pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Representation Alignment from Human Feedback for Cross-Embodiment Reward Learning from Mixed-Quality Demonstrations
Authors: Connor Mattson, Anurag Aribandi, Daniel S. Brown
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

We study the problem of cross-embodiment inverse reinforcement learning, where we wish to learn a reward function from video demonstrations in one or more embodiments and then transfer the learned reward to a different embodiment (e.g., different action space, dynamics, size, shape, etc.). Learning reward functions that transfer across embodiments is important in settings such as teaching a robot a policy via human video demonstrations or teaching a robot to imitate a policy from another robot with a different embodiment. However, prior work has only focused on cases where near-optimal demonstrations are available, which is often difficult to ensure. By contrast, we study the setting of cross-embodiment reward learning from mixed-quality demonstrations. We demonstrate that prior work struggles to learn generalizable reward representations when learning from mixed-quality data. We then analyze several techniques that leverage human feedback for representation learning and alignment to enable effective cross-embodiment learning. Our results give insight into how different representation learning techniques lead to qualitatively different reward shaping behaviors and the importance of human feedback when learning from mixed-quality, mixed-embodiment data.
Mitigating Metropolitan Carbon Emissions with Dynamic Eco-driving at Scale
Authors: Vindula Jayawardana, Baptiste Freydt, Ao Qu, Cameron Hickert, Edgar Sanchez, Catherine Tang, Mark Taylor, Blaine Leonard, Cathy Wu
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Reinforcement Learning

The sheer scale and diversity of transportation make it a formidable sector to decarbonize. Here, we consider an emerging opportunity to reduce carbon emissions: the growing adoption of semi-autonomous vehicles, which can be programmed to mitigate stop-and-go traffic through intelligent speed commands and, thus, reduce emissions. But would such dynamic eco-driving move the needle on climate change? A comprehensive impact analysis has been out of reach due to the vast array of traffic scenarios and the complexity of vehicle emissions. We address this challenge with large-scale scenario modeling efforts and by using multi-task deep reinforcement learning with a carefully designed network decomposition strategy. We perform an in-depth prospective impact assessment of dynamic eco-driving at 6,011 signalized intersections across three major US metropolitan cities, simulating a million traffic scenarios. Overall, we find that vehicle trajectories optimized for emissions can cut city-wide intersection carbon emissions by 11-22%, without harming throughput or safety, and with reasonable assumptions, equivalent to the national emissions of Israel and Nigeria, respectively. We find that 10% eco-driving adoption yields 25%-50% of the total reduction, and nearly 70% of the benefits come from 20% of intersections, suggesting near-term implementation pathways. However, the composition of this high-impact subset of intersections varies considerably across different adoption levels, with minimal overlap, calling for careful strategic planning for eco-driving deployments. Moreover, the impact of eco-driving, when considered jointly with projections of vehicle electrification and hybrid vehicle adoption remains significant. More broadly, this work paves the way for large-scale analysis of traffic externalities, such as time, safety, and air quality, and the potential impact of solution strategies.
Exploring Applications of State Space Models and Advanced Training Techniques in Sequential Recommendations: A Comparative Study on Efficiency and Performance
Authors: Mark Obozov, Makar Baderko, Stepan Kulibaba, Nikolay Kutuzov, Alexander Gasnikov
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, State Space Models

Recommender systems aim to estimate the dynamically changing user preferences and sequential dependencies between historical user behaviour and metadata. Although transformer-based models have proven to be effective in sequential recommendations, their state growth is proportional to the length of the sequence that is being processed, which makes them expensive in terms of memory and inference costs. Our research focused on three promising directions in sequential recommendations: enhancing speed through the use of State Space Models (SSM), as they can achieve SOTA results in the sequential recommendations domain with lower latency, memory, and inference costs, as proposed by arXiv:2403.03900 improving the quality of recommendations with Large Language Models (LLMs) via Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model (ORPO); and implementing adaptive batch- and step-size algorithms to reduce costs and accelerate training processes.
Sequential Representation Learning via Static-Dynamic Conditional Disentanglement
Authors: Mathieu Cyrille Simon, Pascal Frossard, Christophe De Vleeschouwer
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Representation Learning

This paper explores self-supervised disentangled representation learning within sequential data, focusing on separating time-independent and time-varying factors in videos. We propose a new model that breaks the usual independence assumption between those factors by explicitly accounting for the causal relationship between the static/dynamic variables and that improves the model expressivity through additional Normalizing Flows. A formal definition of the factors is proposed. This formalism leads to the derivation of sufficient conditions for the ground truth factors to be identifiable, and to the introduction of a novel theoretically grounded disentanglement constraint that can be directly and efficiently incorporated into our new framework. The experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms previous complex state-of-the-art techniques in scenarios where the dynamics of a scene are influenced by its content.
In-Context Exploiter for Extensive-Form Games
Authors: Shuxin Li, Chang Yang, Youzhi Zhang, Pengdeng Li, Xinrun Wang, Xiao Huang, Hau Chan, Bo An
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, In-Context Learning

Nash equilibrium (NE) is a widely adopted solution concept in game theory due to its stability property. However, we observe that the NE strategy might not always yield the best results, especially against opponents who do not adhere to NE strategies. Based on this observation, we pose a new game-solving question: Can we learn a model that can exploit any, even NE, opponent to maximize their own utility? In this work, we make the first attempt to investigate this problem through in-context learning. Specifically, we introduce a novel method, In-Context Exploiter (ICE), to train a single model that can act as any player in the game and adaptively exploit opponents entirely by in-context learning. Our ICE algorithm involves generating diverse opponent strategies, collecting interactive history training data by a reinforcement learning algorithm, and training a transformer-based agent within a well-designed curriculum learning framework. Finally, comprehensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our ICE algorithm, showcasing its in-context learning ability to exploit any unknown opponent, thereby positively answering our initial game-solving question.
Metacognitive Myopia in Large Language Models
Authors: Florian Scholten, Tobias R. Rebholz, Mandy Hütter
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally inherent stereotypes, cloud moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. Previous explanations mainly attributed bias in LLMs to human annotators and the selection of training data. Consequently, they have typically been addressed with bottom-up approaches such as reinforcement learning or debiasing corpora. However, these methods only treat the effects of LLM biases by indirectly influencing the model architecture, but do not address the underlying causes in the computational process. Here, we propose metacognitive myopia as a cognitive-ecological framework that can account for a conglomerate of established and emerging LLM biases and provide a lever to address problems in powerful but vulnerable tools. Our theoretical framework posits that a lack of the two components of metacognition, monitoring and control, causes five symptoms of metacognitive myopia in LLMs: integration of invalid tokens and embeddings, susceptibility to redundant information, neglect of base rates in conditional computation, decision rules based on frequency, and inappropriate higher-order statistical inference for nested data structures. As a result, LLMs produce erroneous output that reaches into the daily high-stakes decisions of humans. By introducing metacognitive regulatory processes into LLMs, engineers and scientists can develop precise remedies for the underlying causes of these biases. Our theory sheds new light on flawed human-machine interactions and raises ethical concerns regarding the increasing, imprudent implementation of LLMs in organizational structures.
Document-Level Event Extraction with Definition-Driven ICL
Authors: Zhuoyuan Liu, Yilin Luo
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Document-level Event Extraction, Event Extraction, Prompt Engineering

In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in document-level event extraction tasks, but existing methods face challenges in the design of prompts. To address this issue, we propose an optimization strategy called "Definition-driven Document-level Event Extraction (DDEE)." By adjusting the length of the prompt and enhancing the clarity of heuristics, we have significantly improved the event extraction performance of LLMs. We used data balancing techniques to solve the long-tail effect problem, enhancing the model's generalization ability for event types. At the same time, we refined the prompt to ensure it is both concise and comprehensive, adapting to the sensitivity of LLMs to the style of prompts. In addition, the introduction of structured heuristic methods and strict limiting conditions has improved the precision of event and argument role extraction. These strategies not only solve the prompt engineering problems of LLMs in document-level event extraction but also promote the development of event extraction technology, providing new research perspectives for other tasks in the NLP field.
Impacts of Darwinian Evolution on Pre-trained Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Guodong Du, Runhua Jiang, Senqiao Yang, Haoyang Li, Wei Chen, Keren Li, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00

Darwinian evolution of the biological brain is documented through multiple lines of evidence, although the modes of evolutionary changes remain unclear. Drawing inspiration from the evolved neural systems (e.g., visual cortex), deep learning models have demonstrated superior performance in visual tasks, among others. While the success of training deep neural networks has been relying on back-propagation (BP) and its variants to learn representations from data, BP does not incorporate the evolutionary processes that govern biological neural systems. This work proposes a neural network optimization framework based on evolutionary theory. Specifically, BP-trained deep neural networks for visual recognition tasks obtained from the ending epochs are considered the primordial ancestors (initial population). Subsequently, the population evolved with differential evolution. Extensive experiments are carried out to examine the relationships between Darwinian evolution and neural network optimization, including the correspondence between datasets, environment, models, and living species. The empirical results show that the proposed framework has positive impacts on the network, with reduced over-fitting and an order of magnitude lower time complexity compared to BP. Moreover, the experiments show that the proposed framework performs well on deep neural networks and big datasets.
Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search for 3D Point Cloud Analysis
Authors: Yisheng Yang, Guodong Du, Chean Khim Toa, Ho-Kin Tang, Sim Kuan Goh
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Navigate, Neural Architecture Search

Neural architecture search (NAS) automates neural network design by using optimization algorithms to navigate architecture spaces, reducing the burden of manual architecture design. While NAS has achieved success, applying it to emerging domains, such as analyzing unstructured 3D point clouds, remains underexplored due to the data lying in non-Euclidean spaces, unlike images. This paper presents Success-History-based Self-adaptive Differential Evolution with a Joint Point Interaction Dimension Search (SHSADE-PIDS), an evolutionary NAS framework that encodes discrete deep neural network architectures to continuous spaces and performs searches in the continuous spaces for efficient point cloud neural architectures. Comprehensive experiments on challenging 3D segmentation and classification benchmarks demonstrate SHSADE-PIDS's capabilities. It discovered highly efficient architectures with higher accuracy, significantly advancing prior NAS techniques. For segmentation on SemanticKITTI, SHSADE-PIDS attained 64.51% mean IoU using only 0.55M parameters and 4.5GMACs, reducing overhead by over 22-26X versus other top methods. For ModelNet40 classification, it achieved 93.4% accuracy with just 1.31M parameters, surpassing larger models. SHSADE-PIDS provided valuable insights into bridging evolutionary algorithms with neural architecture optimization, particularly for emerging frontiers like point cloud learning.
Multi-layer Sequence Labeling-based Joint Biomedical Event Extraction
Authors: Gongchi Chen, Pengchao Wu, Jinghang Gu, Longhua Qian, Guodong Zhou
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction

In recent years, biomedical event extraction has been dominated by complicated pipeline and joint methods, which need to be simplified. In addition, existing work has not effectively utilized trigger word information explicitly. Hence, we propose MLSL, a method based on multi-layer sequence labeling for joint biomedical event extraction. MLSL does not introduce prior knowledge and complex structures. Moreover, it explicitly incorporates the information of candidate trigger words into the sequence labeling to learn the interaction relationships between trigger words and argument roles. Based on this, MLSL can learn well with just a simple workflow. Extensive experimentation demonstrates the superiority of MLSL in terms of extraction performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.
CryoBench: Diverse and challenging datasets for the heterogeneity problem in cryo-EM
Authors: Minkyu Jeon, Rishwanth Raghu, Miro Astore, Geoffrey Woollard, Ryan Feathers, Alkin Kaz, Sonya M. Hanson, Pilar Cossio, Ellen D. Zhong
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a powerful technique for determining high-resolution 3D biomolecular structures from imaging data. Its unique ability to capture structural variability has spurred the development of heterogeneous reconstruction algorithms that can infer distributions of 3D structures from noisy, unlabeled imaging data. Despite the growing number of advanced methods, progress in the field is hindered by the lack of standardized benchmarks with ground truth information and reliable validation metrics. Here, we introduce CryoBench, a suite of datasets, metrics, and benchmarks for heterogeneous reconstruction in cryo-EM. CryoBench includes five datasets representing different sources of heterogeneity and degrees of difficulty. These include conformational heterogeneity generated from designed motions of antibody complexes or sampled from a molecular dynamics simulation, as well as compositional heterogeneity from mixtures of ribosome assembly states or 100 common complexes present in cells. We then analyze state-of-the-art heterogeneous reconstruction tools, including neural and non-neural methods, assess their sensitivity to noise, and propose new metrics for quantitative evaluation. We hope that CryoBench will be a foundational resource for accelerating algorithmic development and evaluation in the cryo-EM and machine learning communities. Project page: https://cryobench.cs.princeton.edu.
Disentangled Noisy Correspondence Learning
Authors: Zhuohang Dang, Minnan Luo, Jihong Wang, Chengyou Jia, Haochen Han, Herun Wan, Guang Dai, Xiaojun Chang, Jingdong Wang
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Cross-Modal Retrieval, Disentanglement, Mutual Information Estimation

Cross-modal retrieval is crucial in understanding latent correspondences across modalities. However, existing methods implicitly assume well-matched training data, which is impractical as real-world data inevitably involves imperfect alignments, i.e., noisy correspondences. Although some works explore similarity-based strategies to address such noise, they suffer from sub-optimal similarity predictions influenced by modality-exclusive information (MEI), e.g., background noise in images and abstract definitions in texts. This issue arises as MEI is not shared across modalities, thus aligning it in training can markedly mislead similarity predictions. Moreover, although intuitive, directly applying previous cross-modal disentanglement methods suffers from limited noise tolerance and disentanglement efficacy. Inspired by the robustness of information bottlenecks against noise, we introduce DisNCL, a novel information-theoretic framework for feature Disentanglement in Noisy Correspondence Learning, to adaptively balance the extraction of MII and MEI with certifiable optimal cross-modal disentanglement efficacy. DisNCL then enhances similarity predictions in modality-invariant subspace, thereby greatly boosting similarity-based alleviation strategy for noisy correspondences. Furthermore, DisNCL introduces soft matching targets to model noisy many-to-many relationships inherent in multi-modal input for noise-robust and accurate cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments confirm DisNCL's efficacy by 2% average recall improvement. Mutual information estimation and visualization results show that DisNCL learns meaningful MII/MEI subspaces, validating our theoretical analyses.
PointNCBW: Towards Dataset Ownership Verification for Point Clouds via Negative Clean-label Backdoor Watermark
Authors: Cheng Wei, Yang Wang, Kuofeng Gao, Shuo Shao, Yiming Li, Zhibo Wang, Zhan Qin
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00

Recently, point clouds have been widely used in computer vision, whereas their collection is time-consuming and expensive. As such, point cloud datasets are the valuable intellectual property of their owners and deserve protection. To detect and prevent unauthorized use of these datasets, especially for commercial or open-sourced ones that cannot be sold again or used commercially without permission, we intend to identify whether a suspicious third-party model is trained on our protected dataset under the black-box setting. We achieve this goal by designing a scalable clean-label backdoor-based dataset watermark for point clouds that ensures both effectiveness and stealthiness. Unlike existing clean-label watermark schemes, which are susceptible to the number of categories, our method could watermark samples from all classes instead of only from the target one. Accordingly, it can still preserve high effectiveness even on large-scale datasets with many classes. Specifically, we perturb selected point clouds with non-target categories in both shape-wise and point-wise manners before inserting trigger patterns without changing their labels. The features of perturbed samples are similar to those of benign samples from the target class. As such, models trained on the watermarked dataset will have a distinctive yet stealthy backdoor behavior, i.e., misclassifying samples from the target class whenever triggers appear, since the trained DNNs will treat the inserted trigger pattern as a signal to deny predicting the target label. We also design a hypothesis-test-guided dataset ownership verification based on the proposed watermark. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets are conducted, verifying the effectiveness of our method and its resistance to potential removal methods.
LLMServingSim: A HW/SW Co-Simulation Infrastructure for LLM Inference Serving at Scale
Authors: Jaehong Cho, Minsu Kim, Hyunmin Choi, Guseul Heo, Jongse Park
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Recently, there has been an extensive research effort in building efficient large language model (LLM) inference serving systems. These efforts not only include innovations in the algorithm and software domains but also constitute developments of various hardware acceleration techniques. Nevertheless, there is a lack of simulation infrastructure capable of accurately modeling versatile hardware-software behaviors in LLM serving systems without extensively extending the simulation time. This paper aims to develop an effective simulation tool, called LLMServingSim, to support future research in LLM serving systems. In designing LLMServingSim, we focus on two limitations of existing simulators: (1) they lack consideration of the dynamic workload variations of LLM inference serving due to its autoregressive nature, and (2) they incur repetitive simulations without leveraging algorithmic redundancies in LLMs. To address these limitations, LLMServingSim simulates the LLM serving in the granularity of iterations, leveraging the computation redundancies across decoder blocks and reusing the simulation results from previous iterations. Additionally, LLMServingSim provides a flexible framework that allows users to plug in any accelerator compiler-and-simulation stacks for exploring various system designs with heterogeneous processors. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMServingSim produces simulation results closely following the performance behaviors of real GPU-based LLM serving system with less than 14.7% error rate, while offering 91.5x faster simulation speed compared to existing accelerator simulators.
Structure and Reduction of MCTS for Explainable-AI
Authors: Ronit Bustin, Claudia V. Goldman
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

Complex sequential decision-making planning problems, covering infinite states' space have been shown to be solvable by AlphaZero type of algorithms. Such an approach that trains a neural model while simulating projection of futures with a Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm were shown to be applicable to real life planning problems. As such, engineers and users interacting with the resulting policy of behavior might benefit from obtaining automated explanations about these planners' decisions offline or online. This paper focuses on the information within the Monte Carlo Tree Search data structure. Given its construction, this information contains much of the reasoning of the sequential decision-making algorithm and is essential for its explainability. We show novel methods using information theoretic tools for the simplification and reduction of the Monte Carlo Tree Search and the extraction of information. Such information can be directly used for the construction of human understandable explanations. We show that basic explainability quantities can be calculated with limited additional computational cost, as an integrated part of the Monte Carlo Tree Search construction process. We focus on the theoretical and algorithmic aspects and provide examples of how the methods presented here can be used in the construction of human understandable explanations.