pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DeltaBound Attack: Efficient decision-based attack in low queries regime
Authors: Lorenzo Rossi
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00

Deep neural networks and other machine learning systems, despite being extremely powerful and able to make predictions with high accuracy, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We proposed the DeltaBound attack: a novel, powerful attack in the hard-label setting with $\ell_2$ norm bounded perturbations. In this scenario, the attacker has only access to the top-1 predicted label of the model and can be therefore applied to real-world settings such as remote API. This is a complex problem since the attacker has very little information about the model. Consequently, most of the other techniques present in the literature require a massive amount of queries for attacking a single example. Oppositely, this work mainly focuses on the evaluation of attack's power in the low queries regime $\leq 1000$ queries) with $\ell_2$ norm in the hard-label settings. We find that the DeltaBound attack performs as well and sometimes better than current state-of-the-art attacks while remaining competitive across different kinds of models. Moreover, we evaluate our method against not only deep neural networks, but also non-deep learning models, such as Gradient Boosting Decision Trees and Multinomial Naive Bayes.
Swift Markov Logic for Probabilistic Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Luigi Bellomarini, Eleonora Laurenza, Emanuel Sallinger, Evgeny Sherkhonov
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Management, Relational Reasoning

We provide a framework for probabilistic reasoning in Vadalog-based Knowledge Graphs (KGs), satisfying the requirements of ontological reasoning: full recursion, powerful existential quantification, expression of inductive definitions. Vadalog is a Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) language based on Warded Datalog+/-, a logical core language of existential rules, with a good balance between computational complexity and expressive power. Handling uncertainty is essential for reasoning with KGs. Yet Vadalog and Warded Datalog+/- are not covered by the existing probabilistic logic programming and statistical relational learning approaches for several reasons, including insufficient support for recursion with existential quantification, and the impossibility to express inductive definitions. In this work, we introduce Soft Vadalog, a probabilistic extension to Vadalog, satisfying these desiderata. A Soft Vadalog program induces what we call a Probabilistic Knowledge Graph (PKG), which consists of a probability distribution on a network of chase instances, structures obtained by grounding the rules over a database using the chase procedure. We exploit PKGs for probabilistic marginal inference. We discuss the theory and present MCMC-chase, a Monte Carlo method to use Soft Vadalog in practice. We apply our framework to solve data management and industrial problems, and experimentally evaluate it in the Vadalog system. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).
Nested Search versus Limited Discrepancy Search
Authors: Tristan Cazenave
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00

Limited Discrepancy Search (LDS) is a popular algorithm to search a state space with a heuristic to order the possible actions. Nested Search (NS) is another algorithm to search a state space with the same heuristic. NS spends more time on the move associated to the best heuristic playout while LDS spends more time on the best heuristic move. They both use similar times for the same level of search. We advocate in this paper that it is often better to follow the best heuristic playout as in NS than to follow the heuristic as in LDS.
Design of Fuzzy Logic Controller for Washing Machine
Authors: Kriti Dheerawat
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00

Things are becoming more advanced as technology advances,and machines now perform the majority of the manual work. The most often used home appliance is the washing machine for cloths. In this paper, we used the Mamdani approach and created an algorithm based on multi-input multi-output. The algorithm is implemented in Python.The results of this simulation show that the washing machine provides better execution at a low computation cost
Predictive Inference with Feature Conformal Prediction
Authors: Jiaye Teng, Chuan Wen, Dinghuai Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, Yang Gao, Yang Yuan
Date: 2022-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Image Segmentation, Inductive Bias, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, Representation Learning, Semantic Segmentation, valid

Conformal prediction is a distribution-free technique for establishing valid prediction intervals. Although conventionally people conduct conformal prediction in the output space, this is not the only possibility. In this paper, we propose feature conformal prediction, which extends the scope of conformal prediction to semantic feature spaces by leveraging the inductive bias of deep representation learning. From a theoretical perspective, we demonstrate that feature conformal prediction provably outperforms regular conformal prediction under mild assumptions. Our approach could be combined with not only vanilla conformal prediction, but also other adaptive conformal prediction methods. Apart from experiments on existing predictive inference benchmarks, we also demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed methods on large-scale tasks such as ImageNet classification and Cityscapes image segmentation.The code is available at \url{https://github.com/AlvinWen428/FeatureCP}.
Underspecification in Language Modeling Tasks: A Causality-Informed Study of Gendered Pronoun Resolution
Authors: Emily McMilin
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Selection bias

Modern language modeling tasks are often underspecified: for a given token prediction, many words may satisfy the user's intent of producing natural language at inference time, however only one word will minimize the task's loss function at training time. We introduce a simple causal mechanism to describe the role underspecification plays in the generation of spurious correlations. Despite its simplicity, our causal model directly informs the development of two lightweight black-box evaluation methods, that we apply to gendered pronoun resolution tasks on a wide range of LLMs to 1) aid in the detection of inference-time task underspecification by exploiting 2) previously unreported gender vs. time and gender vs. location spurious correlations on LLMs with a range of A) sizes: from BERT-base to GPT-4 Turbo Preview, B) pre-training objectives: from masked & autoregressive language modeling to a mixture of these objectives, and C) training stages: from pre-training only to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Code and open-source demos available at https://github.com/2dot71mily/uspec.
Adversarial Robustness of Representation Learning for Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Peru Bhardwaj
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Data Poisoning, Decision Making, Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, Representation Learning

Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
Predicting Cellular Responses with Variational Causal Inference and Refined Relational Information
Authors: Yulun Wu, Robert A. Barton, Zichen Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Carlo De Donno, Layne C. Price, Luis F. Voloch, George Karypis
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, counterfactual, Drug Discovery

Predicting the responses of a cell under perturbations may bring important benefits to drug discovery and personalized therapeutics. In this work, we propose a novel graph variational Bayesian causal inference framework to predict a cell's gene expressions under counterfactual perturbations (perturbations that this cell did not factually receive), leveraging information representing biological knowledge in the form of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) to aid individualized cellular response predictions. Aiming at a data-adaptive GRN, we also developed an adjacency matrix updating technique for graph convolutional networks and used it to refine GRNs during pre-training, which generated more insights on gene relations and enhanced model performance. Additionally, we propose a robust estimator within our framework for the asymptotically efficient estimation of marginal perturbation effect, which is yet to be carried out in previous works. With extensive experiments, we exhibited the advantage of our approach over state-of-the-art deep learning models for individual response prediction.
Institutional Foundations of Adaptive Planning: Exploration of Flood Planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA
Authors: Ashley D. Ross, Ali Nejat, Virgie Greb
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00

Adaptive planning is ideally suited for the deep uncertainties presented by climate change. While there is a robust scholarship on the theory and methods of adaptive planning, this has largely neglected how adaptive planning is affected by existing planning institutions and how to move forward within the constraints of traditional planning organizations. This study asks: How do existing traditional planning institutions support adaptive planning? We explore this for flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, United States. We draw on county hazard plan and regional flood plan documents as well as transcripts of regional flood planning meetings to explore the emergent topics of these institutional outputs. Using Natural Language Processing to analyze this large amount of text, we find that hazard plans and discussions developing these plans are largely lacking an adaptive approach.
Contrastive Corpus Attribution for Explaining Representations
Authors: Chris Lin, Hugh Chen, Chanwoo Kim, Su-In Lee
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Object Localization

Despite the widespread use of unsupervised models, very few methods are designed to explain them. Most explanation methods explain a scalar model output. However, unsupervised models output representation vectors, the elements of which are not good candidates to explain because they lack semantic meaning. To bridge this gap, recent works defined a scalar explanation output: a dot product-based similarity in the representation space to the sample being explained (i.e., an explicand). Although this enabled explanations of unsupervised models, the interpretation of this approach can still be opaque because similarity to the explicand's representation may not be meaningful to humans. To address this, we propose contrastive corpus similarity, a novel and semantically meaningful scalar explanation output based on a reference corpus and a contrasting foil set of samples. We demonstrate that contrastive corpus similarity is compatible with many post-hoc feature attribution methods to generate COntrastive COrpus Attributions (COCOA) and quantitatively verify that features important to the corpus are identified. We showcase the utility of COCOA in two ways: (i) we draw insights by explaining augmentations of the same image in a contrastive learning setting (SimCLR); and (ii) we perform zero-shot object localization by explaining the similarity of image representations to jointly learned text representations (CLIP).
A Decade of Knowledge Graphs in Natural Language Processing: A Survey
Authors: Phillip Schneider, Tim Schopf, Juraj Vladika, Mikhail Galkin, Elena Simperl, Florian Matthes
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Image-Based Detection of Modifications in Gas Pump PCBs with Deep Convolutional Autoencoders
Authors: Diulhio Candido de Oliveira, Bogdan Tomoyuki Nassu, Marco Aurelio Wehrmeister
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce an approach for detecting modifications in assembled printed circuit boards based on photographs taken without tight control over perspective and illumination conditions. One instance of this problem is the visual inspection of gas pumps PCBs, which can be modified by fraudsters wishing to deceive costumers or evade taxes. Given the uncontrolled environment and the huge number of possible modifications, we address the problem as a case of anomaly detection, proposing an approach that is directed towards the characteristics of that scenario, while being well-suited for other similar applications. The proposed approach employs a deep convolutional autoencoder trained to reconstruct images of an unmodified board, but which remains unable to do the same for images showing modifications. By comparing the input image with its reconstruction, it is possible to segment anomalies and modifications in a pixel-wise manner. Experiments performed on a dataset built to represent real-world situations (and which we will make publicly available) show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches for anomaly segmentation in the considered scenario, while producing comparable results on the popular MVTec-AD dataset for a more general object anomaly detection task.
Safety-Critical Adaptation in Self-Adaptive Systems
Authors: Simon Diemert, Jens H. Weber
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Self Adaptive System

Modern systems are designed to operate in increasingly variable and uncertain environments. Not only are these environments complex, in the sense that they contain a tremendous number of variables, but they also change over time. Systems must be able to adjust their behaviour at run-time to manage these uncertainties. These self-adaptive systems have been studied extensively. This paper proposes a definition of a safety-critical self-adaptive system and then describes a taxonomy for classifying adaptations into different types based on their impact on the system's safety and the system's safety case. The taxonomy expresses criteria for classification and then describes specific criteria that the safety case for a self-adaptive system must satisfy, depending on the type of adaptations performed. Each type in the taxonomy is illustrated using the example of a safety-critical self-adaptive water heating system.
Digital Twin and Artificial Intelligence Incorporated With Surrogate Modeling for Hybrid and Sustainable Energy Systems
Authors: Abid Hossain Khan, Salauddin Omar, Nadia Mushtary, Richa Verma, Dinesh Kumar, Syed Alam
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00

Surrogate modeling has brought about a revolution in computation in the branches of science and engineering. Backed by Artificial Intelligence, a surrogate model can present highly accurate results with a significant reduction in computation time than computer simulation of actual models. Surrogate modeling techniques have found their use in numerous branches of science and engineering, energy system modeling being one of them. Since the idea of hybrid and sustainable energy systems is spreading rapidly in the modern world for the paradigm of the smart energy shift, researchers are exploring the future application of artificial intelligence-based surrogate modeling in analyzing and optimizing hybrid energy systems. One of the promising technologies for assessing applicability for the energy system is the digital twin, which can leverage surrogate modeling. This work presents a comprehensive framework/review on Artificial Intelligence-driven surrogate modeling and its applications with a focus on the digital twin framework and energy systems. The role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in constructing an effective surrogate model is explained. After that, different surrogate models developed for different sustainable energy sources are presented. Finally, digital twin surrogate models and associated uncertainties are described.
Topological Singularity Detection at Multiple Scales
Authors: Julius von Rohrscheidt, Bastian Rieck
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00

The manifold hypothesis, which assumes that data lies on or close to an unknown manifold of low intrinsic dimension, is a staple of modern machine learning research. However, recent work has shown that real-world data exhibits distinct non-manifold structures, i.e. singularities, that can lead to erroneous findings. Detecting such singularities is therefore crucial as a precursor to interpolation and inference tasks. We address this issue by developing a topological framework that (i) quantifies the local intrinsic dimension, and (ii) yields a Euclidicity score for assessing the 'manifoldness' of a point along multiple scales. Our approach identifies singularities of complex spaces, while also capturing singular structures and local geometric complexity in image data.
Multi-Task Option Learning and Discovery for Stochastic Path Planning
Authors: Naman Shah, Siddharth Srivastava
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00

This paper addresses the problem of reliably and efficiently solving broad classes of long-horizon stochastic path planning problems. Starting with a vanilla RL formulation with a stochastic dynamics simulator and an occupancy matrix of the environment, our approach computes useful options with policies as well as high-level paths that compose the discovered options. Our main contributions are (1) data-driven methods for creating abstract states that serve as endpoints for helpful options, (2) methods for computing option policies using auto-generated option guides in the form of dense pseudo-reward functions, and (3) an overarching algorithm for composing the computed options. We show that this approach yields strong guarantees of executability and solvability: under fairly general conditions, the computed option guides lead to composable option policies and consequently ensure downward refinability. Empirical evaluation on a range of robots, environments, and tasks shows that this approach effectively transfers knowledge across related tasks and that it outperforms existing approaches by a significant margin.
Improving Policy Learning via Language Dynamics Distillation
Authors: Victor Zhong, Jesse Mu, Luke Zettlemoyer, Edward Grefenstette, Tim Rocktäschel
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: NetHack, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent work has shown that augmenting environments with language descriptions improves policy learning. However, for environments with complex language abstractions, learning how to ground language to observations is difficult due to sparse, delayed rewards. We propose Language Dynamics Distillation (LDD), which pretrains a model to predict environment dynamics given demonstrations with language descriptions, and then fine-tunes these language-aware pretrained representations via reinforcement learning (RL). In this way, the model is trained to both maximize expected reward and retain knowledge about how language relates to environment dynamics. On SILG, a benchmark of five tasks with language descriptions that evaluate distinct generalization challenges on unseen environments (NetHack, ALFWorld, RTFM, Messenger, and Touchdown), LDD outperforms tabula-rasa RL, VAE pretraining, and methods that learn from unlabeled demonstrations in inverse RL and reward shaping with pretrained experts. In our analyses, we show that language descriptions in demonstrations improve sample-efficiency and generalization across environments, and that dynamics modelling with expert demonstrations is more effective than with non-experts.
Application of Deep Q Learning with Simulation Results for Elevator Optimization
Authors: Zheng Cao, Raymond Guo, Caesar M. Tuguinay, Mark Pock, Jiayi Gao, Ziyu Wang
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning

This paper presents a methodology for combining programming and mathematics to optimize elevator wait times. Based on simulated user data generated according to the canonical three-peak model of elevator traffic, we first develop a naive model from an intuitive understanding of the logic behind elevators. We take into consideration a general array of features including capacity, acceleration, and maximum wait time thresholds to adequately model realistic circumstances. Using the same evaluation framework, we proceed to develop a Deep Q Learning model in an attempt to match the hard-coded naive approach for elevator control. Throughout the majority of the paper, we work under a Markov Decision Process (MDP) schema, but later explore how the assumption fails to characterize the highly stochastic overall Elevator Group Control System (EGCS).
DecAF: Joint Decoding of Answers and Logical Forms for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases
Authors: Donghan Yu, Sheng Zhang, Patrick Ng, Henghui Zhu, Alexander Hanbo Li, Jun Wang, Yiqun Hu, William Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Bing Xiang
Date: 2022-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking, Question Answering, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Question answering over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to answer natural language questions with factual information such as entities and relations in KBs. Previous methods either generate logical forms that can be executed over KBs to obtain final answers or predict answers directly. Empirical results show that the former often produces more accurate answers, but it suffers from non-execution issues due to potential syntactic and semantic errors in the generated logical forms. In this work, we propose a novel framework DecAF that jointly generates both logical forms and direct answers, and then combines the merits of them to get the final answers. Moreover, different from most of the previous methods, DecAF is based on simple free-text retrieval without relying on any entity linking tools -- this simplification eases its adaptation to different datasets. DecAF achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy on WebQSP, FreebaseQA, and GrailQA benchmarks, while getting competitive results on the ComplexWebQuestions benchmark.