pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Decentralized Matrix Factorization with Heterogeneous Differential Privacy
Authors: Wentao Hu, Hui Fang
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00

Conventional matrix factorization relies on centralized collection of users' data for recommendation, which might introduce an increased risk of privacy leakage especially when the recommender is untrusted. Existing differentially private matrix factorization methods either assume the recommender is trusted, or can only provide a uniform level of privacy protection for all users and items with untrusted recommender. In this paper, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Differentially Private Matrix Factorization algorithm (denoted as HDPMF) for untrusted recommender. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to achieve heterogeneous differential privacy for decentralized matrix factorization in untrusted recommender scenario. Specifically, our framework uses modified stretching mechanism with an innovative rescaling scheme to achieve better trade off between privacy and accuracy. Meanwhile, by allocating privacy budget properly, we can capture homogeneous privacy preference within a user/item but heterogeneous privacy preference across different users/items. Theoretical analysis confirms that HDPMF renders rigorous privacy guarantee, and exhaustive experiments demonstrate its superiority especially in strong privacy guarantee, high dimension model and sparse dataset scenario.
The Effect of Data Dimensionality on Neural Network Prunability
Authors: Zachary Ankner, Alex Renda, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite, Jonathan Frankle, Tian Jin
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00

Practitioners prune neural networks for efficiency gains and generalization improvements, but few scrutinize the factors determining the prunability of a neural network the maximum fraction of weights that pruning can remove without compromising the model's test accuracy. In this work, we study the properties of input data that may contribute to the prunability of a neural network. For high dimensional input data such as images, text, and audio, the manifold hypothesis suggests that these high dimensional inputs approximately lie on or near a significantly lower dimensional manifold. Prior work demonstrates that the underlying low dimensional structure of the input data may affect the sample efficiency of learning. In this paper, we investigate whether the low dimensional structure of the input data affects the prunability of a neural network.
Locally Adaptive Hierarchical Cluster Termination With Application To Individual Tree Delineation
Authors: Ashlin Richardson, Donald Leckie
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

A clustering termination procedure which is locally adaptive (with respect to the hierarchical tree of sets representative of the agglomerative merging) is proposed, for agglomerative hierarchical clustering on a set equipped with a distance function. It represents a multi-scale alternative to conventional scale dependent threshold based termination criteria.
On the Compatibility between Neural Networks and Partial Differential Equations for Physics-informed Learning
Authors: Kuangdai Leng, Jeyan Thiyagalingam
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00

We shed light on a pitfall and an opportunity in physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). We prove that a multilayer perceptron (MLP) only with ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit) or ReLU-like Lipschitz activation functions will always lead to a vanished Hessian. Such a network-imposed constraint contradicts any second- or higher-order partial differential equations (PDEs). Therefore, a ReLU-based MLP cannot form a permissible function space for the approximation of their solutions. Inspired by this pitfall, we prove that a linear PDE up to the $n$-th order can be strictly satisfied by an MLP with $C^n$ activation functions when the weights of its output layer lie on a certain hyperplane, as called the out-layer-hyperplane. An MLP equipped with the out-layer-hyperplane becomes "physics-enforced", no longer requiring a loss function for the PDE itself (but only those for the initial and boundary conditions). Such a hyperplane exists not only for MLPs but for any network architecture tailed by a fully-connected hidden layer. To our knowledge, this should be the first PINN architecture that enforces point-wise correctness of PDEs. We show a closed-form expression of the out-layer-hyperplane for second-order linear PDEs, which can be generalised to higher-order nonlinear PDEs.
PIZZA: A new benchmark for complex end-to-end task-oriented parsing
Authors: Konstantine Arkoudas, Nicolas Guenon des Mesnards, Melanie Rubino, Sandesh Swamy, Saarthak Khanna, Weiqi Sun, Khan Haidar
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Resolution

Much recent work in task-oriented parsing has focused on finding a middle ground between flat slots and intents, which are inexpressive but easy to annotate, and powerful representations such as the lambda calculus, which are expressive but costly to annotate. This paper continues the exploration of task-oriented parsing by introducing a new dataset for parsing pizza and drink orders, whose semantics cannot be captured by flat slots and intents. We perform an extensive evaluation of deep-learning techniques for task-oriented parsing on this dataset, including different flavors of seq2seq systems and RNNGs. The dataset comes in two main versions, one in a recently introduced utterance-level hierarchical notation that we call TOP, and one whose targets are executable representations (EXR). We demonstrate empirically that training the parser to directly generate EXR notation not only solves the problem of entity resolution in one fell swoop and overcomes a number of expressive limitations of TOP notation, but also results in significantly greater parsing accuracy.
Task Discovery: Finding the Tasks that Neural Networks Generalize on
Authors: Andrei Atanov, Andrei Filatov, Teresa Yeo, Ajay Sohmshetty, Amir Zamir
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00

When developing deep learning models, we usually decide what task we want to solve then search for a model that generalizes well on the task. An intriguing question would be: what if, instead of fixing the task and searching in the model space, we fix the model and search in the task space? Can we find tasks that the model generalizes on? How do they look, or do they indicate anything? These are the questions we address in this paper. We propose a task discovery framework that automatically finds examples of such tasks via optimizing a generalization-based quantity called agreement score. We demonstrate that one set of images can give rise to many tasks on which neural networks generalize well. These tasks are a reflection of the inductive biases of the learning framework and the statistical patterns present in the data, thus they can make a useful tool for analysing the neural networks and their biases. As an example, we show that the discovered tasks can be used to automatically create adversarial train-test splits which make a model fail at test time, without changing the pixels or labels, but by only selecting how the datapoints should be split between the train and test sets. We end with a discussion on human-interpretability of the discovered tasks.
Gated Recurrent Neural Networks with Weighted Time-Delay Feedback
Authors: N. Benjamin Erichson, Soon Hoe Lim, Michael W. Mahoney
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

In this paper, we present a novel approach to modeling long-term dependencies in sequential data by introducing a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with a weighted time-delay feedback mechanism. Our proposed model, named $\tau$-GRU, is a discretized version of a continuous-time formulation of a recurrent unit, where the dynamics are governed by delay differential equations (DDEs). We prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions for the continuous-time model and show that the proposed feedback mechanism can significantly improve the modeling of long-term dependencies. Our empirical results indicate that $\tau$-GRU outperforms state-of-the-art recurrent units and gated recurrent architectures on a range of tasks, achieving faster convergence and better generalization.
Experimental Observations of the Topology of Convolutional Neural Network Activations
Authors: Emilie Purvine, Davis Brown, Brett Jefferson, Cliff Joslyn, Brenda Praggastis, Archit Rathore, Madelyn Shapiro, Bei Wang, Youjia Zhou
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Topological Data Analysis

Topological data analysis (TDA) is a branch of computational mathematics, bridging algebraic topology and data science, that provides compact, noise-robust representations of complex structures. Deep neural networks (DNNs) learn millions of parameters associated with a series of transformations defined by the model architecture, resulting in high-dimensional, difficult-to-interpret internal representations of input data. As DNNs become more ubiquitous across multiple sectors of our society, there is increasing recognition that mathematical methods are needed to aid analysts, researchers, and practitioners in understanding and interpreting how these models' internal representations relate to the final classification. In this paper, we apply cutting edge techniques from TDA with the goal of gaining insight into the interpretability of convolutional neural networks used for image classification. We use two common TDA approaches to explore several methods for modeling hidden-layer activations as high-dimensional point clouds, and provide experimental evidence that these point clouds capture valuable structural information about the model's process. First, we demonstrate that a distance metric based on persistent homology can be used to quantify meaningful differences between layers, and we discuss these distances in the broader context of existing representational similarity metrics for neural network interpretability. Second, we show that a mapper graph can provide semantic insight into how these models organize hierarchical class knowledge at each layer. These observations demonstrate that TDA is a useful tool to help deep learning practitioners unlock the hidden structures of their models.
Are you using test log-likelihood correctly?
Authors: Sameer K. Deshpande, Soumya Ghosh, Tin D. Nguyen, Tamara Broderick
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Test log-likelihood is commonly used to compare different models of the same data or different approximate inference algorithms for fitting the same probabilistic model. We present simple examples demonstrating how comparisons based on test log-likelihood can contradict comparisons according to other objectives. Specifically, our examples show that (i) approximate Bayesian inference algorithms that attain higher test log-likelihoods need not also yield more accurate posterior approximations and (ii) conclusions about forecast accuracy based on test log-likelihood comparisons may not agree with conclusions based on root mean squared error.
Physics-Constrained Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D Turbulence
Authors: Dima Tretiak, Arvind T. Mohan, Daniel Livescu
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have received wide acclaim among the machine learning (ML) community for their ability to generate realistic 2D images. ML is being applied more often to complex problems beyond those of computer vision. However, current frameworks often serve as black boxes and lack physics embeddings, leading to poor ability in enforcing constraints and unreliable models. In this work, we develop physics embeddings that can be stringently imposed, referred to as hard constraints, in the neural network architecture. We demonstrate their capability for 3D turbulence by embedding them in GANs, particularly to enforce the mass conservation constraint in incompressible fluid turbulence. In doing so, we also explore and contrast the effects of other methods of imposing physics constraints within the GANs framework, especially penalty-based physics constraints popular in literature. By using physics-informed diagnostics and statistics, we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our approach and demonstrate its feasibility.
Clustering and Analysis of GPS Trajectory Data using Distance-based Features
Authors: Zann Koh, Yuren Zhou, Billy Pik Lik Lau, Ran Liu, Keng Hua Chong, Chau Yuen
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

The proliferation of smartphones has accelerated mobility studies by largely increasing the type and volume of mobility data available. One such source of mobility data is from GPS technology, which is becoming increasingly common and helps the research community understand mobility patterns of people. However, there lacks a standardized framework for studying the different mobility patterns created by the non-Work, non-Home locations of Working and Nonworking users on Workdays and Offdays using machine learning methods. We propose a new mobility metric, Daily Characteristic Distance, and use it to generate features for each user together with Origin-Destination matrix features. We then use those features with an unsupervised machine learning method, $k$-means clustering, and obtain three clusters of users for each type of day (Workday and Offday). Finally, we propose two new metrics for the analysis of the clustering results, namely User Commonality and Average Frequency. By using the proposed metrics, interesting user behaviors can be discerned and it helps us to better understand the mobility patterns of the users.
Distilling Reasoning Capabilities into Smaller Language Models
Authors: Kumar Shridhar, Alessandro Stolfo, Mrinmaya Sachan
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Knowledge Distillation, Problem Decomposition, StrategyQA

Step-by-step reasoning approaches like chain of thought (CoT) have proved to be very effective in inducing reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, the success of the CoT approach is fundamentally tied to the model size, and billion parameter-scale models are often needed to get CoT to work. In this paper, we propose a knowledge distillation approach that leverages the step-by-step CoT reasoning capabilities of larger models and distills these abilities into smaller models. In this work, we propose an alternative reasoning scheme, Socratic CoT, that learns a decomposition of the original problem into a sequence of subproblems and uses it to guide the intermediate reasoning steps. We use Socratic CoT to train a combination of two small distilled models: a problem decomposer and a subproblem solver. In practice, given a new problem, the two distilled models work in sync to decompose and solve complex problems. On multiple reasoning datasets (GSM8K, StrategyQA, and SVAMP), our proposed distillation strategies boosts the performance of smaller models over 70% compared to the baselines. Finally, we investigate when Socratic CoT is an effective alternative to CoT, demonstrating cases where a much smaller model (GPT-2 large) can outperform a 10X larger model (GPT-3 6B). Our code is available here: https://github.com/kumar-shridhar/Distiiling-LM
Towards Practical Few-shot Federated NLP
Authors: Dongqi Cai, Yaozong Wu, Haitao Yuan, Shangguang Wang, Felix Xiaozhu Lin, Mengwei Xu
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Federated Learning, Few-Shot Learning

Transformer-based pre-trained models have emerged as the predominant solution for natural language processing (NLP). Fine-tuning such pre-trained models for downstream tasks often requires a considerable amount of labeled private data. In practice, private data is often distributed across heterogeneous mobile devices and may be prohibited from being uploaded. Moreover, well-curated labeled data is often scarce, presenting an additional challenge. To address these challenges, we first introduce a data generator for federated few-shot learning tasks, which encompasses the quantity and skewness of scarce labeled data in a realistic setting. Subsequently, we propose AUG-FedPrompt, a prompt-based federated learning system that exploits abundant unlabeled data for data augmentation. Our experiments indicate that AUG-FedPrompt can perform on par with full-set fine-tuning with a limited amount of labeled data. However, such competitive performance comes at a significant system cost.
Multi-Task Imitation Learning for Linear Dynamical Systems
Authors: Thomas T. Zhang, Katie Kang, Bruce D. Lee, Claire Tomlin, Sergey Levine, Stephen Tu, Nikolai Matni
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Representation Learning

We study representation learning for efficient imitation learning over linear systems. In particular, we consider a setting where learning is split into two phases: (a) a pre-training step where a shared $k$-dimensional representation is learned from $H$ source policies, and (b) a target policy fine-tuning step where the learned representation is used to parameterize the policy class. We find that the imitation gap over trajectories generated by the learned target policy is bounded by $\tilde{O}\left( \frac{k n_x}{HN_{\mathrm{shared}}} + \frac{k n_u}{N_{\mathrm{target}}}\right)$, where $n_x > k$ is the state dimension, $n_u$ is the input dimension, $N_{\mathrm{shared}}$ denotes the total amount of data collected for each policy during representation learning, and $N_{\mathrm{target}}$ is the amount of target task data. This result formalizes the intuition that aggregating data across related tasks to learn a representation can significantly improve the sample efficiency of learning a target task. The trends suggested by this bound are corroborated in simulation.
SPADE: Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection under Distribution Mismatch
Authors: Jinsung Yoon, Kihyuk Sohn, Chun-Liang Li, Sercan O. Arik, Tomas Pfister
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection, Supervised Anomaly Detection

Semi-supervised anomaly detection is a common problem, as often the datasets containing anomalies are partially labeled. We propose a canonical framework: Semi-supervised Pseudo-labeler Anomaly Detection with Ensembling (SPADE) that isn't limited by the assumption that labeled and unlabeled data come from the same distribution. Indeed, the assumption is often violated in many applications - for example, the labeled data may contain only anomalies unlike unlabeled data, or unlabeled data may contain different types of anomalies, or labeled data may contain only 'easy-to-label' samples. SPADE utilizes an ensemble of one class classifiers as the pseudo-labeler to improve the robustness of pseudo-labeling with distribution mismatch. Partial matching is proposed to automatically select the critical hyper-parameters for pseudo-labeling without validation data, which is crucial with limited labeled data. SPADE shows state-of-the-art semi-supervised anomaly detection performance across a wide range of scenarios with distribution mismatch in both tabular and image domains. In some common real-world settings such as model facing new types of unlabeled anomalies, SPADE outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives by 5% AUC in average.
Time-Efficient Reward Learning via Visually Assisted Cluster Ranking
Authors: David Zhang, Micah Carroll, Andreea Bobu, Anca Dragan
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, MuJoCo

One of the most successful paradigms for reward learning uses human feedback in the form of comparisons. Although these methods hold promise, human comparison labeling is expensive and time consuming, constituting a major bottleneck to their broader applicability. Our insight is that we can greatly improve how effectively human time is used in these approaches by batching comparisons together, rather than having the human label each comparison individually. To do so, we leverage data dimensionality-reduction and visualization techniques to provide the human with a interactive GUI displaying the state space, in which the user can label subportions of the state space. Across some simple Mujoco tasks, we show that this high-level approach holds promise and is able to greatly increase the performance of the resulting agents, provided the same amount of human labeling time.
Deep Learning-Based Vehicle Speed Prediction for Ecological Adaptive Cruise Control in Urban and Highway Scenarios
Authors: Sai Krishna Chada, Daniel Görges, Achim Ebert, Roman Teutsch
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control, Prediction, Time Series Analysis

In a typical car-following scenario, target vehicle speed fluctuations act as an external disturbance to the host vehicle and in turn affect its energy consumption. To control a host vehicle in an energy-efficient manner using model predictive control (MPC), and moreover, enhance the performance of an ecological adaptive cruise control (EACC) strategy, forecasting the future velocities of a target vehicle is essential. For this purpose, a deep recurrent neural network-based vehicle speed prediction using long-short term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent units (GRU) is studied in this work. Besides these, the physics-based constant velocity (CV) and constant acceleration (CA) models are discussed. The sequential time series data for training (e.g. speed trajectories of the target and its preceding vehicles obtained through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, road speed limits, traffic light current and future phases collected using vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication) is gathered from both urban and highway networks created in the microscopic traffic simulator SUMO. The proposed speed prediction models are evaluated for long-term predictions (up to 10 s) of target vehicle future velocities. Moreover, the results revealed that the LSTM-based speed predictor outperformed other models in terms of achieving better prediction accuracy on unseen test datasets, and thereby showcasing better generalization ability. Furthermore, the performance of EACC-equipped host car on the predicted velocities is evaluated, and its energy-saving benefits for different prediction horizons are presented.
Novel Modelling Strategies for High-frequency Stock Trading Data
Authors: Xuekui Zhang, Yuying Huang, Ke Xu, Li Xing
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Full electronic automation in stock exchanges has recently become popular, generating high-frequency intraday data and motivating the development of near real-time price forecasting methods. Machine learning algorithms are widely applied to mid-price stock predictions. Processing raw data as inputs for prediction models (e.g., data thinning and feature engineering) can primarily affect the performance of the prediction methods. However, researchers rarely discuss this topic. This motivated us to propose three novel modelling strategies for processing raw data. We illustrate how our novel modelling strategies improve forecasting performance by analyzing high-frequency data of the Dow Jones 30 component stocks. In these experiments, our strategies often lead to statistically significant improvement in predictions. The three strategies improve the F1 scores of the SVM models by 0.056, 0.087, and 0.016, respectively.