pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Flash-LLM: Enabling Cost-Effective and Highly-Efficient Large Generative Model Inference with Unstructured Sparsity
Authors: Haojun Xia, Zhen Zheng, Yuchao Li, Donglin Zhuang, Zhongzhu Zhou, Xiafei Qiu, Yong Li, Wei Lin, Shuaiwen Leon Song
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

With the fast growth of parameter size, it becomes increasingly challenging to deploy large generative models as they typically require large GPU memory consumption and massive computation. Unstructured model pruning has been a common approach to reduce both GPU memory footprint and the overall computation while retaining good model accuracy. However, the existing solutions do not provide a highly-efficient support for handling unstructured sparsity on modern GPUs, especially on the highly-structured Tensor Core hardware. Therefore, we propose Flash-LLM for enabling low-cost and highly-efficient large generative model inference with the sophisticated support of unstructured sparsity on high-performance but highly restrictive Tensor Cores. Based on our key observation that the main bottleneck of generative model inference is the several skinny matrix multiplications for which Tensor Cores would be significantly under-utilized due to low computational intensity, we propose a general Load-as-Sparse and Compute-as-Dense methodology for unstructured sparse matrix multiplication. The basic insight is to address the significant memory bandwidth bottleneck while tolerating redundant computations that are not critical for end-to-end performance on Tensor Cores. Based on this, we design an effective software framework for Tensor Core based unstructured SpMM, leveraging on-chip resources for efficient sparse data extraction and computation/memory-access overlapping. At SpMM kernel level, Flash-LLM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art library, i.e., Sputnik and SparTA by an average of 2.9x and 1.5x, respectively. At end-to-end framework level on OPT-30B/66B/175B models, for tokens per GPU-second, Flash-LLM achieves up to 3.8x and 3.6x improvement over DeepSpeed and FasterTransformer, respectively, with significantly lower inference cost.
Crowdotic: A Privacy-Preserving Hospital Waiting Room Crowd Density Estimation with Non-speech Audio
Authors: Forsad Al Hossain, Tanjid Hasan Tonmoy, Andrew A. Lover, George A. Corey, Mohammad Arif Ul Alam, Tauhidur Rahman
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Management, Privacy Preserving

Privacy-preserving crowd density analysis finds application across a wide range of scenarios, substantially enhancing smart building operation and management while upholding privacy expectations in various spaces. We propose a non-speech audio-based approach for crowd analytics, leveraging a transformer-based model. Our results demonstrate that non-speech audio alone can be used to conduct such analysis with remarkable accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time when non-speech audio signals are proposed for predicting occupancy. As far as we know, there has been no other similar approach of its kind prior to this. To accomplish this, we deployed our sensor-based platform in the waiting room of a large hospital with IRB approval over a period of several months to capture non-speech audio and thermal images for the training and evaluation of our models. The proposed non-speech-based approach outperformed the thermal camera-based model and all other baselines. In addition to demonstrating superior performance without utilizing speech audio, we conduct further analysis using differential privacy techniques to provide additional privacy guarantees. Overall, our work demonstrates the viability of employing non-speech audio data for accurate occupancy estimation, while also ensuring the exclusion of speech-related content and providing robust privacy protections through differential privacy guarantees.
Diffusion Methods for Generating Transition Paths
Authors: Luke Triplett, Jianfeng Lu
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00

In this work, we seek to simulate rare transitions between metastable states using score-based generative models. An efficient method for generating high-quality transition paths is valuable for the study of molecular systems since data is often difficult to obtain. We develop two novel methods for path generation in this paper: a chain-based approach and a midpoint-based approach. The first biases the original dynamics to facilitate transitions, while the second mirrors splitting techniques and breaks down the original transition into smaller transitions. Numerical results of generated transition paths for the M\"uller potential and for Alanine dipeptide demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches in both the data-rich and data-scarce regimes.
What is the Best Automated Metric for Text to Motion Generation?
Authors: Jordan Voas, Yili Wang, QiXing Huang, Raymond Mooney
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation

There is growing interest in generating skeleton-based human motions from natural language descriptions. While most efforts have focused on developing better neural architectures for this task, there has been no significant work on determining the proper evaluation metric. Human evaluation is the ultimate accuracy measure for this task, and automated metrics should correlate well with human quality judgments. Since descriptions are compatible with many motions, determining the right metric is critical for evaluating and designing effective generative models. This paper systematically studies which metrics best align with human evaluations and proposes new metrics that align even better. Our findings indicate that none of the metrics currently used for this task show even a moderate correlation with human judgments on a sample level. However, for assessing average model performance, commonly used metrics such as R-Precision and less-used coordinate errors show strong correlations. Additionally, several recently developed metrics are not recommended due to their low correlation compared to alternatives. We also introduce a novel metric based on a multimodal BERT-like model, MoBERT, which offers strongly human-correlated sample-level evaluations while maintaining near-perfect model-level correlation. Our results demonstrate that this new metric exhibits extensive benefits over all current alternatives.
Multi-fidelity climate model parameterization for better generalization and extrapolation
Authors: Mohamed Aziz Bhouri, Liran Peng, Michael S. Pritchard, Pierre Gentine
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Uncertainty Quantification

Machine-learning-based parameterizations (i.e. representation of sub-grid processes) of global climate models or turbulent simulations have recently been proposed as a powerful alternative to physical, but empirical, representations, offering a lower computational cost and higher accuracy. Yet, those approaches still suffer from a lack of generalization and extrapolation beyond the training data, which is however critical to projecting climate change or unobserved regimes of turbulence. Here we show that a multi-fidelity approach, which integrates datasets of different accuracy and abundance, can provide the best of both worlds: the capacity to extrapolate leveraging the physically-based parameterization and a higher accuracy using the machine-learning-based parameterizations. In an application to climate modeling, the multi-fidelity framework yields more accurate climate projections without requiring major increase in computational resources. Our multi-fidelity randomized prior networks (MF-RPNs) combine physical parameterization data as low-fidelity and storm-resolving historical run's data as high-fidelity. To extrapolate beyond the training data, the MF-RPNs are tested on high-fidelity warming scenarios, $+4K$, data. We show the MF-RPN's capacity to return much more skillful predictions compared to either low- or high-fidelity (historical data) simulations trained only on one regime while providing trustworthy uncertainty quantification across a wide range of scenarios. Our approach paves the way for the use of machine-learning based methods that can optimally leverage historical observations or high-fidelity simulations and extrapolate to unseen regimes such as climate change.
Loop Polarity Analysis to Avoid Underspecification in Deep Learning
Authors: Donald Martin, Jr., David Kinney
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Deep learning is a powerful set of techniques for detecting complex patterns in data. However, when the causal structure of that process is underspecified, deep learning models can be brittle, lacking robustness to shifts in the distribution of the data-generating process. In this paper, we turn to loop polarity analysis as a tool for specifying the causal structure of a data-generating process, in order to encode a more robust understanding of the relationship between system structure and system behavior within the deep learning pipeline. We use simulated epidemic data based on an SIR model to demonstrate how measuring the polarity of the different feedback loops that compose a system can lead to more robust inferences on the part of neural networks, improving the out-of-distribution performance of a deep learning model and infusing a system-dynamics-inspired approach into the machine learning development pipeline.
Stochastic Deep Koopman Model for Quality Propagation Analysis in Multistage Manufacturing Systems
Authors: Zhiyi Chen, Harshal Maske, Huanyi Shui, Devesh Upadhyay, Michael Hopka, Joseph Cohen, Xingjian Lai, Xun Huan, Jun Ni
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00

The modeling of multistage manufacturing systems (MMSs) has attracted increased attention from both academia and industry. Recent advancements in deep learning methods provide an opportunity to accomplish this task with reduced cost and expertise. This study introduces a stochastic deep Koopman (SDK) framework to model the complex behavior of MMSs. Specifically, we present a novel application of Koopman operators to propagate critical quality information extracted by variational autoencoders. Through this framework, we can effectively capture the general nonlinear evolution of product quality using a transferred linear representation, thus enhancing the interpretability of the data-driven model. To evaluate the performance of the SDK framework, we carried out a comparative study on an open-source dataset. The main findings of this paper are as follows. Our results indicate that SDK surpasses other popular data-driven models in accuracy when predicting stagewise product quality within the MMS. Furthermore, the unique linear propagation property in the stochastic latent space of SDK enables traceability for quality evolution throughout the process, thereby facilitating the design of root cause analysis schemes. Notably, the proposed framework requires minimal knowledge of the underlying physics of production lines. It serves as a virtual metrology tool that can be applied to various MMSs, contributing to the ultimate goal of Zero Defect Manufacturing.
Autoencoder-based Anomaly Detection System for Online Data Quality Monitoring of the CMS Electromagnetic Calorimeter
Authors: The CMS ECAL Collaboration
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

The CMS detector is a general-purpose apparatus that detects high-energy collisions produced at the LHC. Online Data Quality Monitoring of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter is a vital operational tool that allows detector experts to quickly identify, localize, and diagnose a broad range of detector issues that could affect the quality of physics data. A real-time autoencoder-based anomaly detection system using semi-supervised machine learning is presented enabling the detection of anomalies in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter data. A novel method is introduced which maximizes the anomaly detection performance by exploiting the time-dependent evolution of anomalies as well as spatial variations in the detector response. The autoencoder-based system is able to efficiently detect anomalies, while maintaining a very low false discovery rate. The performance of the system is validated with anomalies found in 2018 and 2022 LHC collision data. Additionally, the first results from deploying the autoencoder-based system in the CMS online Data Quality Monitoring workflow during the beginning of Run 3 of the LHC are presented, showing its ability to detect issues missed by the existing system.
Q-Transformer: Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functions
Authors: Yevgen Chebotar, Quan Vuong, Alex Irpan, Karol Hausman, Fei Xia, Yao Lu, Aviral Kumar, Tianhe Yu, Alexander Herzog, Karl Pertsch, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Julian Ibarz, Ofir Nachum, Sumedh Sontakke, Grecia Salazar, Huong T Tran, Jodilyn Peralta, Clayton Tan, Deeksha Manjunath, Jaspiar Singht, Brianna Zitkovich, Tomas Jackson, Kanishka Rao, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Offline RL, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In this work, we present a scalable reinforcement learning method for training multi-task policies from large offline datasets that can leverage both human demonstrations and autonomously collected data. Our method uses a Transformer to provide a scalable representation for Q-functions trained via offline temporal difference backups. We therefore refer to the method as Q-Transformer. By discretizing each action dimension and representing the Q-value of each action dimension as separate tokens, we can apply effective high-capacity sequence modeling techniques for Q-learning. We present several design decisions that enable good performance with offline RL training, and show that Q-Transformer outperforms prior offline RL algorithms and imitation learning techniques on a large diverse real-world robotic manipulation task suite. The project's website and videos can be found at https://qtransformer.github.io
Realistic Website Fingerprinting By Augmenting Network Trace
Authors: Alireza Bahramali, Ardavan Bozorgi, Amir Houmansadr
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Triplet

Website Fingerprinting (WF) is considered a major threat to the anonymity of Tor users (and other anonymity systems). While state-of-the-art WF techniques have claimed high attack accuracies, e.g., by leveraging Deep Neural Networks (DNN), several recent works have questioned the practicality of such WF attacks in the real world due to the assumptions made in the design and evaluation of these attacks. In this work, we argue that such impracticality issues are mainly due to the attacker's inability in collecting training data in comprehensive network conditions, e.g., a WF classifier may be trained only on samples collected on specific high-bandwidth network links but deployed on connections with different network conditions. We show that augmenting network traces can enhance the performance of WF classifiers in unobserved network conditions. Specifically, we introduce NetAugment, an augmentation technique tailored to the specifications of Tor traces. We instantiate NetAugment through semi-supervised and self-supervised learning techniques. Our extensive open-world and close-world experiments demonstrate that under practical evaluation settings, our WF attacks provide superior performances compared to the state-of-the-art; this is due to their use of augmented network traces for training, which allows them to learn the features of target traffic in unobserved settings. For instance, with a 5-shot learning in a closed-world scenario, our self-supervised WF attack (named NetCLR) reaches up to 80% accuracy when the traces for evaluation are collected in a setting unobserved by the WF adversary. This is compared to an accuracy of 64.4% achieved by the state-of-the-art Triplet Fingerprinting [35]. We believe that the promising results of our work can encourage the use of network trace augmentation in other types of network traffic analysis.
Neural Feature Learning in Function Space
Authors: Xiangxiang Xu, Lizhong Zheng
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Ratio Estimation, Learning Semantic Representations, Representation Learning, statistical independence testing

We present a novel framework for learning system design with neural feature extractors. First, we introduce the feature geometry, which unifies statistical dependence and feature representations in a function space equipped with inner products. This connection defines function-space concepts on statistical dependence, such as norms, orthogonal projection, and spectral decomposition, exhibiting clear operational meanings. In particular, we associate each learning setting with a dependence component and formulate learning tasks as finding corresponding feature approximations. We propose a nesting technique, which provides systematic algorithm designs for learning the optimal features from data samples with off-the-shelf network architectures and optimizers. We further demonstrate multivariate learning applications, including conditional inference and multimodal learning, where we present the optimal features and reveal their connections to classical approaches.
Deep smoothness WENO scheme for two-dimensional hyperbolic conservation laws: A deep learning approach for learning smoothness indicators
Authors: Tatiana Kossaczká, Ameya D. Jagtap, Matthias Ehrhardt
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this paper, we introduce an improved version of the fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) shock-capturing scheme by incorporating deep learning techniques. The established WENO algorithm is improved by training a compact neural network to adjust the smoothness indicators within the WENO scheme. This modification enhances the accuracy of the numerical results, particularly near abrupt shocks. Unlike previous deep learning-based methods, no additional post-processing steps are necessary for maintaining consistency. We demonstrate the superiority of our new approach using several examples from the literature for the two-dimensional Euler equations of gas dynamics. Through intensive study of these test problems, which involve various shocks and rarefaction waves, the new technique is shown to outperform traditional fifth-order WENO schemes, especially in cases where the numerical solutions exhibit excessive diffusion or overshoot around shocks.
Understanding Catastrophic Forgetting in Language Models via Implicit Inference
Authors: Suhas Kotha, Jacob Mitchell Springer, aditi raghunathan
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

We lack a systematic understanding of the effects of fine-tuning (via methods such as instruction-tuning or reinforcement learning from human feedback), particularly on tasks outside the narrow fine-tuning distribution. In a simplified scenario, we demonstrate that improving performance on tasks within the fine-tuning data distribution comes at the expense of capabilities on other tasks. We hypothesize that language models implicitly infer the task of the prompt and that fine-tuning skews this inference towards tasks in the fine-tuning distribution. To test this, we propose Conjugate Prompting, which artificially makes the task look farther from the fine-tuning distribution while requiring the same capability, and we find that this recovers some of the pretraining capabilities in our synthetic setup. Since real-world fine-tuning distributions are predominantly English, we apply conjugate prompting to recover pretrained capabilities in LLMs by simply translating the prompts to different languages. This allows us to recover in-context learning abilities lost via instruction tuning, natural reasoning capability lost during code fine-tuning, and, more concerningly, harmful content generation suppressed by safety fine-tuning in chatbots like ChatGPT.
A Semi-Supervised Approach for Power System Event Identification
Authors: Nima Taghipourbazargani, Lalitha Sankar, Oliver Kosut
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00

Event identification is increasingly recognized as crucial for enhancing the reliability, security, and stability of the electric power system. With the growing deployment of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and advancements in data science, there are promising opportunities to explore data-driven event identification via machine learning classification techniques. However, obtaining accurately-labeled eventful PMU data samples remains challenging due to its labor-intensive nature and uncertainty about the event type (class) in real-time. Thus, it is natural to use semi-supervised learning techniques, which make use of both labeled and unlabeled samples. %We propose a novel semi-supervised framework to assess the effectiveness of incorporating unlabeled eventful samples to enhance existing event identification methodologies. We evaluate three categories of classical semi-supervised approaches: (i) self-training, (ii) transductive support vector machines (TSVM), and (iii) graph-based label spreading (LS) method. Our approach characterizes events using physically interpretable features extracted from modal analysis of synthetic eventful PMU data. In particular, we focus on the identification of four event classes whose identification is crucial for grid operations. We have developed and publicly shared a comprehensive Event Identification package which consists of three aspects: data generation, feature extraction, and event identification with limited labels using semi-supervised methodologies. Using this package, we generate and evaluate eventful PMU data for the South Carolina synthetic network. Our evaluation consistently demonstrates that graph-based LS outperforms the other two semi-supervised methods that we consider, and can noticeably improve event identification performance relative to the setting with only a small number of labeled samples.
Invariant Probabilistic Prediction
Authors: Alexander Henzi, Xinwei Shen, Michael Law, Peter Bühlmann
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in statistical methods that exhibit robust performance under distribution changes between training and test data. While most of the related research focuses on point predictions with the squared error loss, this article turns the focus towards probabilistic predictions, which aim to comprehensively quantify the uncertainty of an outcome variable given covariates. Within a causality-inspired framework, we investigate the invariance and robustness of probabilistic predictions with respect to proper scoring rules. We show that arbitrary distribution shifts do not, in general, admit invariant and robust probabilistic predictions, in contrast to the setting of point prediction. We illustrate how to choose evaluation metrics and restrict the class of distribution shifts to allow for identifiability and invariance in the prototypical Gaussian heteroscedastic linear model. Motivated by these findings, we propose a method to yield invariant probabilistic predictions, called IPP, and study the consistency of the underlying parameters. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of our proposed procedure on simulated as well as on single-cell data.