pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning logic programs by discovering higher-order abstractions
Authors: Céline Hocquette, Sebastijan Dumančić, Andrew Cropper
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive logic programming, Program Synthesis, Visual Reasoning

We introduce the higher-order refactoring problem, where the goal is to compress a logic program by discovering higher-order abstractions, such as map, filter, and fold. We implement our approach in Stevie, which formulates the refactoring problem as a constraint optimisation problem. Our experiments on multiple domains, including program synthesis and visual reasoning, show that refactoring can improve the learning performance of an inductive logic programming system, specifically improving predictive accuracies by 27% and reducing learning times by 47%. We also show that Stevie can discover abstractions that transfer to multiple domains.
A Framework for Data-Driven Explainability in Mathematical Optimization
Authors: Kevin-Martin Aigner, Marc Goerigk, Michael Hartisch, Frauke Liers, Arthur Miehlich
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

Advancements in mathematical programming have made it possible to efficiently tackle large-scale real-world problems that were deemed intractable just a few decades ago. However, provably optimal solutions may not be accepted due to the perception of optimization software as a black box. Although well understood by scientists, this lacks easy accessibility for practitioners. Hence, we advocate for introducing the explainability of a solution as another evaluation criterion, next to its objective value, which enables us to find trade-off solutions between these two criteria. Explainability is attained by comparing against (not necessarily optimal) solutions that were implemented in similar situations in the past. Thus, solutions are preferred that exhibit similar features. Although we prove that already in simple cases the explainable model is NP-hard, we characterize relevant polynomially solvable cases such as the explainable shortest path problem. Our numerical experiments on both artificial as well as real-world road networks show the resulting Pareto front. It turns out that the cost of enforcing explainability can be very small.
Integrating cognitive map learning and active inference for planning in ambiguous environments
Authors: Toon Van de Maele, Bart Dhoedt, Tim Verbelen, Giovanni Pezzulo
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

Living organisms need to acquire both cognitive maps for learning the structure of the world and planning mechanisms able to deal with the challenges of navigating ambiguous environments. Although significant progress has been made in each of these areas independently, the best way to integrate them is an open research question. In this paper, we propose the integration of a statistical model of cognitive map formation within an active inference agent that supports planning under uncertainty. Specifically, we examine the clone-structured cognitive graph (CSCG) model of cognitive map formation and compare a naive clone graph agent with an active inference-driven clone graph agent, in three spatial navigation scenarios. Our findings demonstrate that while both agents are effective in simple scenarios, the active inference agent is more effective when planning in challenging scenarios, in which sensory observations provide ambiguous information about location.
Robust Bayesian Satisficing
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Distributional shifts pose a significant challenge to achieving robustness in contemporary machine learning. To overcome this challenge, robust satisficing (RS) seeks a robust solution to an unspecified distributional shift while achieving a utility above a desired threshold. This paper focuses on the problem of RS in contextual Bayesian optimization when there is a discrepancy between the true and reference distributions of the context. We propose a novel robust Bayesian satisficing algorithm called RoBOS for noisy black-box optimization. Our algorithm guarantees sublinear lenient regret under certain assumptions on the amount of distribution shift. In addition, we define a weaker notion of regret called robust satisficing regret, in which our algorithm achieves a sublinear upper bound independent of the amount of distribution shift. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to various learning problems and compare it to other approaches, such as distributionally robust optimization.
It Ain't That Bad: Understanding the Mysterious Performance Drop in OOD Generalization for Generative Transformer Models
Authors: Xingcheng Xu, Zihao Pan, Haipeng Zhang, Yanqing Yang
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable proficiency on solving diverse problems. However, their generalization ability is not always satisfying and the generalization problem is common for generative transformer models in general. Researchers take basic mathematical tasks like n-digit addition or multiplication as important perspectives for investigating their generalization behaviors. It is observed that when training models on n-digit operations (e.g., additions) in which both input operands are n-digit in length, models generalize successfully on unseen n-digit inputs (in-distribution (ID) generalization), but fail miserably on longer, unseen cases (out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization). We bring this unexplained performance drop into attention and ask whether there is systematic OOD generalization. Towards understanding LLMs, we train various smaller language models which may share the same underlying mechanism. We discover that the strong ID generalization stems from structured representations, while behind the unsatisfying OOD performance, the models still exhibit clear learned algebraic structures. Specifically, these models map unseen OOD inputs to outputs with learned equivalence relations in the ID domain, which we call the equivalence generalization. These findings deepen our knowledge regarding the generalizability of generative models including LLMs, and provide insights into potential avenues for improvement.
Description Logics Go Second-Order -- Extending EL with Universally Quantified Concepts
Authors: Joshua Hirschbrunn, Yevgeny Kazakov
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

The study of Description Logics have been historically mostly focused on features that can be translated to decidable fragments of first-order logic. In this paper, we leave this restriction behind and look for useful and decidable extensions outside first-order logic. We introduce universally quantified concepts, which take the form of variables that can be replaced with arbitrary concepts, and define two semantics of this extension. A schema semantics allows replacements of concept variables only by concepts from a particular language, giving us axiom schemata similar to modal logics. A second-order semantics allows replacement of concept variables with arbitrary subsets of the domain, which is similar to quantified predicates in second-order logic. To study the proposed semantics, we focus on the extension of the description logic $\mathcal{EL}$. We show that for a useful fragment of the extension, the conclusions entailed by the different semantics coincide, allowing us to use classical $\mathcal{EL}$ reasoning algorithms even for the second-order semantics. For a slightly smaller, but still useful, fragment, we were also able to show polynomial decidability of the extension. This fragment, in particular, can express a generalized form of role chain axioms, positive self restrictions, and some forms of (local) role-value-maps from KL-ONE, without requiring any additional constructors.
TEST: Text Prototype Aligned Embedding to Activate LLM's Ability for Time Series
Authors: Chenxi Sun, Hongyan Li, Yaliang Li, Shenda Hong
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Time Series

This work summarizes two ways to accomplish Time-Series (TS) tasks in today's Large Language Model (LLM) context: LLM-for-TS (model-centric) designs and trains a fundamental large model, or fine-tunes a pre-trained LLM for TS data; TS-for-LLM (data-centric) converts TS into a model-friendly representation to enable the pre-trained LLM to handle TS data. Given the lack of data, limited resources, semantic context requirements, and so on, this work focuses on TS-for-LLM, where we aim to activate LLM's ability for TS data by designing a TS embedding method suitable for LLM. The proposed method is named TEST. It first tokenizes TS, builds an encoder to embed TS via instance-wise, feature-wise, and text-prototype-aligned contrast, where the TS embedding space is aligned to LLM embedding layer space, then creates soft prompts to make LLM more open to that embeddings, and finally implements TS tasks using the frozen LLM. We also demonstrate the feasibility of TS-for-LLM through theory and experiments. Experiments are carried out on TS classification, forecasting, and representation tasks using eight frozen LLMs with various structures and sizes. The results show that the pre-trained LLM with TEST strategy can achieve better or comparable performance than today's SOTA TS models and offer benefits for few-shot and generalization. By treating LLM as the pattern machine, TEST can endow LLM's ability to process TS data without compromising language ability. We hope that this study will serve as a foundation for future work to support TS+LLM progress.
Challenges and Opportunities of Using Transformer-Based Multi-Task Learning in NLP Through ML Lifecycle: A Survey
Authors: Lovre Torbarina, Tin Ferkovic, Lukasz Roguski, Velimir Mihelcic, Bruno Sarlija, Zeljko Kraljevic
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Multi-Task Learning

The increasing adoption of natural language processing (NLP) models across industries has led to practitioners' need for machine learning systems to handle these models efficiently, from training to serving them in production. However, training, deploying, and updating multiple models can be complex, costly, and time-consuming, mainly when using transformer-based pre-trained language models. Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has emerged as a promising approach to improve efficiency and performance through joint training, rather than training separate models. Motivated by this, we first provide an overview of transformer-based MTL approaches in NLP. Then, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of using MTL approaches throughout typical ML lifecycle phases, specifically focusing on the challenges related to data engineering, model development, deployment, and monitoring phases. This survey focuses on transformer-based MTL architectures and, to the best of our knowledge, is novel in that it systematically analyses how transformer-based MTL in NLP fits into ML lifecycle phases. Furthermore, we motivate research on the connection between MTL and continual learning (CL), as this area remains unexplored. We believe it would be practical to have a model that can handle both MTL and CL, as this would make it easier to periodically re-train the model, update it due to distribution shifts, and add new capabilities to meet real-world requirements.
Explainable Multi-View Deep Networks Methodology for Experimental Physics
Authors: Nadav Schneider, Muriel Tzdaka, Galit Sturm, Guy Lazovski, Galit Bar, Gilad Oren, Raz Gvishi, Gal Oren
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, MULTI-VIEW LEARNING

Physical experiments often involve multiple imaging representations, such as X-ray scans and microscopic images. Deep learning models have been widely used for supervised analysis in these experiments. Combining different image representations is frequently required to analyze and make a decision properly. Consequently, multi-view data has emerged - datasets where each sample is described by views from different angles, sources, or modalities. These problems are addressed with the concept of multi-view learning. Understanding the decision-making process of deep learning models is essential for reliable and credible analysis. Hence, many explainability methods have been devised recently. Nonetheless, there is a lack of proper explainability in multi-view models, which are challenging to explain due to their architectures. In this paper, we suggest different multi-view architectures for the vision domain, each suited to another problem, and we also present a methodology for explaining these models. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology, we focus on the domain of High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) experiments, where multiple imaging representations are used to assess the quality of foam samples. We apply our methodology to classify the foam samples quality using the suggested multi-view architectures. Through experimental results, we showcase the improvement of accurate architecture choice on both accuracy - 78% to 84% and AUC - 83% to 93% and present a trade-off between performance and explainability. Specifically, we demonstrate that our approach enables the explanation of individual one-view models, providing insights into the decision-making process of each view. This understanding enhances the interpretability of the overall multi-view model. The sources of this work are available at: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/Multi-View-Explainability.
Towards Ontology-Mediated Planning with OWL DL Ontologies (Extended Version)
Authors: Tobias John, Patrick Koopmann
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

While classical planning languages make the closed-domain and closed-world assumption, there have been various approaches to extend those with DL reasoning, which is then interpreted under the usual open-world semantics. Current approaches for planning with DL ontologies integrate the DL directly into the planning language, and practical approaches have been developed based on first-order rewritings or rewritings into datalog. We present here a new approach in which the planning specification and ontology are kept separate, and are linked together using an interface. This allows planning experts to work in a familiar formalism, while existing ontologies can be easily integrated and extended by ontology experts. Our approach for planning with those ontology-mediated planning problems is optimized for cases with comparatively small domains, and supports the whole OWL DL fragment. The idea is to rewrite the ontology-mediated planning problem into a classical planning problem to be processed by existing planning tools. Different to other approaches, our rewriting is data-dependent. A first experimental evaluation of our approach shows the potential and limitations of this approach.
Modelling the Spread of COVID-19 in Indoor Spaces using Automated Probabilistic Planning
Authors: Mohamed Harmanani
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been ongoing for around 3 years, and has infected over 750 million people and caused over 6 million deaths worldwide at the time of writing. Throughout the pandemic, several strategies for controlling the spread of the disease have been debated by healthcare professionals, government authorities, and international bodies. To anticipate the potential impact of the disease, and to simulate the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies, a robust model of disease spread is needed. In this work, we explore a novel approach based on probabilistic planning and dynamic graph analysis to model the spread of COVID-19 in indoor spaces. We endow the planner with means to control the spread of the disease through non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as mandating masks and vaccines, and we compare the impact of crowds and capacity limits on the spread of COVID-19 in these settings. We demonstrate that the use of probabilistic planning is effective in predicting the amount of infections that are likely to occur in shared spaces, and that automated planners have the potential to design competent interventions to limit the spread of the disease. Our code is fully open-source and is available at: https://github.com/mharmanani/prob-planning-covid19 .
Endogenous Macrodynamics in Algorithmic Recourse
Authors: Patrick Altmeyer, Giovan Angela, Aleksander Buszydlik, Karol Dobiczek, Arie van Deursen, Cynthia C. S. Liem
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, valid

Existing work on Counterfactual Explanations (CE) and Algorithmic Recourse (AR) has largely focused on single individuals in a static environment: given some estimated model, the goal is to find valid counterfactuals for an individual instance that fulfill various desiderata. The ability of such counterfactuals to handle dynamics like data and model drift remains a largely unexplored research challenge. There has also been surprisingly little work on the related question of how the actual implementation of recourse by one individual may affect other individuals. Through this work, we aim to close that gap. We first show that many of the existing methodologies can be collectively described by a generalized framework. We then argue that the existing framework does not account for a hidden external cost of recourse, that only reveals itself when studying the endogenous dynamics of recourse at the group level. Through simulation experiments involving various state-of the-art counterfactual generators and several benchmark datasets, we generate large numbers of counterfactuals and study the resulting domain and model shifts. We find that the induced shifts are substantial enough to likely impede the applicability of Algorithmic Recourse in some situations. Fortunately, we find various strategies to mitigate these concerns. Our simulation framework for studying recourse dynamics is fast and opensourced.
Enhancing Performance on Seen and Unseen Dialogue Scenarios using Retrieval-Augmented End-to-End Task-Oriented System
Authors: JianGuo Zhang, Stephen Roller, Kun Qian, Zhiwei Liu, Rui Meng, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Retrieval, Text Generation

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have achieved promising performance by leveraging sophisticated natural language understanding and natural language generation capabilities of pre-trained models. This work enables the TOD systems with more flexibility through a simple cache. The cache provides the flexibility to dynamically update the TOD systems and handle both existing and unseen dialogue scenarios. Towards this end, we first fine-tune a retrieval module to effectively retrieve the most relevant information entries from the cache. We then train end-to-end TOD models that can refer to and ground on both dialogue history and retrieved information during TOD generation. The cache is straightforward to construct, and the backbone models of TOD systems are compatible with existing pre-trained generative models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our framework, with a notable improvement in non-empty joint goal accuracy by 6.7% compared to strong baselines.
Interpretability Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Misalignment of Prototypical Parts Explanations
Authors: Mikołaj Sacha, Bartosz Jura, Dawid Rymarczyk, Łukasz Struski, Jacek Tabor, Bartosz Zieliński
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

Prototypical parts-based networks are becoming increasingly popular due to their faithful self-explanations. However, their similarity maps are calculated in the penultimate network layer. Therefore, the receptive field of the prototype activation region often depends on parts of the image outside this region, which can lead to misleading interpretations. We name this undesired behavior a spatial explanation misalignment and introduce an interpretability benchmark with a set of dedicated metrics for quantifying this phenomenon. In addition, we propose a method for misalignment compensation and apply it to existing state-of-the-art models. We show the expressiveness of our benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed compensation methodology through extensive empirical studies.
AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation
Authors: Qingyun Wu, Gagan Bansal, Jieyu Zhang, Yiran Wu, Beibin Li, Erkang Zhu, Li Jiang, Xiaoyun Zhang, Shaokun Zhang, Jiale Liu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Ryen W White, Doug Burger, Chi Wang
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, College Computer Science, Decision Making, Question Answering

AutoGen is an open-source framework that allows developers to build LLM applications via multiple agents that can converse with each other to accomplish tasks. AutoGen agents are customizable, conversable, and can operate in various modes that employ combinations of LLMs, human inputs, and tools. Using AutoGen, developers can also flexibly define agent interaction behaviors. Both natural language and computer code can be used to program flexible conversation patterns for different applications. AutoGen serves as a generic infrastructure to build diverse applications of various complexities and LLM capacities. Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in many example applications, with domains ranging from mathematics, coding, question answering, operations research, online decision-making, entertainment, etc.
SYENet: A Simple Yet Effective Network for Multiple Low-Level Vision Tasks with Real-time Performance on Mobile Device
Authors: Weiran Gou, Ziyao Yi, Yan Xiang, Shaoqing Li, Zibin Liu, Dehui Kong, Ke Xu
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Super-Resolution

With the rapid development of AI hardware accelerators, applying deep learning-based algorithms to solve various low-level vision tasks on mobile devices has gradually become possible. However, two main problems still need to be solved: task-specific algorithms make it difficult to integrate them into a single neural network architecture, and large amounts of parameters make it difficult to achieve real-time inference. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel network, SYENet, with only $~$6K parameters, to handle multiple low-level vision tasks on mobile devices in a real-time manner. The SYENet consists of two asymmetrical branches with simple building blocks. To effectively connect the results by asymmetrical branches, a Quadratic Connection Unit(QCU) is proposed. Furthermore, to improve performance, a new Outlier-Aware Loss is proposed to process the image. The proposed method proves its superior performance with the best PSNR as compared with other networks in real-time applications such as Image Signal Processing(ISP), Low-Light Enhancement(LLE), and Super-Resolution(SR) with 2K60FPS throughput on Qualcomm 8 Gen 1 mobile SoC(System-on-Chip). Particularly, for ISP task, SYENet got the highest score in MAI 2022 Learned Smartphone ISP challenge.