pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PEFTDebias : Capturing debiasing information using PEFTs
Authors: Sumit Agarwal, Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla, Srijan Bansal
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

The increasing use of foundation models highlights the urgent need to address and eliminate implicit biases present in them that arise during pretraining. In this paper, we introduce PEFTDebias, a novel approach that employs parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to mitigate the biases within foundation models. PEFTDebias consists of two main phases: an upstream phase for acquiring debiasing parameters along a specific bias axis, and a downstream phase where these parameters are incorporated into the model and frozen during the fine-tuning process. By evaluating on four datasets across two bias axes namely gender and race, we find that downstream biases can be effectively reduced with PEFTs. In addition, we show that these parameters possess axis-specific debiasing characteristics, enabling their effective transferability in mitigating biases in various downstream tasks. To ensure reproducibility, we release the code to do our experiments.
Abstract Syntax Tree for Programming Language Understanding and Representation: How Far Are We?
Authors: Weisong Sun, Chunrong Fang, Yun Miao, Yudu You, Mengzhe Yuan, Yuchen Chen, Quanjun Zhang, An Guo, Xiang Chen, Yang Liu, Zhenyu Chen
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Programming language understanding and representation (a.k.a code representation learning) has always been a hot and challenging task in software engineering. It aims to apply deep learning techniques to produce numerical representations of the source code features while preserving its semantics. These representations can be used for facilitating subsequent code-related tasks. The abstract syntax tree (AST), a fundamental code feature, illustrates the syntactic information of the source code and has been widely used in code representation learning. However, there is still a lack of systematic and quantitative evaluation of how well AST-based code representation facilitates subsequent code-related tasks. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive empirical study to explore the effectiveness of the AST-based code representation in facilitating follow-up code-related tasks. To do so, we compare the performance of models trained with code token sequence (Token for short) based code representation and AST-based code representation on three popular types of code-related tasks. Surprisingly, the overall quantitative statistical results demonstrate that models trained with AST-based code representation consistently perform worse across all three tasks compared to models trained with Token-based code representation. Our further quantitative analysis reveals that models trained with AST-based code representation outperform models trained with Token-based code representation in certain subsets of samples across all three tasks. We also conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate and reveal the impact of the choice of AST parsing/preprocessing/encoding methods on AST-based code representation and subsequent code-related tasks. Our study provides future researchers with detailed guidance on how to select solutions at each stage to fully exploit AST.
Enhancing Explainability in Mobility Data Science through a combination of methods
Authors: Georgios Makridis, Vasileios Koukos, Georgios Fatouros, Dimosthenis Kyriazis
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

In the domain of Mobility Data Science, the intricate task of interpreting models trained on trajectory data, and elucidating the spatio-temporal movement of entities, has persistently posed significant challenges. Conventional XAI techniques, although brimming with potential, frequently overlook the distinct structure and nuances inherent within trajectory data. Observing this deficiency, we introduced a comprehensive framework that harmonizes pivotal XAI techniques: LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), Saliency maps, attention mechanisms, direct trajectory visualization, and Permutation Feature Importance (PFI). Unlike conventional strategies that deploy these methods singularly, our unified approach capitalizes on the collective efficacy of these techniques, yielding deeper and more granular insights for models reliant on trajectory data. In crafting this synthesis, we effectively address the multifaceted essence of trajectories, achieving not only amplified interpretability but also a nuanced, contextually rich comprehension of model decisions. To validate and enhance our framework, we undertook a survey to gauge preferences and reception among various user demographics. Our findings underscored a dichotomy: professionals with academic orientations, particularly those in roles like Data Scientist, IT Expert, and ML Engineer, showcased a profound, technical understanding and often exhibited a predilection for amalgamated methods for interpretability. Conversely, end-users or individuals less acquainted with AI and Data Science showcased simpler inclinations, such as bar plots indicating timestep significance or visual depictions pinpointing pivotal segments of a vessel's trajectory.
SynFundus-1M: A High-quality Million-scale Synthetic fundus images Dataset with Fifteen Types of Annotation
Authors: Fangxin Shang, Jie Fu, Yehui Yang, Haifeng Huang, Junwei Liu, Lei Ma
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Large-scale public datasets with high-quality annotations are rarely available for intelligent medical imaging research, due to data privacy concerns and the cost of annotations. In this paper, we release SynFundus-1M, a high-quality synthetic dataset containing over one million fundus images in terms of \textbf{eleven disease types}. Furthermore, we deliberately assign four readability labels to the key regions of the fundus images. To the best of our knowledge, SynFundus-1M is currently the largest fundus dataset with the most sophisticated annotations. Leveraging over 1.3 million private authentic fundus images from various scenarios, we trained a powerful Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model, named SynFundus-Generator. The released SynFundus-1M are generated by SynFundus-Generator under predefined conditions. To demonstrate the value of SynFundus-1M, extensive experiments are designed in terms of the following aspect: 1) Authenticity of the images: we randomly blend the synthetic images with authentic fundus images, and find that experienced annotators can hardly distinguish the synthetic images from authentic ones. Moreover, we show that the disease-related vision features (e.g. lesions) are well simulated in the synthetic images. 2) Effectiveness for down-stream fine-tuning and pretraining: we demonstrate that retinal disease diagnosis models of either convolutional neural networks (CNN) or Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures can benefit from SynFundus-1M, and compared to the datasets commonly used for pretraining, models trained on SynFundus-1M not only achieve superior performance but also demonstrate faster convergence on various downstream tasks. SynFundus-1M is already public available for the open-source community.
On Exploring the Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models with Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Pei-Chi Lo, Yi-Hang Tsai, Ee-Peng Lim, San-Yih Hwang
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Knowledge Graphs

This paper examines the capacity of LLMs to reason with knowledge graphs using their internal knowledge graph, i.e., the knowledge graph they learned during pre-training. Two research questions are formulated to investigate the accuracy of LLMs in recalling information from pre-training knowledge graphs and their ability to infer knowledge graph relations from context. To address these questions, we employ LLMs to perform four distinct knowledge graph reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we identify two types of hallucinations that may occur during knowledge reasoning with LLMs: content and ontology hallucination. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMs can successfully tackle both simple and complex knowledge graph reasoning tasks from their own memory, as well as infer from input context.
The Case for Scalable, Data-Driven Theory: A Paradigm for Scientific Progress in NLP
Authors: Julian Michael
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling

I propose a paradigm for scientific progress in NLP centered around developing scalable, data-driven theories of linguistic structure. The idea is to collect data in tightly scoped, carefully defined ways which allow for exhaustive annotation of behavioral phenomena of interest, and then use machine learning to construct explanatory theories of these phenomena which can form building blocks for intelligible AI systems. After laying some conceptual groundwork, I describe several investigations into data-driven theories of shallow semantic structure using Question-Answer driven Semantic Role Labeling (QA-SRL), a schema for annotating verbal predicate-argument relations using highly constrained question-answer pairs. While this only scratches the surface of the complex language behaviors of interest in AI, I outline principles for data collection and theoretical modeling which can inform future scientific progress. This note summarizes and draws heavily on my PhD thesis.
Efficient Off-Policy Safe Reinforcement Learning Using Trust Region Conditional Value at Risk
Authors: Dohyeong Kim, Songhwai Oh
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Reinforcement Learning

This paper aims to solve a safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with risk measure-based constraints. As risk measures, such as conditional value at risk (CVaR), focus on the tail distribution of cost signals, constraining risk measures can effectively prevent a failure in the worst case. An on-policy safe RL method, called TRC, deals with a CVaR-constrained RL problem using a trust region method and can generate policies with almost zero constraint violations with high returns. However, to achieve outstanding performance in complex environments and satisfy safety constraints quickly, RL methods are required to be sample efficient. To this end, we propose an off-policy safe RL method with CVaR constraints, called off-policy TRC. If off-policy data from replay buffers is directly used to train TRC, the estimation error caused by the distributional shift results in performance degradation. To resolve this issue, we propose novel surrogate functions, in which the effect of the distributional shift can be reduced, and introduce an adaptive trust-region constraint to ensure a policy not to deviate far from replay buffers. The proposed method has been evaluated in simulation and real-world environments and satisfied safety constraints within a few steps while achieving high returns even in complex robotic tasks.
Green Edge AI: A Contemporary Survey
Authors: Yuyi Mao, Xianghao Yu, Kaibin Huang, Ying-Jun Angela Zhang, Jun Zhang
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have emerged as pivotal enablers across a multitude of industries largely due to their significant resurgence over the past decade. The transformative power of AI is primarily derived from the utilization of deep neural networks (DNNs), which require extensive data for training and substantial computational resources for processing. Consequently, DNN models are typically trained and deployed on resource-rich cloud servers. However, due to potential latency issues associated with cloud communications, deep learning (DL) workflows are increasingly being transitioned to wireless edge networks in proximity to end-user devices (EUDs). This shift is designed to support latency-sensitive applications and has given rise to a new paradigm of edge AI, which will play a critical role in upcoming sixth-generation (6G) networks to support ubiquitous AI applications. Despite its considerable potential, edge AI faces substantial challenges, mostly due to the dichotomy between the resource limitations of wireless edge networks and the resource-intensive nature of DL. Specifically, the acquisition of large-scale data, as well as the training and inference processes of DNNs, can rapidly deplete the battery energy of EUDs. This necessitates an energy-conscious approach to edge AI to ensure both optimal and sustainable performance. In this paper, we present a contemporary survey on green edge AI. We commence by analyzing the principal energy consumption components of edge AI systems to identify the fundamental design principles of green edge AI. Guided by these principles, we then explore energy-efficient design methodologies for the three critical tasks in edge AI systems, including training data acquisition, edge training, and edge inference. Finally, we underscore potential future research directions to further enhance the energy efficiency of edge AI.
Matching Weak Informative Ontologies
Authors: Peng Wang
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Ontology Matching

Most existing ontology matching methods utilize the literal information to discover alignments. However, some literal information in ontologies may be opaque and some ontologies may not have sufficient literal information. In this paper, these ontologies are named as weak informative ontologies (WIOs) and it is challenging for existing methods to matching WIOs. On one hand, string-based and linguistic-based matching methods cannot work well for WIOs. On the other hand, some matching methods use external resources to improve their performance, but collecting and processing external resources is still time-consuming. To address this issue, this paper proposes a practical method for matching WIOs by employing the ontology structure information to discover alignments. First, the semantic subgraphs are extracted from the ontology graph to capture the precise meanings of ontology elements. Then, a new similarity propagation model is designed for matching WIOs. Meanwhile, in order to avoid meaningless propagation, the similarity propagation is constrained by semantic subgraphs and other conditions. Consequently, the similarity propagation model ensures a balance between efficiency and quality during matching. Finally, the similarity propagation model uses a few credible alignments as seeds to find more alignments, and some useful strategies are adopted to improve the performance. This matching method for WIOs has been implemented in the ontology matching system Lily. Experimental results on public OAEI benchmark datasets demonstrate that Lily significantly outperforms most of the state-of-the-art works in both WIO matching tasks and general ontology matching tasks. In particular, Lily increases the recall by a large margin, while it still obtains high precision of matching results.
Agent-OM: Leveraging LLM Agents for Ontology Matching
Authors: Zhangcheng Qiang, Weiqing Wang, Kerry Taylor
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Ontology Matching, Retrieval

Ontology matching (OM) enables semantic interoperability between different ontologies and resolves their conceptual heterogeneity by aligning related entities. OM systems currently have two prevailing design paradigms: conventional knowledge-based expert systems and newer machine learning-based predictive systems. While large language models (LLMs) and LLM agents have revolutionised data engineering and have been applied creatively in many domains, their potential for OM remains underexplored. This study introduces a novel agent-powered LLM-based design paradigm for OM systems. With consideration of several specific challenges in leveraging LLM agents for OM, we propose a generic framework, namely Agent-OM (Agent for Ontology Matching), consisting of two Siamese agents for retrieval and matching, with a set of OM tools. Our framework is implemented in a proof-of-concept system. Evaluations of three Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) tracks over state-of-the-art OM systems show that our system can achieve results very close to the long-standing best performance on simple OM tasks and can significantly improve the performance on complex and few-shot OM tasks.
Mark My Words: Analyzing and Evaluating Language Model Watermarks
Authors: Julien Piet, Chawin Sitawarin, Vivian Fang, Norman Mu, David Wagner
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The capabilities of large language models have grown significantly in recent years and so too have concerns about their misuse. It is important to be able to distinguish machine-generated text from human-authored content. Prior works have proposed numerous schemes to watermark text, which would benefit from a systematic evaluation framework. This work focuses on LLM output watermarking techniques - as opposed to image or model watermarks - and proposes Mark My Words, a comprehensive benchmark for them under different natural language tasks. We focus on three main metrics: quality, size (i.e., the number of tokens needed to detect a watermark), and tamper resistance (i.e., the ability to detect a watermark after perturbing marked text). Current watermarking techniques are nearly practical enough for real-world use: Kirchenbauer et al. [33]'s scheme can watermark models like Llama 2 7B-chat or Mistral-7B-Instruct with no perceivable loss in quality on natural language tasks, the watermark can be detected with fewer than 100 tokens, and their scheme offers good tamper resistance to simple perturbations. However, they struggle to efficiently watermark code generations. We publicly release our benchmark (https://github.com/wagner-group/MarkMyWords).
Academic competitions
Authors: Hugo Jair Escalante, Aleksandra Kruchinina
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00

Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in terms of accessing and participating in the shaping of research fields. Competitions can be traced back for centuries and their achievements have had great influence in our modern world. Recently, they (re)gained popularity, with the overwhelming amounts of data that is being generated in different domains, as well as the need of pushing the barriers of existing methods, and available tools to handle such data. This chapter provides a survey of academic challenges in the context of machine learning and related fields. We review the most influential competitions in the last few years and analyze challenges per area of knowledge. The aims of scientific challenges, their goals, major achievements and expectations for the next few years are reviewed.
Sample Efficient Preference Alignment in LLMs via Active Exploration
Authors: Viraj Mehta, Syrine Belakaria, Vikramjeet Das, Ojash Neopane, Yijia Dai, Ilija Bogunovic, Barbara Engelhardt, Stefano Ermon, Jeff Schneider, Willie Neiswanger
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO). For many applications of preference alignment, the cost of acquiring human feedback can be substantial. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that one can often choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback to most efficiently identify a good policy, and formalize the setting as an active contextual dueling bandit problem. We propose an active exploration algorithm to efficiently select the data and provide theoretical proof that it has a polynomial worst-case regret bound. We extend the setting and methodology for practical use in preference alignment of large language models. We provide two extensions, an online and an offline approach. Our method outperforms the baselines with limited samples of human preferences on several language models and four real-world datasets including two new datasets that we contribute to the literature.
Skipper: Improving the Reach and Fidelity of Quantum Annealers by Skipping Long Chains
Authors: Ramin Ayanzadeh, Moinuddin Qureshi
Date: 2023-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Avg

Quantum Annealers (QAs) operate as single-instruction machines, lacking a SWAP operation to overcome limited qubit connectivity. Consequently, multiple physical qubits are chained to form a program qubit with higher connectivity, resulting in a drastically diminished effective QA capacity by up to 33x. We observe that in QAs: (a) chain lengths exhibit a power-law distribution, a few dominant chains holding substantially more qubits than others; and (b) about 25% of physical qubits remain unused, getting isolated between these chains. We propose Skipper, a software technique that enhances the capacity and fidelity of QAs by skipping dominant chains and substituting their program qubit with two readout results. Using a 5761-qubit QA, we demonstrate that Skipper can tackle up to 59% (Avg. 28%) larger problems when eleven chains are skipped. Additionally, Skipper can improve QA fidelity by up to 44% (Avg. 33%) when cutting five chains (32 runs). Users can specify up to eleven chain cuts in Skipper, necessitating about 2,000 distinct quantum executable runs. To mitigate this, we introduce Skipper-G, a greedy scheme that skips sub-problems less likely to hold the global optimum, executing a maximum of 23 quantum executables with eleven chain trims. Skipper-G can boost QA fidelity by up to 41% (Avg. 29%) when cutting five chains (11 runs).
Negotiated Representations to Prevent Forgetting in Machine Learning Applications
Authors: Nuri Korhan, Ceren Öner
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Image Classification, Split-CIFAR-10, Split-MNIST

Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in the field of machine learning, particularly in neural networks. When a neural network learns to perform well on a new task, it often forgets its previously acquired knowledge or experiences. This phenomenon occurs because the network adjusts its weights and connections to minimize the loss on the new task, which can inadvertently overwrite or disrupt the representations that were crucial for the previous tasks. As a result, the the performance of the network on earlier tasks deteriorates, limiting its ability to learn and adapt to a sequence of tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel method for preventing catastrophic forgetting in machine learning applications, specifically focusing on neural networks. Our approach aims to preserve the knowledge of the network across multiple tasks while still allowing it to learn new information effectively. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by conducting experiments on various benchmark datasets, including Split MNIST, Split CIFAR10, Split Fashion MNIST, and Split CIFAR100. These datasets are created by dividing the original datasets into separate, non overlapping tasks, simulating a continual learning scenario where the model needs to learn multiple tasks sequentially without forgetting the previous ones. Our proposed method tackles the catastrophic forgetting problem by incorporating negotiated representations into the learning process, which allows the model to maintain a balance between retaining past experiences and adapting to new tasks. By evaluating our method on these challenging datasets, we aim to showcase its potential for addressing catastrophic forgetting and improving the performance of neural networks in continual learning settings.