pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction
Authors: Siyu Yuan, Kaitao Song, Jiangjie Chen, Xu Tan, Yongliang Shen, Ren Kan, Dongsheng Li, Deqing Yang
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00

To address intricate real-world tasks, there has been a rising interest in tool utilization in applications of large language models (LLMs). To develop LLM-based agents, it usually requires LLMs to understand many tool functions from different tool documentation. But these documentations could be diverse, redundant or incomplete, which immensely affects the capability of LLMs in using tools. To solve this, we introduce EASYTOOL, a framework transforming diverse and lengthy tool documentation into a unified and concise tool instruction for easier tool usage. EasyTool purifies essential information from extensive tool documentation of different sources, and elaborates a unified interface (i.e., tool instruction) to offer standardized tool descriptions and functionalities for LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments on multiple different tasks demonstrate that EasyTool can significantly reduce token consumption and improve the performance of tool utilization in real-world scenarios. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS/} in the future.
Data-Efficient Interactive Multi-Objective Optimization Using ParEGO
Authors: Arash Heidari, Sebastian Rojas Gonzalez, Tom Dhaene, Ivo Couckuyt
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Gaussian Processes

Multi-objective optimization is a widely studied problem in diverse fields, such as engineering and finance, that seeks to identify a set of non-dominated solutions that provide optimal trade-offs among competing objectives. However, the computation of the entire Pareto front can become prohibitively expensive, both in terms of computational resources and time, particularly when dealing with a large number of objectives. In practical applications, decision-makers (DMs) will select a single solution of the Pareto front that aligns with their preferences to be implemented; thus, traditional multi-objective algorithms invest a lot of budget sampling solutions that are not interesting for the DM. In this paper, we propose two novel algorithms that employ Gaussian Processes and advanced discretization methods to efficiently locate the most preferred region of the Pareto front in expensive-to-evaluate problems. Our approach involves interacting with the decision-maker to guide the optimization process towards their preferred trade-offs. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms are effective in finding non-dominated solutions that align with the decision-maker's preferences while maintaining computational efficiency.
An ontology alignment method with user intervention using compact differential evolution with adaptive parameter control
Authors: Zhaoming Lv
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00

User interaction is one of the most effective ways to improve the ontology alignment quality. However, this approach faces the challenge of how users can participate effectively in the matching process. To solve this challenge. In this paper, an interactive ontology alignment approach using compact differential evolution algorithm with adaptive parameter control (IOACDE) is proposed. In this method, the ontology alignment process is modeled as an interactive optimization problem and users are allowed to intervene in matching in two ways. One is that the mapping suggestions generated by IOACDE as a complete candidate alignment is evaluated by user during optimization process. The other is that the user ameliorates the alignment results by evaluating single mapping after the automatic matching process. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the neural embedding model and K nearest neighbor (KNN) is employed to simulate user for the ontologies of the real world. The experimental results show that the proposed interactive approach can improve the alignment quality compared to the non-interactive. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods from OAEI, the results show that the proposed algorithm has a better performance under the same error rate.
Attention, Distillation, and Tabularization: Towards Practical Neural Network-Based Prefetching
Authors: Pengmiao Zhang, Neelesh Gupta, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor K. Prasanna
Date: 2023-12-23 00:00:00

Attention-based Neural Networks (NN) have demonstrated their effectiveness in accurate memory access prediction, an essential step in data prefetching. However, the substantial computational overheads associated with these models result in high inference latency, limiting their feasibility as practical prefetchers. To close the gap, we propose a new approach based on tabularization that significantly reduces model complexity and inference latency without sacrificing prediction accuracy. Our novel tabularization methodology takes as input a distilled, yet highly accurate attention-based model for memory access prediction and efficiently converts its expensive matrix multiplications into a hierarchy of fast table lookups. As an exemplar of the above approach, we develop DART, a prefetcher comprised of a simple hierarchy of tables. With a modest 0.09 drop in F1-score, DART reduces 99.99% of arithmetic operations from the large attention-based model and 91.83% from the distilled model. DART accelerates the large model inference by 170x and the distilled model by 9.4x. DART has comparable latency and storage costs as state-of-the-art rule-based prefetcher BO but surpasses it by 6.1% in IPC improvement. DART outperforms state-of-the-art NN-based prefetchers TransFetch by 33.1% and Voyager by 37.2% in terms of IPC improvement, primarily due to its low prefetching latency.
Multimodal Optimization with k-Cluster Big Bang-Big Crunch Algorithm and Postprocessing Methods for Identification and Quantification of Optima
Authors: Kemal Erdem Yenin, Reha Oguz Sayin, Kuzey Arar, Kadir Kaan Atalay, Fabio Stroppa
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Multimodal optimization is often encountered in engineering problems, especially when different and alternative solutions are sought. Evolutionary algorithms can efficiently tackle multimodal optimization thanks to their features such as the concept of population, exploration/exploitation, and being suitable for parallel computation. This paper investigates whether a less-known optimizer, the Big Bang-Big Crunch (BBBC) algorithm, is suitable for multimodal optimization. We extended BBBC and propose k-BBBC, a clustering-based multi-modal optimizer. Additionally, we introduce two post-processing methods to (i) identify the local optima in a set of retrieved solutions (i.e., a population), and (ii) quantify the number of correctly retrieved optima against the expected ones (i.e., success rate). Our results show that k-BBBC performs well even with problems having a large number of optima (tested on $379$ optima) and high dimensionality (tested on $32$ decision variables), but it becomes computationally too expensive for problems with many local optima (i.e., in the CEC'2013 benchmark set). Compared to other multimodal optimization methods, it outperforms them in terms of accuracy (in both search and objective space) and success rate (number of correctly retrieved optima) when tested on basic multimodal functions, especially when elitism is applied; however, it requires knowing the number of optima of a problem, which makes its performance decrease when tested on niching competition test CEC'2013. Lastly, we validated our proposed post-processing methods by comparing their success rate to the actual one: results suggest that these methods can be used to evaluate the performance of a multimodal optimization algorithm by correctly identifying optima and providing an indication of success -- without the need to know where the optima are located in the search space.
QuasiNet: a neural network with trainable product layers
Authors: Kristína Malinovská, Slavomír Holenda, Ľudovít Malinovský
Date: 2023-11-21 00:00:00

Classical neural networks achieve only limited convergence in hard problems such as XOR or parity when the number of hidden neurons is small. With the motivation to improve the success rate of neural networks in these problems, we propose a new neural network model inspired by existing neural network models with so called product neurons and a learning rule derived from classical error backpropagation, which elegantly solves the problem of mutually exclusive situations. Unlike existing product neurons, which have weights that are preset and not adaptable, our product layers of neurons also do learn. We tested the model and compared its success rate to a classical multilayer perceptron in the aforementioned problems as well as in other hard problems such as the two spirals. Our results indicate that our model is clearly more successful than the classical MLP and has the potential to be used in many tasks and applications.
Valid causal inference with unobserved confounding in high-dimensional settings
Authors: Niloofar Moosavi, Tetiana Gorbach, Xavier de Luna
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Model Selection, valid

Various methods have recently been proposed to estimate causal effects with confidence intervals that are uniformly valid over a set of data generating processes when high-dimensional nuisance models are estimated by post-model-selection or machine learning estimators. These methods typically require that all the confounders are observed to ensure identification of the effects. We contribute by showing how valid semiparametric inference can be obtained in the presence of unobserved confounders and high-dimensional nuisance models. We propose uncertainty intervals which allow for unobserved confounding, and show that the resulting inference is valid when the amount of unobserved confounding is small relative to the sample size; the latter is formalized in terms of convergence rates. Simulation experiments illustrate the finite sample properties of the proposed intervals and investigate an alternative procedure that improves the empirical coverage of the intervals when the amount of unobserved confounding is large. Finally, a case study on the effect of smoking during pregnancy on birth weight is used to illustrate the use of the methods introduced to perform a sensitivity analysis to unobserved confounding.
Uncertainty-aware multi-fidelity surrogate modeling with noisy data
Authors: Katerina Giannoukou, Stefano Marelli, Bruno Sudret
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design, Prediction Intervals, Uncertainty Quantification

Emulating high-accuracy computationally expensive models is crucial for tasks requiring numerous model evaluations, such as uncertainty quantification and optimization. When lower-fidelity models are available, they can be used to improve the predictions of high-fidelity models. Multi-fidelity surrogate models combine information from sources of varying fidelities to construct an efficient surrogate model. However, in real-world applications, uncertainty is present in both high- and low-fidelity models due to measurement or numerical noise, as well as lack of knowledge due to the limited experimental design budget. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for multi-fidelity surrogate modeling that handles noise-contaminated data and is able to estimate the underlying noise-free high-fidelity model. Our methodology quantitatively incorporates the different types of uncertainty affecting the problem and emphasizes on delivering precise estimates of the uncertainty in its predictions both with respect to the underlying high-fidelity model and unseen noise-contaminated high-fidelity observations, presented through confidence and prediction intervals, respectively. Additionally, the proposed framework offers a natural approach to combining physical experiments and computational models by treating noisy experimental data as high-fidelity sources and white-box computational models as their low-fidelity counterparts. The effectiveness of our methodology is showcased through synthetic examples and a wind turbine application.
Improved Learned Sparse Retrieval with Corpus-Specific Vocabularies
Authors: Puxuan Yu, Antonio Mallia, Matthias Petri
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

We explore leveraging corpus-specific vocabularies that improve both efficiency and effectiveness of learned sparse retrieval systems. We find that pre-training the underlying BERT model on the target corpus, specifically targeting different vocabulary sizes incorporated into the document expansion process, improves retrieval quality by up to 12% while in some scenarios decreasing latency by up to 50%. Our experiments show that adopting corpus-specific vocabulary and increasing vocabulary size decreases average postings list length which in turn reduces latency. Ablation studies show interesting interactions between custom vocabularies, document expansion techniques, and sparsification objectives of sparse models. Both effectiveness and efficiency improvements transfer to different retrieval approaches such as uniCOIL and SPLADE and offer a simple yet effective approach to providing new efficiency-effectiveness trade-offs for learned sparse retrieval systems.
The SemIoE Ontology: A Semantic Model Solution for an IoE-based Industry
Authors: Marco Arazzi, Antonino Nocera, Emanuele Storti
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00

Recently, the Industry 5.0 is gaining attention as a novel paradigm, defining the next concrete steps toward more and more intelligent, green-aware and user-centric digital systems. In an era in which smart devices typically adopted in the industry domain are more and more sophisticated and autonomous, the Internet of Things and its evolution, known as the Internet of Everything (IoE, for short), involving also people, robots, processes and data in the network, represent the main driver to allow industries to put the experiences and needs of human beings at the center of their ecosystems. However, due to the extreme heterogeneity of the involved entities, their intrinsic need and capability to cooperate, and the aim to adapt to a dynamic user-centric context, special attention is required for the integration and processing of the data produced by such an IoE. This is the objective of the present paper, in which we propose a novel semantic model that formalizes the fundamental actors, elements and information of an IoE, along with their relationships. In our design, we focus on state-of-the-art design principles, in particular reuse, and abstraction, to build ``SemIoE'', a lightweight ontology inheriting and extending concepts from well-known and consolidated reference ontologies. The defined semantic layer represents a core data model that can be extended to embrace any modern industrial scenario. It represents the base of an IoE Knowledge Graph, on top of which, as an additional contribution, we analyze and define some essential services for an IoE-based industry.
UNEX-RL: Reinforcing Long-Term Rewards in Multi-Stage Recommender Systems with UNidirectional EXecution
Authors: Gengrui Zhang, Yao Wang, Xiaoshuang Chen, Hongyi Qian, Kaiqiao Zhan, Ben Wang
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Recommendation Systems, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize long-term rewards in recommender systems. Since industrial recommender systems are typically designed as multi-stage systems, RL methods with a single agent face challenges when optimizing multiple stages simultaneously. The reason is that different stages have different observation spaces, and thus cannot be modeled by a single agent. To address this issue, we propose a novel UNidirectional-EXecution-based multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (UNEX-RL) framework to reinforce the long-term rewards in multi-stage recommender systems. We show that the unidirectional execution is a key feature of multi-stage recommender systems, bringing new challenges to the applications of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), namely the observation dependency and the cascading effect. To tackle these challenges, we provide a cascading information chain (CIC) method to separate the independent observations from action-dependent observations and use CIC to train UNEX-RL effectively. We also discuss practical variance reduction techniques for UNEX-RL. Finally, we show the effectiveness of UNEX-RL on both public datasets and an online recommender system with over 100 million users. Specifically, UNEX-RL reveals a 0.558% increase in users' usage time compared with single-agent RL algorithms in online A/B experiments, highlighting the effectiveness of UNEX-RL in industrial recommender systems.
TRACE: A Time-Relational Approximate Cubing Engine for Fast Data Insights
Authors: Suharsh Sivakumar, Jonathan Shen, Rajat Monga
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00

A large class of data questions can be modeled as identifying important slices of data driven by user defined metrics. This paper presents TRACE, a Time-Relational Approximate Cubing Engine that enables interactive analysis on such slices with a low upfront cost - both in space and computation. It does this by materializing the most important parts of the cube over time enabling interactive querying for a large class of analytical queries e.g. what part of my business has the highest revenue growth ([SubCategory=Sports Equipment, Gender=Female]), what slices are lagging in revenue per user ([State=CA, Age=20-30]). Many user defined metrics are supported including common aggregations such as SUM, COUNT, DISTINCT COUNT and more complex ones such as AVERAGE. We implemented and deployed TRACE for a variety of business use cases.
Exploring the Best Practices of Query Expansion with Large Language Models
Authors: Le Zhang, Yihong Wu, Qian Yang, Jian-Yun Nie
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Text Generation, Zero-shot Generalization

Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational in language technologies, particularly in information retrieval (IR). Previous studies have utilized LLMs for query expansion, achieving notable improvements in IR. In this paper, we thoroughly explore the best practice of leveraging LLMs for query expansion. To this end, we introduce a training-free, straightforward yet effective framework called Multi-Text Generation Integration (\textsc{MuGI}). It leverages LLMs to generate multiple pseudo-references, integrating them with queries to enhance both sparse and dense retrievers. Our empirical findings reveal that: (1) Increasing the number of samples from LLMs benefits IR systems; (2) A balance between the query and pseudo-documents, and an effective integration strategy, is critical for high performance; (3) Contextual information from LLMs is essential, even boost a 23M model to outperform a 7B baseline model; (4) Pseudo relevance feedback can further calibrate queries for improved performance; and (5) Query expansion is widely applicable and versatile, consistently enhancing models ranging from 23M to 7B parameters. Our code and all generated references are made available at \url{https://github.com/lezhang7/Retrieval_MuGI}
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Optimal Decision Trees using Dynamic Programming
Authors: Jacobus G. M. van der Linden, Mathijs M. de Weerdt, Emir Demirović
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: global-optimization

Global optimization of decision trees has shown to be promising in terms of accuracy, size, and consequently human comprehensibility. However, many of the methods used rely on general-purpose solvers for which scalability remains an issue. Dynamic programming methods have been shown to scale much better because they exploit the tree structure by solving subtrees as independent subproblems. However, this only works when an objective can be optimized separately for subtrees. We explore this relationship in detail and show the necessary and sufficient conditions for such separability and generalize previous dynamic programming approaches into a framework that can optimize any combination of separable objectives and constraints. Experiments on five application domains show the general applicability of this framework, while outperforming the scalability of general-purpose solvers by a large margin.
SMACv2: An Improved Benchmark for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Benjamin Ellis, Jonathan Cook, Skander Moalla, Mikayel Samvelyan, Mingfei Sun, Anuj Mahajan, Jakob N. Foerster, Shimon Whiteson
Date: 2022-12-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, SMAC, SMAC+, Starcraft

The availability of challenging benchmarks has played a key role in the recent progress of machine learning. In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) has become a popular testbed for centralised training with decentralised execution. However, after years of sustained improvement on SMAC, algorithms now achieve near-perfect performance. In this work, we conduct new analysis demonstrating that SMAC lacks the stochasticity and partial observability to require complex *closed-loop* policies. In particular, we show that an *open-loop* policy conditioned only on the timestep can achieve non-trivial win rates for many SMAC scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce SMACv2, a new version of the benchmark where scenarios are procedurally generated and require agents to generalise to previously unseen settings (from the same distribution) during evaluation. We also introduce the extended partial observability challenge (EPO), which augments SMACv2 to ensure meaningful partial observability. We show that these changes ensure the benchmark requires the use of *closed-loop* policies. We evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms on SMACv2 and show that it presents significant challenges not present in the original benchmark. Our analysis illustrates that SMACv2 addresses the discovered deficiencies of SMAC and can help benchmark the next generation of MARL methods. Videos of training are available at https://sites.google.com/view/smacv2.
Snow Removal for LiDAR Point Clouds with Spatio-temporal Conditional Random Fields
Authors: Weimin WANG, Ting Yang, Yu Du, Yu Liu
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS 2023 9
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, object-detection, Object Detection, Snow Removal

LiDAR sensors have been extensively used in numerous applications, including autonomous driving, owing to their ability to generate high-quality 3D point clouds. However, the sensor can be greatly affected in adverse weather conditions, resulting in noisy 3D points that impair LiDAR-based perception performance. This letter proposes a novel de-snowing formulation with Conditional Random Fields (CRF). The proposed approach first constructs the CRF based on k-nearest neighbors with the snow confidence derived from the physical priors of snow, such as intensity and distribution. Then, Iterated Conditional Modes (ICM) is applied for the confidence propagation from points with high certainty to nearby uncertain ones, thereby identifying the latter. Moreover, the method can be extended to fully utilize the temporal information of sequential scans for clearer snow removal. Extensive experiments on the real-scanned WADS dataset validate that our de-snowing approach significantly outperforms baselines and even the learning-based State-of-The-Art (SoTA) one. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method has the potential to benefit the downstream 3D object detection task in snowy weather.