EDA based companies, there is limited access to benchmarks and labeled data. In this work, we propose a data-independent reinforcement learning (RL) based routing model called Alpha-PD-Router, which learns to route a circuit and correct short violations. The Alpha-PD-Router is based on a two-player collaborative game model that has been trained on a small circuit and successfully resolves 75 violations in 99 cases of 2 pins net arrangements in the testing phase. The proposed model has the potential to be used as a framework to develop RL based routing techniques untethered by the scarce availability of large routing data samples or designer expertise.

Index Terms—Physical design, routing, machine learning, reinforcement learning, collaborative min-max game theory
Retinal Fundus Multi-Disease Image Dataset (RFMiD) 2.0: A Dataset of Frequently and Rarely Identified Diseases
Authors: Panchal Sachin, Ankita Naik, Manesh Kokare, Samiksha Pachade, Rushikesh Naigaonkar, Prerana Phadnis, and Archana Bhange.
Date: 2023-01-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: Data 2023 1

Irreversible vision loss is a worldwide threat. Developing a computer-aided diagnosis system to detect retinal fundus diseases is extremely useful and serviceable to ophthalmologists. Early detection, diagnosis, and correct treatment could save the eye’s vision. Nevertheless, an eye may be afflicted with several diseases if proper care is not taken. A single retinal fundus image might be linked to one or more diseases. Age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, Glaucoma, and uncorrected refractive errors are the leading causes of visual impairment. Our research team at the center of excellence lab has generated a new dataset called the Retinal Fundus Multi-Disease Image Dataset 2.0 (RFMiD2.0). This dataset includes around 860 retinal fundus images, annotated by three eye specialists, and is a multiclass, multilabel dataset. We gathered images from a research facility in Jalna and Nanded, where patients across Maharashtra come for preventative and therapeutic eye care. Our dataset would be the second publicly available dataset consisting of the most frequent diseases, along with some rarely identified diseases. This dataset is auxiliary to the previously published RFMiD dataset. This dataset would be significant for the research and development of artificial intelligence in ophthalmology.
A Contextualized Real-Time Multimodal Emotion Recognition for Conversational Agents using Graph Convolutional Networks in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Fathima Abdul Rahman, Guang Lu
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Emotion Recognition, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Owing to the recent developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLM), conversational agents are becoming increasingly popular and accepted. They provide a human touch by interacting in ways familiar to us and by providing support as virtual companions. Therefore, it is important to understand the user's emotions in order to respond considerately. Compared to the standard problem of emotion recognition, conversational agents face an additional constraint in that recognition must be real-time. Studies on model architectures using audio, visual, and textual modalities have mainly focused on emotion classification using full video sequences that do not provide online features. In this work, we present a novel paradigm for contextualized Emotion Recognition using Graph Convolutional Network with Reinforcement Learning (conER-GRL). Conversations are partitioned into smaller groups of utterances for effective extraction of contextual information. The system uses Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to extract multimodal features from these groups of utterances. More importantly, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are cascade trained to capture the complex dependencies of emotion features in interactive scenarios. Comparing the results of the conER-GRL model with other state-of-the-art models on the benchmark dataset IEMOCAP demonstrates the advantageous capabilities of the conER-GRL architecture in recognizing emotions in real-time from multimodal conversational signals.
Domain Generalized Object Detection for Remote Sensing Images
Authors: Efkan Durakli, Erchan Aptoula
Date: 2023-07-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Signal Processing and Communications Applications (SIU) 2023 7
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Management, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Building roof type detection from remotely sensed images is a crucial task for many remote sensing applications, including urban planning and disaster management. In recent years, deep learning-based object detection approaches have demonstrated outstanding performance in this field. However, most of these approaches assume that the training and testing data are sampled from the same distribution. When there are differences between the distributions of training and test data, known as domain shift, the performance significantly degrades. In this paper, we proposed a domain generalization method to address domain shift at the instance and image level for roof type detection from remote sensing images. Furthermore, we evaluated our proposed method with IEEE Data Fusion Contest 2023 dataset. The proposed approach is the first of its kind in terms of domain generalization for remote sensing object detection.
Large Language Models: The Need for Nuance in Current Debates and a Pragmatic Perspective on Understanding
Authors: Bram M. A. van Dijk, Tom Kouwenhoven, Marco R. Spruit, Max J. van Duijn
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are unparalleled in their ability to generate grammatically correct, fluent text. LLMs are appearing rapidly, and debates on LLM capacities have taken off, but reflection is lagging behind. Thus, in this position paper, we first zoom in on the debate and critically assess three points recurring in critiques of LLM capacities: i) that LLMs only parrot statistical patterns in the training data; ii) that LLMs master formal but not functional language competence; and iii) that language learning in LLMs cannot inform human language learning. Drawing on empirical and theoretical arguments, we show that these points need more nuance. Second, we outline a pragmatic perspective on the issue of `real' understanding and intentionality in LLMs. Understanding and intentionality pertain to unobservable mental states we attribute to other humans because they have pragmatic value: they allow us to abstract away from complex underlying mechanics and predict behaviour effectively. We reflect on the circumstances under which it would make sense for humans to similarly attribute mental states to LLMs, thereby outlining a pragmatic philosophical context for LLMs as an increasingly prominent technology in society.
She had Cobalt Blue Eyes: Prompt Testing to Create Aligned and Sustainable Language Models
Authors: Veronica Chatrath, Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Shaina Raza
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

As the use of large language models (LLMs) increases within society, as does the risk of their misuse. Appropriate safeguards must be in place to ensure LLM outputs uphold the ethical standards of society, highlighting the positive role that artificial intelligence technologies can have. Recent events indicate ethical concerns around conventionally trained LLMs, leading to overall unsafe user experiences. This motivates our research question: how do we ensure LLM alignment? In this work, we introduce a test suite of unique prompts to foster the development of aligned LLMs that are fair, safe, and robust. We show that prompting LLMs at every step of the development pipeline, including data curation, pre-training, and fine-tuning, will result in an overall more responsible model. Our test suite evaluates outputs from four state-of-the-art language models: GPT-3.5, GPT-4, OPT, and LLaMA-2. The assessment presented in this paper highlights a gap between societal alignment and the capabilities of current LLMs. Additionally, implementing a test suite such as ours lowers the environmental overhead of making models safe and fair.
Cognitive modeling and learning with sparse binary hypervectors
Authors: Zhonghao Yang
Date: 2023-09-16 00:00:00

Following the general theoretical framework of VSA (Vector Symbolic Architecture), a cognitive model with the use of sparse binary hypervectors is proposed. In addition, learning algorithms are introduced to bootstrap the model from incoming data stream, with much improved transparency and efficiency. Mimicking human cognitive process, the training can be performed online while inference is in session. Word-level embedding is re-visited with such hypervectors, and further applications in the field of NLP (Natural Language Processing) are explored.
Learning to love diligent trolls: Accounting for rater effects in the dialogue safety task
Authors: Michael John Ilagan
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Essay Scoring, Chatbot, GPU

Chatbots have the risk of generating offensive utterances, which must be avoided. Post-deployment, one way for a chatbot to continuously improve is to source utterance/label pairs from feedback by live users. However, among users are trolls, who provide training examples with incorrect labels. To de-troll training data, previous work removed training examples that have high user-aggregated cross-validation (CV) error. However, CV is expensive; and in a coordinated attack, CV may be overwhelmed by trolls in number and in consistency among themselves. In the present work, I address both limitations by proposing a solution inspired by methodology in automated essay scoring (AES): have multiple users rate each utterance, then perform latent class analysis (LCA) to infer correct labels. As it does not require GPU computations, LCA is inexpensive. In experiments, I found that the AES-like solution can infer training labels with high accuracy when trolls are consistent, even when trolls are the majority.