pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spectral Heterogeneous Graph Convolutions via Positive Noncommutative Polynomials
Authors: Mingguo He, Zhewei Wei, Shikun Feng, Zhengjie Huang, Weibin Li, Yu Sun, dianhai yu
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Node Classification, Node Property Prediction, valid

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have gained significant popularity in various heterogeneous graph learning tasks. However, most existing HGNNs rely on spatial domain-based methods to aggregate information, i.e., manually selected meta-paths or some heuristic modules, lacking theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, these methods cannot learn arbitrary valid heterogeneous graph filters within the spectral domain, which have limited expressiveness. To tackle these issues, we present a positive spectral heterogeneous graph convolution via positive noncommutative polynomials. Then, using this convolution, we propose PSHGCN, a novel Positive Spectral Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network. PSHGCN offers a simple yet effective method for learning valid heterogeneous graph filters. Moreover, we demonstrate the rationale of PSHGCN in the graph optimization framework. We conducted an extensive experimental study to show that PSHGCN can learn diverse heterogeneous graph filters and outperform all baselines on open benchmarks. Notably, PSHGCN exhibits remarkable scalability, efficiently handling large real-world graphs comprising millions of nodes and edges. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ivam-he/PSHGCN.
There is more to graphs than meets the eye: Learning universal features with self-supervision
Authors: Laya Das, Sai Munikoti, Nrushad Joshi, Mahantesh Halappanavar
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

We study the problem of learning features through self-supervision that are generalisable to multiple graphs. State-of-the-art graph self-supervision restricts training to only one graph, resulting in graph-specific models that are incompatible with different but related graphs. We hypothesize that training with more than one graph that belong to the same family can improve the quality of the learnt representations. However, learning universal features from disparate node/edge features in different graphs is non-trivial. To address this challenge, we first homogenise the disparate features with graph-specific encoders that transform the features into a common space. A universal representation learning module then learns generalisable features on this common space. We show that compared to traditional self-supervision with one graph, our approach results in (1) better performance on downstream node classification, (2) learning features that can be re-used for unseen graphs of the same family, (3) more efficient training and (4) compact yet generalisable models. We also show ability of the proposed framework to deliver these benefits for relatively larger graphs. In this paper, we present a principled way to design foundation graph models that learn from more than one graph in an end-to-end manner, while bridging the gap between self-supervised and supervised performance.
Designing Closed-Loop Models for Task Allocation
Authors: Vijay Keswani, L. Elisa Celis, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Matthew Lease
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Automatically assigning tasks to people is challenging because human performance can vary across tasks for many reasons. This challenge is further compounded in real-life settings in which no oracle exists to assess the quality of human decisions and task assignments made. Instead, we find ourselves in a "closed" decision-making loop in which the same fallible human decisions we rely on in practice must also be used to guide task allocation. How can imperfect and potentially biased human decisions train an accurate allocation model? Our key insight is to exploit weak prior information on human-task similarity to bootstrap model training. We show that the use of such a weak prior can improve task allocation accuracy, even when human decision-makers are fallible and biased. We present both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation over synthetic data and a social media toxicity detection task. Results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
Relaxing the Additivity Constraints in Decentralized No-Regret High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Anthony Bardou, Patrick Thiran, Thomas Begin
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is typically used to optimize an unknown function $f$ that is noisy and costly to evaluate, by exploiting an acquisition function that must be maximized at each optimization step. Even if provably asymptotically optimal BO algorithms are efficient at optimizing low-dimensional functions, scaling them to high-dimensional spaces remains an open problem, often tackled by assuming an additive structure for $f$. By doing so, BO algorithms typically introduce additional restrictive assumptions on the additive structure that reduce their applicability domain. This paper contains two main contributions: (i) we relax the restrictive assumptions on the additive structure of $f$ without weakening the maximization guarantees of the acquisition function, and (ii) we address the over-exploration problem for decentralized BO algorithms. To these ends, we propose DuMBO, an asymptotically optimal decentralized BO algorithm that achieves very competitive performance against state-of-the-art BO algorithms, especially when the additive structure of $f$ comprises high-dimensional factors.
EAMDrift: An interpretable self retrain model for time series
Authors: Gonçalo Mateus, Cláudia Soares, João Leitão, António Rodrigues
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting, Time Series Prediction

The use of machine learning for time series prediction has become increasingly popular across various industries thanks to the availability of time series data and advancements in machine learning algorithms. However, traditional methods for time series forecasting rely on pre-optimized models that are ill-equipped to handle unpredictable patterns in data. In this paper, we present EAMDrift, a novel method that combines forecasts from multiple individual predictors by weighting each prediction according to a performance metric. EAMDrift is designed to automatically adapt to out-of-distribution patterns in data and identify the most appropriate models to use at each moment through interpretable mechanisms, which include an automatic retraining process. Specifically, we encode different concepts with different models, each functioning as an observer of specific behaviors. The activation of the overall model then identifies which subset of the concept observers is identifying concepts in the data. This activation is interpretable and based on learned rules, allowing to study of input variables relations. Our study on real-world datasets shows that EAMDrift outperforms individual baseline models by 20% and achieves comparable accuracy results to non-interpretable ensemble models. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of EAMDrift for time-series prediction and highlight the importance of interpretability in machine learning models.
An Empirical Study of Federated Learning on IoT-Edge Devices: Resource Allocation and Heterogeneity
Authors: Kok-Seng Wong, Manh Nguyen-Duc, Khiem Le-Huy, Long Ho-Tuan, Cuong Do-Danh, Danh Le-Phuoc
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Nowadays, billions of phones, IoT and edge devices around the world generate data continuously, enabling many Machine Learning (ML)-based products and applications. However, due to increasing privacy concerns and regulations, these data tend to reside on devices (clients) instead of being centralized for performing traditional ML model training. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed approach in which a single server and multiple clients collaboratively build an ML model without moving data away from clients. Whereas existing studies on FL have their own experimental evaluations, most experiments were conducted using a simulation setting or a small-scale testbed. This might limit the understanding of FL implementation in realistic environments. In this empirical study, we systematically conduct extensive experiments on a large network of IoT and edge devices (called IoT-Edge devices) to present FL real-world characteristics, including learning performance and operation (computation and communication) costs. Moreover, we mainly concentrate on heterogeneous scenarios, which is the most challenging issue of FL. By investigating the feasibility of on-device implementation, our study provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners, promoting the practicality of FL and assisting in improving the current design of real FL systems.
Spectal Harmonics: Bridging Spectral Embedding and Matrix Completion in Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Marina Munkhoeva, Ivan Oseledets
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Low-Rank Matrix Completion, Matrix Completion, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised methods received tremendous attention thanks to their seemingly heuristic approach to learning representations that respect the semantics of the data without any apparent supervision in the form of labels. A growing body of literature is already being published in an attempt to build a coherent and theoretically grounded understanding of the workings of a zoo of losses used in modern self-supervised representation learning methods. In this paper, we attempt to provide an understanding from the perspective of a Laplace operator and connect the inductive bias stemming from the augmentation process to a low-rank matrix completion problem. To this end, we leverage the results from low-rank matrix completion to provide theoretical analysis on the convergence of modern SSL methods and a key property that affects their downstream performance.
Distance Rank Score: Unsupervised filter method for feature selection on imbalanced dataset
Authors: Katarina Firdova, Céline Labart, Arthur Martel
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, feature selection

This paper presents a new filter method for unsupervised feature selection. This method is particularly effective on imbalanced multi-class dataset, as in case of clusters of different anomaly types. Existing methods usually involve the variance of the features, which is not suitable when the different types of observations are not represented equally. Our method, based on Spearman's Rank Correlation between distances on the observations and on feature values, avoids this drawback. The performance of the method is measured on several clustering problems and is compared with existing filter methods suitable for unsupervised data.
Neuro-Causal Factor Analysis
Authors: Alex Markham, MingYu Liu, Bryon Aragam, Liam Solus
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

Factor analysis (FA) is a statistical tool for studying how observed variables with some mutual dependences can be expressed as functions of mutually independent unobserved factors, and it is widely applied throughout the psychological, biological, and physical sciences. We revisit this classic method from the comparatively new perspective given by advancements in causal discovery and deep learning, introducing a framework for Neuro-Causal Factor Analysis (NCFA). Our approach is fully nonparametric: it identifies factors via latent causal discovery methods and then uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) that is constrained to abide by the Markov factorization of the distribution with respect to the learned graph. We evaluate NCFA on real and synthetic data sets, finding that it performs comparably to standard VAEs on data reconstruction tasks but with the advantages of sparser architecture, lower model complexity, and causal interpretability. Unlike traditional FA methods, our proposed NCFA method allows learning and reasoning about the latent factors underlying observed data from a justifiably causal perspective, even when the relations between factors and measurements are highly nonlinear.
Deep learning and MCMC with aggVAE for shifting administrative boundaries: mapping malaria prevalence in Kenya
Authors: Elizaveta Semenova, Swapnil Mishra, Samir Bhatt, Seth Flaxman, H Juliette T Unwin
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Model-based disease mapping remains a fundamental policy-informing tool in the fields of public health and disease surveillance. Hierarchical Bayesian models have emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for disease mapping since they are able to both capture structure in the data and robustly characterise uncertainty. When working with areal data, e.g.~aggregates at the administrative unit level such as district or province, current models rely on the adjacency structure of areal units to account for spatial correlations and perform shrinkage. The goal of disease surveillance systems is to track disease outcomes over time. This task is especially challenging in crisis situations which often lead to redrawn administrative boundaries, meaning that data collected before and after the crisis are no longer directly comparable. Moreover, the adjacency-based approach ignores the continuous nature of spatial processes and cannot solve the change-of-support problem, i.e.~when estimates are required to be produced at different administrative levels or levels of aggregation. We present a novel, practical, and easy to implement solution to solve these problems relying on a methodology combining deep generative modelling and fully Bayesian inference: we build on the recently proposed PriorVAE method able to encode spatial priors over small areas with variational autoencoders by encoding aggregates over administrative units. We map malaria prevalence in Kenya, a country in which administrative boundaries changed in 2010.
Off-By-One Implementation Error in J-UNIWARD
Authors: Benedikt Lorch
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Steganalysis

J-UNIWARD is a popular steganography method for hiding secret messages in JPEG cover images. As a content-adaptive method, J-UNIWARD aims to embed into textured image regions where changes are difficult to detect. To this end, J-UNIWARD first assigns to each DCT coefficient an embedding cost calculated based on the image's Wavelet residual, and then uses a coding method that minimizes the cost while embedding the desired payload. Changing one DCT coefficient affects a 23x23 window of Wavelet coefficients. To speed up the costmap computation, the original implementation pre-computes the Wavelet residual and then considers per changed DCT coefficient a 23x23 window of the Wavelet residual. However, the implementation accesses a window accidentally shifted by one pixel to the bottom right. In this report, we evaluate the effect of this off-by-one error on the resulting costmaps. Some image blocks are over-priced while other image blocks are under-priced, but the difference is relatively small. The off-by-one error seems to make little difference for learning-based steganalysis.
Quality In / Quality Out: Data quality more relevant than model choice in anomaly detection with the UGR'16
Authors: José Camacho, Katarzyna Wasielewska, Pablo Espinosa, Marta Fuentes-García
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Autonomous or self-driving networks are expected to provide a solution to the myriad of extremely demanding new applications with minimal human supervision. For this purpose, the community relies on the development of new Machine Learning (ML) models and techniques. %, like the celebrated Deep Learning (DL). However, ML can only be as good as the data it is fitted with, and data quality is an elusive concept difficult to assess. In this paper, we show that relatively minor modifications on a benchmark dataset (UGR'16, a flow-based real-traffic dataset for anomaly detection) cause significantly more impact on model performance than the specific ML technique considered. We also show that the measured model performance is uncertain, as a result of labelling inaccuracies. Our findings illustrate that the widely adopted approach of comparing a set of models in terms of performance results (e.g., in terms of accuracy or ROC curves) may lead to incorrect conclusions when done without a proper understanding of dataset biases and sensitivity. We contribute a methodology to interpret a model response that can be useful for this understanding.
Attention-Based Methods For Audio Question Answering
Authors: Parthasaarathy Sudarsanam, Tuomas Virtanen
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Question Answering, Binary Classification, Question Answering

Audio question answering (AQA) is the task of producing natural language answers when a system is provided with audio and natural language questions. In this paper, we propose neural network architectures based on self-attention and cross-attention for the AQA task. The self-attention layers extract powerful audio and textual representations. The cross-attention maps audio features that are relevant to the textual features to produce answers. All our models are trained on the recently proposed Clotho-AQA dataset for both binary yes/no questions and single-word answer questions. Our results clearly show improvement over the reference method reported in the original paper. On the yes/no binary classification task, our proposed model achieves an accuracy of 68.3% compared to 62.7% in the reference model. For the single-word answers multiclass classifier, our model produces a top-1 and top-5 accuracy of 57.9% and 99.8% compared to 54.2% and 93.7% in the reference model respectively. We further discuss some of the challenges in the Clotho-AQA dataset such as the presence of the same answer word in multiple tenses, singular and plural forms, and the presence of specific and generic answers to the same question. We address these issues and present a revised version of the dataset.
Recursive Metropolis-Hastings Naming Game: Symbol Emergence in a Multi-agent System based on Probabilistic Generative Models
Authors: Jun Inukai, Tadahiro Taniguchi, Akira Taniguchi, Yoshinobu Hagiwara
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

In the studies on symbol emergence and emergent communication in a population of agents, a computational model was employed in which agents participate in various language games. Among these, the Metropolis-Hastings naming game (MHNG) possesses a notable mathematical property: symbol emergence through MHNG is proven to be a decentralized Bayesian inference of representations shared by the agents. However, the previously proposed MHNG is limited to a two-agent scenario. This paper extends MHNG to an N-agent scenario. The main contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) we propose the recursive Metropolis-Hastings naming game (RMHNG) as an N-agent version of MHNG and demonstrate that RMHNG is an approximate Bayesian inference method for the posterior distribution over a latent variable shared by agents, similar to MHNG; and (2) we empirically evaluate the performance of RMHNG on synthetic and real image data, enabling multiple agents to develop and share a symbol system. Furthermore, we introduce two types of approximations -- one-sample and limited-length -- to reduce computational complexity while maintaining the ability to explain communication in a population of agents. The experimental findings showcased the efficacy of RMHNG as a decentralized Bayesian inference for approximating the posterior distribution concerning latent variables, which are jointly shared among agents, akin to MHNG. Moreover, the utilization of RMHNG elucidated the agents' capacity to exchange symbols. Furthermore, the study discovered that even the computationally simplified version of RMHNG could enable symbols to emerge among the agents.
Neural Markov Jump Processes
Authors: Patrick Seifner, Ramses J. Sanchez
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

Markov jump processes are continuous-time stochastic processes with a wide range of applications in both natural and social sciences. Despite their widespread use, inference in these models is highly non-trivial and typically proceeds via either Monte Carlo or expectation-maximization methods. In this work we introduce an alternative, variational inference algorithm for Markov jump processes which relies on neural ordinary differential equations, and is trainable via back-propagation. Our methodology learns neural, continuous-time representations of the observed data, that are used to approximate the initial distribution and time-dependent transition probability rates of the posterior Markov jump process. The time-independent rates of the prior process are in contrast trained akin to generative adversarial networks. We test our approach on synthetic data sampled from ground-truth Markov jump processes, experimental switching ion channel data and molecular dynamics simulations. Source code to reproduce our experiments is available online.
Bures-Wasserstein Means of Graphs
Authors: Isabel Haasler, Pascal Frossard
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Similarity, Node Classification

Finding the mean of sampled data is a fundamental task in machine learning and statistics. However, in cases where the data samples are graph objects, defining a mean is an inherently difficult task. We propose a novel framework for defining a graph mean via embeddings in the space of smooth graph signal distributions, where graph similarity can be measured using the Wasserstein metric. By finding a mean in this embedding space, we can recover a mean graph that preserves structural information. We establish the existence and uniqueness of the novel graph mean, and provide an iterative algorithm for computing it. To highlight the potential of our framework as a valuable tool for practical applications in machine learning, it is evaluated on various tasks, including k-means clustering of structured aligned graphs, classification of functional brain networks, and semi-supervised node classification in multi-layer graphs. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent performance, outperforms existing baseline approaches, and improves the performance of state-of-the-art methods.
Unbalanced Low-rank Optimal Transport Solvers
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

The relevance of optimal transport methods to machine learning has long been hindered by two salient limitations. First, the $O(n^3)$ computational cost of standard sample-based solvers (when used on batches of $n$ samples) is prohibitive. Second, the mass conservation constraint makes OT solvers too rigid in practice: because they must match \textit{all} points from both measures, their output can be heavily influenced by outliers. A flurry of recent works in OT has addressed these computational and modelling limitations, but has resulted in two separate strains of methods: While the computational outlook was much improved by entropic regularization, more recent $O(n)$ linear-time \textit{low-rank} solvers hold the promise to scale up OT further. On the other hand, modelling rigidities have been eased owing to unbalanced variants of OT, that rely on penalization terms to promote, rather than impose, mass conservation. The goal of this paper is to merge these two strains, to achieve the promise of \textit{both} versatile/scalable unbalanced/low-rank OT solvers. We propose custom algorithms to implement these extensions for the linear OT problem and its Fused-Gromov-Wasserstein generalization, and demonstrate their practical relevance to challenging spatial transcriptomics matching problems.