pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SIG: Speaker Identification in Literature via Prompt-Based Generation
Authors: Zhenlin Su, Liyan Xu, Jin Xu, Jiangnan Li, Mingdu Huangfu
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Identification

Identifying speakers of quotations in narratives is an important task in literary analysis, with challenging scenarios including the out-of-domain inference for unseen speakers, and non-explicit cases where there are no speaker mentions in surrounding context. In this work, we propose a simple and effective approach SIG, a generation-based method that verbalizes the task and quotation input based on designed prompt templates, which also enables easy integration of other auxiliary tasks that further bolster the speaker identification performance. The prediction can either come from direct generation by the model, or be determined by the highest generation probability of each speaker candidate. Based on our approach design, SIG supports out-of-domain evaluation, and achieves open-world classification paradigm that is able to accept any forms of candidate input. We perform both cross-domain evaluation and in-domain evaluation on PDNC, the largest dataset of this task, where empirical results suggest that SIG outperforms previous baselines of complicated designs, as well as the zero-shot ChatGPT, especially excelling at those hard non-explicit scenarios by up to 17% improvement. Additional experiments on another dataset WP further corroborate the efficacy of SIG.
Non-Denoising Forward-Time Diffusions
Authors: Stefano Peluchetti
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

The scope of this paper is generative modeling through diffusion processes. An approach falling within this paradigm is the work of Song et al. (2021), which relies on a time-reversal argument to construct a diffusion process targeting the desired data distribution. We show that the time-reversal argument, common to all denoising diffusion probabilistic modeling proposals, is not necessary. We obtain diffusion processes targeting the desired data distribution by taking appropriate mixtures of diffusion bridges. The resulting transport is exact by construction, allows for greater flexibility in choosing the dynamics of the underlying diffusion, and can be approximated by means of a neural network via novel training objectives. We develop a unifying view of the drift adjustments corresponding to our and to time-reversal approaches and make use of this representation to inspect the inner workings of diffusion-based generative models. Finally, we leverage on scalable simulation and inference techniques common in spatial statistics to move beyond fully factorial distributions in the underlying diffusion dynamics. The methodological advances contained in this work contribute toward establishing a general framework for generative modeling based on diffusion processes.
Data is Moody: Discovering Data Modification Rules from Process Event Logs
Authors: Marco Bjarne Schuster, Boris Wiegand, Jilles Vreeken
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Subgroup Discovery

Although event logs are a powerful source to gain insight about the behavior of the underlying business process, existing work primarily focuses on finding patterns in the activity sequences of an event log, while ignoring event attribute data. Event attribute data has mostly been used to predict event occurrences and process outcome, but the state of the art neglects to mine succinct and interpretable rules how event attribute data changes during process execution. Subgroup discovery and rule-based classification approaches lack the ability to capture the sequential dependencies present in event logs, and thus lead to unsatisfactory results with limited insight into the process behavior. Given an event log, we are interested in finding accurate yet succinct and interpretable if-then rules how the process modifies data. We formalize the problem in terms of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, by which we choose the model with the best lossless description of the data. Additionally, we propose the greedy Moody algorithm to efficiently search for rules. By extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, we show Moody indeed finds compact and interpretable rules, needs little data for accurate discovery, and is robust to noise.
Accelerated Convergence of Stochastic Heavy Ball Method under Anisotropic Gradient Noise
Authors: Rui Pan, Yuxing Liu, Xiaoyu Wang, Tong Zhang
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Heavy-ball momentum with decaying learning rates is widely used with SGD for optimizing deep learning models. In contrast to its empirical popularity, the understanding of its theoretical property is still quite limited, especially under the standard anisotropic gradient noise condition for quadratic regression problems. Although it is widely conjectured that heavy-ball momentum method can provide accelerated convergence and should work well in large batch settings, there is no rigorous theoretical analysis. In this paper, we fill this theoretical gap by establishing a non-asymptotic convergence bound for stochastic heavy-ball methods with step decay scheduler on quadratic objectives, under the anisotropic gradient noise condition. As a direct implication, we show that heavy-ball momentum can provide $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{\kappa})$ accelerated convergence of the bias term of SGD while still achieving near-optimal convergence rate with respect to the stochastic variance term. The combined effect implies an overall convergence rate within log factors from the statistical minimax rate. This means SGD with heavy-ball momentum is useful in the large-batch settings such as distributed machine learning or federated learning, where a smaller number of iterations can significantly reduce the number of communication rounds, leading to acceleration in practice.
Online Covering with Multiple Experts
Authors: Enikő Kevi, Kim-Thang Nguyen
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Designing online algorithms with machine learning predictions is a recent technique beyond the worst-case paradigm for various practically relevant online problems (scheduling, caching, clustering, ski rental, etc.). While most previous learning-augmented algorithm approaches focus on integrating the predictions of a single oracle, we study the design of online algorithms with \emph{multiple} experts. To go beyond the popular benchmark of a static best expert in hindsight, we propose a new \emph{dynamic} benchmark (linear combinations of predictions that change over time). We present a competitive algorithm in the new dynamic benchmark with a performance guarantee of $O(\log K)$, where $K$ is the number of experts, for $0-1$ online optimization problems. Furthermore, our multiple-expert approach provides a new perspective on how to combine in an online manner several online algorithms - a long-standing central subject in the online algorithm research community.
Machine learning for structure-guided materials and process design
Authors: Lukas Morand, Tarek Iraki, Johannes Dornheim, Stefan Sandfeld, Norbert Link, Dirk Helm
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in accelerated materials innovation in the context of the process-structure-property chain. In this regard, it is essential to take into account manufacturing processes and tailor materials design approaches to support downstream process design approaches. As a major step into this direction, we present a holistic and generic optimization approach that covers the entire process-structure-property chain in materials engineering. Our approach specifically employs machine learning to address two critical identification problems: a materials design problem, which involves identifying near-optimal material microstructures that exhibit desired properties, and a process design problem that is to find an optimal processing path to manufacture these microstructures. Both identification problems are typically ill-posed, which presents a significant challenge for solution approaches. However, the non-unique nature of these problems offers an important advantage for processing: By having several target microstructures that perform similarly well, processes can be efficiently guided towards manufacturing the best reachable microstructure. The functionality of the approach is demonstrated at manufacturing crystallographic textures with desired properties in a simulated metal forming process.
An effective and efficient green federated learning method for one-layer neural networks
Authors: Oscar Fontenla-Romero, Bertha Guijarro-Berdiñas, Elena Hernández-Pereira, Beatriz Pérez-Sánchez
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Federated Learning

Nowadays, machine learning algorithms continue to grow in complexity and require a substantial amount of computational resources and energy. For these reasons, there is a growing awareness of the development of new green algorithms and distributed AI can contribute to this. Federated learning (FL) is one of the most active research lines in machine learning, as it allows the training of collaborative models in a distributed way, an interesting option in many real-world environments, such as the Internet of Things, allowing the use of these models in edge computing devices. In this work, we present a FL method, based on a neural network without hidden layers, capable of generating a global collaborative model in a single training round, unlike traditional FL methods that require multiple rounds for convergence. This allows obtaining an effective and efficient model that simplifies the management of the training process. Moreover, this method preserve data privacy by design, a crucial aspect in current data protection regulations. We conducted experiments with large datasets and a large number of federated clients. Despite being based on a network model without hidden layers, it maintains in all cases competitive accuracy results compared to more complex state-of-the-art machine learning models. Furthermore, we show that the method performs equally well in both identically and non-identically distributed scenarios. Finally, it is an environmentally friendly algorithm as it allows significant energy savings during the training process compared to its centralized counterpart.
Unsupervised Harmonic Parameter Estimation Using Differentiable DSP and Spectral Optimal Transport
Authors: Bernardo Torres, Geoffroy Peeters, Gaël Richard
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Signal Processing, parameter estimation

In neural audio signal processing, pitch conditioning has been used to enhance the performance of synthesizers. However, jointly training pitch estimators and synthesizers is a challenge when using standard audio-to-audio reconstruction loss, leading to reliance on external pitch trackers. To address this issue, we propose using a spectral loss function inspired by optimal transportation theory that minimizes the displacement of spectral energy. We validate this approach through an unsupervised autoencoding task that fits a harmonic template to harmonic signals. We jointly estimate the fundamental frequency and amplitudes of harmonics using a lightweight encoder and reconstruct the signals using a differentiable harmonic synthesizer. The proposed approach offers a promising direction for improving unsupervised parameter estimation in neural audio applications.
Theory of Hallucinations based on Equivariance
Authors: Hisaichi Shibata
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

This study aims to acquire knowledge for creating very large language models that are immune to hallucinations. Hallucinations in contemporary large language models are often attributed to a misunderstanding of real-world social relationships. Therefore, I hypothesize that very large language models capable of thoroughly grasping all these relationships will be free from hallucinations. Additionally, I propose that certain types of equivariant language models are adept at learning and understanding these relationships. Building on this, I have developed a specialized cross-entropy error function to create a hallucination scale for language models, which measures their extent of equivariance acquisition. Utilizing this scale, I tested language models for their ability to acquire character-level equivariance. In particular, I introduce and employ a novel technique based on T5 (Text To Text Transfer Transformer) that efficiently understands permuted input texts without the need for explicit dictionaries to convert token IDs (integers) to texts (strings). This T5 model demonstrated a moderate ability to acquire character-level equivariance. Additionally, I discovered scale laws that can aid in developing hallucination-free language models at the character level. This methodology can be extended to assess equivariance acquisition at the word level, paving the way for very large language models that can comprehensively understand relationships and, consequently, avoid hallucinations.
Federated Learning via Input-Output Collaborative Distillation
Authors: Xuan Gong, Shanglin Li, Yuxiang Bao, Barry Yao, Yawen Huang, Ziyan Wu, Baochang Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, David Doermann
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm in which distributed local nodes collaboratively train a central model without sharing individually held private data. Existing FL methods either iteratively share local model parameters or deploy co-distillation. However, the former is highly susceptible to private data leakage, and the latter design relies on the prerequisites of task-relevant real data. Instead, we propose a data-free FL framework based on local-to-central collaborative distillation with direct input and output space exploitation. Our design eliminates any requirement of recursive local parameter exchange or auxiliary task-relevant data to transfer knowledge, thereby giving direct privacy control to local users. In particular, to cope with the inherent data heterogeneity across locals, our technique learns to distill input on which each local model produces consensual yet unique results to represent each expertise. Our proposed FL framework achieves notable privacy-utility trade-offs with extensive experiments on image classification and segmentation tasks under various real-world heterogeneous federated learning settings on both natural and medical images.
Safe Reinforcement Learning with Instantaneous Constraints: The Role of Aggressive Exploration
Authors: Honghao Wei, Xin Liu, Lei Ying
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, reinforcement-learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning

This paper studies safe Reinforcement Learning (safe RL) with linear function approximation and under hard instantaneous constraints where unsafe actions must be avoided at each step. Existing studies have considered safe RL with hard instantaneous constraints, but their approaches rely on several key assumptions: $(i)$ the RL agent knows a safe action set for {\it every} state or knows a {\it safe graph} in which all the state-action-state triples are safe, and $(ii)$ the constraint/cost functions are {\it linear}. In this paper, we consider safe RL with instantaneous hard constraints without assumption $(i)$ and generalize $(ii)$ to Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). Our proposed algorithm, LSVI-AE, achieves $\tilde{\cO}(\sqrt{d^3H^4K})$ regret and $\tilde{\cO}(H \sqrt{dK})$ hard constraint violation when the cost function is linear and $\cO(H\gamma_K \sqrt{K})$ hard constraint violation when the cost function belongs to RKHS. Here $K$ is the learning horizon, $H$ is the length of each episode, and $\gamma_K$ is the information gain w.r.t the kernel used to approximate cost functions. Our results achieve the optimal dependency on the learning horizon $K$, matching the lower bound we provide in this paper and demonstrating the efficiency of LSVI-AE. Notably, the design of our approach encourages aggressive policy exploration, providing a unique perspective on safe RL with general cost functions and no prior knowledge of safe actions, which may be of independent interest.
How to Overcome Curse-of-Dimensionality for Out-of-Distribution Detection?
Authors: Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Yiyou Sun, Yixuan Li
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection

Machine learning models deployed in the wild can be challenged by out-of-distribution (OOD) data from unknown classes. Recent advances in OOD detection rely on distance measures to distinguish samples that are relatively far away from the in-distribution (ID) data. Despite the promise, distance-based methods can suffer from the curse-of-dimensionality problem, which limits the efficacy in high-dimensional feature space. To combat this problem, we propose a novel framework, Subspace Nearest Neighbor (SNN), for OOD detection. In training, our method regularizes the model and its feature representation by leveraging the most relevant subset of dimensions (i.e. subspace). Subspace learning yields highly distinguishable distance measures between ID and OOD data. We provide comprehensive experiments and ablations to validate the efficacy of SNN. Compared to the current best distance-based method, SNN reduces the average FPR95 by 15.96% on the CIFAR-100 benchmark.
DMC4ML: Data Movement Complexity for Machine Learning
Authors: Chen Ding, Christopher Kanan, Dylan McKellips, Toranosuke Ozawa, Arian Shahmirza, Wesley Smith
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00

The greatest demand for today's computing is machine learning. This paper analyzes three machine learning algorithms: transformers, spatial convolution, and FFT. The analysis is novel in three aspects. First, it measures the cost of memory access on an abstract memory hierarchy, instead of traditional time or space complexity. Second, the analysis is asymptotic and identifies the primary sources of the memory cost. Finally, the result is symbolic, which can be used to select algorithmic parameters such as the group size in grouped query attention for any dimension size and number of heads and the batch size for batched convolution for any image size and kernel size.
Asymmetric Bias in Text-to-Image Generation with Adversarial Attacks
Authors: HAZ Sameen Shahgir, Xianghao Kong, Greg Ver Steeg, Yue Dong
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

The widespread use of Text-to-Image (T2I) models in content generation requires careful examination of their safety, including their robustness to adversarial attacks. Despite extensive research on adversarial attacks, the reasons for their effectiveness remain underexplored. This paper presents an empirical study on adversarial attacks against T2I models, focusing on analyzing factors associated with attack success rates (ASR). We introduce a new attack objective - entity swapping using adversarial suffixes and two gradient-based attack algorithms. Human and automatic evaluations reveal the asymmetric nature of ASRs on entity swap: for example, it is easier to replace "human" with "robot" in the prompt "a human dancing in the rain." with an adversarial suffix, but the reverse replacement is significantly harder. We further propose probing metrics to establish indicative signals from the model's beliefs to the adversarial ASR. We identify conditions that result in a success probability of 60% for adversarial attacks and others where this likelihood drops below 5%.
PUMA: Efficient Continual Graph Learning for Node Classification with Graph Condensation
Authors: Yilun Liu, Ruihong Qiu, Yanran Tang, Hongzhi Yin, Zi Huang
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Graph Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Node Classification, Representation Learning

When handling streaming graphs, existing graph representation learning models encounter a catastrophic forgetting problem, where previously learned knowledge of these models is easily overwritten when learning with newly incoming graphs. In response, Continual Graph Learning (CGL) emerges as a novel paradigm enabling graph representation learning from streaming graphs. Our prior work, Condense and Train (CaT) is a replay-based CGL framework with a balanced continual learning procedure, which designs a small yet effective memory bankn for replaying. Although the CaT alleviates the catastrophic forgetting problem, there exist three issues: (1) The graph condensation only focuses on labelled nodes while neglecting abundant information carried by unlabelled nodes; (2) The continual training scheme of the CaT overemphasises on the previously learned knowledge, limiting the model capacity to learn from newly added memories; (3) Both the condensation process and replaying process of the CaT are time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a PsUdo-label guided Memory bAnk (PUMA) CGL framework, extending from the CaT to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness by overcoming the above-mentioned weaknesses and limits. To fully exploit the information in a graph, PUMA expands the coverage of nodes during graph condensation with both labelled and unlabelled nodes. Furthermore, a training-from-scratch strategy is proposed to upgrade the previous continual learning scheme for a balanced training between the historical and the new graphs. Besides, PUMA uses a one-time prorogation and wide graph encoders to accelerate the graph condensation and the graph encoding process in the training stage to improve the efficiency of the whole framework. Extensive experiments on six datasets for the node classification task demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and efficiency over existing methods.
REBEL: Reward Regularization-Based Approach for Robotic Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Authors: Souradip Chakraborty, Anukriti Singh, Amisha Bhaskar, Pratap Tokekar, Dinesh Manocha, Amrit Singh Bedi
Date: 2023-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward function and underlying human preferences (values, social norms) can lead to catastrophic outcomes in the real world especially in the context of robotics for critical decision making. Recent methods aim to mitigate misalignment by learning reward functions from human preferences and subsequently performing policy optimization. However, these methods inadvertently introduce a distribution shift during reward learning due to ignoring the dependence of agent-generated trajectories on the reward learning objective, ultimately resulting in sub-optimal alignment. Hence, in this work, we address this challenge by advocating for the adoption of regularized reward functions that more accurately mirror the intended behaviors of the agent. We propose a novel concept of reward regularization within the robotic RLHF (RL from Human Feedback) framework, which we refer to as \emph{agent preferences}. Our approach uniquely incorporates not just human feedback in the form of preferences but also considers the preferences of the RL agent itself during the reward function learning process. This dual consideration significantly mitigates the issue of distribution shift in RLHF with a computationally tractable algorithm. We provide a theoretical justification for the proposed algorithm by formulating the robotic RLHF problem as a bilevel optimization problem and developing a computationally tractable version of the same. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm {\ours} in several continuous control benchmarks in DeepMind Control Suite \cite{tassa2018deepmind}.