pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
(Why) Is My Prompt Getting Worse? Rethinking Regression Testing for Evolving LLM APIs
Authors: Wanqin Ma, Chenyang Yang, Christian Kästner
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software applications. Downstream application developers often access LLMs through APIs provided as a service. However, LLM APIs are often updated silently and scheduled to be deprecated, forcing users to continuously adapt to evolving models. This can cause performance regression and affect prompt design choices, as evidenced by our case study on toxicity detection. Based on our case study, we emphasize the need for and re-examine the concept of regression testing for evolving LLM APIs. We argue that regression testing LLMs requires fundamental changes to traditional testing approaches, due to different correctness notions, prompting brittleness, and non-determinism in LLM APIs.
Responsible AI Considerations in Text Summarization Research: A Review of Current Practices
Authors: Yu Lu Liu, Meng Cao, Su Lin Blodgett, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Alexandra Olteanu, Adam Trischler
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Summarization

AI and NLP publication venues have increasingly encouraged researchers to reflect on possible ethical considerations, adverse impacts, and other responsible AI issues their work might engender. However, for specific NLP tasks our understanding of how prevalent such issues are, or when and why these issues are likely to arise, remains limited. Focusing on text summarization -- a common NLP task largely overlooked by the responsible AI community -- we examine research and reporting practices in the current literature. We conduct a multi-round qualitative analysis of 333 summarization papers from the ACL Anthology published between 2020-2022. We focus on how, which, and when responsible AI issues are covered, which relevant stakeholders are considered, and mismatches between stated and realized research goals. We also discuss current evaluation practices and consider how authors discuss the limitations of both prior work and their own work. Overall, we find that relatively few papers engage with possible stakeholders or contexts of use, which limits their consideration of potential downstream adverse impacts or other responsible AI issues. Based on our findings, we make recommendations on concrete practices and research directions.
Bit Cipher -- A Simple yet Powerful Word Representation System that Integrates Efficiently with Language Models
Authors: Haoran Zhao, Jake Ryland Williams
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Dimensionality Reduction, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging, Transfer Learning, Word Embeddings

While Large Language Models (LLMs) become ever more dominant, classic pre-trained word embeddings sustain their relevance through computational efficiency and nuanced linguistic interpretation. Drawing from recent studies demonstrating that the convergence of GloVe and word2vec optimizations all tend towards log-co-occurrence matrix variants, we construct a novel word representation system called Bit-cipher that eliminates the need of backpropagation while leveraging contextual information and hyper-efficient dimensionality reduction techniques based on unigram frequency, providing strong interpretability, alongside efficiency. We use the bit-cipher algorithm to train word vectors via a two-step process that critically relies on a hyperparameter -- bits -- that controls the vector dimension. While the first step trains the bit-cipher, the second utilizes it under two different aggregation modes -- summation or concatenation -- to produce contextually rich representations from word co-occurrences. We extend our investigation into bit-cipher's efficacy, performing probing experiments on part-of-speech (POS) tagging and named entity recognition (NER) to assess its competitiveness with classic embeddings like word2vec and GloVe. Additionally, we explore its applicability in LM training and fine-tuning. By replacing embedding layers with cipher embeddings, our experiments illustrate the notable efficiency of cipher in accelerating the training process and attaining better optima compared to conventional training paradigms. Experiments on the integration of bit-cipher embedding layers with Roberta, T5, and OPT, prior to or as a substitute for fine-tuning, showcase a promising enhancement to transfer learning, allowing rapid model convergence while preserving competitive performance.
Joyful: Joint Modality Fusion and Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Dongyuan Li, Yusong Wang, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition in Conversation, Face Swapping, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal emotion recognition aims to recognize emotions for each utterance of multiple modalities, which has received increasing attention for its application in human-machine interaction. Current graph-based methods fail to simultaneously depict global contextual features and local diverse uni-modal features in a dialogue. Furthermore, with the number of graph layers increasing, they easily fall into over-smoothing. In this paper, we propose a method for joint modality fusion and graph contrastive learning for multimodal emotion recognition (Joyful), where multimodality fusion, contrastive learning, and emotion recognition are jointly optimized. Specifically, we first design a new multimodal fusion mechanism that can provide deep interaction and fusion between the global contextual and uni-modal specific features. Then, we introduce a graph contrastive learning framework with inter-view and intra-view contrastive losses to learn more distinguishable representations for samples with different sentiments. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets indicate that Joyful achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to all baselines.
Gendec: A Machine Learning-based Framework for Gender Detection from Japanese Names
Authors: Duong Tien Pham, Luan Thanh Nguyen
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Every human has their own name, a fundamental aspect of their identity and cultural heritage. The name often conveys a wealth of information, including details about an individual's background, ethnicity, and, especially, their gender. By detecting gender through the analysis of names, researchers can unlock valuable insights into linguistic patterns and cultural norms, which can be applied to practical applications. Hence, this work presents a novel dataset for Japanese name gender detection comprising 64,139 full names in romaji, hiragana, and kanji forms, along with their biological genders. Moreover, we propose Gendec, a framework for gender detection from Japanese names that leverages diverse approaches, including traditional machine learning techniques or cutting-edge transfer learning models, to predict the gender associated with Japanese names accurately. Through a thorough investigation, the proposed framework is expected to be effective and serve potential applications in various domains.
Journey of Hallucination-minimized Generative AI Solutions for Financial Decision Makers
Authors: Sohini Roychowdhury
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Decision Making, Hallucination, Question Answering

Generative AI has significantly reduced the entry barrier to the domain of AI owing to the ease of use and core capabilities of automation, translation, and intelligent actions in our day to day lives. Currently, Large language models (LLMs) that power such chatbots are being utilized primarily for their automation capabilities for software monitoring, report generation etc. and for specific personalized question answering capabilities, on a limited scope and scale. One major limitation of the currently evolving family of LLMs is 'hallucinations', wherein inaccurate responses are reported as factual. Hallucinations are primarily caused by biased training data, ambiguous prompts and inaccurate LLM parameters, and they majorly occur while combining mathematical facts with language-based context. Thus, monitoring and controlling for hallucinations becomes necessary when designing solutions that are meant for decision makers. In this work we present the three major stages in the journey of designing hallucination-minimized LLM-based solutions that are specialized for the decision makers of the financial domain, namely: prototyping, scaling and LLM evolution using human feedback. These three stages and the novel data to answer generation modules presented in this work are necessary to ensure that the Generative AI chatbots, autonomous reports and alerts are reliable and high-quality to aid key decision-making processes.
Deception Detection from Linguistic and Physiological Data Streams Using Bimodal Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Panfeng Li, Mohamed Abouelenien, Rada Mihalcea, Zhicheng Ding, Qikai Yang, Yiming Zhou
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deception Detection

Deception detection is gaining increasing interest due to ethical and security concerns. This paper explores the application of convolutional neural networks for the purpose of multimodal deception detection. We use a dataset built by interviewing 104 subjects about two topics, with one truthful and one falsified response from each subject about each topic. In particular, we make three main contributions. First, we extract linguistic and physiological features from this data to train and construct the neural network models. Second, we propose a fused convolutional neural network model using both modalities in order to achieve an improved overall performance. Third, we compare our new approach with earlier methods designed for multimodal deception detection. We find that our system outperforms regular classification methods; our results indicate the feasibility of using neural networks for deception detection even in the presence of limited amounts of data.
Partially Randomizing Transformer Weights for Dialogue Response Diversity
Authors: Jing Yang Lee, Kong Aik Lee, Woon-Seng Gan
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Despite recent progress in generative open-domain dialogue, the issue of low response diversity persists. Prior works have addressed this issue via either novel objective functions, alternative learning approaches such as variational frameworks, or architectural extensions such as the Randomized Link (RL) Transformer. However, these approaches typically entail either additional difficulties during training/inference, or a significant increase in model size and complexity. Hence, we propose the \underline{Pa}rtially \underline{Ra}ndomized trans\underline{Former} (PaRaFormer), a simple extension of the transformer which involves freezing the weights of selected layers after random initialization. Experimental results reveal that the performance of the PaRaformer is comparable to that of the aforementioned approaches, despite not entailing any additional training difficulty or increase in model complexity.
Look into the Mirror: Evolving Self-Dual Bent Boolean Functions
Authors: Claude Carlet, Marko Ðurasevic, Domagoj Jakobovic, Luca Mariot, Stjepan Picek
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Bent Boolean functions are important objects in cryptography and coding theory, and there are several general approaches for constructing such functions. Metaheuristics proved to be a strong choice as they can provide many bent functions, even when the size of the Boolean function is large (e.g., more than 20 inputs). While bent Boolean functions represent only a small part of all Boolean functions, there are several subclasses of bent functions providing specific properties and challenges. One of the most interesting subclasses comprises (anti-)self-dual bent Boolean functions. This paper provides a detailed experimentation with evolutionary algorithms with the goal of evolving (anti-)self-dual bent Boolean functions. We experiment with two encodings and two fitness functions to directly evolve self-dual bent Boolean functions. Our experiments consider Boolean functions with sizes of up to 16 inputs, and we successfully construct self-dual bent functions for each dimension. Moreover, when comparing with the evolution of bent Boolean functions, we notice that the difficulty for evolutionary algorithms is rather similar. Finally, we also tried evolving secondary constructions for self-dual bent functions, but this direction provided no successful results.
A New Angle: On Evolving Rotation Symmetric Boolean Functions
Authors: Claude Carlet, Marko Ðurasevic, Bruno Gašperov, Domagoj Jakobovic, Luca Mariot, Stjepan Picek
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Rotation symmetric Boolean functions represent an interesting class of Boolean functions as they are relatively rare compared to general Boolean functions. At the same time, the functions in this class can have excellent properties, making them interesting for various practical applications. The usage of metaheuristics to construct rotation symmetric Boolean functions is a direction that has been explored for almost twenty years. Despite that, there are very few results considering evolutionary computation methods. This paper uses several evolutionary algorithms to evolve rotation symmetric Boolean functions with different properties. Despite using generic metaheuristics, we obtain results that are competitive with prior work relying on customized heuristics. Surprisingly, we find that bitstring and floating point encodings work better than the tree encoding. Moreover, evolving highly nonlinear general Boolean functions is easier than rotation symmetric ones.
Evolutionary algorithms as an alternative to backpropagation for supervised training of Biophysical Neural Networks and Neural ODEs
Authors: James Hazelden, Yuhan Helena Liu, Eli Shlizerman, Eric Shea-Brown
Date: 2023-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Training networks consisting of biophysically accurate neuron models could allow for new insights into how brain circuits can organize and solve tasks. We begin by analyzing the extent to which the central algorithm for neural network learning -- stochastic gradient descent through backpropagation (BP) -- can be used to train such networks. We find that properties of biophysically based neural network models needed for accurate modelling such as stiffness, high nonlinearity and long evaluation timeframes relative to spike times makes BP unstable and divergent in a variety of cases. To address these instabilities and inspired by recent work, we investigate the use of "gradient-estimating" evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for training biophysically based neural networks. We find that EAs have several advantages making them desirable over direct BP, including being forward-pass only, robust to noisy and rigid losses, allowing for discrete loss formulations, and potentially facilitating a more global exploration of parameters. We apply our method to train a recurrent network of Morris-Lecar neuron models on a stimulus integration and working memory task, and show how it can succeed in cases where direct BP is inapplicable. To expand on the viability of EAs in general, we apply them to a general neural ODE problem and a stiff neural ODE benchmark and find again that EAs can out-perform direct BP here, especially for the over-parameterized regime. Our findings suggest that biophysical neurons could provide useful benchmarks for testing the limits of BP-adjacent methods, and demonstrate the viability of EAs for training networks with complex components.
Is Conventional SNN Really Efficient? A Perspective from Network Quantization
Authors: Guobin Shen, Dongcheng Zhao, Tenglong Li, Jindong Li, Yi Zeng
Date: 2023-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Quantization

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been widely praised for their high energy efficiency and immense potential. However, comprehensive research that critically contrasts and correlates SNNs with quantized Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) remains scant, often leading to skewed comparisons lacking fairness towards ANNs. This paper introduces a unified perspective, illustrating that the time steps in SNNs and quantized bit-widths of activation values present analogous representations. Building on this, we present a more pragmatic and rational approach to estimating the energy consumption of SNNs. Diverging from the conventional Synaptic Operations (SynOps), we champion the "Bit Budget" concept. This notion permits an intricate discourse on strategically allocating computational and storage resources between weights, activation values, and temporal steps under stringent hardware constraints. Guided by the Bit Budget paradigm, we discern that pivoting efforts towards spike patterns and weight quantization, rather than temporal attributes, elicits profound implications for model performance. Utilizing the Bit Budget for holistic design consideration of SNNs elevates model performance across diverse data types, encompassing static imagery and neuromorphic datasets. Our revelations bridge the theoretical chasm between SNNs and quantized ANNs and illuminate a pragmatic trajectory for future endeavors in energy-efficient neural computations.
Biarchetype analysis: simultaneous learning of observations and features based on extremes
Authors: Aleix Alcacer, Irene Epifanio, Ximo Gual-Arnau
Date: 2023-11-18 00:00:00

We introduce a novel exploratory technique, termed biarchetype analysis, which extends archetype analysis to simultaneously identify archetypes of both observations and features. This innovative unsupervised machine learning tool aims to represent observations and features through instances of pure types, or biarchetypes, which are easily interpretable as they embody mixtures of observations and features. Furthermore, the observations and features are expressed as mixtures of the biarchetypes, which makes the structure of the data easier to understand. We propose an algorithm to solve biarchetype analysis. Although clustering is not the primary aim of this technique, biarchetype analysis is demonstrated to offer significant advantages over biclustering methods, particularly in terms of interpretability. This is attributed to biarchetypes being extreme instances, in contrast to the centroids produced by biclustering, which inherently enhances human comprehension. The application of biarchetype analysis across various machine learning challenges underscores its value, and both the source code and examples are readily accessible in R and Python at https://github.com/aleixalcacer/JA-BIAA.
Max-Rank: Efficient Multiple Testing for Conformal Prediction
Authors: Alexander Timans, Christoph-Nikolas Straehle, Kaspar Sakmann, Christian A. Naesseth, Eric Nalisnick
Date: 2023-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Multiple hypothesis testing (MHT) frequently arises in scientific inquiries, and concurrent testing of multiple hypotheses inflates the risk of Type-I errors or false positives, rendering MHT corrections essential. This paper addresses MHT in the context of conformal prediction, a flexible framework for predictive uncertainty quantification. Some conformal applications give rise to simultaneous testing, and positive dependencies among tests typically exist. We introduce $\texttt{max-rank}$, a novel correction that exploits these dependencies whilst efficiently controlling the family-wise error rate. Inspired by existing permutation-based corrections, $\texttt{max-rank}$ leverages rank order information to improve performance and integrates readily with any conformal procedure. We establish its theoretical and empirical advantages over the common Bonferroni correction and its compatibility with conformal prediction, highlighting the potential to strengthen predictive uncertainty estimates.
Scaling Law of Large Sequential Recommendation Models
Authors: Gaowei Zhang, Yupeng Hou, Hongyu Lu, Yu Chen, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2023-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

Scaling of neural networks has recently shown great potential to improve the model capacity in various fields. Specifically, model performance has a power-law relationship with model size or data size, which provides important guidance for the development of large-scale models. However, there is still limited understanding on the scaling effect of user behavior models in recommender systems, where the unique data characteristics (e.g. data scarcity and sparsity) pose new challenges to explore the scaling effect in recommendation tasks. In this work, we focus on investigating the scaling laws in large sequential recommendation models. Specially, we consider a pure ID-based task formulation, where the interaction history of a user is formatted as a chronological sequence of item IDs. We don't incorporate any side information (e.g. item text), because we would like to explore how scaling law holds from the perspective of user behavior. With specially improved strategies, we scale up the model size to 0.8B parameters, making it feasible to explore the scaling effect in a diverse range of model sizes. As the major findings, we empirically show that scaling law still holds for these trained models, even in data-constrained scenarios. We then fit the curve for scaling law, and successfully predict the test loss of the two largest tested model scales. Furthermore, we examine the performance advantage of scaling effect on five challenging recommendation tasks, considering the unique issues (e.g. cold start, robustness, long-term preference) in recommender systems. We find that scaling up the model size can greatly boost the performance on these challenging tasks, which again verifies the benefits of large recommendation models.
Dependency Relationships-Enhanced Attentive Group Recommendation in HINs
Authors: Juntao Zhang, Sheng Wang, Zhiyu Chen, Xiandi Yang, Zhiyong Peng
Date: 2023-11-19 00:00:00

Recommending suitable items to a group of users, commonly referred to as the group recommendation task, is becoming increasingly urgent with the development of group activities. The challenges within the group recommendation task involve aggregating the individual preferences of group members as the group's preferences and facing serious sparsity problems due to the lack of user/group-item interactions. To solve these problems, we propose a novel approach called Dependency Relationships-Enhanced Attentive Group Recommendation (DREAGR) for the recommendation task of occasional groups. Specifically, we introduce the dependency relationship between items as side information to enhance the user/group-item interaction and alleviate the interaction sparsity problem. Then, we propose a Path-Aware Attention Embedding (PAAE) method to model users' preferences on different types of paths. Next, we design a gated fusion mechanism to fuse users' preferences into their comprehensive preferences. Finally, we develop an attention aggregator that aggregates users' preferences as the group's preferences for the group recommendation task. We conducted experiments on two datasets to demonstrate the superiority of DREAGR by comparing it with state-of-the-art group recommender models. The experimental results show that DREAGR outperforms other models, especially HR@N and NDCG@N (N=5, 10), where DREAGR has improved in the range of 3.64% to 7.01% and 2.57% to 3.39% on both datasets, respectively.