pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Precision Glass Thermoforming Assisted by Neural Networks
Authors: Yuzhou Zhang, Mohan Hua, Jinan Liu, Haihui Ruan
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Many glass products require thermoformed geometry with high precision. However, the traditional approach of developing a thermoforming process through trials and errors can cause large waste of time and resources and often end up with unsuccessfulness. Hence, there is a need to develop an efficient predictive model, replacing the costly simulations or experiments, to assist the design of precision glass thermoforming. In this work, we report a surrogate model, based on a dimensionless back-propagation neural network (BPNN), that can adequately predict the form errors and thus compensate for these errors in mold design using geometric features and process parameters as inputs. Our trials with simulation and industrial data indicate that the surrogate model can predict forming errors with adequate accuracy. Although perception errors (mold designers' decisions) and mold fabrication errors make the industrial training data less reliable than simulation data, our preliminary training and testing results still achieved a reasonable consistency with industrial data, suggesting that the surrogate models are directly implementable in the glass-manufacturing industry.
Neuromodulated Meta-Learning
Authors: Jingyao Wang, Huijie Guo, Wenwen Qiang, Jiangmeng Li, Changwen Zheng, Hui Xiong, Gang Hua
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Humans excel at adapting perceptions and actions to diverse environments, enabling efficient interaction with the external world. This adaptive capability relies on the biological nervous system (BNS), which activates different brain regions for distinct tasks. Meta-learning similarly trains machines to handle multiple tasks but relies on a fixed network structure, not as flexible as BNS. To investigate the role of flexible network structure (FNS) in meta-learning, we conduct extensive empirical and theoretical analyses, finding that model performance is tied to structure, with no universally optimal pattern across tasks. This reveals the crucial role of FNS in meta-learning, ensuring meta-learning to generate the optimal structure for each task, thereby maximizing the performance and learning efficiency of meta-learning. Motivated by this insight, we propose to define, measure, and model FNS in meta-learning. First, we define that an effective FNS should possess frugality, plasticity, and sensitivity. Then, to quantify FNS in practice, we present three measurements for these properties, collectively forming the \emph{structure constraint} with theoretical supports. Building on this, we finally propose Neuromodulated Meta-Learning (NeuronML) to model FNS in meta-learning. It utilizes bi-level optimization to update both weights and structure with the structure constraint. Extensive theoretical and empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of NeuronML on various tasks. Code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/WangJingyao07/NeuronML}{https://github.com/WangJingyao07/NeuronML}.
Methane projections from Canada's oil sands tailings using scientific deep learning reveal significant underestimation
Authors: Esha Saha, Oscar Wang, Amit K. Chakraborty, Pablo Venegas Garcia, Russell Milne, Hao Wang
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Bitumen extraction for the production of synthetic crude oil in Canada's Athabasca Oil Sands industry has recently come under spotlight for being a significant source of greenhouse gas emission. A major cause of concern is methane, a greenhouse gas produced by the anaerobic biodegradation of hydrocarbons in oil sands residues, or tailings, stored in settle basins commonly known as oil sands tailing ponds. In order to determine the methane emitting potential of these tailing ponds and have future methane projections, we use real-time weather data, mechanistic models developed from laboratory controlled experiments, and industrial reports to train a physics constrained machine learning model. Our trained model can successfully identify the directions of active ponds and estimate their emission levels, which are generally hard to obtain due to data sampling restrictions. We found that each active oil sands tailing pond could emit between 950 to 1500 tonnes of methane per year, whose environmental impact is equivalent to carbon dioxide emissions from at least 6000 gasoline powered vehicles. Although abandoned ponds are often presumed to have insignificant emissions, our findings indicate that these ponds could become active over time and potentially emit up to 1000 tonnes of methane each year. Taking an average over all datasets that was used in model training, we estimate that emissions around major oil sands regions would need to be reduced by approximately 12% over a year, to reduce the average methane concentrations to 2005 levels.
Beating Adversarial Low-Rank MDPs with Unknown Transition and Bandit Feedback
Authors: Haolin Liu, Zakaria Mhammedi, Chen-Yu Wei, Julian Zimmert
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

We consider regret minimization in low-rank MDPs with fixed transition and adversarial losses. Previous work has investigated this problem under either full-information loss feedback with unknown transitions (Zhao et al., 2024), or bandit loss feedback with known transition (Foster et al., 2022). First, we improve the $poly(d, A, H)T^{5/6}$ regret bound of Zhao et al. (2024) to $poly(d, A, H)T^{2/3}$ for the full-information unknown transition setting, where d is the rank of the transitions, A is the number of actions, H is the horizon length, and T is the number of episodes. Next, we initiate the study on the setting with bandit loss feedback and unknown transitions. Assuming that the loss has a linear structure, we propose both model based and model free algorithms achieving $poly(d, A, H)T^{2/3}$ regret, though they are computationally inefficient. We also propose oracle-efficient model-free algorithms with $poly(d, A, H)T^{4/5}$ regret. We show that the linear structure is necessary for the bandit case without structure on the reward function, the regret has to scale polynomially with the number of states. This is contrary to the full-information case (Zhao et al., 2024), where the regret can be independent of the number of states even for unstructured reward function.
MrSteve: Instruction-Following Agents in Minecraft with What-Where-When Memory
Authors: Junyeong Park, Junmo Cho, Sungjin Ahn
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Minecraft

Significant advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied AI in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. While these approaches, which combine high-level planners with low-level controllers, show promise, low-level controllers frequently become performance bottlenecks due to repeated failures. In this paper, we argue that the primary cause of failure in many low-level controllers is the absence of an episodic memory system. To address this, we introduce MrSteve (Memory Recall Steve-1), a novel low-level controller equipped with Place Event Memory (PEM), a form of episodic memory that captures what, where, and when information from episodes. This directly addresses the main limitation of the popular low-level controller, Steve-1. Unlike previous models that rely on short-term memory, PEM organizes spatial and event-based data, enabling efficient recall and navigation in long-horizon tasks. Additionally, we propose an Exploration Strategy and a Memory-Augmented Task Solving Framework, allowing agents to alternate between exploration and task-solving based on recalled events. Our approach significantly improves task-solving and exploration efficiency compared to existing methods. We will release our code and demos on the project page: https://sites.google.com/view/mr-steve.
GSL-PCD: Improving Generalist-Specialist Learning with Point Cloud Feature-based Task Partitioning
Authors: Xiu Yuan
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) across unseen environment variations often requires training over a diverse set of scenarios. Many existing DRL algorithms struggle with efficiency when handling numerous variations. The Generalist-Specialist Learning (GSL) framework addresses this by first training a generalist model on all variations, then creating specialists from the generalist's weights, each focusing on a subset of variations. The generalist then refines its learning with assistance from the specialists. However, random task partitioning in GSL can impede performance by assigning vastly different variations to the same specialist, often resulting in each specialist focusing on only one variation, which raises computational costs. To improve this, we propose Generalist-Specialist Learning with Point Cloud Feature-based Task Partitioning (GSL-PCD). Our approach clusters environment variations based on features extracted from object point clouds and uses balanced clustering with a greedy algorithm to assign similar variations to the same specialist. Evaluations on robotic manipulation tasks from the ManiSkill benchmark demonstrate that point cloud feature-based partitioning outperforms vanilla partitioning by 9.4%, with a fixed number of specialists, and reduces computational and sample requirements by 50% to achieve comparable performance.
Real-time Monitoring and Analysis of Track and Field Athletes Based on Edge Computing and Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
Authors: Xiaowei Tang, Bin Long, Li Zhou
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Edge-computing

This research focuses on real-time monitoring and analysis of track and field athletes, addressing the limitations of traditional monitoring systems in terms of real-time performance and accuracy. We propose an IoT-optimized system that integrates edge computing and deep learning algorithms. Traditional systems often experience delays and reduced accuracy when handling complex motion data, whereas our method, by incorporating a SAC-optimized deep learning model within the IoT architecture, achieves efficient motion recognition and real-time feedback. Experimental results show that this system significantly outperforms traditional methods in response time, data processing accuracy, and energy efficiency, particularly excelling in complex track and field events. This research not only enhances the precision and efficiency of athlete monitoring but also provides new technical support and application prospects for sports science research.
Truth, beauty, and goodness in grand unification: a machine learning approach
Authors: Shinsuke Kawai, Nobuchika Okada
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

We investigate the flavour sector of the supersymmetric $SU(5)$ Grand Unified Theory (GUT) model using machine learning techniques. The minimal $SU(5)$ model is known to predict fermion masses that disagree with observed values in nature. There are two well-known approaches to address this issue: one involves introducing a 45-representation Higgs field, while the other employs a higher-dimensional operator involving the 24-representation GUT Higgs field. We compare these two approaches by numerically optimising a loss function, defined as the ratio of determinants of mass matrices. Our findings indicate that the 24-Higgs approach achieves the observed fermion masses with smaller modifications to the original minimal $SU(5)$ model.
Learning a Single Neuron Robustly to Distributional Shifts and Adversarial Label Noise
Authors: Shuyao Li, Sushrut Karmalkar, Ilias Diakonikolas, Jelena Diakonikolas
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

We study the problem of learning a single neuron with respect to the $L_2^2$-loss in the presence of adversarial distribution shifts, where the labels can be arbitrary, and the goal is to find a ``best-fit'' function. More precisely, given training samples from a reference distribution $\mathcal{p}_0$, the goal is to approximate the vector $\mathbf{w}^*$ which minimizes the squared loss with respect to the worst-case distribution that is close in $\chi^2$-divergence to $\mathcal{p}_{0}$. We design a computationally efficient algorithm that recovers a vector $ \hat{\mathbf{w}}$ satisfying $\mathbb{E}_{\mathcal{p}^*} (\sigma(\hat{\mathbf{w}} \cdot \mathbf{x}) - y)^2 \leq C \, \mathbb{E}_{\mathcal{p}^*} (\sigma(\mathbf{w}^* \cdot \mathbf{x}) - y)^2 + \epsilon$, where $C>1$ is a dimension-independent constant and $(\mathbf{w}^*, \mathcal{p}^*)$ is the witness attaining the min-max risk $\min_{\mathbf{w}~:~\|\mathbf{w}\| \leq W} \max_{\mathcal{p}} \mathbb{E}_{(\mathbf{x}, y) \sim \mathcal{p}} (\sigma(\mathbf{w} \cdot \mathbf{x}) - y)^2 - \nu \chi^2(\mathcal{p}, \mathcal{p}_0)$. Our algorithm follows a primal-dual framework and is designed by directly bounding the risk with respect to the original, nonconvex $L_2^2$ loss. From an optimization standpoint, our work opens new avenues for the design of primal-dual algorithms under structured nonconvexity.
Shedding Light on Problems with Hyperbolic Graph Learning
Authors: Isay Katsman, Anna Gilbert
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Recent papers in the graph machine learning literature have introduced a number of approaches for hyperbolic representation learning. The asserted benefits are improved performance on a variety of graph tasks, node classification and link prediction included. Claims have also been made about the geometric suitability of particular hierarchical graph datasets to representation in hyperbolic space. Despite these claims, our work makes a surprising discovery: when simple Euclidean models with comparable numbers of parameters are properly trained in the same environment, in most cases, they perform as well, if not better, than all introduced hyperbolic graph representation learning models, even on graph datasets previously claimed to be the most hyperbolic as measured by Gromov $\delta$-hyperbolicity (i.e., perfect trees). This observation gives rise to a simple question: how can this be? We answer this question by taking a careful look at the field of hyperbolic graph representation learning as it stands today, and find that a number of papers fail to diligently present baselines, make faulty modelling assumptions when constructing algorithms, and use misleading metrics to quantify geometry of graph datasets. We take a closer look at each of these three problems, elucidate the issues, perform an analysis of methods, and introduce a parametric family of benchmark datasets to ascertain the applicability of (hyperbolic) graph neural networks.
Bridge: A Unified Framework to Knowledge Graph Completion via Language Models and Knowledge Representation
Authors: Qiao Qiao, Yuepei Li, Qing Wang, Kang Zhou, Qi Li
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graphs, Representation Learning

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) is a task of inferring missing triples based on existing Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Both structural and semantic information are vital for successful KGC. However, existing methods only use either the structural knowledge from the KG embeddings or the semantic information from pre-trained language models (PLMs), leading to suboptimal model performance. Moreover, since PLMs are not trained on KGs, directly using PLMs to encode triples may be inappropriate. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework called Bridge, which jointly encodes structural and semantic information of KGs. Specifically, we strategically encode entities and relations separately by PLMs to better utilize the semantic knowledge of PLMs and enable structured representation learning via a structural learning principle. Furthermore, to bridge the gap between KGs and PLMs, we employ a self-supervised representation learning method called BYOL to fine-tune PLMs with two different views of a triple. Unlike BYOL, which uses augmentation methods to create two semantically similar views of the same image, potentially altering the semantic information. We strategically separate the triple into two parts to create different views, thus avoiding semantic alteration. Experiments demonstrate that Bridge outperforms the SOTA models on three benchmark datasets.
Quantum Policy Gradient in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space
Authors: David M. Bossens, Kishor Bharti, Jayne Thompson
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Parametrised quantum circuits offer expressive and data-efficient representations for machine learning. Due to quantum states residing in a high-dimensional Hilbert space, parametrised quantum circuits have a natural interpretation in terms of kernel methods. The representation of quantum circuits in terms of quantum kernels has been studied widely in quantum supervised learning, but has been overlooked in the context of quantum RL. This paper proposes parametric and non-parametric policy gradient and actor-critic algorithms with quantum kernel policies in quantum environments. This approach, implemented with both numerical and analytical quantum policy gradient techniques, allows exploiting the many advantages of kernel methods, including data-driven forms for functions (and their gradients) as well as tunable expressiveness. The proposed approach is suitable for vector-valued action spaces and each of the formulations demonstrates a quadratic reduction in query complexity compared to their classical counterparts. Two actor-critic algorithms, one based on stochastic policy gradient and one based on deterministic policy gradient (comparable to the popular DDPG algorithm), demonstrate additional query complexity reductions compared to quantum policy gradient algorithms under favourable conditions.
A Novel Combined Data-Driven Approach for Electricity Theft Detection
Authors: Kedi Zheng, Qixin Chen, Yi Wang, Chongqing Kang, Qing Xia
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

The two-way flow of information and energy is an important feature of the Energy Internet. Data analytics is a powerful tool in the information flow that aims to solve practical problems using data mining techniques. As the problem of electricity thefts via tampering with smart meters continues to increase, the abnormal behaviors of thefts become more diversified and more difficult to detect. Thus, a data analytics method for detecting various types of electricity thefts is required. However, the existing methods either require a labeled dataset or additional system information which is difficult to obtain in reality or have poor detection accuracy. In this paper, we combine two novel data mining techniques to solve the problem. One technique is the Maximum Information Coefficient (MIC), which can find the correlations between the non-technical loss (NTL) and a certain electricity behavior of the consumer. MIC can be used to precisely detect thefts that appear normal in shapes. The other technique is the clustering technique by fast search and find of density peaks (CFSFDP). CFSFDP finds the abnormal users among thousands of load profiles, making it quite suitable for detecting electricity thefts with arbitrary shapes. Next, a framework for combining the advantages of the two techniques is proposed. Numerical experiments on the Irish smart meter dataset are conducted to show the good performance of the combined method.
scMEDAL for the interpretable analysis of single-cell transcriptomics data with batch effect visualization using a deep mixed effects autoencoder
Authors: Aixa X. Andrade, Son Nguyen, Albert Montillo
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

scRNA-seq data has the potential to provide new insights into cellular heterogeneity and data acquisition; however, a major challenge is unraveling confounding from technical and biological batch effects. Existing batch correction algorithms suppress and discard these effects, rather than quantifying and modeling them. Here, we present scMEDAL, a framework for single-cell Mixed Effects Deep Autoencoder Learning, which separately models batch-invariant and batch-specific effects using two complementary autoencoder networks. One network is trained through adversarial learning to capture a batch-invariant representation, while a Bayesian autoencoder learns a batch-specific representation. Comprehensive evaluations spanning conditions (e.g., autism, leukemia, and cardiovascular), cell types, and technical and biological effects demonstrate that scMEDAL suppresses batch effects while modeling batch-specific variation, enhancing accuracy and interpretability. Unlike prior approaches, the framework's fixed- and random-effects autoencoders enable retrospective analyses, including predicting a cell's expression as if it had been acquired in a different batch via genomap projections at the cellular level, revealing the impact of biological (e.g., diagnosis) and technical (e.g., acquisition) effects. By combining scMEDAL's batch-agnostic and batch-specific latent spaces, it enables more accurate predictions of disease status, donor group, and cell type, making scMEDAL a valuable framework for gaining deeper insight into data acquisition and cellular heterogeneity.
Inductive Graph Few-shot Class Incremental Learning
Authors: Yayong Li, Peyman Moghadam, Can Peng, Nan Ye, Piotr Koniusz
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning, Node Classification

Node classification with Graph Neural Networks (GNN) under a fixed set of labels is well known in contrast to Graph Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (GFSCIL), which involves learning a GNN classifier as graph nodes and classes growing over time sporadically. We introduce inductive GFSCIL that continually learns novel classes with newly emerging nodes while maintaining performance on old classes without accessing previous data. This addresses the practical concern of transductive GFSCIL, which requires storing the entire graph with historical data. Compared to the transductive GFSCIL, the inductive setting exacerbates catastrophic forgetting due to inaccessible previous data during incremental training, in addition to overfitting issue caused by label sparsity. Thus, we propose a novel method, called Topology-based class Augmentation and Prototype calibration (TAP). To be specific, it first creates a triple-branch multi-topology class augmentation method to enhance model generalization ability. As each incremental session receives a disjoint subgraph with nodes of novel classes, the multi-topology class augmentation method helps replicate such a setting in the base session to boost backbone versatility. In incremental learning, given the limited number of novel class samples, we propose an iterative prototype calibration to improve the separation of class prototypes. Furthermore, as backbone fine-tuning poses the feature distribution drift, prototypes of old classes start failing over time, we propose the prototype shift method for old classes to compensate for the drift. We showcase the proposed method on four datasets.