pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Global memory transformer for processing long documents
Authors: Arij Al Adel
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Reading Comprehension

Transformer variants dominate the state-of-the-art in different natural language processing tasks such as translation, reading comprehension and summarization. Our paper is more directed to use general memory slots added to the inputs and studying the results of adding these slots. This paper is a go on study of general memory slots rule that were added to the input of the proposed model in previous work. We have two main tasks;1) pretraining task using masked language modeling and b) fine tuning task using HotpotQA . This study aims to verify the ability of the proposed model to handle chunks as if they were one chunk comparing with the base model. As baseline we used T5 transformer. We studied the rule of memory slots augmented to each input chunk and studied the model performance without selector. We found that adding memory to input chunks helped the proposed model to overcome the baseline on Masked language modeling task with specific training parameters. Ablation study reveals the ability of using the compressed input chunks with a degradation in performance.
Intermediate Entity-based Sparse Interpretable Representation Learning
Authors: Diego Garcia-Olano, Yasumasa Onoe, Joydeep Ghosh, Byron C. Wallace
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Representation Learning

Interpretable entity representations (IERs) are sparse embeddings that are "human-readable" in that dimensions correspond to fine-grained entity types and values are predicted probabilities that a given entity is of the corresponding type. These methods perform well in zero-shot and low supervision settings. Compared to standard dense neural embeddings, such interpretable representations may permit analysis and debugging. However, while fine-tuning sparse, interpretable representations improves accuracy on downstream tasks, it destroys the semantics of the dimensions which were enforced in pre-training. Can we maintain the interpretable semantics afforded by IERs while improving predictive performance on downstream tasks? Toward this end, we propose Intermediate enTity-based Sparse Interpretable Representation Learning (ItsIRL). ItsIRL realizes improved performance over prior IERs on biomedical tasks, while maintaining "interpretability" generally and their ability to support model debugging specifically. The latter is enabled in part by the ability to perform "counterfactual" fine-grained entity type manipulation, which we explore in this work. Finally, we propose a method to construct entity type based class prototypes for revealing global semantic properties of classes learned by our model.
Smoothing Policy Iteration for Zero-sum Markov Games
Authors: Yangang Ren, Yao Lyu, Wenxuan Wang, Shengbo Eben Li, Zeyang Li, Jingliang Duan
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Zero-sum Markov Games (MGs) has been an efficient framework for multi-agent systems and robust control, wherein a minimax problem is constructed to solve the equilibrium policies. At present, this formulation is well studied under tabular settings wherein the maximum operator is primarily and exactly solved to calculate the worst-case value function. However, it is non-trivial to extend such methods to handle complex tasks, as finding the maximum over large-scale action spaces is usually cumbersome. In this paper, we propose the smoothing policy iteration (SPI) algorithm to solve the zero-sum MGs approximately, where the maximum operator is replaced by the weighted LogSumExp (WLSE) function to obtain the nearly optimal equilibrium policies. Specially, the adversarial policy is served as the weight function to enable an efficient sampling over action spaces.We also prove the convergence of SPI and analyze its approximation error in $\infty -$norm based on the contraction mapping theorem. Besides, we propose a model-based algorithm called Smooth adversarial Actor-critic (SaAC) by extending SPI with the function approximations. The target value related to WLSE function is evaluated by the sampled trajectories and then mean square error is constructed to optimize the value function, and the gradient-ascent-descent methods are adopted to optimize the protagonist and adversarial policies jointly. In addition, we incorporate the reparameterization technique in model-based gradient back-propagation to prevent the gradient vanishing due to sampling from the stochastic policies. We verify our algorithm in both tabular and function approximation settings. Results show that SPI can approximate the worst-case value function with a high accuracy and SaAC can stabilize the training process and improve the adversarial robustness in a large margin.
DACOM: Learning Delay-Aware Communication for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Tingting Yuan, Hwei-Ming Chung, Jie Yuan, XiaoMing Fu
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Communication is supposed to improve multi-agent collaboration and overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, such improvements are prevalently limited in practice since most existing communication schemes ignore communication overheads (e.g., communication delays). In this paper, we demonstrate that ignoring communication delays has detrimental effects on collaborations, especially in delay-sensitive tasks such as autonomous driving. To mitigate this impact, we design a delay-aware multi-agent communication model (DACOM) to adapt communication to delays. Specifically, DACOM introduces a component, TimeNet, that is responsible for adjusting the waiting time of an agent to receive messages from other agents such that the uncertainty associated with delay can be addressed. Our experiments reveal that DACOM has a non-negligible performance improvement over other mechanisms by making a better trade-off between the benefits of communication and the costs of waiting for messages.
Enhanced Gaussian Process Dynamical Models with Knowledge Transfer for Long-term Battery Degradation Forecasting
Authors: Wei W. Xing, Ziyang Zhang, Akeel A. Shah
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Predicting the end-of-life or remaining useful life of batteries in electric vehicles is a critical and challenging problem, predominantly approached in recent years using machine learning to predict the evolution of the state-of-health during repeated cycling. To improve the accuracy of predictive estimates, especially early in the battery lifetime, a number of algorithms have incorporated features that are available from data collected by battery management systems. Unless multiple battery data sets are used for a direct prediction of the end-of-life, which is useful for ball-park estimates, such an approach is infeasible since the features are not known for future cycles. In this paper, we develop a highly-accurate method that can overcome this limitation, by using a modified Gaussian process dynamical model (GPDM). We introduce a kernelised version of GPDM for a more expressive covariance structure between both the observable and latent coordinates. We combine the approach with transfer learning to track the future state-of-health up to end-of-life. The method can incorporate features as different physical observables, without requiring their values beyond the time up to which data is available. Transfer learning is used to improve learning of the hyperparameters using data from similar batteries. The accuracy and superiority of the approach over modern benchmarks algorithms including a Gaussian process model and deep convolutional and recurrent networks are demonstrated on three data sets, particularly at the early stages of the battery lifetime.
An ADMM-Incorporated Latent Factorization of Tensors Method for QoS Prediction
Authors: Jiajia Mi, Hao Wu
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00

As the Internet developed rapidly, it is important to choose suitable web services from a wide range of candidates. Quality of service (QoS) describes the performance of a web service dynamically with respect to the service requested by the service consumer. Moreover, the latent factorization of tenors (LFT) is very effective for discovering temporal patterns in high dimensional and sparse (HiDS) tensors. However, current LFT models suffer from a low convergence rate and rarely account for the effects of outliers. To address the above problems, this paper proposes an Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based Outlier-Resilient Nonnegative Latent-factorization of Tensors model. We maintain the non-negativity of the model by constructing an augmented Lagrangian function with the ADMM optimization framework. In addition, the Cauchy function is taken as the metric function to reduce the impact on the model training. The empirical work on two dynamic QoS datasets shows that the proposed method has faster convergence and better performance on prediction accuracy.
Domain-Invariant Feature Alignment Using Variational Inference For Partial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Sandipan Choudhuri, Suli Adeniye, Arunabha Sen, Hemanth Venkateswara
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, domain classification, Partial Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning, Variational Inference

The standard closed-set domain adaptation approaches seek to mitigate distribution discrepancies between two domains under the constraint of both sharing identical label sets. However, in realistic scenarios, finding an optimal source domain with identical label space is a challenging task. Partial domain adaptation alleviates this problem of procuring a labeled dataset with identical label space assumptions and addresses a more practical scenario where the source label set subsumes the target label set. This, however, presents a few additional obstacles during adaptation. Samples with categories private to the source domain thwart relevant knowledge transfer and degrade model performance. In this work, we try to address these issues by coupling variational information and adversarial learning with a pseudo-labeling technique to enforce class distribution alignment and minimize the transfer of superfluous information from the source samples. The experimental findings in numerous cross-domain classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed technique delivers superior and comparable accuracy to existing methods.
Multi-view deep learning based molecule design and structural optimization accelerates the SARS-CoV-2 inhibitor discovery
Authors: Chao Pang, Yu Wang, Yi Jiang, Ruheng Wang, Ran Su, Leyi Wei
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Representation Learning

In this work, we propose MEDICO, a Multi-viEw Deep generative model for molecule generation, structural optimization, and the SARS-CoV-2 Inhibitor disCOvery. To the best of our knowledge, MEDICO is the first-of-this-kind graph generative model that can generate molecular graphs similar to the structure of targeted molecules, with a multi-view representation learning framework to sufficiently and adaptively learn comprehensive structural semantics from targeted molecular topology and geometry. We show that our MEDICO significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in generating valid, unique, and novel molecules under benchmarking comparisons. In particular, we showcase the multi-view deep learning model enables us to generate not only the molecules structurally similar to the targeted molecules but also the molecules with desired chemical properties, demonstrating the strong capability of our model in exploring the chemical space deeply. Moreover, case study results on targeted molecule generation for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) show that by integrating molecule docking into our model as chemical priori, we successfully generate new small molecules with desired drug-like properties for the Mpro, potentially accelerating the de novo design of Covid-19 drugs. Further, we apply MEDICO to the structural optimization of three well-known Mpro inhibitors (N3, 11a, and GC376) and achieve ~88% improvement in their binding affinity to Mpro, demonstrating the application value of our model for the development of therapeutics for SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Time-Series via Temporal Mixup
Authors: Emadeldeen Eldele, Mohamed Ragab, Zhenghua Chen, Min Wu, Chee-Keong Kwoh, XiaoLi Li
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Domain Adaptation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) has emerged as a powerful solution for the domain shift problem via transferring the knowledge from a labeled source domain to a shifted unlabeled target domain. Despite the prevalence of UDA for visual applications, it remains relatively less explored for time-series applications. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight contrastive domain adaptation framework called CoTMix for time-series data. Unlike existing approaches that either use statistical distances or adversarial techniques, we leverage contrastive learning solely to mitigate the distribution shift across the different domains. Specifically, we propose a novel temporal mixup strategy to generate two intermediate augmented views for the source and target domains. Subsequently, we leverage contrastive learning to maximize the similarity between each domain and its corresponding augmented view. The generated views consider the temporal dynamics of time-series data during the adaptation process while inheriting the semantics among the two domains. Hence, we gradually push both domains towards a common intermediate space, mitigating the distribution shift across them. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world time-series datasets show that our approach can significantly outperform all state-of-the-art UDA methods. The implementation code of CoTMix is available at \href{https://github.com/emadeldeen24/CoTMix}{github.com/emadeldeen24/CoTMix}.
Probabilistic Verification of ReLU Neural Networks via Characteristic Functions
Authors: Joshua Pilipovsky, Vignesh Sivaramakrishnan, Meeko M. K. Oishi, Panagiotis Tsiotras
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00

Verifying the input-output relationships of a neural network so as to achieve some desired performance specification is a difficult, yet important, problem due to the growing ubiquity of neural nets in many engineering applications. We use ideas from probability theory in the frequency domain to provide probabilistic verification guarantees for ReLU neural networks. Specifically, we interpret a (deep) feedforward neural network as a discrete dynamical system over a finite horizon that shapes distributions of initial states, and use characteristic functions to propagate the distribution of the input data through the network. Using the inverse Fourier transform, we obtain the corresponding cumulative distribution function of the output set, which can be used to check if the network is performing as expected given any random point from the input set. The proposed approach does not require distributions to have well-defined moments or moment generating functions. We demonstrate our proposed approach on two examples, and compare its performance to related approaches.
Exploring the Limits of Differentially Private Deep Learning with Group-wise Clipping
Authors: Jiyan He, Xuechen Li, Da Yu, Huishuai Zhang, Janardhan Kulkarni, Yin Tat Lee, Arturs Backurs, Nenghai Yu, Jiang Bian
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Differentially private deep learning has recently witnessed advances in computational efficiency and privacy-utility trade-off. We explore whether further improvements along the two axes are possible and provide affirmative answers leveraging two instantiations of \emph{group-wise clipping}. To reduce the compute time overhead of private learning, we show that \emph{per-layer clipping}, where the gradient of each neural network layer is clipped separately, allows clipping to be performed in conjunction with backpropagation in differentially private optimization. This results in private learning that is as memory-efficient and almost as fast per training update as non-private learning for many workflows of interest. While per-layer clipping with constant thresholds tends to underperform standard flat clipping, per-layer clipping with adaptive thresholds matches or outperforms flat clipping under given training epoch constraints, hence attaining similar or better task performance within less wall time. To explore the limits of scaling (pretrained) models in differentially private deep learning, we privately fine-tune the 175 billion-parameter GPT-3. We bypass scaling challenges associated with clipping gradients that are distributed across multiple devices with \emph{per-device clipping} that clips the gradient of each model piece separately on its host device. Privately fine-tuning GPT-3 with per-device clipping achieves a task performance at $\epsilon=1$ better than what is attainable by non-privately fine-tuning the largest GPT-2 on a summarization task.
GlueFL: Reconciling Client Sampling and Model Masking for Bandwidth Efficient Federated Learning
Authors: Shiqi He, Qifan Yan, Feijie Wu, Lanjun Wang, Mathias Lécuyer, Ivan Beschastnikh
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Model Compression

Federated learning (FL) is an effective technique to directly involve edge devices in machine learning training while preserving client privacy. However, the substantial communication overhead of FL makes training challenging when edge devices have limited network bandwidth. Existing work to optimize FL bandwidth overlooks downstream transmission and does not account for FL client sampling. In this paper we propose GlueFL, a framework that incorporates new client sampling and model compression algorithms to mitigate low download bandwidths of FL clients. GlueFL prioritizes recently used clients and bounds the number of changed positions in compression masks in each round. Across three popular FL datasets and three state-of-the-art strategies, GlueFL reduces downstream client bandwidth by 27% on average and reduces training time by 29% on average.
Beyond ADMM: A Unified Client-variance-reduced Adaptive Federated Learning Framework
Authors: Shuai Wang, Yanqing Xu, Zhiguo Wang, Tsung-Hui Chang, Tony Q. S. Quek, Defeng Sun
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Semi-Supervised Image Classification

As a novel distributed learning paradigm, federated learning (FL) faces serious challenges in dealing with massive clients with heterogeneous data distribution and computation and communication resources. Various client-variance-reduction schemes and client sampling strategies have been respectively introduced to improve the robustness of FL. Among others, primal-dual algorithms such as the alternating direction of method multipliers (ADMM) have been found being resilient to data distribution and outperform most of the primal-only FL algorithms. However, the reason behind remains a mystery still. In this paper, we firstly reveal the fact that the federated ADMM is essentially a client-variance-reduced algorithm. While this explains the inherent robustness of federated ADMM, the vanilla version of it lacks the ability to be adaptive to the degree of client heterogeneity. Besides, the global model at the server under client sampling is biased which slows down the practical convergence. To go beyond ADMM, we propose a novel primal-dual FL algorithm, termed FedVRA, that allows one to adaptively control the variance-reduction level and biasness of the global model. In addition, FedVRA unifies several representative FL algorithms in the sense that they are either special instances of FedVRA or are close to it. Extensions of FedVRA to semi/un-supervised learning are also presented. Experiments based on (semi-)supervised image classification tasks demonstrate superiority of FedVRA over the existing schemes in learning scenarios with massive heterogeneous clients and client sampling.
Hedging Complexity in Generalization via a Parametric Distributionally Robust Optimization Framework
Authors: Garud Iyengar, Henry Lam, Tianyu Wang
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Management, Portfolio Optimization, Stochastic Optimization

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) and distributionally robust optimization (DRO) are popular approaches for solving stochastic optimization problems that appear in operations management and machine learning. Existing generalization error bounds for these methods depend on either the complexity of the cost function or dimension of the random perturbations. Consequently, the performance of these methods can be poor for high-dimensional problems with complex objective functions. We propose a simple approach in which the distribution of random perturbations is approximated using a parametric family of distributions. This mitigates both sources of complexity; however, it introduces a model misspecification error. We show that this new source of error can be controlled by suitable DRO formulations. Our proposed parametric DRO approach has significantly improved generalization bounds over existing ERM and DRO methods and parametric ERM for a wide variety of settings. Our method is particularly effective under distribution shifts and works broadly in contextual optimization. We also illustrate the superior performance of our approach on both synthetic and real-data portfolio optimization and regression tasks.
Constrained Reinforcement Learning via Dissipative Saddle Flow Dynamics
Authors: Tianqi Zheng, Pengcheng You, Enrique Mallada
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several algorithms rooted in sampled-based primal-dual methods have been recently proposed to solve this problem in policy space. However, such methods are based on stochastic gradient descent ascent algorithms whose trajectories are connected to the optimal policy only after a mixing output stage that depends on the algorithm's history. As a result, there is a mismatch between the behavioral policy and the optimal one. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm for constrained RL that does not suffer from these limitations. Leveraging recent results on regularized saddle-flow dynamics, we develop a novel stochastic gradient descent-ascent algorithm whose trajectories converge to the optimal policy almost surely.
Online Estimation of the Koopman Operator Using Fourier Features
Authors: Tahiya Salam, Alice Kate Li, M. Ani Hsieh
Date: 2022-12-03 00:00:00

Transfer operators offer linear representations and global, physically meaningful features of nonlinear dynamical systems. Discovering transfer operators, such as the Koopman operator, require careful crafted dictionaries of observables, acting on states of the dynamical system. This is ad hoc and requires the full dataset for evaluation. In this paper, we offer an optimization scheme to allow joint learning of the observables and Koopman operator with online data. Our results show we are able to reconstruct the evolution and represent the global features of complex dynamical systems.