pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Forecast Hedging and Calibration
Authors: Dean P. Foster, Sergiu Hart
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

Calibration means that forecasts and average realized frequencies are close. We develop the concept of forecast hedging, which consists of choosing the forecasts so as to guarantee that the expected track record can only improve. This yields all the calibration results by the same simple basic argument while differentiating between them by the forecast-hedging tools used: deterministic and fixed point based versus stochastic and minimax based. Additional contributions are an improved definition of continuous calibration, ensuing game dynamics that yield Nash equilibria in the long run, and a new calibrated forecasting procedure for binary events that is simpler than all known such procedures.
Smooth Calibration, Leaky Forecasts, Finite Recall, and Nash Dynamics
Authors: Dean P. Foster, Sergiu Hart
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

We propose to smooth out the calibration score, which measures how good a forecaster is, by combining nearby forecasts. While regular calibration can be guaranteed only by randomized forecasting procedures, we show that smooth calibration can be guaranteed by deterministic procedures. As a consequence, it does not matter if the forecasts are leaked, i.e., made known in advance: smooth calibration can nevertheless be guaranteed (while regular calibration cannot). Moreover, our procedure has finite recall, is stationary, and all forecasts lie on a finite grid. To construct the procedure, we deal also with the related setups of online linear regression and weak calibration. Finally, we show that smooth calibration yields uncoupled finite-memory dynamics in n-person games "smooth calibrated learning" in which the players play approximate Nash equilibria in almost all periods (by contrast, calibrated learning, which uses regular calibration, yields only that the time-averages of play are approximate correlated equilibria).
Learning Multivariate CDFs and Copulas using Tensor Factorization
Authors: Magda Amiridi, Nicholas D. Sidiropoulos
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Uncertainty Quantification

Learning the multivariate distribution of data is a core challenge in statistics and machine learning. Traditional methods aim for the probability density function (PDF) and are limited by the curse of dimensionality. Modern neural methods are mostly based on black-box models, lacking identifiability guarantees. In this work, we aim to learn multivariate cumulative distribution functions (CDFs), as they can handle mixed random variables, allow efficient box probability evaluation, and have the potential to overcome local sample scarcity owing to their cumulative nature. We show that any grid sampled version of a joint CDF of mixed random variables admits a universal representation as a naive Bayes model via the Canonical Polyadic (tensor-rank) decomposition. By introducing a low-rank model, either directly in the raw data domain, or indirectly in a transformed (Copula) domain, the resulting model affords efficient sampling, closed form inference and uncertainty quantification, and comes with uniqueness guarantees under relatively mild conditions. We demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model in several synthetic and real datasets and applications including regression, sampling and data imputation. Interestingly, our experiments with real data show that it is possible to obtain better density/mass estimates indirectly via a low-rank CDF model, than a low-rank PDF/PMF model.
Language Models of Code are Few-Shot Commonsense Learners
Authors: Aman Madaan, Shuyan Zhou, Uri Alon, Yiming Yang, Graham Neubig
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

We address the general task of structured commonsense reasoning: given a natural language input, the goal is to generate a graph such as an event -- or a reasoning-graph. To employ large language models (LMs) for this task, existing approaches ``serialize'' the output graph as a flat list of nodes and edges. Although feasible, these serialized graphs strongly deviate from the natural language corpora that LMs were pre-trained on, hindering LMs from generating them correctly. In this paper, we show that when we instead frame structured commonsense reasoning tasks as code generation tasks, pre-trained LMs of code are better structured commonsense reasoners than LMs of natural language, even when the downstream task does not involve source code at all. We demonstrate our approach across three diverse structured commonsense reasoning tasks. In all these natural language tasks, we show that using our approach, a code generation LM (CODEX) outperforms natural-LMs that are fine-tuned on the target task (e.g., T5) and other strong LMs such as GPT-3 in the few-shot setting.
Graph-based Neural Modules to Inspect Attention-based Architectures: A Position Paper
Authors: Breno W. Carvalho, Artur D'Avilla Garcez, Luis C. Lamb
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Position

Encoder-decoder architectures are prominent building blocks of state-of-the-art solutions for tasks across multiple fields where deep learning (DL) or foundation models play a key role. Although there is a growing community working on the provision of interpretation for DL models as well as considerable work in the neuro-symbolic community seeking to integrate symbolic representations and DL, many open questions remain around the need for better tools for visualization of the inner workings of DL architectures. In particular, encoder-decoder models offer an exciting opportunity for visualization and editing by humans of the knowledge implicitly represented in model weights. In this work, we explore ways to create an abstraction for segments of the network as a two-way graph-based representation. Changes to this graph structure should be reflected directly in the underlying tensor representations. Such two-way graph representation enables new neuro-symbolic systems by leveraging the pattern recognition capabilities of the encoder-decoder along with symbolic reasoning carried out on the graphs. The approach is expected to produce new ways of interacting with DL models but also to improve performance as a result of the combination of learning and reasoning capabilities.
Precision QCD corrections to gluon-initiated diphoton-plus-jet production at the LHC
Authors: Ryan Moodie
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

In this thesis, we present recent advances at the precision frontier of higher-order quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations. We consider massless two-loop five-point amplitudes, with a particular focus on diphoton-plus-jet production through gluon fusion. We build a library of infrared functions up to at most next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD, which can be used to validate amplitudes and construct counterterms in subtraction schemes at NNLO. We review progress in the novel use of machine learning technology to optimise the evaluation of amplitudes in hadron collider simulations. We present the full-colour virtual QCD corrections to diphoton-plus-jet production through gluon fusion, discussing the new techniques developed to calculate these non-planar two-loop amplitudes. We use these amplitudes to compute the next-to-leading QCD corrections to the differential cross sections of diphoton-plus-jet production through gluon fusion at the Large Hadron Collider. We also present the leading-colour double-virtual corrections to hadronic trijet production. All derived amplitudes are made available in a public implementation that is ready for further phenomenological application.
Dissipative residual layers for unsupervised implicit parameterization of data manifolds
Authors: Viktor Reshniak
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose an unsupervised technique for implicit parameterization of data manifolds. In our approach, the data is assumed to belong to a lower dimensional manifold in a higher dimensional space, and the data points are viewed as the endpoints of the trajectories originating outside the manifold. Under this assumption, the data manifold is an attractive manifold of a dynamical system to be estimated. We parameterize such a dynamical system with a residual neural network and propose a spectral localization technique to ensure it is locally attractive in the vicinity of data. We also present initialization and additional regularization of the proposed residual layers. % that we call dissipative bottlenecks. We mention the importance of the considered problem for the tasks of reinforcement learning and support our discussion with examples demonstrating the performance of the proposed layers in denoising and generative tasks.
Meta-learning Based Short-Term Passenger Flow Prediction for Newly-Operated Urban Rail Transit Stations
Authors: Kuo Han, Jinlei Zhang, Chunqi Zhu, Lixing Yang, Xiaoyu Huang, Songsong Li
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Meta-Learning, Prediction

Accurate short-term passenger flow prediction in urban rail transit stations has great benefits for reasonably allocating resources, easing congestion, and reducing operational risks. However, compared with data-rich stations, the passenger flow prediction in newly-operated stations is limited by passenger flow data volume, which would reduce the prediction accuracy and increase the difficulty for station management and operation. Hence, how accurately predicting passenger flow in newly-operated stations with limited data is an urgent problem to be solved. Existing passenger flow prediction approaches generally depend on sufficient data, which might be unsuitable for newly-operated stations. Therefore, we propose a meta-learning method named Meta Long Short-Term Memory Network (Meta-LSTM) to predict the passenger flow in newly-operated stations. The Meta-LSTM is to construct a framework that increases the generalization ability of long short-term memory network (LSTM) to various passenger flow characteristics by learning passenger flow characteristics from multiple data-rich stations and then applying the learned parameter to data-scarce stations by parameter initialization. The Meta-LSTM is applied to the subway network of Nanning, Hangzhou, and Beijing, China. The experiments on three real-world subway networks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Meta-LSTM over several competitive baseline models. Results also show that our proposed Meta-LSTM has a good generalization ability to various passenger flow characteristics, which can provide a reference for passenger flow prediction in the stations with limited data.
Implicit Bias in Leaky ReLU Networks Trained on High-Dimensional Data
Authors: Spencer Frei, Gal Vardi, Peter L. Bartlett, Nathan Srebro, Wei Hu
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The implicit biases of gradient-based optimization algorithms are conjectured to be a major factor in the success of modern deep learning. In this work, we investigate the implicit bias of gradient flow and gradient descent in two-layer fully-connected neural networks with leaky ReLU activations when the training data are nearly-orthogonal, a common property of high-dimensional data. For gradient flow, we leverage recent work on the implicit bias for homogeneous neural networks to show that asymptotically, gradient flow produces a neural network with rank at most two. Moreover, this network is an $\ell_2$-max-margin solution (in parameter space), and has a linear decision boundary that corresponds to an approximate-max-margin linear predictor. For gradient descent, provided the random initialization variance is small enough, we show that a single step of gradient descent suffices to drastically reduce the rank of the network, and that the rank remains small throughout training. We provide experiments which suggest that a small initialization scale is important for finding low-rank neural networks with gradient descent.
Self-Supervised Learning of Linear Precoders under Non-Linear PA Distortion for Energy-Efficient Massive MIMO Systems
Authors: Thomas Feys, Xavier Mestre, François Rottenberg
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems are typically designed under the assumption of linear power amplifiers (PAs). However, PAs are typically most energy-efficient when operating close to their saturation point, where they cause non-linear distortion. Moreover, when using conventional precoders, this distortion coherently combines at the user locations, limiting performance. As such, when designing an energy-efficient massive MIMO system, this distortion has to be managed. In this work, we propose the use of a neural network (NN) to learn the mapping between the channel matrix and the precoding matrix, which maximizes the sum rate in the presence of this non-linear distortion. This is done for a third-order polynomial PA model for both the single and multi-user case. By learning this mapping a significant increase in energy efficiency is achieved as compared to conventional precoders and even as compared to perfect digital pre-distortion (DPD), in the saturation regime.
Variational Graph Generator for Multi-View Graph Clustering
Authors: Jianpeng Chen, Yawen Ling, Jie Xu, Yazhou Ren, Shudong Huang, Xiaorong Pu, Zhifeng Hao, Philip S. Yu, Lifang He
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Clustering

Multi-view graph clustering (MGC) methods are increasingly being studied due to the explosion of multi-view data with graph structural information. The critical point of MGC is to better utilize view-specific and view-common information in features and graphs of multiple views. However, existing works have an inherent limitation that they are unable to concurrently utilize the consensus graph information across multiple graphs and the view-specific feature information. To address this issue, we propose Variational Graph Generator for Multi-View Graph Clustering (VGMGC). Specifically, a novel variational graph generator is proposed to extract common information among multiple graphs. This generator infers a reliable variational consensus graph based on a priori assumption over multiple graphs. Then a simple yet effective graph encoder in conjunction with the multi-view clustering objective is presented to learn the desired graph embeddings for clustering, which embeds the inferred view-common graph and view-specific graphs together with features. Finally, theoretical results illustrate the rationality of the VGMGC by analyzing the uncertainty of the inferred consensus graph with the information bottleneck principle.Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our VGMGC over SOTAs. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/cjpcool/VGMGC.
DICTDIS: Dictionary Constrained Disambiguation for Improved NMT
Authors: Ayush Maheshwari, Preethi Jyothi, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT

Domain-specific neural machine translation (NMT) systems (e.g., in educational applications) are socially significant with the potential to help make information accessible to a diverse set of users in multilingual societies. It is desirable that such NMT systems be lexically constrained and draw from domain-specific dictionaries. Dictionaries could present multiple candidate translations for a source word/phrase due to the polysemous nature of words. The onus is then on the NMT model to choose the contextually most appropriate candidate. Prior work has largely ignored this problem and focused on the single candidate constraint setting wherein the target word or phrase is replaced by a single constraint. In this work we present DictDis, a lexically constrained NMT system that disambiguates between multiple candidate translations derived from dictionaries. We achieve this by augmenting training data with multiple dictionary candidates to actively encourage disambiguation during training by implicitly aligning multiple candidate constraints. We demonstrate the utility of DictDis via extensive experiments on English-Hindi and English-German sentences in a variety of domains including regulatory, finance, engineering. We also present comparisons on standard benchmark test datasets. In comparison with existing approaches for lexically constrained and unconstrained NMT, we demonstrate superior performance with respect to constraint copy and disambiguation related measures on all domains while also obtaining improved fluency of up to 2-3 BLEU points on some domains.
Shot-frugal and Robust quantum kernel classifiers
Authors: Abhay Shastry, Abhijith Jayakumar, Apoorva Patel, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Quantum kernel methods are a candidate for quantum speed-ups in supervised machine learning. The number of quantum measurements N required for a reasonable kernel estimate is a critical resource, both from complexity considerations and because of the constraints of near-term quantum hardware. We emphasize that for classification tasks, the aim is reliable classification and not precise kernel evaluation, and demonstrate that the former is far more resource efficient. Furthermore, it is shown that the accuracy of classification is not a suitable performance metric in the presence of noise and we motivate a new metric that characterizes the reliability of classification. We then obtain a bound for N which ensures, with high probability, that classification errors over a dataset are bounded by the margin errors of an idealized quantum kernel classifier. Using chance constraint programming and the subgaussian bounds of quantum kernel distributions, we derive several Shot-frugal and Robust (ShofaR) programs starting from the primal formulation of the Support Vector Machine. This significantly reduces the number of quantum measurements needed and is robust to noise by construction. Our strategy is applicable to uncertainty in quantum kernels arising from any source of unbiased noise.
Behavioral graph fraud detection in E-commerce
Authors: Hang Yin, Zitao Zhang, Zhurong Wang, Yilmazcan Ozyurt, Weiming Liang, Wenyu Dong, Yang Zhao, Yinan Shan
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, GPU, graph construction, Graph Embedding, Graph Neural Network

In e-commerce industry, graph neural network methods are the new trends for transaction risk modeling.The power of graph algorithms lie in the capability to catch transaction linking network information, which is very hard to be captured by other algorithms.However, in most existing approaches, transaction or user connections are defined by hard link strategies on shared properties, such as same credit card, same device, same ip address, same shipping address, etc. Those types of strategies will result in sparse linkages by entities with strong identification characteristics (ie. device) and over-linkages by entities that could be widely shared (ie. ip address), making it more difficult to learn useful information from graph. To address aforementioned problems, we present a novel behavioral biometric based method to establish transaction linkings based on user behavioral similarities, then train an unsupervised GNN to extract embedding features for downstream fraud prediction tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first time similarity based soft link has been used in graph embedding applications. To speed up similarity calculation, we apply an in-house GPU based HDBSCAN clustering method to remove highly concentrated and isolated nodes before graph construction. Our experiments show that embedding features learned from similarity based behavioral graph have achieved significant performance increase to the baseline fraud detection model in various business scenarios. In new guest buyer transaction scenario, this segment is a challenge for traditional method, we can make precision increase from 0.82 to 0.86 at the same recall of 0.27, which means we can decrease false positive rate using this method.
Causality-driven Hierarchical Structure Discovery for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Shaohui Peng, Xing Hu, Rui Zhang, Ke Tang, Jiaming Guo, Qi Yi, Ruizhi Chen, Xishan Zhang, Zidong Du, Ling Li, Qi Guo, Yunji Chen
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Minecraft, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) effectively improves agents' exploration efficiency on tasks with sparse reward, with the guide of high-quality hierarchical structures (e.g., subgoals or options). However, how to automatically discover high-quality hierarchical structures is still a great challenge. Previous HRL methods can hardly discover the hierarchical structures in complex environments due to the low exploration efficiency by exploiting the randomness-driven exploration paradigm. To address this issue, we propose CDHRL, a causality-driven hierarchical reinforcement learning framework, leveraging a causality-driven discovery instead of a randomness-driven exploration to effectively build high-quality hierarchical structures in complicated environments. The key insight is that the causalities among environment variables are naturally fit for modeling reachable subgoals and their dependencies and can perfectly guide to build high-quality hierarchical structures. The results in two complex environments, 2D-Minecraft and Eden, show that CDHRL significantly boosts exploration efficiency with the causality-driven paradigm.
A Survey on Explainable Anomaly Detection
Authors: Zhong Li, Yuxuan Zhu, Matthijs van Leeuwen
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Survey

In the past two decades, most research on anomaly detection has focused on improving the accuracy of the detection, while largely ignoring the explainability of the corresponding methods and thus leaving the explanation of outcomes to practitioners. As anomaly detection algorithms are increasingly used in safety-critical domains, providing explanations for the high-stakes decisions made in those domains has become an ethical and regulatory requirement. Therefore, this work provides a comprehensive and structured survey on state-of-the-art explainable anomaly detection techniques. We propose a taxonomy based on the main aspects that characterize each explainable anomaly detection technique, aiming to help practitioners and researchers find the explainable anomaly detection method that best suits their needs.
Delta-Closure Structure for Studying Data Distribution
Authors: Aleksey Buzmakov, Tatiana Makhalova, Sergei O. Kuznetsov, Amedeo Napoli
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

In this paper, we revisit pattern mining and study the distribution underlying a binary dataset thanks to the closure structure which is based on passkeys, i.e., minimum generators in equivalence classes robust to noise. We introduce $\Delta$-closedness, a generalization of the closure operator, where $\Delta$ measures how a closed set differs from its upper neighbors in the partial order induced by closure. A $\Delta$-class of equivalence includes minimum and maximum elements and allows us to characterize the distribution underlying the data. Moreover, the set of $\Delta$-classes of equivalence can be partitioned into the so-called $\Delta$-closure structure. In particular, a $\Delta$-class of equivalence with a high level demonstrates correlations among many attributes, which are supported by more observations when $\Delta$ is large. In the experiments, we study the $\Delta$-closure structure of several real-world datasets and show that this structure is very stable for large $\Delta$ and does not substantially depend on the data sampling used for the analysis.