pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Inference in conditioned dynamics through causality restoration
Authors: Alfredo Braunstein, Giovanni Catania, Luca Dall'Asta, Matteo Mariani, Anna Paola Muntoni
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00

Computing observables from conditioned dynamics is typically computationally hard, because, although obtaining independent samples efficiently from the unconditioned dynamics is usually feasible, generally most of the samples must be discarded (in a form of importance sampling) because they do not satisfy the imposed conditions. Sampling directly from the conditioned distribution is non-trivial, as conditioning breaks the causal properties of the dynamics which ultimately renders the sampling procedure efficient. One standard way of achieving it is through a Metropolis Monte-Carlo procedure, but this procedure is normally slow and a very large number of Monte-Carlo steps is needed to obtain a small number of statistically independent samples. In this work, we propose an alternative method to produce independent samples from a conditioned distribution. The method learns the parameters of a generalized dynamical model that optimally describe the conditioned distribution in a variational sense. The outcome is an effective, unconditioned, dynamical model, from which one can trivially obtain independent samples, effectively restoring causality of the conditioned distribution. The consequences are twofold: on the one hand, it allows us to efficiently compute observables from the conditioned dynamics by simply averaging over independent samples. On the other hand, the method gives an effective unconditioned distribution which is easier to interpret. The method is flexible and can be applied virtually to any dynamics. We discuss an important application of the method, namely the problem of epidemic risk assessment from (imperfect) clinical tests, for a large family of time-continuous epidemic models endowed with a Gillespie-like sampler. We show that the method compares favorably against the state of the art, including the soft-margin approach and mean-field methods.
Granger causal inference on DAGs identifies genomic loci regulating transcription
Authors: Rohit Singh, Alexander P. Wu, Bonnie Berger
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Causal Inference

When a dynamical system can be modeled as a sequence of observations, Granger causality is a powerful approach for detecting predictive interactions between its variables. However, traditional Granger causal inference has limited utility in domains where the dynamics need to be represented as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) rather than as a linear sequence, such as with cell differentiation trajectories. Here, we present GrID-Net, a framework based on graph neural networks with lagged message passing for Granger causal inference on DAG-structured systems. Our motivating application is the analysis of single-cell multimodal data to identify genomic loci that mediate the regulation of specific genes. To our knowledge, GrID-Net is the first single-cell analysis tool that accounts for the temporal lag between a genomic locus becoming accessible and its downstream effect on a target gene's expression. We applied GrID-Net on multimodal single-cell assays that profile chromatin accessibility (ATAC-seq) and gene expression (RNA-seq) in the same cell and show that it dramatically outperforms existing methods for inferring regulatory locus-gene links, achieving up to 71% greater agreement with independent population genetics-based estimates. By extending Granger causality to DAG-structured dynamical systems, our work unlocks new domains for causal analyses and, more specifically, opens a path towards elucidating gene regulatory interactions relevant to cellular differentiation and complex human diseases at unprecedented scale and resolution.
Nonparametric Quantile Regression: Non-Crossing Constraints and Conformal Prediction
Authors: Wenlu Tang, Guohao Shen, Yuanyuan Lin, Jian Huang
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, quantile regression, regression

We propose a nonparametric quantile regression method using deep neural networks with a rectified linear unit penalty function to avoid quantile crossing. This penalty function is computationally feasible for enforcing non-crossing constraints in multi-dimensional nonparametric quantile regression. We establish non-asymptotic upper bounds for the excess risk of the proposed nonparametric quantile regression function estimators. Our error bounds achieve optimal minimax rate of convergence for the Holder class, and the prefactors of the error bounds depend polynomially on the dimension of the predictor, instead of exponentially. Based on the proposed non-crossing penalized deep quantile regression, we construct conformal prediction intervals that are fully adaptive to heterogeneity. The proposed prediction interval is shown to have good properties in terms of validity and accuracy under reasonable conditions. We also derive non-asymptotic upper bounds for the difference of the lengths between the proposed non-crossing conformal prediction interval and the theoretically oracle prediction interval. Numerical experiments including simulation studies and a real data example are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Uncertainty in Extreme Multi-label Classification
Authors: Jyun-Yu Jiang, Wei-Cheng Chang, Jiong Zhong, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Hsiang-Fu Yu
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Decision Making, Extreme Multi-Label Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Retrieval, Uncertainty Quantification

Uncertainty quantification is one of the most crucial tasks to obtain trustworthy and reliable machine learning models for decision making. However, most research in this domain has only focused on problems with small label spaces and ignored eXtreme Multi-label Classification (XMC), which is an essential task in the era of big data for web-scale machine learning applications. Moreover, enormous label spaces could also lead to noisy retrieval results and intractable computational challenges for uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we aim to investigate general uncertainty quantification approaches for tree-based XMC models with a probabilistic ensemble-based framework. In particular, we analyze label-level and instance-level uncertainty in XMC, and propose a general approximation framework based on beam search to efficiently estimate the uncertainty with a theoretical guarantee under long-tail XMC predictions. Empirical studies on six large-scale real-world datasets show that our framework not only outperforms single models in predictive performance, but also can serve as strong uncertainty-based baselines for label misclassification and out-of-distribution detection, with significant speedup. Besides, our framework can further yield better state-of-the-art results based on deep XMC models with uncertainty quantification.
TEFL: Turbo Explainable Federated Learning for 6G Trustworthy Zero-Touch Network Slicing
Authors: Swastika Roy, Hatim Chergui, Christos Verikoukis
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Federated Learning, Management

Sixth-generation (6G) networks anticipate intelligently supporting a massive number of coexisting and heterogeneous slices associated with various vertical use cases. Such a context urges the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven zero-touch management and orchestration (MANO) of the end-to-end (E2E) slices under stringent service level agreements (SLAs). Specifically, the trustworthiness of the AI black-boxes in real deployment can be achieved by explainable AI (XAI) tools to build transparency between the interacting actors in the slicing ecosystem, such as tenants, infrastructure providers and operators. Inspired by the turbo principle, this paper presents a novel iterative explainable federated learning (FL) approach where a constrained resource allocation model and an \emph{explainer} exchange -- in a closed loop (CL) fashion -- soft attributions of the features as well as inference predictions to achieve a transparent and SLA-aware zero-touch service management (ZSM) of 6G network slices at RAN-Edge setup under non-independent identically distributed (non-IID) datasets. In particular, we quantitatively validate the faithfulness of the explanations via the so-called attribution-based \emph{confidence metric} that is included as a constraint in the run-time FL optimization task. In this respect, Integrated-Gradient (IG) as well as Input $\times$ Gradient and SHAP are used to generate the attributions for the turbo explainable FL (TEFL), wherefore simulation results under different methods confirm its superiority over an unconstrained Integrated-Gradient \emph{post-hoc} FL baseline.
Output Feedback Tube MPC-Guided Data Augmentation for Robust, Efficient Sensorimotor Policy Learning
Authors: Andrea Tagliabue, Jonathan P. How
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Imitation Learning

Imitation learning (IL) can generate computationally efficient sensorimotor policies from demonstrations provided by computationally expensive model-based sensing and control algorithms. However, commonly employed IL methods are often data-inefficient, requiring the collection of a large number of demonstrations and producing policies with limited robustness to uncertainties. In this work, we combine IL with an output feedback robust tube model predictive controller (RTMPC) to co-generate demonstrations and a data augmentation strategy to efficiently learn neural network-based sensorimotor policies. Thanks to the augmented data, we reduce the computation time and the number of demonstrations needed by IL, while providing robustness to sensing and process uncertainty. We tailor our approach to the task of learning a trajectory tracking visuomotor policy for an aerial robot, leveraging a 3D mesh of the environment as part of the data augmentation process. We numerically demonstrate that our method can learn a robust visuomotor policy from a single demonstration--a two-orders of magnitude improvement in demonstration efficiency compared to existing IL methods.
Auditing YouTube's Recommendation Algorithm for Misinformation Filter Bubbles
Authors: Ivan Srba, Robert Moro, Matus Tomlein, Branislav Pecher, Jakub Simko, Elena Stefancova, Michal Kompan, Andrea Hrckova, Juraj Podrouzek, Adrian Gavornik, Maria Bielikova
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

In this paper, we present results of an auditing study performed over YouTube aimed at investigating how fast a user can get into a misinformation filter bubble, but also what it takes to "burst the bubble", i.e., revert the bubble enclosure. We employ a sock puppet audit methodology, in which pre-programmed agents (acting as YouTube users) delve into misinformation filter bubbles by watching misinformation promoting content. Then they try to burst the bubbles and reach more balanced recommendations by watching misinformation debunking content. We record search results, home page results, and recommendations for the watched videos. Overall, we recorded 17,405 unique videos, out of which we manually annotated 2,914 for the presence of misinformation. The labeled data was used to train a machine learning model classifying videos into three classes (promoting, debunking, neutral) with the accuracy of 0.82. We use the trained model to classify the remaining videos that would not be feasible to annotate manually. Using both the manually and automatically annotated data, we observe the misinformation bubble dynamics for a range of audited topics. Our key finding is that even though filter bubbles do not appear in some situations, when they do, it is possible to burst them by watching misinformation debunking content (albeit it manifests differently from topic to topic). We also observe a sudden decrease of misinformation filter bubble effect when misinformation debunking videos are watched after misinformation promoting videos, suggesting a strong contextuality of recommendations. Finally, when comparing our results with a previous similar study, we do not observe significant improvements in the overall quantity of recommended misinformation content.
Combination of Raman spectroscopy and chemometrics: A review of recent studies published in the Spectrochimica Acta, Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy Journal
Authors: Yulia Khristoforova, Lyudmila Bratchenko, Ivan Bratchenko
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, regression

Raman spectroscopy is a promising technique used for noninvasive analysis of samples in various fields of application due to its ability for fingerprint probing of samples at the molecular level. Chemometrics methods are widely used nowadays for better understanding of the recorded spectral fingerprints of samples and differences in their chemical composition. This review considers a number of manuscripts published in the Spectrochimica Acta, Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy Journal that presented findings regarding the application of Raman spectroscopy in combination with chemometrics to study samples and their changes caused by different factors. In 57 reviewed manuscripts, we analyzed application of chemometrics algorithms, statistical modeling parameters, utilization of cross validation, sample sizes, as well as the performance of the proposed classification and regression model. We summarized the best strategies for creating classification models and highlighted some common drawbacks when it comes to the application of chemometrics techniques. According to our estimations, about 70% of the papers are likely to contain unsupported or invalid data due to insufficient description of the utilized methods or drawbacks of the proposed classification models. These drawbacks include: (1) insufficient experimental sample size for classification/regression to achieve significant and reliable results, (2) lack of cross validation (or a test set) for verification of the classifier/regression performance, (3) incorrect division of the spectral data into the training and the test/validation sets; (4) improper selection of the PC number to reduce the analyzed spectral data dimension.
Explainable bilevel optimization: an application to the Helsinki deblur challenge
Authors: Silvia Bonettini, Giorgia Franchini, Danilo Pezzi, Marco Prato
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, Binarization, Deblurring, Image Deblurring

In this paper we present a bilevel optimization scheme for the solution of a general image deblurring problem, in which a parametric variational-like approach is encapsulated within a machine learning scheme to provide a high quality reconstructed image with automatically learned parameters. The ingredients of the variational lower level and the machine learning upper one are specifically chosen for the Helsinki Deblur Challenge 2021, in which sequences of letters are asked to be recovered from out-of-focus photographs with increasing levels of blur. Our proposed procedure for the reconstructed image consists in a fixed number of FISTA iterations applied to the minimization of an edge preserving and binarization enforcing regularized least-squares functional. The parameters defining the variational model and the optimization steps, which, unlike most deep learning approaches, all have a precise and interpretable meaning, are learned via either a similarity index or a support vector machine strategy. Numerical experiments on the test images provided by the challenge authors show significant gains with respect to a standard variational approach and performances comparable with those of some of the proposed deep learning based algorithms which require the optimization of millions of parameters.
Towards Practical Explainability with Cluster Descriptors
Authors: Xiaoyuan Liu, Ilya Tyagin, Hayato Ushijima-Mwesigwa, Indradeep Ghosh, Ilya Safro
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Combinatorial Optimization

With the rapid development of machine learning, improving its explainability has become a crucial research goal. We study the problem of making the clusters more explainable by investigating the cluster descriptors. Given a set of objects $S$, a clustering of these objects $\pi$, and a set of tags $T$ that have not participated in the clustering algorithm. Each object in $S$ is associated with a subset of $T$. The goal is to find a representative set of tags for each cluster, referred to as the cluster descriptors, with the constraint that these descriptors we find are pairwise disjoint, and the total size of all the descriptors is minimized. In general, this problem is NP-hard. We propose a novel explainability model that reinforces the previous models in such a way that tags that do not contribute to explainability and do not sufficiently distinguish between clusters are not added to the optimal descriptors. The proposed model is formulated as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem which makes it suitable for solving on modern optimization hardware accelerators. We experimentally demonstrate how a proposed explainability model can be solved on specialized hardware for accelerating combinatorial optimization, the Fujitsu Digital Annealer, and use real-life Twitter and PubMed datasets for use cases.
UniNL: Aligning Representation Learning with Scoring Function for OOD Detection via Unified Neighborhood Learning
Authors: Yutao Mou, Pei Wang, Keqing He, Yanan Wu, Jingang Wang, Wei Wu, Weiran Xu
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Representation Learning, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents from user queries is essential for avoiding wrong operations in task-oriented dialogue systems. The key challenge is how to distinguish in-domain (IND) and OOD intents. Previous methods ignore the alignment between representation learning and scoring function, limiting the OOD detection performance. In this paper, we propose a unified neighborhood learning framework (UniNL) to detect OOD intents. Specifically, we design a K-nearest neighbor contrastive learning (KNCL) objective for representation learning and introduce a KNN-based scoring function for OOD detection. We aim to align representation learning with scoring function. Experiments and analysis on two benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method.
Incorporating Relevance Feedback for Information-Seeking Retrieval using Few-Shot Document Re-Ranking
Authors: Tim Baumgärtner, Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro, Nils Reimers, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Argument Retrieval, Information Retrieval, Meta-Learning, Question Answering, Re-Ranking, Retrieval

Pairing a lexical retriever with a neural re-ranking model has set state-of-the-art performance on large-scale information retrieval datasets. This pipeline covers scenarios like question answering or navigational queries, however, for information-seeking scenarios, users often provide information on whether a document is relevant to their query in form of clicks or explicit feedback. Therefore, in this work, we explore how relevance feedback can be directly integrated into neural re-ranking models by adopting few-shot and parameter-efficient learning techniques. Specifically, we introduce a kNN approach that re-ranks documents based on their similarity with the query and the documents the user considers relevant. Further, we explore Cross-Encoder models that we pre-train using meta-learning and subsequently fine-tune for each query, training only on the feedback documents. To evaluate our different integration strategies, we transform four existing information retrieval datasets into the relevance feedback scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating relevance feedback directly in neural re-ranking models improves their performance, and fusing lexical ranking with our best performing neural re-ranker outperforms all other methods by 5.2 nDCG@20.
Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages
Authors: Idris Abdulmumin, Michael Beukman, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Chris Emezue, Everlyn Asiko, Tosin Adewumi, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Mofetoluwa Adeyemi, Oreen Yousuf, Sahib Singh, Tajuddeen Rabiu Gwadabe
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

We participated in the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for the African Languages Shared Task. This work describes our approach, which is based on filtering the given noisy data using a sentence-pair classifier that was built by fine-tuning a pre-trained language model. To train the classifier, we obtain positive samples (i.e. high-quality parallel sentences) from a gold-standard curated dataset and extract negative samples (i.e. low-quality parallel sentences) from automatically aligned parallel data by choosing sentences with low alignment scores. Our final machine translation model was then trained on filtered data, instead of the entire noisy dataset. We empirically validate our approach by evaluating on two common datasets and show that data filtering generally improves overall translation quality, in some cases even significantly.
Towards Procedural Fairness: Uncovering Biases in How a Toxic Language Classifier Uses Sentiment Information
Authors: Isar Nejadgholi, Esma Balkir, Kathleen C. Fraser, Svetlana Kiritchenko
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Previous works on the fairness of toxic language classifiers compare the output of models with different identity terms as input features but do not consider the impact of other important concepts present in the context. Here, besides identity terms, we take into account high-level latent features learned by the classifier and investigate the interaction between these features and identity terms. For a multi-class toxic language classifier, we leverage a concept-based explanation framework to calculate the sensitivity of the model to the concept of sentiment, which has been used before as a salient feature for toxic language detection. Our results show that although for some classes, the classifier has learned the sentiment information as expected, this information is outweighed by the influence of identity terms as input features. This work is a step towards evaluating procedural fairness, where unfair processes lead to unfair outcomes. The produced knowledge can guide debiasing techniques to ensure that important concepts besides identity terms are well-represented in training datasets.
Towards Realistic Low-resource Relation Extraction: A Benchmark with Empirical Baseline Study
Authors: Xin Xu, Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xie, Xi Chen, Huajun Chen
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

This paper presents an empirical study to build relation extraction systems in low-resource settings. Based upon recent pre-trained language models, we comprehensively investigate three schemes to evaluate the performance in low-resource settings: (i) different types of prompt-based methods with few-shot labeled data; (ii) diverse balancing methods to address the long-tailed distribution issue; (iii) data augmentation technologies and self-training to generate more labeled in-domain data. We create a benchmark with 8 relation extraction (RE) datasets covering different languages, domains and contexts and perform extensive comparisons over the proposed schemes with combinations. Our experiments illustrate: (i) Though prompt-based tuning is beneficial in low-resource RE, there is still much potential for improvement, especially in extracting relations from cross-sentence contexts with multiple relational triples; (ii) Balancing methods are not always helpful for RE with long-tailed distribution; (iii) Data augmentation complements existing baselines and can bring much performance gain, while self-training may not consistently achieve advancement to low-resource RE. Code and datasets are in https://github.com/zjunlp/LREBench.