pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Eureka-Moments in Transformers: Multi-Step Tasks Reveal Softmax Induced Optimization Problems
Authors: David T. Hoffmann, Simon Schrodi, Jelena Bratulić, Nadine Behrmann, Volker Fischer, Thomas Brox
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In this work, we study rapid improvements of the training loss in transformers when being confronted with multi-step decision tasks. We found that transformers struggle to learn the intermediate task and both training and validation loss saturate for hundreds of epochs. When transformers finally learn the intermediate task, they do this rapidly and unexpectedly. We call these abrupt improvements Eureka-moments, since the transformer appears to suddenly learn a previously incomprehensible concept. We designed synthetic tasks to study the problem in detail, but the leaps in performance can be observed also for language modeling and in-context learning (ICL). We suspect that these abrupt transitions are caused by the multi-step nature of these tasks. Indeed, we find connections and show that ways to improve on the synthetic multi-step tasks can be used to improve the training of language modeling and ICL. Using the synthetic data we trace the problem back to the Softmax function in the self-attention block of transformers and show ways to alleviate the problem. These fixes reduce the required number of training steps, lead to higher likelihood to learn the intermediate task, to higher final accuracy and training becomes more robust to hyper-parameters.
Towards Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning under Diverse Data Corruption
Authors: Rui Yang, Han Zhong, Jiawei Xu, Amy Zhang, Chongjie Zhang, Lei Han, Tong Zhang
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising approach for learning reinforced policies from offline datasets without the need for costly or unsafe interactions with the environment. However, datasets collected by humans in real-world environments are often noisy and may even be maliciously corrupted, which can significantly degrade the performance of offline RL. In this work, we first investigate the performance of current offline RL algorithms under comprehensive data corruption, including states, actions, rewards, and dynamics. Our extensive experiments reveal that implicit Q-learning (IQL) demonstrates remarkable resilience to data corruption among various offline RL algorithms. Furthermore, we conduct both empirical and theoretical analyses to understand IQL's robust performance, identifying its supervised policy learning scheme as the key factor. Despite its relative robustness, IQL still suffers from heavy-tail targets of Q functions under dynamics corruption. To tackle this challenge, we draw inspiration from robust statistics to employ the Huber loss to handle the heavy-tailedness and utilize quantile estimators to balance penalization for corrupted data and learning stability. By incorporating these simple yet effective modifications into IQL, we propose a more robust offline RL approach named Robust IQL (RIQL). Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIQL exhibits highly robust performance when subjected to diverse data corruption scenarios.
Luminate: Structured Generation and Exploration of Design Space with Large Language Models for Human-AI Co-Creation
Authors: Sangho Suh, Meng Chen, Bryan Min, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Haijun Xia
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00

Thanks to their generative capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have become an invaluable tool for creative processes. These models have the capacity to produce hundreds and thousands of visual and textual outputs, offering abundant inspiration for creative endeavors. But are we harnessing their full potential? We argue that current interaction paradigms fall short, guiding users towards rapid convergence on a limited set of ideas, rather than empowering them to explore the vast latent design space in generative models. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that facilitates the structured generation of design space in which users can seamlessly explore, evaluate, and synthesize a multitude of responses. We demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of this framework through the design and development of an interactive system, Luminate, and a user study with 14 professional writers. Our work advances how we interact with LLMs for creative tasks, introducing a way to harness the creative potential of LLMs.
The Foundation Model Transparency Index
Authors: Rishi Bommasani, Kevin Klyman, Shayne Longpre, Sayash Kapoor, Nestor Maslej, Betty Xiong, Daniel Zhang, Percy Liang
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Foundation models have rapidly permeated society, catalyzing a wave of generative AI applications spanning enterprise and consumer-facing contexts. While the societal impact of foundation models is growing, transparency is on the decline, mirroring the opacity that has plagued past digital technologies (e.g. social media). Reversing this trend is essential: transparency is a vital precondition for public accountability, scientific innovation, and effective governance. To assess the transparency of the foundation model ecosystem and help improve transparency over time, we introduce the Foundation Model Transparency Index. The Foundation Model Transparency Index specifies 100 fine-grained indicators that comprehensively codify transparency for foundation models, spanning the upstream resources used to build a foundation model (e.g data, labor, compute), details about the model itself (e.g. size, capabilities, risks), and the downstream use (e.g. distribution channels, usage policies, affected geographies). We score 10 major foundation model developers (e.g. OpenAI, Google, Meta) against the 100 indicators to assess their transparency. To facilitate and standardize assessment, we score developers in relation to their practices for their flagship foundation model (e.g. GPT-4 for OpenAI, PaLM 2 for Google, Llama 2 for Meta). We present 10 top-level findings about the foundation model ecosystem: for example, no developer currently discloses significant information about the downstream impact of its flagship model, such as the number of users, affected market sectors, or how users can seek redress for harm. Overall, the Foundation Model Transparency Index establishes the level of transparency today to drive progress on foundation model governance via industry standards and regulatory intervention.
Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Models
Authors: Yecheng Jason Ma, William Liang, Guanzhi Wang, De-An Huang, Osbert Bastani, Dinesh Jayaraman, Yuke Zhu, Linxi Fan, Anima Anandkumar
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, In-Context Learning, reinforcement-learning, Sequential Decision Making

Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled as high-level semantic planners for sequential decision-making tasks. However, harnessing them to learn complex low-level manipulation tasks, such as dexterous pen spinning, remains an open problem. We bridge this fundamental gap and present Eureka, a human-level reward design algorithm powered by LLMs. Eureka exploits the remarkable zero-shot generation, code-writing, and in-context improvement capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4, to perform evolutionary optimization over reward code. The resulting rewards can then be used to acquire complex skills via reinforcement learning. Without any task-specific prompting or pre-defined reward templates, Eureka generates reward functions that outperform expert human-engineered rewards. In a diverse suite of 29 open-source RL environments that include 10 distinct robot morphologies, Eureka outperforms human experts on 83% of the tasks, leading to an average normalized improvement of 52%. The generality of Eureka also enables a new gradient-free in-context learning approach to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), readily incorporating human inputs to improve the quality and the safety of the generated rewards without model updating. Finally, using Eureka rewards in a curriculum learning setting, we demonstrate for the first time, a simulated Shadow Hand capable of performing pen spinning tricks, adeptly manipulating a pen in circles at rapid speed.
Digital Twin-Enabled Intelligent DDoS Detection Mechanism for Autonomous Core Networks
Authors: Yagmur Yigit, Bahadir Bal, Aytac Karameseoglu, Trung Q. Duong, Berk Canberk
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Existing distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) solutions cannot handle highly aggregated data rates; thus, they are unsuitable for Internet service provider (ISP) core networks. This article proposes a digital twin-enabled intelligent DDoS detection mechanism using an online learning method for autonomous systems. Our contributions are three-fold: we first design a DDoS detection architecture based on the digital twin for ISP core networks. We implemented a Yet Another Next Generation (YANG) model and an automated feature selection (AutoFS) module to handle core network data. We used an online learning approach to update the model instantly and efficiently, improve the learning model quickly, and ensure accurate predictions. Finally, we reveal that our proposed solution successfully detects DDoS attacks and updates the feature selection method and learning model with a true classification rate of ninety-seven percent. Our proposed solution can estimate the attack within approximately fifteen minutes after the DDoS attack starts.
Vision-Language Models are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Juan Rocamonde, Victoriano Montesinos, Elvis Nava, Ethan Perez, David Lindner
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, Prompt Engineering, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sentence, Spatial Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires either manually specifying a reward function, which is often infeasible, or learning a reward model from a large amount of human feedback, which is often very expensive. We study a more sample-efficient alternative: using pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) as zero-shot reward models (RMs) to specify tasks via natural language. We propose a natural and general approach to using VLMs as reward models, which we call VLM-RMs. We use VLM-RMs based on CLIP to train a MuJoCo humanoid to learn complex tasks without a manually specified reward function, such as kneeling, doing the splits, and sitting in a lotus position. For each of these tasks, we only provide a single sentence text prompt describing the desired task with minimal prompt engineering. We provide videos of the trained agents at: https://sites.google.com/view/vlm-rm. We can improve performance by providing a second "baseline" prompt and projecting out parts of the CLIP embedding space irrelevant to distinguish between goal and baseline. Further, we find a strong scaling effect for VLM-RMs: larger VLMs trained with more compute and data are better reward models. The failure modes of VLM-RMs we encountered are all related to known capability limitations of current VLMs, such as limited spatial reasoning ability or visually unrealistic environments that are far off-distribution for the VLM. We find that VLM-RMs are remarkably robust as long as the VLM is large enough. This suggests that future VLMs will become more and more useful reward models for a wide range of RL applications.
Generative Marginalization Models
Authors: Sulin Liu, Peter J. Ramadge, Ryan P. Adams
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00

We introduce marginalization models (MAMs), a new family of generative models for high-dimensional discrete data. They offer scalable and flexible generative modeling by explicitly modeling all induced marginal distributions. Marginalization models enable fast approximation of arbitrary marginal probabilities with a single forward pass of the neural network, which overcomes a major limitation of arbitrary marginal inference models, such as any-order autoregressive models. MAMs also address the scalability bottleneck encountered in training any-order generative models for high-dimensional problems under the context of energy-based training, where the goal is to match the learned distribution to a given desired probability (specified by an unnormalized log-probability function such as energy or reward function). We propose scalable methods for learning the marginals, grounded in the concept of "marginalization self-consistency". We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on a variety of discrete data distributions, including images, text, physical systems, and molecules, for maximum likelihood and energy-based training settings. MAMs achieve orders of magnitude speedup in evaluating the marginal probabilities on both settings. For energy-based training tasks, MAMs enable any-order generative modeling of high-dimensional problems beyond the scale of previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/PrincetonLIPS/MaM.
Network-Aware AutoML Framework for Software-Defined Sensor Networks
Authors: Emre Horsanali, Yagmur Yigit, Gokhan Secinti, Aytac Karameseoglu, Berk Canberk
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML

As the current detection solutions of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) need additional infrastructures to handle high aggregate data rates, they are not suitable for sensor networks or the Internet of Things. Besides, the security architecture of software-defined sensor networks needs to pay attention to the vulnerabilities of both software-defined networks and sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a network-aware automated machine learning (AutoML) framework which detects DDoS attacks in software-defined sensor networks. Our framework selects an ideal machine learning algorithm to detect DDoS attacks in network-constrained environments, using metrics such as variable traffic load, heterogeneous traffic rate, and detection time while preventing over-fitting. Our contributions are two-fold: (i) we first investigate the trade-off between the efficiency of ML algorithms and network/traffic state in the scope of DDoS detection. (ii) we design and implement a software architecture containing open-source network tools, with the deployment of multiple ML algorithms. Lastly, we show that under the denial of service attacks, our framework ensures the traffic packets are still delivered within the network with additional delays.
Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytelling
Authors: Nina Begus
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00

The paper proposes a framework that combines behavioral and computational experiments employing fictional prompts as a novel tool for investigating cultural artifacts and social biases in storytelling both by humans and generative AI. The study analyzes 250 stories authored by crowdworkers in June 2019 and 80 stories generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in March 2023 by merging methods from narratology and inferential statistics. Both crowdworkers and large language models responded to identical prompts about creating and falling in love with an artificial human. The proposed experimental paradigm allows a direct and controlled comparison between human and LLM-generated storytelling. Responses to the Pygmalionesque prompts confirm the pervasive presence of the Pygmalion myth in the collective imaginary of both humans and large language models. All solicited narratives present a scientific or technological pursuit. The analysis reveals that narratives from GPT-3.5 and particularly GPT-4 are more progressive in terms of gender roles and sexuality than those written by humans. While AI narratives with default settings and no additional prompting can occasionally provide innovative plot twists, they offer less imaginative scenarios and rhetoric than human-authored texts. The proposed framework argues that fiction can be used as a window into human and AI-based collective imaginary and social dimensions.
Personalized human mobility prediction for HuMob challenge
Authors: Masahiro Suzuki, Shomu Furuta, Yusuke Fukazawa
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, feature selection, Prediction

We explain the methodology used to create the data submitted to HuMob Challenge, a data analysis competition for human mobility prediction. We adopted a personalized model to predict the individual's movement trajectory from their data, instead of predicting from the overall movement, based on the hypothesis that human movement is unique to each person. We devised the features such as the date and time, activity time, days of the week, time of day, and frequency of visits to POI (Point of Interest). As additional features, we incorporated the movement of other individuals with similar behavior patterns through the employment of clustering. The machine learning model we adopted was the Support Vector Regression (SVR). We performed accuracy through offline assessment and carried out feature selection and parameter tuning. Although overall dataset provided consists of 100,000 users trajectory, our method use only 20,000 target users data, and do not need to use other 80,000 data. Despite the personalized model's traditional feature engineering approach, this model yields reasonably good accuracy with lower computational cost.
TwinPot: Digital Twin-assisted Honeypot for Cyber-Secure Smart Seaports
Authors: Yagmur Yigit, Omer Kemal Kinaci, Trung Q. Duong, Berk Canberk
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00

The idea of next-generation ports has become more apparent in the last ten years in response to the challenge posed by the rising demand for efficiency and the ever-increasing volume of goods. In this new era of intelligent infrastructure and facilities, it is evident that cyber-security has recently received the most significant attention from the seaport and maritime authorities, and it is a primary concern on the agenda of most ports. Traditional security solutions can be applied to safeguard IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) from harmful entities. Nevertheless, security researchers can only watch, examine, and learn about the behaviors of attackers if these solutions operate more transparently. Herein, honeypots are potential solutions since they offer valuable information about the attackers. It can be virtual or physical. Virtual honeypots must be more realistic to entice attackers, necessitating better high-fidelity. To this end, Digital Twin (DT) technology can be employed to increase the complexity and simulation fidelity of the honeypots. Seaports can be attacked from both their existing devices and external devices at the same time. Existing mechanisms are insufficient to detect external attacks; therefore, the current systems cannot handle attacks at the desired level. DT and honeypot technologies can be used together to tackle them. Consequently, we suggest a DT-assisted honeypot, called TwinPot, for external attacks in smart seaports. Moreover, we propose an intelligent attack detection mechanism to handle different attack types using DT for internal attacks. Finally, we build an extensive smart seaport dataset for internal and external attacks using the MANSIM tool and two existing datasets to test the performance of our system. We show that under simultaneous internal and external attacks on the system, our solution successfully detects internal and external attacks.
Predicting Ovarian Cancer Treatment Response in Histopathology using Hierarchical Vision Transformers and Multiple Instance Learning
Authors: Jack Breen, Katie Allen, Kieran Zucker, Geoff Hall, Nishant Ravikumar, Nicolas M. Orsi
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, whole slide images

For many patients, current ovarian cancer treatments offer limited clinical benefit. For some therapies, it is not possible to predict patients' responses, potentially exposing them to the adverse effects of treatment without any therapeutic benefit. As part of the automated prediction of treatment effectiveness in ovarian cancer using histopathological images (ATEC23) challenge, we evaluated the effectiveness of deep learning to predict whether a course of treatment including the antiangiogenic drug bevacizumab could contribute to remission or prevent disease progression for at least 6 months in a set of 282 histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) from 78 ovarian cancer patients. Our approach used a pretrained Hierarchical Image Pyramid Transformer (HIPT) to extract region-level features and an attention-based multiple instance learning (ABMIL) model to aggregate features and classify whole slides. The optimal HIPT-ABMIL model had an internal balanced accuracy of 60.2% +- 2.9% and an AUC of 0.646 +- 0.033. Histopathology-specific model pretraining was found to be beneficial to classification performance, though hierarchical transformers were not, with a ResNet feature extractor achieving similar performance. Due to the dataset being small and highly heterogeneous, performance was variable across 5-fold cross-validation folds, and there were some extreme differences between validation and test set performance within folds. The model did not generalise well to tissue microarrays, with accuracy worse than random chance. It is not yet clear whether ovarian cancer WSIs contain information that can be used to accurately predict treatment response, with further validation using larger, higher-quality datasets required.
Physical Information Neural Networks for Solving High-index Differential-algebraic Equation Systems Based on Radau Methods
Authors: Jiasheng Chen, Juan Tang, Ming Yan, Shuai Lai, Kun Liang, Jianguang Lu, Wenqiang Yang
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00

As is well known, differential algebraic equations (DAEs), which are able to describe dynamic changes and underlying constraints, have been widely applied in engineering fields such as fluid dynamics, multi-body dynamics, mechanical systems and control theory. In practical physical modeling within these domains, the systems often generate high-index DAEs. Classical implicit numerical methods typically result in varying order reduction of numerical accuracy when solving high-index systems.~Recently, the physics-informed neural network (PINN) has gained attention for solving DAE systems. However, it faces challenges like the inability to directly solve high-index systems, lower predictive accuracy, and weaker generalization capabilities. In this paper, we propose a PINN computational framework, combined Radau IIA numerical method with a neural network structure via the attention mechanisms, to directly solve high-index DAEs. Furthermore, we employ a domain decomposition strategy to enhance solution accuracy. We conduct numerical experiments with two classical high-index systems as illustrative examples, investigating how different orders of the Radau IIA method affect the accuracy of neural network solutions. The experimental results demonstrate that the PINN based on a 5th-order Radau IIA method achieves the highest level of system accuracy. Specifically, the absolute errors for all differential variables remains as low as $10^{-6}$, and the absolute errors for algebraic variables is maintained at $10^{-5}$, surpassing the results found in existing literature. Therefore, our method exhibits excellent computational accuracy and strong generalization capabilities, providing a feasible approach for the high-precision solution of larger-scale DAEs with higher indices or challenging high-dimensional partial differential algebraic equation systems.