pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Investigating Semi-Supervised Learning Algorithms in Text Datasets
Authors: Himmet Toprak Kesgin, Mehmet Fatih Amasyali
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Using large training datasets enhances the generalization capabilities of neural networks. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is useful when there are few labeled data and a lot of unlabeled data. SSL methods that use data augmentation are most successful for image datasets. In contrast, texts do not have consistent augmentation methods as images. Consequently, methods that use augmentation are not as effective in text data as they are in image data. In this study, we compared SSL algorithms that do not require augmentation; these are self-training, co-training, tri-training, and tri-training with disagreement. In the experiments, we used 4 different text datasets for different tasks. We examined the algorithms from a variety of perspectives by asking experiment questions and suggested several improvements. Among the algorithms, tri-training with disagreement showed the closest performance to the Oracle; however, performance gap shows that new semi-supervised algorithms or improvements in existing methods are needed.
Act as You Learn: Adaptive Decision-Making in Non-Stationary Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Baiting Luo, Yunuo Zhang, Abhishek Dubey, Ayan Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Heuristic Search, Sequential Decision Making

A fundamental (and largely open) challenge in sequential decision-making is dealing with non-stationary environments, where exogenous environmental conditions change over time. Such problems are traditionally modeled as non-stationary Markov decision processes (NSMDP). However, existing approaches for decision-making in NSMDPs have two major shortcomings: first, they assume that the updated environmental dynamics at the current time are known (although future dynamics can change); and second, planning is largely pessimistic, i.e., the agent acts ``safely'' to account for the non-stationary evolution of the environment. We argue that both these assumptions are invalid in practice -- updated environmental conditions are rarely known, and as the agent interacts with the environment, it can learn about the updated dynamics and avoid being pessimistic, at least in states whose dynamics it is confident about. We present a heuristic search algorithm called \textit{Adaptive Monte Carlo Tree Search (ADA-MCTS)} that addresses these challenges. We show that the agent can learn the updated dynamics of the environment over time and then act as it learns, i.e., if the agent is in a region of the state space about which it has updated knowledge, it can avoid being pessimistic. To quantify ``updated knowledge,'' we disintegrate the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in the agent's updated belief and show how the agent can use these estimates for decision-making. We compare the proposed approach with the multiple state-of-the-art approaches in decision-making across multiple well-established open-source problems and empirically show that our approach is faster and highly adaptive without sacrificing safety.
Neural Control: Concurrent System Identification and Control Learning with Neural ODE
Authors: Cheng Chi
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00

Controlling continuous-time dynamical systems is generally a two step process: first, identify or model the system dynamics with differential equations, then, minimize the control objectives to achieve optimal control function and optimal state trajectories. However, any inaccuracy in dynamics modeling will lead to sub-optimality in the resulting control function. To address this, we propose a neural ODE based method for controlling unknown dynamical systems, denoted as Neural Control (NC), which combines dynamics identification and optimal control learning using a coupled neural ODE. Through an intriguing interplay between the two neural networks in coupled neural ODE structure, our model concurrently learns system dynamics as well as optimal controls that guides towards target states. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for learning optimal control of unknown dynamical systems. Codes available at https://github.com/chichengmessi/neural_ode_control/tree/main
Concurrent Brainstorming & Hypothesis Satisfying: An Iterative Framework for Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (R2CBR3H-SR)
Authors: Arash Shahmansoori
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Information Retrieval, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Addressing the complexity of comprehensive information retrieval, this study introduces an innovative, iterative retrieval-augmented generation system. Our approach uniquely integrates a vector-space driven re-ranking mechanism with concurrent brainstorming to expedite the retrieval of highly relevant documents, thereby streamlining the generation of potential queries. This sets the stage for our novel hybrid process, which synergistically combines hypothesis formulation with satisfying decision-making strategy to determine content adequacy, leveraging a chain of thought-based prompting technique. This unified hypothesize-satisfied phase intelligently distills information to ascertain whether user queries have been satisfactorily addressed. Upon reaching this criterion, the system refines its output into a concise representation, maximizing conceptual density with minimal verbosity. The iterative nature of the workflow enhances process efficiency and accuracy. Crucially, the concurrency within the brainstorming phase significantly accelerates recursive operations, facilitating rapid convergence to solution satisfaction. Compared to conventional methods, our system demonstrates a marked improvement in computational time and cost-effectiveness. This research advances the state-of-the-art in intelligent retrieval systems, setting a new benchmark for resource-efficient information extraction and abstraction in knowledge-intensive applications.
Iterative Mask Filling: An Effective Text Augmentation Method Using Masked Language Modeling
Authors: Himmet Toprak Kesgin, Mehmet Fatih Amasyali
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, fill-mask, Fill Mask, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Sentence, Text Augmentation, Topic Classification

Data augmentation is an effective technique for improving the performance of machine learning models. However, it has not been explored as extensively in natural language processing (NLP) as it has in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel text augmentation method that leverages the Fill-Mask feature of the transformer-based BERT model. Our method involves iteratively masking words in a sentence and replacing them with language model predictions. We have tested our proposed method on various NLP tasks and found it to be effective in many cases. Our results are presented along with a comparison to existing augmentation methods. Experimental results show that our proposed method significantly improves performance, especially on topic classification datasets.
Large Language Models Relearn Removed Concepts
Authors: Michelle Lo, Shay B. Cohen, Fazl Barez
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Editing

Advances in model editing through neuron pruning hold promise for removing undesirable concepts from large language models. However, it remains unclear whether models have the capacity to reacquire pruned concepts after editing. To investigate this, we evaluate concept relearning in models by tracking concept saliency and similarity in pruned neurons during retraining. Our findings reveal that models can quickly regain performance post-pruning by relocating advanced concepts to earlier layers and reallocating pruned concepts to primed neurons with similar semantics. This demonstrates that models exhibit polysemantic capacities and can blend old and new concepts in individual neurons. While neuron pruning provides interpretability into model concepts, our results highlight the challenges of permanent concept removal for improved model \textit{safety}. Monitoring concept reemergence and developing techniques to mitigate relearning of unsafe concepts will be important directions for more robust model editing. Overall, our work strongly demonstrates the resilience and fluidity of concept representations in LLMs post concept removal.
A quatum inspired neural network for geometric modeling
Authors: Weitao Du, Shengchao Liu, Xuecang Zhang
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Tensor Networks

By conceiving physical systems as 3D many-body point clouds, geometric graph neural networks (GNNs), such as SE(3)/E(3) equivalent GNNs, have showcased promising performance. In particular, their effective message-passing mechanics make them adept at modeling molecules and crystalline materials. However, current geometric GNNs only offer a mean-field approximation of the many-body system, encapsulated within two-body message passing, thus falling short in capturing intricate relationships within these geometric graphs. To address this limitation, tensor networks, widely employed by computational physics to handle manybody systems using high-order tensors, have been introduced. Nevertheless, integrating these tensorized networks into the message-passing framework of GNNs faces scalability and symmetry conservation (e.g., permutation and rotation) challenges. In response, we introduce an innovative equivariant Matrix Product State (MPS)-based message-passing strategy, through achieving an efficient implementation of the tensor contraction operation. Our method effectively models complex many-body relationships, suppressing mean-field approximations, and captures symmetries within geometric graphs. Importantly, it seamlessly replaces the standard message-passing and layer-aggregation modules intrinsic to geometric GNNs. We empirically validate the superior accuracy of our approach on benchmark tasks, including predicting classical Newton systems and quantum tensor Hamiltonian matrices. To our knowledge, our approach represents the inaugural utilization of parameterized geometric tensor networks.
CoMoSVC: Consistency Model-based Singing Voice Conversion
Authors: Yiwen Lu, Zhen Ye, Wei Xue, Xu Tan, Qifeng Liu, Yike Guo
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, model, Voice Conversion

The diffusion-based Singing Voice Conversion (SVC) methods have achieved remarkable performances, producing natural audios with high similarity to the target timbre. However, the iterative sampling process results in slow inference speed, and acceleration thus becomes crucial. In this paper, we propose CoMoSVC, a consistency model-based SVC method, which aims to achieve both high-quality generation and high-speed sampling. A diffusion-based teacher model is first specially designed for SVC, and a student model is further distilled under self-consistency properties to achieve one-step sampling. Experiments on a single NVIDIA GTX4090 GPU reveal that although CoMoSVC has a significantly faster inference speed than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) diffusion-based SVC system, it still achieves comparable or superior conversion performance based on both subjective and objective metrics. Audio samples and codes are available at https://comosvc.github.io/.
Deep learning the Hurst parameter of linear fractional processes and assessing its reliability
Authors: Dániel Boros, Bálint Csanády, Iván Ivkovic, Lóránt Nagy, András Lukács, László Márkus
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

This research explores the reliability of deep learning, specifically Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, for estimating the Hurst parameter in fractional stochastic processes. The study focuses on three types of processes: fractional Brownian motion (fBm), fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (fOU) process, and linear fractional stable motions (lfsm). The work involves a fast generation of extensive datasets for fBm and fOU to train the LSTM network on a large volume of data in a feasible time. The study analyses the accuracy of the LSTM network's Hurst parameter estimation regarding various performance measures like RMSE, MAE, MRE, and quantiles of the absolute and relative errors. It finds that LSTM outperforms the traditional statistical methods in the case of fBm and fOU processes; however, it has limited accuracy on lfsm processes. The research also delves into the implications of training length and valuation sequence length on the LSTM's performance. The methodology is applied by estimating the Hurst parameter in Li-ion battery degradation data and obtaining confidence bounds for the estimation. The study concludes that while deep learning methods show promise in parameter estimation of fractional processes, their effectiveness is contingent on the process type and the quality of training data.
Applications of machine learning and IoT for Outdoor Air Pollution Monitoring and Prediction: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Ihsane Gryech, Chaimae Assad, Mounir Ghogho, Abdellatif Kobbane
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Air Pollution Prediction, Diversity, Prediction, Systematic Literature Review, Time Series

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution kills seven million people every year. Outdoor air pollution is a major environmental health problem affecting low, middle, and high-income countries. In the past few years, the research community has explored IoT-enabled machine learning applications for outdoor air pollution prediction. The general objective of this paper is to systematically review applications of machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) for outdoor air pollution prediction and the combination of monitoring sensors and input features used. Two research questions were formulated for this review. 1086 publications were collected in the initial PRISMA stage. After the screening and eligibility phases, 37 papers were selected for inclusion. A cost-based analysis was conducted on the findings to highlight high-cost monitoring, low-cost IoT and hybrid enabled prediction. Three methods of prediction were identified: time series, feature-based and spatio-temporal. This review's findings identify major limitations in applications found in the literature, namely lack of coverage, lack of diversity of data and lack of inclusion of context-specific features. This review proposes directions for future research and underlines practical implications in healthcare, urban planning, global synergy and smart cities.
A Novel Paradigm for Neural Computation: X-Net with Learnable Neurons and Adaptable Structure
Authors: YanJie Li, Weijun Li, Lina Yu, Min Wu, Jinyi Liu, Wenqiang Li, Meilan Hao, Shu Wei, Yusong Deng, Liping Zhang, Xiaoli Dong, Hong Qin, Xin Ning, Yugui Zhang, Baoli Lu, Jian Xu, Shuang Li
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: scientific discovery

Multilayer perception (MLP) has permeated various disciplinary domains, ranging from bioinformatics to financial analytics, where their application has become an indispensable facet of contemporary scientific research endeavors. However, MLP has obvious drawbacks. 1), The type of activation function is single and relatively fixed, which leads to poor `representation ability' of the network, and it is often to solve simple problems with complex networks; 2), the network structure is not adaptive, it is easy to cause network structure redundant or insufficient. In this work, we propose a novel neural network paradigm X-Net promising to replace MLPs. X-Net can dynamically learn activation functions individually based on derivative information during training to improve the network's representational ability for specific tasks. At the same time, X-Net can precisely adjust the network structure at the neuron level to accommodate tasks of varying complexity and reduce computational costs. We show that X-Net outperforms MLPs in terms of representational capability. X-Net can achieve comparable or even better performance than MLP with much smaller parameters on regression and classification tasks. Specifically, in terms of the number of parameters, X-Net is only 3% of MLP on average and only 1.1% under some tasks. We also demonstrate X-Net's ability to perform scientific discovery on data from various disciplines such as energy, environment, and aerospace, where X-Net is shown to help scientists discover new laws of mathematics or physics.
Incremental FastPitch: Chunk-based High Quality Text to Speech
Authors: Muyang Du, Chuan Liu, Junjie Lai
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Parallel text-to-speech models have been widely applied for real-time speech synthesis, and they offer more controllability and a much faster synthesis process compared with conventional auto-regressive models. Although parallel models have benefits in many aspects, they become naturally unfit for incremental synthesis due to their fully parallel architecture such as transformer. In this work, we propose Incremental FastPitch, a novel FastPitch variant capable of incrementally producing high-quality Mel chunks by improving the architecture with chunk-based FFT blocks, training with receptive-field constrained chunk attention masks, and inference with fixed size past model states. Experimental results show that our proposal can produce speech quality comparable to the parallel FastPitch, with a significant lower latency that allows even lower response time for real-time speech applications.
Using AI/ML to Find and Remediate Enterprise Secrets in Code & Document Sharing Platforms
Authors: Gregor Kerr, David Algorry, Senad Ibraimoski, Peter Maciver, Sean Moran
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00

We introduce a new challenge to the software development community: 1) leveraging AI to accurately detect and flag up secrets in code and on popular document sharing platforms that frequently used by developers, such as Confluence and 2) automatically remediating the detections (e.g. by suggesting password vault functionality). This is a challenging, and mostly unaddressed task. Existing methods leverage heuristics and regular expressions, that can be very noisy, and therefore increase toil on developers. The next step - modifying code itself - to automatically remediate a detection, is a complex task. We introduce two baseline AI models that have good detection performance and propose an automatic mechanism for remediating secrets found in code, opening up the study of this task to the wider community.
A Generative AI Assistant to Accelerate Cloud Migration
Authors: Amal Vaidya, Mohan Krishna Vankayalapati, Jacky Chan, Senad Ibraimoski, Sean Moran
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00

We present a tool that leverages generative AI to accelerate the migration of on-premises applications to the cloud. The Cloud Migration LLM accepts input from the user specifying the parameters of their migration, and outputs a migration strategy with an architecture diagram. A user study suggests that the migration LLM can assist inexperienced users in finding the right cloud migration profile, while avoiding complexities of a manual approach.
Task and Explanation Network
Authors: Moshe Sipper
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00

Explainability in deep networks has gained increased importance in recent years. We argue herein that an AI must be tasked not just with a task but also with an explanation of why said task was accomplished as such. We present a basic framework -- Task and Explanation Network (TENet) -- which fully integrates task completion and its explanation. We believe that the field of AI as a whole should insist -- quite emphatically -- on explainability.
Ravnest: Decentralized Asynchronous Training on Heterogeneous Devices
Authors: Anirudh Rajiv Menon, Unnikrishnan Menon, Kailash Ahirwar
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00

Modern deep learning models, growing larger and more complex, have demonstrated exceptional generalization and accuracy due to training on huge datasets. This trend is expected to continue. However, the increasing size of these models poses challenges in training, as traditional centralized methods are limited by memory constraints at such scales. This paper proposes an asynchronous decentralized training paradigm for large modern deep learning models that harnesses the compute power of regular heterogeneous PCs with limited resources connected across the internet to achieve favourable performance metrics. Ravnest facilitates decentralized training by efficiently organizing compute nodes into clusters with similar data transfer rates and compute capabilities, without necessitating that each node hosts the entire model. These clusters engage in $\textit{Zero-Bubble Asynchronous Model Parallel}$ training, and a $\textit{Parallel Multi-Ring All-Reduce}$ method is employed to effectively execute global parameter averaging across all clusters. We have framed our asynchronous SGD loss function as a block structured optimization problem with delayed updates and derived an optimal convergence rate of $O\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{K}}\right)$. We further discuss linear speedup with respect to the number of participating clusters and the bound on the staleness parameter.
Deep Automated Mechanism Design for Integrating Ad Auction and Allocation in Feed
Authors: Xuejian Li, Ze Wang, Bingqi Zhu, Fei He, Yongkang Wang, Xingxing Wang
Date: 2024-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

E-commerce platforms usually present an ordered list, mixed with several organic items and an advertisement, in response to each user's page view request. This list, the outcome of ad auction and allocation processes, directly impacts the platform's ad revenue and gross merchandise volume (GMV). Specifically, the ad auction determines which ad is displayed and the corresponding payment, while the ad allocation decides the display positions of the advertisement and organic items. The prevalent methods of segregating the ad auction and allocation into two distinct stages face two problems: 1) Ad auction does not consider externalities, such as the influence of actual display position and context on ad Click-Through Rate (CTR); 2) The ad allocation, which utilizes the auction-winning ad's payment to determine the display position dynamically, fails to maintain incentive compatibility (IC) for the advertisement. For instance, in the auction stage employing the traditional Generalized Second Price (GSP) , even if the winning ad increases its bid, its payment remains unchanged. This implies that the advertisement cannot secure a better position and thus loses the opportunity to achieve higher utility in the subsequent ad allocation stage. Previous research often focused on one of the two stages, neglecting the two-stage problem, which may result in suboptimal outcomes...