pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Is Deep Learning Network Necessary for Image Generation?
Authors: Chenqiu Zhao, Guanfang Dong, Anup Basu
Date: 2023-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Dimensionality Reduction, Image Generation

Recently, images are considered samples from a high-dimensional distribution, and deep learning has become almost synonymous with image generation. However, is a deep learning network truly necessary for image generation? In this paper, we investigate the possibility of image generation without using a deep learning network, motivated by validating the assumption that images follow a high-dimensional distribution. Since images are assumed to be samples from such a distribution, we utilize the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to describe it. In particular, we employ a recent distribution learning technique named as Monte-Carlo Marginalization to capture the parameters of the GMM based on image samples. Moreover, we also use the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for dimensionality reduction to decrease computational complexity. During our evaluation experiment, we first attempt to model the distribution of image samples directly to verify the assumption that images truly follow a distribution. We then use the SVD for dimensionality reduction. The principal components, rather than raw image data, are used for distribution learning. Compared to methods relying on deep learning networks, our approach is more explainable, and its performance is promising. Experiments show that our images have a lower FID value compared to those generated by variational auto-encoders, demonstrating the feasibility of image generation without deep learning networks.
Project Aria: A New Tool for Egocentric Multi-Modal AI Research
Authors: Jakob Engel, Kiran Somasundaram, Michael Goesele, Albert Sun, Alexander Gamino, Andrew Turner, Arjang Talattof, Arnie Yuan, Bilal Souti, Brighid Meredith, Cheng Peng, Chris Sweeney, Cole Wilson, Dan Barnes, Daniel DeTone, David Caruso, Derek Valleroy, Dinesh Ginjupalli, Duncan Frost, Edward Miller, Elias Mueggler, Evgeniy Oleinik, Fan Zhang, Guruprasad Somasundaram, Gustavo Solaira, Harry Lanaras, Henry Howard-Jenkins, Huixuan Tang, Hyo Jin Kim, Jaime Rivera, Ji Luo, Jing Dong, Julian Straub, Kevin Bailey, Kevin Eckenhoff, Lingni Ma, Luis Pesqueira, Mark Schwesinger, Maurizio Monge, Nan Yang, Nick Charron, Nikhil Raina, Omkar Parkhi, Peter Borschowa, Pierre Moulon, Prince Gupta, Raul Mur-Artal, Robbie Pennington, Sachin Kulkarni, Sagar Miglani, Santosh Gondi, Saransh Solanki, Sean Diener, Shangyi Cheng, Simon Green, Steve Saarinen, Suvam Patra, Tassos Mourikis, Thomas Whelan, Tripti Singh, Vasileios Balntas, Vijay Baiyya, Wilson Dreewes, Xiaqing Pan, Yang Lou, Yipu Zhao, Yusuf Mansour, Yuyang Zou, Zhaoyang Lv, Zijian Wang, Mingfei Yan, Carl Ren, Renzo De Nardi, Richard Newcombe
Date: 2023-08-24 00:00:00

Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data.
Learning to Predict 3D Rotational Dynamics from Images of a Rigid Body with Unknown Mass Distribution
Authors: Justice Mason, Christine Allen-Blanchette, Nicholas Zolman, Elizabeth Davison, Naomi Ehrich Leonard
Date: 2023-08-24 00:00:00

In many real-world settings, image observations of freely rotating 3D rigid bodies may be available when low-dimensional measurements are not. However, the high-dimensionality of image data precludes the use of classical estimation techniques to learn the dynamics. The usefulness of standard deep learning methods is also limited, because an image of a rigid body reveals nothing about the distribution of mass inside the body, which, together with initial angular velocity, is what determines how the body will rotate. We present a physics-based neural network model to estimate and predict 3D rotational dynamics from image sequences. We achieve this using a multi-stage prediction pipeline that maps individual images to a latent representation homeomorphic to $\mathbf{SO}(3)$, computes angular velocities from latent pairs, and predicts future latent states using the Hamiltonian equations of motion. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on new rotating rigid-body datasets of sequences of synthetic images of rotating objects, including cubes, prisms and satellites, with unknown uniform and non-uniform mass distributions. Our model outperforms competing baselines on our datasets, producing better qualitative predictions and reducing the error observed for the state-of-the-art Hamiltonian Generative Network by a factor of 2.
Federated Learning for Computer Vision
Authors: Yassine Himeur, Iraklis Varlamis, Hamza Kheddar, Abbes Amira, Shadi Atalla, Yashbir Singh, Faycal Bensaali, Wathiq Mansoor
Date: 2023-08-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Computer Vision (CV) is playing a significant role in transforming society by utilizing machine learning (ML) tools for a wide range of tasks. However, the need for large-scale datasets to train ML models creates challenges for centralized ML algorithms. The massive computation loads required for processing and the potential privacy risks associated with storing and processing data on central cloud servers put these algorithms under severe strain. To address these issues, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution, allowing privacy preservation by training models locally and exchanging them to improve overall performance. Additionally, the computational load is distributed across multiple clients, reducing the burden on central servers. This paper presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first review discussing recent advancements of FL in CV applications, comparing them to conventional centralized training paradigms. It provides an overview of current FL applications in various CV tasks, emphasizing the advantages of FL and the challenges of implementing it in CV. To facilitate this, the paper proposes a taxonomy of FL techniques in CV, outlining their applications and security threats. It also discusses privacy concerns related to implementing blockchain in FL schemes for CV tasks and summarizes existing privacy preservation methods. Moving on, the paper identifies open research challenges and potential future research directions to further exploit the potential of FL and blockchain in CV applications.
Minimizing Quasi-Self-Concordant Functions by Gradient Regularization of Newton Method
Authors: Nikita Doikov
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00

We study the composite convex optimization problems with a Quasi-Self-Concordant smooth component. This problem class naturally interpolates between classic Self-Concordant functions and functions with Lipschitz continuous Hessian. Previously, the best complexity bounds for this problem class were associated with trust-region schemes and implementations of a ball-minimization oracle. In this paper, we show that for minimizing Quasi-Self-Concordant functions we can use instead the basic Newton Method with Gradient Regularization. For unconstrained minimization, it only involves a simple matrix inversion operation (solving a linear system) at each step. We prove a fast global linear rate for this algorithm, matching the complexity bound of the trust-region scheme, while our method remains especially simple to implement. Then, we introduce the Dual Newton Method, and based on it, develop the corresponding Accelerated Newton Scheme for this problem class, which further improves the complexity factor of the basic method. As a direct consequence of our results, we establish fast global linear rates of simple variants of the Newton Method applied to several practical problems, including Logistic Regression, Soft Maximum, and Matrix Scaling, without requiring additional assumptions on strong or uniform convexity for the target objective.
Diversified Ensemble of Independent Sub-Networks for Robust Self-Supervised Representation Learning
Authors: Amirhossein Vahidi, Lisa Wimmer, Hüseyin Anil Gündüz, Bernd Bischl, Eyke Hüllermeier, Mina Rezaei
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Ensemble Learning, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Representation Learning

Ensembling a neural network is a widely recognized approach to enhance model performance, estimate uncertainty, and improve robustness in deep supervised learning. However, deep ensembles often come with high computational costs and memory demands. In addition, the efficiency of a deep ensemble is related to diversity among the ensemble members which is challenging for large, over-parameterized deep neural networks. Moreover, ensemble learning has not yet seen such widespread adoption, and it remains a challenging endeavor for self-supervised or unsupervised representation learning. Motivated by these challenges, we present a novel self-supervised training regime that leverages an ensemble of independent sub-networks, complemented by a new loss function designed to encourage diversity. Our method efficiently builds a sub-model ensemble with high diversity, leading to well-calibrated estimates of model uncertainty, all achieved with minimal computational overhead compared to traditional deep self-supervised ensembles. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments across various tasks, including in-distribution generalization, out-of-distribution detection, dataset corruption, and semi-supervised settings. The results demonstrate that our method significantly improves prediction reliability. Our approach not only achieves excellent accuracy but also enhances calibration, surpassing baseline performance across a wide range of self-supervised architectures in computer vision, natural language processing, and genomics data.
Hybrid PLS-ML Authentication Scheme for V2I Communication Networks
Authors: Hala Amin, Jawaher Kaldari, Nora Mohamed, Waqas Aman, Saif Al-Kuwari
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Vehicular communication networks are rapidly emerging as vehicles become smarter. However, these networks are increasingly susceptible to various attacks. The situation is exacerbated by the rise in automated vehicles complicates, emphasizing the need for security and authentication measures to ensure safe and effective traffic management. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid physical layer security (PLS)-machine learning (ML) authentication scheme by exploiting the position of the transmitter vehicle as a device fingerprint. We use a time-of-arrival (ToA) based localization mechanism where the ToA is estimated at roadside units (RSUs), and the coordinates of the transmitter vehicle are extracted at the base station (BS).Furthermore, to track the mobility of the moving legitimate vehicle, we use ML model trained on several system parameters. We try two ML models for this purpose, i.e., support vector regression and decision tree. To evaluate our scheme, we conduct binary hypothesis testing on the estimated positions with the help of the ground truths provided by the ML model, which classifies the transmitter node as legitimate or malicious. Moreover, we consider the probability of false alarm and the probability of missed detection as performance metrics resulting from the binary hypothesis testing, and mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and coefficient of determination $\text{R}^2$ to further evaluate the ML models. We also compare our scheme with a baseline scheme that exploits the angle of arrival at RSUs for authentication. We observe that our proposed position-based mechanism outperforms the baseline scheme significantly in terms of missed detections.
RESTORE: Graph Embedding Assessment Through Reconstruction
Authors: Hong Yung Yip, Chidaksh Ravuru, Neelabha Banerjee, Shashwat Jha, Amit Sheth, Aman Chadha, Amitava Das
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Graph Reconstruction, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Following the success of Word2Vec embeddings, graph embeddings (GEs) have gained substantial traction. GEs are commonly generated and evaluated extrinsically on downstream applications, but intrinsic evaluations of the original graph properties in terms of topological structure and semantic information have been lacking. Understanding these will help identify the deficiency of the various families of GE methods when vectorizing graphs in terms of preserving the relevant knowledge or learning incorrect knowledge. To address this, we propose RESTORE, a framework for intrinsic GEs assessment through graph reconstruction. We show that reconstructing the original graph from the underlying GEs yields insights into the relative amount of information preserved in a given vector form. We first introduce the graph reconstruction task. We generate GEs from three GE families based on factorization methods, random walks, and deep learning (with representative algorithms from each family) on the CommonSense Knowledge Graph (CSKG). We analyze their effectiveness in preserving the (a) topological structure of node-level graph reconstruction with an increasing number of hops and (b) semantic information on various word semantic and analogy tests. Our evaluations show deep learning-based GE algorithm (SDNE) is overall better at preserving (a) with a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.54 and 0.35 for 2 and 3-hop reconstruction respectively, while the factorization-based algorithm (HOPE) is better at encapsulating (b) with an average Euclidean distance of 0.14, 0.17, and 0.11 for 1, 2, and 3-hop reconstruction respectively. The modest performance of these GEs leaves room for further research avenues on better graph representation learning.
Adversarial Predictions of Data Distributions Across Federated Internet-of-Things Devices
Authors: Samir Rajani, Dario Dematties, Nathaniel Hudson, Kyle Chard, Nicola Ferrier, Rajesh Sankaran, Peter Beckman
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is increasingly becoming the default approach for training machine learning models across decentralized Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. A key advantage of FL is that no raw data are communicated across the network, providing an immediate layer of privacy. Despite this, recent works have demonstrated that data reconstruction can be done with the locally trained model updates which are communicated across the network. However, many of these works have limitations with regard to how the gradients are computed in backpropagation. In this work, we demonstrate that the model weights shared in FL can expose revealing information about the local data distributions of IoT devices. This leakage could expose sensitive information to malicious actors in a distributed system. We further discuss results which show that injecting noise into model weights is ineffective at preventing data leakage without seriously harming the global model accuracy.
Edge Generation Scheduling for DAG Tasks Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Binqi Sun, Mirco Theile, Ziyuan Qin, Daniele Bernardini, Debayan Roy, Andrea Bastoni, Marco Caccamo
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

Directed acyclic graph (DAG) tasks are currently adopted in the real-time domain to model complex applications from the automotive, avionics, and industrial domains that implement their functionalities through chains of intercommunicating tasks. This paper studies the problem of scheduling real-time DAG tasks by presenting a novel schedulability test based on the concept of trivial schedulability. Using this schedulability test, we propose a new DAG scheduling framework (edge generation scheduling -- EGS) that attempts to minimize the DAG width by iteratively generating edges while guaranteeing the deadline constraint. We study how to efficiently solve the problem of generating edges by developing a deep reinforcement learning algorithm combined with a graph representation neural network to learn an efficient edge generation policy for EGS. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing it with state-of-the-art DAG scheduling heuristics and an optimal mixed-integer linear programming baseline. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art by requiring fewer processors to schedule the same DAG tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/binqi-sun/egs.
Human Comfortability Index Estimation in Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration Task
Authors: Celal Savur, Jamison Heard, Ferat Sahin
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00

Fluent human-robot collaboration requires a robot teammate to understand, learn, and adapt to the human's psycho-physiological state. Such collaborations require a computing system that monitors human physiological signals during human-robot collaboration (HRC) to quantitatively estimate a human's level of comfort, which we have termed in this research as comfortability index (CI) and uncomfortability index (unCI). Subjective metrics (surprise, anxiety, boredom, calmness, and comfortability) and physiological signals were collected during a human-robot collaboration experiment that varied robot behavior. The emotion circumplex model is adapted to calculate the CI from the participant's quantitative data as well as physiological data. To estimate CI/unCI from physiological signals, time features were extracted from electrocardiogram (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and pupillometry signals. In this research, we successfully adapt the circumplex model to find the location (axis) of 'comfortability' and 'uncomfortability' on the circumplex model, and its location match with the closest emotions on the circumplex model. Finally, the study showed that the proposed approach can estimate human comfortability/uncomfortability from physiological signals.
Rate-Optimal Policy Optimization for Linear Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Uri Sherman, Alon Cohen, Tomer Koren, Yishay Mansour
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00

We study regret minimization in online episodic linear Markov Decision Processes, and obtain rate-optimal $\widetilde O (\sqrt K)$ regret where $K$ denotes the number of episodes. Our work is the first to establish the optimal (w.r.t.~$K$) rate of convergence in the stochastic setting with bandit feedback using a policy optimization based approach, and the first to establish the optimal (w.r.t.~$K$) rate in the adversarial setup with full information feedback, for which no algorithm with an optimal rate guarantee is currently known.
Comparing AutoML and Deep Learning Methods for Condition Monitoring using Realistic Validation Scenarios
Authors: Payman Goodarzi, Andreas Schütze, Tizian Schneider
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, feature selection

This study extensively compares conventional machine learning methods and deep learning for condition monitoring tasks using an AutoML toolbox. The experiments reveal consistent high accuracy in random K-fold cross-validation scenarios across all tested models. However, when employing leave-one-group-out (LOGO) cross-validation on the same datasets, no clear winner emerges, indicating the presence of domain shift in real-world scenarios. Additionally, the study assesses the scalability and interpretability of conventional methods and neural networks. Conventional methods offer explainability with their modular structure aiding feature identification. In contrast, neural networks require specialized interpretation techniques like occlusion maps to visualize important regions in the input data. Finally, the paper highlights the significance of feature selection, particularly in condition monitoring tasks with limited class variations. Low-complexity models prove sufficient for such tasks, as only a few features from the input signal are typically needed. In summary, these findings offer crucial insights into the strengths and limitations of various approaches, providing valuable benchmarks and identifying the most suitable methods for condition monitoring applications, thereby enhancing their applicability in real-world scenarios.
AI in the Gray: Exploring Moderation Policies in Dialogic Large Language Models vs. Human Answers in Controversial Topics
Authors: Vahid Ghafouri, Vibhor Agarwal, Yong Zhang, Nishanth Sastry, Jose Such, Guillermo Suarez-Tangil
Date: 2023-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The introduction of ChatGPT and the subsequent improvement of Large Language Models (LLMs) have prompted more and more individuals to turn to the use of ChatBots, both for information and assistance with decision-making. However, the information the user is after is often not formulated by these ChatBots objectively enough to be provided with a definite, globally accepted answer. Controversial topics, such as "religion", "gender identity", "freedom of speech", and "equality", among others, can be a source of conflict as partisan or biased answers can reinforce preconceived notions or promote disinformation. By exposing ChatGPT to such debatable questions, we aim to understand its level of awareness and if existing models are subject to socio-political and/or economic biases. We also aim to explore how AI-generated answers compare to human ones. For exploring this, we use a dataset of a social media platform created for the purpose of debating human-generated claims on polemic subjects among users, dubbed Kialo. Our results show that while previous versions of ChatGPT have had important issues with controversial topics, more recent versions of ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo) are no longer manifesting significant explicit biases in several knowledge areas. In particular, it is well-moderated regarding economic aspects. However, it still maintains degrees of implicit libertarian leaning toward right-winged ideals which suggest the need for increased moderation from the socio-political point of view. In terms of domain knowledge on controversial topics, with the exception of the "Philosophical" category, ChatGPT is performing well in keeping up with the collective human level of knowledge. Finally, we see that sources of Bing AI have slightly more tendency to the center when compared to human answers. All the analyses we make are generalizable to other types of biases and domains.