pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MM-Forecast: A Multimodal Approach to Temporal Event Forecasting with Large Language Models
Authors: Haoxuan Li, Zhengmao Yang, Yunshan Ma, Yi Bin, Yang Yang, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

We study an emerging and intriguing problem of multimodal temporal event forecasting with large language models. Compared to using text or graph modalities, the investigation of utilizing images for temporal event forecasting has not been fully explored, especially in the era of large language models (LLMs). To bridge this gap, we are particularly interested in two key questions of: 1) why images will help in temporal event forecasting, and 2) how to integrate images into the LLM-based forecasting framework. To answer these research questions, we propose to identify two essential functions that images play in the scenario of temporal event forecasting, i.e., highlighting and complementary. Then, we develop a novel framework, named MM-Forecast. It employs an Image Function Identification module to recognize these functions as verbal descriptions using multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and subsequently incorporates these function descriptions into LLM-based forecasting models. To evaluate our approach, we construct a new multimodal dataset, MidEast-TE-mm, by extending an existing event dataset MidEast-TE-mini with images. Empirical studies demonstrate that our MM-Forecast can correctly identify the image functions, and further more, incorporating these verbal function descriptions significantly improves the forecasting performance. The dataset, code, and prompts are available at https://github.com/LuminosityX/MM-Forecast.
Non-maximizing policies that fulfill multi-criterion aspirations in expectation
Authors: Simon Dima, Simon Fischer, Jobst Heitzig, Joss Oliver
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Decision Making

In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that maximizes the expected total reward. However, many goals that humans care about naturally concern multiple aspects of the world, and it may not be obvious how to condense those into a single reward function. Furthermore, maximization suffers from specification gaming, where the obtained policy achieves a high expected total reward in an unintended way, often taking extreme or nonsensical actions. Here we consider finite acyclic Markov Decision Processes with multiple distinct evaluation metrics, which do not necessarily represent quantities that the user wants to be maximized. We assume the task of the agent is to ensure that the vector of expected totals of the evaluation metrics falls into some given convex set, called the aspiration set. Our algorithm guarantees that this task is fulfilled by using simplices to approximate feasibility sets and propagate aspirations forward while ensuring they remain feasible. It has complexity linear in the number of possible state-action-successor triples and polynomial in the number of evaluation metrics. Moreover, the explicitly non-maximizing nature of the chosen policy and goals yields additional degrees of freedom, which can be used to apply heuristic safety criteria to the choice of actions. We discuss several such safety criteria that aim to steer the agent towards more conservative behavior.
Judgment2vec: Apply Graph Analytics to Searching and Recommendation of Similar Judgments
Authors: Hsuan-Lei Shao
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, text similarity

In court practice, legal professionals rely on their training to provide opinions that resolve cases, one of the most crucial aspects being the ability to identify similar judgments from previous courts efficiently. However, finding a similar case is challenging and often depends on experience, legal domain knowledge, and extensive labor hours, making veteran lawyers or judges indispensable. This research aims to automate the analysis of judgment text similarity. We utilized a judgment dataset labeled as the "golden standard" by experts, which includes human-verified features that can be converted into an "expert similarity score." We then constructed a knowledge graph based on "case-article" relationships, ranking each case using natural language processing to derive a "Node2vec similarity score." By evaluating these two similarity scores, we identified their discrepancies and relationships. The results can significantly reduce the labor hours required for legal searches and recommendations, with potential applications extending to various fields of information retrieval.
Anomaly Prediction: A Novel Approach with Explicit Delay and Horizon
Authors: Jiang You, Arben Cela, René Natowicz, Jacob Ouanounou, Patrick Siarry
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Anomaly detection in time series data is a critical challenge across various domains. Traditional methods typically focus on identifying anomalies in immediate subsequent steps, often underestimating the significance of temporal dynamics such as delay time and horizons of anomalies, which generally require extensive post-analysis. This paper introduces a novel approach for time series anomaly prediction, incorporating temporal information directly into the prediction results. We propose a new dataset specifically designed to evaluate this approach and conduct comprehensive experiments using several state-of-the-art methods. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in providing timely and accurate anomaly predictions, setting a new benchmark for future research in this field.
Optimal Layout-Aware CNOT Circuit Synthesis with Qubit Permutation
Authors: Irfansha Shaik, Jaco van de Pol
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

CNOT optimization plays a significant role in noise reduction for Quantum Circuits. Several heuristic and exact approaches exist for CNOT optimization. In this paper, we investigate more complicated variations of optimal synthesis by allowing qubit permutations and handling layout restrictions. We encode such problems into Planning, SAT, and QBF. We provide optimization for both CNOT gate count and circuit depth. For experimental evaluation, we consider standard T-gate optimized benchmarks and optimize CNOT sub-circuits. We show that allowing qubit permutations can further reduce up to 56% in CNOT count and 46% in circuit depth. In the case of optimally mapped circuits under layout restrictions, we observe a reduction up to 17% CNOT count and 19% CNOT depth.
Towards Explainable Network Intrusion Detection using Large Language Models
Authors: Paul R. B. Houssel, Priyanka Singh, Siamak Layeghy, Marius Portmann
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionised natural language processing tasks, particularly as chat agents. However, their applicability to threat detection problems remains unclear. This paper examines the feasibility of employing LLMs as a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS), despite their high computational requirements, primarily for the sake of explainability. Furthermore, considerable resources have been invested in developing LLMs, and they may offer utility for NIDS. Current state-of-the-art NIDS rely on artificial benchmarking datasets, resulting in skewed performance when applied to real-world networking environments. Therefore, we compare the GPT-4 and LLama3 models against traditional architectures and transformer-based models to assess their ability to detect malicious NetFlows without depending on artificially skewed datasets, but solely on their vast pre-trained acquired knowledge. Our results reveal that, although LLMs struggle with precise attack detection, they hold significant potential for a path towards explainable NIDS. Our preliminary exploration shows that LLMs are unfit for the detection of Malicious NetFlows. Most promisingly, however, these exhibit significant potential as complementary agents in NIDS, particularly in providing explanations and aiding in threat response when integrated with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and function calling capabilities.
KnowPC: Knowledge-Driven Programmatic Reinforcement Learning for Zero-shot Coordination
Authors: Yin Gu, Qi Liu, Zhi Li, Kai Zhang
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) remains a major challenge in the cooperative AI field, which aims to learn an agent to cooperate with an unseen partner in training environments or even novel environments. In recent years, a popular ZSC solution paradigm has been deep reinforcement learning (DRL) combined with advanced self-play or population-based methods to enhance the neural policy's ability to handle unseen partners. Despite some success, these approaches usually rely on black-box neural networks as the policy function. However, neural networks typically lack interpretability and logic, making the learned policies difficult for partners (e.g., humans) to understand and limiting their generalization ability. These shortcomings hinder the application of reinforcement learning methods in diverse cooperative scenarios.We suggest to represent the agent's policy with an interpretable program. Unlike neural networks, programs contain stable logic, but they are non-differentiable and difficult to optimize.To automatically learn such programs, we introduce Knowledge-driven Programmatic reinforcement learning for zero-shot Coordination (KnowPC). We first define a foundational Domain-Specific Language (DSL), including program structures, conditional primitives, and action primitives. A significant challenge is the vast program search space, making it difficult to find high-performing programs efficiently. To address this, KnowPC integrates an extractor and an reasoner. The extractor discovers environmental transition knowledge from multi-agent interaction trajectories, while the reasoner deduces the preconditions of each action primitive based on the transition knowledge.
Learning with Digital Agents: An Analysis based on the Activity Theory
Authors: Mateusz Dolata, Dzmitry Katsiuba, Natalie Wellnhammer, Gerhard Schwabe
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

Digital agents are considered a general-purpose technology. They spread quickly in private and organizational contexts, including education. Yet, research lacks a conceptual framing to describe interaction with such agents in a holistic manner. While focusing on the interaction with a pedagogical agent, i.e., a digital agent capable of natural-language interaction with a learner, we propose a model of learning activity based on activity theory. We use this model and a review of prior research on digital agents in education to analyze how various characteristics of the activity, including features of a pedagogical agent or learner, influence learning outcomes. The analysis leads to identification of IS research directions and guidance for developers of pedagogical agents and digital agents in general. We conclude by extending the activity theory-based model beyond the context of education and show how it helps designers and researchers ask the right questions when creating a digital agent.
Tackling Noisy Clients in Federated Learning with End-to-end Label Correction
Authors: Xuefeng Jiang, Sheng Sun, Jia Li, Jingjing Xue, Runhan Li, Zhiyuan Wu, Gang Xu, Yuwei Wang, Min Liu
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Misinformation

Recently, federated learning (FL) has achieved wide successes for diverse privacy-sensitive applications without sacrificing the sensitive private information of clients. However, the data quality of client datasets can not be guaranteed since corresponding annotations of different clients often contain complex label noise of varying degrees, which inevitably causes the performance degradation. Intuitively, the performance degradation is dominated by clients with higher noise rates since their trained models contain more misinformation from data, thus it is necessary to devise an effective optimization scheme to mitigate the negative impacts of these noisy clients. In this work, we propose a two-stage framework FedELC to tackle this complicated label noise issue. The first stage aims to guide the detection of noisy clients with higher label noise, while the second stage aims to correct the labels of noisy clients' data via an end-to-end label correction framework which is achieved by learning possible ground-truth labels of noisy clients' datasets via back propagation. We implement sixteen related methods and evaluate five datasets with three types of complicated label noise scenarios for a comprehensive comparison. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our proposed framework achieves superior performance than its counterparts for different scenarios. Additionally, we effectively improve the data quality of detected noisy clients' local datasets with our label correction framework. The code is available at https://github.com/Sprinter1999/FedELC.
Assigning Credit with Partial Reward Decoupling in Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization
Authors: Aditya Kapoor, Benjamin Freed, Howie Choset, Jeff Schneider
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Starcraft, Starcraft II

Multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) has recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on challenging multi-agent reinforcement learning tasks. However, MAPPO still struggles with the credit assignment problem, wherein the sheer difficulty in ascribing credit to individual agents' actions scales poorly with team size. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that adapts recent developments in credit assignment to improve upon MAPPO. Our approach leverages partial reward decoupling (PRD), which uses a learned attention mechanism to estimate which of a particular agent's teammates are relevant to its learning updates. We use this estimate to dynamically decompose large groups of agents into smaller, more manageable subgroups. We empirically demonstrate that our approach, PRD-MAPPO, decouples agents from teammates that do not influence their expected future reward, thereby streamlining credit assignment. We additionally show that PRD-MAPPO yields significantly higher data efficiency and asymptotic performance compared to both MAPPO and other state-of-the-art methods across several multi-agent tasks, including StarCraft II. Finally, we propose a version of PRD-MAPPO that is applicable to \textit{shared} reward settings, where PRD was previously not applicable, and empirically show that this also leads to performance improvements over MAPPO.
AI-Driven Chatbot for Intrusion Detection in Edge Networks: Enhancing Cybersecurity with Ethical User Consent
Authors: Mugheez Asif, Abdul Manan, Abdul Moiz ur Rehman, Mamoona Naveed Asghar, Muhammad Umair
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Intrusion Detection

In today's contemporary digital landscape, chatbots have become indispensable tools across various sectors, streamlining customer service, providing personal assistance, automating routine tasks, and offering health advice. However, their potential remains underexplored in the realm of network security, particularly for intrusion detection. To bridge this gap, we propose an architecture chatbot specifically designed to enhance security within edge networks specifically for intrusion detection. Leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, this chatbot will monitor network traffic to identify and mitigate potential intrusions. By securing the network environment using an edge network managed by a Raspberry Pi module and ensuring ethical user consent promoting transparency and trust, this innovative solution aims to safeguard sensitive data and maintain a secure workplace, thereby addressing the growing need for robust network security measures in the digital age.
Unveiling Hidden Visual Information: A Reconstruction Attack Against Adversarial Visual Information Hiding
Authors: Jonggyu Jang, Hyeonsu Lyu, Seongjin Hwang, Hyun Jong Yang
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Reconstruction Attack

This paper investigates the security vulnerabilities of adversarial-example-based image encryption by executing data reconstruction (DR) attacks on encrypted images. A representative image encryption method is the adversarial visual information hiding (AVIH), which uses type-I adversarial example training to protect gallery datasets used in image recognition tasks. In the AVIH method, the type-I adversarial example approach creates images that appear completely different but are still recognized by machines as the original ones. Additionally, the AVIH method can restore encrypted images to their original forms using a predefined private key generative model. For the best security, assigning a unique key to each image is recommended; however, storage limitations may necessitate some images sharing the same key model. This raises a crucial security question for AVIH: How many images can safely share the same key model without being compromised by a DR attack? To address this question, we introduce a dual-strategy DR attack against the AVIH encryption method by incorporating (1) generative-adversarial loss and (2) augmented identity loss, which prevent DR from overfitting -- an issue akin to that in machine learning. Our numerical results validate this approach through image recognition and re-identification benchmarks, demonstrating that our strategy can significantly enhance the quality of reconstructed images, thereby requiring fewer key-sharing encrypted images. Our source code to reproduce our results will be available soon.
EfficientRAG: Efficient Retriever for Multi-Hop Question Answering
Authors: Ziyuan Zhuang, Zhiyang Zhang, Sitao Cheng, Fangkai Yang, Jia Liu, ShuJian Huang, QIngwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encounter difficulties when addressing complex questions like multi-hop queries. While iterative retrieval methods improve performance by gathering additional information, current approaches often rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce EfficientRAG, an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering. EfficientRAG iteratively generates new queries without the need for LLM calls at each iteration and filters out irrelevant information. Experimental results demonstrate that EfficientRAG surpasses existing RAG methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets.
Scalable Transformer for High Dimensional Multivariate Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Xin Zhou, Weiqing Wang, Wray Buntine, Shilin Qu, Abishek Sriramulu, Weicong Tan, Christoph Bergmeir
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Deep models for Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting have recently demonstrated significant success. Channel-dependent models capture complex dependencies that channel-independent models cannot capture. However, the number of channels in real-world applications outpaces the capabilities of existing channel-dependent models, and contrary to common expectations, some models underperform the channel-independent models in handling high-dimensional data, which raises questions about the performance of channel-dependent models. To address this, our study first investigates the reasons behind the suboptimal performance of these channel-dependent models on high-dimensional MTS data. Our analysis reveals that two primary issues lie in the introduced noise from unrelated series that increases the difficulty of capturing the crucial inter-channel dependencies, and challenges in training strategies due to high-dimensional data. To address these issues, we propose STHD, the Scalable Transformer for High-Dimensional Multivariate Time Series Forecasting. STHD has three components: a) Relation Matrix Sparsity that limits the noise introduced and alleviates the memory issue; b) ReIndex applied as a training strategy to enable a more flexible batch size setting and increase the diversity of training data; and c) Transformer that handles 2-D inputs and captures channel dependencies. These components jointly enable STHD to manage the high-dimensional MTS while maintaining computational feasibility. Furthermore, experimental results show STHD's considerable improvement on three high-dimensional datasets: Crime-Chicago, Wiki-People, and Traffic. The source code and dataset are publicly available https://github.com/xinzzzhou/ScalableTransformer4HighDimensionMTSF.git.
The Ungrounded Alignment Problem
Authors: Marc Pickett, Aakash Kumar Nain, Joseph Modayil, Llion Jones
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

Modern machine learning systems have demonstrated substantial abilities with methods that either embrace or ignore human-provided knowledge, but combining benefits of both styles remains a challenge. One particular challenge involves designing learning systems that exhibit built-in responses to specific abstract stimulus patterns, yet are still plastic enough to be agnostic about the modality and exact form of their inputs. In this paper, we investigate what we call The Ungrounded Alignment Problem, which asks How can we build in predefined knowledge in a system where we don't know how a given stimulus will be grounded? This paper examines a simplified version of the general problem, where an unsupervised learner is presented with a sequence of images for the characters in a text corpus, and this learner is later evaluated on its ability to recognize specific (possibly rare) sequential patterns. Importantly, the learner is given no labels during learning or evaluation, but must map images from an unknown font or permutation to its correct class label. That is, at no point is our learner given labeled images, where an image vector is explicitly associated with a class label. Despite ample work in unsupervised and self-supervised loss functions, all current methods require a labeled fine-tuning phase to map the learned representations to correct classes. Finding this mapping in the absence of labels may seem a fool's errand, but our main result resolves this seeming paradox. We show that leveraging only letter bigram frequencies is sufficient for an unsupervised learner both to reliably associate images to class labels and to reliably identify trigger words in the sequence of inputs. More generally, this method suggests an approach for encoding specific desired innate behaviour in modality-agnostic models.