pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
What Makes for Effective Few-shot Point Cloud Classification?
Authors: Chuangguan Ye, Hongyuan Zhu, Yongbin Liao, Yanggang Zhang, Tao Chen, Jiayuan Fan
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Classification, Few-Shot Learning, Few-Shot Point Cloud Classification, Point Cloud Classification

Due to the emergence of powerful computing resources and large-scale annotated datasets, deep learning has seen wide applications in our daily life. However, most current methods require extensive data collection and retraining when dealing with novel classes never seen before. On the other hand, we humans can quickly recognize new classes by looking at a few samples, which motivates the recent popularity of few-shot learning (FSL) in machine learning communities. Most current FSL approaches work on 2D image domain, however, its implication in 3D perception is relatively under-explored. Not only needs to recognize the unseen examples as in 2D domain, 3D few-shot learning is more challenging with unordered structures, high intra-class variances, and subtle inter-class differences. Moreover, different architectures and learning algorithms make it difficult to study the effectiveness of existing 2D methods when migrating to the 3D domain. In this work, for the first time, we perform systematic and extensive studies of recent 2D FSL and 3D backbone networks for benchmarking few-shot point cloud classification, and we suggest a strong baseline and learning architectures for 3D FSL. Then, we propose a novel plug-and-play component called Cross-Instance Adaptation (CIA) module, to address the high intra-class variances and subtle inter-class differences issues, which can be easily inserted into current baselines with significant performance improvement. Extensive experiments on two newly introduced benchmark datasets, ModelNet40-FS and ShapeNet70-FS, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed network for 3D FSL.
Video text tracking for dense and small text based on pp-yoloe-r and sort algorithm
Authors: Hongen Liu
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection, Text Detection, Text Spotting

Although end-to-end video text spotting methods based on Transformer can model long-range dependencies and simplify the train process, it will lead to large computation cost with the increase of the frame size in the input video. Therefore, considering the resolution of ICDAR 2023 DSText is 1080 * 1920 and slicing the video frame into several areas will destroy the spatial correlation of text, we divided the small and dense text spotting into two tasks, text detection and tracking. For text detection, we adopt the PP-YOLOE-R which is proven effective in small object detection as our detection model. For text detection, we use the sort algorithm for high inference speed. Experiments on DSText dataset demonstrate that our method is competitive on small and dense text spotting.
Optimal Goal-Reaching Reinforcement Learning via Quasimetric Learning
Authors: Tongzhou Wang, Antonio Torralba, Phillip Isola, Amy Zhang
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In goal-reaching reinforcement learning (RL), the optimal value function has a particular geometry, called quasimetric structure. This paper introduces Quasimetric Reinforcement Learning (QRL), a new RL method that utilizes quasimetric models to learn optimal value functions. Distinct from prior approaches, the QRL objective is specifically designed for quasimetrics, and provides strong theoretical recovery guarantees. Empirically, we conduct thorough analyses on a discretized MountainCar environment, identifying properties of QRL and its advantages over alternatives. On offline and online goal-reaching benchmarks, QRL also demonstrates improved sample efficiency and performance, across both state-based and image-based observations.
Is Stochastic Mirror Descent Vulnerable to Adversarial Delay Attacks? A Traffic Assignment Resilience Study
Authors: Yunian Pan, Tao Li, Quanyan Zhu
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00

\textit{Intelligent Navigation Systems} (INS) are exposed to an increasing number of informational attack vectors, which often intercept through the communication channels between the INS and the transportation network during the data collecting process. To measure the resilience of INS, we use the concept of a Wardrop Non-Equilibrium Solution (WANES), which is characterized by the probabilistic outcome of learning within a bounded number of interactions. By using concentration arguments, we have discovered that any bounded feedback delaying attack only degrades the systematic performance up to order $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{{d^3}{T^{-1}}})$ along the traffic flow trajectory within the Delayed Mirror Descent (DMD) online-learning framework. This degradation in performance can occur with only mild assumptions imposed. Our result implies that learning-based INS infrastructures can achieve Wardrop Non-equilibrium even when experiencing a certain period of disruption in the information structure. These findings provide valuable insights for designing defense mechanisms against possible jamming attacks across different layers of the transportation ecosystem.
Algebraic and Geometric Models for Space Networking
Authors: William Bernardoni, Robert Cardona, Jacob Cleveland, Justin Curry, Robert Green, Brian Heller, Alan Hylton, Tung Lam, Robert Kassouf-Short
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis

In this paper we introduce some new algebraic and geometric perspectives on networked space communications. Our main contribution is a novel definition of a time-varying graph (TVG), defined in terms of a matrix with values in subsets of the real line P(R). We leverage semi-ring properties of P(R) to model multi-hop communication in a TVG using matrix multiplication and a truncated Kleene star. This leads to novel statistics on the communication capacity of TVGs called lifetime curves, which we generate for large samples of randomly chosen STARLINK satellites, whose connectivity is modeled over day-long simulations. Determining when a large subsample of STARLINK is temporally strongly connected is further analyzed using novel metrics introduced here that are inspired by topological data analysis (TDA). To better model networking scenarios between the Earth and Mars, we introduce various semi-rings capable of modeling propagation delay as well as protocols common to Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), such as store-and-forward. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of zigzag persistence for featurizing different space networks and demonstrate the efficacy of K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classification for distinguishing Earth-Mars and Earth-Moon satellite systems using time-varying topology alone.
Synthesis parameter effect detection using quantitative representations and high dimensional distribution distances
Authors: Alex Hagen, Shane Jackson
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00

Detection of effects of the parameters of the synthetic process on the microstructure of materials is an important, yet elusive goal of materials science. We develop a method for detecting effects based on copula theory, high dimensional distribution distances, and permutational statistics to analyze a designed experiment synthesizing plutonium oxide from Pu(III) Oxalate. We detect effects of strike order and oxalic acid feed on the microstructure of the resulting plutonium oxide, which match the literature well. We also detect excess bivariate effects between the pairs of acid concentration, strike order and precipitation temperature.
Theoretical guarantees for neural control variates in MCMC
Authors: Denis Belomestny, Artur Goldman, Alexey Naumov, Sergey Samsonov
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a variance reduction approach for Markov chains based on additive control variates and the minimization of an appropriate estimate for the asymptotic variance. We focus on the particular case when control variates are represented as deep neural networks. We derive the optimal convergence rate of the asymptotic variance under various ergodicity assumptions on the underlying Markov chain. The proposed approach relies upon recent results on the stochastic errors of variance reduction algorithms and function approximation theory.
RunBugRun -- An Executable Dataset for Automated Program Repair
Authors: Julian Aron Prenner, Romain Robbes
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Program Repair

Recently, we can notice a transition to data-driven techniques in Automated Program Repair (APR), in particular towards deep neural networks. This entails training on hundreds of thousands or even millions of non-executable code fragments. We would like to bring more attention to an aspect of code often neglected in Neural Program Repair (NPR), namely its execution. Code execution has several significant advantages. It allows for test-based evaluation of candidate fixes and can provide valuable information to aid repair. In this work we present a fully executable dataset of 450,000 small buggy/fixed program pairs originally submitted to programming competition websites written in eight different programming languages. Along with the dataset we provide infrastructure to compile, safely execute and test programs as well as fine-grained bug-type labels. To give a point of reference, we provide basic evaluation results for two baselines, one based on a generate-and-validate approach and one on deep learning. With this dataset we follow several goals: we want to lift Neural Program Repair beyond fully static code representations, foster the use of execution-based features and, by including several different languages, counterbalance the predominance of Java in the current landscape of APR datasets and benchmarks.
Evolving Artificial Neural Networks To Imitate Human Behaviour In Shinobi III : Return of the Ninja Master
Authors: Maximilien Le Clei
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic neural networks, Evolutionary Algorithms

Our society is increasingly fond of computational tools. This phenomenon has greatly increased over the past decade following, among other factors, the emergence of a new Artificial Intelligence paradigm. Specifically, the coupling of two algorithmic techniques, Deep Neural Networks and Stochastic Gradient Descent, thrusted by an exponentially increasing computing capacity, has and is continuing to become a major asset in many modern technologies. However, as progress takes its course, some still wonder whether other methods could similarly or even more greatly benefit from these various hardware advances. In order to further this study, we delve in this thesis into Evolutionary Algorithms and their application to Dynamic Neural Networks, two techniques which despite enjoying many advantageous properties have yet to find their niche in contemporary Artificial Intelligence. We find that by elaborating new methods while exploiting strong computational resources, it becomes possible to develop strongly performing agents on a variety of benchmarks but also some other agents behaving very similarly to human subjects on the video game Shinobi III : Return of The Ninja Master, typical complex tasks previously out of reach for non-gradient-based optimization.
Self-building Neural Networks
Authors: Andrea Ferigo, Giovanni Iacca
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00

During the first part of life, the brain develops while it learns through a process called synaptogenesis. The neurons, growing and interacting with each other, create synapses. However, eventually the brain prunes those synapses. While previous work focused on learning and pruning independently, in this work we propose a biologically plausible model that, thanks to a combination of Hebbian learning and pruning, aims to simulate the synaptogenesis process. In this way, while learning how to solve the task, the agent translates its experience into a particular network structure. Namely, the network structure builds itself during the execution of the task. We call this approach Self-building Neural Network (SBNN). We compare our proposed SBNN with traditional neural networks (NNs) over three classical control tasks from OpenAI. The results show that our model performs generally better than traditional NNs. Moreover, we observe that the performance decay while increasing the pruning rate is smaller in our model than with NNs. Finally, we perform a validation test, testing the models over tasks unseen during the learning phase. In this case, the results show that SBNNs can adapt to new tasks better than the traditional NNs, especially when over $80\%$ of the weights are pruned.
FMGNN: Fused Manifold Graph Neural Network
Authors: Cheng Deng, Fan Xu, Jiaxing Ding, Luoyi Fu, Weinan Zhang, Xinbing Wang
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Graph representation learning has been widely studied and demonstrated effectiveness in various graph tasks. Most existing works embed graph data in the Euclidean space, while recent works extend the embedding models to hyperbolic or spherical spaces to achieve better performance on graphs with complex structures, such as hierarchical or ring structures. Fusing the embedding from different manifolds can further take advantage of the embedding capabilities over different graph structures. However, existing embedding fusion methods mostly focus on concatenating or summing up the output embeddings, without considering interacting and aligning the embeddings of the same vertices on different manifolds, which can lead to distortion and impression in the final fusion results. Besides, it is also challenging to fuse the embeddings of the same vertices from different coordinate systems. In face of these challenges, we propose the Fused Manifold Graph Neural Network (FMGNN), a novel GNN architecture that embeds graphs into different Riemannian manifolds with interaction and alignment among these manifolds during training and fuses the vertex embeddings through the distances on different manifolds between vertices and selected landmarks, geometric coresets. Our experiments demonstrate that FMGNN yields superior performance over strong baselines on the benchmarks of node classification and link prediction tasks.
Conformal Prediction Regions for Time Series using Linear Complementarity Programming
Authors: Matthew Cleaveland, Insup Lee, George J. Pappas, Lars Lindemann
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Time Series, valid

Conformal prediction is a statistical tool for producing prediction regions of machine learning models that are valid with high probability. However, applying conformal prediction to time series data leads to conservative prediction regions. In fact, to obtain prediction regions over $T$ time steps with confidence $1-\delta$, {previous works require that each individual prediction region is valid} with confidence $1-\delta/T$. We propose an optimization-based method for reducing this conservatism to enable long horizon planning and verification when using learning-enabled time series predictors. Instead of considering prediction errors individually at each time step, we consider a parameterized prediction error over multiple time steps. By optimizing the parameters over an additional dataset, we find prediction regions that are not conservative. We show that this problem can be cast as a mixed integer linear complementarity program (MILCP), which we then relax into a linear complementarity program (LCP). Additionally, we prove that the relaxed LP has the same optimal cost as the original MILCP. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method on case studies using pedestrian trajectory predictors and F16 fighter jet altitude predictors.
Depth Separation with Multilayer Mean-Field Networks
Authors: Yunwei Ren, Mo Zhou, Rong Ge
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

Depth separation -- why a deeper network is more powerful than a shallower one -- has been a major problem in deep learning theory. Previous results often focus on representation power. For example, arXiv:1904.06984 constructed a function that is easy to approximate using a 3-layer network but not approximable by any 2-layer network. In this paper, we show that this separation is in fact algorithmic: one can learn the function constructed by arXiv:1904.06984 using an overparameterized network with polynomially many neurons efficiently. Our result relies on a new way of extending the mean-field limit to multilayer networks, and a decomposition of loss that factors out the error introduced by the discretization of infinite-width mean-field networks.
Self-Supervised learning for Neural Architecture Search (NAS)
Authors: Samuel Ducros
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Position, Self-Supervised Learning

The objective of this internship is to propose an innovative method that uses unlabelled data, i.e. data that will allow the AI to automatically learn to predict the correct outcome. To reach this stage, the steps to be followed can be defined as follows: (1) consult the state of the art and position ourself against it, (2) come up with ideas for development paths, (3) implement these ideas, (4) and finally test them to position ourself against the state of the art, and then start the sequence again. During my internship, this sequence was done several times and therefore gives the tracks explored during the internship.
Federated Kalman Filter for Secure IoT-based Device Monitoring Services
Authors: Marc Jayson Baucas, Petros Spachos
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Device monitoring services have increased in popularity with the evolution of recent technology and the continuously increased number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Among the popular services are the ones that use device location information. However, these services run into privacy issues due to the nature of data collection and transmission. In this work, we introduce a platform incorporating Federated Kalman Filter (FKF) with a federated learning approach and private blockchain technology for privacy preservation. We analyze the accuracy of the proposed design against a standard Kalman Filter (KF) implementation of localization based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). The experimental results reveal significant potential for improved data estimation for RSSI-based localization in device monitoring.
Development and Evaluation of Conformal Prediction Methods for QSAR
Authors: Yuting Xu, Andy Liaw, Robert P. Sheridan, Vladimir Svetnik
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, valid

The quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) regression model is a commonly used technique for predicting biological activities of compounds using their molecular descriptors. Predictions from QSAR models can help, for example, to optimize molecular structure; prioritize compounds for further experimental testing; and estimate their toxicity. In addition to the accurate estimation of the activity, it is highly desirable to obtain some estimate of the uncertainty associated with the prediction, e.g., calculate a prediction interval (PI) containing the true molecular activity with a pre-specified probability, say 70%, 90% or 95%. The challenge is that most machine learning (ML) algorithms that achieve superior predictive performance require some add-on methods for estimating uncertainty of their prediction. The development of these algorithms is an active area of research by statistical and ML communities but their implementation for QSAR modeling remains limited. Conformal prediction (CP) is a promising approach. It is agnostic to the prediction algorithm and can produce valid prediction intervals under some weak assumptions on the data distribution. We proposed computationally efficient CP algorithms tailored to the most advanced ML models, including Deep Neural Networks and Gradient Boosting Machines. The validity and efficiency of proposed conformal predictors are demonstrated on a diverse collection of QSAR datasets as well as simulation studies.
Learning Sparsity of Representations with Discrete Latent Variables
Authors: Zhao Xu, Daniel Onoro Rubio, Giuseppe Serra, Mathias Niepert
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00

Deep latent generative models have attracted increasing attention due to the capacity of combining the strengths of deep learning and probabilistic models in an elegant way. The data representations learned with the models are often continuous and dense. However in many applications, sparse representations are expected, such as learning sparse high dimensional embedding of data in an unsupervised setting, and learning multi-labels from thousands of candidate tags in a supervised setting. In some scenarios, there could be further restriction on degree of sparsity: the number of non-zero features of a representation cannot be larger than a pre-defined threshold $L_0$. In this paper we propose a sparse deep latent generative model SDLGM to explicitly model degree of sparsity and thus enable to learn the sparse structure of the data with the quantified sparsity constraint. The resulting sparsity of a representation is not fixed, but fits to the observation itself under the pre-defined restriction. In particular, we introduce to each observation $i$ an auxiliary random variable $L_i$, which models the sparsity of its representation. The sparse representations are then generated with a two-step sampling process via two Gumbel-Softmax distributions. For inference and learning, we develop an amortized variational method based on MC gradient estimator. The resulting sparse representations are differentiable with backpropagation. The experimental evaluation on multiple datasets for unsupervised and supervised learning problems shows the benefits of the proposed method.
Uncertainty Propagation in Node Classification
Authors: Zhao Xu, Carolin Lawrence, Ammar Shaker, Raman Siarheyeu
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Node Classification

Quantifying predictive uncertainty of neural networks has recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we focus on measuring uncertainty of graph neural networks (GNNs) for the task of node classification. Most existing GNNs model message passing among nodes. The messages are often deterministic. Questions naturally arise: Does there exist uncertainty in the messages? How could we propagate such uncertainty over a graph together with messages? To address these issues, we propose a Bayesian uncertainty propagation (BUP) method, which embeds GNNs in a Bayesian modeling framework, and models predictive uncertainty of node classification with Bayesian confidence of predictive probability and uncertainty of messages. Our method proposes a novel uncertainty propagation mechanism inspired by Gaussian models. Moreover, we present an uncertainty oriented loss for node classification that allows the GNNs to clearly integrate predictive uncertainty in learning procedure. Consequently, the training examples with large predictive uncertainty will be penalized. We demonstrate the BUP with respect to prediction reliability and out-of-distribution (OOD) predictions. The learned uncertainty is also analyzed in depth. The relations between uncertainty and graph topology, as well as predictive uncertainty in the OOD cases are investigated with extensive experiments. The empirical results with popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.