pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Continuous Indeterminate Probability Neural Network
Authors: Tao Yang
Date: 2023-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Decoder, General Classification

This paper introduces a general model called CIPNN - Continuous Indeterminate Probability Neural Network, and this model is based on IPNN, which is used for discrete latent random variables. Currently, posterior of continuous latent variables is regarded as intractable, with the new theory proposed by IPNN this problem can be solved. Our contributions are Four-fold. First, we derive the analytical solution of the posterior calculation of continuous latent random variables and propose a general classification model (CIPNN). Second, we propose a general auto-encoder called CIPAE - Continuous Indeterminate Probability Auto-Encoder, the decoder part is not a neural network and uses a fully probabilistic inference model for the first time. Third, we propose a new method to visualize the latent random variables, we use one of N dimensional latent variables as a decoder to reconstruct the input image, which can work even for classification tasks, in this way, we can see what each latent variable has learned. Fourth, IPNN has shown great classification capability, CIPNN has pushed this classification capability to infinity. Theoretical advantages are reflected in experimental results.
Variantional autoencoder with decremental information bottleneck for disentanglement
Authors: Jiantao Wu, Shentong Mo, Muhammad Awais, Sara Atito, Xingshen Zhang, Lin Wang, Xiang Yang
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Representation Learning

One major challenge of disentanglement learning with variational autoencoders is the trade-off between disentanglement and reconstruction fidelity. Previous studies, which increase the information bottleneck during training, tend to lose the constraint of disentanglement, leading to the information diffusion problem. In this paper, we present a novel framework for disentangled representation learning, DeVAE, which utilizes hierarchical latent spaces with decreasing information bottlenecks across these spaces. The key innovation of our approach lies in connecting the hierarchical latent spaces through disentanglement-invariant transformations, allowing the sharing of disentanglement properties among spaces while maintaining an acceptable level of reconstruction performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeVAE in achieving a balance between disentanglement and reconstruction through a series of experiments and ablation studies on dSprites and Shapes3D datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/erow/disentanglement_lib/tree/pytorch#devae.
Reinforcement Learning with Exogenous States and Rewards
Authors: George Trimponias, Thomas G. Dietterich
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes additively into endogenous and exogenous components, the MDP can be decomposed into an exogenous Markov Reward Process (based on the exogenous reward) and an endogenous Markov Decision Process (optimizing the endogenous reward). Any optimal policy for the endogenous MDP is also an optimal policy for the original MDP, but because the endogenous reward typically has reduced variance, the endogenous MDP is easier to solve. We study settings where the decomposition of the state space into exogenous and endogenous state spaces is not given but must be discovered. The paper introduces and proves correctness of algorithms for discovering the exogenous and endogenous subspaces of the state space when they are mixed through linear combination. These algorithms can be applied during reinforcement learning to discover the exogenous space, remove the exogenous reward, and focus reinforcement learning on the endogenous MDP. Experiments on a variety of challenging synthetic MDPs show that these methods, applied online, discover large exogenous state spaces and produce substantial speedups in reinforcement learning.
Real-World Community-in-the-Loop Smart Video Surveillance -- A Case Study at a Community College
Authors: Shanle Yao, Babak Rahimi Ardabili, Armin Danesh Pazho, Ghazal Alinezhad Noghre, Christopher Neff, Hamed Tabkhi
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00

Smart Video surveillance systems have become important recently for ensuring public safety and security, especially in smart cities. However, applying real-time artificial intelligence technologies combined with low-latency notification and alarming has made deploying these systems quite challenging. This paper presents a case study for designing and deploying smart video surveillance systems based on a real-world testbed at a community college. We primarily focus on a smart camera-based system that can identify suspicious/abnormal activities and alert the stakeholders and residents immediately. The paper highlights and addresses different algorithmic and system design challenges to guarantee real-time high-accuracy video analytics processing in the testbed. It also presents an example of cloud system infrastructure and a mobile application for real-time notification to keep students, faculty/staff, and responsible security personnel in the loop. At the same time, it covers the design decision to maintain communities' privacy and ethical requirements as well as hardware configuration and setups. We evaluate the system's performance using throughput and end-to-end latency. The experiment results show that, on average, our system's end-to-end latency to notify the end users in case of detecting suspicious objects is 5.3, 5.78, and 11.11 seconds when running 1, 4, and 8 cameras, respectively. On the other hand, in case of detecting anomalous behaviors, the system could notify the end users with 7.3, 7.63, and 20.78 seconds average latency. These results demonstrate that the system effectively detects and notifies abnormal behaviors and suspicious objects to the end users within a reasonable period. The system can run eight cameras simultaneously at a 32.41 Frame Per Second (FPS) rate.
Revisiting the Fragility of Influence Functions
Authors: Jacob R. Epifano, Ravi P. Ramachandran, Aaron J. Masino, Ghulam Rasool
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00

In the last few years, many works have tried to explain the predictions of deep learning models. Few methods, however, have been proposed to verify the accuracy or faithfulness of these explanations. Recently, influence functions, which is a method that approximates the effect that leave-one-out training has on the loss function, has been shown to be fragile. The proposed reason for their fragility remains unclear. Although previous work suggests the use of regularization to increase robustness, this does not hold in all cases. In this work, we seek to investigate the experiments performed in the prior work in an effort to understand the underlying mechanisms of influence function fragility. First, we verify influence functions using procedures from the literature under conditions where the convexity assumptions of influence functions are met. Then, we relax these assumptions and study the effects of non-convexity by using deeper models and more complex datasets. Here, we analyze the key metrics and procedures that are used to validate influence functions. Our results indicate that the validation procedures may cause the observed fragility.
Deep learning-based stereo camera multi-video synchronization
Authors: Nicolas Boizard, Kevin El Haddad, Thierry Ravet, François Cresson, Thierry Dutoit
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Video Synchronization

Stereo vision is essential for many applications. Currently, the synchronization of the streams coming from two cameras is done using mostly hardware. A software-based synchronization method would reduce the cost, weight and size of the entire system and allow for more flexibility when building such systems. With this goal in mind, we present here a comparison of different deep learning-based systems and prove that some are efficient and generalizable enough for such a task. This study paves the way to a production ready software-based video synchronization system.
Feature Reduction Method Comparison Towards Explainability and Efficiency in Cybersecurity Intrusion Detection Systems
Authors: Adam M. Lehavi, Seongtae Kim
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Intrusion Detection

In the realm of cybersecurity, intrusion detection systems (IDS) detect and prevent attacks based on collected computer and network data. In recent research, IDS models have been constructed using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods such as Random Forest (RF) and deep neural networks (DNN). Feature selection (FS) can be used to construct faster, more interpretable, and more accurate models. We look at three different FS techniques; RF information gain (RF-IG), correlation feature selection using the Bat Algorithm (CFS-BA), and CFS using the Aquila Optimizer (CFS-AO). Our results show CFS-BA to be the most efficient of the FS methods, building in 55% of the time of the best RF-IG model while achieving 99.99% of its accuracy. This reinforces prior contributions attesting to CFS-BA's accuracy while building upon the relationship between subset size, CFS score, and RF-IG score in final results.
A dynamic risk score for early prediction of cardiogenic shock using machine learning
Authors: Yuxuan Hu, Albert Lui, Mark Goldstein, Mukund Sudarshan, Andrea Tinsay, Cindy Tsui, Samuel Maidman, John Medamana, Neil Jethani, Aahlad Puli, Vuthy Nguy, Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs, Nicholas Kiefer, Nathaniel Smilowitz, James Horowitz, Tania Ahuja, Glenn I Fishman, Judith Hochman, Stuart Katz, Samuel Bernard, Rajesh Ranganath
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

Myocardial infarction and heart failure are major cardiovascular diseases that affect millions of people in the US. The morbidity and mortality are highest among patients who develop cardiogenic shock. Early recognition of cardiogenic shock is critical. Prompt implementation of treatment measures can prevent the deleterious spiral of ischemia, low blood pressure, and reduced cardiac output due to cardiogenic shock. However, early identification of cardiogenic shock has been challenging due to human providers' inability to process the enormous amount of data in the cardiac intensive care unit (ICU) and lack of an effective risk stratification tool. We developed a deep learning-based risk stratification tool, called CShock, for patients admitted into the cardiac ICU with acute decompensated heart failure and/or myocardial infarction to predict onset of cardiogenic shock. To develop and validate CShock, we annotated cardiac ICU datasets with physician adjudicated outcomes. CShock achieved an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.820, which substantially outperformed CardShock (AUROC 0.519), a well-established risk score for cardiogenic shock prognosis. CShock was externally validated in an independent patient cohort and achieved an AUROC of 0.800, demonstrating its generalizability in other cardiac ICUs.
Human Uncertainty in Concept-Based AI Systems
Authors: Katherine M. Collins, Matthew Barker, Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga, Naveen Raman, Umang Bhatt, Mateja Jamnik, Ilia Sucholutsky, Adrian Weller, Krishnamurthy Dvijotham
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Placing a human in the loop may abate the risks of deploying AI systems in safety-critical settings (e.g., a clinician working with a medical AI system). However, mitigating risks arising from human error and uncertainty within such human-AI interactions is an important and understudied issue. In this work, we study human uncertainty in the context of concept-based models, a family of AI systems that enable human feedback via concept interventions where an expert intervenes on human-interpretable concepts relevant to the task. Prior work in this space often assumes that humans are oracles who are always certain and correct. Yet, real-world decision-making by humans is prone to occasional mistakes and uncertainty. We study how existing concept-based models deal with uncertain interventions from humans using two novel datasets: UMNIST, a visual dataset with controlled simulated uncertainty based on the MNIST dataset, and CUB-S, a relabeling of the popular CUB concept dataset with rich, densely-annotated soft labels from humans. We show that training with uncertain concept labels may help mitigate weaknesses of concept-based systems when handling uncertain interventions. These results allow us to identify several open challenges, which we argue can be tackled through future multidisciplinary research on building interactive uncertainty-aware systems. To facilitate further research, we release a new elicitation platform, UElic, to collect uncertain feedback from humans in collaborative prediction tasks.
Salient Span Masking for Temporal Understanding
Authors: Jeremy R. Cole, Aditi Chaudhary, Bhuwan Dhingra, Partha Talukdar
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Avg, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

Salient Span Masking (SSM) has shown itself to be an effective strategy to improve closed-book question answering performance. SSM extends general masked language model pretraining by creating additional unsupervised training sentences that mask a single entity or date span, thus oversampling factual information. Despite the success of this paradigm, the span types and sampling strategies are relatively arbitrary and not widely studied for other tasks. Thus, we investigate SSM from the perspective of temporal tasks, where learning a good representation of various temporal expressions is important. To that end, we introduce Temporal Span Masking (TSM) intermediate training. First, we find that SSM alone improves the downstream performance on three temporal tasks by an avg. +5.8 points. Further, we are able to achieve additional improvements (avg. +0.29 points) by adding the TSM task. These comprise the new best reported results on the targeted tasks. Our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of SSM stems from the sentences chosen in the training data rather than the mask choice: sentences with entities frequently also contain temporal expressions. Nonetheless, the additional targeted spans of TSM can still improve performance, especially in a zero-shot context.
Semi-Oblivious Chase Termination for Linear Existential Rules: An Experimental Study
Authors: Marco Calautti, Mostafa Milani, Andreas Pieris
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00

The chase procedure is a fundamental algorithmic tool in databases that allows us to reason with constraints, such as existential rules, with a plethora of applications. It takes as input a database and a set of constraints, and iteratively completes the database as dictated by the constraints. A key challenge, though, is the fact that it may not terminate, which leads to the problem of checking whether it terminates given a database and a set of constraints. In this work, we focus on the semi-oblivious version of the chase, which is well-suited for practical implementations, and linear existential rules, a central class of constraints with several applications. In this setting, there is a mature body of theoretical work that provides syntactic characterizations of when the chase terminates, algorithms for checking chase termination, precise complexity results, and worst-case optimal bounds on the size of the result of the chase (whenever is finite). Our main objective is to experimentally evaluate the existing chase termination algorithms with the aim of understanding which input parameters affect their performance, clarifying whether they can be used in practice, and revealing their performance limitations.
The power and limitations of learning quantum dynamics incoherently
Authors: Sofiene Jerbi, Joe Gibbs, Manuel S. Rudolph, Matthias C. Caro, Patrick J. Coles, Hsin-Yuan Huang, Zoë Holmes
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00

Quantum process learning is emerging as an important tool to study quantum systems. While studied extensively in coherent frameworks, where the target and model system can share quantum information, less attention has been paid to whether the dynamics of quantum systems can be learned without the system and target directly interacting. Such incoherent frameworks are practically appealing since they open up methods of transpiling quantum processes between the different physical platforms without the need for technically challenging hybrid entanglement schemes. Here we provide bounds on the sample complexity of learning unitary processes incoherently by analyzing the number of measurements that are required to emulate well-established coherent learning strategies. We prove that if arbitrary measurements are allowed, then any efficiently representable unitary can be efficiently learned within the incoherent framework; however, when restricted to shallow-depth measurements only low-entangling unitaries can be learned. We demonstrate our incoherent learning algorithm for low entangling unitaries by successfully learning a 16-qubit unitary on \texttt{ibmq\_kolkata}, and further demonstrate the scalabilty of our proposed algorithm through extensive numerical experiments.
Data-Driven Leader-following Consensus for Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems against Composite Attacks: A Twins Layer Approach
Authors: Xin Gong, Jintao Peng, Dong Yang, Zhan Shu, TingWen Huang, Yukang Cui
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00

This paper studies the leader-following consensuses of uncertain and nonlinear multi-agent systems against composite attacks (CAs), including Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and actuation attacks (AAs). A double-layer control framework is formulated, where a digital twin layer (TL) is added beside the traditional cyber-physical layer (CPL), inspired by the recent Digital Twin technology. Consequently, the resilient control task against CAs can be divided into two parts: One is distributed estimation against DoS attacks on the TL and the other is resilient decentralized tracking control against actuation attacks on the CPL. %The data-driven scheme is used to deal with both model non-linearity and model uncertainty, in which only the input and output data of the system are employed throughout the whole control process. First, a distributed observer based on switching estimation law against DoS is designed on TL. Second, a distributed model free adaptive control (DMFAC) protocol based on attack compensation against AAs is designed on CPL. Moreover, the uniformly ultimately bounded convergence of consensus error of the proposed double-layer DMFAC algorithm is strictly proved. Finally, the simulation verifies the effectiveness of the resilient double-layer control scheme.
Towards A Visual Programming Tool to Create Deep Learning Models
Authors: Tommaso Calò, Luigi De Russis
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Deep Learning (DL) developers come from different backgrounds, e.g., medicine, genomics, finance, and computer science. To create a DL model, they must learn and use high-level programming languages (e.g., Python), thus needing to handle related setups and solve programming errors. This paper presents DeepBlocks, a visual programming tool that allows DL developers to design, train, and evaluate models without relying on specific programming languages. DeepBlocks works by building on the typical model structure: a sequence of learnable functions whose arrangement defines the specific characteristics of the model. We derived DeepBlocks' design goals from a 5-participants formative interview, and we validated the first implementation of the tool through a typical use case. Results are promising and show that developers could visually design complex DL architectures.
Mining Clinical Notes for Physical Rehabilitation Exercise Information: Natural Language Processing Algorithm Development and Validation Study
Authors: Sonish Sivarajkumar, Fengyi Gao, Parker E. Denny, Bayan M. Aldhahwani, Shyam Visweswaran, Allyn Bove, Yanshan Wang
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Motion Detection

Post-stroke patient rehabilitation requires precise, personalized treatment plans. Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers potential to extract valuable exercise information from clinical notes, aiding in the development of more effective rehabilitation strategies. Objective: This study aims to develop and evaluate a variety of NLP algorithms to extract and categorize physical rehabilitation exercise information from the clinical notes of post-stroke patients treated at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. A cohort of 13,605 patients diagnosed with stroke was identified, and their clinical notes containing rehabilitation therapy notes were retrieved. A comprehensive clinical ontology was created to represent various aspects of physical rehabilitation exercises. State-of-the-art NLP algorithms were then developed and compared, including rule-based, machine learning-based algorithms, and large language model (LLM)-based algorithms (ChatGPT). Analysis was conducted on a dataset comprising 23,724 notes with detailed demographic and clinical characteristics. The rule-based NLP algorithm demonstrated superior performance in most areas, particularly in detecting the 'Right Side' location with an F1 score of 0.975, outperforming Gradient Boosting by 0.063. Gradient Boosting excelled in 'Lower Extremity' location detection (F1 score: 0.978), surpassing rule-based NLP by 0.023. It also showed notable performance in 'Passive Range of Motion' with an F1 score of 0.970, a 0.032 improvement over rule-based NLP. The rule-based algorithm efficiently handled 'Duration', 'Sets', and 'Reps' with F1 scores up to 0.65. LLM-based NLP, particularly ChatGPT with few-shot prompts, achieved high recall but generally lower precision and F1 scores. However, it notably excelled in 'Backward Plane' motion detection, achieving an F1 score of 0.846, surpassing the rule-based algorithm's 0.720.
Deep RL with Hierarchical Action Exploration for Dialogue Generation
Authors: Itsugun Cho, Ryota Takahashi, Yusaku Yanase, Hiroaki Saito
Date: 2023-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Traditionally, approximate dynamic programming is employed in dialogue generation with greedy policy improvement through action sampling, as the natural language action space is vast. However, this practice is inefficient for reinforcement learning (RL) due to the sparsity of eligible responses with high action values, which leads to weak improvement sustained by random sampling. This paper presents theoretical analysis and experiments that reveal the performance of the dialogue policy is positively correlated with the sampling size. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel dual-granularity Q-function that explores the most promising response category to intervene in the sampling process. Our approach extracts actions based on a grained hierarchy, thereby achieving the optimum with fewer policy iterations. Additionally, we use offline RL and learn from multiple reward functions designed to capture emotional nuances in human interactions. Empirical studies demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms baselines across automatic metrics and human evaluations. Further testing reveals that our algorithm exhibits both explainability and controllability and generates responses with higher expected rewards.