pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Bridging the Domain Gap: A Simple Domain Matching Method for Reference-based Image Super-Resolution in Remote Sensing
Authors: Jeongho Min, Yejun Lee, Dongyoung Kim, Jaejun Yoo
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recently, reference-based image super-resolution (RefSR) has shown excellent performance in image super-resolution (SR) tasks. The main idea of RefSR is to utilize additional information from the reference (Ref) image to recover the high-frequency components in low-resolution (LR) images. By transferring relevant textures through feature matching, RefSR models outperform existing single image super-resolution (SISR) models. However, their performance significantly declines when a domain gap between Ref and LR images exists, which often occurs in real-world scenarios, such as satellite imaging. In this letter, we introduce a Domain Matching (DM) module that can be seamlessly integrated with existing RefSR models to enhance their performance in a plug-and-play manner. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore Domain Matching-based RefSR in remote sensing image processing. Our analysis reveals that their domain gaps often occur in different satellites, and our model effectively addresses these challenges, whereas existing models struggle. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed DM module improves SR performance both qualitatively and quantitatively for remote sensing super-resolution tasks.
A Class-aware Optimal Transport Approach with Higher-Order Moment Matching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Tuan Nguyen, Van Nguyen, Trung Le, He Zhao, Quan Hung Tran, Dinh Phung
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called class-aware optimal transport (OT), which measures the OT distance between a distribution over the source class-conditional distributions and a mixture of source and target data distribution. Our class-aware OT leverages a cost function that determines the matching extent between a given data example and a source class-conditional distribution. By optimizing this cost function, we find the optimal matching between target examples and source class-conditional distributions, effectively addressing the data and label shifts that occur between the two domains. To handle the class-aware OT efficiently, we propose an amortization solution that employs deep neural networks to formulate the transportation probabilities and the cost function. Additionally, we propose minimizing class-aware Higher-order Moment Matching (HMM) to align the corresponding class regions on the source and target domains. The class-aware HMM component offers an economical computational approach for accurately evaluating the HMM distance between the two distributions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.
Scalable Federated Unlearning via Isolated and Coded Sharding
Authors: Yijing Lin, Zhipeng Gao, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato, Gui Gui, Shuguang Cui, Jinke Ren
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00

Federated unlearning has emerged as a promising paradigm to erase the client-level data effect without affecting the performance of collaborative learning models. However, the federated unlearning process often introduces extensive storage overhead and consumes substantial computational resources, thus hindering its implementation in practice. To address this issue, this paper proposes a scalable federated unlearning framework based on isolated sharding and coded computing. We first divide distributed clients into multiple isolated shards across stages to reduce the number of clients being affected. Then, to reduce the storage overhead of the central server, we develop a coded computing mechanism by compressing the model parameters across different shards. In addition, we provide the theoretical analysis of time efficiency and storage effectiveness for the isolated and coded sharding. Finally, extensive experiments on two typical learning tasks, i.e., classification and generation, demonstrate that our proposed framework can achieve better performance than three state-of-the-art frameworks in terms of accuracy, retraining time, storage overhead, and F1 scores for resisting membership inference attacks.
NoFunEval: Funny How Code LMs Falter on Requirements Beyond Functional Correctness
Authors: Manav Singhal, Tushar Aggarwal, Abhijeet Awasthi, Nagarajan Natarajan, Aditya Kanade
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: HumanEval

Existing evaluation benchmarks of language models of code (code LMs) focus almost exclusively on whether the LMs can generate functionally-correct code. In real-world software engineering, developers think beyond functional correctness. They have requirements on "how" a functionality should be implemented to meet overall system design objectives like efficiency, security, and maintainability. They would also trust the code LMs more if the LMs demonstrate robust understanding of such requirements. We propose a new benchmark NoFunEval to evaluate code LMs on non-functional requirements and simple classification instances for both functional and non-functional requirements. We propose a prompting method, Coding Concepts (CoCo), as a way for a developer to communicate the domain knowledge to the LMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 27 code LMs. Our finding is that LMs generally falter when tested on our benchmark, hinting at fundamental blindspots in their training setups. Surprisingly, even the classification accuracy on functional-correctness instances derived from the popular HumanEval benchmark is low, calling in question the depth of their comprehension and the source of their success in generating functionally-correct code in the first place. We release our benchmark and evaluation scripts publicly at https://aka.ms/NoFunEval.
Response Generation for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with Large Language Models: Comparative Study with Socratic Questioning
Authors: Kenta Izumi, Hiroki Tanaka, Kazuhiro Shidara, Hiroyoshi Adachi, Daisuke Kanayama, Takashi Kudo, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation

Dialogue systems controlled by predefined or rule-based scenarios derived from counseling techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), play an important role in mental health apps. Despite the need for responsible responses, it is conceivable that using the newly emerging LLMs to generate contextually relevant utterances will enhance these apps. In this study, we construct dialogue modules based on a CBT scenario focused on conventional Socratic questioning using two kinds of LLMs: a Transformer-based dialogue model further trained with a social media empathetic counseling dataset, provided by Osaka Prefecture (OsakaED), and GPT-4, a state-of-the art LLM created by OpenAI. By comparing systems that use LLM-generated responses with those that do not, we investigate the impact of generated responses on subjective evaluations such as mood change, cognitive change, and dialogue quality (e.g., empathy). As a result, no notable improvements are observed when using the OsakaED model. When using GPT-4, the amount of mood change, empathy, and other dialogue qualities improve significantly. Results suggest that GPT-4 possesses a high counseling ability. However, they also indicate that even when using a dialogue model trained with a human counseling dataset, it does not necessarily yield better outcomes compared to scenario-based dialogues. While presenting LLM-generated responses, including GPT-4, and having them interact directly with users in real-life mental health care services may raise ethical issues, it is still possible for human professionals to produce example responses or response templates using LLMs in advance in systems that use rules, scenarios, or example responses.
Routers in Vision Mixture of Experts: An Empirical Study
Authors: Tianlin Liu, Mathieu Blondel, Carlos Riquelme, Joan Puigcerver
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Mixture-of-Experts

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are a promising way to scale up model capacity without significantly increasing computational cost. A key component of MoEs is the router, which decides which subset of parameters (experts) process which feature embeddings (tokens). In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of routers in MoEs for computer vision tasks. We introduce a unified MoE formulation that subsumes different MoEs with two parametric routing tensors. This formulation covers both sparse MoE, which uses a binary or hard assignment between experts and tokens, and soft MoE, which uses a soft assignment between experts and weighted combinations of tokens. Routers for sparse MoEs can be further grouped into two variants: Token Choice, which matches experts to each token, and Expert Choice, which matches tokens to each expert. We conduct head-to-head experiments with 6 different routers, including existing routers from prior work and new ones we introduce. We show that (i) many routers originally developed for language modeling can be adapted to perform strongly in vision tasks, (ii) in sparse MoE, Expert Choice routers generally outperform Token Choice routers, and (iii) soft MoEs generally outperform sparse MoEs with a fixed compute budget. These results provide new insights regarding the crucial role of routers in vision MoE models.
HEQuant: Marrying Homomorphic Encryption and Quantization for Communication-Efficient Private Inference
Authors: Tianshi Xu, Meng Li, Runsheng Wang
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Secure two-party computation with homomorphic encryption (HE) protects data privacy with a formal security guarantee but suffers from high communication overhead. While previous works, e.g., Cheetah, Iron, etc, have proposed efficient HE-based protocols for different neural network (NN) operations, they still assume high precision, e.g., fixed point 37 bit, for the NN operations and ignore NNs' native robustness against quantization error. In this paper, we propose HEQuant, which features low-precision-quantization-aware optimization for the HE-based protocols. We observe the benefit of a naive combination of quantization and HE quickly saturates as bit precision goes down. Hence, to further improve communication efficiency, we propose a series of optimizations, including an intra-coefficient packing algorithm and a quantization-aware tiling algorithm, to simultaneously reduce the number and precision of the transferred data. Compared with prior-art HE-based protocols, e.g., CrypTFlow2, Cheetah, Iron, etc, HEQuant achieves $3.5\sim 23.4\times$ communication reduction and $3.0\sim 9.3\times$ latency reduction. Meanwhile, when compared with prior-art network optimization frameworks, e.g., SENet, SNL, etc, HEQuant also achieves $3.1\sim 3.6\times$ communication reduction.
GPS: Graph Contrastive Learning via Multi-scale Augmented Views from Adversarial Pooling
Authors: Wei Ju, Yiyang Gu, Zhengyang Mao, Ziyue Qiao, Yifang Qin, Xiao Luo, Hui Xiong, Ming Zhang
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Contrastive Learning, Graph Classification, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

Self-supervised graph representation learning has recently shown considerable promise in a range of fields, including bioinformatics and social networks. A large number of graph contrastive learning approaches have shown promising performance for representation learning on graphs, which train models by maximizing agreement between original graphs and their augmented views (i.e., positive views). Unfortunately, these methods usually involve pre-defined augmentation strategies based on the knowledge of human experts. Moreover, these strategies may fail to generate challenging positive views to provide sufficient supervision signals. In this paper, we present a novel approach named Graph Pooling ContraSt (GPS) to address these issues. Motivated by the fact that graph pooling can adaptively coarsen the graph with the removal of redundancy, we rethink graph pooling and leverage it to automatically generate multi-scale positive views with varying emphasis on providing challenging positives and preserving semantics, i.e., strongly-augmented view and weakly-augmented view. Then, we incorporate both views into a joint contrastive learning framework with similarity learning and consistency learning, where our pooling module is adversarially trained with respect to the encoder for adversarial robustness. Experiments on twelve datasets on both graph classification and transfer learning tasks verify the superiority of the proposed method over its counterparts.
SERL: A Software Suite for Sample-Efficient Robotic Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jianlan Luo, Zheyuan Hu, Charles Xu, You Liang Tan, Jacob Berg, Archit Sharma, Stefan Schaal, Chelsea Finn, Abhishek Gupta, Sergey Levine
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of robotic reinforcement learning (RL), enabling methods that handle complex image observations, train in the real world, and incorporate auxiliary data, such as demonstrations and prior experience. However, despite these advances, robotic RL remains hard to use. It is acknowledged among practitioners that the particular implementation details of these algorithms are often just as important (if not more so) for performance as the choice of algorithm. We posit that a significant challenge to widespread adoption of robotic RL, as well as further development of robotic RL methods, is the comparative inaccessibility of such methods. To address this challenge, we developed a carefully implemented library containing a sample efficient off-policy deep RL method, together with methods for computing rewards and resetting the environment, a high-quality controller for a widely-adopted robot, and a number of challenging example tasks. We provide this library as a resource for the community, describe its design choices, and present experimental results. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that our implementation can achieve very efficient learning, acquiring policies for PCB board assembly, cable routing, and object relocation between 25 to 50 minutes of training per policy on average, improving over state-of-the-art results reported for similar tasks in the literature. These policies achieve perfect or near-perfect success rates, extreme robustness even under perturbations, and exhibit emergent recovery and correction behaviors. We hope that these promising results and our high-quality open-source implementation will provide a tool for the robotics community to facilitate further developments in robotic RL. Our code, documentation, and videos can be found at https://serl-robot.github.io/
Probabilistic Abduction for Visual Abstract Reasoning via Learning Rules in Vector-symbolic Architectures
Authors: Michael Hersche, Francesco Di Stefano, Thomas Hofmann, Abu Sebastian, Abbas Rahimi
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Abstract reasoning is a cornerstone of human intelligence, and replicating it with artificial intelligence (AI) presents an ongoing challenge. This study focuses on efficiently solving Raven's progressive matrices (RPM), a visual test for assessing abstract reasoning abilities, by using distributed computation and operators provided by vector-symbolic architectures (VSA). Instead of hard-coding the rule formulations associated with RPMs, our approach can learn the VSA rule formulations (hence the name Learn-VRF) with just one pass through the training data. Yet, our approach, with compact parameters, remains transparent and interpretable. Learn-VRF yields accurate predictions on I-RAVEN's in-distribution data, and exhibits strong out-of-distribution capabilities concerning unseen attribute-rule pairs, significantly outperforming pure connectionist baselines including large language models. Our code is available at https://github.com/IBM/learn-vector-symbolic-architectures-rule-formulations.
Federated unsupervised random forest for privacy-preserving patient stratification
Authors: Bastian Pfeifer, Christel Sirocchi, Marcus D. Bloice, Markus Kreuzthaler, Martin Urschler
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Feature Importance, Privacy Preserving

In the realm of precision medicine, effective patient stratification and disease subtyping demand innovative methodologies tailored for multi-omics data. Clustering techniques applied to multi-omics data have become instrumental in identifying distinct subgroups of patients, enabling a finer-grained understanding of disease variability. This work establishes a powerful framework for advancing precision medicine through unsupervised random-forest-based clustering and federated computing. We introduce a novel multi-omics clustering approach utilizing unsupervised random-forests. The unsupervised nature of the random forest enables the determination of cluster-specific feature importance, unraveling key molecular contributors to distinct patient groups. Moreover, our methodology is designed for federated execution, a crucial aspect in the medical domain where privacy concerns are paramount. We have validated our approach on machine learning benchmark data sets as well as on cancer data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art in terms of disease subtyping, but at the same time substantially improves the cluster interpretability. Experiments indicate that local clustering performance can be improved through federated computing.
Flexible Parallel Neural Network Architecture Model for Early Prediction of Lithium Battery Life
Authors: Lidang Jiang, Zhuoxiang Li, Changyan Hu, Qingsong Huang, Ge He
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00

The early prediction of battery life (EPBL) is vital for enhancing the efficiency and extending the lifespan of lithium batteries. Traditional models with fixed architectures often encounter underfitting or overfitting issues due to the diverse data distributions in different EPBL tasks. An interpretable deep learning model of flexible parallel neural network (FPNN) is proposed, which includes an InceptionBlock, a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN), a 2D CNN, and a dual-stream network. The proposed model effectively extracts electrochemical features from video-like formatted data using the 3D CNN and achieves advanced multi-scale feature abstraction through the InceptionBlock. The FPNN can adaptively adjust the number of InceptionBlocks to flexibly handle tasks of varying complexity in EPBL. The test on the MIT dataset shows that the FPNN model achieves outstanding predictive accuracy in EPBL tasks, with MAPEs of 2.47%, 1.29%, 1.08%, and 0.88% when the input cyclic data volumes are 10, 20, 30, and 40, respectively. The interpretability of the FPNN is mainly reflected in its flexible unit structure and parameter selection: its diverse branching structure enables the model to capture features at different scales, thus allowing the machine to learn informative features. The approach presented herein provides an accurate, adaptable, and comprehensible solution for early life prediction of lithium batteries, opening new possibilities in the field of battery health monitoring.
Beyond Direct Diagnosis: LLM-based Multi-Specialist Agent Consultation for Automatic Diagnosis
Authors: Haochun Wang, Sendong Zhao, Zewen Qiang, Nuwa Xi, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Natural Language Understanding

Automatic diagnosis is a significant application of AI in healthcare, where diagnoses are generated based on the symptom description of patients. Previous works have approached this task directly by modeling the relationship between the normalized symptoms and all possible diseases. However, in the clinical diagnostic process, patients are initially consulted by a general practitioner and, if necessary, referred to specialists in specific domains for a more comprehensive evaluation. The final diagnosis often emerges from a collaborative consultation among medical specialist groups. Recently, large language models have shown impressive capabilities in natural language understanding. In this study, we adopt tuning-free LLM-based agents as medical practitioners and propose the Agent-derived Multi-Specialist Consultation (AMSC) framework to model the diagnosis process in the real world by adaptively fusing probability distributions of agents over potential diseases. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with baselines. Notably, our approach requires significantly less parameter updating and training time, enhancing efficiency and practical utility. Furthermore, we delve into a novel perspective on the role of implicit symptoms within the context of automatic diagnosis.
Looking for a better fit? An Incremental Learning Multimodal Object Referencing Framework adapting to Individual Drivers
Authors: Amr Gomaa, Guillermo Reyes, Michael Feld, Antonio Krüger
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Lifelong learning

The rapid advancement of the automotive industry towards automated and semi-automated vehicles has rendered traditional methods of vehicle interaction, such as touch-based and voice command systems, inadequate for a widening range of non-driving related tasks, such as referencing objects outside of the vehicle. Consequently, research has shifted toward gestural input (e.g., hand, gaze, and head pose gestures) as a more suitable mode of interaction during driving. However, due to the dynamic nature of driving and individual variation, there are significant differences in drivers' gestural input performance. While, in theory, this inherent variability could be moderated by substantial data-driven machine learning models, prevalent methodologies lean towards constrained, single-instance trained models for object referencing. These models show a limited capacity to continuously adapt to the divergent behaviors of individual drivers and the variety of driving scenarios. To address this, we propose \textit{IcRegress}, a novel regression-based incremental learning approach that adapts to changing behavior and the unique characteristics of drivers engaged in the dual task of driving and referencing objects. We suggest a more personalized and adaptable solution for multimodal gestural interfaces, employing continuous lifelong learning to enhance driver experience, safety, and convenience. Our approach was evaluated using an outside-the-vehicle object referencing use case, highlighting the superiority of the incremental learning models adapted over a single trained model across various driver traits such as handedness, driving experience, and numerous driving conditions. Finally, to facilitate reproducibility, ease deployment, and promote further research, we offer our approach as an open-source framework at \url{https://github.com/amrgomaaelhady/IcRegress}.
Neural Network Training on Encrypted Data with TFHE
Authors: Luis Montero, Jordan Frery, Celia Kherfallah, Roman Bredehoft, Andrei Stoian
Date: 2024-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We present an approach to outsourcing of training neural networks while preserving data confidentiality from malicious parties. We use fully homomorphic encryption to build a unified training approach that works on encrypted data and learns quantized neural network models. The data can be horizontally or vertically split between multiple parties, enabling collaboration on confidential data. We train logistic regression and multi-layer perceptrons on several datasets.