pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Resilient and Accessible Distribution-Preserving Watermark for Large Language Models
Authors: Yihan Wu, Zhengmian Hu, Junfeng Guo, Hongyang Zhang, Heng Huang
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Watermarking techniques offer a promising way to identify machine-generated content via embedding covert information into the contents generated from language models. A challenge in the domain lies in preserving the distribution of original generated content after watermarking. Our research extends and improves upon existing watermarking framework, placing emphasis on the importance of a \textbf{Di}stribution-\textbf{P}reserving (DiP) watermark. Contrary to the current strategies, our proposed DiPmark simultaneously preserves the original token distribution during watermarking (distribution-preserving), is detectable without access to the language model API and prompts (accessible), and is provably robust to moderate changes of tokens (resilient). DiPmark operates by selecting a random set of tokens prior to the generation of a word, then modifying the token distribution through a distribution-preserving reweight function to enhance the probability of these selected tokens during the sampling process. Extensive empirical evaluation on various language models and tasks demonstrates our approach's distribution-preserving property, accessibility, and resilience, making it a effective solution for watermarking tasks that demand impeccable quality preservation.
SurroCBM: Concept Bottleneck Surrogate Models for Generative Post-hoc Explanation
Authors: Bo Pan, Zhenke Liu, Yifei Zhang, Liang Zhao
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Explainable AI seeks to bring light to the decision-making processes of black-box models. Traditional saliency-based methods, while highlighting influential data segments, often lack semantic understanding. Recent advancements, such as Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) and Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), offer concept-based explanations but necessitate human-defined concepts. However, human-annotated concepts are expensive to attain. This paper introduces the Concept Bottleneck Surrogate Models (SurroCBM), a novel framework that aims to explain the black-box models with automatically discovered concepts. SurroCBM identifies shared and unique concepts across various black-box models and employs an explainable surrogate model for post-hoc explanations. An effective training strategy using self-generated data is proposed to enhance explanation quality continuously. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of SurroCBM in concept discovery and explanation, underscoring its potential in advancing the field of explainable AI.
Controllable Data Generation Via Iterative Data-Property Mutual Mappings
Authors: Bo Pan, Muran Qin, Shiyu Wang, Yifei Zhang, Liang Zhao
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

Deep generative models have been widely used for their ability to generate realistic data samples in various areas, such as images, molecules, text, and speech. One major goal of data generation is controllability, namely to generate new data with desired properties. Despite growing interest in the area of controllable generation, significant challenges still remain, including 1) disentangling desired properties with unrelated latent variables, 2) out-of-distribution property control, and 3) objective optimization for out-of-distribution property control. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a general framework to enhance VAE-based data generators with property controllability and ensure disentanglement. Our proposed objective can be optimized on both data seen and unseen in the training set. We propose a training procedure to train the objective in a semi-supervised manner by iteratively conducting mutual mappings between the data and properties. The proposed framework is implemented on four VAE-based controllable generators to evaluate its performance on property error, disentanglement, generation quality, and training time. The results indicate that our proposed framework enables more precise control over the properties of generated samples in a short training time, ensuring the disentanglement and keeping the validity of the generated samples.
Explainable Image Similarity: Integrating Siamese Networks and Grad-CAM
Authors: Ioannis E. Livieris, Emmanuel Pintelas, Niki Kiriakidou, Panagiotis Pintelas
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Decision Making

With the proliferation of image-based applications in various domains, the need for accurate and interpretable image similarity measures has become increasingly critical. Existing image similarity models often lack transparency, making it challenging to understand the reasons why two images are considered similar. In this paper, we propose the concept of explainable image similarity, where the goal is the development of an approach, which is capable of providing similarity scores along with visual factual and counterfactual explanations. Along this line, we present a new framework, which integrates Siamese Networks and Grad-CAM for providing explainable image similarity and discuss the potential benefits and challenges of adopting this approach. In addition, we provide a comprehensive discussion about factual and counterfactual explanations provided by the proposed framework for assisting decision making. The proposed approach has the potential to enhance the interpretability, trustworthiness and user acceptance of image-based systems in real-world image similarity applications. The implementation code can be found in https://github.com/ioannislivieris/Grad_CAM_Siamese.git.
Composite Backdoor Attacks Against Large Language Models
Authors: Hai Huang, Zhengyu Zhao, Michael Backes, Yun Shen, Yang Zhang
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance compared to previous methods on various tasks, and often serve as the foundation models for many researches and services. However, the untrustworthy third-party LLMs may covertly introduce vulnerabilities for downstream tasks. In this paper, we explore the vulnerability of LLMs through the lens of backdoor attacks. Different from existing backdoor attacks against LLMs, ours scatters multiple trigger keys in different prompt components. Such a Composite Backdoor Attack (CBA) is shown to be stealthier than implanting the same multiple trigger keys in only a single component. CBA ensures that the backdoor is activated only when all trigger keys appear. Our experiments demonstrate that CBA is effective in both natural language processing (NLP) and multimodal tasks. For instance, with $3\%$ poisoning samples against the LLaMA-7B model on the Emotion dataset, our attack achieves a $100\%$ Attack Success Rate (ASR) with a False Triggered Rate (FTR) below $2.06\%$ and negligible model accuracy degradation. Our work highlights the necessity of increased security research on the trustworthiness of foundation LLMs.
Stabilizing Estimates of Shapley Values with Control Variates
Authors: Jeremy Goldwasser, Giles Hooker
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00

Shapley values are among the most popular tools for explaining predictions of blackbox machine learning models. However, their high computational cost motivates the use of sampling approximations, inducing a considerable degree of uncertainty. To stabilize these model explanations, we propose ControlSHAP, an approach based on the Monte Carlo technique of control variates. Our methodology is applicable to any machine learning model and requires virtually no extra computation or modeling effort. On several high-dimensional datasets, we find it can produce dramatic reductions in the Monte Carlo variability of Shapley estimates.
GRaMuFeN: Graph-based Multi-modal Fake News Detection in Social Media
Authors: Makan Kananian, Fatima Badiei, S. AmirAli Gh. Ghahramani
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection

The proliferation of social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Weibo has significantly enhanced the dissemination of false information. This phenomenon grants both individuals and governmental entities the ability to shape public opinions, highlighting the need for deploying effective detection methods. In this paper, we propose GraMuFeN, a model designed to detect fake content by analyzing both the textual and image content of news. GraMuFeN comprises two primary components: a text encoder and an image encoder. For textual analysis, GraMuFeN treats each text as a graph and employs a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) as the text encoder. Additionally, the pre-trained ResNet-152, as a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), has been utilized as the image encoder. By integrating the outputs from these two encoders and implementing a contrastive similarity loss function, GraMuFeN achieves remarkable results. Extensive evaluations conducted on two publicly available benchmark datasets for social media news indicate a 10 % increase in micro F1-Score, signifying improvement over existing state-of-the-art models. These findings underscore the effectiveness of combining GCN and CNN models for detecting fake news in multi-modal data, all while minimizing the additional computational burden imposed by model parameters.
Global Minima, Recoverability Thresholds, and Higher-Order Structure in GNNS
Authors: Drake Brown, Trevor Garrity, Kaden Parker, Jason Oliphant, Stone Carson, Cole Hanson, Zachary Boyd
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Stochastic Block Model

We analyze the performance of graph neural network (GNN) architectures from the perspective of random graph theory. Our approach promises to complement existing lenses on GNN analysis, such as combinatorial expressive power and worst-case adversarial analysis, by connecting the performance of GNNs to typical-case properties of the training data. First, we theoretically characterize the nodewise accuracy of one- and two-layer GCNs relative to the contextual stochastic block model (cSBM) and related models. We additionally prove that GCNs cannot beat linear models under certain circumstances. Second, we numerically map the recoverability thresholds, in terms of accuracy, of four diverse GNN architectures (GCN, GAT, SAGE, and Graph Transformer) under a variety of assumptions about the data. Sample results of this second analysis include: heavy-tailed degree distributions enhance GNN performance, GNNs can work well on strongly heterophilous graphs, and SAGE and Graph Transformer can perform well on arbitrarily noisy edge data, but no architecture handled sufficiently noisy feature data well. Finally, we show how both specific higher-order structures in synthetic data and the mix of empirical structures in real data have dramatic effects (usually negative) on GNN performance.
Deep Backtracking Counterfactuals for Causally Compliant Explanations
Authors: Klaus-Rudolf Kladny, Julius von Kügelgen, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michael Muehlebach
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Philosophy

Counterfactuals answer questions of what would have been observed under altered circumstances and can therefore offer valuable insights. Whereas the classical interventional interpretation of counterfactuals has been studied extensively, backtracking constitutes a less studied alternative where all causal laws are kept intact. In the present work, we introduce a practical method called deep backtracking counterfactuals (DeepBC) for computing backtracking counterfactuals in structural causal models that consist of deep generative components. We propose two distinct versions of our method--one utilizing Langevin Monte Carlo sampling and the other employing constrained optimization--to generate counterfactuals for high-dimensional data. As a special case, our formulation reduces to methods in the field of counterfactual explanations. Compared to these, our approach represents a causally compliant, versatile and modular alternative. We demonstrate these properties experimentally on a modified version of MNIST and CelebA.
The First Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge
Authors: Çağkan Yapar, Fabian Jaensch, Ron Levie, Gitta Kutyniok, Giuseppe Caire
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

To foster research and facilitate fair comparisons among recently proposed pathloss radio map prediction methods, we have launched the ICASSP 2023 First Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge. In this short overview paper, we briefly describe the pathloss prediction problem, the provided datasets, the challenge task and the challenge evaluation methodology. Finally, we present the results of the challenge.
Audio-Visual Neural Syntax Acquisition
Authors: Cheng-I Jeff Lai, Freda Shi, Puyuan Peng, Yoon Kim, Kevin Gimpel, Shiyu Chang, Yung-Sung Chuang, Saurabhchand Bhati, David Cox, David Harwath, Yang Zhang, Karen Livescu, James Glass
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Acquisition

We study phrase structure induction from visually-grounded speech. The core idea is to first segment the speech waveform into sequences of word segments, and subsequently induce phrase structure using the inferred segment-level continuous representations. We present the Audio-Visual Neural Syntax Learner (AV-NSL) that learns phrase structure by listening to audio and looking at images, without ever being exposed to text. By training on paired images and spoken captions, AV-NSL exhibits the capability to infer meaningful phrase structures that are comparable to those derived by naturally-supervised text parsers, for both English and German. Our findings extend prior work in unsupervised language acquisition from speech and grounded grammar induction, and present one approach to bridge the gap between the two topics.
Hypercomplex Multimodal Emotion Recognition from EEG and Peripheral Physiological Signals
Authors: Eleonora Lopez, Eleonora Chiarantano, Eleonora Grassucci, Danilo Comminiello
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal emotion recognition from physiological signals is receiving an increasing amount of attention due to the impossibility to control them at will unlike behavioral reactions, thus providing more reliable information. Existing deep learning-based methods still rely on extracted handcrafted features, not taking full advantage of the learning ability of neural networks, and often adopt a single-modality approach, while human emotions are inherently expressed in a multimodal way. In this paper, we propose a hypercomplex multimodal network equipped with a novel fusion module comprising parameterized hypercomplex multiplications. Indeed, by operating in a hypercomplex domain the operations follow algebraic rules which allow to model latent relations among learned feature dimensions for a more effective fusion step. We perform classification of valence and arousal from electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals, employing the publicly available database MAHNOB-HCI surpassing a multimodal state-of-the-art network. The code of our work is freely available at https://github.com/ispamm/MHyEEG.
Toward Understanding BERT-Like Pre-Training for DNA Foundation Models
Authors: Chaoqi Liang, Lifeng Qiao, Peng Ye, Nanqing Dong, Jianle Sun, Weiqiang Bai, Yuchen Ren, Xinzhu Ma, Hongliang Yan, Chunfeng Song, Wanli Ouyang, WangMeng Zuo
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00

With the success of large-scale pre-training in language tasks, there is an increasing trend of applying it to the domain of life sciences. In particular, pre-training methods based on DNA sequences have received increasing attention because of their potential to capture general information about genes. However, existing pre-training methods for DNA sequences largely rely on direct adoptions of BERT pre-training from NLP, lacking a comprehensive understanding and a specifically tailored approach. To address this research gap, we provide the first empirical study with three insightful observations. Based on the empirical study, we notice that overlapping tokenizer can benefit the fine-tuning of downstream tasks but leads to inadequate pre-training with fast convergence. To unleash the pre-training potential, we introduce a novel approach called RandomMask, which gradually increases the task difficulty of BERT-like pre-training by continuously expanding its mask boundary, forcing the model to learn more knowledge. RandomMask is simple but effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance across 6 downstream tasks. RandomMask achieves a staggering 68.16\% in Matthew's correlation coefficient for Epigenetic Mark Prediction, a groundbreaking increase of 19.85\% over the baseline and a remarkable 3.69\% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art result.
Evaluating Large Language Models at Evaluating Instruction Following
Authors: Zhiyuan Zeng, Jiatong Yu, Tianyu Gao, Yu Meng, Tanya Goyal, Danqi Chen
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

As research in large language models (LLMs) continues to accelerate, LLM-based evaluation has emerged as a scalable and cost-effective alternative to human evaluations for comparing the ever increasing list of models. This paper investigates the efficacy of these ``LLM evaluators'', particularly in using them to assess instruction following, a metric that gauges how closely generated text adheres to the given instruction. We introduce a challenging meta-evaluation benchmark, LLMBar, designed to test the ability of an LLM evaluator in discerning instruction-following outputs. The authors manually curated 419 pairs of outputs, one adhering to instructions while the other diverging, yet may possess deceptive qualities that mislead an LLM evaluator, e.g., a more engaging tone. Contrary to existing meta-evaluation, we discover that different evaluators (i.e., combinations of LLMs and prompts) exhibit distinct performance on LLMBar and even the highest-scoring ones have substantial room for improvement. We also present a novel suite of prompting strategies that further close the gap between LLM and human evaluators. With LLMBar, we hope to offer more insight into LLM evaluators and foster future research in developing better instruction-following models.
Prompt Backdoors in Visual Prompt Learning
Authors: Hai Huang, Zhengyu Zhao, Michael Backes, Yun Shen, Yang Zhang
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Prompt Learning

Fine-tuning large pre-trained computer vision models is infeasible for resource-limited users. Visual prompt learning (VPL) has thus emerged to provide an efficient and flexible alternative to model fine-tuning through Visual Prompt as a Service (VPPTaaS). Specifically, the VPPTaaS provider optimizes a visual prompt given downstream data, and downstream users can use this prompt together with the large pre-trained model for prediction. However, this new learning paradigm may also pose security risks when the VPPTaaS provider instead provides a malicious visual prompt. In this paper, we take the first step to explore such risks through the lens of backdoor attacks. Specifically, we propose BadVisualPrompt, a simple yet effective backdoor attack against VPL. For example, poisoning $5\%$ CIFAR10 training data leads to above $99\%$ attack success rates with only negligible model accuracy drop by $1.5\%$. In particular, we identify and then address a new technical challenge related to interactions between the backdoor trigger and visual prompt, which does not exist in conventional, model-level backdoors. Moreover, we provide in-depth analyses of seven backdoor defenses from model, prompt, and input levels. Overall, all these defenses are either ineffective or impractical to mitigate our BadVisualPrompt, implying the critical vulnerability of VPL.
Graph Transformer Network for Flood Forecasting with Heterogeneous Covariates
Authors: Jimeng Shi, Vitalii Stebliankin, Zhaonan Wang, Shaowen Wang, Giri Narasimhan
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Floods can be very destructive causing heavy damage to life, property, and livelihoods. Global climate change and the consequent sea-level rise have increased the occurrence of extreme weather events, resulting in elevated and frequent flood risk. Therefore, accurate and timely flood forecasting in coastal river systems is critical to facilitate good flood management. However, the computational tools currently used are either slow or inaccurate. In this paper, we propose a Flood prediction tool using Graph Transformer Network (FloodGTN) for river systems. More specifically, FloodGTN learns the spatio-temporal dependencies of water levels at different monitoring stations using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and an LSTM. It is currently implemented to consider external covariates such as rainfall, tide, and the settings of hydraulic structures (e.g., outflows of dams, gates, pumps, etc.) along the river. We use a Transformer to learn the attention given to external covariates in computing water levels. We apply the FloodGTN tool to data from the South Florida Water Management District, which manages a coastal area prone to frequent storms and hurricanes. Experimental results show that FloodGTN outperforms the physics-based model (HEC-RAS) by achieving higher accuracy with 70% improvement while speeding up run times by at least 500x.
Differentiable Euler Characteristic Transforms for Shape Classification
Authors: Ernst Roell, Bastian Rieck
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Point Cloud Classification

The Euler Characteristic Transform (ECT) has proven to be a powerful representation, combining geometrical and topological characteristics of shapes and graphs. However, the ECT was hitherto unable to learn task-specific representations. We overcome this issue and develop a novel computational layer that enables learning the ECT in an end-to-end fashion. Our method, the Differentiable Euler Characteristic Transform (DECT), is fast and computationally efficient, while exhibiting performance on a par with more complex models in both graph and point cloud classification tasks. Moreover, we show that this seemingly simple statistic provides the same topological expressivity as more complex topological deep learning layers.
Learning of Sea Surface Height Interpolation from Multi-variate Simulated Satellite Observations
Authors: Theo Archambault, Arthur Filoche, Anastase Charantonis, Dominique Bereziat, Sylvie Thiria
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00

Satellite-based remote sensing missions have revolutionized our understanding of the Ocean state and dynamics. Among them, space-borne altimetry provides valuable Sea Surface Height (SSH) measurements, used to estimate surface geostrophic currents. Due to the sensor technology employed, important gaps occur in SSH observations. Complete SSH maps are produced using linear Optimal Interpolations (OI) such as the widely-used Data Unification and Altimeter Combination System (DUACS). On the other hand, Sea Surface Temperature (SST) products have much higher data coverage and SST is physically linked to geostrophic currents through advection. We propose a new multi-variate Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) emulating 20 years of SSH and SST satellite observations. We train an Attention-Based Encoder-Decoder deep learning network (\textsc{abed}) on this data, comparing two settings: one with access to ground truth during training and one without. On our OSSE, we compare ABED reconstructions when trained using either supervised or unsupervised loss functions, with or without SST information. We evaluate the SSH interpolations in terms of eddy detection. We also introduce a new way to transfer the learning from simulation to observations: supervised pre-training on our OSSE followed by unsupervised fine-tuning on satellite data. Based on real SSH observations from the Ocean Data Challenge 2021, we find that this learning strategy, combined with the use of SST, decreases the root mean squared error by 24% compared to OI.