pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DAGAD: Data Augmentation for Graph Anomaly Detection
Authors: Fanzhen Liu, Xiaoxiao Ma, Jia Wu, Jian Yang, Shan Xue, Amin Beheshti, Chuan Zhou, Hao Peng, Quan Z. Sheng, Charu C. Aggarwal
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Data Augmentation, Graph Anomaly Detection, Graph Neural Network

Graph anomaly detection in this paper aims to distinguish abnormal nodes that behave differently from the benign ones accounting for the majority of graph-structured instances. Receiving increasing attention from both academia and industry, yet existing research on this task still suffers from two critical issues when learning informative anomalous behavior from graph data. For one thing, anomalies are usually hard to capture because of their subtle abnormal behavior and the shortage of background knowledge about them, which causes severe anomalous sample scarcity. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of objects in real-world graphs are normal, bringing the class imbalance problem as well. To bridge the gaps, this paper devises a novel Data Augmentation-based Graph Anomaly Detection (DAGAD) framework for attributed graphs, equipped with three specially designed modules: 1) an information fusion module employing graph neural network encoders to learn representations, 2) a graph data augmentation module that fertilizes the training set with generated samples, and 3) an imbalance-tailored learning module to discriminate the distributions of the minority (anomalous) and majority (normal) classes. A series of experiments on three datasets prove that DAGAD outperforms ten state-of-the-art baseline detectors concerning various mostly-used metrics, together with an extensive ablation study validating the strength of our proposed modules.
Pareto Manifold Learning: Tackling multiple tasks via ensembles of single-task models
Authors: Nikolaos Dimitriadis, Pascal Frossard, François Fleuret
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Task Learning, Scene Understanding

In Multi-Task Learning (MTL), tasks may compete and limit the performance achieved on each other, rather than guiding the optimization to a solution, superior to all its single-task trained counterparts. Since there is often not a unique solution optimal for all tasks, practitioners have to balance tradeoffs between tasks' performance, and resort to optimality in the Pareto sense. Most MTL methodologies either completely neglect this aspect, and instead of aiming at learning a Pareto Front, produce one solution predefined by their optimization schemes, or produce diverse but discrete solutions. Recent approaches parameterize the Pareto Front via neural networks, leading to complex mappings from tradeoff to objective space. In this paper, we conjecture that the Pareto Front admits a linear parameterization in parameter space, which leads us to propose \textit{Pareto Manifold Learning}, an ensembling method in weight space. Our approach produces a continuous Pareto Front in a single training run, that allows to modulate the performance on each task during inference. Experiments on multi-task learning benchmarks, ranging from image classification to tabular datasets and scene understanding, show that \textit{Pareto Manifold Learning} outperforms state-of-the-art single-point algorithms, while learning a better Pareto parameterization than multi-point baselines.
Clustering-based Aggregations for Prediction in Event Streams
Authors: Yorick Spenrath, Marwan Hassani, Boudewijn F. van Dongen
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Marketing, Prediction

Predicting the behaviour of shoppers provides valuable information for retailers, such as the expected spend of a shopper or the total turnover of a supermarket. The ability to make predictions on an individual level is useful, as it allows supermarkets to accurately perform targeted marketing. However, given the expected number of shoppers and their diverse behaviours, making accurate predictions on an individual level is difficult. This problem does not only arise in shopper behaviour, but also in various business processes, such as predicting when an invoice will be paid. In this paper we present CAPiES, a framework that focuses on this trade-off in an online setting. By making predictions on a larger number of entities at a time, we improve the predictive accuracy but at the potential cost of usefulness since we can say less about the individual entities. CAPiES is developed in an online setting, where we continuously update the prediction model and make new predictions over time. We show the existence of the trade-off in an experimental evaluation in two real-world scenarios: a supermarket with over 160 000 shoppers and a paint factory with over 171 000 invoices.
Importance Weighting Correction of Regularized Least-Squares for Covariate and Target Shifts
Authors: Davit Gogolashvili
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

In many real world problems, the training data and test data have different distributions. This situation is commonly referred as a dataset shift. The most common settings for dataset shift often considered in the literature are {\em covariate shift } and {\em target shift}. Importance weighting (IW) correction is a universal method for correcting the bias present in learning scenarios under dataset shift. The question one may ask is: does IW correction work equally well for different dataset shift scenarios? By investigating the generalization properties of the weighted kernel ridge regression (W-KRR) under covariate and target shifts we show that the answer is negative, except when IW is bounded and the model is wellspecified. In the latter cases, a minimax optimal rates are achieved by importance weighted kernel ridge regression (IW-KRR) in both, covariate and target shift scenarios. Slightly relaxing the boundedness condition of the IW we show that the IW-KRR still achieves the optimal rates under target shift while leading to slower rates for covariate shift. In the case of the model misspecification we show that the performance of the W-KRR under covariate shift could be substantially increased by designing an alternative reweighting function. The distinction between misspecified and wellspecified scenarios does not seem to be crucial in the learning problems under target shift.
Consistent Multiclass Algorithms for Complex Metrics and Constraints
Authors: Harikrishna Narasimhan, Harish G. Ramaswamy, Shiv Kumar Tavker, Drona Khurana, Praneeth Netrapalli, Shivani Agarwal
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We present consistent algorithms for multiclass learning with complex performance metrics and constraints, where the objective and constraints are defined by arbitrary functions of the confusion matrix. This setting includes many common performance metrics such as the multiclass G-mean and micro F1-measure, and constraints such as those on the classifier's precision and recall and more recent measures of fairness discrepancy. We give a general framework for designing consistent algorithms for such complex design goals by viewing the learning problem as an optimization problem over the set of feasible confusion matrices. We provide multiple instantiations of our framework under different assumptions on the performance metrics and constraints, and in each case show rates of convergence to the optimal (feasible) classifier (and thus asymptotic consistency). Experiments on a variety of multiclass classification tasks and fairness-constrained problems show that our algorithms compare favorably to the state-of-the-art baselines.
Not All Poisons are Created Equal: Robust Training against Data Poisoning
Authors: Yu Yang, Tian Yu Liu, Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Data Poisoning

Data poisoning causes misclassification of test time target examples by injecting maliciously crafted samples in the training data. Existing defenses are often effective only against a specific type of targeted attack, significantly degrade the generalization performance, or are prohibitive for standard deep learning pipelines. In this work, we propose an efficient defense mechanism that significantly reduces the success rate of various data poisoning attacks, and provides theoretical guarantees for the performance of the model. Targeted attacks work by adding bounded perturbations to a randomly selected subset of training data to match the targets' gradient or representation. We show that: (i) under bounded perturbations, only a number of poisons can be optimized to have a gradient that is close enough to that of the target and make the attack successful; (ii) such effective poisons move away from their original class and get isolated in the gradient space; (iii) dropping examples in low-density gradient regions during training can successfully eliminate the effective poisons, and guarantees similar training dynamics to that of training on full data. Our extensive experiments show that our method significantly decreases the success rate of state-of-the-art targeted attacks, including Gradient Matching and Bullseye Polytope, and easily scales to large datasets.
Clustering Categorical Data: Soft Rounding k-modes
Authors: Surya Teja Gavva, Karthik C. S., Sharath Punna
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Over the last three decades, researchers have intensively explored various clustering tools for categorical data analysis. Despite the proposal of various clustering algorithms, the classical k-modes algorithm remains a popular choice for unsupervised learning of categorical data. Surprisingly, our first insight is that in a natural generative block model, the k-modes algorithm performs poorly for a large range of parameters. We remedy this issue by proposing a soft rounding variant of the k-modes algorithm (SoftModes) and theoretically prove that our variant addresses the drawbacks of the k-modes algorithm in the generative model. Finally, we empirically verify that SoftModes performs well on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Split-KalmanNet: A Robust Model-Based Deep Learning Approach for SLAM
Authors: Geon Choi, Jeonghun Park, Nir Shlezinger, Yonina C. Eldar, Namyoon Lee
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a method that constructs a map of an unknown environment and localizes the position of a moving agent on the map simultaneously. Extended Kalman filter (EKF) has been widely adopted as a low complexity solution for online SLAM, which relies on a motion and measurement model of the moving agent. In practice, however, acquiring precise information about these models is very challenging, and the model mismatch effect causes severe performance loss in SLAM. In this paper, inspired by the recently proposed KalmanNet, we present a robust EKF algorithm using the power of deep learning for online SLAM, referred to as Split-KalmanNet. The key idea of Split-KalmanNet is to compute the Kalman gain using the Jacobian matrix of a measurement function and two recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The two RNNs independently learn the covariance matrices for a prior state estimate and the innovation from data. The proposed split structure in the computation of the Kalman gain allows to compensate for state and measurement model mismatch effects independently. Numerical simulation results verify that Split-KalmanNet outperforms the traditional EKF and the state-of-the-art KalmanNet algorithm in various model mismatch scenarios.
DPIS: An Enhanced Mechanism for Differentially Private SGD with Importance Sampling
Authors: Jianxin Wei, Ergute Bao, Xiaokui Xiao, Yin Yang
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Privacy Preserving

Nowadays, differential privacy (DP) has become a well-accepted standard for privacy protection, and deep neural networks (DNN) have been immensely successful in machine learning. The combination of these two techniques, i.e., deep learning with differential privacy, promises the privacy-preserving release of high-utility models trained with sensitive data such as medical records. A classic mechanism for this purpose is DP-SGD, which is a differentially private version of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimizer commonly used for DNN training. Subsequent approaches have improved various aspects of the model training process, including noise decay schedule, model architecture, feature engineering, and hyperparameter tuning. However, the core mechanism for enforcing DP in the SGD optimizer remains unchanged ever since the original DP-SGD algorithm, which has increasingly become a fundamental barrier limiting the performance of DP-compliant machine learning solutions. Motivated by this, we propose DPIS, a novel mechanism for differentially private SGD training that can be used as a drop-in replacement of the core optimizer of DP-SGD, with consistent and significant accuracy gains over the latter. The main idea is to employ importance sampling (IS) in each SGD iteration for mini-batch selection, which reduces both sampling variance and the amount of random noise injected to the gradients that is required to satisfy DP. Integrating IS into the complex mathematical machinery of DP-SGD is highly non-trivial. DPIS addresses the challenge through novel mechanism designs, fine-grained privacy analysis, efficiency enhancements, and an adaptive gradient clipping optimization. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, namely MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR-10 and IMDb, demonstrate the superior effectiveness of DPIS over existing solutions for deep learning with differential privacy.
FLECS-CGD: A Federated Learning Second-Order Framework via Compression and Sketching with Compressed Gradient Differences
Authors: Artem Agafonov, Brahim Erraji, Martin Takáč
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Stochastic Optimization

In the recent paper FLECS (Agafonov et al, FLECS: A Federated Learning Second-Order Framework via Compression and Sketching), the second-order framework FLECS was proposed for the Federated Learning problem. This method utilize compression of sketched Hessians to make communication costs low. However, the main bottleneck of FLECS is gradient communication without compression. In this paper, we propose the modification of FLECS with compressed gradient differences, which we call FLECS-CGD (FLECS with Compressed Gradient Differences) and make it applicable for stochastic optimization. Convergence guarantees are provided in strongly convex and nonconvex cases. Experiments show the practical benefit of proposed approach.
ODEs learn to walk: ODE-Net based data-driven modeling for crowd dynamics
Authors: Chen Cheng, Jinglai Li
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00

Predicting the behaviors of pedestrian crowds is of critical importance for a variety of real-world problems. Data driven modeling, which aims to learn the mathematical models from observed data, is a promising tool to construct models that can make accurate predictions of such systems. In this work, we present a data-driven modeling approach based on the ODE-Net framework, for constructing continuous-time models of crowd dynamics. We discuss some challenging issues in applying the ODE-Net method to such problems, which are primarily associated with the dimensionality of the underlying crowd system, and we propose to address these issues by incorporating the social-force concept in the ODE-Net framework. Finally application examples are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.
A Novel Feature Representation for Malware Classification
Authors: John Musgrave, Temesguen Messay-Kebede, David Kapp, Anca Ralescu
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Descriptive, Malware Classification

In this study we have presented a novel feature representation for malicious programs that can be used for malware classification. We have shown how to construct the features in a bottom-up approach, and analyzed the overlap of malicious and benign programs in terms of their components. We have shown that our method of analysis offers an increase in feature resolution that is descriptive of data movement in comparison to tf-idf features.
An Improved Structured Mesh Generation Method Based on Physics-informed Neural Networks
Authors: Xinhai Chen, Jie Liu, Junjun Yan, Zhichao Wang, Chunye Gong
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

Mesh generation remains a key technology in many areas where numerical simulations are required. As numerical algorithms become more efficient and computers become more powerful, the percentage of time devoted to mesh generation becomes higher. In this paper, we present an improved structured mesh generation method. The method formulates the meshing problem as a global optimization problem related to a physics-informed neural network. The mesh is obtained by intelligently solving the physical boundary-constrained partial differential equations. To improve the prediction accuracy of the neural network, we also introduce a novel auxiliary line strategy and an efficient network model during meshing. The strategy first employs a priori auxiliary lines to provide ground truth data and then uses these data to construct a loss term to better constrain the convergence of the subsequent training. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is effective and robust. It can accurately approximate the mapping (transformation) from the computational domain to the physical domain and enable fast high-quality structured mesh generation.
Fine-mixing: Mitigating Backdoors in Fine-tuned Language Models
Authors: Zhiyuan Zhang, Lingjuan Lyu, Xingjun Ma, Chenguang Wang, Xu sun
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Sentence, Sentence-Pair Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, Word Embeddings

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), DNNs are often backdoored during the fine-tuning process of a large-scale Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) with poisoned samples. Although the clean weights of PLMs are readily available, existing methods have ignored this information in defending NLP models against backdoor attacks. In this work, we take the first step to exploit the pre-trained (unfine-tuned) weights to mitigate backdoors in fine-tuned language models. Specifically, we leverage the clean pre-trained weights via two complementary techniques: (1) a two-step Fine-mixing technique, which first mixes the backdoored weights (fine-tuned on poisoned data) with the pre-trained weights, then fine-tunes the mixed weights on a small subset of clean data; (2) an Embedding Purification (E-PUR) technique, which mitigates potential backdoors existing in the word embeddings. We compare Fine-mixing with typical backdoor mitigation methods on three single-sentence sentiment classification tasks and two sentence-pair classification tasks and show that it outperforms the baselines by a considerable margin in all scenarios. We also show that our E-PUR method can benefit existing mitigation methods. Our work establishes a simple but strong baseline defense for secure fine-tuned NLP models against backdoor attacks.
Graph Anomaly Detection with Unsupervised GNNs
Authors: Lingxiao Zhao, Saurabh Sawlani, Arvind Srinivasan, Leman Akoglu
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Graph Anomaly Detection, Model Selection

Graph-based anomaly detection finds numerous applications in the real-world. Thus, there exists extensive literature on the topic that has recently shifted toward deep detection models due to advances in deep learning and graph neural networks (GNNs). A vast majority of prior work focuses on detecting node/edge/subgraph anomalies within a single graph, with much less work on graph-level anomaly detection in a graph database. This work aims to fill two gaps in the literature: We (1) design GLAM, an end-to-end graph-level anomaly detection model based on GNNs, and (2) focus on unsupervised model selection, which is notoriously hard due to lack of any labels, yet especially critical for deep NN based models with a long list of hyper-parameters. Further, we propose a new pooling strategy for graph-level embedding, called MMD-pooling, that is geared toward detecting distribution anomalies which has not been considered before. Through extensive experiments on 15 real-world datasets, we show that (i) GLAM outperforms node-level and two-stage (i.e. not end-to-end) baselines, and (ii) model selection picks a significantly more effective model than expectation (i.e. average) -- without using any labels -- among candidates with otherwise large variation in performance.
A Hybrid System of Sound Event Detection Transformer and Frame-wise Model for DCASE 2022 Task 4
Authors: Yiming Li, Zhifang Guo, Zhirong Ye, Xiangdong Wang, Hong Liu, Yueliang Qian, Rui Tao, Long Yan, Kazushige Ouchi
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Metric Learning, Sound Event Detection

In this paper, we describe in detail our system for DCASE 2022 Task4. The system combines two considerably different models: an end-to-end Sound Event Detection Transformer (SEDT) and a frame-wise model, Metric Learning and Focal Loss CNN (MLFL-CNN). The former is an event-wise model which learns event-level representations and predicts sound event categories and boundaries directly, while the latter is based on the widely adopted frame-classification scheme, under which each frame is classified into event categories and event boundaries are obtained by post-processing such as thresholding and smoothing. For SEDT, self-supervised pre-training using unlabeled data is applied, and semi-supervised learning is adopted by using an online teacher, which is updated from the student model using the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) strategy and generates reliable pseudo labels for weakly-labeled and unlabeled data. For the frame-wise model, the ICT-TOSHIBA system of DCASE 2021 Task 4 is used. Experimental results show that the hybrid system considerably outperforms either individual model and achieves psds1 of 0.420 and psds2 of 0.783 on the validation set without external data. The code is available at https://github.com/965694547/Hybrid-system-of-frame-wise-model-and-SEDT.
SVLDL: Improved Speaker Age Estimation Using Selective Variance Label Distribution Learning
Authors: Zuheng Kang, Jianzong Wang, Junqing Peng, Jing Xiao
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation

Estimating age from a single speech is a classic and challenging topic. Although Label Distribution Learning (LDL) can represent adjacent indistinguishable ages well, the uncertainty of the age estimate for each utterance varies from person to person, i.e., the variance of the age distribution is different. To address this issue, we propose selective variance label distribution learning (SVLDL) method to adapt the variance of different age distributions. Furthermore, the model uses WavLM as the speech feature extractor and adds the auxiliary task of gender recognition to further improve the performance. Two tricks are applied on the loss function to enhance the robustness of the age estimation and improve the quality of the fitted age distribution. Extensive experiments show that the model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all aspects of the NIST SRE08-10 and a real-world datasets.