pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DNS-Rec: Data-aware Neural Architecture Search for Recommender Systems
Authors: Sheng Zhang, Maolin Wang, Yao Zhao, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu, Ruocheng Guo, Xiangyu Zhao, Zijian Zhang, Hongzhi Yin
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Recommendation Systems

In the era of data proliferation, efficiently sifting through vast information to extract meaningful insights has become increasingly crucial. This paper addresses the computational overhead and resource inefficiency prevalent in existing Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs). We introduce an innovative approach combining pruning methods with advanced model designs. Furthermore, we delve into resource-constrained Neural Architecture Search (NAS), an emerging technique in recommender systems, to optimize models in terms of FLOPs, latency, and energy consumption while maintaining or enhancing accuracy. Our principal contribution is the development of a Data-aware Neural Architecture Search for Recommender System (DNS-Rec). DNS-Rec is specifically designed to tailor compact network architectures for attention-based SRS models, thereby ensuring accuracy retention. It incorporates data-aware gates to enhance the performance of the recommendation network by learning information from historical user-item interactions. Moreover, DNS-Rec employs a dynamic resource constraint strategy, stabilizing the search process and yielding more suitable architectural solutions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through rigorous experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets, which highlight the superiority of DNS-Rec in SRSs. Our findings set a new standard for future research in efficient and accurate recommendation systems, marking a significant step forward in this rapidly evolving field.
On the $O(\frac{\sqrt{d}}{T^{1/4}})$ Convergence Rate of RMSProp and Its Momentum Extension Measured by $\ell_1$ Norm
Authors: Huan Li, Yiming Dong, Zhouchen Lin
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00

Although adaptive gradient methods have been extensively used in deep learning, their convergence rates proved in the literature are all slower than that of SGD, particularly with respect to their dependence on the dimension. This paper considers the classical RMSProp and its momentum extension and establishes the convergence rate of $\frac{1}{T}\sum_{k=1}^T E\left[\|\nabla f(x^k)\|_1\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{d}C}{T^{1/4}})$ measured by $\ell_1$ norm without the bounded gradient assumption, where $d$ is the dimension of the optimization variable, $T$ is the iteration number, and $C$ is a constant identical to that appeared in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Our convergence rate matches the lower bound with respect to all the coefficients except the dimension $d$. Since $\|x\|_2\ll\|x\|_1\leq\sqrt{d}\|x\|_2$ for problems with extremely large $d$, our convergence rate can be considered to be analogous to the $\frac{1}{T}\sum_{k=1}^T E\left[\|\nabla f(x^k)\|_2\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{T^{1/4}})$ rate of SGD in the ideal case of $\|\nabla f(x)\|_1=\varTheta(\sqrt{d}\|\nabla f(x)\|_2)$.
Cumulative Distribution Function based General Temporal Point Processes
Authors: Maolin Wang, Yu Pan, Zenglin Xu, Ruocheng Guo, Xiangyu Zhao, Wanyu Wang, Yiqi Wang, Zitao Liu, Langming Liu
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Point Processes, Recommendation Systems

Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) hold a pivotal role in modeling event sequences across diverse domains, including social networking and e-commerce, and have significantly contributed to the advancement of recommendation systems and information retrieval strategies. Through the analysis of events such as user interactions and transactions, TPPs offer valuable insights into behavioral patterns, facilitating the prediction of future trends. However, accurately forecasting future events remains a formidable challenge due to the intricate nature of these patterns. The integration of Neural Networks with TPPs has ushered in the development of advanced deep TPP models. While these models excel at processing complex and nonlinear temporal data, they encounter limitations in modeling intensity functions, grapple with computational complexities in integral computations, and struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies effectively. In this study, we introduce the CuFun model, representing a novel approach to TPPs that revolves around the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF). CuFun stands out by uniquely employing a monotonic neural network for CDF representation, utilizing past events as a scaling factor. This innovation significantly bolsters the model's adaptability and precision across a wide range of data scenarios. Our approach addresses several critical issues inherent in traditional TPP modeling: it simplifies log-likelihood calculations, extends applicability beyond predefined density function forms, and adeptly captures long-range temporal patterns. Our contributions encompass the introduction of a pioneering CDF-based TPP model, the development of a methodology for incorporating past event information into future event prediction, and empirical validation of CuFun's effectiveness through extensive experimentation on synthetic and real-world datasets.
Legged Robot State Estimation With Invariant Extended Kalman Filter Using Neural Measurement Network
Authors: Donghoon Youm, Hyunsik Oh, Suyoung Choi, Hyeongjun Kim, Jemin Hwangbo
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

This paper introduces a novel proprioceptive state estimator for legged robots that combines model-based filters and deep neural networks. Recent studies have shown that neural networks such as multi-layer perceptron or recurrent neural networks can estimate the robot states, including contact probability and linear velocity. Inspired by this, we develop a state estimation framework that integrates a neural measurement network (NMN) with an invariant extended Kalman filter. We show that our framework improves estimation performance in various terrains. Existing studies that combine model-based filters and learning-based approaches typically use real-world data. However, our approach relies solely on simulation data, as it allows us to easily obtain extensive data. This difference leads to a gap between the learning and the inference domain, commonly referred to as a sim-to-real gap. We address this challenge by adapting existing learning techniques and regularization. To validate our proposed method, we conduct experiments using a quadruped robot on four types of terrain: \textit{flat}, \textit{debris}, \textit{soft}, and \textit{slippery}. We observe that our approach significantly reduces position drift compared to the existing model-based state estimator.
Climate Trends of Tropical Cyclone Intensity and Energy Extremes Revealed by Deep Learning
Authors: Buo-Fu Chen, Boyo Chen, Chun-Min Hsiao, Hsu-Feng Teng, Cheng-Shang Lee, Hung-Chi Kuo
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00

Anthropogenic influences have been linked to tropical cyclone (TC) poleward migration, TC extreme precipitation, and an increased proportion of major hurricanes [1, 2, 3, 4]. Understanding past TC trends and variability is critical for projecting future TC impacts on human society considering the changing climate [5]. However, past trends of TC structure/energy remain uncertain due to limited observations; subjective-analyzed and spatiotemporal-heterogeneous "best-track" datasets lead to reduced confidence in the assessed TC repose to climate change [6, 7]. Here, we use deep learning to reconstruct past "observations" and yield an objective global TC wind profile dataset during 1981 to 2020, facilitating a comprehensive examination of TC structure/energy. By training with uniquely labeled data integrating best tracks and numerical model analysis of 2004 to 2018 TCs, our model converts multichannel satellite imagery to a 0-750-km wind profile of axisymmetric surface winds. The model performance is verified to be sufficient for climate studies by comparing it to independent satellite-radar surface winds. Based on the new homogenized dataset, the major TC proportion has increased by ~13% in the past four decades. Moreover, the proportion of extremely high-energy TCs has increased by ~25%, along with an increasing trend (> one standard deviation of the 40-y variability) of the mean total energy of high-energy TCs. Although the warming ocean favors TC intensification, the TC track migration to higher latitudes and altered environments further affect TC structure/energy. This new deep learning method/dataset reveals novel trends regarding TC structure extremes and may help verify simulations/studies regarding TCs in the changing climate.
Adaptive Primal-Dual Method for Safe Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Weiqin Chen, James Onyejizu, Long Vu, Lan Hoang, Dharmashankar Subramanian, Koushik Kar, Sandipan Mishra, Santiago Paternain
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning

Primal-dual methods have a natural application in Safe Reinforcement Learning (SRL), posed as a constrained policy optimization problem. In practice however, applying primal-dual methods to SRL is challenging, due to the inter-dependency of the learning rate (LR) and Lagrangian multipliers (dual variables) each time an embedded unconstrained RL problem is solved. In this paper, we propose, analyze and evaluate adaptive primal-dual (APD) methods for SRL, where two adaptive LRs are adjusted to the Lagrangian multipliers so as to optimize the policy in each iteration. We theoretically establish the convergence, optimality and feasibility of the APD algorithm. Finally, we conduct numerical evaluation of the practical APD algorithm with four well-known environments in Bullet-Safey-Gym employing two state-of-the-art SRL algorithms: PPO-Lagrangian and DDPG-Lagrangian. All experiments show that the practical APD algorithm outperforms (or achieves comparable performance) and attains more stable training than the constant LR cases. Additionally, we substantiate the robustness of selecting the two adaptive LRs by empirical evidence.
On the Challenges of Fuzzing Techniques via Large Language Models
Authors: Linghan Huang, Peizhou Zhao, Huaming Chen, Lei Ma
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: software testing, Survey

In the modern era where software plays a pivotal role, software security and vulnerability analysis are essential for secure software development. Fuzzing test, as an efficient and traditional software testing method, has been widely adopted across various domains. Meanwhile, the rapid development in Large Language Models (LLMs) has facilitated their application in the field of software testing, demonstrating remarkable performance. As existing fuzzing test techniques are not fully automated and software vulnerabilities continue to evolve, there is a growing interest in leveraging large language models to generate fuzzing test. In this paper, we present a systematic overview of the developments that utilize large language models for the fuzzing test. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that covers the intersection of three areas, including LLMs, fuzzing test, and fuzzing test generated based on LLMs. A statistical analysis and discussion of the literature are conducted by summarizing the state-of-the-art methods up to date of the submission. Our work also investigates the potential for widespread deployment and application of fuzzing test techniques generated by LLMs in the future, highlighting their promise for advancing automated software testing practices.
ODICE: Revealing the Mystery of Distribution Correction Estimation via Orthogonal-gradient Update
Authors: Liyuan Mao, Haoran Xu, Weinan Zhang, Xianyuan Zhan
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this study, we investigate the DIstribution Correction Estimation (DICE) methods, an important line of work in offline reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL). DICE-based methods impose state-action-level behavior constraint, which is an ideal choice for offline learning. However, they typically perform much worse than current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods that solely use action-level behavior constraint. After revisiting DICE-based methods, we find there exist two gradient terms when learning the value function using true-gradient update: forward gradient (taken on the current state) and backward gradient (taken on the next state). Using forward gradient bears a large similarity to many offline RL methods, and thus can be regarded as applying action-level constraint. However, directly adding the backward gradient may degenerate or cancel out its effect if these two gradients have conflicting directions. To resolve this issue, we propose a simple yet effective modification that projects the backward gradient onto the normal plane of the forward gradient, resulting in an orthogonal-gradient update, a new learning rule for DICE-based methods. We conduct thorough theoretical analyses and find that the projected backward gradient brings state-level behavior regularization, which reveals the mystery of DICE-based methods: the value learning objective does try to impose state-action-level constraint, but needs to be used in a corrected way. Through toy examples and extensive experiments on complex offline RL and IL tasks, we demonstrate that DICE-based methods using orthogonal-gradient updates (O-DICE) achieve SOTA performance and great robustness.
Multi-agent Path Finding for Cooperative Autonomous Driving
Authors: Zhongxia Yan, Han Zheng, Cathy Wu
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Multi-Agent Path Finding, Scheduling

Anticipating possible future deployment of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), cooperative autonomous driving at intersections has been studied by many works in control theory and intelligent transportation across decades. Simultaneously, recent parallel works in robotics have devised efficient algorithms for multi-agent path finding (MAPF), though often in environments with simplified kinematics. In this work, we hybridize insights and algorithms from MAPF with the structure and heuristics of optimizing the crossing order of CAVs at signal-free intersections. We devise an optimal and complete algorithm, Order-based Search with Kinematics Arrival Time Scheduling (OBS-KATS), which significantly outperforms existing algorithms, fixed heuristics, and prioritized planning with KATS. The performance is maintained under different vehicle arrival rates, lane lengths, crossing speeds, and control horizon. Through ablations and dissections, we offer insight on the contributing factors to OBS-KATS's performance. Our work is directly applicable to many similarly scaled traffic and multi-robot scenarios with directed lanes.
SCO-VIST: Social Interaction Commonsense Knowledge-based Visual Storytelling
Authors: Eileen Wang, Soyeon Caren Han, Josiah Poon
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Captioning, Visual Grounding, Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling aims to automatically generate a coherent story based on a given image sequence. Unlike tasks like image captioning, visual stories should contain factual descriptions, worldviews, and human social commonsense to put disjointed elements together to form a coherent and engaging human-writeable story. However, most models mainly focus on applying factual information and using taxonomic/lexical external knowledge when attempting to create stories. This paper introduces SCO-VIST, a framework representing the image sequence as a graph with objects and relations that includes human action motivation and its social interaction commonsense knowledge. SCO-VIST then takes this graph representing plot points and creates bridges between plot points with semantic and occurrence-based edge weights. This weighted story graph produces the storyline in a sequence of events using Floyd-Warshall's algorithm. Our proposed framework produces stories superior across multiple metrics in terms of visual grounding, coherence, diversity, and humanness, per both automatic and human evaluations.
The whack-a-mole governance challenge for AI-enabled synthetic biology: literature review and emerging frameworks
Authors: Trond Arne Undheim
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00

AI-enabled synthetic biology has tremendous potential but also significantly increases biorisks and brings about a new set of dual use concerns. The picture is complicated given the vast innovations envisioned to emerge by combining emerging technologies, as AI-enabled synthetic biology potentially scales up bioengineering into industrial biomanufacturing. However, the literature review indicates that goals such as maintaining a reasonable scope for innovation, or more ambitiously to foster a huge bioeconomy don't necessarily contrast with biosafety, but need to go hand in hand. This paper presents a literature review of the issues and describes emerging frameworks for policy and practice that transverse the options of command-and control, stewardship, bottom-up, and laissez-faire governance. How to achieve early warning systems that enable prevention and mitigation of future AI-enabled biohazards from the lab, from deliberate misuse, or from the public realm, will constantly need to evolve, and adaptive, interactive approaches should emerge. Although biorisk is subject to an established governance regime, and scientists generally adhere to biosafety protocols, even experimental, but legitimate use by scientists could lead to unexpected developments. Recent advances in chatbots enabled by generative AI have revived fears that advanced biological insight can more easily get into the hands of malignant individuals or organizations. Given these sets of issues, society needs to rethink how AI-enabled synthetic biology should be governed. The suggested way to visualize the challenge at hand is whack-a-mole governance, although the emerging solutions are perhaps not so different either.
An Accurate and Low-Parameter Machine Learning Architecture for Next Location Prediction
Authors: Calvin Jary, Nafiseh Kahani
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Prediction

Next location prediction is a discipline that involves predicting a users next location. Its applications include resource allocation, quality of service, energy efficiency, and traffic management. This paper proposes an energy-efficient, small, and low parameter machine learning (ML) architecture for accurate next location prediction, deployable on modest base stations and edge devices. To accomplish this we ran a hundred hyperparameter experiments on the full human mobility patterns of an entire city, to determine an exact ML architecture that reached a plateau of accuracy with the least amount of model parameters. We successfully achieved a reduction in the number of model parameters within published ML architectures from 202 million down to 2 million. This reduced the total size of the model parameters from 791 MB down to 8 MB. Additionally, this decreased the training time by a factor of four, the amount of graphics processing unit (GPU) memory needed for training by a factor of twenty, and the overall accuracy was increased from 80.16% to 82.54%. This improvement allows for modest base stations and edge devices which do not have a large amount of memory or storage, to deploy and utilize the proposed ML architecture for next location prediction.
PAP-REC: Personalized Automatic Prompt for Recommendation Language Model
Authors: Zelong Li, Jianchao Ji, Yingqiang Ge, Wenyue Hua, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recently emerged prompt-based Recommendation Language Models (RLM) can solve multiple recommendation tasks uniformly. The RLMs make full use of the inherited knowledge learned from the abundant pre-training data to solve the downstream recommendation tasks by prompts, without introducing additional parameters or network training. However, handcrafted prompts require significant expertise and human effort since slightly rewriting prompts may cause massive performance changes. In this paper, we propose PAP-REC, a framework to generate the Personalized Automatic Prompt for RECommendation language models to mitigate the inefficiency and ineffectiveness problems derived from manually designed prompts. Specifically, personalized automatic prompts allow different users to have different prompt tokens for the same task, automatically generated using a gradient-based method. One challenge for personalized automatic prompt generation for recommendation language models is the extremely large search space, leading to a long convergence time. To effectively and efficiently address the problem, we develop surrogate metrics and leverage an alternative updating schedule for prompting recommendation language models. Experimental results show that our PAP-REC framework manages to generate personalized prompts, and the automatically generated prompts outperform manually constructed prompts and also outperform various baseline recommendation models. The source code of the work is available at https://github.com/rutgerswiselab/PAP-REC.
Computational Experiments Meet Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey and Perspective
Authors: Qun Ma, Xiao Xue, Deyu Zhou, Xiangning Yu, Donghua Liu, Xuwen Zhang, Zihan Zhao, Yifan Shen, Peilin Ji, Juanjuan Li, Gang Wang, Wanpeng Ma
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Computational experiments have emerged as a valuable method for studying complex systems, involving the algorithmization of counterfactuals. However, accurately representing real social systems in Agent-based Modeling (ABM) is challenging due to the diverse and intricate characteristics of humans, including bounded rationality and heterogeneity. To address this limitation, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been proposed, enabling agents to possess anthropomorphic abilities such as complex reasoning and autonomous learning. These agents, known as LLM-based Agent, offer the potential to enhance the anthropomorphism lacking in ABM. Nonetheless, the absence of explicit explainability in LLMs significantly hinders their application in the social sciences. Conversely, computational experiments excel in providing causal analysis of individual behaviors and complex phenomena. Thus, combining computational experiments with LLM-based Agent holds substantial research potential. This paper aims to present a comprehensive exploration of this fusion. Primarily, it outlines the historical development of agent structures and their evolution into artificial societies, emphasizing their importance in computational experiments. Then it elucidates the advantages that computational experiments and LLM-based Agents offer each other, considering the perspectives of LLM-based Agent for computational experiments and vice versa. Finally, this paper addresses the challenges and future trends in this research domain, offering guidance for subsequent related studies.