pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Description and Discussion on DCASE 2022 Challenge Task 2: Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection for Machine Condition Monitoring Applying Domain Generalization Techniques
Authors: Kota Dohi, Keisuke Imoto, Noboru Harada, Daisuke Niizumi, Yuma Koizumi, Tomoya Nishida, Harsh Purohit, Takashi Endo, Masaaki Yamamoto, Yohei Kawaguchi
Date: 2022-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: domain classification, Domain Generalization, Task 2

We present the task description and discussion on the results of the DCASE 2022 Challenge Task 2: ``Unsupervised anomalous sound detection (ASD) for machine condition monitoring applying domain generalization techniques''. Domain shifts are a critical problem for the application of ASD systems. Because domain shifts can change the acoustic characteristics of data, a model trained in a source domain performs poorly for a target domain. In DCASE 2021 Challenge Task 2, we organized an ASD task for handling domain shifts. In this task, it was assumed that the occurrences of domain shifts are known. However, in practice, the domain of each sample may not be given, and the domain shifts can occur implicitly. In 2022 Task 2, we focus on domain generalization techniques that detects anomalies regardless of the domain shifts. Specifically, the domain of each sample is not given in the test data and only one threshold is allowed for all domains. Analysis of 81 submissions from 31 teams revealed two remarkable types of domain generalization techniques: 1) domain-mixing-based approach that obtains generalized representations and 2) domain-classification-based approach that explicitly or implicitly classifies different domains to improve detection performance for each domain.
On the Convergence to a Global Solution of Shuffling-Type Gradient Algorithms
Date: 2022-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the method of choice in many machine learning tasks thanks to its scalability and efficiency in dealing with large-scale problems. In this paper, we focus on the shuffling version of SGD which matches the mainstream practical heuristics. We show the convergence to a global solution of shuffling SGD for a class of non-convex functions under over-parameterized settings. Our analysis employs more relaxed non-convex assumptions than previous literature. Nevertheless, we maintain the desired computational complexity as shuffling SGD has achieved in the general convex setting.
ChordMixer: A Scalable Neural Attention Model for Sequences with Different Lengths
Authors: Ruslan Khalitov, Tong Yu, Lei Cheng, Zhirong Yang
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, Document Classification, Long-range modeling, Position

Sequential data naturally have different lengths in many domains, with some very long sequences. As an important modeling tool, neural attention should capture long-range interaction in such sequences. However, most existing neural attention models admit only short sequences, or they have to employ chunking or padding to enforce a constant input length. Here we propose a simple neural network building block called ChordMixer which can model the attention for long sequences with variable lengths. Each ChordMixer block consists of a position-wise rotation layer without learnable parameters and an element-wise MLP layer. Repeatedly applying such blocks forms an effective network backbone that mixes the input signals towards the learning targets. We have tested ChordMixer on the synthetic adding problem, long document classification, and DNA sequence-based taxonomy classification. The experiment results show that our method substantially outperforms other neural attention models.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Investment and Saving Strategy Selection in Heterogeneous Profiles: Intelligent Agents working towards retirement
Authors: Fatih Ozhamaratli, Paolo Barucca
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The transition from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans shifts the responsibility for saving toward retirement from governments and institutions to the individuals. Determining optimal saving and investment strategy for individuals is paramount for stable financial stance and for avoiding poverty during work-life and retirement, and it is a particularly challenging task in a world where form of employment and income trajectory experienced by different occupation groups are highly diversified. We introduce a model in which agents learn optimal portfolio allocation and saving strategies that are suitable for their heterogeneous profiles. We use deep reinforcement learning to train agents. The environment is calibrated with occupation and age dependent income evolution dynamics. The research focuses on heterogeneous income trajectories dependent on agent profiles and incorporates the behavioural parameterisation of agents. The model provides a flexible methodology to estimate lifetime consumption and investment choices for heterogeneous profiles under varying scenarios.
Stochastic Gradient Descent without Full Data Shuffle
Authors: Lijie Xu, Shuang Qiu, Binhang Yuan, Jiawei Jiang, Cedric Renggli, Shaoduo Gan, Kaan Kara, Guoliang Li, Ji Liu, Wentao Wu, Jieping Ye, Ce Zhang
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the cornerstone of modern machine learning (ML) systems. Despite its computational efficiency, SGD requires random data access that is inherently inefficient when implemented in systems that rely on block-addressable secondary storage such as HDD and SSD, e.g., TensorFlow/PyTorch and in-DB ML systems over large files. To address this impedance mismatch, various data shuffling strategies have been proposed to balance the convergence rate of SGD (which favors randomness) and its I/O performance (which favors sequential access). In this paper, we first conduct a systematic empirical study on existing data shuffling strategies, which reveals that all existing strategies have room for improvement -- they all suffer in terms of I/O performance or convergence rate. With this in mind, we propose a simple but novel hierarchical data shuffling strategy, CorgiPile. Compared with existing strategies, CorgiPile avoids a full data shuffle while maintaining comparable convergence rate of SGD as if a full shuffle were performed. We provide a non-trivial theoretical analysis of CorgiPile on its convergence behavior. We further integrate CorgiPile into PyTorch by designing new parallel/distributed shuffle operators inside a new CorgiPileDataSet API. We also integrate CorgiPile into PostgreSQL by introducing three new physical operators with optimizations. Our experimental results show that CorgiPile can achieve comparable convergence rate with the full shuffle based SGD for both deep learning and generalized linear models. For deep learning models on ImageNet dataset, CorgiPile is 1.5X faster than PyTorch with full data shuffle. For in-DB ML with linear models, CorgiPile is 1.6X-12.8X faster than two state-of-the-art in-DB ML systems, Apache MADlib and Bismarck, on both HDD and SSD.
Bounding and Approximating Intersectional Fairness through Marginal Fairness
Authors: Mathieu Molina, Patrick Loiseau
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Fairness

Discrimination in machine learning often arises along multiple dimensions (a.k.a. protected attributes); it is then desirable to ensure \emph{intersectional fairness} -- i.e., that no subgroup is discriminated against. It is known that ensuring \emph{marginal fairness} for every dimension independently is not sufficient in general. Due to the exponential number of subgroups, however, directly measuring intersectional fairness from data is impossible. In this paper, our primary goal is to understand in detail the relationship between marginal and intersectional fairness through statistical analysis. We first identify a set of sufficient conditions under which an exact relationship can be obtained. Then, we prove bounds (easily computable through marginal fairness and other meaningful statistical quantities) in high-probability on intersectional fairness in the general case. Beyond their descriptive value, we show that these theoretical bounds can be leveraged to derive a heuristic improving the approximation and bounds of intersectional fairness by choosing, in a relevant manner, protected attributes for which we describe intersectional subgroups. Finally, we test the performance of our approximations and bounds on real and synthetic data-sets.
Case-Based Inverse Reinforcement Learning Using Temporal Coherence
Authors: Jonas Nüßlein, Steffen Illium, Robert Müller, Thomas Gabor, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), valid

Providing expert trajectories in the context of Imitation Learning is often expensive and time-consuming. The goal must therefore be to create algorithms which require as little expert data as possible. In this paper we present an algorithm that imitates the higher-level strategy of the expert rather than just imitating the expert on action level, which we hypothesize requires less expert data and makes training more stable. As a prior, we assume that the higher-level strategy is to reach an unknown target state area, which we hypothesize is a valid prior for many domains in Reinforcement Learning. The target state area is unknown, but since the expert has demonstrated how to reach it, the agent tries to reach states similar to the expert. Building on the idea of Temporal Coherence, our algorithm trains a neural network to predict whether two states are similar, in the sense that they may occur close in time. During inference, the agent compares its current state with expert states from a Case Base for similarity. The results show that our approach can still learn a near-optimal policy in settings with very little expert data, where algorithms that try to imitate the expert at the action level can no longer do so.
Science through Machine Learning: Quantification of Poststorm Thermospheric Cooling
Authors: Richard J. Licata, Piyush M. Mehta, Daniel R. Weimer, Douglas P. Drob, W. Kent Tobiska, Jean Yoshii
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) is often viewed as a black-box regression technique that is unable to provide considerable scientific insight. ML models are universal function approximators and - if used correctly - can provide scientific information related to the ground-truth dataset used for fitting. A benefit to ML over parametric models is that there are no predefined basis functions limiting the phenomena that can be modeled. In this work, we develop ML models on three datasets: the Space Environment Technologies (SET) High Accuracy Satellite Drag Model (HASDM) density database, a spatiotemporally matched dataset of outputs from the Jacchia-Bowman 2008 Empirical Thermospheric Density Model (JB2008), and an accelerometer-derived density dataset from CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP). These ML models are compared to the Naval Research Laboratory Mass Spectrometer and Incoherent Scatter radar (NRLMSIS 2.0) model to study the presence of post-storm cooling in the middle-thermosphere. We find that both NRLMSIS 2.0 and JB2008-ML do not account for post-storm cooling and consequently perform poorly in periods following strong geomagnetic storms (e.g. the 2003 Halloween storms). Conversely, HASDM-ML and CHAMP-ML do show evidence of post-storm cooling indicating that this phenomenon is present in the original datasets. Results show that density reductions up to 40% can occur 1--3 days post-storm depending on location and the strength of the storm.
An Industry 4.0 example: real-time quality control for steel-based mass production using Machine Learning on non-invasive sensor data
Authors: Michiel Straat, Kevin Koster, Nick Goet, Kerstin Bunte
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection

Insufficient steel quality in mass production can cause extremely costly damage to tooling, production downtimes and low quality products. Automatic, fast and cheap strategies to estimate essential material properties for quality control, risk mitigation and the prediction of faults are highly desirable. In this work we analyse a high throughput production line of steel-based products. Currently, the material quality is checked using manual destructive testing, which is slow, wasteful and covers only a tiny fraction of the material. To achieve complete testing coverage our industrial collaborator developed a contactless, non-invasive, electromagnetic sensor to measure all material during production in real-time. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) We show in a controlled experiment that the sensor can distinguish steel with deliberately altered properties. 2) 48 steel coils were fully measured non-invasively and additional destructive tests were conducted on samples to serve as ground truth. A linear model is fitted to predict from the non-invasive measurements two key material properties (yield strength and tensile strength) that normally are obtained by destructive tests. The performance is evaluated in leave-one-coil-out cross-validation. 3) The resulting model is used to analyse the material properties and the relationship with logged product faults on real production data of ~108 km of processed material measured with the non-invasive sensor. The model achieves an excellent performance (F3-score of 0.95) predicting material running out of specifications for the tensile strength. The combination of model predictions and logged product faults shows that if a significant percentage of estimated yield stress values is out of specification, the risk of product faults is high. Our analysis demonstrates promising directions for real-time quality control, risk monitoring and fault detection.
Self-critiquing models for assisting human evaluators
Authors: William Saunders, Catherine Yeh, Jeff Wu, Steven Bills, Long Ouyang, Jonathan Ward, Jan Leike
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00

We fine-tune large language models to write natural language critiques (natural language critical comments) using behavioral cloning. On a topic-based summarization task, critiques written by our models help humans find flaws in summaries that they would have otherwise missed. Our models help find naturally occurring flaws in both model and human written summaries, and intentional flaws in summaries written by humans to be deliberately misleading. We study scaling properties of critiquing with both topic-based summarization and synthetic tasks. Larger models write more helpful critiques, and on most tasks, are better at self-critiquing, despite having harder-to-critique outputs. Larger models can also integrate their own self-critiques as feedback, refining their own summaries into better ones. Finally, we motivate and introduce a framework for comparing critiquing ability to generation and discrimination ability. Our measurements suggest that even large models may still have relevant knowledge they cannot or do not articulate as critiques. These results are a proof of concept for using AI-assisted human feedback to scale the supervision of machine learning systems to tasks that are difficult for humans to evaluate directly. We release our training datasets, as well as samples from our critique assistance experiments.
SGD and Weight Decay Secretly Minimize the Rank of Your Neural Network
Authors: Tomer Galanti, Zachary S. Siegel, Aparna Gupte, Tomaso Poggio
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00

We investigate the inherent bias of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) toward learning low-rank weight matrices during the training of deep neural networks. Our results demonstrate that training with mini-batch SGD and weight decay induces a bias toward rank minimization in the weight matrices. Specifically, we show both theoretically and empirically that this bias becomes more pronounced with smaller batch sizes, higher learning rates, or stronger weight decay. Additionally, we predict and empirically confirm that weight decay is essential for this bias to occur. Unlike previous literature, our analysis does not rely on assumptions about the data, convergence, or optimality of the weight matrices, making it applicable to a wide range of neural network architectures of any width or depth. Finally, we empirically explore the connection between this bias and generalization, finding that it has a marginal effect on the test performance.
Learning-Based Data Storage [Vision] (Technical Report)
Authors: Xiang Lian, Xiaofei Zhang
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, image-classification, Image Classification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Deep neural network (DNN) and its variants have been extensively used for a wide spectrum of real applications such as image classification, face/speech recognition, fraud detection, and so on. In addition to many important machine learning tasks, as artificial networks emulating the way brain cells function, DNNs also show the capability of storing non-linear relationships between input and output data, which exhibits the potential of storing data via DNNs. We envision a new paradigm of data storage, "DNN-as-a-Database", where data are encoded in well-trained machine learning models. Compared with conventional data storage that directly records data in raw formats, learning-based structures (e.g., DNN) can implicitly encode data pairs of inputs and outputs and compute/materialize actual output data of different resolutions only if input data are provided. This new paradigm can greatly enhance the data security by allowing flexible data privacy settings on different levels, achieve low space consumption and fast computation with the acceleration of new hardware (e.g., Diffractive Neural Network and AI chips), and can be generalized to distributed DNN-based storage/computing. In this paper, we propose this novel concept of learning-based data storage, which utilizes a learning structure called learning-based memory unit (LMU), to store, organize, and retrieve data. As a case study, we use DNNs as the engine in the LMU, and study the data capacity and accuracy of the DNN-based data storage. Our preliminary experimental results show the feasibility of the learning-based data storage by achieving high (100%) accuracy of the DNN storage. We explore and design effective solutions to utilize the DNN-based data storage to manage and query relational tables. We discuss how to generalize our solutions to other data types (e.g., graphs) and environments such as distributed DNN storage/computing.
The Rough Topology for Numerical Data
Authors: Uğur Yiğit
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

In this paper, we generalize the rough topology and the core to numerical data by classifying objects in terms of the attribute values. A new approach to finding the core for numerical data is discussed. Then a measurement to find whether an attribute is in the core or not is given. This new method for finding the core is used for attribute reduction. It is tested and compared by using eight different machine-learning algorithms. Also, it is discussed how this material is used to rank the importance of attributes in data classification. Finally, the algorithms and codes to convert data to pertinent data and to find the core is also provided.
Distributed Differential Privacy in Multi-Armed Bandits
Authors: Sayak Ray Chowdhury, Xingyu Zhou
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

We consider the standard $K$-armed bandit problem under a distributed trust model of differential privacy (DP), which enables to guarantee privacy without a trustworthy server. Under this trust model, previous work largely focus on achieving privacy using a shuffle protocol, where a batch of users data are randomly permuted before sending to a central server. This protocol achieves ($\epsilon,\delta$) or approximate-DP guarantee by sacrificing an additional additive $O\!\left(\!\frac{K\log T\sqrt{\log(1/\delta)}}{\epsilon}\!\right)\!$ cost in $T$-step cumulative regret. In contrast, the optimal privacy cost for achieving a stronger ($\epsilon,0$) or pure-DP guarantee under the widely used central trust model is only $\Theta\!\left(\!\frac{K\log T}{\epsilon}\!\right)\!$, where, however, a trusted server is required. In this work, we aim to obtain a pure-DP guarantee under distributed trust model while sacrificing no more regret than that under central trust model. We achieve this by designing a generic bandit algorithm based on successive arm elimination, where privacy is guaranteed by corrupting rewards with an equivalent discrete Laplace noise ensured by a secure computation protocol. We also show that our algorithm, when instantiated with Skellam noise and the secure protocol, ensures \emph{R\'{e}nyi differential privacy} -- a stronger notion than approximate DP -- under distributed trust model with a privacy cost of $O\!\left(\!\frac{K\sqrt{\log T}}{\epsilon}\!\right)\!$.
Mining Multi-Label Samples from Single Positive Labels
Authors: Youngin Cho, Daejin Kim, Mohammad Azam Khan, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00

Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) have shown superior results in class-conditional generation tasks. To simultaneously control multiple conditions, cGANs require multi-label training datasets, where multiple labels can be assigned to each data instance. Nevertheless, the tremendous annotation cost limits the accessibility of multi-label datasets in real-world scenarios. Therefore, in this study we explore the practical setting called the single positive setting, where each data instance is annotated by only one positive label with no explicit negative labels. To generate multi-label data in the single positive setting, we propose a novel sampling approach called single-to-multi-label (S2M) sampling, based on the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. As a widely applicable "add-on" method, our proposed S2M sampling method enables existing unconditional and conditional GANs to draw high-quality multi-label data with a minimal annotation cost. Extensive experiments on real image datasets verify the effectiveness and correctness of our method, even when compared to a model trained with fully annotated datasets.
Matching options to tasks using Option-Indexed Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Kushal Chauhan, Soumya Chatterjee, Akash Reddy, Balaraman Ravindran, Pradeep Shenoy
Date: 2022-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Zero-shot Generalization

The options framework in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning breaks down overall goals into a combination of options or simpler tasks and associated policies, allowing for abstraction in the action space. Ideally, these options can be reused across different higher-level goals; indeed, such reuse is necessary to realize the vision of a continual learning agent that can effectively leverage its prior experience. Previous approaches have only proposed limited forms of transfer of prelearned options to new task settings. We propose a novel option indexing approach to hierarchical learning (OI-HRL), where we learn an affinity function between options and the items present in the environment. This allows us to effectively reuse a large library of pretrained options, in zero-shot generalization at test time, by restricting goal-directed learning to only those options relevant to the task at hand. We develop a meta-training loop that learns the representations of options and environments over a series of HRL problems, by incorporating feedback about the relevance of retrieved options to the higher-level goal. We evaluate OI-HRL in two simulated settings - the CraftWorld and AI2THOR environments - and show that we achieve performance competitive with oracular baselines, and substantial gains over a baseline that has the entire option pool available for learning the hierarchical policy.