pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AMUN: Adversarial Machine UNlearning
Authors: Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Hari Sundaram, Varun Chandrasekaran
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning, where users can request the deletion of a forget dataset, is becoming increasingly important because of numerous privacy regulations. Initial works on ``exact'' unlearning (e.g., retraining) incur large computational overheads. However, while computationally inexpensive, ``approximate'' methods have fallen short of reaching the effectiveness of exact unlearning: models produced fail to obtain comparable accuracy and prediction confidence on both the forget and test (i.e., unseen) dataset. Exploiting this observation, we propose a new unlearning method, Adversarial Machine UNlearning (AMUN), that outperforms prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for image classification. AMUN lowers the confidence of the model on the forget samples by fine-tuning the model on their corresponding adversarial examples. Adversarial examples naturally belong to the distribution imposed by the model on the input space; fine-tuning the model on the adversarial examples closest to the corresponding forget samples (a) localizes the changes to the decision boundary of the model around each forget sample and (b) avoids drastic changes to the global behavior of the model, thereby preserving the model's accuracy on test samples. Using AMUN for unlearning a random $10\%$ of CIFAR-10 samples, we observe that even SOTA membership inference attacks cannot do better than random guessing.
Parameter-Adaptive Dynamic Pricing
Authors: Xueping Gong, Jiheng Zhang
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

Dynamic pricing is crucial in sectors like e-commerce and transportation, balancing exploration of demand patterns and exploitation of pricing strategies. Existing methods often require precise knowledge of the demand function, e.g., the H{\"o}lder smoothness level and Lipschitz constant, limiting practical utility. This paper introduces an adaptive approach to address these challenges without prior parameter knowledge. By partitioning the demand function's domain and employing a linear bandit structure, we develop an algorithm that manages regret efficiently, enhancing flexibility and practicality. Our Parameter-Adaptive Dynamic Pricing (PADP) algorithm outperforms existing methods, offering improved regret bounds and extensions for contextual information. Numerical experiments validate our approach, demonstrating its superiority in handling unknown demand parameters.
Learning-Augmented Frequent Directions
Authors: Anders Aamand, Justin Y. Chen, Siddharth Gollapudi, Sandeep Silwal, Hao Wu
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

An influential paper of Hsu et al. (ICLR'19) introduced the study of learning-augmented streaming algorithms in the context of frequency estimation. A fundamental problem in the streaming literature, the goal of frequency estimation is to approximate the number of occurrences of items appearing in a long stream of data using only a small amount of memory. Hsu et al. develop a natural framework to combine the worst-case guarantees of popular solutions such as CountMin and CountSketch with learned predictions of high frequency elements. They demonstrate that learning the underlying structure of data can be used to yield better streaming algorithms, both in theory and practice. We simplify and generalize past work on learning-augmented frequency estimation. Our first contribution is a learning-augmented variant of the Misra-Gries algorithm which improves upon the error of learned CountMin and learned CountSketch and achieves the state-of-the-art performance of randomized algorithms (Aamand et al., NeurIPS'23) with a simpler, deterministic algorithm. Our second contribution is to adapt learning-augmentation to a high-dimensional generalization of frequency estimation corresponding to finding important directions (top singular vectors) of a matrix given its rows one-by-one in a stream. We analyze a learning-augmented variant of the Frequent Directions algorithm, extending the theoretical and empirical understanding of learned predictions to matrix streaming.
CAGN-GAT Fusion: A Hybrid Contrastive Attentive Graph Neural Network for Network Intrusion Detection
Authors: Md Abrar Jahin, Shahriar Soudeep, M. F. Mridha, Raihan Kabir, Md Rashedul Islam, Yutaka Watanobe
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Graph Attention, graph construction, Graph Neural Network, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

Cybersecurity threats are growing, making network intrusion detection essential. Traditional machine learning models remain effective in resource-limited environments due to their efficiency, requiring fewer parameters and less computational time. However, handling short and highly imbalanced datasets remains challenging. In this study, we propose the fusion of a Contrastive Attentive Graph Network and Graph Attention Network (CAGN-GAT Fusion) and benchmark it against 15 other models, including both Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and traditional ML models. Our evaluation is conducted on four benchmark datasets (KDD-CUP-1999, NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and CICIDS2017) using a short and proportionally imbalanced dataset with a constant size of 5000 samples to ensure fairness in comparison. Results show that CAGN-GAT Fusion demonstrates stable and competitive accuracy, recall, and F1-score, even though it does not achieve the highest performance in every dataset. Our analysis also highlights the impact of adaptive graph construction techniques, including small changes in connections (edge perturbation) and selective hiding of features (feature masking), improving detection performance. The findings confirm that GNNs, particularly CAGN-GAT Fusion, are robust and computationally efficient, making them well-suited for resource-constrained environments. Future work will explore GraphSAGE layers and multiview graph construction techniques to further enhance adaptability and detection accuracy.
Molecule Generation for Target Protein Binding with Hierarchical Consistency Diffusion Model
Authors: Guanlue Li, Chenran Jiang, Ziqi Gao, Yu Liu, Chenyang Liu, Jiean Chen, Yong Huang, Jia Li
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design, Drug Discovery, MULTI-VIEW LEARNING

Effective generation of molecular structures, or new chemical entities, that bind to target proteins is crucial for lead identification and optimization in drug discovery. Despite advancements in atom- and motif-wise deep learning models for 3D molecular generation, current methods often struggle with validity and reliability. To address these issues, we develop the Atom-Motif Consistency Diffusion Model (AMDiff), utilizing a joint-training paradigm for multi-view learning. This model features a hierarchical diffusion architecture that integrates both atom- and motif-level views of molecules, allowing for comprehensive exploration of complementary information. By leveraging classifier-free guidance and incorporating binding site features as conditional inputs, AMDiff ensures robust molecule generation across diverse targets. Compared to existing approaches, AMDiff exhibits superior validity and novelty in generating molecules tailored to fit various protein pockets. Case studies targeting protein kinases, including Anaplastic Lymphoma Kinase (ALK) and Cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4), demonstrate the model's capability in structure-based de novo drug design. Overall, AMDiff bridges the gap between atom-view and motif-view drug discovery and speeds up the process of target-aware molecular generation.
Machine Learning for Health symposium 2024 -- Findings track
Authors: Stefan Hegselmann, Helen Zhou, Elizabeth Healey, Trenton Chang, Caleb Ellington, Vishwali Mhasawade, Sana Tonekaboni, Peniel Argaw, Haoran Zhang
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

A collection of the accepted Findings papers that were presented at the 4th Machine Learning for Health symposium (ML4H 2024), which was held on December 15-16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. ML4H 2024 invited high-quality submissions describing innovative research in a variety of health-related disciplines including healthcare, biomedicine, and public health. Works could be submitted to either the archival Proceedings track, or the non-archival Findings track. The Proceedings track targeted mature, cohesive works with technical sophistication and high-impact relevance to health. The Findings track promoted works that would spark new insights, collaborations, and discussions at ML4H. Both tracks were given the opportunity to share their work through the in-person poster session. All the manuscripts submitted to ML4H Symposium underwent a double-blind peer-review process.
Explainable Multi-modal Time Series Prediction with LLM-in-the-Loop
Authors: Yushan Jiang, Wenchao Yu, Geon Lee, Dongjin Song, Kijung Shin, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Haifeng Chen
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Time series analysis provides essential insights for real-world system dynamics and informs downstream decision-making, yet most existing methods often overlook the rich contextual signals present in auxiliary modalities. To bridge this gap, we introduce TimeXL, a multi-modal prediction framework that integrates a prototype-based time series encoder with three collaborating Large Language Models (LLMs) to deliver more accurate predictions and interpretable explanations. First, a multi-modal prototype-based encoder processes both time series and textual inputs to generate preliminary forecasts alongside case-based rationales. These outputs then feed into a prediction LLM, which refines the forecasts by reasoning over the encoder's predictions and explanations. Next, a reflection LLM compares the predicted values against the ground truth, identifying textual inconsistencies or noise. Guided by this feedback, a refinement LLM iteratively enhances text quality and triggers encoder retraining. This closed-loop workflow -- prediction, critique (reflect), and refinement -- continuously boosts the framework's performance and interpretability. Empirical evaluations on four real-world datasets demonstrate that TimeXL achieves up to 8.9\% improvement in AUC and produces human-centric, multi-modal explanations, highlighting the power of LLM-driven reasoning for time series prediction.
Personalize Your LLM: Fake it then Align it
Authors: Yijing Zhang, Dyah Adila, Changho Shin, Frederic Sala
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for delivering tailored interactions that improve user experience. Many existing personalization methods require fine-tuning LLMs for each user, rendering them prohibitively expensive for widespread adoption. Although retrieval-based approaches offer a more compute-efficient alternative, they still depend on large, high-quality datasets that are not consistently available for all users. To address this challenge, we propose CHAMELEON, a scalable and efficient personalization approach that uses (1) self-generated personal preference data and (2) representation editing to enable quick and cost-effective personalization. Our experiments on various tasks, including those from the LaMP personalization benchmark, show that CHAMELEON efficiently adapts models to personal preferences, improving instruction-tuned models and outperforms two personalization baselines by an average of 40% across two model architectures.
ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Party LLM Data Valuation
Authors: Yanzhou Pan, Huawei Lin, Yide Ran, Jiamin Chen, Xiaodong Yu, Weijie Zhao, Denghui Zhang, Zhaozhuo Xu
Date: 2025-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Valuation

Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance, especially when working within a limited budget. In this work, we aim to offer a third-party data valuation approach that benefits both data providers and model developers. We introduce a linearized future influence kernel (LinFiK), which assesses the value of individual data samples in improving LLM performance during training. We further propose ALinFiK, a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK, enabling scalable data valuation. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that this approach surpasses existing baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, demonstrating significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase.
All Roads Lead to Likelihood: The Value of Reinforcement Learning in Fine-Tuning
Authors: Gokul Swamy, Sanjiban Choudhury, Wen Sun, Zhiwei Steven Wu, J. Andrew Bagnell
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on some dataset (e.g. human preferences) before using it to provide online feedback as part of a downstream reinforcement learning (RL) procedure, rather than directly optimizing the policy parameters on the dataset via offline maximum likelihood estimation. In fact, from an information-theoretic perspective, we can only lose information via passing through a reward model and cannot create any new information via on-policy sampling. To explain this discrepancy, we scrutinize several hypotheses on the value of RL in FT through both theoretical and empirical lenses. Of the hypotheses considered, we find the most support for the explanation that on problems with a generation-verification gap, the combination of the ease of learning the relatively simple RM (verifier) from the preference data, coupled with the ability of the downstream RL procedure to then filter its search space to the subset of policies (generators) that are optimal for relatively simple verifiers is what leads to the superior performance of online FT.
Measuring the Validity of Clustering Validation Datasets
Authors: Hyeon Jeon, Michaël Aupetit, Donghwa Shin, Aeri Cho, SeokHyeon Park, Jinwook Seo
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Clustering techniques are often validated using benchmark datasets where class labels are used as ground-truth clusters. However, depending on the datasets, class labels may not align with the actual data clusters, and such misalignment hampers accurate validation. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate and compare datasets regarding their cluster-label matching (CLM), i.e., how well their class labels match actual clusters. Internal validation measures (IVMs), like Silhouette, can compare CLM over different labeling of the same dataset, but are not designed to do so across different datasets. We thus introduce Adjusted IVMs as fast and reliable methods to evaluate and compare CLM across datasets. We establish four axioms that require validation measures to be independent of data properties not related to cluster structure (e.g., dimensionality, dataset size). Then, we develop standardized protocols to convert any IVM to satisfy these axioms, and use these protocols to adjust six widely used IVMs. Quantitative experiments (1) verify the necessity and effectiveness of our protocols and (2) show that adjusted IVMs outperform the competitors, including standard IVMs, in accurately evaluating CLM both within and across datasets. We also show that the datasets can be filtered or improved using our method to form more reliable benchmarks for clustering validation.
Apollo-MILP: An Alternating Prediction-Correction Neural Solving Framework for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming
Authors: Haoyang Liu, Jie Wang, Zijie Geng, Xijun Li, Yuxuan Zong, Fangzhou Zhu, Jianye Hao, Feng Wu
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00

Leveraging machine learning (ML) to predict an initial solution for mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) has gained considerable popularity in recent years. These methods predict a solution and fix a subset of variables to reduce the problem dimension. Then, they solve the reduced problem to obtain the final solutions. However, directly fixing variable values can lead to low-quality solutions or even infeasible reduced problems if the predicted solution is not accurate enough. To address this challenge, we propose an Alternating prediction-correction neural solving framework (Apollo-MILP) that can identify and select accurate and reliable predicted values to fix. In each iteration, Apollo-MILP conducts a prediction step for the unfixed variables, followed by a correction step to obtain an improved solution (called reference solution) through a trust-region search. By incorporating the predicted and reference solutions, we introduce a novel Uncertainty-based Error upper BOund (UEBO) to evaluate the uncertainty of the predicted values and fix those with high confidence. A notable feature of Apollo-MILP is the superior ability for problem reduction while preserving optimality, leading to high-quality final solutions. Experiments on commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed Apollo-MILP significantly outperforms other ML-based approaches in terms of solution quality, achieving over a 50% reduction in the solution gap.
DPR: Diffusion Preference-based Reward for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Teng Pang, Bingzheng Wang, Guoqiang Wu, Yilong Yin
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) mitigates the need for reward definition, aligning with human preferences via preference-driven reward feedback without interacting with the environment. However, the effectiveness of preference-driven reward functions depends on the modeling ability of the learning model, which current MLP-based and Transformer-based methods may fail to adequately provide. To alleviate the failure of the reward function caused by insufficient modeling, we propose a novel preference-based reward acquisition method: Diffusion Preference-based Reward (DPR). Unlike previous methods using Bradley-Terry models for trajectory preferences, we use diffusion models to directly model preference distributions for state-action pairs, allowing rewards to be discriminatively obtained from these distributions. In addition, considering the particularity of preference data that only know the internal relationships of paired trajectories, we further propose Conditional Diffusion Preference-based Reward (C-DPR), which leverages relative preference information to enhance the construction of the diffusion model. We apply the above methods to existing offline reinforcement learning algorithms and a series of experiment results demonstrate that the diffusion-based reward acquisition approach outperforms previous MLP-based and Transformer-based methods.
Unify and Anchor: A Context-Aware Transformer for Cross-Domain Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Xiaobin Hong, Jiawen Zhang, Wenzhong Li, Sanglu Lu, Jia Li
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Mixture-of-Experts, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

The rise of foundation models has revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, yet their best practices to time series forecasting remains underexplored. Existing time series foundation models often adopt methodologies from these fields without addressing the unique characteristics of time series data. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in cross-domain time series forecasting: the complexity of temporal patterns and semantic misalignment. To tackle these issues, we propose the ``Unify and Anchor" transfer paradigm, which disentangles frequency components for a unified perspective and incorporates external context as domain anchors for guided adaptation. Based on this framework, we introduce ContexTST, a Transformer-based model that employs a time series coordinator for structured representation and the Transformer blocks with a context-informed mixture-of-experts mechanism for effective cross-domain generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ContexTST advances state-of-the-art forecasting performance while achieving strong zero-shot transferability across diverse domains.
Differentiable Information Enhanced Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xiaoyuan Zhang, Xinyan Cai, Bo Liu, Weidong Huang, Song-Chun Zhu, Siyuan Qi, Yaodong Yang
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deformable Object Manipulation, model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Differentiable environments have heralded new possibilities for learning control policies by offering rich differentiable information that facilitates gradient-based methods. In comparison to prevailing model-free reinforcement learning approaches, model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) methods exhibit the potential to effectively harness the power of differentiable information for recovering the underlying physical dynamics. However, this presents two primary challenges: effectively utilizing differentiable information to 1) construct models with more accurate dynamic prediction and 2) enhance the stability of policy training. In this paper, we propose a Differentiable Information Enhanced MBRL method, MB-MIX, to address both challenges. Firstly, we adopt a Sobolev model training approach that penalizes incorrect model gradient outputs, enhancing prediction accuracy and yielding more precise models that faithfully capture system dynamics. Secondly, we introduce mixing lengths of truncated learning windows to reduce the variance in policy gradient estimation, resulting in improved stability during policy learning. To validate the effectiveness of our approach in differentiable environments, we provide theoretical analysis and empirical results. Notably, our approach outperforms previous model-based and model-free methods, in multiple challenging tasks involving controllable rigid robots such as humanoid robots' motion control and deformable object manipulation.
Hypergraph Foundation Model
Authors: Yifan Feng, Shiquan Liu, Xiangmin Han, Shaoyi Du, Zongze Wu, Han Hu, Yue Gao
Date: 2025-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, model

Hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) effectively model complex high-order relationships in domains like protein interactions and social networks by connecting multiple vertices through hyperedges, enhancing modeling capabilities, and reducing information loss. Developing foundation models for hypergraphs is challenging due to their distinct data, which includes both vertex features and intricate structural information. We present Hyper-FM, a Hypergraph Foundation Model for multi-domain knowledge extraction, featuring Hierarchical High-Order Neighbor Guided Vertex Knowledge Embedding for vertex feature representation and Hierarchical Multi-Hypergraph Guided Structural Knowledge Extraction for structural information. Additionally, we curate 10 text-attributed hypergraph datasets to advance research between HGNNs and LLMs. Experiments on these datasets show that Hyper-FM outperforms baseline methods by approximately 13.3\%, validating our approach. Furthermore, we propose the first scaling law for hypergraph foundation models, demonstrating that increasing domain diversity significantly enhances performance, unlike merely augmenting vertex and hyperedge counts. This underscores the critical role of domain diversity in scaling hypergraph models.