pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A GAN-based data poisoning framework against anomaly detection in vertical federated learning
Authors: Xiaolin Chen, Daoguang Zan, Wei Li, Bei guan, Yongji Wang
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Data Poisoning, Federated Learning, Vertical Federated Learning

In vertical federated learning (VFL), commercial entities collaboratively train a model while preserving data privacy. However, a malicious participant's poisoning attack may degrade the performance of this collaborative model. The main challenge in achieving the poisoning attack is the absence of access to the server-side top model, leaving the malicious participant without a clear target model. To address this challenge, we introduce an innovative end-to-end poisoning framework P-GAN. Specifically, the malicious participant initially employs semi-supervised learning to train a surrogate target model. Subsequently, this participant employs a GAN-based method to produce adversarial perturbations to degrade the surrogate target model's performance. Finally, the generator is obtained and tailored for VFL poisoning. Besides, we develop an anomaly detection algorithm based on a deep auto-encoder (DAE), offering a robust defense mechanism to VFL scenarios. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the efficacy of P-GAN and DAE, and further analyze the factors that influence their performance.
FedLoGe: Joint Local and Generic Federated Learning under Long-tailed Data
Authors: Zikai Xiao, Zihan Chen, Liyinglan Liu, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Wanlu Liu, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Howard Hao Yang, Zuozhu Liu
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning, Representation Learning

Federated Long-Tailed Learning (Fed-LT), a paradigm wherein data collected from decentralized local clients manifests a globally prevalent long-tailed distribution, has garnered considerable attention in recent times. In the context of Fed-LT, existing works have predominantly centered on addressing the data imbalance issue to enhance the efficacy of the generic global model while neglecting the performance at the local level. In contrast, conventional Personalized Federated Learning (pFL) techniques are primarily devised to optimize personalized local models under the presumption of a balanced global data distribution. This paper introduces an approach termed Federated Local and Generic Model Training in Fed-LT (FedLoGe), which enhances both local and generic model performance through the integration of representation learning and classifier alignment within a neural collapse framework. Our investigation reveals the feasibility of employing a shared backbone as a foundational framework for capturing overarching global trends, while concurrently employing individualized classifiers to encapsulate distinct refinements stemming from each client's local features. Building upon this discovery, we establish the Static Sparse Equiangular Tight Frame Classifier (SSE-C), inspired by neural collapse principles that naturally prune extraneous noisy features and foster the acquisition of potent data representations. Furthermore, leveraging insights from imbalance neural collapse's classifier norm patterns, we develop Global and Local Adaptive Feature Realignment (GLA-FR) via an auxiliary global classifier and personalized Euclidean norm transfer to align global features with client preferences. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR-10/100-LT, ImageNet, and iNaturalist demonstrate the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art pFL and Fed-LT approaches.
OCTO+: A Suite for Automatic Open-Vocabulary Object Placement in Mixed Reality
Authors: Aditya Sharma, Luke Yoffe, Tobias Höllerer
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixed Reality, valid

One key challenge in Augmented Reality is the placement of virtual content in natural locations. Most existing automated techniques can only work with a closed-vocabulary, fixed set of objects. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate several methods for automatic object placement using recent advances in open-vocabulary vision-language models. Through a multifaceted evaluation, we identify a new state-of-the-art method, OCTO+. We also introduce a benchmark for automatically evaluating the placement of virtual objects in augmented reality, alleviating the need for costly user studies. Through this, in addition to human evaluations, we find that OCTO+ places objects in a valid region over 70% of the time, outperforming other methods on a range of metrics.
From User Surveys to Telemetry-Driven AI Agents: Exploring the Potential of Personalized Productivity Solutions
Authors: Subigya Nepal, Javier Hernandez, Talie Massachi, Kael Rowan, Judith Amores, Jina Suh, Gonzalo Ramos, Brian Houck, Shamsi T. Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Information workers increasingly struggle with productivity challenges in modern workplaces, facing difficulties in managing time and effectively utilizing workplace analytics data for behavioral improvement. Despite the availability of productivity metrics through enterprise tools, workers often fail to translate this data into actionable insights. We present a comprehensive, user-centric approach to address these challenges through AI-based productivity agents tailored to users' needs. Utilizing a two-phase method, we first conducted a survey with 363 participants, exploring various aspects of productivity, communication style, agent approach, personality traits, personalization, and privacy. Drawing on the survey insights, we developed a GPT-4 powered personalized productivity agent that utilizes telemetry data gathered via Viva Insights from information workers to provide tailored assistance. We compared its performance with alternative productivity-assistive tools, such as dashboard and narrative, in a study involving 40 participants. Our findings highlight the importance of user-centric design, adaptability, and the balance between personalization and privacy in AI-assisted productivity tools. By building on these insights, our work provides important guidance for developing more effective productivity solutions, ultimately leading to optimized efficiency and user experiences for information workers.
Towards Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Ranking Policies with Human Feedback
Authors: Teng Xiao, Suhang Wang
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Learning-To-Rank, reinforcement-learning, Sequential Decision Making

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by formulating the recommendation as a sequential decision-making problem, but could only achieve inferior accuracy compared to LTR counterparts, primarily due to the lack of online interactions and the characteristics of ranking. In this paper, we propose a new off-policy value ranking (VR) algorithm that can simultaneously maximize user long-term rewards and optimize the ranking metric offline for improved sample efficiency in a unified Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework. We theoretically and empirically show that the EM process guides the leaned policy to enjoy the benefit of integration of the future reward and ranking metric, and learn without any online interactions. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.
Learning from Imperfect Demonstrations with Self-Supervision for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Kun Wu, Ning Liu, Zhen Zhao, Di Qiu, Jinming Li, Zhengping Che, Zhiyuan Xu, Jian Tang
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Manipulation

Improving data utilization, especially for imperfect data from task failures, is crucial for robotic manipulation due to the challenging, time-consuming, and expensive data collection process in the real world. Current imitation learning (IL) typically discards imperfect data, focusing solely on successful expert data. While reinforcement learning (RL) can learn from explorations and failures, the sim2real gap and its reliance on dense reward and online exploration make it difficult to apply effectively in real-world scenarios. In this work, we aim to conquer the challenge of leveraging imperfect data without the need for reward information to improve the model performance for robotic manipulation in an offline manner. Specifically, we introduce a Self-Supervised Data Filtering framework (SSDF) that combines expert and imperfect data to compute quality scores for failed trajectory segments. High-quality segments from the failed data are used to expand the training dataset. Then, the enhanced dataset can be used with any downstream policy learning method for robotic manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments on the ManiSkill2 benchmark built on the high-fidelity Sapien simulator and real-world robotic manipulation tasks using the Franka robot arm demonstrated that the SSDF can accurately expand the training dataset with high-quality imperfect data and improve the success rates for all robotic manipulation tasks.
DeLF: Designing Learning Environments with Foundation Models
Authors: Aida Afshar, Wenchao Li
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a capable and intuitive structure for the fundamental sequential decision-making problem. Despite impressive breakthroughs, it can still be difficult to employ RL in practice in many simple applications. In this paper, we try to address this issue by introducing a method for designing the components of the RL environment for a given, user-intended application. We provide an initial formalization for the problem of RL component design, that concentrates on designing a good representation for observation and action space. We propose a method named DeLF: Designing Learning Environments with Foundation Models, that employs large language models to design and codify the user's intended learning scenario. By testing our method on four different learning environments, we demonstrate that DeLF can obtain executable environment codes for the corresponding RL problems.
Learning to detect cloud and snow in remote sensing images from noisy labels
Authors: Zili Liu, Hao Chen, Wenyuan Li, Keyan Chen, Zipeng Qi, Chenyang Liu, Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Semantic Segmentation

Detecting clouds and snow in remote sensing images is an essential preprocessing task for remote sensing imagery. Previous works draw inspiration from semantic segmentation models in computer vision, with most research focusing on improving model architectures to enhance detection performance. However, unlike natural images, the complexity of scenes and the diversity of cloud types in remote sensing images result in many inaccurate labels in cloud and snow detection datasets, introducing unnecessary noises into the training and testing processes. By constructing a new dataset and proposing a novel training strategy with the curriculum learning paradigm, we guide the model in reducing overfitting to noisy labels. Additionally, we design a more appropriate model performance evaluation method, that alleviates the performance assessment bias caused by noisy labels. By conducting experiments on models with UNet and Segformer, we have validated the effectiveness of our proposed method. This paper is the first to consider the impact of label noise on the detection of clouds and snow in remote sensing images.
3D Human Pose Analysis via Diffusion Synthesis
Authors: Haorui Ji, Hongdong Li
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in generative modeling. In this paper, we propose PADS (Pose Analysis by Diffusion Synthesis), a novel framework designed to address various challenges in 3D human pose analysis through a unified pipeline. Central to PADS are two distinctive strategies: i) learning a task-agnostic pose prior using a diffusion synthesis process to effectively capture the kinematic constraints in human pose data, and ii) unifying multiple pose analysis tasks like estimation, completion, denoising, etc, as instances of inverse problems. The learned pose prior will be treated as a regularization imposing on task-specific constraints, guiding the optimization process through a series of conditional denoising steps. PADS represents the first diffusion-based framework for tackling general 3D human pose analysis within the inverse problem framework. Its performance has been validated on different benchmarks, signaling the adaptability and robustness of this pipeline.
Bridging State and History Representations: Understanding Self-Predictive RL
Authors: Tianwei Ni, Benjamin Eysenbach, Erfan Seyedsalehi, Michel Ma, Clement Gehring, Aditya Mahajan, Pierre-Luc Bacon
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

Representations are at the core of all deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods for both Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Many representation learning methods and theoretical frameworks have been developed to understand what constitutes an effective representation. However, the relationships between these methods and the shared properties among them remain unclear. In this paper, we show that many of these seemingly distinct methods and frameworks for state and history abstractions are, in fact, based on a common idea of self-predictive abstraction. Furthermore, we provide theoretical insights into the widely adopted objectives and optimization, such as the stop-gradient technique, in learning self-predictive representations. These findings together yield a minimalist algorithm to learn self-predictive representations for states and histories. We validate our theories by applying our algorithm to standard MDPs, MDPs with distractors, and POMDPs with sparse rewards. These findings culminate in a set of preliminary guidelines for RL practitioners.
CFASL: Composite Factor-Aligned Symmetry Learning for Disentanglement in Variational AutoEncoder
Authors: Hee-Jun Jung, Jaehyoung Jeong, Kangil Kim
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Disentanglement, Inductive Bias

Symmetries of input and latent vectors have provided valuable insights for disentanglement learning in VAEs. However, only a few works were proposed as an unsupervised method, and even these works require known factor information in the training data. We propose a novel method, Composite Factor-Aligned Symmetry Learning (CFASL), which is integrated into VAEs for learning symmetry-based disentanglement in unsupervised learning without any knowledge of the dataset factor information. CFASL incorporates three novel features for learning symmetry-based disentanglement: 1) Injecting inductive bias to align latent vector dimensions to factor-aligned symmetries within an explicit learnable symmetry code-book 2) Learning a composite symmetry to express unknown factors change between two random samples by learning factor-aligned symmetries within the codebook 3) Inducing a group equivariant encoder and decoder in training VAEs with the two conditions. In addition, we propose an extended evaluation metric for multi-factor changes in comparison to disentanglement evaluation in VAEs. In quantitative and in-depth qualitative analysis, CFASL demonstrates a significant improvement of disentanglement in single-factor change, and multi-factor change conditions compared to state-of-the-art methods.
NOTSOFAR-1 Challenge: New Datasets, Baseline, and Tasks for Distant Meeting Transcription
Authors: Alon Vinnikov, Amir Ivry, Aviv Hurvitz, Igor Abramovski, Sharon Koubi, Ilya Gurvich, Shai Pe`er, Xiong Xiao, Benjamin Martinez Elizalde, Naoyuki Kanda, Xiaofei Wang, Shalev Shaer, Stav Yagev, Yossi Asher, Sunit Sivasankaran, Yifan Gong, Min Tang, Huaming Wang, Eyal Krupka
Date: 2024-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Benchmarking, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We introduce the first Natural Office Talkers in Settings of Far-field Audio Recordings (``NOTSOFAR-1'') Challenge alongside datasets and baseline system. The challenge focuses on distant speaker diarization and automatic speech recognition (DASR) in far-field meeting scenarios, with single-channel and known-geometry multi-channel tracks, and serves as a launch platform for two new datasets: First, a benchmarking dataset of 315 meetings, averaging 6 minutes each, capturing a broad spectrum of real-world acoustic conditions and conversational dynamics. It is recorded across 30 conference rooms, featuring 4-8 attendees and a total of 35 unique speakers. Second, a 1000-hour simulated training dataset, synthesized with enhanced authenticity for real-world generalization, incorporating 15,000 real acoustic transfer functions. The tasks focus on single-device DASR, where multi-channel devices always share the same known geometry. This is aligned with common setups in actual conference rooms, and avoids technical complexities associated with multi-device tasks. It also allows for the development of geometry-specific solutions. The NOTSOFAR-1 Challenge aims to advance research in the field of distant conversational speech recognition, providing key resources to unlock the potential of data-driven methods, which we believe are currently constrained by the absence of comprehensive high-quality training and benchmarking datasets.
Contribution Functions for Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Graphs: A Principle-based Analysis
Authors: Timotheus Kampik, Nico Potyka, Xiang Yin, Kristijonas Čyras, Francesca Toni
Date: 2024-01-16 00:00:00

We present a principle-based analysis of contribution functions for quantitative bipolar argumentation graphs that quantify the contribution of one argument to another. The introduced principles formalise the intuitions underlying different contribution functions as well as expectations one would have regarding the behaviour of contribution functions in general. As none of the covered contribution functions satisfies all principles, our analysis can serve as a tool that enables the selection of the most suitable function based on the requirements of a given use case.
DCRMTA: Unbiased Causal Representation for Multi-touch Attribution
Authors: Jiaming Tang
Date: 2024-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) currently plays a pivotal role in achieving a fair estimation of the contributions of each advertising touchpoint to-wards conversion behavior, deeply influencing budget allocation and advertising recommenda-tion. Previous works attempted to eliminate the bias caused by user preferences to achieve the unbiased assumption of the conversion model. The multi-model collaboration method is not ef-ficient, and the complete elimination of user in-fluence also eliminates the causal effect of user features on conversion, resulting in limited per-formance of the conversion model. This paper re-defines the causal effect of user features on con-versions and proposes a novel end-to-end ap-proach, Deep Causal Representation for MTA (DCRMTA). Our model focuses on extracting causa features between conversions and users while eliminating confounding variables. Fur-thermore, extensive experiments demonstrate DCRMTA's superior performance in converting prediction across varying data distributions, while also effectively attributing value across dif-ferent advertising channels.
Robust Localization of Key Fob Using Channel Impulse Response of Ultra Wide Band Sensors for Keyless Entry Systems
Authors: Abhiram Kolli, Filippo Casamassima, Horst Possegger, Horst Bischof
Date: 2024-01-16 00:00:00

Using neural networks for localization of key fob within and surrounding a car as a security feature for keyless entry is fast emerging. In this paper we study: 1) the performance of pre-computed features of neural networks based UWB (ultra wide band) localization classification forming the baseline of our experiments. 2) Investigate the inherent robustness of various neural networks; therefore, we include the study of robustness of the adversarial examples without any adversarial training in this work. 3) Propose a multi-head self-supervised neural network architecture which outperforms the baseline neural networks without any adversarial training. The model's performance improved by 67% at certain ranges of adversarial magnitude for fast gradient sign method and 37% each for basic iterative method and projected gradient descent method.
REValueD: Regularised Ensemble Value-Decomposition for Factorisable Markov Decision Processes
Authors: David Ireland, Giovanni Montana
Date: 2024-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Discrete-action reinforcement learning algorithms often falter in tasks with high-dimensional discrete action spaces due to the vast number of possible actions. A recent advancement leverages value-decomposition, a concept from multi-agent reinforcement learning, to tackle this challenge. This study delves deep into the effects of this value-decomposition, revealing that whilst it curtails the over-estimation bias inherent to Q-learning algorithms, it amplifies target variance. To counteract this, we present an ensemble of critics to mitigate target variance. Moreover, we introduce a regularisation loss that helps to mitigate the effects that exploratory actions in one dimension can have on the value of optimal actions in other dimensions. Our novel algorithm, REValueD, tested on discretised versions of the DeepMind Control Suite tasks, showcases superior performance, especially in the challenging humanoid and dog tasks. We further dissect the factors influencing REValueD's performance, evaluating the significance of the regularisation loss and the scalability of REValueD with increasing sub-actions per dimension.
Learning from Sparse Offline Datasets via Conservative Density Estimation
Authors: Zhepeng Cen, Zuxin Liu, Zitong Wang, Yihang Yao, Henry Lam, Ding Zhao
Date: 2024-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL, Density Estimation, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction for learning policies from pre-collected datasets without requiring further interactions with the environment. However, existing methods struggle to handle out-of-distribution (OOD) extrapolation errors, especially in sparse reward or scarce data settings. In this paper, we propose a novel training algorithm called Conservative Density Estimation (CDE), which addresses this challenge by explicitly imposing constraints on the state-action occupancy stationary distribution. CDE overcomes the limitations of existing approaches, such as the stationary distribution correction method, by addressing the support mismatch issue in marginal importance sampling. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmark. Notably, CDE consistently outperforms baselines in challenging tasks with sparse rewards or insufficient data, demonstrating the advantages of our approach in addressing the extrapolation error problem in offline RL.