pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Topological safeguard for evasion attack interpreting the neural networks' behavior
Authors: Xabier Echeberria-Barrio, Amaia Gil-Lerchundi, Iñigo Mendialdua, Raul Orduna-Urrutia
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

In the last years, Deep Learning technology has been proposed in different fields, bringing many advances in each of them, but identifying new threats in these solutions regarding cybersecurity. Those implemented models have brought several vulnerabilities associated with Deep Learning technology. Moreover, those allow taking advantage of the implemented model, obtaining private information, and even modifying the model's decision-making. Therefore, interest in studying those vulnerabilities/attacks and designing defenses to avoid or fight them is gaining prominence among researchers. In particular, the widely known evasion attack is being analyzed by researchers; thus, several defenses to avoid such a threat can be found in the literature. Since the presentation of the L-BFG algorithm, this threat concerns the research community. However, it continues developing new and ingenious countermeasures since there is no perfect defense for all the known evasion algorithms. In this work, a novel detector of evasion attacks is developed. It focuses on the information of the activations of the neurons given by the model when an input sample is injected. Moreover, it puts attention to the topology of the targeted deep learning model to analyze the activations according to which neurons are connecting. This approach has been decided because the literature shows that the targeted model's topology contains essential information about if the evasion attack occurs. For this purpose, a huge data preprocessing is required to introduce all this information in the detector, which uses the Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) technology. Thus, it understands the topology of the target model, obtaining promising results and improving the outcomes presented in the literature related to similar defenses.
Cartesian atomic cluster expansion for machine learning interatomic potentials
Authors: Bingqing Cheng
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

Machine learning interatomic potentials are revolutionizing large-scale, accurate atomistic modelling in material science and chemistry. Many potentials use atomic cluster expansion or equivariant message passing frameworks. Such frameworks typically use spherical harmonics as angular basis functions, and then use Clebsch-Gordan contraction to maintain rotational symmetry, which may introduce redundancies in representations and computational overhead. We propose an alternative: a Cartesian-coordinates-based atomic density expansion. This approach provides a complete set of polynormially indepedent features of atomic environments while maintaining interaction body orders. Additionally, we integrate low-dimensional embeddings of various chemical elements and inter-atomic message passing. The resulting potential, named Cartesian Atomic Cluster Expansion (CACE), exhibits good accuracy, stability, and generalizability. We validate its performance in diverse systems, including bulk water, small molecules, and 25-element high-entropy alloys.
Differentially Private Decentralized Learning with Random Walks
Authors: Edwige Cyffers, Aurélien Bellet, Jalaj Upadhyay
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

The popularity of federated learning comes from the possibility of better scalability and the ability for participants to keep control of their data, improving data security and sovereignty. Unfortunately, sharing model updates also creates a new privacy attack surface. In this work, we characterize the privacy guarantees of decentralized learning with random walk algorithms, where a model is updated by traveling from one node to another along the edges of a communication graph. Using a recent variant of differential privacy tailored to the study of decentralized algorithms, namely Pairwise Network Differential Privacy, we derive closed-form expressions for the privacy loss between each pair of nodes where the impact of the communication topology is captured by graph theoretic quantities. Our results further reveal that random walk algorithms tends to yield better privacy guarantees than gossip algorithms for nodes close from each other. We supplement our theoretical results with empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world graphs and datasets.
On the Distance from Calibration in Sequential Prediction
Authors: Mingda Qiao, Letian Zheng
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

We study a sequential binary prediction setting where the forecaster is evaluated in terms of the calibration distance, which is defined as the $L_1$ distance between the predicted values and the set of predictions that are perfectly calibrated in hindsight. This is analogous to a calibration measure recently proposed by B{\l}asiok, Gopalan, Hu and Nakkiran (STOC 2023) for the offline setting. The calibration distance is a natural and intuitive measure of deviation from perfect calibration, and satisfies a Lipschitz continuity property which does not hold for many popular calibration measures, such as the $L_1$ calibration error and its variants. We prove that there is a forecasting algorithm that achieves an $O(\sqrt{T})$ calibration distance in expectation on an adversarially chosen sequence of $T$ binary outcomes. At the core of this upper bound is a structural result showing that the calibration distance is accurately approximated by the lower calibration distance, which is a continuous relaxation of the former. We then show that an $O(\sqrt{T})$ lower calibration distance can be achieved via a simple minimax argument and a reduction to online learning on a Lipschitz class. On the lower bound side, an $\Omega(T^{1/3})$ calibration distance is shown to be unavoidable, even when the adversary outputs a sequence of independent random bits, and has an additional ability to early stop (i.e., to stop producing random bits and output the same bit in the remaining steps). Interestingly, without this early stopping, the forecaster can achieve a much smaller calibration distance of $\mathrm{polylog}(T)$.
Bandit-Feedback Online Multiclass Classification: Variants and Tradeoffs
Authors: Yuval Filmus, Steve Hanneke, Idan Mehalel, Shay Moran
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Consider the domain of multiclass classification within the adversarial online setting. What is the price of relying on bandit feedback as opposed to full information? To what extent can an adaptive adversary amplify the loss compared to an oblivious one? To what extent can a randomized learner reduce the loss compared to a deterministic one? We study these questions in the mistake bound model and provide nearly tight answers. We demonstrate that the optimal mistake bound under bandit feedback is at most $O(k)$ times higher than the optimal mistake bound in the full information case, where $k$ represents the number of labels. This bound is tight and provides an answer to an open question previously posed and studied by Daniely and Helbertal ['13] and by Long ['17, '20], who focused on deterministic learners. Moreover, we present nearly optimal bounds of $\tilde{\Theta}(k)$ on the gap between randomized and deterministic learners, as well as between adaptive and oblivious adversaries in the bandit feedback setting. This stands in contrast to the full information scenario, where adaptive and oblivious adversaries are equivalent, and the gap in mistake bounds between randomized and deterministic learners is a constant multiplicative factor of $2$. In addition, our results imply that in some cases the optimal randomized mistake bound is approximately the square-root of its deterministic parallel. Previous results show that this is essentially the smallest it can get.
Top-$K$ ranking with a monotone adversary
Authors: Yuepeng Yang, Antares Chen, Lorenzo Orecchia, Cong Ma
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

In this paper, we address the top-$K$ ranking problem with a monotone adversary. We consider the scenario where a comparison graph is randomly generated and the adversary is allowed to add arbitrary edges. The statistician's goal is then to accurately identify the top-$K$ preferred items based on pairwise comparisons derived from this semi-random comparison graph. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a weighted maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) that achieves near-optimal sample complexity, up to a $\log^2(n)$ factor, where $n$ denotes the number of items under comparison. This is made possible through a combination of analytical and algorithmic innovations. On the analytical front, we provide a refined~$\ell_\infty$ error analysis of the weighted MLE that is more explicit and tighter than existing analyses. It relates the~$\ell_\infty$ error with the spectral properties of the weighted comparison graph. Motivated by this, our algorithmic innovation involves the development of an SDP-based approach to reweight the semi-random graph and meet specified spectral properties. Additionally, we propose a first-order method based on the Matrix Multiplicative Weight Update (MMWU) framework. This method efficiently solves the resulting SDP in nearly-linear time relative to the size of the semi-random comparison graph.
The I/O Complexity of Attention, or How Optimal is Flash Attention?
Authors: Barna Saha, Christopher Ye
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Self-attention is at the heart of the popular Transformer architecture, yet suffers from quadratic time and memory complexity. The breakthrough FlashAttention algorithm revealed I/O complexity as the true bottleneck in scaling Transformers. Given two levels of memory hierarchy, a fast cache (e.g. GPU on-chip SRAM) and a slow memory (e.g. GPU high-bandwidth memory), the I/O complexity measures the number of accesses to memory. FlashAttention computes attention using $\frac{N^2d^2}{M}$ I/O operations where $N$ is the dimension of the attention matrix, $d$ the head-dimension and $M$ the cache size. However, is this I/O complexity optimal? The known lower bound only rules out an I/O complexity of $o(Nd)$ when $M=\Theta(Nd)$, since the output that needs to be written to slow memory is $\Omega(Nd)$. This leads to the main question of our work: Is FlashAttention I/O optimal for all values of $M$? We resolve the above question in its full generality by showing an I/O complexity lower bound that matches the upper bound provided by FlashAttention for any values of $M \geq d^2$ within any constant factors. Further, we give a better algorithm with lower I/O complexity for $M < d^2$, and show that it is optimal as well. Moreover, our lower bounds do not rely on using combinatorial matrix multiplication for computing the attention matrix. We show even if one uses fast matrix multiplication, the above I/O complexity bounds cannot be improved. We do so by introducing a new communication complexity protocol for matrix compression, and connecting communication complexity to I/O complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to establish a connection between communication complexity and I/O complexity, and we believe this connection could be of independent interest and will find many more applications in proving I/O complexity lower bounds in the future.
Benchmarking and Building Long-Context Retrieval Models with LoCo and M2-BERT
Authors: Jon Saad-Falcon, Daniel Y. Fu, Simran Arora, Neel Guha, Christopher Ré
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Chunking, GPU, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Retrieval pipelines-an integral component of many machine learning systems-perform poorly in domains where documents are long (e.g., 10K tokens or more) and where identifying the relevant document requires synthesizing information across the entire text. Developing long-context retrieval encoders suitable for these domains raises three challenges: (1) how to evaluate long-context retrieval performance, (2) how to pretrain a base language model to represent both short contexts (corresponding to queries) and long contexts (corresponding to documents), and (3) how to fine-tune this model for retrieval under the batch size limitations imposed by GPU memory constraints. To address these challenges, we first introduce LoCoV1, a novel 12 task benchmark constructed to measure long-context retrieval where chunking is not possible or not effective. We next present the M2-BERT retrieval encoder, an 80M parameter state-space encoder model built from the Monarch Mixer architecture, capable of scaling to documents up to 32K tokens long. We describe a pretraining data mixture which allows this encoder to process both short and long context sequences, and a finetuning approach that adapts this base model to retrieval with only single-sample batches. Finally, we validate the M2-BERT retrieval encoder on LoCoV1, finding that it outperforms competitive Transformer-based models by at least 23.3 points, despite containing upwards of 90x fewer parameters.
Potential-Based Reward Shaping For Intrinsic Motivation
Authors: Grant C. Forbes, Nitish Gupta, Leonardo Villalobos-Arias, Colin M. Potts, Arnav Jhala, David L. Roberts
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment, leading to suboptimal behavior. Previous work on mitigating the risks of reward shaping, particularly through potential-based reward shaping (PBRS), has not been applicable to many IM methods, as they are often complex, trainable functions themselves, and therefore dependent on a wider set of variables than the traditional reward functions that PBRS was developed for. We present an extension to PBRS that we prove preserves the set of optimal policies under a more general set of functions than has been previously proven. We also present {\em Potential-Based Intrinsic Motivation} (PBIM), a method for converting IM rewards into a potential-based form that is useable without altering the set of optimal policies. Testing in the MiniGrid DoorKey and Cliff Walking environments, we demonstrate that PBIM successfully prevents the agent from converging to a suboptimal policy and can speed up training.
Conformal Predictive Programming for Chance Constrained Optimization
Authors: Yiqi Zhao, Xinyi Yu, Matteo Sesia, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh, Lars Lindemann
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, Conformal Prediction, LEMMA

We propose conformal predictive programming (CPP), a framework to solve chance constrained optimization problems, i.e., optimization problems with constraints that are functions of random variables. CPP utilizes samples from these random variables along with the quantile lemma - central to conformal prediction - to transform the chance constrained optimization problem into a deterministic problem with a quantile reformulation. CPP inherits a priori guarantees on constraint satisfaction from existing sample average approximation approaches for a class of chance constrained optimization problems, and it provides a posteriori guarantees that are of conditional and marginal nature otherwise. The strength of CPP is that it can easily support different variants of conformal prediction which have been (or will be) proposed within the conformal prediction community. To illustrate this, we present robust CPP to deal with distribution shifts in the random variables and Mondrian CPP to deal with class conditional chance constraints. To enable tractable solutions to the quantile reformulation, we present a mixed integer programming method (CPP-MIP) encoding, a bilevel optimization strategy (CPP-Bilevel), and a sampling-and-discarding optimization strategy (CPP-Discarding). We also extend CPP to deal with joint chance constrained optimization (JCCO). In a series of case studies, we show the validity of the aforementioned approaches, empirically compare CPP-MIP, CPP-Bilevel, as well as CPP-Discarding, and illustrate the advantage of CPP as compared to scenario approach.
Replicability is Asymptotically Free in Multi-armed Bandits
Authors: Junpei Komiyama, Shinji Ito, Yuichi Yoshida, Souta Koshino
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Armed Bandits

We consider a replicable stochastic multi-armed bandit algorithm that ensures, with high probability, that the algorithm's sequence of actions is not affected by the randomness inherent in the dataset. Replicability allows third parties to reproduce published findings and assists the original researcher in applying standard statistical tests. We observe that existing algorithms require $O(K^2/\rho^2)$ times more regret than nonreplicable algorithms, where $K$ is the number of arms and $\rho$ is the level of nonreplication. However, we demonstrate that this additional cost is unnecessary when the time horizon $T$ is sufficiently large for a given $K, \rho$, provided that the magnitude of the confidence bounds is chosen carefully. Therefore, for a large $T$, our algorithm only suffers $K^2/\rho^2$ times smaller amount of exploration than existing algorithms. To ensure the replicability of the proposed algorithms, we incorporate randomness into their decision-making processes. We propose a principled approach to limiting the probability of nonreplication. This approach elucidates the steps that existing research has implicitly followed. Furthermore, we derive the first lower bound for the two-armed replicable bandit problem, which implies the optimality of the proposed algorithms up to a $\log\log T$ factor for the two-armed case.
The Limits of Assumption-free Tests for Algorithm Performance
Authors: Yuetian Luo, Rina Foygel Barber
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

Algorithm evaluation and comparison are fundamental questions in machine learning and statistics -- how well does an algorithm perform at a given modeling task, and which algorithm performs best? Many methods have been developed to assess algorithm performance, often based around cross-validation type strategies, retraining the algorithm of interest on different subsets of the data and assessing its performance on the held-out data points. Despite the broad use of such procedures, the theoretical properties of these methods are not yet fully understood. In this work, we explore some fundamental limits for answering these questions with limited amounts of data. In particular, we make a distinction between two questions: how good is an algorithm $A$ at the problem of learning from a training set of size $n$, versus, how good is a particular fitted model produced by running $A$ on a particular training data set of size $n$? Our main results prove that, for any test that treats the algorithm $A$ as a ``black box'' (i.e., we can only study the behavior of $A$ empirically), there is a fundamental limit on our ability to carry out inference on the performance of $A$, unless the number of available data points $N$ is many times larger than the sample size $n$ of interest. (On the other hand, evaluating the performance of a particular fitted model is easy as long as a holdout data set is available -- that is, as long as $N-n$ is not too small.) We also ask whether an assumption of algorithmic stability might be sufficient to circumvent this hardness result. Surprisingly, we find that this is not the case: the same hardness result still holds for the problem of evaluating the performance of $A$, aside from a high-stability regime where fitted models are essentially nonrandom. Finally, we also establish similar hardness results for the problem of comparing multiple algorithms.
Making Flow-Matching-Based Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Laugh as You Like
Authors: Naoyuki Kanda, Xiaofei Wang, Sefik Emre Eskimez, Manthan Thakker, Hemin Yang, Zirun Zhu, Min Tang, Canrun Li, Chung-Hsien Tsai, Zhen Xiao, Yufei Xia, Jinzhu Li, Yanqing Liu, Sheng Zhao, Michael Zeng
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Laughter is one of the most expressive and natural aspects of human speech, conveying emotions, social cues, and humor. However, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems lack the ability to produce realistic and appropriate laughter sounds, limiting their applications and user experience. While there have been prior works to generate natural laughter, they fell short in terms of controlling the timing and variety of the laughter to be generated. In this work, we propose ELaTE, a zero-shot TTS that can generate natural laughing speech of any speaker based on a short audio prompt with precise control of laughter timing and expression. Specifically, ELaTE works on the audio prompt to mimic the voice characteristic, the text prompt to indicate the contents of the generated speech, and the input to control the laughter expression, which can be either the start and end times of laughter, or the additional audio prompt that contains laughter to be mimicked. We develop our model based on the foundation of conditional flow-matching-based zero-shot TTS, and fine-tune it with frame-level representation from a laughter detector as additional conditioning. With a simple scheme to mix small-scale laughter-conditioned data with large-scale pre-training data, we demonstrate that a pre-trained zero-shot TTS model can be readily fine-tuned to generate natural laughter with precise controllability, without losing any quality of the pre-trained zero-shot TTS model. Through objective and subjective evaluations, we show that ELaTE can generate laughing speech with significantly higher quality and controllability compared to conventional models. See https://aka.ms/elate/ for demo samples.
Diff-RNTraj: A Structure-aware Diffusion Model for Road Network-constrained Trajectory Generation
Authors: Tonglong Wei, Youfang Lin, Shengnan Guo, Yan Lin, Yiheng Huang, Chenyang Xiang, Yuqing Bai, Huaiyu Wan
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

Trajectory data is essential for various applications as it records the movement of vehicles. However, publicly available trajectory datasets remain limited in scale due to privacy concerns, which hinders the development of trajectory data mining and trajectory-based applications. To address this issue, some methods for generating synthetic trajectories have been proposed to expand the scale of the dataset. However, all existing methods generate trajectories in the geographical coordinate system, which poses two limitations for their utilization in practical applications: 1) the inability to ensure that the generated trajectories are constrained on the road. 2) the lack of road-related information. In this paper, we propose a new problem to meet the practical application need, \emph{i.e.}, road network-constrained trajectory (RNTraj) generation, which can directly generate trajectories on the road network with road-related information. RNTraj is a hybrid type of data, in which each point is represented by a discrete road segment and a continuous moving rate. To generate RNTraj, we design a diffusion model called Diff-RNTraj. This model can effectively handle the hybrid RNTraj using a continuous diffusion framework by incorporating a pre-training strategy to embed hybrid RNTraj into continuous representations. During the sampling stage, a RNTraj decoder is designed to map the continuous representation generated by the diffusion model back to the hybrid RNTraj format. Furthermore, Diff-RNTraj introduces a novel loss function to enhance the spatial validity of the generated trajectories. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.