pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Decision-Dependent Risk Minimization in Geometrically Decaying Dynamic Environments
Authors: Mitas Ray, Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy, Maryam Fazel, Lillian J. Ratliff
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00

This paper studies the problem of expected loss minimization given a data distribution that is dependent on the decision-maker's action and evolves dynamically in time according to a geometric decay process. Novel algorithms for both the information setting in which the decision-maker has a first order gradient oracle and the setting in which they have simply a loss function oracle are introduced. The algorithms operate on the same underlying principle: the decision-maker repeatedly deploys a fixed decision over the length of an epoch, thereby allowing the dynamically changing environment to sufficiently mix before updating the decision. The iteration complexity in each of the settings is shown to match existing rates for first and zero order stochastic gradient methods up to logarithmic factors. The algorithms are evaluated on a "semi-synthetic" example using real world data from the SFpark dynamic pricing pilot study; it is shown that the announced prices result in an improvement for the institution's objective (target occupancy), while achieving an overall reduction in parking rates.
MP2: A Momentum Contrast Approach for Recommendation with Pointwise and Pairwise Learning
Authors: Menghan Wang, Yuchen Guo, Zhenqi Zhao, Guangzheng Hu, Yuming Shen, Mingming Gong, Philip Torr
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00

Binary pointwise labels (aka implicit feedback) are heavily leveraged by deep learning based recommendation algorithms nowadays. In this paper we discuss the limited expressiveness of these labels may fail to accommodate varying degrees of user preference, and thus lead to conflicts during model training, which we call annotation bias. To solve this issue, we find the soft-labeling property of pairwise labels could be utilized to alleviate the bias of pointwise labels. To this end, we propose a momentum contrast framework (MP2) that combines pointwise and pairwise learning for recommendation. MP2 has a three-tower network structure: one user network and two item networks. The two item networks are used for computing pointwise and pairwise loss respectively. To alleviate the influence of the annotation bias, we perform a momentum update to ensure a consistent item representation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms.
GNN-encoder: Learning a Dual-encoder Architecture via Graph Neural Networks for Dense Passage Retrieval
Authors: Jiduan Liu, Jiahao Liu, Yang Yang, Jingang Wang, Wei Wu, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Questions, Passage Retrieval, Retrieval, TriviaQA

Recently, retrieval models based on dense representations are dominant in passage retrieval tasks, due to their outstanding ability in terms of capturing semantics of input text compared to the traditional sparse vector space models. A common practice of dense retrieval models is to exploit a dual-encoder architecture to represent a query and a passage independently. Though efficient, such a structure loses interaction between the query-passage pair, resulting in inferior accuracy. To enhance the performance of dense retrieval models without loss of efficiency, we propose a GNN-encoder model in which query (passage) information is fused into passage (query) representations via graph neural networks that are constructed by queries and their top retrieved passages. By this means, we maintain a dual-encoder structure, and retain some interaction information between query-passage pairs in their representations, which enables us to achieve both efficiency and efficacy in passage retrieval. Evaluation results indicate that our method significantly outperforms the existing models on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets, and achieves the new state-of-the-art on these datasets.
Table Enrichment System for Machine Learning
Authors: Yuyang Dong, Masafumi Oyamada
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, feature selection

Data scientists are constantly facing the problem of how to improve prediction accuracy with insufficient tabular data. We propose a table enrichment system that enriches a query table by adding external attributes (columns) from data lakes and improves the accuracy of machine learning predictive models. Our system has four stages, join row search, task-related table selection, row and column alignment, and feature selection and evaluation, to efficiently create an enriched table for a given query table and a specified machine learning task. We demonstrate our system with a web UI to show the use cases of table enrichment.
PrivateRec: Differentially Private Training and Serving for Federated News Recommendation
Authors: Ruixuan Liu, Yanlin Wang, Yang Cao, Lingjuan Lyu, Weike Pan, Yun Chen, Hong Chen
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, News Recommendation, Privacy Preserving, Recommendation Systems

Collecting and training over sensitive personal data raise severe privacy concerns in personalized recommendation systems, and federated learning can potentially alleviate the problem by training models over decentralized user data.However, a theoretically private solution in both the training and serving stages of federated recommendation is essential but still lacking.Furthermore, naively applying differential privacy (DP) to the two stages in federated recommendation would fail to achieve a satisfactory trade-off between privacy and utility due to the high-dimensional characteristics of model gradients and hidden representations.In this work, we propose a federated news recommendation method for achieving a better utility in model training and online serving under a DP guarantee.We first clarify the DP definition over behavior data for each round in the life-circle of federated recommendation systems.Next, we propose a privacy-preserving online serving mechanism under this definition based on the idea of decomposing user embeddings with public basic vectors and perturbing the lower-dimensional combination coefficients. We apply a random behavior padding mechanism to reduce the required noise intensity for better utility. Besides, we design a federated recommendation model training method, which can generate effective and public basic vectors for serving while providing DP for training participants. We avoid the dimension-dependent noise for large models via label permutation and differentially private attention modules. Experiments on real-world news recommendation datasets validate that our method achieves superior utility under a DP guarantee in both training and serving of federated news recommendations.
A Survey on Efficient Processing of Similarity Queries over Neural Embeddings
Authors: Yifan Wang
Date: 2022-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Resolution, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Similarity query is the family of queries based on some similarity metrics. Unlike the traditional database queries which are mostly based on value equality, similarity queries aim to find targets "similar enough to" the given data objects, depending on some similarity metric, e.g., Euclidean distance, cosine similarity and so on. To measure the similarity between data objects, traditional methods normally work on low level or syntax features(e.g., basic visual features on images or bag-of-word features of text), which makes them weak to compute the semantic similarities between objects. So for measuring data similarities semantically, neural embedding is applied. Embedding techniques work by representing the raw data objects as vectors (so called "embeddings" or "neural embeddings" since they are mostly generated by neural network models) that expose the hidden semantics of the raw data, based on which embeddings do show outstanding effectiveness on capturing data similarities, making it one of the most widely used and studied techniques in the state-of-the-art similarity query processing research. But there are still many open challenges on the efficiency of embedding based similarity query processing, which are not so well-studied as the effectiveness. In this survey, we first provide an overview of the "similarity query" and "similarity query processing" problems. Then we talk about recent approaches on designing the indexes and operators for highly efficient similarity query processing on top of embeddings (or more generally, high dimensional data). Finally, we investigate the specific solutions with and without using embeddings in selected application domains of similarity queries, including entity resolution and information retrieval. By comparing the solutions, we show how neural embeddings benefit those applications.
LRH-Net: A Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation Approach for Low-Resource Heart Network
Authors: Ekansh Chauhan, Swathi Guptha, Likith Reddy, Bapi Raju
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

An electrocardiogram (ECG) monitors the electrical activity generated by the heart and is used to detect fatal cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Conventionally, to capture the precise electrical activity, clinical experts use multiple-lead ECGs (typically 12 leads). But in recent times, large-size deep learning models have been used to detect these diseases. However, such models require heavy compute resources like huge memory and long inference time. To alleviate these shortcomings, we propose a low-parameter model, named Low Resource Heart-Network (LRH-Net), which uses fewer leads to detect ECG anomalies in a resource-constrained environment. A multi-level knowledge distillation process is used on top of that to get better generalization performance on our proposed model. The multi-level knowledge distillation process distills the knowledge to LRH-Net trained on a reduced number of leads from higher parameter (teacher) models trained on multiple leads to reduce the performance gap. The proposed model is evaluated on the PhysioNet-2020 challenge dataset with constrained input. The parameters of the LRH-Net are 106x less than our teacher model for detecting CVDs. The performance of the LRH-Net was scaled up to 3.2% and the inference time scaled down by 75% compared to the teacher model. In contrast to the compute- and parameter-intensive deep learning techniques, the proposed methodology uses a subset of ECG leads using the low resource LRH-Net, making it eminently suitable for deployment on edge devices.
The Price Impact of Order Book Events
Authors: Rama Cont, Arseniy Kukanov, SASHA STOIKOV
Date: 2010-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

We study the price impact of order book events - limit orders, market orders and cancelations - using the NYSE TAQ data for 50 U.S. stocks. We show that, over short time intervals, price changes are mainly driven by the order flow imbalance, defined as the imbalance between supply and demand at the best bid and ask prices. Our study reveals a linear relation between order flow imbalance and price changes, with a slope inversely proportional to the market depth. These results are shown to be robust to seasonality effects, and stable across time scales and across stocks. We argue that this linear price impact model, together with a scaling argument, implies the empirically observed "square-root" relation between price changes and trading volume. However, the relation between price changes and trade volume is found to be noisy and less robust than the one based on order flow imbalance.
Scaling properties of protein family phylogenies
Authors: E. Alejandro Herrada, Víctor M. Eguíluz, Emilio Hernández-García, Carlos M. Duarte
Date: 2011-02-22 00:00:00

One of the classical questions in evolutionary biology is how evolutionary processes are coupled at the gene and species level. With this motivation, we compare the topological properties (mainly the depth scaling, as a characterization of balance) of a large set of protein phylogenies with a set of species phylogenies. The comparative analysis shows that both sets of phylogenies share remarkably similar scaling behavior, suggesting the universality of branching rules and of the evolutionary processes that drive biological diversification from gene to species level. In order to explain such generality, we propose a simple model which allows us to estimate the proportion of evolvability/robustness needed to approximate the scaling behavior observed in the phylogenies, highlighting the relevance of the robustness of a biological system (species or protein) in the scaling properties of the phylogenetic trees. Thus, the rules that govern the incapability of a biological system to diversify are equally relevant both at the gene and at the species level.
A testing based extraction algorithm for identifying significant communities in networks
Authors: James D. Wilson, Simi Wang, Peter J. Mucha, Shankar Bhamidi, Andrew B. Nobel
Date: 2014-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection

A common and important problem arising in the study of networks is how to divide the vertices of a given network into one or more groups, called communities, in such a way that vertices of the same community are more interconnected than vertices belonging to different ones. We propose and investigate a testing based community detection procedure called Extraction of Statistically Significant Communities (ESSC). The ESSC procedure is based on p-values for the strength of connection between a single vertex and a set of vertices under a reference distribution derived from a conditional configuration network model. The procedure automatically selects both the number of communities in the network and their size. Moreover, ESSC can handle overlapping communities and, unlike the majority of existing methods, identifies "background" vertices that do not belong to a well-defined community. The method has only one parameter, which controls the stringency of the hypothesis tests. We investigate the performance and potential use of ESSC and compare it with a number of existing methods, through a validation study using four real network data sets. In addition, we carry out a simulation study to assess the effectiveness of ESSC in networks with various types of community structure, including networks with overlapping communities and those with background vertices. These results suggest that ESSC is an effective exploratory tool for the discovery of relevant community structure in complex network systems. Data and software are available at \urlhttp://www.this http URL.
A Method for Face Fusion Based on Variational Auto-Encoder
Authors: Xiang Li Department of Information and Software Engineering, China Jin-Mei Wen Department of Information and Software Engineering, China An-Long Chen Department of Information and Software Engineering, China Bo Chen Department of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, ChengDu, China
Date: 2018-12-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Computer Conference on Wavelet Active Media Technology and Information Processing (ICCWAMTIP) 2018 12

Face fusion refers to fuse two different facial images into a new face image that retains the facial features of the original image. Our network model is combine Variational Auto-Encoder(V Ae)and Generative Adversarial Networks(GAN), which achieved the end-to-end fusion task. Not only does it guarantee the quality of the fusion image(the image generated by GAN is sharp and photorealistic), but also doesn't lose specific details of the face(This is guaranteed by VAE). In the end, the experiment achieved a promising result on the CelebA dataset.
Index Modulation Pattern Design for Non-Orthogonal Multicarrier Signal Waveforms
Authors: Yinglin Chen, Tongyang Xu, Izzat Darwazeh
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00

Spectral efficiency improvement is a key focus in most wireless communication systems and achieved by various means such as using large antenna arrays and/or advanced modulation schemes and signal formats. This work proposes to further improve spectral efficiency through combining non-orthogonal spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) systems with index modulation (IM), which can efficiently make use of the indices of activated subcarriers as communication information. Recent research has verified that IM may be used with SEFDM to alleviate inter-carrier interference (ICI) and improve error performance. This work proposes new SEFDM signal formats based on novel activation pattern designs, which limit the locations of activated subcarriers and enable a variable number of activated subcarriers in each SEFDM subblock. SEFDM-IM system designs are developed by jointly considering activation patterns, modulation schemes and signal waveform formats, with a set of solutions evaluated under different spectral efficiency scenarios. Detailed modelling of coded systems and simulation studies reveal that the proposed designs not only lead to better bit error rate (BER) but also lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and reduced computational complexity relative to other reported index-modulated systems.
An alternative approach for distributed parameter estimation under Gaussian settings
Authors: Subhro Das
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

This paper takes a different approach for the distributed linear parameter estimation over a multi-agent network. The parameter vector is considered to be stochastic with a Gaussian distribution. The sensor measurements at each agent are linear and corrupted with additive white Gaussian noise. Under such settings, this paper presents a novel distributed estimation algorithm that fuses the the concepts of consensus and innovations by incorporating the consensus terms (of neighboring estimates) into the innovation terms. Under the assumption of distributed parameter observability, introduced in this paper, we design the optimal gain matrices such that the distributed estimates are consistent and achieves fast convergence.
Beta Residuals: Improving Fault-Tolerant Control for Sensory Faults via Bayesian Inference and Precision Learning
Authors: Mohamed Baioumy, William Hartemink, Riccardo M. G. Ferrari, Nick Hawes
Date: 2022-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Fault Detection

Model-based fault-tolerant control (FTC) often consists of two distinct steps: fault detection & isolation (FDI), and fault accommodation. In this work we investigate posing fault-tolerant control as a single Bayesian inference problem. Previous work showed that precision learning allows for stochastic FTC without an explicit fault detection step. While this leads to implicit fault recovery, information on sensor faults is not provided, which may be essential for triggering other impact-mitigation actions. In this paper, we introduce a precision-learning based Bayesian FTC approach and a novel beta residual for fault detection. Simulation results are presented, supporting the use of beta residual against competing approaches.
Backward Reachability Analysis for Neural Feedback Loops
Authors: Nicholas Rober, Michael Everett, Jonathan P. How
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance

The increasing prevalence of neural networks (NNs) in safety-critical applications calls for methods to certify their behavior and guarantee safety. This paper presents a backward reachability approach for safety verification of neural feedback loops (NFLs), i.e., closed-loop systems with NN control policies. While recent works have focused on forward reachability as a strategy for safety certification of NFLs, backward reachability offers advantages over the forward strategy, particularly in obstacle avoidance scenarios. Prior works have developed techniques for backward reachability analysis for systems without NNs, but the presence of NNs in the feedback loop presents a unique set of problems due to the nonlinearities in their activation functions and because NN models are generally not invertible. To overcome these challenges, we use existing forward NN analysis tools to find affine bounds on the control inputs and solve a series of linear programs (LPs) to efficiently find an approximation of the backprojection (BP) set, i.e., the set of states for which the NN control policy will drive the system to a given target set. We present an algorithm to iteratively find BP set estimates over a given time horizon and demonstrate the ability to reduce conservativeness in the BP set estimates by up to 88% with low additional computational cost. We use numerical results from a double integrator model to verify the efficacy of these algorithms and demonstrate the ability to certify safety for a linearized ground robot model in a collision avoidance scenario where forward reachability fails.
LBL System for Underwater Acoustic Positioning: Concept and Equations
Authors: Pablo Otero, Álvaro Hernández-Romero, Miguel-Ángel Luque-Nieto
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00

GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) positioning is not available underwater due to the very short range of electromagnetic waves in the sea water medium. In this article a LBL (Long Base Line) acoustic repeater system of the GNSS positioning is presented. The system is hyperbolic, i.e., based on time differences and it does not need very accurate atomic clocks to synchronize repeaters.
Linear Battery Models for Power Systems Analysis
Authors: David Pozo
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Tracking

Mathematical models are just models. The desire to describe battery energy storage system (BESS) operation using computationally tractable model formulations has motivated a long-standing discussion in both the scientific and industrial communities. Linear BESS models are the most widely used so far. However, finding suitable linear BESS models has been controversial. This paper focuses on the description of linear BESS models. Four linear BESS formulations are presented, among the most popularly used. A new formulation is also proposed. The 5 BESS models are tested in 100 random BESS and 1.450 random samples of daily profiles of renewable generation. Two classical problems of power systems, namely, the set-point tracking problem and the transmission expansion planning problem, are selected for numerical analysis. Five thousand simulations are used to draw a better interpretation of each linear formulation presented and showcase specific challenges of BESS models. Practical recommendations are provided based on the findings.
Pricing Real-time Stochastic Storage Operations
Authors: Cong Chen, Lang Tong
Date: 2022-04-18 00:00:00

Pricing storage operation in the real-time market under demand and generation stochasticities is considered. A scenario-based stochastic rolling-window dispatch model is formulated for the real-time market, consisting of conventional generators, utility-scale storage, and distributed energy resource aggregators. We show that uniform pricing mechanisms require discriminative out-of-the-market uplifts, making settlements under locational marginal pricing (LMP) discriminative. It is shown that the temporal locational marginal pricing (TLMP) that adds nonuniform shadow prices of ramping and state-of-charge to LMP removes the need for out-of-the-market uplifts. Truthful bidding incentives are also established for price-taking participants under TLMP. Revenue adequacy and uplifts are evaluated in numerical simulations.