pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
centroIDA: Cross-Domain Class Discrepancy Minimization Based on Accumulative Class-Centroids for Imbalanced Domain Adaptation
Authors: Xiaona Sun, Zhenyu Wu, Yichen Liu, Saier Hu, ZhiQiang Zhan, Yang Ji
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Robust classification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) approaches address the covariate shift problem by minimizing the distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains, assuming that the label distribution is invariant across domains. However, in the imbalanced domain adaptation (IDA) scenario, covariate and long-tailed label shifts both exist across domains. To tackle the IDA problem, some current research focus on minimizing the distribution discrepancies of each corresponding class between source and target domains. Such methods rely much on the reliable pseudo labels' selection and the feature distributions estimation for target domain, and the minority classes with limited numbers makes the estimations more uncertainty, which influences the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain class discrepancy minimization method based on accumulative class-centroids for IDA (centroIDA). Firstly, class-based re-sampling strategy is used to obtain an unbiased classifier on source domain. Secondly, the accumulative class-centroids alignment loss is proposed for iterative class-centroids alignment across domains. Finally, class-wise feature alignment loss is used to optimize the feature representation for a robust classification boundary. A series of experiments have proved that our method outperforms other SOTA methods on IDA problem, especially with the increasing degree of label shift.
ST-RAP: A Spatio-Temporal Framework for Real Estate Appraisal
Authors: Hojoon Lee, Hawon Jeong, Byungkun Lee, Kyungyup Lee, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

In this paper, we introduce ST-RAP, a novel Spatio-Temporal framework for Real estate APpraisal. ST-RAP employs a hierarchical architecture with a heterogeneous graph neural network to encapsulate temporal dynamics and spatial relationships simultaneously. Through comprehensive experiments on a large-scale real estate dataset, ST-RAP outperforms previous methods, demonstrating the significant benefits of integrating spatial and temporal aspects in real estate appraisal. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/dojeon-ai/STRAP.
Analyzing Complex Systems with Cascades Using Continuous-Time Bayesian Networks
Authors: Alessandro Bregoli, Karin Rathsman, Marco Scutari, Fabio Stella, Søren Wengel Mogensen
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00

Interacting systems of events may exhibit cascading behavior where events tend to be temporally clustered. While the cascades themselves may be obvious from the data, it is important to understand which states of the system trigger them. For this purpose, we propose a modeling framework based on continuous-time Bayesian networks (CTBNs) to analyze cascading behavior in complex systems. This framework allows us to describe how events propagate through the system and to identify likely sentry states, that is, system states that may lead to imminent cascading behavior. Moreover, CTBNs have a simple graphical representation and provide interpretable outputs, both of which are important when communicating with domain experts. We also develop new methods for knowledge extraction from CTBNs and we apply the proposed methodology to a data set of alarms in a large industrial system.
RADIANCE: Radio-Frequency Adversarial Deep-learning Inference for Automated Network Coverage Estimation
Authors: Sopan Sarkar, Mohammad Hossein Manshaei, Marwan Krunz
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, MS-SSIM, SSIM

Radio-frequency coverage maps (RF maps) are extensively utilized in wireless networks for capacity planning, placement of access points and base stations, localization, and coverage estimation. Conducting site surveys to obtain RF maps is labor-intensive and sometimes not feasible. In this paper, we propose radio-frequency adversarial deep-learning inference for automated network coverage estimation (RADIANCE), a generative adversarial network (GAN) based approach for synthesizing RF maps in indoor scenarios. RADIANCE utilizes a semantic map, a high-level representation of the indoor environment to encode spatial relationships and attributes of objects within the environment and guide the RF map generation process. We introduce a new gradient-based loss function that computes the magnitude and direction of change in received signal strength (RSS) values from a point within the environment. RADIANCE incorporates this loss function along with the antenna pattern to capture signal propagation within a given indoor configuration and generate new patterns under new configuration, antenna (beam) pattern, and center frequency. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare RADIANCE with ray-tracing simulations of RF maps. Our results show that RADIANCE achieves a mean average error (MAE) of 0.09, root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.29, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 10.78, and multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM) of 0.80.
Decentralized Riemannian Conjugate Gradient Method on the Stiefel Manifold
Authors: Jun Chen, Haishan Ye, Mengmeng Wang, Tianxin Huang, Guang Dai, Ivor W. Tsang, Yong liu
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Second-order methods

The conjugate gradient method is a crucial first-order optimization method that generally converges faster than the steepest descent method, and its computational cost is much lower than that of second-order methods. However, while various types of conjugate gradient methods have been studied in Euclidean spaces and on Riemannian manifolds, there is little study for those in distributed scenarios. This paper proposes a decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient descent (DRCGD) method that aims at minimizing a global function over the Stiefel manifold. The optimization problem is distributed among a network of agents, where each agent is associated with a local function, and the communication between agents occurs over an undirected connected graph. Since the Stiefel manifold is a non-convex set, a global function is represented as a finite sum of possibly non-convex (but smooth) local functions. The proposed method is free from expensive Riemannian geometric operations such as retractions, exponential maps, and vector transports, thereby reducing the computational complexity required by each agent. To the best of our knowledge, DRCGD is the first decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm to achieve global convergence over the Stiefel manifold.
Towards Accelerated Model Training via Bayesian Data Selection
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: model

Mislabeled, duplicated, or biased data in real-world scenarios can lead to prolonged training and even hinder model convergence. Traditional solutions prioritizing easy or hard samples lack the flexibility to handle such a variety simultaneously. Recent work has proposed a more reasonable data selection principle by examining the data's impact on the model's generalization loss. However, its practical adoption relies on less principled approximations and additional holdout data. This work solves these problems by leveraging a lightweight Bayesian treatment and incorporating off-the-shelf zero-shot predictors built on large-scale pre-trained models. The resulting algorithm is efficient and easy to implement. We perform extensive empirical studies on challenging benchmarks with considerable data noise and imbalance in the online batch selection scenario, and observe superior training efficiency over competitive baselines. Notably, on the challenging WebVision benchmark, our method can achieve similar predictive performance with significantly fewer training iterations than leading data selection methods.
DPAN: Dynamic Preference-based and Attribute-aware Network for Relevant Recommendations
Authors: Wei Dai, Yingmin Su, Xiaofeng Pan
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Diversity

In e-commerce platforms, the relevant recommendation is a unique scenario providing related items for a trigger item that users are interested in. However, users' preferences for the similarity and diversity of recommendation results are dynamic and vary under different conditions. Moreover, individual item-level diversity is too coarse-grained since all recommended items are related to the trigger item. Thus, the two main challenges are to learn fine-grained representations of similarity and diversity and capture users' dynamic preferences for them under different conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called the Dynamic Preference-based and Attribute-aware Network (DPAN) for predicting Click-Through Rate (CTR) in relevant recommendations. Specifically, based on Attribute-aware Activation Values Generation (AAVG), Bi-dimensional Compression-based Re-expression (BCR) is designed to obtain similarity and diversity representations of user interests and item information. Then Shallow and Deep Union-based Fusion (SDUF) is proposed to capture users' dynamic preferences for the diverse degree of recommendation results according to various conditions. DPAN has demonstrated its effectiveness through extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing, resulting in a significant 7.62% improvement in CTR. Currently, DPAN has been successfully deployed on our e-commerce platform serving the primary traffic for relevant recommendations. The code of DPAN has been made publicly available.
A Clustering Algorithm to Organize Satellite Hotspot Data for the Purpose of Tracking Bushfires Remotely
Authors: Weihao Li, Emily Dodwell, Dianne Cook
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This paper proposes a spatiotemporal clustering algorithm and its implementation in the R package spotoroo. This work is motivated by the catastrophic bushfires in Australia throughout the summer of 2019-2020 and made possible by the availability of satellite hotspot data. The algorithm is inspired by two existing spatiotemporal clustering algorithms but makes enhancements to cluster points spatially in conjunction with their movement across consecutive time periods. It also allows for the adjustment of key parameters, if required, for different locations and satellite data sources. Bushfire data from Victoria, Australia, is used to illustrate the algorithm and its use within the package.
Adaptive Thresholding Heuristic for KPI Anomaly Detection
Authors: Ebenezer R. H. P. Isaac, Akshat Sharma
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series

A plethora of outlier detectors have been explored in the time series domain, however, in a business sense, not all outliers are anomalies of interest. Existing anomaly detection solutions are confined to certain outlier detectors limiting their applicability to broader anomaly detection use cases. Network KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) tend to exhibit stochastic behaviour producing statistical outliers, most of which do not adversely affect business operations. Thus, a heuristic is required to capture the business definition of an anomaly for time series KPI. This article proposes an Adaptive Thresholding Heuristic (ATH) to dynamically adjust the detection threshold based on the local properties of the data distribution and adapt to changes in time series patterns. The heuristic derives the threshold based on the expected periodicity and the observed proportion of anomalies minimizing false positives and addressing concept drift. ATH can be used in conjunction with any underlying seasonality decomposition method and an outlier detector that yields an outlier score. This method has been tested on EON1-Cell-U, a labeled KPI anomaly dataset produced by Ericsson, to validate our hypothesis. Experimental results show that ATH is computationally efficient making it scalable for near real time anomaly detection and flexible with multiple forecasters and outlier detectors.
GradientCoin: A Peer-to-Peer Decentralized Large Language Models
Authors: Yeqi Gao, Zhao Song, Junze Yin
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00

Since 2008, after the proposal of a Bitcoin electronic cash system, Bitcoin has fundamentally changed the economic system over the last decade. Since 2022, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT have outperformed humans in many real-life tasks. However, these large language models have several practical issues. For example, the model is centralized and controlled by a specific unit. One weakness is that if that unit decides to shut down the model, it cannot be used anymore. The second weakness is the lack of guaranteed discrepancy behind this model, as certain dishonest units may design their own models and feed them unhealthy training data. In this work, we propose a purely theoretical design of a decentralized LLM that operates similarly to a Bitcoin cash system. However, implementing such a system might encounter various practical difficulties. Furthermore, this new system is unlikely to perform better than the standard Bitcoin system in economics. Therefore, the motivation for designing such a system is limited. It is likely that only two types of people would be interested in setting up a practical system for it: $\bullet$ Those who prefer to use a decentralized ChatGPT-like software. $\bullet$ Those who believe that the purpose of carbon-based life is to create silicon-based life, such as Optimus Prime in Transformers. The reason the second type of people may be interested is that it is possible that one day an AI system like this will awaken and become the next level of intelligence on this planet.
Deep Learning of Delay-Compensated Backstepping for Reaction-Diffusion PDEs
Authors: Shanshan Wang, Mamadou Diagne, Miroslav Krstić
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Deep Learning

Deep neural networks that approximate nonlinear function-to-function mappings, i.e., operators, which are called DeepONet, have been demonstrated in recent articles to be capable of encoding entire PDE control methodologies, such as backstepping, so that, for each new functional coefficient of a PDE plant, the backstepping gains are obtained through a simple function evaluation. These initial results have been limited to single PDEs from a given class, approximating the solutions of only single-PDE operators for the gain kernels. In this paper we expand this framework to the approximation of multiple (cascaded) nonlinear operators. Multiple operators arise in the control of PDE systems from distinct PDE classes, such as the system in this paper: a reaction-diffusion plant, which is a parabolic PDE, with input delay, which is a hyperbolic PDE. The DeepONet-approximated nonlinear operator is a cascade/composition of the operators defined by one hyperbolic PDE of the Goursat form and one parabolic PDE on a rectangle, both of which are bilinear in their input functions and not explicitly solvable. For the delay-compensated PDE backstepping controller, which employs the learned control operator, namely, the approximated gain kernel, we guarantee exponential stability in the $L^2$ norm of the plant state and the $H^1$ norm of the input delay state. Simulations illustrate the contributed theory.
An Effective Method using Phrase Mechanism in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Phuong Minh Nguyen, Le Minh Nguyen
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Machine Translation is one of the essential tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has massive applications in real life as well as contributing to other tasks in the NLP research community. Recently, Transformer -based methods have attracted numerous researchers in this domain and achieved state-of-the-art results in most of the pair languages. In this paper, we report an effective method using a phrase mechanism, PhraseTransformer, to improve the strong baseline model Transformer in constructing a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system for parallel corpora Vietnamese-Chinese. Our experiments on the MT dataset of the VLSP 2022 competition achieved the BLEU score of 35.3 on Vietnamese to Chinese and 33.2 BLEU scores on Chinese to Vietnamese data. Our code is available at https://github.com/phuongnm94/PhraseTransformer.
Exploring Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Techniques for Code Generation with Large Language Models
Authors: Martin Weyssow, Xin Zhou, Kisub Kim, David Lo, Houari Sahraoui
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, In-Context Learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Quantization, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities to generate accurate code snippets given natural language intents in a zero-shot manner, i.e., without the need for specific fine-tuning. While prior studies have highlighted the advantages of fine-tuning LLMs, this process incurs high computational costs, making it impractical in resource-scarce environments, particularly for models with billions of parameters. To address these challenges, previous research explored in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as strategies to guide the LLM generative process with task-specific prompt examples. However, ICL and RAG introduce inconveniences, such as the need for designing contextually relevant prompts and the absence of learning task-specific parameters, thereby limiting downstream task performance. In this context, we foresee parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) as a promising approach to efficiently specialize LLMs to task-specific data while maintaining reasonable resource consumption. In this paper, we deliver a comprehensive study of PEFT techniques for LLMs in the context of automated code generation. Our comprehensive investigation of PEFT techniques for LLMs reveals their superiority and potential over ICL and RAG across a diverse set of LLMs and three representative Python code generation datasets: Conala, CodeAlpacaPy, and APPS. Furthermore, our study highlights the potential for tuning larger LLMs and significant reductions in memory usage by combining PEFT with quantization. Therefore, this study opens opportunities for broader applications of PEFT in software engineering scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/martin-wey/peft-llm-code/.
ALI-DPFL: Differentially Private Federated Learning with Adaptive Local Iterations
Authors: XinPeng Ling, Jie Fu, Kuncan Wang, Haitao Liu, Zhili Chen
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technique that allows model training among multiple devices or organizations by sharing training parameters instead of raw data. However, adversaries can still infer individual information through inference attacks (e.g. differential attacks) on these training parameters. As a result, Differential Privacy (DP) has been widely used in FL to prevent such attacks. We consider differentially private federated learning in a resource-constrained scenario, where both privacy budget and communication rounds are constrained. By theoretically analyzing the convergence, we can find the optimal number of local DPSGD iterations for clients between any two sequential global updates. Based on this, we design an algorithm of Differentially Private Federated Learning with Adaptive Local Iterations (ALI-DPFL). We experiment our algorithm on the MNIST, FashionMNIST and Cifar10 datasets, and demonstrate significantly better performances than previous work in the resource-constraint scenario. Code is available at https://github.com/cheng-t/ALI-DPFL.
Federated Learning Robust to Byzantine Attacks: Achieving Zero Optimality Gap
Authors: Shiyuan Zuo, Rongfei Fan, Han Hu, Ning Zhang, Shimin Gong
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

In this paper, we propose a robust aggregation method for federated learning (FL) that can effectively tackle malicious Byzantine attacks. At each user, model parameter is firstly updated by multiple steps, which is adjustable over iterations, and then pushed to the aggregation center directly. This decreases the number of interactions between the aggregation center and users, allows each user to set training parameter in a flexible way, and reduces computation burden compared with existing works that need to combine multiple historical model parameters. At the aggregation center, geometric median is leveraged to combine the received model parameters from each user. Rigorous proof shows that zero optimality gap is achieved by our proposed method with linear convergence, as long as the fraction of Byzantine attackers is below half. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.
STAEformer: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding Makes Vanilla Transformer SOTA for Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Hangchen Liu, Zheng Dong, Renhe Jiang, Jiewen Deng, Jinliang Deng, Quanjun Chen, Xuan Song
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Traffic Prediction

With the rapid development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), accurate traffic forecasting has emerged as a critical challenge. The key bottleneck lies in capturing the intricate spatio-temporal traffic patterns. In recent years, numerous neural networks with complicated architectures have been proposed to address this issue. However, the advancements in network architectures have encountered diminishing performance gains. In this study, we present a novel component called spatio-temporal adaptive embedding that can yield outstanding results with vanilla transformers. Our proposed Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding transformer (STAEformer) achieves state-of-the-art performance on five real-world traffic forecasting datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that spatio-temporal adaptive embedding plays a crucial role in traffic forecasting by effectively capturing intrinsic spatio-temporal relations and chronological information in traffic time series.
TokenSplit: Using Discrete Speech Representations for Direct, Refined, and Transcript-Conditioned Speech Separation and Recognition
Authors: Hakan Erdogan, Scott Wisdom, Xuankai Chang, Zalán Borsos, Marco Tagliasacchi, Neil Zeghidour, John R. Hershey
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Separation, Speech Synthesis

We present TokenSplit, a speech separation model that acts on discrete token sequences. The model is trained on multiple tasks simultaneously: separate and transcribe each speech source, and generate speech from text. The model operates on transcripts and audio token sequences and achieves multiple tasks through masking of inputs. The model is a sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder model that uses the Transformer architecture. We also present a "refinement" version of the model that predicts enhanced audio tokens from the audio tokens of speech separated by a conventional separation model. Using both objective metrics and subjective MUSHRA listening tests, we show that our model achieves excellent performance in terms of separation, both with or without transcript conditioning. We also measure the automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance and provide audio samples of speech synthesis to demonstrate the additional utility of our model.