pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Graph Contrastive Learning with Generative Adversarial Network
Authors: Cheng Wu, Chaokun Wang, Jingcao Xu, Ziyang Liu, Kai Zheng, Xiaowei Wang, Yang song, Kun Gai
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated promising results on exploiting node representations for many downstream tasks through supervised end-to-end training. To deal with the widespread label scarcity issue in real-world applications, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) is leveraged to train GNNs with limited or even no labels by maximizing the mutual information between nodes in its augmented views generated from the original graph. However, the distribution of graphs remains unconsidered in view generation, resulting in the ignorance of unseen edges in most existing literature, which is empirically shown to be able to improve GCL's performance in our experiments. To this end, we propose to incorporate graph generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn the distribution of views for GCL, in order to i) automatically capture the characteristic of graphs for augmentations, and ii) jointly train the graph GAN model and the GCL model. Specifically, we present GACN, a novel Generative Adversarial Contrastive learning Network for graph representation learning. GACN develops a view generator and a view discriminator to generate augmented views automatically in an adversarial style. Then, GACN leverages these views to train a GNN encoder with two carefully designed self-supervised learning losses, including the graph contrastive loss and the Bayesian personalized ranking Loss. Furthermore, we design an optimization framework to train all GACN modules jointly. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets show that GACN is able to generate high-quality augmented views for GCL and is superior to twelve state-of-the-art baseline methods. Noticeably, our proposed GACN surprisingly discovers that the generated views in data augmentation finally conform to the well-known preferential attachment rule in online networks.
A Novel Temporal Multi-Gate Mixture-of-Experts Approach for Vehicle Trajectory and Driving Intention Prediction
Authors: Renteng Yuan, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, Qiaojun Xiang, Zijin Wang, Ou Zheng
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Position, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Accurate Vehicle Trajectory Prediction is critical for automated vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. Vehicle trajectory prediction consists of two essential tasks, i.e., longitudinal position prediction and lateral position prediction. There is a significant correlation between driving intentions and vehicle motion. In existing work, the three tasks are often conducted separately without considering the relationships between the longitudinal position, lateral position, and driving intention. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Multi-Gate Mixture-of-Experts (TMMOE) model for simultaneously predicting the vehicle trajectory and driving intention. The proposed model consists of three layers: a shared layer, an expert layer, and a fully connected layer. In the model, the shared layer utilizes Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) to extract temporal features. Then the expert layer is built to identify different information according to the three tasks. Moreover, the fully connected layer is used to integrate and export prediction results. To achieve better performance, uncertainty algorithm is used to construct the multi-task loss function. Finally, the publicly available CitySim dataset validates the TMMOE model, demonstrating superior performance compared to the LSTM model, achieving the highest classification and regression results. Keywords: Vehicle trajectory prediction, driving intentions Classification, Multi-task
Variational Label-Correlation Enhancement for Congestion Prediction
Authors: Biao Liu, Congyu Qiao, Ning Xu, Xin Geng, Ziran Zhu, Jun Yang
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Variational Inference

The physical design process of large-scale designs is a time-consuming task, often requiring hours to days to complete, with routing being the most critical and complex step. As the the complexity of Integrated Circuits (ICs) increases, there is an increased demand for accurate routing quality prediction. Accurate congestion prediction aids in identifying design flaws early on, thereby accelerating circuit design and conserving resources. Despite the advancements in current congestion prediction methodologies, an essential aspect that has been largely overlooked is the spatial label-correlation between different grids in congestion prediction. The spatial label-correlation is a fundamental characteristic of circuit design, where the congestion status of a grid is not isolated but inherently influenced by the conditions of its neighboring grids. In order to fully exploit the inherent spatial label-correlation between neighboring grids, we propose a novel approach, {\ours}, i.e., VAriational Label-Correlation Enhancement for Congestion Prediction, which considers the local label-correlation in the congestion map, associating the estimated congestion value of each grid with a local label-correlation weight influenced by its surrounding grids. {\ours} leverages variational inference techniques to estimate this weight, thereby enhancing the regression model's performance by incorporating spatial dependencies. Experiment results validate the superior effectiveness of {\ours} on the public available \texttt{ISPD2011} and \texttt{DAC2012} benchmarks using the superblue circuit line.
Mirror Natural Evolution Strategies
Authors: Haishan Ye
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00

The zeroth-order optimization has been widely used in machine learning applications. However, the theoretical study of the zeroth-order optimization focus on the algorithms which approximate (first-order) gradients using (zeroth-order) function value difference at a random direction. The theory of algorithms which approximate the gradient and Hessian information by zeroth-order queries is much less studied. In this paper, we focus on the theory of zeroth-order optimization which utilizes both the first-order and second-order information approximated by the zeroth-order queries. We first propose a novel reparameterized objective function with parameters $(\mu, \Sigma)$. This reparameterized objective function achieves its optimum at the minimizer and the Hessian inverse of the original objective function respectively, but with small perturbations. Accordingly, we propose a new algorithm to minimize our proposed reparameterized objective, which we call \texttt{MiNES} (mirror descent natural evolution strategy). We show that the estimated covariance matrix of \texttt{MiNES} converges to the inverse of Hessian matrix of the objective function with a convergence rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/k)$, where $k$ is the iteration number and $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\cdot)$ hides the constant and $\log$ terms. We also provide the explicit convergence rate of \texttt{MiNES} and how the covariance matrix promotes the convergence rate.
Tackling Hallucinations in Neural Chart Summarization
Authors: Saad Obaid ul Islam, Iza Škrjanec, Ondřej Dušek, Vera Demberg
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data-to-Text Generation, Table-to-Text Generation, Text Generation

Hallucinations in text generation occur when the system produces text that is not grounded in the input. In this work, we tackle the problem of hallucinations in neural chart summarization. Our analysis shows that the target side of chart summarization training datasets often contains additional information, leading to hallucinations. We propose a natural language inference (NLI) based method to preprocess the training data and show through human evaluation that our method significantly reduces hallucinations. We also found that shortening long-distance dependencies in the input sequence and adding chart-related information like title and legends improves the overall performance.
A Survey of Time Series Anomaly Detection Methods in the AIOps Domain
Authors: Zhenyu Zhong, Qiliang Fan, Jiacheng Zhang, Minghua Ma, Shenglin Zhang, Yongqian Sun, QIngwei Lin, Yuzhi Zhang, Dan Pei
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Time Series Anomaly Detection

Internet-based services have seen remarkable success, generating vast amounts of monitored key performance indicators (KPIs) as univariate or multivariate time series. Monitoring and analyzing these time series are crucial for researchers, service operators, and on-call engineers to detect outliers or anomalies indicating service failures or significant events. Numerous advanced anomaly detection methods have emerged to address availability and performance issues. This review offers a comprehensive overview of time series anomaly detection in Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), which uses AI capabilities to automate and optimize operational workflows. Additionally, it explores future directions for real-world and next-generation time-series anomaly detection based on recent advancements.
Doubly Robust Instance-Reweighted Adversarial Training
Authors: Daouda Sow, Sen Lin, Zhangyang Wang, Yingbin Liang
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00

Assigning importance weights to adversarial data has achieved great success in training adversarially robust networks under limited model capacity. However, existing instance-reweighted adversarial training (AT) methods heavily depend on heuristics and/or geometric interpretations to determine those importance weights, making these algorithms lack rigorous theoretical justification/guarantee. Moreover, recent research has shown that adversarial training suffers from a severe non-uniform robust performance across the training distribution, e.g., data points belonging to some classes can be much more vulnerable to adversarial attacks than others. To address both issues, in this paper, we propose a novel doubly-robust instance reweighted AT framework, which allows to obtain the importance weights via exploring distributionally robust optimization (DRO) techniques, and at the same time boosts the robustness on the most vulnerable examples. In particular, our importance weights are obtained by optimizing the KL-divergence regularized loss function, which allows us to devise new algorithms with a theoretical convergence guarantee. Experiments on standard classification datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms related state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of average robust performance, and at the same time improves the robustness against attacks on the weakest data points. Codes will be available soon.
Predictive Modeling through Hyper-Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Manisha Senadeera, Santu Rana, Sunil Gupta, Svetha Venkatesh
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Model Selection

Model selection is an integral problem of model based optimization techniques such as Bayesian optimization (BO). Current approaches often treat model selection as an estimation problem, to be periodically updated with observations coming from the optimization iterations. In this paper, we propose an alternative way to achieve both efficiently. Specifically, we propose a novel way of integrating model selection and BO for the single goal of reaching the function optima faster. The algorithm moves back and forth between BO in the model space and BO in the function space, where the goodness of the recommended model is captured by a score function and fed back, capturing how well the model helped convergence in the function space. The score function is derived in such a way that it neutralizes the effect of the moving nature of the BO in the function space, thus keeping the model selection problem stationary. This back and forth leads to quick convergence for both model selection and BO in the function space. In addition to improved sample efficiency, the framework outputs information about the black-box function. Convergence is proved, and experimental results show significant improvement compared to standard BO.
CLAMS: A Cluster Ambiguity Measure for Estimating Perceptual Variability in Visual Clustering
Authors: Hyeon Jeon, Ghulam Jilani Quadri, Hyunwook Lee, Paul Rosen, Danielle Albers Szafir, Jinwook Seo
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Clustering

Visual clustering is a common perceptual task in scatterplots that supports diverse analytics tasks (e.g., cluster identification). However, even with the same scatterplot, the ways of perceiving clusters (i.e., conducting visual clustering) can differ due to the differences among individuals and ambiguous cluster boundaries. Although such perceptual variability casts doubt on the reliability of data analysis based on visual clustering, we lack a systematic way to efficiently assess this variability. In this research, we study perceptual variability in conducting visual clustering, which we call Cluster Ambiguity. To this end, we introduce CLAMS, a data-driven visual quality measure for automatically predicting cluster ambiguity in monochrome scatterplots. We first conduct a qualitative study to identify key factors that affect the visual separation of clusters (e.g., proximity or size difference between clusters). Based on study findings, we deploy a regression module that estimates the human-judged separability of two clusters. Then, CLAMS predicts cluster ambiguity by analyzing the aggregated results of all pairwise separability between clusters that are generated by the module. CLAMS outperforms widely-used clustering techniques in predicting ground truth cluster ambiguity. Meanwhile, CLAMS exhibits performance on par with human annotators. We conclude our work by presenting two applications for optimizing and benchmarking data mining techniques using CLAMS. The interactive demo of CLAMS is available at clusterambiguity.dev.
ZADU: A Python Library for Evaluating the Reliability of Dimensionality Reduction Embeddings
Authors: Hyeon Jeon, Aeri Cho, Jinhwa Jang, Soohyun Lee, Jake Hyun, Hyung-Kwon Ko, Jaemin Jo, Jinwook Seo
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques inherently distort the original structure of input high-dimensional data, producing imperfect low-dimensional embeddings. Diverse distortion measures have thus been proposed to evaluate the reliability of DR embeddings. However, implementing and executing distortion measures in practice has so far been time-consuming and tedious. To address this issue, we present ZADU, a Python library that provides distortion measures. ZADU is not only easy to install and execute but also enables comprehensive evaluation of DR embeddings through three key features. First, the library covers a wide range of distortion measures. Second, it automatically optimizes the execution of distortion measures, substantially reducing the running time required to execute multiple measures. Last, the library informs how individual points contribute to the overall distortions, facilitating the detailed analysis of DR embeddings. By simulating a real-world scenario of optimizing DR embeddings, we verify that our optimization scheme substantially reduces the time required to execute distortion measures. Finally, as an application of ZADU, we present another library called ZADUVis that allows users to easily create distortion visualizations that depict the extent to which each region of an embedding suffers from distortions.
Data Collaboration Analysis applied to Compound Datasets and the Introduction of Projection data to Non-IID settings
Authors: Akihiro Mizoguchi, Anna Bogdanova, Akira Imakura, Tetsuya Sakurai
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Given the time and expense associated with bringing a drug to market, numerous studies have been conducted to predict the properties of compounds based on their structure using machine learning. Federated learning has been applied to compound datasets to increase their prediction accuracy while safeguarding potentially proprietary information. However, federated learning is encumbered by low accuracy in not identically and independently distributed (non-IID) settings, i.e., data partitioning has a large label bias, and is considered unsuitable for compound datasets, which tend to have large label bias. To address this limitation, we utilized an alternative method of distributed machine learning to chemical compound data from open sources, called data collaboration analysis (DC). We also proposed data collaboration analysis using projection data (DCPd), which is an improved method that utilizes auxiliary PubChem data. This improves the quality of individual user-side data transformations for the projection data for the creation of intermediate representations. The classification accuracy, i.e., area under the curve in the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) and AUC in the precision-recall curve (PR-AUC), of federated averaging (FedAvg), DC, and DCPd was compared for five compound datasets. We determined that the machine learning performance for non-IID settings was in the order of DCPd, DC, and FedAvg, although they were almost the same in identically and independently distributed (IID) settings. Moreover, the results showed that compared to other methods, DCPd exhibited a negligible decline in classification accuracy in experiments with different degrees of label bias. Thus, DCPd can address the low performance in non-IID settings, which is one of the challenges of federated learning.
Classes are not Clusters: Improving Label-based Evaluation of Dimensionality Reduction
Authors: Hyeon Jeon, Yun-Hsin Kuo, Michaël Aupetit, Kwan-Liu Ma, Jinwook Seo
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

A common way to evaluate the reliability of dimensionality reduction (DR) embeddings is to quantify how well labeled classes form compact, mutually separated clusters in the embeddings. This approach is based on the assumption that the classes stay as clear clusters in the original high-dimensional space. However, in reality, this assumption can be violated; a single class can be fragmented into multiple separated clusters, and multiple classes can be merged into a single cluster. We thus cannot always assure the credibility of the evaluation using class labels. In this paper, we introduce two novel quality measures -- Label-Trustworthiness and Label-Continuity (Label-T&C) -- advancing the process of DR evaluation based on class labels. Instead of assuming that classes are well-clustered in the original space, Label-T&C work by (1) estimating the extent to which classes form clusters in the original and embedded spaces and (2) evaluating the difference between the two. A quantitative evaluation showed that Label-T&C outperform widely used DR evaluation measures (e.g., Trustworthiness and Continuity, Kullback-Leibler divergence) in terms of the accuracy in assessing how well DR embeddings preserve the cluster structure, and are also scalable. Moreover, we present case studies demonstrating that Label-T&C can be successfully used for revealing the intrinsic characteristics of DR techniques and their hyperparameters.
Neural approximation of Wasserstein distance via a universal architecture for symmetric and factorwise group invariant functions
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Efficient Neural Network

Learning distance functions between complex objects, such as the Wasserstein distance to compare point sets, is a common goal in machine learning applications. However, functions on such complex objects (e.g., point sets and graphs) are often required to be invariant to a wide variety of group actions e.g. permutation or rigid transformation. Therefore, continuous and symmetric product functions (such as distance functions) on such complex objects must also be invariant to the product of such group actions. We call these functions symmetric and factor-wise group invariant (or SFGI functions in short). In this paper, we first present a general neural network architecture for approximating SFGI functions. The main contribution of this paper combines this general neural network with a sketching idea to develop a specific and efficient neural network which can approximate the $p$-th Wasserstein distance between point sets. Very importantly, the required model complexity is independent of the sizes of input point sets. On the theoretical front, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first result showing that there exists a neural network with the capacity to approximate Wasserstein distance with bounded model complexity. Our work provides an interesting integration of sketching ideas for geometric problems with universal approximation of symmetric functions. On the empirical front, we present a range of results showing that our newly proposed neural network architecture performs comparatively or better than other models (including a SOTA Siamese Autoencoder based approach). In particular, our neural network generalizes significantly better and trains much faster than the SOTA Siamese AE. Finally, this line of investigation could be useful in exploring effective neural network design for solving a broad range of geometric optimization problems (e.g., $k$-means in a metric space).
Asynchronous Federated Learning with Bidirectional Quantized Communications and Buffered Aggregation
Authors: Tomas Ortega, Hamid Jafarkhani
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Quantization

Asynchronous Federated Learning with Buffered Aggregation (FedBuff) is a state-of-the-art algorithm known for its efficiency and high scalability. However, it has a high communication cost, which has not been examined with quantized communications. To tackle this problem, we present a new algorithm (QAFeL), with a quantization scheme that establishes a shared "hidden" state between the server and clients to avoid the error propagation caused by direct quantization. This approach allows for high precision while significantly reducing the data transmitted during client-server interactions. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for QAFeL and corroborate our analysis with experiments on a standard benchmark.
AQUILA: Communication Efficient Federated Learning with Adaptive Quantization in Device Selection Strategy
Authors: Zihao Zhao, Yuzhu Mao, Zhenpeng Shi, Yang Liu, Tian Lan, Wenbo Ding, Xiao-Ping Zhang
Date: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Quantization

The widespread adoption of Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving distributed learning methodology, has been impeded by the challenge of high communication overheads, typically arising from the transmission of large-scale models. Existing adaptive quantization methods, designed to mitigate these overheads, operate under the impractical assumption of uniform device participation in every training round. Additionally, these methods are limited in their adaptability due to the necessity of manual quantization level selection and often overlook biases inherent in local devices' data, thereby affecting the robustness of the global model. In response, this paper introduces AQUILA (adaptive quantization in device selection strategy), a novel adaptive framework devised to effectively handle these issues, enhancing the efficiency and robustness of FL. AQUILA integrates a sophisticated device selection method that prioritizes the quality and usefulness of device updates. Utilizing the exact global model stored by devices, it enables a more precise device selection criterion, reduces model deviation, and limits the need for hyperparameter adjustments. Furthermore, AQUILA presents an innovative quantization criterion, optimized to improve communication efficiency while assuring model convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AQUILA significantly decreases communication costs compared to existing methods, while maintaining comparable model performance across diverse non-homogeneous FL settings, such as Non-IID data and heterogeneous model architectures.