pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MultiFIX: An XAI-friendly feature inducing approach to building models from multimodal data
Authors: Mafalda Malafaia, Thalea Schlender, Peter A. N. Bosman, Tanja Alderliesten
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence

In the health domain, decisions are often based on different data modalities. Thus, when creating prediction models, multimodal fusion approaches that can extract and combine relevant features from different data modalities, can be highly beneficial. Furthermore, it is important to understand how each modality impacts the final prediction, especially in high-stake domains, so that these models can be used in a trustworthy and responsible manner. We propose MultiFIX: a new interpretability-focused multimodal data fusion pipeline that explicitly induces separate features from different data types that can subsequently be combined to make a final prediction. An end-to-end deep learning architecture is used to train a predictive model and extract representative features of each modality. Each part of the model is then explained using explainable artificial intelligence techniques. Attention maps are used to highlight important regions in image inputs. Inherently interpretable symbolic expressions, learned with GP-GOMEA, are used to describe the contribution of tabular inputs. The fusion of the extracted features to predict the target label is also replaced by a symbolic expression, learned with GP-GOMEA. Results on synthetic problems demonstrate the strengths and limitations of MultiFIX. Lastly, we apply MultiFIX to a publicly available dataset for the detection of malignant skin lesions.
Examining Monitoring System: Detecting Abnormal Behavior In Online Examinations
Authors: Dinh An Ngo, Thanh Dat Nguyen, Thi Le Chi Dang, Huy Hoan Le, Ton Bao Ho, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Cheating in online exams has become a prevalent issue over the past decade, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. To address this issue of academic dishonesty, our "Exam Monitoring System: Detecting Abnormal Behavior in Online Examinations" is designed to assist proctors in identifying unusual student behavior. Our system demonstrates high accuracy and speed in detecting cheating in real-time scenarios, providing valuable information, and aiding proctors in decision-making. This article outlines our methodology and the effectiveness of our system in mitigating the widespread problem of cheating in online exams.
Mafin: Enhancing Black-Box Embeddings with Model Augmented Fine-Tuning
Authors: Mingtian Zhang, Shawn Lan, Peter Hayes, David Barber
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an effective solution for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs). The retrieval stage in RAG typically involves a pre-trained embedding model, which converts queries and passages into vectors to capture their semantics. However, a standard pre-trained embedding model may exhibit sub-optimal performance when applied to specific domain knowledge, necessitating fine-tuning. This paper addresses scenarios where the embeddings are only available from a black-box model. We introduce Model augmented fine-tuning (Mafin) -- a novel approach for fine-tuning a black-box embedding model by augmenting it with a trainable embedding model. Our results demonstrate that Mafin significantly enhances the performance of the black-box embeddings by only requiring the training of a small augmented model. We validate the effectiveness of our method on both labeled and unlabeled datasets, illustrating its broad applicability and efficiency.
Defending Against Weight-Poisoning Backdoor Attacks for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Shuai Zhao, Leilei Gan, Luu Anh Tuan, Jie Fu, Lingjuan Lyu, Meihuizi Jia, Jinming Wen
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, text-classification, Text Classification

Recently, various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies for application to language models have been proposed and successfully implemented. However, this raises the question of whether PEFT, which only updates a limited set of model parameters, constitutes security vulnerabilities when confronted with weight-poisoning backdoor attacks. In this study, we show that PEFT is more susceptible to weight-poisoning backdoor attacks compared to the full-parameter fine-tuning method, with pre-defined triggers remaining exploitable and pre-defined targets maintaining high confidence, even after fine-tuning. Motivated by this insight, we developed a Poisoned Sample Identification Module (PSIM) leveraging PEFT, which identifies poisoned samples through confidence, providing robust defense against weight-poisoning backdoor attacks. Specifically, we leverage PEFT to train the PSIM with randomly reset sample labels. During the inference process, extreme confidence serves as an indicator for poisoned samples, while others are clean. We conduct experiments on text classification tasks, five fine-tuning strategies, and three weight-poisoning backdoor attack methods. Experiments show near 100% success rates for weight-poisoning backdoor attacks when utilizing PEFT. Furthermore, our defensive approach exhibits overall competitive performance in mitigating weight-poisoning backdoor attacks.
Endowing Pre-trained Graph Models with Provable Fairness
Authors: Zhongjian Zhang, Mengmei Zhang, Yue Yu, Cheng Yang, Jiawei Liu, Chuan Shi
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness, Node Classification

Pre-trained graph models (PGMs) aim to capture transferable inherent structural properties and apply them to different downstream tasks. Similar to pre-trained language models, PGMs also inherit biases from human society, resulting in discriminatory behavior in downstream applications. The debiasing process of existing fair methods is generally coupled with parameter optimization of GNNs. However, different downstream tasks may be associated with different sensitive attributes in reality, directly employing existing methods to improve the fairness of PGMs is inflexible and inefficient. Moreover, most of them lack a theoretical guarantee, i.e., provable lower bounds on the fairness of model predictions, which directly provides assurance in a practical scenario. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel adapter-tuning framework that endows pre-trained graph models with provable fairness (called GraphPAR). GraphPAR freezes the parameters of PGMs and trains a parameter-efficient adapter to flexibly improve the fairness of PGMs in downstream tasks. Specifically, we design a sensitive semantic augmenter on node representations, to extend the node representations with different sensitive attribute semantics for each node. The extended representations will be used to further train an adapter, to prevent the propagation of sensitive attribute semantics from PGMs to task predictions. Furthermore, with GraphPAR, we quantify whether the fairness of each node is provable, i.e., predictions are always fair within a certain range of sensitive attribute semantics. Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that GraphPAR achieves state-of-the-art prediction performance and fairness on node classification task. Furthermore, based on our GraphPAR, around 90\% nodes have provable fairness.
Transformer-based Causal Language Models Perform Clustering
Authors: Xinbo Wu, Lav R. Varshney
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Even though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in solving various natural language tasks, the capability of an LLM to follow human instructions is still a concern. Recent works have shown great improvements in the instruction-following capability via additional training for instruction-following tasks. However, the mechanisms responsible for effective instruction-following capabilities remain inadequately understood. Here, we introduce a simplified instruction-following task and use synthetic datasets to analyze a Transformer-based causal language model. Our findings suggest that the model learns task-specific information by clustering data within its hidden space, with this clustering process evolving dynamically during learning. We also demonstrate how this phenomenon assists the model in handling unseen instances, and validate our results in a more realistic setting. Furthermore, we present inspired applications regarding pre-training and alignment.
Your Large Language Model is Secretly a Fairness Proponent and You Should Prompt it Like One
Authors: Tianlin Li, XiaoYu Zhang, Chao Du, Tianyu Pang, Qian Liu, Qing Guo, Chao Shen, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) underscores the urgent need to ensure their fairness. However, LLMs frequently present dominant viewpoints while ignoring alternative perspectives from minority parties, resulting in potential biases. We hypothesize that these fairness-violating behaviors occur because LLMs express their viewpoints using a human personality that represents the majority of training data. In response to this, we validate that prompting LLMs with specific roles can allow LLMs to express diverse viewpoints. Building on this insight and observation, we develop FairThinking, a pipeline designed to automatically generate roles that enable LLMs to articulate diverse perspectives for fair expressions. To evaluate FairThinking, we create a dataset with a thousand items covering three fairness-related topics and conduct experiments on GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Llama2, and Mistral to demonstrate its superior performance.
Surprising Efficacy of Fine-Tuned Transformers for Fact-Checking over Larger Language Models
Authors: Vinay Setty
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Retrieval

In this paper, we explore the challenges associated with establishing an end-to-end fact-checking pipeline in a real-world context, covering over 90 languages. Our real-world experimental benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning Transformer models specifically for fact-checking tasks, such as claim detection and veracity prediction, provide superior performance over large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Mistral-7b. However, we illustrate that LLMs excel in generative tasks such as question decomposition for evidence retrieval. Through extensive evaluation, we show the efficacy of fine-tuned models for fact-checking in a multilingual setting and complex claims that include numerical quantities.
Enabling Weak LLMs to Judge Response Reliability via Meta Ranking
Authors: Zijun Liu, Boqun Kou, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, In-Context Learning

Despite the strong performance of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks, they still have reliability issues. Previous studies indicate that strong LLMs like GPT-4-turbo excel in evaluating the reliability of responses from LLMs, but face efficiency and local deployment issues. Thus, to enable weak LLMs to effectively assess the reliability of LLM responses, we propose a novel cross-query-comparison-based method called $\textit{Meta Ranking}$ (MR). Unlike previous few-shot methods that solely based on in-context learning capabilities in LLMs, MR assesses reliability by pairwisely ranking the target query-response pair with multiple reference query-response pairs. We found that MR is highly effective in error detection for LLM responses, where weak LLMs, such as Phi-2, could surpass strong baselines like GPT-3.5-turbo, requiring only five reference samples and significantly improving efficiency. We further demonstrate that MR can enhance strong LLMs' performance in two practical applications: model cascading and instruction tuning. In model cascading, we combine open- and closed-source LLMs to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4-turbo with lower costs. In instruction tuning, we use MR for iterative training data filtering, significantly reducing data processing time and enabling LLaMA-7B and Phi-2 to surpass Alpaca-13B with fewer training tokens. These results underscore the high potential of MR in both efficiency and effectiveness.
SSTKG: Simple Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graph for Intepretable and Versatile Dynamic Information Embedding
Authors: Ruiyi Yang, Flora D. Salim, Hao Xue
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Prediction

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been increasingly employed for link prediction and recommendation using real-world datasets. However, the majority of current methods rely on static data, neglecting the dynamic nature and the hidden spatio-temporal attributes of real-world scenarios. This often results in suboptimal predictions and recommendations. Although there are effective spatio-temporal inference methods, they face challenges such as scalability with large datasets and inadequate semantic understanding, which impede their performance. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel framework - Simple Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graph (SSTKG), for constructing and exploring spatio-temporal KGs. To integrate spatial and temporal data into KGs, our framework exploited through a new 3-step embedding method. Output embeddings can be used for future temporal sequence prediction and spatial information recommendation, providing valuable insights for various applications such as retail sales forecasting and traffic volume prediction. Our framework offers a simple but comprehensive way to understand the underlying patterns and trends in dynamic KG, thereby enhancing the accuracy of predictions and the relevance of recommendations. This work paves the way for more effective utilization of spatio-temporal data in KGs, with potential impacts across a wide range of sectors.
IRR: Image Review Ranking Framework for Evaluating Vision-Language Models
Authors: Kazuki Hayashi, Kazuma Onishi, Toma Suzuki, Yusuke Ide, Seiji Gobara, Shigeki Saito, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Katsuhiko Hayashi, Taro Watanabe
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Captioning

Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) process both images and text, excelling in multimodal tasks such as image captioning and description generation. However, while these models excel at generating factual content, their ability to generate and evaluate texts reflecting perspectives on the same image, depending on the context, has not been sufficiently explored. To address this, we propose IRR: Image Review Rank, a novel evaluation framework designed to assess critic review texts from multiple perspectives. IRR evaluates LVLMs by measuring how closely their judgments align with human interpretations. We validate it using a dataset of images from 15 categories, each with five critic review texts and annotated rankings in both English and Japanese, totaling over 2,000 data instances. The datasets are available at https://hf.co/datasets/naist-nlp/Wiki-ImageReview1.0. Our results indicate that, although LVLMs exhibited consistent performance across languages, their correlation with human annotations was insufficient, highlighting the need for further advancements. These findings highlight the limitations of current evaluation methods and the need for approaches that better capture human reasoning in Vision & Language tasks.
DualView: Data Attribution from the Dual Perspective
Authors: Galip Ümit Yolcu, Thomas Wiegand, Wojciech Samek, Sebastian Lapuschkin
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Local data attribution (or influence estimation) techniques aim at estimating the impact that individual data points seen during training have on particular predictions of an already trained Machine Learning model during test time. Previous methods either do not perform well consistently across different evaluation criteria from literature, are characterized by a high computational demand, or suffer from both. In this work we present DualView, a novel method for post-hoc data attribution based on surrogate modelling, demonstrating both high computational efficiency, as well as good evaluation results. With a focus on neural networks, we evaluate our proposed technique using suitable quantitative evaluation strategies from the literature against related principal local data attribution methods. We find that DualView requires considerably lower computational resources than other methods, while demonstrating comparable performance to competing approaches across evaluation metrics. Futhermore, our proposed method produces sparse explanations, where sparseness can be tuned via a hyperparameter. Finally, we showcase that with DualView, we can now render explanations from local data attributions compatible with established local feature attribution methods: For each prediction on (test) data points explained in terms of impactful samples from the training set, we are able to compute and visualize how the prediction on (test) sample relates to each influential training sample in terms of features recognized and by the model. We provide an Open Source implementation of DualView online, together with implementations for all other local data attribution methods we compare against, as well as the metrics reported here, for full reproducibility.
Is It a Free Lunch for Removing Outliers during Pretraining?
Authors: Baohao Liao, Christof Monz
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

With the growing size of large language models, the role of quantization becomes increasingly significant. However, outliers present in weights or activations notably influence the performance of quantized models. Recently, \citet{qtransformer} introduced a novel softmax function aimed at pretraining models in an outlier-free manner, thereby enhancing their suitability for quantization. Interestingly, we observed that such an approach leads to performance degradation in full precision. Building on this insight, we enhance the method by ensuring its normalization is invariant to sequence length, a crucial factor for bridging the gap between pretraining and fine-tuning. Moreover, this improved method also facilitates successful pretraining of causal language models.
Groot: Adversarial Testing for Generative Text-to-Image Models with Tree-based Semantic Transformation
Authors: Yi Liu, Guowei Yang, Gelei Deng, Feiyue Chen, Yuqi Chen, Ling Shi, Tianwei Zhang, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

With the prevalence of text-to-image generative models, their safety becomes a critical concern. adversarial testing techniques have been developed to probe whether such models can be prompted to produce Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. However, existing solutions face several challenges, including low success rate and inefficiency. We introduce Groot, the first automated framework leveraging tree-based semantic transformation for adversarial testing of text-to-image models. Groot employs semantic decomposition and sensitive element drowning strategies in conjunction with LLMs to systematically refine adversarial prompts. Our comprehensive evaluation confirms the efficacy of Groot, which not only exceeds the performance of current state-of-the-art approaches but also achieves a remarkable success rate (93.66%) on leading text-to-image models such as DALL-E 3 and Midjourney.
Towards Explainable LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Gradient Based Target Localization
Authors: Abhishek Kuriyal, Vaibhav Kumar
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic Segmentation (SS) of LiDAR point clouds is essential for many applications, such as urban planning and autonomous driving. While much progress has been made in interpreting SS predictions for images, interpreting point cloud SS predictions remains a challenge. This paper introduces pGS-CAM, a novel gradient-based method for generating saliency maps in neural network activation layers. Inspired by Grad-CAM, which uses gradients to highlight local importance, pGS-CAM is robust and effective on a variety of datasets (SemanticKITTI, Paris-Lille3D, DALES) and 3D deep learning architectures (KPConv, RandLANet). Our experiments show that pGS-CAM effectively accentuates the feature learning in intermediate activations of SS architectures by highlighting the contribution of each point. This allows us to better understand how SS models make their predictions and identify potential areas for improvement. Relevant codes are available at https://github.com/geoai4cities/pGS-CAM.
Do Large Language Models Understand Logic or Just Mimick Context?
Authors: Junbing Yan, Chengyu Wang, Jun Huang, Wei zhang
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, In-Context Learning, Logical Reasoning

Over the past few years, the abilities of large language models (LLMs) have received extensive attention, which have performed exceptionally well in complicated scenarios such as logical reasoning and symbolic inference. A significant factor contributing to this progress is the benefit of in-context learning and few-shot prompting. However, the reasons behind the success of such models using contextual reasoning have not been fully explored. Do LLMs have understand logical rules to draw inferences, or do they ``guess'' the answers by learning a type of probabilistic mapping through context? This paper investigates the reasoning capabilities of LLMs on two logical reasoning datasets by using counterfactual methods to replace context text and modify logical concepts. Based on our analysis, it is found that LLMs do not truly understand logical rules; rather, in-context learning has simply enhanced the likelihood of these models arriving at the correct answers. If one alters certain words in the context text or changes the concepts of logical terms, the outputs of LLMs can be significantly disrupted, leading to counter-intuitive responses. This work provides critical insights into the limitations of LLMs, underscoring the need for more robust mechanisms to ensure reliable logical reasoning in LLMs.
HIP Network: Historical Information Passing Network for Extrapolation Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graph
Authors: Yongquan He, Peng Zhang, Luchen Liu, Qi Liang, Wenyuan Zhang, Chuang Zhang
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

In recent years, temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning has received significant attention. Most existing methods assume that all timestamps and corresponding graphs are available during training, which makes it difficult to predict future events. To address this issue, recent works learn to infer future events based on historical information. However, these methods do not comprehensively consider the latent patterns behind temporal changes, to pass historical information selectively, update representations appropriately and predict events accurately. In this paper, we propose the Historical Information Passing (HIP) network to predict future events. HIP network passes information from temporal, structural and repetitive perspectives, which are used to model the temporal evolution of events, the interactions of events at the same time step, and the known events respectively. In particular, our method considers the updating of relation representations and adopts three scoring functions corresponding to the above dimensions. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets show the superiority of HIP network, and the significant improvements on Hits@1 prove that our method can more accurately predict what is going to happen.