pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
QuMoS: A Framework for Preserving Security of Quantum Machine Learning Model
Authors: Zhepeng Wang, Jinyang Li, Zhirui Hu, Blake Gage, Elizabeth Iwasawa, Weiwen Jiang
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Quantum Machine Learning

Security has always been a critical issue in machine learning (ML) applications. Due to the high cost of model training -- such as collecting relevant samples, labeling data, and consuming computing power -- model-stealing attack is one of the most fundamental but vitally important issues. When it comes to quantum computing, such a quantum machine learning (QML) model-stealing attack also exists and is even more severe because the traditional encryption method, such as homomorphic encryption can hardly be directly applied to quantum computation. On the other hand, due to the limited quantum computing resources, the monetary cost of training QML model can be even higher than classical ones in the near term. Therefore, a well-tuned QML model developed by a third-party company can be delegated to a quantum cloud provider as a service to be used by ordinary users. In this case, the QML model will likely be leaked if the cloud provider is under attack. To address such a problem, we propose a novel framework, namely QuMoS, to preserve model security. We propose to divide the complete QML model into multiple parts and distribute them to multiple physically isolated quantum cloud providers for execution. As such, even if the adversary in a single provider can obtain a partial model, it does not have sufficient information to retrieve the complete model. Although promising, we observed that an arbitrary model design under distributed settings cannot provide model security. We further developed a reinforcement learning-based security engine, which can automatically optimize the model design under the distributed setting, such that a good trade-off between model performance and security can be made. Experimental results on four datasets show that the model design proposed by QuMoS can achieve competitive performance while providing the highest security than the baselines.
Improved Churn Causal Analysis Through Restrained High-Dimensional Feature Space Effects in Financial Institutions
Authors: David Hason Rudd, Huan Huo, Guandong Xu
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

Customer churn describes terminating a relationship with a business or reducing customer engagement over a specific period. Customer acquisition cost can be five to six times that of customer retention, hence investing in customers with churn risk is wise. Causal analysis of the churn model can predict whether a customer will churn in the foreseeable future and identify effects and possible causes for churn. In general, this study presents a conceptual framework to discover the confounding features that correlate with independent variables and are causally related to those dependent variables that impact churn. We combine different algorithms including the SMOTE, ensemble ANN, and Bayesian networks to address churn prediction problems on a massive and high-dimensional finance data that is usually generated in financial institutions due to employing interval-based features used in Customer Relationship Management systems. The effects of the curse and blessing of dimensionality assessed by utilising the Recursive Feature Elimination method to overcome the high dimension feature space problem. Moreover, a causal discovery performed to find possible interpretation methods to describe cause probabilities that lead to customer churn. Evaluation metrics on validation data confirm the random forest and our ensemble ANN model, with %86 accuracy, outperformed other approaches. Causal analysis results confirm that some independent causal variables representing the level of super guarantee contribution, account growth, and account balance amount were identified as confounding variables that cause customer churn with a high degree of belief. This article provides a real-world customer churn analysis from current status inference to future directions in local superannuation funds.
Physics-guided generative adversarial network to learn physical models
Authors: Kazuo Yonekura
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

This short note describes the concept of guided training of deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn physically reasonable solutions. DNNs are being widely used to predict phenomena in physics and mechanics. One of the issues of DNNs is that their output does not always satisfy physical equations. One approach to consider physical equations is adding a residual of equations into the loss function; this is called physics-informed neural network (PINN). One feature of PINNs is that the physical equations and corresponding residual must be implemented as part of a neural network model. In addition, the residual does not always converge to a small value. The proposed model is a physics-guided generative adversarial network (PG-GAN) that uses a GAN architecture in which physical equations are used to judge whether the neural network's output is consistent with physics. The proposed method was applied to a simple problem to assess its potential usability.
(Vector) Space is Not the Final Frontier: Product Search as Program Synthesis
Authors: Jacopo Tagliabue, Ciro Greco
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Position, Program Synthesis, Retrieval

As ecommerce continues growing, huge investments in ML and NLP for Information Retrieval are following. While the vector space model dominated retrieval modelling in product search - even as vectorization itself greatly changed with the advent of deep learning -, our position paper argues in a contrarian fashion that program synthesis provides significant advantages for many queries and a significant number of players in the market. We detail the industry significance of the proposed approach, sketch implementation details, and address common objections drawing from our experience building a similar system at Tooso.
Increasing the Scope as You Learn: Adaptive Bayesian Optimization in Nested Subspaces
Authors: Leonard Papenmeier, Luigi Nardi, Matthias Poloczek
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Neural Architecture Search

Recent advances have extended the scope of Bayesian optimization (BO) to expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions with dozens of dimensions, aspiring to unlock impactful applications, for example, in the life sciences, neural architecture search, and robotics. However, a closer examination reveals that the state-of-the-art methods for high-dimensional Bayesian optimization (HDBO) suffer from degrading performance as the number of dimensions increases or even risk failure if certain unverifiable assumptions are not met. This paper proposes BAxUS that leverages a novel family of nested random subspaces to adapt the space it optimizes over to the problem. This ensures high performance while removing the risk of failure, which we assert via theoretical guarantees. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that BAxUS achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods for a broad set of applications.
Recurrent Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory Networks: Tutorial and Survey
Authors: Benyamin Ghojogh, Ali Ghodsi
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Speech Recognition

This is a tutorial paper on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM), and their variants. We start with a dynamical system and backpropagation through time for RNN. Then, we discuss the problems of gradient vanishing and explosion in long-term dependencies. We explain close-to-identity weight matrix, long delays, leaky units, and echo state networks for solving this problem. Then, we introduce LSTM gates and cells, history and variants of LSTM, and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU). Finally, we introduce bidirectional RNN, bidirectional LSTM, and the Embeddings from Language Model (ELMo) network, for processing a sequence in both directions.
Reinforcement Learning with an Abrupt Model Change
Authors: Wuxia Chen, Taposh Banerjee, Jemin George, Carl Busart
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, model, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm is model-free and learns the optimal policy by interacting with the environment. It is shown that the proposed algorithm has strong optimality properties. The effectiveness of the algorithm is also demonstrated using simulation results. The proposed algorithm exploits a fundamental reward-detection trade-off present in these problems and uses a quickest change detection algorithm to detect the model change. Recommendations are provided for faster detection of model changes and for smart initialization strategies.
Constructing a meta-learner for unsupervised anomaly detection
Authors: Małgorzata Gutowska, Suzanne Little, Andrew McCarren
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, AutoML, Diversity, Meta-Learning, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) is critical for a wide range of practical applications, from network security to health and medical tools. Due to the diversity of problems, no single algorithm has been found to be superior for all AD tasks. Choosing an algorithm, otherwise known as the Algorithm Selection Problem (ASP), has been extensively examined in supervised classification problems, through the use of meta-learning and AutoML, however, it has received little attention in unsupervised AD tasks. This research proposes a new meta-learning approach that identifies an appropriate unsupervised AD algorithm given a set of meta-features generated from the unlabelled input dataset. The performance of the proposed meta-learner is superior to the current state of the art solution. In addition, a mixed model statistical analysis has been conducted to examine the impact of the meta-learner components: the meta-model, meta-features, and the base set of AD algorithms, on the overall performance of the meta-learner. The analysis was conducted using more than 10,000 datasets, which is significantly larger than previous studies. Results indicate that a relatively small number of meta-features can be used to identify an appropriate AD algorithm, but the choice of a meta-model in the meta-learner has a considerable impact.
Hyper-Laplacian Regularized Concept Factorization in Low-rank Tensor Space for Multi-view Clustering
Authors: Zixiao Yu, Lele Fu, Zhiling Cai, Zhoumin Lu
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Multi-view Subspace Clustering

Tensor-oriented multi-view subspace clustering has achieved significant strides in assessing high-order correlations and improving clustering analysis of multi-view data. Nevertheless, most of existing investigations are typically hampered by the two flaws. First, self-representation based tensor subspace learning usually induces high time and space complexity, and is limited in perceiving nonlinear local structure in the embedding space. Second, the tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) model redistributes each singular value equally without considering the diverse importance among them. To well cope with the issues, we propose a hyper-Laplacian regularized concept factorization (HLRCF) in low-rank tensor space for multi-view clustering. Specifically, we adopt the concept factorization to explore the latent cluster-wise representation of each view. Further, the hypergraph Laplacian regularization endows the model with the capability of extracting the nonlinear local structures in the latent space. Considering that different tensor singular values associate structural information with unequal importance, we develop a self-weighted tensor Schatten p-norm to constrain the tensor comprised of all cluster-wise representations. Notably, the tensor with smaller size greatly decreases the time and space complexity in the low-rank optimization. Finally, experimental results on eight benchmark datasets exhibit that HLRCF outperforms other multi-view methods, showingcasing its superior performance.
L3Cube-IndicSBERT: A simple approach for learning cross-lingual sentence representations using multilingual BERT
Authors: Samruddhi Deode, Janhavi Gadre, Aditi Kajale, Ananya Joshi, Raviraj Joshi
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Similarity, STS

The multilingual Sentence-BERT (SBERT) models map different languages to common representation space and are useful for cross-language similarity and mining tasks. We propose a simple yet effective approach to convert vanilla multilingual BERT models into multilingual sentence BERT models using synthetic corpus. We simply aggregate translated NLI or STS datasets of the low-resource target languages together and perform SBERT-like fine-tuning of the vanilla multilingual BERT model. We show that multilingual BERT models are inherent cross-lingual learners and this simple baseline fine-tuning approach without explicit cross-lingual training yields exceptional cross-lingual properties. We show the efficacy of our approach on 10 major Indic languages and also show the applicability of our approach to non-Indic languages German and French. Using this approach, we further present L3Cube-IndicSBERT, the first multilingual sentence representation model specifically for Indian languages Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, Odia, Bengali, and Punjabi. The IndicSBERT exhibits strong cross-lingual capabilities and performs significantly better than alternatives like LaBSE, LASER, and paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2 on Indic cross-lingual and monolingual sentence similarity tasks. We also release monolingual SBERT models for each of the languages and show that IndicSBERT performs competitively with its monolingual counterparts. These models have been evaluated using embedding similarity scores and classification accuracy.
Universal Adversarial Backdoor Attacks to Fool Vertical Federated Learning in Cloud-Edge Collaboration
Authors: Peng Chen, Xin Du, Zhihui Lu, Hongfeng Chai
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Federated Learning, Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a cloud-edge collaboration paradigm that enables edge nodes, comprising resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to cooperatively train artificial intelligence (AI) models while retaining their data locally. This paradigm facilitates improved privacy and security for edges and IoT devices, making VFL an essential component of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) systems. Nevertheless, the partitioned structure of VFL can be exploited by adversaries to inject a backdoor, enabling them to manipulate the VFL predictions. In this paper, we aim to investigate the vulnerability of VFL in the context of binary classification tasks. To this end, we define a threat model for backdoor attacks in VFL and introduce a universal adversarial backdoor (UAB) attack to poison the predictions of VFL. The UAB attack, consisting of universal trigger generation and clean-label backdoor injection, is incorporated during the VFL training at specific iterations. This is achieved by alternately optimizing the universal trigger and model parameters of VFL sub-problems. Our work distinguishes itself from existing studies on designing backdoor attacks for VFL, as those require the knowledge of auxiliary information not accessible within the split VFL architecture. In contrast, our approach does not necessitate any additional data to execute the attack. On the LendingClub and Zhongyuan datasets, our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 100\% backdoor task performance while maintaining the main task performance. Our results in this paper make a major advance to revealing the hidden backdoor risks of VFL, hence paving the way for the future development of secure AIoT.
Pipeline MoE: A Flexible MoE Implementation with Pipeline Parallelism
Authors: Xin Chen, Hengheng Zhang, Xiaotao Gu, Kaifeng Bi, Lingxi Xie, Qi Tian
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Mixture-of-Experts

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) model becomes an important choice of large language models nowadays because of its scalability with sublinear computational complexity for training and inference. However, existing MoE models suffer from two critical drawbacks, 1) tremendous inner-node and inter-node communication overhead introduced by all-to-all dispatching and gathering, and 2) limited scalability for the backbone because of the bound data parallel and expert parallel to scale in the expert dimension. In this paper, we systematically analyze these drawbacks in terms of training efficiency in the parallel framework view and propose a novel MoE architecture called Pipeline MoE (PPMoE) to tackle them. PPMoE builds expert parallel incorporating with tensor parallel and replaces communication-intensive all-to-all dispatching and gathering with a simple tensor index slicing and inner-node all-reduce. Besides, it is convenient for PPMoE to integrate pipeline parallel to further scale the backbone due to its flexible parallel architecture. Extensive experiments show that PPMoE not only achieves a more than $1.75\times$ speed up compared to existing MoE architectures but also reaches $90\%$ throughput of its corresponding backbone model that is $20\times$ smaller.
Towards Carbon-Neutral Edge Computing: Greening Edge AI by Harnessing Spot and Future Carbon Markets
Authors: Huirong Ma, Zhi Zhou, Xiaoxi Zhang, Xu Chen
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Provisioning dynamic machine learning (ML) inference as a service for artificial intelligence (AI) applications of edge devices faces many challenges, including the trade-off among accuracy loss, carbon emission, and unknown future costs. Besides, many governments are launching carbon emission rights (CER) for operators to reduce carbon emissions further to reverse climate change. Facing these challenges, to achieve carbon-aware ML task offloading under limited carbon emission rights thus to achieve green edge AI, we establish a joint ML task offloading and CER purchasing problem, intending to minimize the accuracy loss under the long-term time-averaged cost budget of purchasing the required CER. However, considering the uncertainty of the resource prices, the CER purchasing prices, the carbon intensity of sites, and ML tasks' arrivals, it is hard to decide the optimal policy online over a long-running period time. To overcome this difficulty, we leverage the two-timescale Lyapunov optimization technique, of which the $T$-slot drift-plus-penalty methodology inspires us to propose an online algorithm that purchases CER in multiple timescales (on-preserved in carbon future market and on-demanded in the carbon spot market) and makes decisions about where to offload ML tasks. Considering the NP-hardness of the $T$-slot problems, we further propose the resource-restricted randomized dependent rounding algorithm to help to gain the near-optimal solution with no help of any future information. Our theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results driven by the real carbon intensity trace show the superior performance of the proposed algorithms.
Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation via Lipschitz-Regularised Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Benedikt Groß, Gerhard Wunder
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Synthetic Data Generation

Synthetic data has been hailed as the silver bullet for privacy preserving data analysis. If a record is not real, then how could it violate a person's privacy? In addition, deep-learning based generative models are employed successfully to approximate complex high-dimensional distributions from data and draw realistic samples from this learned distribution. It is often overlooked though that generative models are prone to memorising many details of individual training records and often generate synthetic data that too closely resembles the underlying sensitive training data, hence violating strong privacy regulations as, e.g., encountered in health care. Differential privacy is the well-known state-of-the-art framework for guaranteeing protection of sensitive individuals' data, allowing aggregate statistics and even machine learning models to be released publicly without compromising privacy. The training mechanisms however often add too much noise during the training process, and thus severely compromise the utility of these private models. Even worse, the tight privacy budgets do not allow for many training epochs so that model quality cannot be properly controlled in practice. In this paper we explore an alternative approach for privately generating data that makes direct use of the inherent stochasticity in generative models, e.g., variational autoencoders. The main idea is to appropriately constrain the continuity modulus of the deep models instead of adding another noise mechanism on top. For this approach, we derive mathematically rigorous privacy guarantees and illustrate its effectiveness with practical experiments.
On Accelerating Diffusion-Based Sampling Process via Improved Integration Approximation
Authors: Guoqiang Zhang, Niwa Kenta, W. Bastiaan Kleijn
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00

A popular approach to sample a diffusion-based generative model is to solve an ordinary differential equation (ODE). In existing samplers, the coefficients of the ODE solvers are pre-determined by the ODE formulation, the reverse discrete timesteps, and the employed ODE methods. In this paper, we consider accelerating several popular ODE-based sampling processes (including EDM, DDIM, and DPM-Solver) by optimizing certain coefficients via improved integration approximation (IIA). We propose to minimize, for each time step, a mean squared error (MSE) function with respect to the selected coefficients. The MSE is constructed by applying the original ODE solver for a set of fine-grained timesteps, which in principle provides a more accurate integration approximation in predicting the next diffusion state. The proposed IIA technique does not require any change of a pre-trained model, and only introduces a very small computational overhead for solving a number of quadratic optimization problems. Extensive experiments show that considerably better FID scores can be achieved by using IIA-EDM, IIA-DDIM, and IIA-DPM-Solver than the original counterparts when the neural function evaluation (NFE) is small (i.e., less than 25).