pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Robust Energy Consumption Prediction with a Missing Value-Resilient Metaheuristic-based Neural Network in Mobile App Development
Authors: Seyed Jalaleddin Mousavirad, Luís A. Alexandre
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Missing Values

Energy consumption is a fundamental concern in mobile application development, bearing substantial significance for both developers and end-users. Main objective of this research is to propose a novel neural network-based framework, enhanced by a metaheuristic approach, to achieve robust energy prediction in the context of mobile app development. The metaheuristic approach here aims to achieve two goals: 1) identifying suitable learning algorithms and their corresponding hyperparameters, and 2) determining the optimal number of layers and neurons within each layer. Moreover, due to limitations in accessing certain aspects of a mobile phone, there might be missing data in the data set, and the proposed framework can handle this. In addition, we conducted an optimal algorithm selection strategy, employing 13 base and advanced metaheuristic algorithms, to identify the best algorithm based on accuracy and resistance to missing values. The representation in our proposed metaheuristic algorithm is variable-size, meaning that the length of the candidate solutions changes over time. We compared the algorithms based on the architecture found by each algorithm at different levels of missing values, accuracy, F-measure, and stability analysis. Additionally, we conducted a Wilcoxon signed-rank test for statistical comparison of the results. The extensive experiments show that our proposed approach significantly improves energy consumption prediction. Particularly, the JADE algorithm, a variant of Differential Evolution (DE), DE, and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy deliver superior results under various conditions and across different missing value levels.
A Theory of Multimodal Learning
Authors: Zhou Lu
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Philosophy

Human perception of the empirical world involves recognizing the diverse appearances, or 'modalities', of underlying objects. Despite the longstanding consideration of this perspective in philosophy and cognitive science, the study of multimodality remains relatively under-explored within the field of machine learning. Nevertheless, current studies of multimodal machine learning are limited to empirical practices, lacking theoretical foundations beyond heuristic arguments. An intriguing finding from the practice of multimodal learning is that a model trained on multiple modalities can outperform a finely-tuned unimodal model, even on unimodal tasks. This paper provides a theoretical framework that explains this phenomenon, by studying generalization properties of multimodal learning algorithms. We demonstrate that multimodal learning allows for a superior generalization bound compared to unimodal learning, up to a factor of $O(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ represents the sample size. Such advantage occurs when both connection and heterogeneity exist between the modalities.
A Convex Framework for Confounding Robust Inference
Authors: Kei Ishikawa, Niao He, Takafumi Kanamori
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Multi-Armed Bandits, Sensitivity

We study policy evaluation of offline contextual bandits subject to unobserved confounders. Sensitivity analysis methods are commonly used to estimate the policy value under the worst-case confounding over a given uncertainty set. However, existing work often resorts to some coarse relaxation of the uncertainty set for the sake of tractability, leading to overly conservative estimation of the policy value. In this paper, we propose a general estimator that provides a sharp lower bound of the policy value using convex programming. The generality of our estimator enables various extensions such as sensitivity analysis with f-divergence, model selection with cross validation and information criterion, and robust policy learning with the sharp lower bound. Furthermore, our estimation method can be reformulated as an empirical risk minimization problem thanks to the strong duality, which enables us to provide strong theoretical guarantees of the proposed estimator using techniques of the M-estimation.
Change Management using Generative Modeling on Digital Twins
Authors: Nilanjana Das, Anantaa Kotal, Daniel Roseberry, Anupam Joshi
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

A key challenge faced by small and medium-sized business entities is securely managing software updates and changes. Specifically, with rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats, changes/updates/patches to software systems are necessary to stay ahead of emerging threats and are often mandated by regulators or statutory authorities to counter these. However, security patches/updates require stress testing before they can be released in the production system. Stress testing in production environments is risky and poses security threats. Large businesses usually have a non-production environment where such changes can be made and tested before being released into production. Smaller businesses do not have such facilities. In this work, we show how "digital twins", especially for a mix of IT and IoT environments, can be created on the cloud. These digital twins act as a non-production environment where changes can be applied, and the system can be securely tested before patch release. Additionally, the non-production digital twin can be used to collect system data and run stress tests on the environment, both manually and automatically. In this paper, we show how using a small sample of real data/interactions, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models can be used to generate testing scenarios to check for points of failure.
Memory Efficient Mixed-Precision Optimizers
Authors: Basile Lewandowski, Atli Kosson
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00

Traditional optimization methods rely on the use of single-precision floating point arithmetic, which can be costly in terms of memory size and computing power. However, mixed precision optimization techniques leverage the use of both single and half-precision floating point arithmetic to reduce memory requirements while maintaining model accuracy. We provide here an algorithm to further reduce memory usage during the training of a model by getting rid of the floating point copy of the parameters, virtually keeping only half-precision numbers. We also explore the benefits of getting rid of the gradient's value by executing the optimizer step during the back-propagation. In practice, we achieve up to 25% lower peak memory use and 15% faster training while maintaining the same level of accuracy.
Methods for generating and evaluating synthetic longitudinal patient data: a systematic review
Authors: Katariina Perkonoja, Kari Auranen, Joni Virta
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Synthetic Data Generation, Systematic Literature Review

The rapid growth in data availability has facilitated research and development, yet not all industries have benefited equally due to legal and privacy constraints. The healthcare sector faces significant challenges in utilizing patient data because of concerns about data security and confidentiality. To address this, various privacy-preserving methods, including synthetic data generation, have been proposed. Synthetic data replicate existing data as closely as possible, acting as a proxy for sensitive information. While patient data are often longitudinal, this aspect remains underrepresented in existing reviews of synthetic data generation in healthcare. This paper maps and describes methods for generating and evaluating synthetic longitudinal patient data in real-life settings through a systematic literature review, conducted following the PRISMA guidelines and incorporating data from five databases up to May 2024. Thirty-nine methods were identified, with four addressing all challenges of longitudinal data generation, though none included privacy-preserving mechanisms. Resemblance was evaluated in most studies, utility in the majority, and privacy in just over half. Only a small fraction of studies assessed all three aspects. Our findings highlight the need for further research in this area.
Shedding Light on the Ageing of Extra Virgin Olive Oil: Probing the Impact of Temperature with Fluorescence Spectroscopy and Machine Learning Techniques
Authors: Francesca Venturini, Silvan Fluri, Manas Mejari, Michael Baumgartner, Dario Piga, Umberto Michelucci
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00

This work systematically investigates the oxidation of extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) under accelerated storage conditions with UV absorption and total fluorescence spectroscopy. With the large amount of data collected, it proposes a method to monitor the oil's quality based on machine learning applied to highly-aggregated data. EVOO is a high-quality vegetable oil that has earned worldwide reputation for its numerous health benefits and excellent taste. Despite its outstanding quality, EVOO degrades over time owing to oxidation, which can affect both its health qualities and flavour. Therefore, it is highly relevant to quantify the effects of oxidation on EVOO and develop methods to assess it that can be easily implemented under field conditions, rather than in specialized laboratories. The following study demonstrates that fluorescence spectroscopy has the capability to monitor the effect of oxidation and assess the quality of EVOO, even when the data are highly aggregated. It shows that complex laboratory equipment is not necessary to exploit fluorescence spectroscopy using the proposed method and that cost-effective solutions, which can be used in-field by non-scientists, could provide an easily-accessible assessment of the quality of EVOO.
Fairness Hub Technical Briefs: AUC Gap
Authors: Jinsook Lee, Chris Brooks, Renzhe Yu, Rene Kizilcec
Date: 2023-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Math

To measure bias, we encourage teams to consider using AUC Gap: the absolute difference between the highest and lowest test AUC for subgroups (e.g., gender, race, SES, prior knowledge). It is agnostic to the AI/ML algorithm used and it captures the disparity in model performance for any number of subgroups, which enables non-binary fairness assessments such as for intersectional identity groups. The teams use a wide range of AI/ML models in pursuit of a common goal of doubling math achievement in low-income middle schools. Ensuring that the models, which are trained on datasets collected in many different contexts, do not introduce or amplify biases is important for achieving the goal. We offer here a versatile and easy-to-compute measure of model bias for all the teams in order to create a common benchmark and an analytical basis for sharing what strategies have worked for different teams.
Dynamic ASR Pathways: An Adaptive Masking Approach Towards Efficient Pruning of A Multilingual ASR Model
Authors: Jiamin Xie, Ke Li, Jinxi Guo, Andros Tjandra, Yuan Shangguan, Leda Sari, Chunyang Wu, Junteng Jia, Jay Mahadeokar, Ozlem Kalinli
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Network Pruning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Neural network pruning offers an effective method for compressing a multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model with minimal performance loss. However, it entails several rounds of pruning and re-training needed to be run for each language. In this work, we propose the use of an adaptive masking approach in two scenarios for pruning a multilingual ASR model efficiently, each resulting in sparse monolingual models or a sparse multilingual model (named as Dynamic ASR Pathways). Our approach dynamically adapts the sub-network, avoiding premature decisions about a fixed sub-network structure. We show that our approach outperforms existing pruning methods when targeting sparse monolingual models. Further, we illustrate that Dynamic ASR Pathways jointly discovers and trains better sub-networks (pathways) of a single multilingual model by adapting from different sub-network initializations, thereby reducing the need for language-specific pruning.
Nested Event Extraction upon Pivot Element Recogniton
Authors: Weicheng Ren, Zixuan Li, Xiaolong Jin, Long Bai, Miao Su, Yantao Liu, Saiping Guan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction, Prompt Learning

Nested Event Extraction (NEE) aims to extract complex event structures where an event contains other events as its arguments recursively. Nested events involve a kind of Pivot Elements (PEs) that simultaneously act as arguments of outer-nest events and as triggers of inner-nest events, and thus connect them into nested structures. This special characteristic of PEs brings challenges to existing NEE methods, as they cannot well cope with the dual identities of PEs. Therefore, this paper proposes a new model, called PerNee, which extracts nested events mainly based on recognizing PEs. Specifically, PerNee first recognizes the triggers of both inner-nest and outer-nest events and further recognizes the PEs via classifying the relation type between trigger pairs. The model uses prompt learning to incorporate information from both event types and argument roles for better trigger and argument representations to improve NEE performance. Since existing NEE datasets (e.g., Genia11) are limited to specific domains and contain a narrow range of event types with nested structures, we systematically categorize nested events in the generic domain and construct a new NEE dataset, called ACE2005-Nest. Experimental results demonstrate that PerNee consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on ACE2005-Nest, Genia11, and Genia13. The ACE2005-Nest dataset and the code of the PerNee model are available at https://github.com/waysonren/PerNee.
TOPFORMER: Topology-Aware Authorship Attribution of Deepfake Texts with Diverse Writing Styles
Authors: Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Dongwon Lee
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution, Face Swapping, Misinformation, Text Generation, Topological Data Analysis

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of open-ended high-quality texts, that are non-trivial to distinguish from human-written texts. We refer to such LLM-generated texts as deepfake texts. There are currently over 72K text generation models in the huggingface model repo. As such, users with malicious intent can easily use these open-sourced LLMs to generate harmful texts and dis/misinformation at scale. To mitigate this problem, a computational method to determine if a given text is a deepfake text or not is desired--i.e., Turing Test (TT). In particular, in this work, we investigate the more general version of the problem, known as Authorship Attribution (AA), in a multi-class setting--i.e., not only determining if a given text is a deepfake text or not but also being able to pinpoint which LLM is the author. We propose TopFormer to improve existing AA solutions by capturing more linguistic patterns in deepfake texts by including a Topological Data Analysis (TDA) layer in the Transformer-based model. We show the benefits of having a TDA layer when dealing with imbalanced, and multi-style datasets, by extracting TDA features from the reshaped $pooled\_output$ of our backbone as input. This Transformer-based model captures contextual representations (i.e., semantic and syntactic linguistic features), while TDA captures the shape and structure of data (i.e., linguistic structures). Finally, TopFormer, outperforms all baselines in all 3 datasets, achieving up to 7\% increase in Macro F1 score. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/AdaUchendu/topformer
Affect Recognition in Conversations Using Large Language Models
Authors: Shutong Feng, Guangzhi Sun, Nurul Lubis, Wen Wu, Chao Zhang, Milica Gašić
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), In-Context Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Affect recognition, encompassing emotions, moods, and feelings, plays a pivotal role in human communication. In the realm of conversational artificial intelligence, the ability to discern and respond to human affective cues is a critical factor for creating engaging and empathetic interactions. This study investigates the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to recognise human affect in conversations, with a focus on both open-domain chit-chat dialogues and task-oriented dialogues. Leveraging three diverse datasets, namely IEMOCAP (Busso et al., 2008), EmoWOZ (Feng et al., 2022), and DAIC-WOZ (Gratch et al., 2014), covering a spectrum of dialogues from casual conversations to clinical interviews, we evaluate and compare LLMs' performance in affect recognition. Our investigation explores the zero-shot and few-shot capabilities of LLMs through in-context learning as well as their model capacities through task-specific fine-tuning. Additionally, this study takes into account the potential impact of automatic speech recognition errors on LLM predictions. With this work, we aim to shed light on the extent to which LLMs can replicate human-like affect recognition capabilities in conversations.
StyloMetrix: An Open-Source Multilingual Tool for Representing Stylometric Vectors
Authors: Inez Okulska, Daria Stetsenko, Anna Kołos, Agnieszka Karlińska, Kinga Głąbińska, Adam Nowakowski
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

This work aims to provide an overview on the open-source multilanguage tool called StyloMetrix. It offers stylometric text representations that cover various aspects of grammar, syntax and lexicon. StyloMetrix covers four languages: Polish as the primary language, English, Ukrainian and Russian. The normalized output of each feature can become a fruitful course for machine learning models and a valuable addition to the embeddings layer for any deep learning algorithm. We strive to provide a concise, but exhaustive overview on the application of the StyloMetrix vectors as well as explain the sets of the developed linguistic features. The experiments have shown promising results in supervised content classification with simple algorithms as Random Forest Classifier, Voting Classifier, Logistic Regression and others. The deep learning assessments have unveiled the usefulness of the StyloMetrix vectors at enhancing an embedding layer extracted from Transformer architectures. The StyloMetrix has proven itself to be a formidable source for the machine learning and deep learning algorithms to execute different classification tasks.
ChatPRCS: A Personalized Support System for English Reading Comprehension based on ChatGPT
Authors: Xizhe Wang, Yihua Zhong, Changqin Huang, Xiaodi Huang
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Reading Comprehension

As a common approach to learning English, reading comprehension primarily entails reading articles and answering related questions. However, the complexity of designing effective exercises results in students encountering standardized questions, making it challenging to align with individualized learners' reading comprehension ability. By leveraging the advanced capabilities offered by large language models, exemplified by ChatGPT, this paper presents a novel personalized support system for reading comprehension, referred to as ChatPRCS, based on the Zone of Proximal Development theory. ChatPRCS employs methods including reading comprehension proficiency prediction, question generation, and automatic evaluation, among others, to enhance reading comprehension instruction. First, we develop a new algorithm that can predict learners' reading comprehension abilities using their historical data as the foundation for generating questions at an appropriate level of difficulty. Second, a series of new ChatGPT prompt patterns is proposed to address two key aspects of reading comprehension objectives: question generation, and automated evaluation. These patterns further improve the quality of generated questions. Finally, by integrating personalized ability and reading comprehension prompt patterns, ChatPRCS is systematically validated through experiments. Empirical results demonstrate that it provides learners with high-quality reading comprehension questions that are broadly aligned with expert-crafted questions at a statistical level.
Furthest Reasoning with Plan Assessment: Stable Reasoning Path with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
Authors: Yin Zhu, Zhiling Luo, Gong Cheng
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs), acting as a powerful reasoner and generator, exhibit extraordinary performance across various natural language tasks, such as question answering (QA). Among these tasks, Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) stands as a widely discussed category, necessitating seamless integration between LLMs and the retrieval of external knowledge. Existing methods employ LLM to generate reasoning paths and plans, and utilize IR to iteratively retrieve related knowledge, but these approaches have inherent flaws. On one hand, Information Retriever (IR) is hindered by the low quality of generated queries by LLM. On the other hand, LLM is easily misguided by the irrelevant knowledge by IR. These inaccuracies, accumulated by the iterative interaction between IR and LLM, lead to a disaster in effectiveness at the end. To overcome above barriers, in this paper, we propose a novel pipeline for MHQA called Furthest-Reasoning-with-Plan-Assessment (FuRePA), including an improved framework (Furthest Reasoning) and an attached module (Plan Assessor). 1) Furthest reasoning operates by masking previous reasoning path and generated queries for LLM, encouraging LLM generating chain of thought from scratch in each iteration. This approach enables LLM to break the shackle built by previous misleading thoughts and queries (if any). 2) The Plan Assessor is a trained evaluator that selects an appropriate plan from a group of candidate plans proposed by LLM. Our methods are evaluated on three highly recognized public multi-hop question answering datasets and outperform state-of-the-art on most metrics (achieving a 10%-12% in answer accuracy).
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Is Perturbed Data better than Other Language augmentation for Low Resource Self-Supervised Speech Models
Authors: Asad Ullah, Alessandro Ragano, Andrew Hines
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Phoneme Recognition, Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

Self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) has demonstrated superior performance than supervised models for tasks including phoneme recognition. Training SSRL models poses a challenge for low-resource languages where sufficient pre-training data may not be available. A common approach is cross-lingual pre-training. Instead, we propose to use audio augmentation techniques, namely: pitch variation, noise addition, accented target language and other language speech to pre-train SSRL models in a low resource condition and evaluate phoneme recognition. Our comparisons found that a combined synthetic augmentations (noise/pitch) strategy outperformed accent and language knowledge transfer. Furthermore, we examined the scaling factor of augmented data to achieve equivalent performance to model pre-trained with target domain speech. Our findings suggest that for resource-constrained languages, combined augmentations can be a viable option than other augmentations.