pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Consensus Focus for Object Detection and minority classes
Authors: Erik Isai Valle Salgado, Chen Li, Yaqi Han, Linchao Shi, Xinghui Li
Date: 2024-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Long-tailed Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Transfer Learning

Ensemble methods exploit the availability of a given number of classifiers or detectors trained in single or multiple source domains and tasks to address machine learning problems such as domain adaptation or multi-source transfer learning. Existing research measures the domain distance between the sources and the target dataset, trains multiple networks on the same data with different samples per class, or combines predictions from models trained under varied hyperparameters and settings. Their solutions enhanced the performance on small or tail categories but hurt the rest. To this end, we propose a modified consensus focus for semi-supervised and long-tailed object detection. We introduce a voting system based on source confidence that spots the contribution of each model in a consensus, lets the user choose the relevance of each class in the target label space so that it relaxes minority bounding boxes suppression, and combines multiple models' results without discarding the poisonous networks. Our tests on synthetic driving datasets retrieved higher confidence and more accurate bounding boxes than the NMS, soft-NMS, and WBF. The code used to generate the results is available in our GitHub repository: http://github.com/ErikValle/Consensus-focus-for-object-detection.
Transformer-CNN Fused Architecture for Enhanced Skin Lesion Segmentation
Authors: Siddharth Tiwari
Date: 2024-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Skin Lesion Segmentation

The segmentation of medical images is important for the improvement and creation of healthcare systems, particularly for early disease detection and treatment planning. In recent years, the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and other state-of-the-art methods has greatly advanced medical image segmentation. However, CNNs have been found to struggle with learning long-range dependencies and capturing global context due to the limitations of convolution operations. In this paper, we explore the use of transformers and CNNs for medical image segmentation and propose a hybrid architecture that combines the ability of transformers to capture global dependencies with the ability of CNNs to capture low-level spatial details. We compare various architectures and configurations and conduct multiple experiments to evaluate their effectiveness.
D3GU: Multi-Target Active Domain Adaptation via Enhancing Domain Alignment
Authors: Lin Zhang, Linghan Xu, Saman Motamed, Shayok Chakraborty, Fernando de la Torre
Date: 2024-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for image classification has made remarkable progress in transferring classification knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, thanks to effective domain alignment techniques. Recently, in order to further improve performance on a target domain, many Single-Target Active Domain Adaptation (ST-ADA) methods have been proposed to identify and annotate the salient and exemplar target samples. However, it requires one model to be trained and deployed for each target domain and the domain label associated with each test sample. This largely restricts its application in the ubiquitous scenarios with multiple target domains. Therefore, we propose a Multi-Target Active Domain Adaptation (MT-ADA) framework for image classification, named D3GU, to simultaneously align different domains and actively select samples from them for annotation. This is the first research effort in this field to our best knowledge. D3GU applies Decomposed Domain Discrimination (D3) during training to achieve both source-target and target-target domain alignments. Then during active sampling, a Gradient Utility (GU) score is designed to weight every unlabeled target image by its contribution towards classification and domain alignment tasks, and is further combined with KMeans clustering to form GU-KMeans for diverse image sampling. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, Office31, OfficeHome, and DomainNet, have been conducted to validate consistently superior performance of D3GU for MT-ADA.
TOFU: A Task of Fictitious Unlearning for LLMs
Authors: Pratyush Maini, Zhili Feng, Avi Schwarzschild, Zachary C. Lipton, J. Zico Kolter
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00

Large language models trained on massive corpora of data from the web can memorize and reproduce sensitive or private data raising both legal and ethical concerns. Unlearning, or tuning models to forget information present in their training data, provides us with a way to protect private data after training. Although several methods exist for such unlearning, it is unclear to what extent they result in models equivalent to those where the data to be forgotten was never learned in the first place. To address this challenge, we present TOFU, a Task of Fictitious Unlearning, as a benchmark aimed at helping deepen our understanding of unlearning. We offer a dataset of 200 diverse synthetic author profiles, each consisting of 20 question-answer pairs, and a subset of these profiles called the forget set that serves as the target for unlearning. We compile a suite of metrics that work together to provide a holistic picture of unlearning efficacy. Finally, we provide a set of baseline results from existing unlearning algorithms. Importantly, none of the baselines we consider show effective unlearning motivating continued efforts to develop approaches for unlearning that effectively tune models so that they truly behave as if they were never trained on the forget data at all.
Extreme Compression of Large Language Models via Additive Quantization
Authors: Vage Egiazarian, Andrei Panferov, Denis Kuznedelev, Elias Frantar, Artem Babenko, Dan Alistarh
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Information Retrieval, Quantization

The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has led to a race towards performant quantization techniques which can enable their execution on end-user devices. In this paper, we revisit the problem of "extreme" LLM compression-defined as targeting extremely low bit counts, such as 2 to 3 bits per parameter-from the point of view of classic methods in Multi-Codebook Quantization (MCQ). Our algorithm, called AQLM, generalizes the classic Additive Quantization (AQ) approach for information retrieval to advance the state-of-the-art in LLM compression, via two innovations: 1) learned additive quantization of weight matrices in input-adaptive fashion, and 2) joint optimization of codebook parameters across each transformer blocks. Broadly, AQLM is the first scheme that is Pareto optimal in terms of accuracy-vs-model-size when compressing to less than 3 bits per parameter, and significantly improves upon all known schemes in the extreme compression (2bit) regime. In addition, AQLM is practical: we provide fast GPU and CPU implementations of AQLM for token generation, which enable us to match or outperform optimized FP16 implementations for speed, while executing in a much smaller memory footprint.
A Closer Look at AUROC and AUPRC under Class Imbalance
Authors: Matthew B. A. McDermott, Haoran Zhang, Lasse Hyldig Hansen, Giovanni Angelotti, Jack Gallifant
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Fairness

In machine learning (ML), a widespread claim is that the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) is a superior metric for model comparison to the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) for tasks with class imbalance. This paper refutes this notion on two fronts. First, we theoretically characterize the behavior of AUROC and AUPRC in the presence of model mistakes, establishing clearly that AUPRC is not generally superior in cases of class imbalance. We further show that AUPRC can be a harmful metric as it can unduly favor model improvements in subpopulations with more frequent positive labels, heightening algorithmic disparities. Next, we empirically support our theory using experiments on both semi-synthetic and real-world fairness datasets. Prompted by these insights, we conduct a review of over 1.5 million scientific papers to understand the origin of this invalid claim, finding that it is often made without citation, misattributed to papers that do not argue this point, and aggressively over-generalized from source arguments. Our findings represent a dual contribution: a significant technical advancement in understanding the relationship between AUROC and AUPRC and a stark warning about unchecked assumptions in the ML community.
PANDORA: A Parallel Dendrogram Construction Algorithm for Single Linkage Clustering on GPU
Authors: Piyush Sao, Andrey Prokopenko, Damien Lebrun-Grandié
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, GPU

This paper presents \pandora, a novel parallel algorithm for efficiently constructing dendrograms for single-linkage hierarchical clustering, including \hdbscan. Traditional dendrogram construction methods from a minimum spanning tree (MST), such as agglomerative or divisive techniques, often fail to efficiently parallelize, especially with skewed dendrograms common in real-world data. \pandora addresses these challenges through a unique recursive tree contraction method, which simplifies the tree for initial dendrogram construction and then progressively reconstructs the complete dendrogram. This process makes \pandora asymptotically work-optimal, independent of dendrogram skewness. All steps in \pandora are fully parallel and suitable for massively threaded accelerators such as GPUs. Our implementation is written in Kokkos, providing support for both CPUs and multi-vendor GPUs (e.g., Nvidia, AMD). The multithreaded version of \pandora is 2.2$\times$ faster than the current best-multithreaded implementation, while the GPU \pandora implementation achieved 6-20$\times$ on \amdgpu and 10-37$\times$ on \nvidiagpu speed-up over multithreaded \pandora. These advancements lead to up to a 6-fold speedup for \hdbscan on GPUs over the current best, which only offload MST construction to GPUs and perform multithreaded dendrogram construction.
Peridynamic Neural Operators: A Data-Driven Nonlocal Constitutive Model for Complex Material Responses
Authors: Siavash Jafarzadeh, Stewart Silling, Ning Liu, Zhongqiang Zhang, Yue Yu
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00

Neural operators, which can act as implicit solution operators of hidden governing equations, have recently become popular tools for learning the responses of complex real-world physical systems. Nevertheless, most neural operator applications have thus far been data-driven and neglect the intrinsic preservation of fundamental physical laws in data. In this work, we introduce a novel integral neural operator architecture called the Peridynamic Neural Operator (PNO) that learns a nonlocal constitutive law from data. This neural operator provides a forward model in the form of state-based peridynamics, with objectivity and momentum balance laws automatically guaranteed. As applications, we demonstrate the expressivity and efficacy of our model in learning complex material behaviors from both synthetic and experimental data sets. We show that, owing to its ability to capture complex responses, our learned neural operator achieves improved accuracy and efficiency compared to baseline models that use predefined constitutive laws. Moreover, by preserving the essential physical laws within the neural network architecture, the PNO is robust in treating noisy data. The method shows generalizability to different domain configurations, external loadings, and discretizations.
Wavelet-Inspired Multiscale Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Qipeng Qian, Tanwi Mallick
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Graph Learning

Traffic forecasting is the foundation for intelligent transportation systems. Spatiotemporal graph neural networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in traffic forecasting. However, these methods do not explicitly model some of the natural characteristics in traffic data, such as the multiscale structure that encompasses spatial and temporal variations at different levels of granularity or scale. To that end, we propose a Wavelet-Inspired Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (WavGCRN) which combines multiscale analysis (MSA)-based method with Deep Learning (DL)-based method. In WavGCRN, the traffic data is decomposed into time-frequency components with Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), constructing a multi-stream input structure; then Graph Convolutional Recurrent networks (GCRNs) are employed as encoders for each stream, extracting spatiotemporal features in different scales; and finally the learnable Inversed DWT and GCRN are combined as the decoder, fusing the information from all streams for traffic metrics reconstruction and prediction. Furthermore, road-network-informed graphs and data-driven graph learning are combined to accurately capture spatial correlation. The proposed method can offer well-defined interpretability, powerful learning capability, and competitive forecasting performance on real-world traffic data sets.
Partial Counterfactual Identification of Continuous Outcomes with a Curvature Sensitivity Model
Authors: Valentyn Melnychuk, Dennis Frauen, Stefan Feuerriegel
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Inference, Decoder, Sensitivity

Counterfactual inference aims to answer retrospective "what if" questions and thus belongs to the most fine-grained type of inference in Pearl's causality ladder. Existing methods for counterfactual inference with continuous outcomes aim at point identification and thus make strong and unnatural assumptions about the underlying structural causal model. In this paper, we relax these assumptions and aim at partial counterfactual identification of continuous outcomes, i.e., when the counterfactual query resides in an ignorance interval with informative bounds. We prove that, in general, the ignorance interval of the counterfactual queries has non-informative bounds, already when functions of structural causal models are continuously differentiable. As a remedy, we propose a novel sensitivity model called Curvature Sensitivity Model. This allows us to obtain informative bounds by bounding the curvature of level sets of the functions. We further show that existing point counterfactual identification methods are special cases of our Curvature Sensitivity Model when the bound of the curvature is set to zero. We then propose an implementation of our Curvature Sensitivity Model in the form of a novel deep generative model, which we call Augmented Pseudo-Invertible Decoder. Our implementation employs (i) residual normalizing flows with (ii) variational augmentations. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our Augmented Pseudo-Invertible Decoder. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first partial identification model for Markovian structural causal models with continuous outcomes.
A tree-based varying coefficient model
Authors: Henning Zakrisson, Mathias Lindholm
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, feature selection, model

The paper introduces a tree-based varying coefficient model (VCM) where the varying coefficients are modelled using the cyclic gradient boosting machine (CGBM) from Delong et al. (2023). Modelling the coefficient functions using a CGBM allows for dimension-wise early stopping and feature importance scores. The dimension-wise early stopping not only reduces the risk of dimension-specific overfitting, but also reveals differences in model complexity across dimensions. The use of feature importance scores allows for simple feature selection and easy model interpretation. The model is evaluated on the same simulated and real data examples as those used in Richman and W\"uthrich (2023), and the results show that it produces results in terms of out of sample loss that are comparable to those of their neural network-based VCM called LocalGLMnet.
Scientific Machine Learning Based Reduced-Order Models for Plasma Turbulence Simulations
Authors: Constantin Gahr, Ionut-Gabriel Farcas, Frank Jenko
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00

This paper investigates non-intrusive Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) Reduced-Order Models (ROMs) for plasma turbulence simulations. In particular, we focus on Operator Inference (OpInf) to build low-cost physics-based ROMs from data for such simulations. As a representative example, we consider the (classical) Hasegawa-Wakatani (HW) equations used for modeling two-dimensional electrostatic drift-wave turbulence. For a comprehensive perspective of the potential of OpInf to construct predictive ROMs, we consider three setups for the HW equations by varying a key parameter, namely the adiabaticity coefficient. These setups lead to the formation of complex and nonlinear dynamics, which makes the construction of predictive ROMs of any kind challenging. We generate the training datasets by performing direct numerical simulations of the HW equations and recording the computed state data and outputs the over a time horizon of $100$ time units in the turbulent phase. We then use these datasets to construct OpInf ROMs for predictions over $400$ additional time units, that is, $400\%$ more than the training horizon. Our results show that the OpInf ROMs capture important statistical features of the turbulent dynamics and generalize beyond the training time horizon while reducing the computational effort of the high-fidelity simulation by up to five orders of magnitude. In the broader context of fusion research, this shows that non-intrusive SciML ROMs have the potential to drastically accelerate numerical studies, which can ultimately enable tasks such as the design of optimized fusion devices.
Time Series Forecasting of HIV/AIDS in the Philippines Using Deep Learning: Does COVID-19 Epidemic Matter?
Authors: Sales G. Aribe Jr., Bobby D. Gerardo, Ruji P. Medina
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

With a 676% growth rate in HIV incidence between 2010 and 2021, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Philippines is the one that is spreading the quickest in the western Pacific. Although the full effects of COVID-19 on HIV services and development are still unknown, it is predicted that such disruptions could lead to a significant increase in HIV casualties. Therefore, the nation needs some modeling and forecasting techniques to foresee the spread pattern and enhance the governments prevention, treatment, testing, and care program. In this study, the researcher uses Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network to forecast time series during the period when the COVID-19 pandemic strikes the nation, using statistics taken from the HIV/AIDS and ART Registry of the Philippines. After training, validation, and testing of data, the study finds that the predicted cumulative cases in the nation by 2030 will reach 145,273. Additionally, there is very little difference between observed and anticipated HIV epidemic levels, as evidenced by reduced RMSE, MAE, and MAPE values as well as a greater coefficient of determination. Further research revealed that the Philippines seems far from achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3 of Project 2030 due to an increase in the nations rate of new HIV infections. Despite the detrimental effects of COVID-19 spread on HIV/AIDS efforts nationwide, the Philippine government, under the Marcos administration, must continue to adhere to the United Nations 90-90-90 targets by enhancing its ART program and ensuring that all vital health services are readily accessible and available.
EpilepsyLLM: Domain-Specific Large Language Model Fine-tuned with Epilepsy Medical Knowledge
Authors: Xuyang Zhao, Qibin Zhao, Toshihisa Tanaka
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

With large training datasets and massive amounts of computing sources, large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance in comprehensive and generative ability. Based on those powerful LLMs, the model fine-tuned with domain-specific datasets posseses more specialized knowledge and thus is more practical like medical LLMs. However, the existing fine-tuned medical LLMs are limited to general medical knowledge with English language. For disease-specific problems, the model's response is inaccurate and sometimes even completely irrelevant, especially when using a language other than English. In this work, we focus on the particular disease of Epilepsy with Japanese language and introduce a customized LLM termed as EpilepsyLLM. Our model is trained from the pre-trained LLM by fine-tuning technique using datasets from the epilepsy domain. The datasets contain knowledge of basic information about disease, common treatment methods and drugs, and important notes in life and work. The experimental results demonstrate that EpilepsyLLM can provide more reliable and specialized medical knowledge responses.
Optimistic Model Rollouts for Pessimistic Offline Policy Optimization
Authors: Yuanzhao Zhai, Yiying Li, Zijian Gao, Xudong Gong, Kele Xu, Dawei Feng, Ding Bo, Huaimin Wang
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy optimization, usually via constructing a Pessimistic Markov Decision Process (P-MDP). However, the P-MDP discourages the policies from learning in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions beyond the support of offline datasets, which can under-utilize the generalization ability of dynamics models. In contrast, we propose constructing an Optimistic MDP (O-MDP). We initially observed the potential benefits of optimism brought by encouraging more OOD rollouts. Motivated by this observation, we present ORPO, a simple yet effective model-based offline RL framework. ORPO generates Optimistic model Rollouts for Pessimistic offline policy Optimization. Specifically, we train an optimistic rollout policy in the O-MDP to sample more OOD model rollouts. Then we relabel the sampled state-action pairs with penalized rewards and optimize the output policy in the P-MDP. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the performance of policies trained with ORPO can be lower-bounded in linear MDPs. Experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms P-MDP baselines by a margin of 30%, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the widely-used benchmark. Moreover, ORPO exhibits notable advantages in problems that require generalization.