pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Antagonistic AI
Authors: Alice Cai, Ian Arawjo, Elena L. Glassman
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

The vast majority of discourse around AI development assumes that subservient, "moral" models aligned with "human values" are universally beneficial -- in short, that good AI is sycophantic AI. We explore the shadow of the sycophantic paradigm, a design space we term antagonistic AI: AI systems that are disagreeable, rude, interrupting, confrontational, challenging, etc. -- embedding opposite behaviors or values. Far from being "bad" or "immoral," we consider whether antagonistic AI systems may sometimes have benefits to users, such as forcing users to confront their assumptions, build resilience, or develop healthier relational boundaries. Drawing from formative explorations and a speculative design workshop where participants designed fictional AI technologies that employ antagonism, we lay out a design space for antagonistic AI, articulating potential benefits, design techniques, and methods of embedding antagonistic elements into user experience. Finally, we discuss the many ethical challenges of this space and identify three dimensions for the responsible design of antagonistic AI -- consent, context, and framing.
Accuracy of TextFooler black box adversarial attacks on 01 loss sign activation neural network ensemble
Authors: Yunzhe Xue, Usman Roshan
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, News Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Recent work has shown the defense of 01 loss sign activation neural networks against image classification adversarial attacks. A public challenge to attack the models on CIFAR10 dataset remains undefeated. We ask the following question in this study: are 01 loss sign activation neural networks hard to deceive with a popular black box text adversarial attack program called TextFooler? We study this question on four popular text classification datasets: IMDB reviews, Yelp reviews, MR sentiment classification, and AG news classification. We find that our 01 loss sign activation network is much harder to attack with TextFooler compared to sigmoid activation cross entropy and binary neural networks. We also study a 01 loss sign activation convolutional neural network with a novel global pooling step specific to sign activation networks. With this new variation we see a significant gain in adversarial accuracy rendering TextFooler practically useless against it. We make our code freely available at \url{https://github.com/zero-one-loss/wordcnn01} and \url{https://github.com/xyzacademic/mlp01example}. Our work here suggests that 01 loss sign activation networks could be further developed to create fool proof models against text adversarial attacks.
Measurement Scheduling for ICU Patients with Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zongliang Ji, Anna Goldenberg, Rahul G. Krishnan
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling, Time Series

Scheduling laboratory tests for ICU patients presents a significant challenge. Studies show that 20-40% of lab tests ordered in the ICU are redundant and could be eliminated without compromising patient safety. Prior work has leveraged offline reinforcement learning (Offline-RL) to find optimal policies for ordering lab tests based on patient information. However, new ICU patient datasets have since been released, and various advancements have been made in Offline-RL methods. In this study, we first introduce a preprocessing pipeline for the newly-released MIMIC-IV dataset geared toward time-series tasks. We then explore the efficacy of state-of-the-art Offline-RL methods in identifying better policies for ICU patient lab test scheduling. Besides assessing methodological performance, we also discuss the overall suitability and practicality of using Offline-RL frameworks for scheduling laboratory tests in ICU settings.
Imagining a Future of Designing with AI: Dynamic Grounding, Constructive Negotiation, and Sustainable Motivation
Authors: Priyan Vaithilingam, Ian Arawjo, Elena L. Glassman
Date: 2024-02-12 00:00:00

We ideate a future design workflow that involves AI technology. Drawing from activity and communication theory, we attempt to isolate the new value large AI models can provide design compared to past technologies. We arrive at three affordances -- dynamic grounding, constructive negotiation, and sustainable motivation -- that summarize latent qualities of natural language-enabled foundation models that, if explicitly designed for, can support the process of design. Through design fiction, we then imagine a future interface as a diegetic prototype, the story of Squirrel Game, that demonstrates each of our three affordances in a realistic usage scenario. Our design process, terminology, and diagrams aim to contribute to future discussions about the relative affordances of AI technology with regard to collaborating with human designers.
Persian Speech Emotion Recognition by Fine-Tuning Transformers
Authors: Minoo Shayaninasab, Bagher BabaAli
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Self-Supervised Learning, Speech Emotion Recognition

Given the significance of speech emotion recognition, numerous methods have been developed in recent years to create effective and efficient systems in this domain. One of these methods involves the use of pretrained transformers, fine-tuned to address this specific problem, resulting in high accuracy. Despite extensive discussions and global-scale efforts to enhance these systems, the application of this innovative and effective approach has received less attention in the context of Persian speech emotion recognition. In this article, we review the field of speech emotion recognition and its background, with an emphasis on the importance of employing transformers in this context. We present two models, one based on spectrograms and the other on the audio itself, fine-tuned using the shEMO dataset. These models significantly enhance the accuracy of previous systems, increasing it from approximately 65% to 80% on the mentioned dataset. Subsequently, to investigate the effect of multilinguality on the fine-tuning process, these same models are fine-tuned twice. First, they are fine-tuned using the English IEMOCAP dataset, and then they are fine-tuned with the Persian shEMO dataset. This results in an improved accuracy of 82% for the Persian emotion recognition system. Keywords: Persian Speech Emotion Recognition, shEMO, Self-Supervised Learning
Towards Explainable, Safe Autonomous Driving with Language Embeddings for Novelty Identification and Active Learning: Framework and Experimental Analysis with Real-World Data Sets
Authors: Ross Greer, Mohan Trivedi
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Navigate, Novelty Detection

This research explores the integration of language embeddings for active learning in autonomous driving datasets, with a focus on novelty detection. Novelty arises from unexpected scenarios that autonomous vehicles struggle to navigate, necessitating higher-level reasoning abilities. Our proposed method employs language-based representations to identify novel scenes, emphasizing the dual purpose of safety takeover responses and active learning. The research presents a clustering experiment using Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained (CLIP) embeddings to organize datasets and detect novelties. We find that the proposed algorithm effectively isolates novel scenes from a collection of subsets derived from two real-world driving datasets, one vehicle-mounted and one infrastructure-mounted. From the generated clusters, we further present methods for generating textual explanations of elements which differentiate scenes classified as novel from other scenes in the data pool, presenting qualitative examples from the clustered results. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language-driven embeddings in identifying novel elements and generating explanations of data, and we further discuss potential applications in safe takeovers, data curation, and multi-task active learning.
ODIN: Disentangled Reward Mitigates Hacking in RLHF
Authors: Lichang Chen, Chen Zhu, Davit Soselia, Jiuhai Chen, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, Heng Huang, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00

In this work, we study the issue of reward hacking on the response length, a challenge emerging in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on LLMs. A well-formatted, verbose but less helpful response from the LLMs can often deceive LLMs or even human evaluators to achieve high scores. The same issue also holds for some reward models in RL. To address the challenges in both training and evaluation, we establish a more reliable evaluation protocol for comparing different training configurations, which inspects the trade-off between LLM evaluation score and response length obtained by varying training hyperparameters. Based on this evaluation, we conduct large-scale studies, where the results shed insights into the efficacy of hyperparameters and tricks used in RL on mitigating length bias. We further propose to improve the reward model by jointly training two linear heads on shared feature representations to predict the rewards, one trained to correlate with length, and the other trained to decorrelate with length and therefore focus more on the actual content. We then discard the length head in RL to prevent reward hacking on length. Experiments demonstrate that our approach almost eliminates the reward correlation with length, and improves the obtained policy by a significant margin.
Training Heterogeneous Client Models using Knowledge Distillation in Serverless Federated Learning
Authors: Mohak Chadha, Pulkit Khera, Jianfeng Gu, Osama Abboud, Michael Gerndt
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm that enables the collaborative training of a shared global model across distributed clients while keeping the data decentralized. Recent works on designing systems for efficient FL have shown that utilizing serverless computing technologies, particularly Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) for FL, can enhance resource efficiency, reduce training costs, and alleviate the complex infrastructure management burden on data holders. However, existing serverless FL systems implicitly assume a uniform global model architecture across all participating clients during training. This assumption fails to address fundamental challenges in practical FL due to the resource and statistical data heterogeneity among FL clients. To address these challenges and enable heterogeneous client models in serverless FL, we utilize Knowledge Distillation (KD) in this paper. Towards this, we propose novel optimized serverless workflows for two popular conventional federated KD techniques, i.e., FedMD and FedDF. We implement these workflows by introducing several extensions to an open-source serverless FL system called FedLess. Moreover, we comprehensively evaluate the two strategies on multiple datasets across varying levels of client data heterogeneity using heterogeneous client models with respect to accuracy, fine-grained training times, and costs. Results from our experiments demonstrate that serverless FedDF is more robust to extreme non-IID data distributions, is faster, and leads to lower costs than serverless FedMD. In addition, compared to the original implementation, our optimizations for particular steps in FedMD and FedDF lead to an average speedup of 3.5x and 1.76x across all datasets.
On the Effectiveness of Machine Learning-based Call Graph Pruning: An Empirical Study
Authors: Amir M. Mir, Mehdi Keshani, Sebastian Proksch
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00

Static call graph (CG) construction often over-approximates call relations, leading to sound, but imprecise results. Recent research has explored machine learning (ML)-based CG pruning as a means to enhance precision by eliminating false edges. However, current methods suffer from a limited evaluation dataset, imbalanced training data, and reduced recall, which affects practical downstream analyses. Prior results were also not compared with advanced static CG construction techniques yet. This study tackles these issues. We introduce the NYXCorpus, a dataset of real-world Java programs with high test coverage and we collect traces from test executions and build a ground truth of dynamic CGs. We leverage these CGs to explore conservative pruning strategies during the training and inference of ML-based CG pruners. We conduct a comparative analysis of static CGs generated using zero control flow analysis (0-CFA) and those produced by a context-sensitive 1-CFA algorithm, evaluating both with and without pruning. We find that CG pruning is a difficult task for real-world Java projects and substantial improvements in the CG precision (+25%) meet reduced recall (-9%). However, our experiments show promising results: even when we favor recall over precision by using an F2 metric in our experiments, we can show that pruned CGs have comparable quality to a context-sensitive 1-CFA analysis while being computationally less demanding. Resulting CGs are much smaller (69%), and substantially faster (3.5x speed-up), with virtually unchanged results in our downstream analysis.
How do Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts between Honesty and Helpfulness?
Authors: Ryan Liu, Theodore R. Sumers, Ishita Dasgupta, Thomas L. Griffiths
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

In day-to-day communication, people often approximate the truth - for example, rounding the time or omitting details - in order to be maximally helpful to the listener. How do large language models (LLMs) handle such nuanced trade-offs? To address this question, we use psychological models and experiments designed to characterize human behavior to analyze LLMs. We test a range of LLMs and explore how optimization for human preferences or inference-time reasoning affects these trade-offs. We find that reinforcement learning from human feedback improves both honesty and helpfulness, while chain-of-thought prompting skews LLMs towards helpfulness over honesty. Finally, GPT-4 Turbo demonstrates human-like response patterns including sensitivity to the conversational framing and listener's decision context. Our findings reveal the conversational values internalized by LLMs and suggest that even these abstract values can, to a degree, be steered by zero-shot prompting.
Highly Accurate Disease Diagnosis and Highly Reproducible Biomarker Identification with PathFormer
Authors: Zehao Dong, Qihang Zhao, Philip R. O. Payne, Michael A Province, Carlos Cruchaga, Muhan Zhang, Tianyu Zhao, Yixin Chen, Fuhai Li
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00

Biomarker identification is critical for precise disease diagnosis and understanding disease pathogenesis in omics data analysis, like using fold change and regression analysis. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been the dominant deep learning model for analyzing graph-structured data. However, we found two major limitations of existing GNNs in omics data analysis, i.e., limited-prediction (diagnosis) accuracy and limited-reproducible biomarker identification capacity across multiple datasets. The root of the challenges is the unique graph structure of biological signaling pathways, which consists of a large number of targets and intensive and complex signaling interactions among these targets. To resolve these two challenges, in this study, we presented a novel GNN model architecture, named PathFormer, which systematically integrate signaling network, priori knowledge and omics data to rank biomarkers and predict disease diagnosis. In the comparison results, PathFormer outperformed existing GNN models significantly in terms of highly accurate prediction capability ( 30% accuracy improvement in disease diagnosis compared with existing GNN models) and high reproducibility of biomarker ranking across different datasets. The improvement was confirmed using two independent Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and cancer transcriptomic datasets. The PathFormer model can be directly applied to other omics data analysis studies.
DIMON: Learning Solution Operators of Partial Differential Equations on a Diffeomorphic Family of Domains
Authors: Minglang Yin, Nicolas Charon, Ryan Brody, Lu Lu, Natalia Trayanova, Mauro Maggioni
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Operator learning

The solution of a PDE over varying initial/boundary conditions on multiple domains is needed in a wide variety of applications, but it is computationally expensive if the solution is computed de novo whenever the initial/boundary conditions of the domain change. We introduce a general operator learning framework, called DIffeomorphic Mapping Operator learNing (DIMON) to learn approximate PDE solutions over a family of domains $\{\Omega_{\theta}}_\theta$, that learns the map from initial/boundary conditions and domain $\Omega_\theta$ to the solution of the PDE, or to specified functionals thereof. DIMON is based on transporting a given problem (initial/boundary conditions and domain $\Omega_{\theta}$) to a problem on a reference domain $\Omega_{0}$, where training data from multiple problems is used to learn the map to the solution on $\Omega_{0}$, which is then re-mapped to the original domain $\Omega_{\theta}$. We consider several problems to demonstrate the performance of the framework in learning both static and time-dependent PDEs on non-rigid geometries; these include solving the Laplace equation, reaction-diffusion equations, and a multiscale PDE that characterizes the electrical propagation on the left ventricle. This work paves the way toward the fast prediction of PDE solutions on a family of domains and the application of neural operators in engineering and precision medicine.
SAIS: A Novel Bio-Inspired Artificial Immune System Based on Symbiotic Paradigm
Authors: Junhao Song, Yingfang Yuan, Wei Pang
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Evolutionary Algorithms

We propose a novel type of Artificial Immune System (AIS): Symbiotic Artificial Immune Systems (SAIS), drawing inspiration from symbiotic relationships in biology. SAIS parallels the three key stages (i.e., mutualism, commensalism and parasitism) of population updating from the Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) algorithm. This parallel approach effectively addresses the challenges of large population size and enhances population diversity in AIS, which traditional AIS and SOS struggle to resolve efficiently. We conducted a series of experiments, which demonstrated that our SAIS achieved comparable performance to the state-of-the-art approach SOS and outperformed other popular AIS approaches and evolutionary algorithms across 26 benchmark problems. Furthermore, we investigated the problem of parameter selection and found that SAIS performs better in handling larger population sizes while requiring fewer generations. Finally, we believe SAIS, as a novel bio-inspired and immune-inspired algorithm, paves the way for innovation in bio-inspired computing with the symbiotic paradigm.
CPSDBench: A Large Language Model Evaluation Benchmark and Baseline for Chinese Public Security Domain
Authors: Xin Tong, Bo Jin, Zhi Lin, Binjun Wang, Ting Yu, Qiang Cheng
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Model Evaluation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, text-classification, Text Classification, Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential and effectiveness across multiple application domains. To assess the performance of mainstream LLMs in public security tasks, this study aims to construct a specialized evaluation benchmark tailored to the Chinese public security domain--CPSDbench. CPSDbench integrates datasets related to public security collected from real-world scenarios, supporting a comprehensive assessment of LLMs across four key dimensions: text classification, information extraction, question answering, and text generation. Furthermore, this study introduces a set of innovative evaluation metrics designed to more precisely quantify the efficacy of LLMs in executing tasks related to public security. Through the in-depth analysis and evaluation conducted in this research, we not only enhance our understanding of the performance strengths and limitations of existing models in addressing public security issues but also provide references for the future development of more accurate and customized LLM models targeted at applications in this field.
TransGPT: Multi-modal Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Transportation
Authors: Peng Wang, Xiang Wei, Fangxu Hu, Wenjuan Han
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Natural language processing (NLP) is a key component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), but it faces many challenges in the transportation domain, such as domain-specific knowledge and data, and multi-modal inputs and outputs. This paper presents TransGPT, a novel (multi-modal) large language model for the transportation domain, which consists of two independent variants: TransGPT-SM for single-modal data and TransGPT-MM for multi-modal data. TransGPT-SM is finetuned on a single-modal Transportation dataset (STD) that contains textual data from various sources in the transportation domain. TransGPT-MM is finetuned on a multi-modal Transportation dataset (MTD) that we manually collected from three areas of the transportation domain: driving tests, traffic signs, and landmarks. We evaluate TransGPT on several benchmark datasets for different tasks in the transportation domain, and show that it outperforms baseline models on most tasks. We also showcase the potential applications of TransGPT for traffic analysis and modeling, such as generating synthetic traffic scenarios, explaining traffic phenomena, answering traffic-related questions, providing traffic recommendations, and generating traffic reports. This work advances the state-of-the-art of NLP in the transportation domain and provides a useful tool for ITS researchers and practitioners.
Successive Refinement in Large-Scale Computation: Advancing Model Inference Applications
Authors: Homa Esfahanizadeh, Alejandro Cohen, Shlomo Shamai, Muriel Medard
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Modern computationally-intensive applications often operate under time constraints, necessitating acceleration methods and distribution of computational workloads across multiple entities. However, the outcome is either achieved within the desired timeline or not, and in the latter case, valuable resources are wasted. In this paper, we introduce solutions for layered-resolution computation. These solutions allow lower-resolution results to be obtained at an earlier stage than the final result. This innovation notably enhances the deadline-based systems, as if a computational job is terminated due to time constraints, an approximate version of the final result can still be generated. Moreover, in certain operational regimes, a high-resolution result might be unnecessary, because the low-resolution result may already deviate significantly from the decision threshold, for example in AI-based decision-making systems. Therefore, operators can decide whether higher resolution is needed or not based on intermediate results, enabling computations with adaptive resolution. We present our framework for two critical and computationally demanding jobs: distributed matrix multiplication (linear) and model inference in machine learning (nonlinear). Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate that the execution delay for the first resolution is significantly shorter than that for the final resolution, while maintaining overall complexity comparable to the conventional one-shot approach. Our experiments further illustrate how the layering feature increases the likelihood of meeting deadlines and enables adaptability and transparency in massive, large-scale computations.