pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SecureLLM: Using Compositionality to Build Provably Secure Language Models for Private, Sensitive, and Secret Data
Authors: Abdulrahman Alabdulkareem, Christian M Arnold, Yerim Lee, Pieter M Feenstra, Boris Katz, Andrei Barbu
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Traditional security mechanisms isolate resources from users who should not access them. We reflect the compositional nature of such security mechanisms back into the structure of LLMs to build a provably secure LLM; that we term SecureLLM. Other approaches to LLM safety attempt to protect against bad actors or bad outcomes, but can only do so to an extent making them inappropriate for sensitive data. SecureLLM blends access security with fine-tuning methods. Each data silo has associated with it a separate fine-tuning and a user has access only to the collection of fine-tunings that they have permission for. The model must then perform on compositional tasks at the intersection of those data silos with the combination of those individual fine-tunings. While applicable to any task like document QA or making API calls, in this work we concern ourselves with models that learn the layouts of new SQL databases to provide natural-language-to-SQL translation capabilities. Existing fine-tuning composition methods fail in this challenging environment, as they are not well-equipped for handling compositional tasks. Compositionality remains a challenge for LLMs. We contribute both a difficult new compositional natural-language-to-SQL translation task and a new perspective on LLM security that allows models to be deployed to secure environments today.
An Analysis of Sentential Neighbors in Implicit Discourse Relation Prediction
Authors: Evi Judge, Reece Suchocki, Konner Syed
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Relation, Relation Classification, Relation Prediction, Sentence

Discourse relation classification is an especially difficult task without explicit context markers (Prasad et al., 2008). Current approaches to implicit relation prediction solely rely on two neighboring sentences being targeted, ignoring the broader context of their surrounding environments (Atwell et al., 2021). In this research, we propose three new methods in which to incorporate context in the task of sentence relation prediction: (1) Direct Neighbors (DNs), (2) Expanded Window Neighbors (EWNs), and (3) Part-Smart Random Neighbors (PSRNs). Our findings indicate that the inclusion of context beyond one discourse unit is harmful in the task of discourse relation classification.
SCI 3.0: A Web-based Schema Curation Interface for Graphical Event Representations
Authors: Reece Suchocki, Mary Martin, Martha Palmer, Susan Brown
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

To understand the complexity of global events, one must navigate a web of interwoven sub-events, identifying those most impactful elements within the larger, abstract macro-event framework at play. This concept can be extended to the field of natural language processing (NLP) through the creation of structured event schemas which can serve as representations of these abstract events. Central to our approach is the Schema Curation Interface 3.0 (SCI 3.0), a web application that facilitates real-time editing of event schema properties within a generated graph e.g., adding, removing, or editing sub-events, entities, and relations directly through an interface.
Influence Maximization in Hypergraphs using Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms
Authors: Stefano Genetti, Eros Ribaga, Elia Cunegatti, Quintino Francesco Lotito, Giovanni Iacca
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Evolutionary Algorithms

The Influence Maximization (IM) problem is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial problem over graphs whose goal is to find the set of nodes in a network that spreads influence at most. Among the various methods for solving the IM problem, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been shown to be particularly effective. While the literature on the topic is particularly ample, only a few attempts have been made at solving the IM problem over higher-order networks, namely extensions of standard graphs that can capture interactions that involve more than two nodes. Hypergraphs are a valuable tool for modeling complex interaction networks in various domains; however, they require rethinking of several graph-based problems, including IM. In this work, we propose a multi-objective EA for the IM problem over hypergraphs that leverages smart initialization and hypergraph-aware mutation. While the existing methods rely on greedy or heuristic methods, to our best knowledge this is the first attempt at applying EAs to this problem. Our results over nine real-world datasets and three propagation models, compared with five baseline algorithms, reveal that our method achieves in most cases state-of-the-art results in terms of hypervolume and solution diversity.
A Guide to Tracking Phylogenies in Parallel and Distributed Agent-based Evolution Models
Authors: Matthew Andres Moreno, Anika Ranjan, Emily Dolson, Luis Zaman
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00

Computer simulations are an important tool for studying the mechanics of biological evolution. In particular, in silico work with agent-based models provides an opportunity to collect high-quality records of ancestry relationships among simulated agents. Such phylogenies can provide insight into evolutionary dynamics within these simulations. Existing work generally tracks lineages directly, yielding an exact phylogenetic record of evolutionary history. However, direct tracking can be inefficient for large-scale, many-processor evolutionary simulations. An alternate approach to extracting phylogenetic information from simulation that scales more favorably is post hoc estimation, akin to how bioinformaticians build phylogenies by assessing genetic similarities between organisms. Recently introduced ``hereditary stratigraphy'' algorithms provide means for efficient inference of phylogenetic history from non-coding annotations on simulated organisms' genomes. A number of options exist in configuring hereditary stratigraphy methodology, but no work has yet tested how they impact reconstruction quality. To address this question, we surveyed reconstruction accuracy under alternate configurations across a matrix of evolutionary conditions varying in selection pressure, spatial structure, and ecological dynamics. We synthesize results from these experiments to suggest a prescriptive system of best practices for work with hereditary stratigraphy, ultimately guiding researchers in choosing appropriate instrumentation for large-scale simulation studies.
When Large Language Model Meets Optimization
Authors: Sen Huang, Kaixiang Yang, Sheng Qi, Rui Wang
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

Optimization algorithms and large language models (LLMs) enhance decision-making in dynamic environments by integrating artificial intelligence with traditional techniques. LLMs, with extensive domain knowledge, facilitate intelligent modeling and strategic decision-making in optimization, while optimization algorithms refine LLM architectures and output quality. This synergy offers novel approaches for advancing general AI, addressing both the computational challenges of complex problems and the application of LLMs in practical scenarios. This review outlines the progress and potential of combining LLMs with optimization algorithms, providing insights for future research directions.
CatCMA : Stochastic Optimization for Mixed-Category Problems
Authors: Ryoki Hamano, Shota Saito, Masahiro Nomura, Kento Uchida, Shinichi Shirakawa
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Stochastic Optimization

Black-box optimization problems often require simultaneously optimizing different types of variables, such as continuous, integer, and categorical variables. Unlike integer variables, categorical variables do not necessarily have a meaningful order, and the discretization approach of continuous variables does not work well. Although several Bayesian optimization methods can deal with mixed-category black-box optimization (MC-BBO), they suffer from a lack of scalability to high-dimensional problems and internal computational cost. This paper proposes CatCMA, a stochastic optimization method for MC-BBO problems, which employs the joint probability distribution of multivariate Gaussian and categorical distributions as the search distribution. CatCMA updates the parameters of the joint probability distribution in the natural gradient direction. CatCMA also incorporates the acceleration techniques used in the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) and the stochastic natural gradient method, such as step-size adaptation and learning rate adaptation. In addition, we restrict the ranges of the categorical distribution parameters by margin to prevent premature convergence and analytically derive a promising margin setting. Numerical experiments show that the performance of CatCMA is superior and more robust to problem dimensions compared to state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization algorithms.
CLASSP: a Biologically-Inspired Approach to Continual Learning through Adjustment Suppression and Sparsity Promotion
Authors: Oswaldo Ludwig
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ResearchGate 2024 4
Tasks: Continual Learning, Sentiment Analysis, Sparse Learning

This paper introduces a new biologically-inspired training method named Continual Learning through Adjustment Suppression and Sparsity Promotion (CLASSP). CLASSP is based on two main principles observed in neuroscience, particularly in the context of synaptic transmission and Long-Term Potentiation (LTP). The first principle is a decay rate over the weight adjustment, which is implemented as a generalization of the AdaGrad optimization algorithm. This means that weights that have received many updates should have lower learning rates as they likely encode important information about previously seen data. However, this principle results in a diffuse distribution of updates throughout the model, as it promotes updates for weights that haven't been previously updated, while a sparse update distribution is preferred to leave weights unassigned for future tasks. Therefore, the second principle introduces a threshold on the loss gradient. This promotes sparse learning by updating a weight only if the loss gradient with respect to that weight is above a certain threshold, i.e. only updating weights with a significant impact on the current loss. Both principles reflect phenomena observed in LTP, where a threshold effect and a gradual saturation of potentiation have been observed. CLASSP is implemented in a Python/PyTorch class, making it applicable to any model. When compared with Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) using Computer Vision and sentiment analysis datasets, CLASSP demonstrates superior performance in terms of accuracy and memory footprint.
Subgradient Selection Convergence Implies Uniform Subdifferential Set Convergence: And Other Tight Convergences Rates in Stochastic Convex Composite Minimization
Authors: Feng Ruan
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

In nonsmooth, nonconvex stochastic optimization, understanding the uniform convergence of subdifferential mappings is crucial for analyzing stationary points of sample average approximations of risk as they approach the population risk. Yet, characterizing this convergence remains a fundamental challenge. This work introduces a novel perspective by connecting the uniform convergence of subdifferential mappings to that of subgradient mappings as empirical risk converges to the population risk. We prove that, for stochastic weakly-convex objectives, and within any open set, a uniform bound on the convergence of subgradients -- chosen arbitrarily from the corresponding subdifferential sets -- translates to a uniform bound on the convergence of the subdifferential sets themselves, measured by the Hausdorff metric. Using this technique, we derive uniform convergence rates for subdifferential sets of stochastic convex-composite objectives. Our results do not rely on key distributional assumptions in the literature, such as the continuous differentiability of the population objective, yet still provide tight convergence rates. These guarantees lead to new insights into the nonsmooth landscapes of such objectives within finite samples.
A Gaussian Process Model for Ordinal Data with Applications to Chemoinformatics
Authors: Arron Gosnell, Evangelos Evangelou
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes

With the proliferation of screening tools for chemical testing, it is now possible to create vast databases of chemicals easily. However, rigorous statistical methodologies employed to analyse these databases are in their infancy, and further development to facilitate chemical discovery is imperative. In this paper, we present conditional Gaussian process models to predict ordinal outcomes from chemical experiments, where the inputs are chemical compounds. We implement the Tanimoto distance, a metric on the chemical space, within the covariance of the Gaussian processes to capture correlated effects in the chemical space. A novel aspect of our model is that the kernel contains a scaling parameter, a feature not previously examined in the literature, that controls the strength of the correlation between elements of the chemical space. Using molecular fingerprints, a numerical representation of a compound's location within the chemical space, we find that accounting for correlation amongst chemical compounds improves predictive performance over the uncorrelated model, where effects are assumed to be independent. Moreover, we present a genetic algorithm for the facilitation of chemical discovery and identification of important features to the compound's efficacy, based on two criteria derived from the proposed model. Simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the suitability of the proposed methods. Our model is demonstrated on a hazard classification problem of organic solvents.
Identification of Single-Treatment Effects in Factorial Experiments
Authors: Guilherme Duarte
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Despite their cost, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely regarded as gold-standard evidence in disciplines ranging from social science to medicine. In recent decades, researchers have increasingly sought to reduce the resource burden of repeated RCTs with factorial designs that simultaneously test multiple hypotheses, e.g. experiments that evaluate the effects of many medications or products simultaneously. Here I show that when multiple interventions are randomized in experiments, the effect any single intervention would have outside the experimental setting is not identified absent heroic assumptions, even if otherwise perfectly realistic conditions are achieved. This happens because single-treatment effects involve a counterfactual world with a single focal intervention, allowing other variables to take their natural values (which may be confounded or modified by the focal intervention). In contrast, observational studies and factorial experiments provide information about potential-outcome distributions with zero and multiple interventions, respectively. In this paper, I formalize sufficient conditions for the identifiability of those isolated quantities. I show that researchers who rely on this type of design have to justify either linearity of functional forms or -- in the nonparametric case -- specify with Directed Acyclic Graphs how variables are related in the real world. Finally, I develop nonparametric sharp bounds -- i.e., maximally informative best-/worst-case estimates consistent with limited RCT data -- that show when extrapolations about effect signs are empirically justified. These new results are illustrated with simulated data.
The radius of statistical efficiency
Authors: Joshua Cutler, Mateo Díaz, Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Matrix Completion, Retrieval

Classical results in asymptotic statistics show that the Fisher information matrix controls the difficulty of estimating a statistical model from observed data. In this work, we introduce a companion measure of robustness of an estimation problem: the radius of statistical efficiency (RSE) is the size of the smallest perturbation to the problem data that renders the Fisher information matrix singular. We compute RSE up to numerical constants for a variety of test bed problems, including principal component analysis, generalized linear models, phase retrieval, bilinear sensing, and matrix completion. In all cases, the RSE quantifies the compatibility between the covariance of the population data and the latent model parameter. Interestingly, we observe a precise reciprocal relationship between RSE and the intrinsic complexity/sensitivity of the problem instance, paralleling the classical Eckart-Young theorem in numerical analysis.
Learning 3-Manifold Triangulations
Authors: Francesco Costantino, Yang-Hui He, Elli Heyes, Edward Hirst
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00

Real 3-manifold triangulations can be uniquely represented by isomorphism signatures. Databases of these isomorphism signatures are generated for a variety of 3-manifolds and knot complements, using SnapPy and Regina, then these language-like inputs are used to train various machine learning architectures to differentiate the manifolds, as well as their Dehn surgeries, via their triangulations. Gradient saliency analysis then extracts key parts of this language-like encoding scheme from the trained models. The isomorphism signature databases are taken from the 3-manifolds' Pachner graphs, which are also generated in bulk for some selected manifolds of focus and for the subset of the SnapPy orientable cusped census with $<8$ initial tetrahedra. These Pachner graphs are further analysed through the lens of network science to identify new structure in the triangulation representation; in particular for the hyperbolic case, a relation between the length of the shortest geodesic (systole) and the size of the Pachner graph's ball is observed.
UniRAG: Universal Retrieval Augmentation for Large Vision Language Models
Authors: Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Shivani Upadhyay, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Image Generation, Question Answering, Retrieval, Visual Question Answering

Recently, Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have unlocked many complex use cases that require Multi-Modal (MM) understanding (e.g., image captioning or visual question answering) and MM generation (e.g., text-guided image generation or editing) capabilities. To further improve the output fidelityof LVLMs we introduce UniRAG, a plug-and-play technique that adds relevant retrieved information to prompts as few-shot examples during inference. Unlike the common belief that Retrieval Augmentation (RA) mainly improves generation or understanding of uncommon entities, our evaluation results on the MSCOCO dataset with common entities show that both proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini-Pro and smaller open-source models like LLaVA, LaVIT, and Emu2 significantly enhance their generation quality when their input prompts are augmented with relevant information retrieved by Vision-Language (VL) retrievers like UniIR models. All the necessary code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/castorini/UniRAG
Co-Matching: Towards Human-Machine Collaborative Legal Case Matching
Authors: Chen Huang, Xinwei Yang, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Jiancheng Lv, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00

Recent efforts have aimed to improve AI machines in legal case matching by integrating legal domain knowledge. However, successful legal case matching requires the tacit knowledge of legal practitioners, which is difficult to verbalize and encode into machines. This emphasizes the crucial role of involving legal practitioners in high-stakes legal case matching. To address this, we propose a collaborative matching framework called Co-Matching, which encourages both the machine and the legal practitioner to participate in the matching process, integrating tacit knowledge. Unlike existing methods that rely solely on the machine, Co-Matching allows both the legal practitioner and the machine to determine key sentences and then combine them probabilistically. Co-Matching introduces a method called ProtoEM to estimate human decision uncertainty, facilitating the probabilistic combination. Experimental results demonstrate that Co-Matching consistently outperforms existing legal case matching methods, delivering significant performance improvements over human- and machine-based matching in isolation (on average, +5.51% and +8.71%, respectively). Further analysis shows that Co-Matching also ensures better human-machine collaboration effectiveness. Our study represents a pioneering effort in human-machine collaboration for the matching task, marking a milestone for future collaborative matching studies.
Beyond Static Calibration: The Impact of User Preference Dynamics on Calibrated Recommendation
Authors: Kun Lin, Masoud Mansoury, Farzad Eskandanian, Milad Sabouri, Bamshad Mobasher
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Calibration in recommender systems is an important performance criterion that ensures consistency between the distribution of user preference categories and that of recommendations generated by the system. Standard methods for mitigating miscalibration typically assume that user preference profiles are static, and they measure calibration relative to the full history of user's interactions, including possibly outdated and stale preference categories. We conjecture that this approach can lead to recommendations that, while appearing calibrated, in fact, distort users' true preferences. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary investigation of recommendation calibration at a more granular level, taking into account evolving user preferences. By analyzing differently sized training time windows from the most recent interactions to the oldest, we identify the most relevant segment of user's preferences that optimizes the calibration metric. We perform an exploratory analysis with datasets from different domains with distinctive user-interaction characteristics. We demonstrate how the evolving nature of user preferences affects recommendation calibration, and how this effect is manifested differently depending on the characteristics of the data in a given domain. Datasets, codes, and more detailed experimental results are available at: https://github.com/nicolelin13/DynamicCalibrationUMAP.