pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Utilizing deep learning for automated tuning of database management systems
Authors: Karthick Prasad Gunasekaran, Kajal Tiwari, Rachana Acharya
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Management

Managing the configurations of a database system poses significant challenges due to the multitude of configuration knobs that impact various system aspects.The lack of standardization, independence, and universality among these knobs further complicates the task of determining the optimal settings.To address this issue, an automated solution leveraging supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques was developed.This solution aims to identify influential knobs, analyze previously unseen workloads, and provide recommendations for knob settings.The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through the evaluation of a new tool called OtterTune [1] on three different database management systems (DBMSs).The results indicate that OtterTune's recommendations are comparable to or even surpass the configurations generated by existing tools or human experts.In this study, we build upon the automated technique introduced in the original OtterTune paper, utilizing previously collected training data to optimize new DBMS deployments.By employing supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, we focus on improving latency prediction.Our approach expands upon the methods proposed in the original paper by incorporating GMM clustering to streamline metrics selection and combining ensemble models (such as RandomForest) with non-linear models (like neural networks) for more accurate prediction modeling.
GPatcher: A Simple and Adaptive MLP Model for Alleviating Graph Heterophily
Authors: Shuaicheng Zhang, Haohui Wang, Si Zhang, Dawei Zhou
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

While graph heterophily has been extensively studied in recent years, a fundamental research question largely remains nascent: How and to what extent will graph heterophily affect the prediction performance of graph neural networks (GNNs)? In this paper, we aim to demystify the impact of graph heterophily on GNN spectral filters. Our theoretical results show that it is essential to design adaptive polynomial filters that adapts different degrees of graph heterophily to guarantee the generalization performance of GNNs. Inspired by our theoretical findings, we propose a simple yet powerful GNN named GPatcher by leveraging the MLP-Mixer architectures. Our approach comprises two main components: (1) an adaptive patch extractor function that automatically transforms each node's non-Euclidean graph representations to Euclidean patch representations given different degrees of heterophily, and (2) an efficient patch mixer function that learns salient node representation from both the local context information and the global positional information. Through extensive experiments, the GPatcher model demonstrates outstanding performance on node classification compared with popular homophily GNNs and state-of-the-art heterophily GNNs.
The Neuro-Symbolic Inverse Planning Engine (NIPE): Modeling Probabilistic Social Inferences from Linguistic Inputs
Authors: Lance Ying, Katherine M. Collins, Megan Wei, Cedegao E. Zhang, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Adrian Weller, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Lionel Wong
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Human beings are social creatures. We routinely reason about other agents, and a crucial component of this social reasoning is inferring people's goals as we learn about their actions. In many settings, we can perform intuitive but reliable goal inference from language descriptions of agents, actions, and the background environments. In this paper, we study this process of language driving and influencing social reasoning in a probabilistic goal inference domain. We propose a neuro-symbolic model that carries out goal inference from linguistic inputs of agent scenarios. The "neuro" part is a large language model (LLM) that translates language descriptions to code representations, and the "symbolic" part is a Bayesian inverse planning engine. To test our model, we design and run a human experiment on a linguistic goal inference task. Our model closely matches human response patterns and better predicts human judgements than using an LLM alone.
RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations
Authors: Yilun Zhao, Chen Zhao, Linyong Nan, Zhenting Qi, Wenlin Zhang, Xiangru Tang, Boyu Mi, Dragomir Radev
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Question Answering

Despite significant progress having been made in question answering on tabular data (Table QA), it's unclear whether, and to what extent existing Table QA models are robust to task-specific perturbations, e.g., replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. To systematically study the robustness of Table QA models, we propose a benchmark called RobuT, which builds upon existing Table QA datasets (WTQ, WikiSQL-Weak, and SQA) and includes human-annotated adversarial perturbations in terms of table header, table content, and question. Our results indicate that both state-of-the-art Table QA models and large language models (e.g., GPT-3) with few-shot learning falter in these adversarial sets. We propose to address this problem by using large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models. Our data and code is publicly available at https://github.com/yilunzhao/RobuT.
Im2win: Memory Efficient Convolution On SIMD Architectures
Authors: Shuai Lu, Jun Chu, Xu T. Liu
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00

Convolution is the most expensive operation among neural network operations, thus its performance is critical to the overall performance of neural networks. Commonly used convolution approaches, including general matrix multiplication (GEMM)-based convolution and direct convolution, rely on im2col for data transformation or do not use data transformation at all, respectively. However, the im2col data transformation can lead to at least 2$\times$ memory footprint compared to not using data transformation at all, thus limiting the size of neural network models running on memory-limited systems. Meanwhile, not using data transformation usually performs poorly due to nonconsecutive memory access although it consumes less memory. To solve those problems, we propose a new memory-efficient data transformation algorithm, called im2win. This algorithm refactorizes a row of square or rectangle dot product windows of the input image and flattens unique elements within these windows into a row in the output tensor, which enables consecutive memory access and data reuse, and thus greatly reduces the memory overhead. Furthermore, we propose a high-performance im2win-based convolution algorithm with various optimizations, including vectorization, loop reordering, etc. Our experimental results show that our algorithm reduces the memory overhead by average to 41.6% compared to the PyTorch's convolution implementation based on im2col, and achieves average to 3.6$\times$ and 5.3$\times$ speedup in performance compared to the im2col-based convolution and not using data transformation, respectively.
Im2win: An Efficient Convolution Paradigm on GPU
Authors: Shuai Lu, Jun Chu, Luanzheng Guo, Xu T. Liu
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Convolution is the most time-consuming operation in deep neural network operations, so its performance is critical to the overall performance of the neural network. The commonly used methods for convolution on GPU include the general matrix multiplication (GEMM)-based convolution and the direct convolution. GEMM-based convolution relies on the im2col algorithm, which results in a large memory footprint and reduced performance. Direct convolution does not have the large memory footprint problem, but the performance is not on par with GEMM-based approach because of the discontinuous memory access. This paper proposes a window-order-based convolution paradigm on GPU, called im2win, which not only reduces memory footprint but also offers continuous memory accesses, resulting in improved performance. Furthermore, we apply a range of optimization techniques on the convolution CUDA kernel, including shared memory, tiling, micro-kernel, double buffer, and prefetching. We compare our implementation with the direct convolution, and PyTorch's GEMM-based convolution with cuBLAS and six cuDNN-based convolution implementations, with twelve state-of-the-art DNN benchmarks. The experimental results show that our implementation 1) uses less memory footprint by 23.1% and achieves 3.5$\times$ TFLOPS compared with cuBLAS, 2) uses less memory footprint by 32.8% and achieves up to 1.8$\times$ TFLOPS compared with the best performant convolutions in cuDNN, and 3) achieves up to 155$\times$ TFLOPS compared with the direct convolution. We further perform an ablation study on the applied optimization techniques and find that the micro-kernel has the greatest positive impact on performance.
G-STO: Sequential Main Shopping Intention Detection via Graph-Regularized Stochastic Transformer
Authors: Yuchen Zhuang, Xin Shen, Yan Zhao, Chaosheng Dong, Ming Wang, Jin Li, Chao Zhang
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation requires understanding the dynamic patterns of users' behaviors, contexts, and preferences from their historical interactions. Most existing works focus on modeling user-item interactions only from the item level, ignoring that they are driven by latent shopping intentions (e.g., ballpoint pens, miniatures, etc). The detection of the underlying shopping intentions of users based on their historical interactions is a crucial aspect for e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, to enhance the convenience and efficiency of their customers' shopping experiences. Despite its significance, the area of main shopping intention detection remains under-investigated in the academic literature. To fill this gap, we propose a graph-regularized stochastic Transformer method, G-STO. By considering intentions as sets of products and user preferences as compositions of intentions, we model both of them as stochastic Gaussian embeddings in the latent representation space. Instead of training the stochastic representations from scratch, we develop a global intention relational graph as prior knowledge for regularization, allowing relevant shopping intentions to be distributionally close. Finally, we feed the newly regularized stochastic embeddings into Transformer-based models to encode sequential information from the intention transitions. We evaluate our main shopping intention identification model on three different real-world datasets, where G-STO achieves significantly superior performances to the baselines by 18.08% in Hit@1, 7.01% in Hit@10, and 6.11% in NDCG@10 on average.
Let's Do a Thought Experiment: Using Counterfactuals to Improve Moral Reasoning
Authors: Xiao Ma, Swaroop Mishra, Ahmad Beirami, Alex Beutel, Jilin Chen
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Math, MMLU, Moral Scenarios, Multi-task Language Understanding

Language models still struggle on moral reasoning, despite their impressive performance in many other tasks. In particular, the Moral Scenarios task in MMLU (Multi-task Language Understanding) is among the worst performing tasks for many language models, including GPT-3. In this work, we propose a new prompting framework, Thought Experiments, to teach language models to do better moral reasoning using counterfactuals. Experiment results show that our framework elicits counterfactual questions and answers from the model, which in turn helps improve the accuracy on Moral Scenarios task by 9-16% compared to other zero-shot baselines. Interestingly, unlike math reasoning tasks, zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning doesn't work out of the box, and even reduces accuracy by around 4% compared to direct zero-shot. We further observed that with minimal human supervision in the form of 5 few-shot examples, the accuracy of the task can be improved to as much as 80%.
Screening Autism Spectrum Disorder in childrens using Deep Learning Approach : Evaluating the classification model of YOLOv8 by comparing with other models
Authors: Subash Gautam, Prabin Sharma, Kisan Thapa, Mala Deep Upadhaya, Dikshya Thapa, Salik Ram Khanal, Vítor Manuel de Jesus Filipe
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental condition that presents significant challenges in social interaction, communication, and behavior. Early intervention plays a pivotal role in enhancing cognitive abilities and reducing autistic symptoms in children with ASD. Numerous clinical studies have highlighted distinctive facial characteristics that distinguish ASD children from typically developing (TD) children. In this study, we propose a practical solution for ASD screening using facial images using YoloV8 model. By employing YoloV8, a deep learning technique, on a dataset of Kaggle, we achieved exceptional results. Our model achieved a remarkable 89.64% accuracy in classification and an F1-score of 0.89. Our findings provide support for the clinical observations regarding facial feature discrepancies between children with ASD. The high F1-score obtained demonstrates the potential of deep learning models in screening children with ASD. We conclude that the newest version of YoloV8 which is usually used for object detection can be used for classification problem of Austistic and Non-autistic images.
Multi-Scale Cross Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Qianying Liu, Xiao Gu, Paul Henderson, Fani Deligianni
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning has demonstrated great potential in medical image segmentation by utilizing knowledge from unlabeled data. However, most existing approaches do not explicitly capture high-level semantic relations between distant regions, which limits their performance. In this paper, we focus on representation learning for semi-supervised learning, by developing a novel Multi-Scale Cross Supervised Contrastive Learning (MCSC) framework, to segment structures in medical images. We jointly train CNN and Transformer models, regularising their features to be semantically consistent across different scales. Our approach contrasts multi-scale features based on ground-truth and cross-predicted labels, in order to extract robust feature representations that reflect intra- and inter-slice relationships across the whole dataset. To tackle class imbalance, we take into account the prevalence of each class to guide contrastive learning and ensure that features adequately capture infrequent classes. Extensive experiments on two multi-structure medical segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MCSC. It not only outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by more than 3.0% in Dice, but also greatly reduces the performance gap with fully supervised methods.
Enhancing Adversarial Training via Reweighting Optimization Trajectory
Authors: Tianjin Huang, Shiwei Liu, Tianlong Chen, Meng Fang, Li Shen, Vlaod Menkovski, Lu Yin, Yulong Pei, Mykola Pechenizkiy
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Despite the fact that adversarial training has become the de facto method for improving the robustness of deep neural networks, it is well-known that vanilla adversarial training suffers from daunting robust overfitting, resulting in unsatisfactory robust generalization. A number of approaches have been proposed to address these drawbacks such as extra regularization, adversarial weights perturbation, and training with more data over the last few years. However, the robust generalization improvement is yet far from satisfactory. In this paper, we approach this challenge with a brand new perspective -- refining historical optimization trajectories. We propose a new method named \textbf{Weighted Optimization Trajectories (WOT)} that leverages the optimization trajectories of adversarial training in time. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of WOT under various state-of-the-art adversarial attacks. Our results show that WOT integrates seamlessly with the existing adversarial training methods and consistently overcomes the robust overfitting issue, resulting in better adversarial robustness. For example, WOT boosts the robust accuracy of AT-PGD under AA-$L_{\infty}$ attack by 1.53\% $\sim$ 6.11\% and meanwhile increases the clean accuracy by 0.55\%$\sim$5.47\% across SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets.
Revolutionizing Cyber Threat Detection with Large Language Models: A privacy-preserving BERT-based Lightweight Model for IoT/IIoT Devices
Authors: Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Mthandazo Ndhlovu, Norbert Tihanyi, Lucas C. Cordeiro, Merouane Debbah, Thierry Lestable, Narinderjit Singh Thandi
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Language Modelling, Privacy Preserving

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is currently undergoing a revolutionary transformation driven by the power of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) based on groundbreaking Transformer architectures. As the frequency and diversity of cybersecurity attacks continue to rise, the importance of incident detection has significantly increased. IoT devices are expanding rapidly, resulting in a growing need for efficient techniques to autonomously identify network-based attacks in IoT networks with both high precision and minimal computational requirements. This paper presents SecurityBERT, a novel architecture that leverages the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model for cyber threat detection in IoT networks. During the training of SecurityBERT, we incorporated a novel privacy-preserving encoding technique called Privacy-Preserving Fixed-Length Encoding (PPFLE). We effectively represented network traffic data in a structured format by combining PPFLE with the Byte-level Byte-Pair Encoder (BBPE) Tokenizer. Our research demonstrates that SecurityBERT outperforms traditional Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) methods, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), in cyber threat detection. Employing the Edge-IIoTset cybersecurity dataset, our experimental analysis shows that SecurityBERT achieved an impressive 98.2% overall accuracy in identifying fourteen distinct attack types, surpassing previous records set by hybrid solutions such as GAN-Transformer-based architectures and CNN-LSTM models. With an inference time of less than 0.15 seconds on an average CPU and a compact model size of just 16.7MB, SecurityBERT is ideally suited for real-life traffic analysis and a suitable choice for deployment on resource-constrained IoT devices.
A Multilingual Translator to SQL with Database Schema Pruning to Improve Self-Attention
Authors: Marcelo Archanjo Jose, Fabio Gagliardi Cozman
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00

Long sequences of text are challenging in the context of transformers, due to quadratic memory increase in the self-attention mechanism. As this issue directly affects the translation from natural language to SQL queries (as techniques usually take as input a concatenated text with the question and the database schema), we present techniques that allow long text sequences to be handled by transformers with up to 512 input tokens. We propose a training process with database schema pruning (removal of tables and columns names that are useless for the query of interest). In addition, we used a multilingual approach with the mT5-large model fine-tuned with a data-augmented Spider dataset in four languages simultaneously: English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Our proposed technique used the Spider dataset and increased the exact set match accuracy results from 0.718 to 0.736 in a validation dataset (Dev). Source code, evaluations, and checkpoints are available at: \underline{https://github.com/C4AI/gap-text2sql}.
Unveiling the Potential of Sentiment: Can Large Language Models Predict Chinese Stock Price Movements?
Authors: Haohan Zhang, Fengrui Hua, Chengjin Xu, Hao Kong, Ruiting Zuo, Jian Guo
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred discussions about their potential to enhance quantitative trading strategies. LLMs excel in analyzing sentiments about listed companies from financial news, providing critical insights for trading decisions. However, the performance of LLMs in this task varies substantially due to their inherent characteristics. This paper introduces a standardized experimental procedure for comprehensive evaluations. We detail the methodology using three distinct LLMs, each embodying a unique approach to performance enhancement, applied specifically to the task of sentiment factor extraction from large volumes of Chinese news summaries. Subsequently, we develop quantitative trading strategies using these sentiment factors and conduct back-tests in realistic scenarios. Our results will offer perspectives about the performances of Large Language Models applied to extracting sentiments from Chinese news texts.
Feature Adversarial Distillation for Point Cloud Classification
Authors: YuXing Lee, Wei Wu
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, FAD, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Point Cloud Classification, Transfer Learning

Due to the point cloud's irregular and unordered geometry structure, conventional knowledge distillation technology lost a lot of information when directly used on point cloud tasks. In this paper, we propose Feature Adversarial Distillation (FAD) method, a generic adversarial loss function in point cloud distillation, to reduce loss during knowledge transfer. In the feature extraction stage, the features extracted by the teacher are used as the discriminator, and the students continuously generate new features in the training stage. The feature of the student is obtained by attacking the feedback from the teacher and getting a score to judge whether the student has learned the knowledge well or not. In experiments on standard point cloud classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN datasets, our method reduced the information loss of knowledge transfer in distillation in 40x model compression while maintaining competitive performance.