pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning the Dynamics of Particle-based Systems with Lagrangian Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Ravinder Bhattoo, Sayan Ranu, N. M. Anoop Krishnan
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Inductive Bias

Physical systems are commonly represented as a combination of particles, the individual dynamics of which govern the system dynamics. However, traditional approaches require the knowledge of several abstract quantities such as the energy or force to infer the dynamics of these particles. Here, we present a framework, namely, Lagrangian graph neural network (LGnn), that provides a strong inductive bias to learn the Lagrangian of a particle-based system directly from the trajectory. We test our approach on challenging systems with constraints and drag -- LGnn outperforms baselines such as feed-forward Lagrangian neural network (Lnn) with improved performance. We also show the zero-shot generalizability of the system by simulating systems two orders of magnitude larger than the trained one and also hybrid systems that are unseen by the model, a unique feature. The graph architecture of LGnn significantly simplifies the learning in comparison to Lnn with ~25 times better performance on ~20 times smaller amounts of data. Finally, we show the interpretability of LGnn, which directly provides physical insights on drag and constraint forces learned by the model. LGnn can thus provide a fillip toward understanding the dynamics of physical systems purely from observable quantities.
Phishing URL Detection: A Network-based Approach Robust to Evasion
Authors: Taeri Kim, Noseong Park, Jiwon Hong, Sang-Wook Kim
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00

Many cyberattacks start with disseminating phishing URLs. When clicking these phishing URLs, the victim's private information is leaked to the attacker. There have been proposed several machine learning methods to detect phishing URLs. However, it still remains under-explored to detect phishing URLs with evasion, i.e., phishing URLs that pretend to be benign by manipulating patterns. In many cases, the attacker i) reuses prepared phishing web pages because making a completely brand-new set costs non-trivial expenses, ii) prefers hosting companies that do not require private information and are cheaper than others, iii) prefers shared hosting for cost efficiency, and iv) sometimes uses benign domains, IP addresses, and URL string patterns to evade existing detection methods. Inspired by those behavioral characteristics, we present a network-based inference method to accurately detect phishing URLs camouflaged with legitimate patterns, i.e., robust to evasion. In the network approach, a phishing URL will be still identified as phishy even after evasion unless a majority of its neighbors in the network are evaded at the same time. Our method consistently shows better detection performance throughout various experimental tests than state-of-the-art methods, e.g., F-1 of 0.89 for our method vs. 0.84 for the best feature-based method.
Suppressing Noise from Built Environment Datasets to Reduce Communication Rounds for Convergence of Federated Learning
Authors: Rahul Mishra, Hari Prabhat Gupta, Tanima Dutta, Sajal K. Das
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Smart sensing provides an easier and convenient data-driven mechanism for monitoring and control in the built environment. Data generated in the built environment are privacy sensitive and limited. Federated learning is an emerging paradigm that provides privacy-preserving collaboration among multiple participants for model training without sharing private and limited data. The noisy labels in the datasets of the participants degrade the performance and increase the number of communication rounds for convergence of federated learning. Such large communication rounds require more time and energy to train the model. In this paper, we propose a federated learning approach to suppress the unequal distribution of the noisy labels in the dataset of each participant. The approach first estimates the noise ratio of the dataset for each participant and normalizes the noise ratio using the server dataset. The proposed approach can handle bias in the server dataset and minimizes its impact on the participants' dataset. Next, we calculate the optimal weighted contributions of the participants using the normalized noise ratio and influence of each participant. We further derive the expression to estimate the number of communication rounds required for the convergence of the proposed approach. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over existing techniques in terms of the communication rounds and achieved performance in the built environment.
Negative Selection Approach to support Formal Verification and Validation of BlackBox Models' Input Constraints
Authors: Abdul-Rauf Nuhu, Kishor Datta Gupta, Wendwosen Bellete Bedada, Mahmoud Nabil, Lydia Asrat Zeleke, Abdollah Homaifar, Edward Tunstel
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00

Generating unsafe sub-requirements from a partitioned input space to support verification-guided test cases for formal verification of black-box models is a challenging problem for researchers. The size of the search space makes exhaustive search computationally impractical. This paper investigates a meta-heuristic approach to search for unsafe candidate sub-requirements in partitioned input space. We present a Negative Selection Algorithm (NSA) for identifying the candidates' unsafe regions within given safety properties. The Meta-heuristic capability of the NSA algorithm made it possible to estimate vast unsafe regions while validating a subset of these regions. We utilize a parallel execution of partitioned input space to produce safe areas. The NSA based on the prior knowledge of the safe regions is used to identify candidate unsafe region areas and the Marabou framework is then used to validate the NSA results. Our preliminary experimentation and evaluation show that the procedure finds candidate unsafe sub-requirements when validated with the Marabou framework with high precision.
Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction
Authors: Yufeng Zhang, Weiqing Wang, Hongzhi Yin, Pengpeng Zhao, Wei Chen, Lei Zhao
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Inductive Link Prediction, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Prediction, Relation

Inductive link prediction (ILP) is to predict links for unseen entities in emerging knowledge graphs (KGs), considering the evolving nature of KGs. A more challenging scenario is that emerging KGs consist of only unseen entities, called as disconnected emerging KGs (DEKGs). Existing studies for DEKGs only focus on predicting enclosing links, i.e., predicting links inside the emerging KG. The bridging links, which carry the evolutionary information from the original KG to DEKG, have not been investigated by previous work so far. To fill in the gap, we propose a novel model entitled DEKG-ILP (Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction) that consists of the following two components. (1) The module CLRM (Contrastive Learning-based Relation-specific Feature Modeling) is developed to extract global relation-based semantic features that are shared between original KGs and DEKGs with a novel sampling strategy. (2) The module GSM (GNN-based Subgraph Modeling) is proposed to extract the local subgraph topological information around each link in KGs. The extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that DEKG-ILP has obvious performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods for both enclosing and bridging link prediction. The source code is available online.
Hypergraph convolutional neural network-based clustering technique
Authors: Loc H. Tran, Nguyen Trinh, Linh H. Tran
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This paper constitutes the novel hypergraph convolutional neural networkbased clustering technique. This technique is employed to solve the clustering problem for the Citeseer dataset and the Cora dataset. Each dataset contains the feature matrix and the incidence matrix of the hypergraph (i.e., constructed from the feature matrix). This novel clustering method utilizes both matrices. Initially, the hypergraph auto-encoders are employed to transform both the incidence matrix and the feature matrix from high dimensional space to low dimensional space. In the end, we apply the k-means clustering technique to the transformed matrix. The hypergraph convolutional neural network (CNN)-based clustering technique presented a better result on performance during experiments than those of the other classical clustering techniques.
SaleNet: A low-power end-to-end CNN accelerator for sustained attention level evaluation using EEG
Authors: Chao Zhang, Zijian Tang, Taoming Guo, Jiaxin Lei, Jiaxin Xiao, Anhe Wang, Shuo Bai, Milin Zhang
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Model Compression, Quantization

This paper proposes SaleNet - an end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) for sustained attention level evaluation using prefrontal electroencephalogram (EEG). A bias-driven pruning method is proposed together with group convolution, global average pooling (GAP), near-zero pruning, weight clustering and quantization for the model compression, achieving a total compression ratio of 183.11x. The compressed SaleNet obtains a state-of-the-art subject-independent sustained attention level classification accuracy of 84.2% on the recorded 6-subject EEG database in this work. The SaleNet is implemented on a Artix-7 FPGA with a competitive power consumption of 0.11 W and an energy-efficiency of 8.19 GOps/W.
Tree-Based Learning in RNNs for Power Consumption Forecasting
Authors: Roberto Baviera, Pietro Manzoni
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00

A Recurrent Neural Network that operates on several time lags, called an RNN(p), is the natural generalization of an Autoregressive ARX(p) model. It is a powerful forecasting tool when different time scales can influence a given phenomenon, as it happens in the energy sector where hourly, daily, weekly and yearly interactions coexist. The cost-effective BPTT is the industry standard as learning algorithm for RNNs. We prove that, when training RNN(p) models, other learning algorithms turn out to be much more efficient in terms of both time and space complexity. We also introduce a new learning algorithm, the Tree Recombined Recurrent Learning, that leverages on a tree representation of the unrolled network and appears to be even more effective. We present an application of RNN(p) models for power consumption forecasting on the hourly scale: experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and the excellent predictive accuracy achieved by the selected model both in point and in probabilistic forecasting of the energy consumption.
Identify The Beehive Sound Using Deep Learning
Authors: Shah Jafor Sadeek Quaderi, Sadia Afrin Labonno, Sadia Mostafa, Shamim Akhter
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Flowers play an essential role in removing the duller from the environment. The life cycle of the flowering plants involves pollination, fertilization, flowering, seed-formation, dispersion, and germination. Honeybees pollinate approximately 75% of all flowering plants. Environmental pollution, climate change, natural landscape demolition, and so on, threaten the natural habitats, thus continuously reducing the number of honeybees. As a result, several researchers are attempting to resolve this issue. Applying acoustic classification to recordings of beehive sounds may be a way of detecting changes within them. In this research, we use deep learning techniques, namely Sequential Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Network, and Recurrent Neural Network, on the recorded sounds to classify bee sounds from the nonbeehive noises. In addition, we perform a comparative study among some popular non-deep learning techniques, namely Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Na\"ive Bayes, with the deep learning techniques. The techniques are also verified on the combined recorded sounds (25-75% noises).
Sharp bounds on the price of bandit feedback for several models of mistake-bounded online learning
Authors: Raymond Feng, Jesse Geneson, Andrew Lee, Espen Slettnes
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00

We determine sharp bounds on the price of bandit feedback for several variants of the mistake-bound model. The first part of the paper presents bounds on the $r$-input weak reinforcement model and the $r$-input delayed, ambiguous reinforcement model. In both models, the adversary gives $r$ inputs in each round and only indicates a correct answer if all $r$ guesses are correct. The only difference between the two models is that in the delayed, ambiguous model, the learner must answer each input before receiving the next input of the round, while the learner receives all $r$ inputs at once in the weak reinforcement model. In the second part of the paper, we introduce models for online learning with permutation patterns, in which a learner attempts to learn a permutation from a set of permutations by guessing statistics related to sub-permutations. For these permutation models, we prove sharp bounds on the price of bandit feedback.
Generative Modeling via Tree Tensor Network States
Authors: Xun Tang, YoonHaeng Hur, Yuehaw Khoo, Lexing Ying
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

In this paper, we present a density estimation framework based on tree tensor-network states. The proposed method consists of determining the tree topology with Chow-Liu algorithm, and obtaining a linear system of equations that defines the tensor-network components via sketching techniques. Novel choices of sketch functions are developed in order to consider graphical models that contain loops. Sample complexity guarantees are provided and further corroborated by numerical experiments.
FedAR+: A Federated Learning Approach to Appliance Recognition with Mislabeled Data in Residential Buildings
Authors: Ashish Gupta, Hari Prabhat Gupta, Sajal K. Das
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

With the enhancement of people's living standards and rapid growth of communication technologies, residential environments are becoming smart and well-connected, increasing overall energy consumption substantially. As household appliances are the primary energy consumers, their recognition becomes crucial to avoid unattended usage, thereby conserving energy and making smart environments more sustainable. An appliance recognition model is traditionally trained at a central server (service provider) by collecting electricity consumption data, recorded via smart plugs, from the clients (consumers), causing a privacy breach. Besides that, the data are susceptible to noisy labels that may appear when an appliance gets connected to a non-designated smart plug. While addressing these issues jointly, we propose a novel federated learning approach to appliance recognition, called FedAR+, enabling decentralized model training across clients in a privacy preserving way even with mislabeled training data. FedAR+ introduces an adaptive noise handling method, essentially a joint loss function incorporating weights and label distribution, to empower the appliance recognition model against noisy labels. By deploying smart plugs in an apartment complex, we collect a labeled dataset that, along with two existing datasets, are utilized to evaluate the performance of FedAR+. Experimental results show that our approach can effectively handle up to $30\%$ concentration of noisy labels while outperforming the prior solutions by a large margin on accuracy.
Classifying Spatial Trajectories
Authors: Hasan Pourmahmood-Aghababa, Jeff M. Phillips
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00

We provide the first comprehensive study on how to classify trajectories using only their spatial representations, measured on 5 real-world data sets. Our comparison considers 20 distinct classifiers arising either as a KNN classifier of a popular distance, or as a more general type of classifier using a vectorized representation of each trajectory. We additionally develop new methods for how to vectorize trajectories via a data-driven method to select the associated landmarks, and these methods prove among the most effective in our study. These vectorized approaches are simple and efficient to use, and also provide state-of-the-art accuracy on an established transportation mode classification task. In all, this study sets the standard for how to classify trajectories, including introducing new simple techniques to achieve these results, and sets a rigorous standard for the inevitable future study on this topic.
Deep Stable Representation Learning on Electronic Health Records
Authors: Yingtao Luo, Zhaocheng Liu, Qiang Liu
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Disease Prediction, Representation Learning

Deep learning models have achieved promising disease prediction performance of the Electronic Health Records (EHR) of patients. However, most models developed under the I.I.D. hypothesis fail to consider the agnostic distribution shifts, diminishing the generalization ability of deep learning models to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data. In this setting, spurious statistical correlations that may change in different environments will be exploited, which can cause sub-optimal performances of deep learning models. The unstable correlation between procedures and diagnoses existed in the training distribution can cause spurious correlation between historical EHR and future diagnosis. To address this problem, we propose to use a causal representation learning method called Causal Healthcare Embedding (CHE). CHE aims at eliminating the spurious statistical relationship by removing the dependencies between diagnoses and procedures. We introduce the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to measure the degree of independence between the embedded diagnosis and procedure features. Based on causal view analyses, we perform the sample weighting technique to get rid of such spurious relationship for the stable learning of EHR across different environments. Moreover, our proposed CHE method can be used as a flexible plug-and-play module that can enhance existing deep learning models on EHR. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and five state-of-the-art baselines unequivocally show that CHE can improve the prediction accuracy of deep learning models on out-of-distribution data by a large margin. In addition, the interpretability study shows that CHE could successfully leverage causal structures to reflect a more reasonable contribution of historical records for predictions.
TransPolymer: a Transformer-based language model for polymer property predictions
Authors: Changwen Xu, Yuyang Wang, Amir Barati Farimani
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Prediction, Property Prediction, Representation Learning

Accurate and efficient prediction of polymer properties is of great significance in polymer design. Conventionally, expensive and time-consuming experiments or simulations are required to evaluate polymer functions. Recently, Transformer models, equipped with self-attention mechanisms, have exhibited superior performance in natural language processing. However, such methods have not been investigated in polymer sciences. Herein, we report TransPolymer, a Transformer-based language model for polymer property prediction. Our proposed polymer tokenizer with chemical awareness enables learning representations from polymer sequences. Rigorous experiments on ten polymer property prediction benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TransPolymer. Moreover, we show that TransPolymer benefits from pretraining on large unlabeled dataset via Masked Language Modeling. Experimental results further manifest the important role of self-attention in modeling polymer sequences. We highlight this model as a promising computational tool for promoting rational polymer design and understanding structure-property relationships from a data science view.
Geometry of EM and related iterative algorithms
Authors: Hideitsu Hino, Shotaro Akaho, Noboru Murata
Date: 2022-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

The Expectation--Maximization (EM) algorithm is a simple meta-algorithm that has been used for many years as a methodology for statistical inference when there are missing measurements in the observed data or when the data is composed of observables and unobservables. Its general properties are well studied, and also, there are countless ways to apply it to individual problems. In this paper, we introduce the $em$ algorithm, an information geometric formulation of the EM algorithm, and its extensions and applications to various problems. Specifically, we will see that it is possible to formulate an outlier-robust inference algorithm, an algorithm for calculating channel capacity, parameter estimation methods on probability simplex, particular multivariate analysis methods such as principal component analysis in a space of probability models and modal regression, matrix factorization, and learning generative models, which have recently attracted attention in deep learning, from the geometric perspective.
Are Attribute Inference Attacks Just Imputation?
Authors: Bargav Jayaraman, David Evans
Date: 2022-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Imputation, Inference Attack

Models can expose sensitive information about their training data. In an attribute inference attack, an adversary has partial knowledge of some training records and access to a model trained on those records, and infers the unknown values of a sensitive feature of those records. We study a fine-grained variant of attribute inference we call \emph{sensitive value inference}, where the adversary's goal is to identify with high confidence some records from a candidate set where the unknown attribute has a particular sensitive value. We explicitly compare attribute inference with data imputation that captures the training distribution statistics, under various assumptions about the training data available to the adversary. Our main conclusions are: (1) previous attribute inference methods do not reveal more about the training data from the model than can be inferred by an adversary without access to the trained model, but with the same knowledge of the underlying distribution as needed to train the attribute inference attack; (2) black-box attribute inference attacks rarely learn anything that cannot be learned without the model; but (3) white-box attacks, which we introduce and evaluate in the paper, can reliably identify some records with the sensitive value attribute that would not be predicted without having access to the model. Furthermore, we show that proposed defenses such as differentially private training and removing vulnerable records from training do not mitigate this privacy risk. The code for our experiments is available at \url{https://github.com/bargavj/EvaluatingDPML}.
A PDE approach for regret bounds under partial monitoring
Authors: Erhan Bayraktar, Ibrahim Ekren, Xin Zhang
Date: 2022-09-02 00:00:00

In this paper, we study a learning problem in which a forecaster only observes partial information. By properly rescaling the problem, we heuristically derive a limiting PDE on Wasserstein space which characterizes the asymptotic behavior of the regret of the forecaster. Using a verification type argument, we show that the problem of obtaining regret bounds and efficient algorithms can be tackled by finding appropriate smooth sub/supersolutions of this parabolic PDE.