pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Contrastive Identity-Aware Learning for Multi-Agent Value Decomposition
Authors: Shunyu Liu, Yihe Zhou, Jie Song, Tongya Zheng, KaiXuan Chen, Tongtian Zhu, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Diversity, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, SMAC, SMAC+

Value Decomposition (VD) aims to deduce the contributions of agents for decentralized policies in the presence of only global rewards, and has recently emerged as a powerful credit assignment paradigm for tackling cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems. One of the main challenges in VD is to promote diverse behaviors among agents, while existing methods directly encourage the diversity of learned agent networks with various strategies. However, we argue that these dedicated designs for agent networks are still limited by the indistinguishable VD network, leading to homogeneous agent behaviors and thus downgrading the cooperation capability. In this paper, we propose a novel Contrastive Identity-Aware learning (CIA) method, explicitly boosting the credit-level distinguishability of the VD network to break the bottleneck of multi-agent diversity. Specifically, our approach leverages contrastive learning to maximize the mutual information between the temporal credits and identity representations of different agents, encouraging the full expressiveness of credit assignment and further the emergence of individualities. The algorithm implementation of the proposed CIA module is simple yet effective that can be readily incorporated into various VD architectures. Experiments on the SMAC benchmarks and across different VD backbones demonstrate that the proposed method yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts. Our code is available at https://github.com/liushunyu/CIA.
SnCQA: A hardware-efficient equivariant quantum convolutional circuit architecture
Authors: Han Zheng, Christopher Kang, Gokul Subramanian Ravi, Hanrui Wang, Kanav Setia, Frederic T. Chong, Junyu Liu
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Computational chemistry

We propose SnCQA, a set of hardware-efficient variational circuits of equivariant quantum convolutional circuits respective to permutation symmetries and spatial lattice symmetries with the number of qubits $n$. By exploiting permutation symmetries of the system, such as lattice Hamiltonians common to many quantum many-body and quantum chemistry problems, Our quantum neural networks are suitable for solving machine learning problems where permutation symmetries are present, which could lead to significant savings of computational costs. Aside from its theoretical novelty, we find our simulations perform well in practical instances of learning ground states in quantum computational chemistry, where we could achieve comparable performances to traditional methods with few tens of parameters. Compared to other traditional variational quantum circuits, such as the pure hardware-efficient ansatz (pHEA), we show that SnCQA is more scalable, accurate, and noise resilient (with $20\times$ better performance on $3 \times 4$ square lattice and $200\% - 1000\%$ resource savings in various lattice sizes and key criterions such as the number of layers, parameters, and times to converge in our cases), suggesting a potentially favorable experiment on near-time quantum devices.
SciAI4Industry -- Solving PDEs for industry-scale problems with deep learning
Authors: Philipp A. Witte, Russell J. Hewett, Kumar Saurabh, AmirHossein Sojoodi, Ranveer Chandra
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Uncertainty Quantification

Solving partial differential equations with deep learning makes it possible to reduce simulation times by multiple orders of magnitude and unlock scientific methods that typically rely on large numbers of sequential simulations, such as optimization and uncertainty quantification. Two of the largest challenges of adopting scientific AI for industrial problem settings is that training datasets must be simulated in advance and that neural networks for solving large-scale PDEs exceed the memory capabilities of current GPUs. We introduce a distributed programming API in the Julia language for simulating training data in parallel on the cloud and without requiring users to manage the underlying HPC infrastructure. In addition, we show that model-parallel deep learning based on domain decomposition allows us to scale neural networks for solving PDEs to commercial-scale problem settings and achieve above 90% parallel efficiency. Combining our cloud API for training data generation and model-parallel deep learning, we train large-scale neural networks for solving the 3D Navier-Stokes equation and simulating 3D CO2 flow in porous media. For the CO2 example, we simulate a training dataset based on a commercial carbon capture and storage (CCS) project and train a neural network for CO2 flow simulation on a 3D grid with over 2 million cells that is 5 orders of magnitudes faster than a conventional numerical simulator and 3,200 times cheaper.
Quality Assurance in MLOps Setting: An Industrial Perspective
Authors: Ayan Chatterjee, Bestoun S. Ahmed, Erik Hallin, Anton Engman
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00

Today, machine learning (ML) is widely used in industry to provide the core functionality of production systems. However, it is practically always used in production systems as part of a larger end-to-end software system that is made up of several other components in addition to the ML model. Due to production demand and time constraints, automated software engineering practices are highly applicable. The increased use of automated ML software engineering practices in industries such as manufacturing and utilities requires an automated Quality Assurance (QA) approach as an integral part of ML software. Here, QA helps reduce risk by offering an objective perspective on the software task. Although conventional software engineering has automated tools for QA data analysis for data-driven ML, the use of QA practices for ML in operation (MLOps) is lacking. This paper examines the QA challenges that arise in industrial MLOps and conceptualizes modular strategies to deal with data integrity and Data Quality (DQ). The paper is accompanied by real industrial use-cases from industrial partners. The paper also presents several challenges that may serve as a basis for future studies.
Evaluating Feature Attribution Methods for Electrocardiogram
Authors: Jangwon Suh, Jimyeong Kim, Euna Jung, Wonjong Rhee
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Arrhythmia Detection

The performance of cardiac arrhythmia detection with electrocardiograms(ECGs) has been considerably improved since the introduction of deep learning models. In practice, the high performance alone is not sufficient and a proper explanation is also required. Recently, researchers have started adopting feature attribution methods to address this requirement, but it has been unclear which of the methods are appropriate for ECG. In this work, we identify and customize three evaluation metrics for feature attribution methods based on the characteristics of ECG: localization score, pointing game, and degradation score. Using the three evaluation metrics, we evaluate and analyze eleven widely-used feature attribution methods. We find that some of the feature attribution methods are much more adequate for explaining ECG, where Grad-CAM outperforms the second-best method by a large margin.
Continual Learning of Natural Language Processing Tasks: A Survey
Authors: Zixuan Ke, Bing Liu
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Survey, Transfer Learning

Continual learning (CL) is a learning paradigm that emulates the human capability of learning and accumulating knowledge continually without forgetting the previously learned knowledge and also transferring the learned knowledge to help learn new tasks better. This survey presents a comprehensive review and analysis of the recent progress of CL in NLP, which has significant differences from CL in computer vision and machine learning. It covers (1) all CL settings with a taxonomy of existing techniques; (2) catastrophic forgetting (CF) prevention, (3) knowledge transfer (KT), which is particularly important for NLP tasks; and (4) some theory and the hidden challenge of inter-task class separation (ICS). (1), (3) and (4) have not been included in the existing survey. Finally, a list of future directions is discussed.
DyRRen: A Dynamic Retriever-Reranker-Generator Model for Numerical Reasoning over Tabular and Textual Data
Authors: Xiao Li, Yin Zhu, Sichen Liu, Jiangzhou Ju, Yuzhong Qu, Gong Cheng
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Reranking, Retrieval

Numerical reasoning over hybrid data containing tables and long texts has recently received research attention from the AI community. To generate an executable reasoning program consisting of math and table operations to answer a question, state-of-the-art methods use a retriever-generator pipeline. However, their retrieval results are static, while different generation steps may rely on different sentences. To attend to the retrieved information that is relevant to each generation step, in this paper, we propose DyRRen, an extended retriever-reranker-generator framework where each generation step is enhanced by a dynamic reranking of retrieved sentences. It outperforms existing baselines on the FinQA dataset.
The Impact of Generative AI on the Future of Visual Content Marketing
Authors: Shiva Mayahi, Marko Vidrih
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

In today's world of marketing, it is necessary to have visually appealing content. Visual material has become an essential area of focus for every company as a result of the widespread availability of gadgets for mass communication and extended visual advancements. Similarly, artificial intelligence is also gaining ground and it is proving to be the most revolutionary technological advancement thus far. The integration of visual content with artificial intelligence is the key to acquiring and retaining loyal customers; its absence from the overarching marketing strategy of any production raises a red flag that could ultimately result in a smaller market share for that company.
Leveraging Data Recasting to Enhance Tabular Reasoning
Authors: Aashna Jena, Vivek Gupta, Manish Shrivastava, Julian Martin Eisenschlos
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing

Creating challenging tabular inference data is essential for learning complex reasoning. Prior work has mostly relied on two data generation strategies. The first is human annotation, which yields linguistically diverse data but is difficult to scale. The second category for creation is synthetic generation, which is scalable and cost effective but lacks inventiveness. In this research, we present a framework for semi-automatically recasting existing tabular data to make use of the benefits of both approaches. We utilize our framework to build tabular NLI instances from five datasets that were initially intended for tasks like table2text creation, tabular Q/A, and semantic parsing. We demonstrate that recasted data could be used as evaluation benchmarks as well as augmentation data to enhance performance on tabular NLI tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of models trained on recasted data in the zero-shot scenario, and analyse trends in performance across different recasted datasets types.
Safe Control and Learning Using the Generalized Action Governor
Authors: Nan Li, Yutong Li, Ilya Kolmanovsky, Anouck Girard, H. Eric Tseng, Dimitar Filev
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This article introduces a general framework for safe control and learning based on the generalized action governor (AG). The AG is a supervisory scheme for augmenting a nominal closed-loop system with the ability of strictly handling prescribed safety constraints. In the first part of this article, we present a generalized AG methodology and analyze its key properties in a general setting. Then, we introduce tailored AG design approaches derived from the generalized methodology for linear and discrete systems. Afterward, we discuss the application of the generalized AG to facilitate safe online learning, which aims at safely evolving control parameters using real-time data to enhance control performance in uncertain systems. We present two safe learning algorithms based on, respectively, reinforcement learning and data-driven Koopman operator-based control integrated with the generalized AG to exemplify this application. Finally, we illustrate the developments with a numerical example.
Improving Robust Generalization by Direct PAC-Bayesian Bound Minimization
Authors: Zifan Wang, Nan Ding, Tomer Levinboim, Xi Chen, Radu Soricut
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Recent research in robust optimization has shown an overfitting-like phenomenon in which models trained against adversarial attacks exhibit higher robustness on the training set compared to the test set. Although previous work provided theoretical explanations for this phenomenon using a robust PAC-Bayesian bound over the adversarial test error, related algorithmic derivations are at best only loosely connected to this bound, which implies that there is still a gap between their empirical success and our understanding of adversarial robustness theory. To close this gap, in this paper we consider a different form of the robust PAC-Bayesian bound and directly minimize it with respect to the model posterior. The derivation of the optimal solution connects PAC-Bayesian learning to the geometry of the robust loss surface through a Trace of Hessian (TrH) regularizer that measures the surface flatness. In practice, we restrict the TrH regularizer to the top layer only, which results in an analytical solution to the bound whose computational cost does not depend on the network depth. Finally, we evaluate our TrH regularization approach over CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet using Vision Transformers (ViT) and compare against baseline adversarial robustness algorithms. Experimental results show that TrH regularization leads to improved ViT robustness that either matches or surpasses previous state-of-the-art approaches while at the same time requires less memory and computational cost.
AutoReply: Detecting Nonsense in Dialogue Introspectively with Discriminative Replies
Authors: Weiyan Shi, Emily Dinan, Adi Renduchintala, Daniel Fried, Athul Paul Jacob, Zhou Yu, Mike Lewis
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00

Existing approaches built separate classifiers to detect nonsense in dialogues. In this paper, we show that without external classifiers, dialogue models can detect errors in their own messages introspectively, by calculating the likelihood of replies that are indicative of poor messages. For example, if an agent believes its partner is likely to respond "I don't understand" to a candidate message, that message may not make sense, so an alternative message should be chosen. We evaluate our approach on a dataset from the game Diplomacy, which contains long dialogues richly grounded in the game state, on which existing models make many errors. We first show that hand-crafted replies can be effective for the task of detecting nonsense in applications as complex as Diplomacy. We then design AutoReply, an algorithm to search for such discriminative replies automatically, given a small number of annotated dialogue examples. We find that AutoReply-generated replies outperform handcrafted replies and perform on par with carefully fine-tuned large supervised models. Results also show that one single reply without much computation overheads can also detect dialogue nonsense reasonably well.
Efficient Exploration using Model-Based Quality-Diversity with Gradients
Authors: Bryan Lim, Manon Flageat, Antoine Cully
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Efficient Exploration

Exploration is a key challenge in Reinforcement Learning, especially in long-horizon, deceptive and sparse-reward environments. For such applications, population-based approaches have proven effective. Methods such as Quality-Diversity deals with this by encouraging novel solutions and producing a diversity of behaviours. However, these methods are driven by either undirected sampling (i.e. mutations) or use approximated gradients (i.e. Evolution Strategies) in the parameter space, which makes them highly sample-inefficient. In this paper, we propose a model-based Quality-Diversity approach. It extends existing QD methods to use gradients for efficient exploitation and leverage perturbations in imagination for efficient exploration. Our approach optimizes all members of a population simultaneously to maintain both performance and diversity efficiently by leveraging the effectiveness of QD algorithms as good data generators to train deep models. We demonstrate that it maintains the divergent search capabilities of population-based approaches on tasks with deceptive rewards while significantly improving their sample efficiency and quality of solutions.
Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Wenhu Chen, Xueguang Ma, Xinyi Wang, William W. Cohen
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Recently, there has been significant progress in teaching language models to perform step-by-step reasoning to solve complex numerical reasoning tasks. Chain-of-thoughts prompting (CoT) is by far the state-of-art method for these tasks. CoT uses language models to perform both reasoning and computation in the multi-step `thought' process. To disentangle computation from reasoning, we propose `Program of Thoughts' (PoT), which uses language models (mainly Codex) to express the reasoning process as a program. The computation is relegated to an external computer, which executes the generated programs to derive the answer. We evaluate PoT on five math word problem datasets (GSM, AQuA, SVAMP, TabMWP, MultiArith) and three financial-QA datasets (FinQA, ConvFinQA, TATQA) for both few-shot and zero-shot setups. Under both few-shot and zero-shot settings, PoT can show an average performance gain over CoT by around 12\% across all the evaluated datasets. By combining PoT with self-consistency decoding, we can achieve SoTA performance on all math problem datasets and near-SoTA performance on financial datasets. All of our data and code are released in Github https://github.com/wenhuchen/Program-of-Thoughts
Big Earth Data and Machine Learning for Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture
Authors: Vasileios Sitokonstantinou
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Earth Observation, Interpretable Machine Learning

Big streams of Earth images from satellites or other platforms (e.g., drones and mobile phones) are becoming increasingly available at low or no cost and with enhanced spatial and temporal resolution. This thesis recognizes the unprecedented opportunities offered by the high quality and open access Earth observation data of our times and introduces novel machine learning and big data methods to properly exploit them towards developing applications for sustainable and resilient agriculture. The thesis addresses three distinct thematic areas, i.e., the monitoring of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the monitoring of food security and applications for smart and resilient agriculture. The methodological innovations of the developments related to the three thematic areas address the following issues: i) the processing of big Earth Observation (EO) data, ii) the scarcity of annotated data for machine learning model training and iii) the gap between machine learning outputs and actionable advice. This thesis demonstrated how big data technologies such as data cubes, distributed learning, linked open data and semantic enrichment can be used to exploit the data deluge and extract knowledge to address real user needs. Furthermore, this thesis argues for the importance of semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning models that circumvent the ever-present challenge of scarce annotations and thus allow for model generalization in space and time. Specifically, it is shown how merely few ground truth data are needed to generate high quality crop type maps and crop phenology estimations. Finally, this thesis argues there is considerable distance in value between model inferences and decision making in real-world scenarios and thereby showcases the power of causal and interpretable machine learning in bridging this gap.
UNSAT Solver Synthesis via Monte Carlo Forest Search
Authors: Chris Cameron, Jason Hartford, Taylor Lundy, Tuan Truong, Alan Milligan, Rex Chen, Kevin Leyton-Brown
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We introduce Monte Carlo Forest Search (MCFS), a class of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for learning policies in {tree MDPs}, for which policy execution involves traversing an exponential-sized tree. Examples of such problems include proving unsatisfiability of a SAT formula; counting the number of solutions of a satisfiable SAT formula; and finding the optimal solution to a mixed-integer program. MCFS algorithms can be seen as extensions of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to cases where, rather than finding a good path (solution) within a tree, the problem is to find a small tree within a forest of candidate trees. We instantiate and evaluate our ideas in an algorithm that we dub Knuth Synthesis, an MCFS algorithm that learns DPLL branching policies for solving the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem, with the objective of achieving good average-case performance on a given distribution of unsatisfiable problem instances. Knuth Synthesis is the first RL approach to avoid the prohibitive costs of policy evaluations in an exponentially-sized tree, leveraging two key ideas: first, we estimate tree size by randomly sampling paths and measuring their lengths, drawing on an unbiased approximation due to Knuth (1975); second, we query a strong solver at a user-defined depth rather than learning a policy across the whole tree, to focus our policy search on early decisions that offer the greatest potential for reducing tree size. We matched or exceeded the performance of a strong baseline on three well-known SAT distributions, facing problems that were two orders of magnitude more challenging than those addressed in previous RL studies.
Online Federated Learning via Non-Stationary Detection and Adaptation amidst Concept Drift
Authors: Bhargav Ganguly, Vaneet Aggarwal
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging domain in the broader context of artificial intelligence research. Methodologies pertaining to FL assume distributed model training, consisting of a collection of clients and a server, with the main goal of achieving optimal global model with restrictions on data sharing due to privacy concerns. It is worth highlighting that the diverse existing literature in FL mostly assume stationary data generation processes; such an assumption is unrealistic in real-world conditions where concept drift occurs due to, for instance, seasonal or period observations, faults in sensor measurements. In this paper, we introduce a multiscale algorithmic framework which combines theoretical guarantees of \textit{FedAvg} and \textit{FedOMD} algorithms in near stationary settings with a non-stationary detection and adaptation technique to ameliorate FL generalization performance in the presence of concept drifts. We present a multi-scale algorithmic framework leading to $\Tilde{\mathcal{O}} ( \min \{ \sqrt{LT} , \Delta^{\frac{1}{3}}T^{\frac{2}{3}} + \sqrt{T} \})$ \textit{dynamic regret} for $T$ rounds with an underlying general convex loss function, where $L$ is the number of times non-stationary drifts occurred and $\Delta$ is the cumulative magnitude of drift experienced within $T$ rounds.