pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Graph Augmentation for Recommendation
Authors: Qianru Zhang, Lianghao Xia, Xuheng Cai, SiuMing Yiu, Chao Huang, Christian S. Jensen
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Neural Network, Recommendation Systems

Graph augmentation with contrastive learning has gained significant attention in the field of recommendation systems due to its ability to learn expressive user representations, even when labeled data is limited. However, directly applying existing GCL models to real-world recommendation environments poses challenges. There are two primary issues to address. Firstly, the lack of consideration for data noise in contrastive learning can result in noisy self-supervised signals, leading to degraded performance. Secondly, many existing GCL approaches rely on graph neural network (GNN) architectures, which can suffer from over-smoothing problems due to non-adaptive message passing. To address these challenges, we propose a principled framework called GraphAug. This framework introduces a robust data augmentor that generates denoised self-supervised signals, enhancing recommender systems. The GraphAug framework incorporates a graph information bottleneck (GIB)-regularized augmentation paradigm, which automatically distills informative self-supervision information and adaptively adjusts contrastive view generation. Through rigorous experimentation on real-world datasets, we thoroughly assessed the performance of our novel GraphAug model. The outcomes consistently unveil its superiority over existing baseline methods. The source code for our model is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphAug.
A Novel Loss Function-based Support Vector Machine for Binary Classification
Authors: Yan Li, Liping Zhang
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

The previous support vector machine(SVM) including $0/1$ loss SVM, hinge loss SVM, ramp loss SVM, truncated pinball loss SVM, and others, overlooked the degree of penalty for the correctly classified samples within the margin. This oversight affects the generalization ability of the SVM classifier to some extent. To address this limitation, from the perspective of confidence margin, we propose a novel Slide loss function ($\ell_s$) to construct the support vector machine classifier($\ell_s$-SVM). By introducing the concept of proximal stationary point, and utilizing the property of Lipschitz continuity, we derive the first-order optimality conditions for $\ell_s$-SVM. Based on this, we define the $\ell_s$ support vectors and working set of $\ell_s$-SVM. To efficiently handle $\ell_s$-SVM, we devise a fast alternating direction method of multipliers with the working set ($\ell_s$-ADMM), and provide the convergence analysis. The numerical experiments on real world datasets confirm the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap with Bayesian Inference
Authors: Jonas Rothfuss, Bhavya Sukhija, Lenart Treven, Florian Dörfler, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Uncertainty Quantification

We present SIM-FSVGD for learning robot dynamics from data. As opposed to traditional methods, SIM-FSVGD leverages low-fidelity physical priors, e.g., in the form of simulators, to regularize the training of neural network models. While learning accurate dynamics already in the low data regime, SIM-FSVGD scales and excels also when more data is available. We empirically show that learning with implicit physical priors results in accurate mean model estimation as well as precise uncertainty quantification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SIM-FSVGD in bridging the sim-to-real gap on a high-performance RC racecar system. Using model-based RL, we demonstrate a highly dynamic parking maneuver with drifting, using less than half the data compared to the state of the art.
A comparative analysis of embedding models for patent similarity
Authors: Grazia Sveva Ascione, Valerio Sterzi
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Sentence, Word Embeddings

This paper makes two contributions to the field of text-based patent similarity. First, it compares the performance of different kinds of patent-specific pretrained embedding models, namely static word embeddings (such as word2vec and doc2vec models) and contextual word embeddings (such as transformers based models), on the task of patent similarity calculation. Second, it compares specifically the performance of Sentence Transformers (SBERT) architectures with different training phases on the patent similarity task. To assess the models' performance, we use information about patent interferences, a phenomenon in which two or more patent claims belonging to different patent applications are proven to be overlapping by patent examiners. Therefore, we use these interferences cases as a proxy for maximum similarity between two patents, treating them as ground-truth to evaluate the performance of the different embedding models. Our results point out that, first, Patent SBERT-adapt-ub, the domain adaptation of the pretrained Sentence Transformer architecture proposed in this research, outperforms the current state-of-the-art in patent similarity. Second, they show that, in some cases, large static models performances are still comparable to contextual ones when trained on extensive data; thus, we believe that the superiority in the performance of contextual embeddings may not be related to the actual architecture but rather to the way the training phase is performed.
Distributed collaborative anomalous sound detection by embedding sharing
Authors: Kota Dohi, Yohei Kawaguchi
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

To develop a machine sound monitoring system, a method for detecting anomalous sound is proposed. In this paper, we explore a method for multiple clients to collaboratively learn an anomalous sound detection model while keeping their raw data private from each other. In the context of industrial machine anomalous sound detection, each client possesses data from different machines or different operational states, making it challenging to learn through federated learning or split learning. In our proposed method, each client calculates embeddings using a common pre-trained model developed for sound data classification, and these calculated embeddings are aggregated on the server to perform anomalous sound detection through outlier exposure. Experiments showed that our proposed method improves the AUC of anomalous sound detection by an average of 6.8%.
Antigen-Specific Antibody Design via Direct Energy-based Preference Optimization
Authors: Xiangxin Zhou, Dongyu Xue, Ruizhe Chen, Zaixiang Zheng, Liang Wang, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00

Antibody design, a crucial task with significant implications across various disciplines such as therapeutics and biology, presents considerable challenges due to its intricate nature. In this paper, we tackle antigen-specific antibody sequence-structure co-design as an optimization problem towards specific preferences, considering both rationality and functionality. Leveraging a pre-trained conditional diffusion model that jointly models sequences and structures of antibodies with equivariant neural networks, we propose direct energy-based preference optimization to guide the generation of antibodies with both rational structures and considerable binding affinities to given antigens. Our method involves fine-tuning the pre-trained diffusion model using a residue-level decomposed energy preference. Additionally, we employ gradient surgery to address conflicts between various types of energy, such as attraction and repulsion. Experiments on RAbD benchmark show that our approach effectively optimizes the energy of generated antibodies and achieves state-of-the-art performance in designing high-quality antibodies with low total energy and high binding affinity simultaneously, demonstrating the superiority of our approach.
Accelerating Federated Learning by Selecting Beneficial Herd of Local Gradients
Authors: Ping Luo, Xiaoge Deng, Ziqing Wen, Tao Sun, Dongsheng Li
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning framework in communication network systems. However, the systems' Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (Non-IID) data negatively affect the convergence efficiency of the global model, since only a subset of these data samples are beneficial for model convergence. In pursuit of this subset, a reliable approach involves determining a measure of validity to rank the samples within the dataset. In this paper, We propose the BHerd strategy which selects a beneficial herd of local gradients to accelerate the convergence of the FL model. Specifically, we map the distribution of the local dataset to the local gradients and use the Herding strategy to obtain a permutation of the set of gradients, where the more advanced gradients in the permutation are closer to the average of the set of gradients. These top portion of the gradients will be selected and sent to the server for global aggregation. We conduct experiments on different datasets, models and scenarios by building a prototype system, and experimental results demonstrate that our BHerd strategy is effective in selecting beneficial local gradients to mitigate the effects brought by the Non-IID dataset, thus accelerating model convergence.
Differentially Private Online Federated Learning with Correlated Noise
Authors: Jiaojiao Zhang, Linglingzhi Zhu, Mikael Johansson
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

We introduce a novel differentially private algorithm for online federated learning that employs temporally correlated noise to enhance utility while ensuring privacy of continuously released models. To address challenges posed by DP noise and local updates with streaming non-iid data, we develop a perturbed iterate analysis to control the impact of the DP noise on the utility. Moreover, we demonstrate how the drift errors from local updates can be effectively managed under a quasi-strong convexity condition. Subject to an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP budget, we establish a dynamic regret bound over the entire time horizon, quantifying the impact of key parameters and the intensity of changes in dynamic environments. Numerical experiments confirm the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.
Human Understanding AI Paper Challenge 2024 -- Dataset Design
Authors: Se Won Oh, Hyuntae Jeong, Jeong Mook Lim, Seungeun Chung, Kyoung Ju Noh
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00

In 2024, we will hold a research paper competition (the third Human Understanding AI Paper Challenge) for the research and development of artificial intelligence technologies to understand human daily life. This document introduces the datasets that will be provided to participants in the competition, and summarizes the issues to consider in data processing and learning model development.
Determined Multi-Label Learning via Similarity-Based Prompt
Authors: Meng Wei, Zhongnian Li, Peng Ying, Yong Zhou, Xinzheng Xu
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-Label Learning, Prompt Learning

In multi-label classification, each training instance is associated with multiple class labels simultaneously. Unfortunately, collecting the fully precise class labels for each training instance is time- and labor-consuming for real-world applications. To alleviate this problem, a novel labeling setting termed \textit{Determined Multi-Label Learning} (DMLL) is proposed, aiming to effectively alleviate the labeling cost inherent in multi-label tasks. In this novel labeling setting, each training instance is associated with a \textit{determined label} (either "Yes" or "No"), which indicates whether the training instance contains the provided class label. The provided class label is randomly and uniformly selected from the whole candidate labels set. Besides, each training instance only need to be determined once, which significantly reduce the annotation cost of the labeling task for multi-label datasets. In this paper, we theoretically derive an risk-consistent estimator to learn a multi-label classifier from these determined-labeled training data. Additionally, we introduce a similarity-based prompt learning method for the first time, which minimizes the risk-consistent loss of large-scale pre-trained models to learn a supplemental prompt with richer semantic information. Extensive experimental validation underscores the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
Learning from Reduced Labels for Long-Tailed Data
Authors: Meng Wei, Zhongnian Li, Yong Zhou, Xinzheng Xu
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Weakly-supervised Learning

Long-tailed data is prevalent in real-world classification tasks and heavily relies on supervised information, which makes the annotation process exceptionally labor-intensive and time-consuming. Unfortunately, despite being a common approach to mitigate labeling costs, existing weakly supervised learning methods struggle to adequately preserve supervised information for tail samples, resulting in a decline in accuracy for the tail classes. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel weakly supervised labeling setting called Reduced Label. The proposed labeling setting not only avoids the decline of supervised information for the tail samples, but also decreases the labeling costs associated with long-tailed data. Additionally, we propose an straightforward and highly efficient unbiased framework with strong theoretical guarantees to learn from these Reduced Labels. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets including ImageNet validate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods.
Training Generative Adversarial Network-Based Vocoder with Limited Data Using Augmentation-Conditional Discriminator
Authors: Takuhiro Kaneko, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Speech Synthesis

A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based vocoder trained with an adversarial discriminator is commonly used for speech synthesis because of its fast, lightweight, and high-quality characteristics. However, this data-driven model requires a large amount of training data incurring high data-collection costs. This fact motivates us to train a GAN-based vocoder on limited data. A promising solution is to augment the training data to avoid overfitting. However, a standard discriminator is unconditional and insensitive to distributional changes caused by data augmentation. Thus, augmented speech (which can be extraordinary) may be considered real speech. To address this issue, we propose an augmentation-conditional discriminator (AugCondD) that receives the augmentation state as input in addition to speech, thereby assessing the input speech according to the augmentation state, without inhibiting the learning of the original non-augmented distribution. Experimental results indicate that AugCondD improves speech quality under limited data conditions while achieving comparable speech quality under sufficient data conditions. Audio samples are available at https://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/people/kaneko.takuhiro/projects/augcondd/.
On the rates of convergence for learning with convolutional neural networks
Authors: Yunfei Yang, Han Feng, Ding-Xuan Zhou
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

We study approximation and learning capacities of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with one-side zero-padding and multiple channels. Our first result proves a new approximation bound for CNNs with certain constraint on the weights. Our second result gives new analysis on the covering number of feed-forward neural networks with CNNs as special cases. The analysis carefully takes into account the size of the weights and hence gives better bounds than the existing literature in some situations. Using these two results, we are able to derive rates of convergence for estimators based on CNNs in many learning problems. In particular, we establish minimax optimal convergence rates of the least squares based on CNNs for learning smooth functions in the nonparametric regression setting. For binary classification, we derive convergence rates for CNN classifiers with hinge loss and logistic loss. It is also shown that the obtained rates for classification are minimax optimal in some common settings.
Physics-informed RL for Maximal Safety Probability Estimation
Authors: Hikaru Hoshino, Yorie Nakahira
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Accurate risk quantification and reachability analysis are crucial for safe control and learning, but sampling from rare events, risky states, or long-term trajectories can be prohibitively costly. Motivated by this, we study how to estimate the long-term safety probability of maximally safe actions without sufficient coverage of samples from risky states and long-term trajectories. The use of maximal safety probability in control and learning is expected to avoid conservative behaviors due to over-approximation of risk. Here, we first show that long-term safety probability, which is multiplicative in time, can be converted into additive costs and be solved using standard reinforcement learning methods. We then derive this probability as solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) and propose Physics-Informed Reinforcement Learning (PIRL) algorithm. The proposed method can learn using sparse rewards because the physics constraints help propagate risk information through neighbors. This suggests that, for the purpose of extracting more information for efficient learning, physics constraints can serve as an alternative to reward shaping. The proposed method can also estimate long-term risk using short-term samples and deduce the risk of unsampled states. This feature is in stark contrast with the unconstrained deep RL that demands sufficient data coverage. These merits of the proposed method are demonstrated in numerical simulation.
Real-time Adaptation for Condition Monitoring Signal Prediction using Label-aware Neural Processes
Authors: Seokhyun Chung, Raed Al Kontar
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Building a predictive model that rapidly adapts to real-time condition monitoring (CM) signals is critical for engineering systems/units. Unfortunately, many current methods suffer from a trade-off between representation power and agility in online settings. For instance, parametric methods that assume an underlying functional form for CM signals facilitate efficient online prediction updates. However, this simplification leads to vulnerability to model specifications and an inability to capture complex signals. On the other hand, approaches based on over-parameterized or non-parametric models can excel at explaining complex nonlinear signals, but real-time updates for such models pose a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a neural process-based approach that addresses this trade-off. It encodes available observations within a CM signal into a representation space and then reconstructs the signal's history and evolution for prediction. Once trained, the model can encode an arbitrary number of observations without requiring retraining, enabling on-the-spot real-time predictions along with quantified uncertainty and can be readily updated as more online data is gathered. Furthermore, our model is designed to incorporate qualitative information (i.e., labels) from individual units. This integration not only enhances individualized predictions for each unit but also enables joint inference for both signals and their associated labels. Numerical studies on both synthetic and real-world data in reliability engineering highlight the advantageous features of our model in real-time adaptation, enhanced signal prediction with uncertainty quantification, and joint prediction for labels and signals.
ProIn: Learning to Predict Trajectory Based on Progressive Interactions for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yinke Dong, Haifeng Yuan, Hongkun Liu, Wei Jing, Fangzhen Li, Hongmin Liu, Bin Fan
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, motion prediction

Accurate motion prediction of pedestrians, cyclists, and other surrounding vehicles (all called agents) is very important for autonomous driving. Most existing works capture map information through an one-stage interaction with map by vector-based attention, to provide map constraints for social interaction and multi-modal differentiation. However, these methods have to encode all required map rules into the focal agent's feature, so as to retain all possible intentions' paths while at the meantime to adapt to potential social interaction. In this work, a progressive interaction network is proposed to enable the agent's feature to progressively focus on relevant maps, in order to better learn agents' feature representation capturing the relevant map constraints. The network progressively encode the complex influence of map constraints into the agent's feature through graph convolutions at the following three stages: after historical trajectory encoder, after social interaction, and after multi-modal differentiation. In addition, a weight allocation mechanism is proposed for multi-modal training, so that each mode can obtain learning opportunities from a single-mode ground truth. Experiments have validated the superiority of progressive interactions to the existing one-stage interaction, and demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. Encouraging results were obtained in the challenging benchmarks.
SignSGD with Federated Voting
Authors: Chanho Park, H. Vincent Poor, Namyoon Lee
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Distributed learning is commonly used for accelerating model training by harnessing the computational capabilities of multiple-edge devices. However, in practical applications, the communication delay emerges as a bottleneck due to the substantial information exchange required between workers and a central parameter server. SignSGD with majority voting (signSGD-MV) is an effective distributed learning algorithm that can significantly reduce communication costs by one-bit quantization. However, due to heterogeneous computational capabilities, it fails to converge when the mini-batch sizes differ among workers. To overcome this, we propose a novel signSGD optimizer with \textit{federated voting} (signSGD-FV). The idea of federated voting is to exploit learnable weights to perform weighted majority voting. The server learns the weights assigned to the edge devices in an online fashion based on their computational capabilities. Subsequently, these weights are employed to decode the signs of the aggregated local gradients in such a way to minimize the sign decoding error probability. We provide a unified convergence rate analysis framework applicable to scenarios where the estimated weights are known to the parameter server either perfectly or imperfectly. We demonstrate that the proposed signSGD-FV algorithm has a theoretical convergence guarantee even when edge devices use heterogeneous mini-batch sizes. Experimental results show that signSGD-FV outperforms signSGD-MV, exhibiting a faster convergence rate, especially in heterogeneous mini-batch sizes.