pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Finding Order in Chaos: A Novel Data Augmentation Method for Time Series in Contrastive Learning
Authors: Berken Utku Demirel, Christian Holz
Date: 2023-09-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Heart rate estimation, Human Activity Recognition, Time Series

The success of contrastive learning is well known to be dependent on data augmentation. Although the degree of data augmentations has been well controlled by utilizing pre-defined techniques in some domains like vision, time-series data augmentation is less explored and remains a challenging problem due to the complexity of the data generation mechanism, such as the intricate mechanism involved in the cardiovascular system. Moreover, there is no widely recognized and general time-series augmentation method that can be applied across different tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method for quasi-periodic time-series tasks that aims to connect intra-class samples together, and thereby find order in the latent space. Our method builds upon the well-known mixup technique by incorporating a novel approach that accounts for the periodic nature of non-stationary time-series. Also, by controlling the degree of chaos created by data augmentation, our method leads to improved feature representations and performance on downstream tasks. We evaluate our proposed method on three time-series tasks, including heart rate estimation, human activity recognition, and cardiovascular disease detection. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed approach outperforms prior works on optimal data generation and known data augmentation techniques in the three tasks, reflecting the effectiveness of the presented method. Source code: https://github.com/eth-siplab/Finding_Order_in_Chaos
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning for Attribute-Based Object Reference in Human-Robot Interaction
Authors: Peng Gao, Ahmed Jaafar, Brian Reily, Christopher Reardon, Hao Zhang
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 16k, Attribute, Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension, Zero-Shot Learning

Language-enabled robots have been widely studied over the past years to enable natural human-robot interaction and teaming in various real-world applications. Language-enabled robots must be able to comprehend referring expressions to identify a particular object from visual perception using a set of referring attributes extracted from natural language. However, visual observations of an object may not be available when it is referred to, and the number of objects and attributes may also be unbounded in open worlds. To address the challenges, we implement an attribute-based compositional zero-shot learning method that uses a list of attributes to perform referring expression comprehension in open worlds. We evaluate the approach on two datasets including the MIT-States and the Clothing 16K. The preliminary experimental results show that our implemented approach allows a robot to correctly identify the objects referred to by human commands.
TraceFL: Interpretability-Driven Debugging in Federated Learning via Neuron Provenance
Authors: Waris Gill, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Models, Fault localization, Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Interpretability Techniques for Deep Learning, Interpretable Machine Learning, Privacy Preserving, text-classification, Text Classification

In Federated Learning, clients train models on local data and send updates to a central server, which aggregates them into a global model using a fusion algorithm. This collaborative yet privacy-preserving training comes at a cost. FL developers face significant challenges in attributing global model predictions to specific clients. Localizing responsible clients is a crucial step towards (a) excluding clients primarily responsible for incorrect predictions and (b) encouraging clients who contributed high-quality models to continue participating in the future. Existing ML debugging approaches are inherently inapplicable as they are designed for single-model, centralized training. We introduce TraceFL, a fine-grained neuron provenance capturing mechanism that identifies clients responsible for a global model's prediction by tracking the flow of information from individual clients to the global model. Since inference on different inputs activates a different set of neurons of the global model, TraceFL dynamically quantifies the significance of the global model's neurons in a given prediction, identifying the most crucial neurons in the global model. It then maps them to the corresponding neurons in every participating client to determine each client's contribution, ultimately localizing the responsible client. We evaluate TraceFL on six datasets, including two real-world medical imaging datasets and four neural networks, including advanced models such as GPT. TraceFL achieves 99% accuracy in localizing the responsible client in FL tasks spanning both image and text classification tasks. At a time when state-of-the-artML debugging approaches are mostly domain-specific (e.g., image classification only), TraceFL is the first technique to enable highly accurate automated reasoning across a wide range of FL applications.
Navigating the Structured What-If Spaces: Counterfactual Generation via Structured Diffusion
Authors: Nishtha Madaan, Srikanta Bedathur
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Diversity

Generating counterfactual explanations is one of the most effective approaches for uncovering the inner workings of black-box neural network models and building user trust. While remarkable strides have been made in generative modeling using diffusion models in domains like vision, their utility in generating counterfactual explanations in structured modalities remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Structured Counterfactual Diffuser or SCD, the first plug-and-play framework leveraging diffusion for generating counterfactual explanations in structured data. SCD learns the underlying data distribution via a diffusion model which is then guided at test time to generate counterfactuals for any arbitrary black-box model, input, and desired prediction. Our experiments show that our counterfactuals not only exhibit high plausibility compared to the existing state-of-the-art but also show significantly better proximity and diversity.
Anchoring Path for Inductive Relation Prediction in Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Zhixiang Su, Di Wang, Chunyan Miao, Lizhen Cui
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Relation Prediction, Knowledge Graphs, Prediction, Relation, Relation Prediction, Retrieval, Sentence, World Knowledge

Aiming to accurately predict missing edges representing relations between entities, which are pervasive in real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs), relation prediction plays a critical role in enhancing the comprehensiveness and utility of KGs. Recent research focuses on path-based methods due to their inductive and explainable properties. However, these methods face a great challenge when lots of reasoning paths do not form Closed Paths (CPs) in the KG. To address this challenge, we propose Anchoring Path Sentence Transformer (APST) by introducing Anchoring Paths (APs) to alleviate the reliance of CPs. Specifically, we develop a search-based description retrieval method to enrich entity descriptions and an assessment mechanism to evaluate the rationality of APs. APST takes both APs and CPs as the inputs of a unified Sentence Transformer architecture, enabling comprehensive predictions and high-quality explanations. We evaluate APST on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 30 of 36 transductive, inductive, and few-shot experimental settings.
Towards More Faithful Natural Language Explanation Using Multi-Level Contrastive Learning in VQA
Authors: Chengen Lai, Shengli Song, Shiqi Meng, Jingyang Li, Sitong Yan, GuangNeng Hu
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Decision Making, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Natural language explanation in visual question answer (VQA-NLE) aims to explain the decision-making process of models by generating natural language sentences to increase users' trust in the black-box systems. Existing post-hoc methods have achieved significant progress in obtaining a plausible explanation. However, such post-hoc explanations are not always aligned with human logical inference, suffering from the issues on: 1) Deductive unsatisfiability, the generated explanations do not logically lead to the answer; 2) Factual inconsistency, the model falsifies its counterfactual explanation for answers without considering the facts in images; and 3) Semantic perturbation insensitivity, the model can not recognize the semantic changes caused by small perturbations. These problems reduce the faithfulness of explanations generated by models. To address the above issues, we propose a novel self-supervised \textbf{M}ulti-level \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{L}earning based natural language \textbf{E}xplanation model (MCLE) for VQA with semantic-level, image-level, and instance-level factual and counterfactual samples. MCLE extracts discriminative features and aligns the feature spaces from explanations with visual question and answer to generate more consistent explanations. We conduct extensive experiments, ablation analysis, and case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two VQA-NLE benchmarks.
Automatic Curriculum Learning with Gradient Reward Signals
Authors: Ryan Campbell, Junsang Yoon
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

This paper investigates the impact of using gradient norm reward signals in the context of Automatic Curriculum Learning (ACL) for deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We introduce a framework where the teacher model, utilizing the gradient norm information of a student model, dynamically adapts the learning curriculum. This approach is based on the hypothesis that gradient norms can provide a nuanced and effective measure of learning progress. Our experimental setup involves several reinforcement learning environments (PointMaze, AntMaze, and AdroitHandRelocate), to assess the efficacy of our method. We analyze how gradient norm rewards influence the teacher's ability to craft challenging yet achievable learning sequences, ultimately enhancing the student's performance. Our results show that this approach not only accelerates the learning process but also leads to improved generalization and adaptability in complex tasks. The findings underscore the potential of gradient norm signals in creating more efficient and robust ACL systems, opening new avenues for research in curriculum learning and reinforcement learning.
The Truth is in There: Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction
Authors: Pratyusha Sharma, Jordan T. Ash, Dipendra Misra
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a fixture in modern machine learning. Correspondingly, significant resources are allocated towards research that aims to further advance this technology, typically resulting in models of increasing size that are trained on increasing amounts of data. This work, however, demonstrates the surprising result that it is often possible to significantly improve the performance of LLMs by selectively removing higher-order components of their weight matrices. This simple intervention, which we call LAyer-SElective Rank reduction (LASER), can be done on a model after training has completed, and requires no additional parameters or data. We show extensive experiments demonstrating the generality of this finding across language models and datasets, and provide in-depth analyses offering insights into both when LASER is effective and the mechanism by which it operates.
Empowering Few-Shot Recommender Systems with Large Language Models -- Enhanced Representations
Authors: Zhoumeng Wang
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems utilizing explicit feedback have witnessed significant advancements and widespread applications over the past years. However, generating recommendations in few-shot scenarios remains a persistent challenge. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising solution for addressing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, thereby offering novel insights into tackling the few-shot scenarios encountered by explicit feedback-based recommender systems. To bridge recommender systems and LLMs, we devise a prompting template that generates user and item representations based on explicit feedback. Subsequently, we integrate these LLM-processed representations into various recommendation models to evaluate their significance across diverse recommendation tasks. Our ablation experiments and case study analysis collectively demonstrate the effectiveness of LLMs in processing explicit feedback, highlighting that LLMs equipped with generative and logical reasoning capabilities can effectively serve as a component of recommender systems to enhance their performance in few-shot scenarios. Furthermore, the broad adaptability of LLMs augments the generalization potential of recommender models, despite certain inherent constraints. We anticipate that our study can inspire researchers to delve deeper into the multifaceted dimensions of LLMs's involvement in recommender systems and contribute to the advancement of the explicit feedback-based recommender systems field.
Domain Adaptive Graph Classification
Authors: Siyang Luo, Ziyi Jiang, Zhenghan Chen, Xiaoxuan Liang
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Domain Adaptation, Graph Classification, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Despite the remarkable accomplishments of graph neural networks (GNNs), they typically rely on task-specific labels, posing potential challenges in terms of their acquisition. Existing work have been made to address this issue through the lens of unsupervised domain adaptation, wherein labeled source graphs are utilized to enhance the learning process for target data. However, the simultaneous exploration of graph topology and reduction of domain disparities remains a substantial hurdle. In this paper, we introduce the Dual Adversarial Graph Representation Learning (DAGRL), which explore the graph topology from dual branches and mitigate domain discrepancies via dual adversarial learning. Our method encompasses a dual-pronged structure, consisting of a graph convolutional network branch and a graph kernel branch, which enables us to capture graph semantics from both implicit and explicit perspectives. Moreover, our approach incorporates adaptive perturbations into the dual branches, which align the source and target distribution to address domain discrepancies. Extensive experiments on a wild range graph classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
HW-V2W-Map: Hardware Vulnerability to Weakness Mapping Framework for Root Cause Analysis with GPT-assisted Mitigation Suggestion
Authors: Yu-Zheng Lin, Muntasir Mamun, Muhtasim Alam Chowdhury, Shuyu Cai, Mingyu Zhu, Banafsheh Saber Latibari, Kevin Immanuel Gubbi, Najmeh Nazari Bavarsad, Arjun Caputo, Avesta Sasan, Houman Homayoun, Setareh Rafatirad, Pratik Satam, Soheil Salehi
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00

The escalating complexity of modern computing frameworks has resulted in a surge in the cybersecurity vulnerabilities reported to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) by practitioners. Despite the fact that the stature of NVD is one of the most significant databases for the latest insights into vulnerabilities, extracting meaningful trends from such a large amount of unstructured data is still challenging without the application of suitable technological methodologies. Previous efforts have mostly concentrated on software vulnerabilities; however, a holistic strategy incorporates approaches for mitigating vulnerabilities, score prediction, and a knowledge-generating system that may extract relevant insights from the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) and Common Vulnerability Exchange (CVE) databases is notably absent. As the number of hardware attacks on Internet of Things (IoT) devices continues to rapidly increase, we present the Hardware Vulnerability to Weakness Mapping (HW-V2W-Map) Framework, which is a Machine Learning (ML) framework focusing on hardware vulnerabilities and IoT security. The architecture that we have proposed incorporates an Ontology-driven Storytelling framework, which automates the process of updating the ontology in order to recognize patterns and evolution of vulnerabilities over time and provides approaches for mitigating the vulnerabilities. The repercussions of vulnerabilities can be mitigated as a result of this, and conversely, future exposures can be predicted and prevented. Furthermore, our proposed framework utilized Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide mitigation suggestions.
Preparing to Integrate Generative Pretrained Transformer Series 4 models into Genetic Variant Assessment Workflows: Assessing Performance, Drift, and Nondeterminism Characteristics Relative to Classifying Functional Evidence in Literature
Authors: Samuel J. Aronson, Kalotina Machini, Jiyeon Shin, Pranav Sriraman, Sean Hamill, Emma R. Henricks, Charlotte Mailly, Angie J. Nottage, Sami S. Amr, Michael Oates, Matthew S. Lebo
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Sensitivity

Background. Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise for improving genetic variant literature review in clinical testing. We assessed Generative Pretrained Transformer 4's (GPT-4) performance, nondeterminism, and drift to inform its suitability for use in complex clinical processes. Methods. A 2-prompt process for classification of functional evidence was optimized using a development set of 45 articles. The prompts asked GPT-4 to supply all functional data present in an article related to a variant or indicate that no functional evidence is present. For articles indicated as containing functional evidence, a second prompt asked GPT-4 to classify the evidence into pathogenic, benign, or intermediate/inconclusive categories. A final test set of 72 manually classified articles was used to test performance. Results. Over a 2.5-month period (Dec 2023-Feb 2024), we observed substantial differences in intraday (nondeterminism) and across day (drift) results, which lessened after 1/18/24. This variability is seen within and across models in the GPT-4 series, affecting different performance statistics to different degrees. Twenty runs after 1/18/24 identified articles containing functional evidence with 92.2% sensitivity, 95.6% positive predictive value (PPV) and 86.3% negative predictive value (NPV). The second prompt's identified pathogenic functional evidence with 90.0% sensitivity, 74.0% PPV and 95.3% NVP and for benign evidence with 88.0% sensitivity, 76.6% PPV and 96.9% NVP. Conclusion. Nondeterminism and drift within LLMs must be assessed and monitored when introducing LLM based functionality into clinical workflows. Failing to do this assessment or accounting for these challenges could lead to incorrect or missing information that is critical for patient care. The performance of our prompts appears adequate to assist in article prioritization but not in automated decision making.
Multimodal Federated Learning with Missing Modality via Prototype Mask and Contrast
Authors: Guangyin Bao, Qi Zhang, Duoqian Miao, Zixuan Gong, Liang Hu, Ke Liu, Yang Liu, Chongyang Shi
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

In real-world scenarios, multimodal federated learning often faces the practical challenge of intricate modality missing, which poses constraints on building federated frameworks and significantly degrades model inference accuracy. Existing solutions for addressing missing modalities generally involve developing modality-specific encoders on clients and training modality fusion modules on servers. However, these methods are primarily constrained to specific scenarios with either unimodal clients or complete multimodal clients, struggling to generalize effectively in the intricate modality missing scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a prototype library into the FedAvg-based Federated Learning framework, thereby empowering the framework with the capability to alleviate the global model performance degradation resulting from modality missing during both training and testing. The proposed method utilizes prototypes as masks representing missing modalities to formulate a task-calibrated training loss and a model-agnostic uni-modality inference strategy. In addition, a proximal term based on prototypes is constructed to enhance local training. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach. Compared to the baselines, our method improved inference accuracy by 3.7\% with 50\% modality missing during training and by 23.8\% during uni-modality inference. Code is available at https://github.com/BaoGuangYin/PmcmFL.
SPDGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network based on SPD Manifold Learning for Automatic Image Colorization
Authors: Youssef Mourchid, Marc Donias, Yannick Berthoumieu, Mohamed Najim
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Colorization, SSIM

This paper addresses the automatic colorization problem, which converts a gray-scale image to a colorized one. Recent deep-learning approaches can colorize automatically grayscale images. However, when it comes to different scenes which contain distinct color styles, it is difficult to accurately capture the color characteristics. In this work, we propose a fully automatic colorization approach based on Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) Manifold Learning with a generative adversarial network (SPDGAN) that improves the quality of the colorization results. Our SPDGAN model establishes an adversarial game between two discriminators and a generator. The latter is based on ResNet architecture with few alterations. Its goal is to generate fake colorized images without losing color information across layers through residual connections. Then, we employ two discriminators from different domains. The first one is devoted to the image pixel domain, while the second one is to the Riemann manifold domain which helps to avoid color misalignment. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Places365 and COCO-stuff databases to test the effect of each component of our SPDGAN. In addition, quantitative and qualitative comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by achieving more realistic colorized images with less artifacts visually, and good results of PSNR, SSIM, and FID values.