pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Selective Inference for Sparse Multitask Regression with Applications in Neuroimaging
Authors: Snigdha Panigrahi, Natasha Stewart, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Elizaveta Levina
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, regression, Uncertainty Quantification

Multi-task learning is frequently used to model a set of related response variables from the same set of features, improving predictive performance and modeling accuracy relative to methods that handle each response variable separately. Despite the potential of multi-task learning to yield more powerful inference than single-task alternatives, prior work in this area has largely omitted uncertainty quantification. Our focus in this paper is a common multi-task problem in neuroimaging, where the goal is to understand the relationship between multiple cognitive task scores (or other subject-level assessments) and brain connectome data collected from imaging. We propose a framework for selective inference to address this problem, with the flexibility to: (i) jointly identify the relevant covariates for each task through a sparsity-inducing penalty, and (ii) conduct valid inference in a model based on the estimated sparsity structure. Our framework offers a new conditional procedure for inference, based on a refinement of the selection event that yields a tractable selection-adjusted likelihood. This gives an approximate system of estimating equations for maximum likelihood inference, solvable via a single convex optimization problem, and enables us to efficiently form confidence intervals with approximately the correct coverage. Applied to both simulated data and data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, our selective inference methods yield tighter confidence intervals than commonly used alternatives, such as data splitting. We also demonstrate through simulations that multi-task learning with selective inference can more accurately recover true signals than single-task methods.
Towards Personalized Bundle Creative Generation with Contrastive Non-Autoregressive Decoding
Authors: Penghui Wei, Shaoguo Liu, Xuanhua Yang, Liang Wang, Bo Zheng
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

Current bundle generation studies focus on generating a combination of items to improve user experience. In real-world applications, there is also a great need to produce bundle creatives that consist of mixture types of objects (e.g., items, slogans and templates) for achieving better promotion effect. We study a new problem named bundle creative generation: for given users, the goal is to generate personalized bundle creatives that the users will be interested in. To take both quality and efficiency into account, we propose a contrastive non-autoregressive model that captures user preferences with ingenious decoding objective. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets verify that our proposed model shows significant advantages in terms of creative quality and generation speed.
A multimedia recommendation model based on collaborative graph
Authors: Breda Lim, Shubhi Bansal, Ahmed Buru, Kayla Manthey
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, model, Multimedia recommendation, Recommendation Systems

As one of the main solutions to the information overload problem, recommender systems are widely used in daily life. In the recent emerging micro-video recommendation scenario, micro-videos contain rich multimedia information, involving text, image, video and other multimodal data, and these rich multimodal information conceals users' deep interest in the items. Most of the current recommendation algorithms based on multimodal data use multimodal information to expand the information on the item side, but ignore the different preferences of users for different modal information, and lack the fine-grained mining of the internal connection of multimodal information. To investigate the problems in the micro-video recommendr system mentioned above, we design a hybrid recommendation model based on multimodal information, introduces multimodal information and user-side auxiliary information in the network structure, fully explores the deep interest of users, measures the importance of each dimension of user and item feature representation in the scoring prediction task, makes the application of graph neural network in the recommendation system is improved by using an attention mechanism to fuse the multi-layer state output information, allowing the shallow structural features provided by the intermediate layer to better participate in the prediction task. The recommendation accuracy is improved compared with the traditional recommendation algorithm on different data sets, and the feasibility and effectiveness of our model is verified.
Cache-Augmented Inbatch Importance Resampling for Training Recommender Retriever
Authors: Jin Chen, Defu Lian, Yucheng Li, Baoyun Wang, Kai Zheng, Enhong Chen
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

Recommender retrievers aim to rapidly retrieve a fraction of items from the entire item corpus when a user query requests, with the representative two-tower model trained with the log softmax loss. For efficiently training recommender retrievers on modern hardwares, inbatch sampling, where the items in the mini-batch are shared as negatives to estimate the softmax function, has attained growing interest. However, existing inbatch sampling based strategies just correct the sampling bias of inbatch items with item frequency, being unable to distinguish the user queries within the mini-batch and still incurring significant bias from the softmax. In this paper, we propose a Cache-Augmented Inbatch Importance Resampling (XIR) for training recommender retrievers, which not only offers different negatives to user queries with inbatch items, but also adaptively achieves a more accurate estimation of the softmax distribution. Specifically, XIR resamples items for the given mini-batch training pairs based on certain probabilities, where a cache with more frequently sampled items is adopted to augment the candidate item set, with the purpose of reusing the historical informative samples. XIR enables to sample query-dependent negatives based on inbatch items and to capture dynamic changes of model training, which leads to a better approximation of the softmax and further contributes to better convergence. Finally, we conduct experiments to validate the superior performance of the proposed XIR compared with competitive approaches.
Unified Approach to Secret Sharing and Symmetric Private Information Retrieval with Colluding Servers in Quantum Systems
Authors: Masahito Hayashi, Seunghoan Song
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This paper unifiedly addresses two kinds of key quantum secure tasks, i.e., quantum versions of secret sharing (SS) and symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) by using multi-target monotone span program (MMSP), which characterizes the classical linear protocols of SS and SPIR. SS has two quantum extensions; One is the classical-quantum (CQ) setting, in which the secret to be sent is classical information and the shares are quantum systems. The other is the quantum-quantum (QQ) setting, in which the secret to be sent is a quantum state and the shares are quantum systems. The relation between these quantum protocols and MMSP has not been studied sufficiently. We newly introduce the third setting, i.e., the entanglement-assisted (EA) setting, which is defined by modifying the CQ setting with allowing prior entanglement between the dealer and the end-user who recovers the secret by collecting the shares. Showing that the linear version of SS with the EA setting is directly linked to MMSP, we characterize linear quantum versions of SS with the CQ ad QQ settings via MMSP. Further, we introduce the EA setting of SPIR, which is shown to link to MMSP. In addition, we discuss the quantum version of maximum distance separable codes.
Deep Deconfounded Content-based Tag Recommendation for UGC with Causal Intervention
Authors: Yaochen Zhu, Xubin Ren, Jing Yi, Zhenzhong Chen
Date: 2022-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, TAG

Traditional content-based tag recommender systems directly learn the association between user-generated content (UGC) and tags based on collected UGC-tag pairs. However, since a UGC uploader simultaneously creates the UGC and selects the corresponding tags, her personal preference inevitably biases the tag selections, which prevents these recommenders from learning the causal influence of UGCs' content features on tags. In this paper, we propose a deep deconfounded content-based tag recommender system, namely, DecTag, to address the above issues. We first establish a causal graph to represent the relations among uploader, UGC, and tag, where the uploaders are identified as confounders that spuriously correlate UGC and tag selections. Specifically, to eliminate the confounding bias, causal intervention is conducted on the UGC node in the graph via backdoor adjustment, where uploaders' influence on tags leaked through backdoor paths can be eliminated for causal effect estimation. Observing that adjusting the causal graph with do-calculus requires integrating the entire uploader space, which is infeasible, we design a novel Monte Carlo (MC)-based estimator with bootstrap, which can achieve asymptotic unbiasedness provided that uploaders for the collected UGCs are i.i.d. samples from the population. In addition, the MC estimator has the intuition of substituting the biased uploaders with a hypothetical random uploader from the population in the training phase, where deconfounding can be achieved in an interpretable manner. Finally, we establish a YT-8M-Causal dataset based on the widely used YouTube-8M dataset with causal intervention and propose an evaluation strategy accordingly to unbiasedly evaluate causal tag recommenders. Extensive experiments show that DecTag is more robust to confounding bias than state-of-the-art causal recommenders.
Risk of Stochastic Systems for Temporal Logic Specifications
Authors: Lars Lindemann, Lejun Jiang, Nikolai Matni, George J. Pappas
Date: 2022-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

The wide availability of data coupled with the computational advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to enable many future technologies such as autonomous driving. While there has been a variety of successful demonstrations of these technologies, critical system failures have repeatedly been reported. Even if rare, such system failures pose a serious barrier to adoption without a rigorous risk assessment. This paper presents a framework for the systematic and rigorous risk verification of systems. We consider a wide range of system specifications formulated in signal temporal logic (STL) and model the system as a stochastic process, permitting discrete-time and continuous-time stochastic processes. We then define the STL robustness risk as the risk of lacking robustness against failure. This definition is motivated as system failures are often caused by missing robustness to modeling errors, system disturbances, and distribution shifts in the underlying data generating process. Within the definition, we permit general classes of risk measures and focus on tail risk measures such as the value-at-risk and the conditional value-at-risk. While the STL robustness risk is in general hard to compute, we propose the approximate STL robustness risk as a more tractable notion that upper bounds the STL robustness risk. We show how the approximate STL robustness risk can accurately be estimated from system trajectory data. For discrete-time stochastic processes, we show under which conditions the approximate STL robustness risk can even be computed exactly. We illustrate our verification algorithm in the autonomous driving simulator CARLA and show how a least risky controller can be selected among four neural network lane keeping controllers for five meaningful system specifications.
A New High-Performance Approach to Approximate Pattern-Matching for Plagiarism Detection in Blockchain-Based Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
Authors: Ciprian Pungila, Darius Galis, Viorel Negru
Date: 2022-05-28 00:00:00

We are presenting a fast and innovative approach to performing approximate pattern-matching for plagiarism detection, using an NDFA-based approach that significantly enhances performance compared to other existing similarity measures. We outline the advantages of our approach in the context of blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We present, formalize, discuss and test our proposed approach in several real-world scenarios and with different similarity measures commonly used in plagiarism detection, and observe significant throughput enhancements throughout the entire spectrum of tests, with little to no compromises on the accuracy of the detection process overall. We conclude that our approach is suitable and adequate to perform approximate pattern-matching for plagiarism detection, and outline research directions for future improvements.
Differentiable Point-Based Radiance Fields for Efficient View Synthesis
Authors: Qiang Zhang, Seung-Hwan Baek, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Felix Heide
Date: 2022-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

We propose a differentiable rendering algorithm for efficient novel view synthesis. By departing from volume-based representations in favor of a learned point representation, we improve on existing methods more than an order of magnitude in memory and runtime, both in training and inference. The method begins with a uniformly-sampled random point cloud and learns per-point position and view-dependent appearance, using a differentiable splat-based renderer to evolve the model to match a set of input images. Our method is up to 300x faster than NeRF in both training and inference, with only a marginal sacrifice in quality, while using less than 10~MB of memory for a static scene. For dynamic scenes, our method trains two orders of magnitude faster than STNeRF and renders at near interactive rate, while maintaining high image quality and temporal coherence even without imposing any temporal-coherency regularizers.
Safeguarding NOMA Networks via Reconfigurable Dual-Functional Surface under Imperfect CSI
Authors: Wen Wang, Wanli Ni, Hui Tian, Zhaohui Yang, Chongwen Huang, Kai-Kit Wong
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00

This paper investigates the use of the reconfigurable dual-functional surface to guarantee the full-space secure transmission in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. In the presence of eavesdroppers, the downlink communication from the base station to the legitimate users is safeguarded by the simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS), where three practical operating protocols, namely energy splitting (ES), mode selection (MS), and time splitting (TS), are studied. The joint optimization of power allocation, active and passive beamforming is investigated to maximize the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE), taking into account the imperfect channel state information (CSI) of all channels. For ES, by approximating the semi-infinite constraints with the S-procedure and general sign-definiteness, the problem is solved by an alternating optimization framework. Besides, the proposed algorithm is extended to the MS protocol by solving a mixed-integer non-convex problem. While for TS, a two-layer iterative method is proposed. Simulation results show that: 1) The proposed STAR-RIS assisted NOMA networks are able to provide up to 33.6\% higher SEE than conventional RIS counterparts; 2) TS and ES protocols are generally preferable for low and high power domain, respectively; 3) The accuracy of CSI estimation and the bit resolution power consumption are crucial to reap the SEE benefits offered by STAR-RIS.
Input-to-State Safety with Input Delay in Longitudinal Vehicle Control
Authors: Tamas G. Molnar, Anil Alan, Adam K. Kiss, Aaron D. Ames, Gabor Orosz
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00

Safe longitudinal control is discussed for a connected automated truck traveling behind a preceding connected vehicle. A controller is proposed based on control barrier function theory and predictor feedback for provably safe, collision-free behavior by taking into account the significant response time of the truck as input delay and the uncertainty of its dynamical model as input disturbance. The benefits of the proposed controller compared to control designs that neglect the delay or treat the delay as disturbance are shown by numerical simulations.
To catch a chorus, verse, intro, or anything else: Analyzing a song with structural functions
Authors: Ju-Chiang Wang, Yun-Ning Hung, Jordan B. L. Smith
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Temporal Localization

Conventional music structure analysis algorithms aim to divide a song into segments and to group them with abstract labels (e.g., 'A', 'B', and 'C'). However, explicitly identifying the function of each segment (e.g., 'verse' or 'chorus') is rarely attempted, but has many applications. We introduce a multi-task deep learning framework to model these structural semantic labels directly from audio by estimating "verseness," "chorusness," and so forth, as a function of time. We propose a 7-class taxonomy (i.e., intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro, instrumental, and silence) and provide rules to consolidate annotations from four disparate datasets. We also propose to use a spectral-temporal Transformer-based model, called SpecTNT, which can be trained with an additional connectionist temporal localization (CTL) loss. In cross-dataset evaluations using four public datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the SpecTNT model and CTL loss, and obtain strong results overall: the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art chorus-detection and boundary-detection methods at detecting choruses and boundaries, respectively.
FiltPIM: In-Memory Filter for DNA Sequencing
Authors: Marcel Khalifa, Rotem Ben-Hur, Ronny Ronen, Orian Leitersdorf, Leonid Yavits, Shahar Kvatinsky
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

Aligning the entire genome of an organism is a compute-intensive task. Pre-alignment filters substantially reduce computation complexity by filtering potential alignment locations. The base-count filter successfully removes over 68% of the potential locations through a histogram-based heuristic. This paper presents FiltPIM, an efficient design of the basecount filter that is based on memristive processing-in-memory. The in-memory design reduces CPU-to-memory data transfer and utilizes both intra-crossbar and inter-crossbar memristive stateful-logic parallelism. The reduction in data transfer and the efficient stateful-logic computation together improve filtering time by 100x compared to a CPU implementation of the filter.
A Deep Learning based Detection Method for Combined Integrity-Availability Cyber Attacks in Power System
Authors: Wangkun Xu, Fei Teng
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

As one of the largest and most complex systems on earth, power grid (PG) operation and control have stepped forward as a compound analysis on both physical and cyber layers which makes it vulnerable to assaults from economic and security considerations. A new type of attack, namely as combined data Integrity-Availability attack, has been recently proposed, where the attackers can simultaneously manipulate and blind some measurements on SCADA system to mislead the control operation and keep stealthy. Compared with traditional FDIAs, this combined attack can further complicate and vitiate the model-based detection mechanism. To detect such attack, this paper proposes a novel random denoising LSTM-AE (LSTMRDAE) framework, where the spatial-temporal correlations of measurements can be explicitly captured and the unavailable data is countered by the random dropout layer. The proposed algorithm is evaluated and the performance is verified on a standard IEEE 118-bus system under various unseen attack attempts.
Carleman Lifting for Nonlinear System Identification with Guaranteed Error Bounds
Authors: Moad Abudia, Joel A. Rosenfeld, Rushikesh Kamalapurkar
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

This paper concerns identification of uncontrolled or closed loop nonlinear systems using a set of trajectories that are generated by the system in a domain of attraction. The objective is to ensure that the trajectories of the identified systems are close to the trajectories of the real system, as quantified by an error bound that is prescribed a priori. A majority of existing methods for nonlinear system identification rely on techniques such as neural networks, autoregressive moving averages, and spectral decomposition that do not provide systematic approaches to meet pre-defined error bounds. The developed method is based on Carleman linearization-based lifting of the nonlinear system to an infinite dimensional linear system. The linear system is then truncated to a suitable order, computed based on the prescribed error bound, and parameters of the truncated linear system are estimated from data. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by identifying an approximation of the Van der Pol oscillator from data within a prescribed error bound.
Joint Constrained Bayesian Optimization of Planning, Guidance, Control, and State Estimation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Authors: David Stenger, Maximilian Nitsch, Dirk Abel
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, State Estimation

The performance of a guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) heavily depends on the correct tuning of its parameters. Our objective is to automatically tune these parameters with respect to arbitrary high-level control objectives within different operational scenarios. In contrast to literature, an overall tuning is performed for the entire GNC system, which is new in the context of autonomous underwater vehicles. The main challenges in solving the optimization problem are computationally expensive objective function evaluations, crashing simulations due to infeasible parametrization and the numerous tunable parameters (in our case 13). These challenges are met by using constrained Bayesian optimization with crash constraints. The method is demonstrated in simulation on a GNC system of an underactuated miniature AUV designed within the TRIPLE-nanoAUV initiative for exploration of sub-glacial lakes. We quantify the substantial reduction in energy consumption achieved by tuning the overall system. Furthermore, different parametrizations are automatically generated for different power consumption functions, robustness, and accuracy requirements. E.g. energy consumption can be reduced by ~28%, if the maximum allowed deviation from the planned path is increased by ~65%. This shows the versatile practical applicability of the optimization-based tuning approach.
Mean square stability conditions for platoons with lossy inter-vehicle communication channels
Authors: Marco A. Gordon, Francisco J. Vargas, Andrés A. Peters
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00

This paper studies the mean-square stability of heterogeneous LTI vehicular platoons with inter-vehicle communication channels affected by random data loss. We consider a discrete-time platoon system with predecessor following topology and constant time-headway spacing policy. Lossy channels are modeled by Bernoulli processes allowed to be correlated in space. We make use of a class of compensation strategies to reduce the effect of data loss. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the convergence of the mean and variance of the tracking errors, which depend not only on the controller design but also on the compensation strategy and the probabilities of successful transmission. Through numerical simulations, we illustrate the theoretical results, describing different platoon behaviors. We also provide insights on the mean-square stability as a necessary condition for string stability in this stochastic setting.