pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Predictive Inference in Multi-environment Scenarios
Authors: John C. Duchi, Suyash Gupta, Kuanhao Jiang, Pragya Sur
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

We address the challenge of constructing valid confidence intervals and sets in problems of prediction across multiple environments. We investigate two types of coverage suitable for these problems, extending the jackknife and split-conformal methods to show how to obtain distribution-free coverage in such non-traditional, potentially hierarchical data-generating scenarios. We demonstrate a novel resizing method to adapt to problem difficulty, which applies both to existing approaches for predictive inference and the methods we develop; this reduces prediction set sizes using limited information from the test environment, a key to the methods' practical performance, which we evaluate through neurochemical sensing and species classification datasets. Our contributions also include extensions for settings with non-real-valued responses, a theory of consistency for predictive inference in these general problems, and insights on the limits of conditional coverage.
Modeling Analog Dynamic Range Compressors using Deep Learning and State-space Models
Authors: Hanzhi Yin, Gang Cheng, Christian J. Steinmetz, Ruibin Yuan, Richard M. Stern, Roger B. Dannenberg
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, State Space Models

We describe a novel approach for developing realistic digital models of dynamic range compressors for digital audio production by analyzing their analog prototypes. While realistic digital dynamic compressors are potentially useful for many applications, the design process is challenging because the compressors operate nonlinearly over long time scales. Our approach is based on the structured state space sequence model (S4), as implementing the state-space model (SSM) has proven to be efficient at learning long-range dependencies and is promising for modeling dynamic range compressors. We present in this paper a deep learning model with S4 layers to model the Teletronix LA-2A analog dynamic range compressor. The model is causal, executes efficiently in real time, and achieves roughly the same quality as previous deep-learning models but with fewer parameters.
Optimization on a Finer Scale: Bounded Local Subgradient Variation Perspective
Authors: Jelena Diakonikolas, Cristóbal Guzmán
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00

We initiate the study of nonsmooth optimization problems under bounded local subgradient variation, which postulates bounded difference between (sub)gradients in small local regions around points, in either average or maximum sense. The resulting class of objective functions encapsulates the classes of objective functions traditionally studied in optimization, which are defined based on either Lipschitz continuity of the objective or H\"{o}lder/Lipschitz continuity of its gradient. Further, the defined class contains functions that are neither Lipschitz continuous nor have a H\"{o}lder continuous gradient. When restricted to the traditional classes of optimization problems, the parameters defining the studied classes lead to more fine-grained complexity bounds, recovering traditional oracle complexity bounds in the worst case but generally leading to lower oracle complexity for functions that are not ``worst case.'' Some highlights of our results are that: (i) it is possible to obtain complexity results for both convex and nonconvex problems with the (local or global) Lipschitz constant being replaced by a constant of local subgradient variation and (ii) mean width of the subdifferential set around the optima plays a role in the complexity of nonsmooth optimization, particularly in parallel settings. A consequence of (ii) is that for any error parameter $\epsilon > 0$, parallel oracle complexity of nonsmooth Lipschitz convex optimization is lower than its sequential oracle complexity by a factor $\tilde{\Omega}\big(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\big)$ whenever the objective function is piecewise linear with polynomially many pieces in the input size. This is particularly surprising as existing parallel complexity lower bounds are based on such classes of functions. The seeming contradiction is resolved by considering the region in which the algorithm is allowed to query the objective.
Interpretable Modeling of Deep Reinforcement Learning Driven Scheduling
Authors: Boyang Li, Zhiling Lan, Michael E. Papka
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Imitation Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

In the field of high-performance computing (HPC), there has been recent exploration into the use of deep reinforcement learning for cluster scheduling (DRL scheduling), which has demonstrated promising outcomes. However, a significant challenge arises from the lack of interpretability in deep neural networks (DNN), rendering them as black-box models to system managers. This lack of model interpretability hinders the practical deployment of DRL scheduling. In this work, we present a framework called IRL (Interpretable Reinforcement Learning) to address the issue of interpretability of DRL scheduling. The core idea is to interpret DNN (i.e., the DRL policy) as a decision tree by utilizing imitation learning. Unlike DNN, decision tree models are non-parametric and easily comprehensible to humans. To extract an effective and efficient decision tree, IRL incorporates the Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) algorithm and introduces the notion of critical state to prune the derived decision tree. Through trace-based experiments, we demonstrate that IRL is capable of converting a black-box DNN policy into an interpretable rulebased decision tree while maintaining comparable scheduling performance. Additionally, IRL can contribute to the setting of rewards in DRL scheduling.
The Evolution of Football Betting- A Machine Learning Approach to Match Outcome Forecasting and Bookmaker Odds Estimation
Authors: Purnachandra Mandadapu
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sports Analytics

This paper explores the significant history of professional football and the betting industry, tracing its evolution from clandestine beginnings to a lucrative multi-million-pound enterprise. Initiated by the legalization of gambling in 1960 and complemented by advancements in football data gathering pioneered by Thorold Charles Reep, the symbiotic relationship between these sectors has propelled rapid growth and innovation. Over the past six decades, both industries have undergone radical transformations, with data collection methods evolving from rudimentary notetaking to sophisticated technologies such as high-definition cameras and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven analytics. Therefore, the primary aim of this study is to utilize Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to forecast premier league football match outcomes. By analyzing historical data and investigating the significance of various features, the study seeks to identify the most effective predictive models and discern key factors influencing match results. Additionally, the study aims to utilize these forecasting to inform the establishment of bookmaker odds, providing insights into the impact of different variables on match outcomes. By highlighting the potential for informed decision-making in sports forecasting and betting, this study opens up new avenues for research and practical applications in the domain of sports analytics.
Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Abstractive Text Summarization Using Meta Heuristic Approaches
Authors: Aditya Saxena, Ashutosh Ranjan
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Articles, Decoder, Text Summarization

As human society transitions into the information age, reduction in our attention span is a contingency, and people who spend time reading lengthy news articles are decreasing rapidly and the need for succinct information is higher than ever before. Therefore, it is essential to provide a quick overview of important news by concisely summarizing the top news article and the most intuitive headline. When humans try to make summaries, they extract the essential information from the source and add useful phrases and grammatical annotations from the original extract. Humans have a unique ability to create abstractions. However, automatic summarization is a complicated problem to solve. The use of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models for neural abstractive text summarization has been ascending as far as prevalence. Numerous innovative strategies have been proposed to develop the current seq2seq models further, permitting them to handle different issues like saliency, familiarity, and human lucidness and create excellent synopses. In this article, we aimed toward enhancing the present architectures and models for abstractive text summarization. The modifications have been aimed at fine-tuning hyper-parameters, attempting specific encoder-decoder combinations. We examined many experiments on an extensively used CNN/DailyMail dataset to check the effectiveness of various models.
An early warning indicator trained on stochastic disease-spreading models with different noises
Authors: Amit K. Chakraborty, Shan Gao, Reza Miry, Pouria Ramazi, Russell Greiner, Mark A. Lewis, Hao Wang
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Time Series

The timely detection of disease outbreaks through reliable early warning signals (EWSs) is indispensable for effective public health mitigation strategies. Nevertheless, the intricate dynamics of real-world disease spread, often influenced by diverse sources of noise and limited data in the early stages of outbreaks, pose a significant challenge in developing reliable EWSs, as the performance of existing indicators varies with extrinsic and intrinsic noises. Here, we address the challenge of modeling disease when the measurements are corrupted by additive white noise, multiplicative environmental noise, and demographic noise into a standard epidemic mathematical model. To navigate the complexities introduced by these noise sources, we employ a deep learning algorithm that provides EWS in infectious disease outbreak by training on noise-induced disease-spreading models. The indicator's effectiveness is demonstrated through its application to real-world COVID-19 cases in Edmonton and simulated time series derived from diverse disease spread models affected by noise. Notably, the indicator captures an impending transition in a time series of disease outbreaks and outperforms existing indicators. This study contributes to advancing early warning capabilities by addressing the intricate dynamics inherent in real-world disease spread, presenting a promising avenue for enhancing public health preparedness and response efforts.
Systematic construction of continuous-time neural networks for linear dynamical systems
Authors: Chinmay Datar, Adwait Datar, Felix Dietrich, Wil Schilders
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00

Discovering a suitable neural network architecture for modeling complex dynamical systems poses a formidable challenge, often involving extensive trial and error and navigation through a high-dimensional hyper-parameter space. In this paper, we discuss a systematic approach to constructing neural architectures for modeling a subclass of dynamical systems, namely, Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems. We use a variant of continuous-time neural networks in which the output of each neuron evolves continuously as a solution of a first-order or second-order Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). Instead of deriving the network architecture and parameters from data, we propose a gradient-free algorithm to compute sparse architecture and network parameters directly from the given LTI system, leveraging its properties. We bring forth a novel neural architecture paradigm featuring horizontal hidden layers and provide insights into why employing conventional neural architectures with vertical hidden layers may not be favorable. We also provide an upper bound on the numerical errors of our neural networks. Finally, we demonstrate the high accuracy of our constructed networks on three numerical examples.
Convergence analysis of OT-Flow for sample generation
Authors: Yang Jing, Lei LI
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Deep generative models aim to learn the underlying distribution of data and generate new ones. Despite the diversity of generative models and their high-quality generation performance in practice, most of them lack rigorous theoretical convergence proofs. In this work, we aim to establish some convergence results for OT-Flow, one of the deep generative models. First, by reformulating the framework of OT-Flow model, we establish the $\Gamma$-convergence of the formulation of OT-flow to the corresponding optimal transport (OT) problem as the regularization term parameter $\alpha$ goes to infinity. Second, since the loss function will be approximated by Monte Carlo method in training, we established the convergence between the discrete loss function and the continuous one when the sample number $N$ goes to infinity as well. Meanwhile, the approximation capability of the neural network provides an upper bound for the discrete loss function of the minimizers. The proofs in both aspects provide convincing assurances for OT-Flow.
Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals
Authors: Rui Zheng, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place carefully crafted perturbations on normal examples to fool DNNs. To better understand such attacks, a characterization of the features carried by adversarial examples is needed. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by inspecting the subspaces of sample features through spectral analysis. We first empirically show that the features of either clean signals or adversarial perturbations are redundant and span in low-dimensional linear subspaces respectively with minimal overlap, and the classical low-dimensional subspace projection can suppress perturbation features out of the subspace of clean signals. This makes it possible for DNNs to learn a subspace where only features of clean signals exist while those of perturbations are discarded, which can facilitate the distinction of adversarial examples. To prevent the residual perturbations that is inevitable in subspace learning, we propose an independence criterion to disentangle clean signals from perturbations. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy enables the model to inherently suppress adversaries, which not only boosts model robustness but also motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense.
Predicting Energy Budgets in Droplet Dynamics: A Recurrent Neural Network Approach
Authors: Diego A. de Aguiar, Hugo L. França, Cassio M. Oishi
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

Neural networks in fluid mechanics offer an efficient approach for exploring complex flows, including multiphase and free surface flows. The recurrent neural network, particularly the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, proves attractive for learning mappings from transient inputs to dynamic outputs. This study applies LSTM to predict transient and static outputs for fluid flows under surface tension effects. Specifically, we explore two distinct droplet dynamic scenarios: droplets with diverse initial shapes impacting with solid surfaces, as well as the coalescence of two droplets following collision. Using only dimensionless numbers and geometric time series data from numerical simulations, LSTM predicts the energy budget. The marker-and-cell front-tracking methodology combined with a marker-and-cell finite-difference strategy is adopted for simulating the droplet dynamics. Using a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture fed with time series data derived from geometrical parameters, as for example droplet diameter variation, our study shows the accuracy of our approach in predicting energy budgets, as for instance the kinetic, dissipation, and surface energy trends, across a range of Reynolds and Weber numbers in droplet dynamic problems. Finally, a two-phase sequential neural network using only geometric data, which is readily available in experimental settings, is employed to predict the energies and then use them to estimate static parameters, such as the Reynolds and Weber numbers. While our methodology has been primarily validated with simulation data, its adaptability to experimental datasets is a promising avenue for future exploration. We hope that our strategy can be useful for diverse applications, spanning from inkjet printing to combustion engines, where the prediction of energy budgets or dissipation energies is crucial.
A Survey on Self-Supervised Graph Foundation Models: Knowledge-Based Perspective
Authors: Ziwen Zhao, Yixin Su, Yuhua Li, Yixiong Zou, Ruixuan Li, Rui Zhang
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Self-Supervised Learning

Graph self-supervised learning (SSL) is now a go-to method for pre-training graph foundation models (GFMs). There is a wide variety of knowledge patterns embedded in the graph data, such as node properties and clusters, which are crucial to learning generalized representations for GFMs. However, existing surveys of GFMs have several shortcomings: they lack comprehensiveness regarding the most recent progress, have unclear categorization of self-supervised methods, and take a limited architecture-based perspective that is restricted to only certain types of graph models. As the ultimate goal of GFMs is to learn generalized graph knowledge, we provide a comprehensive survey of self-supervised GFMs from a novel knowledge-based perspective. We propose a knowledge-based taxonomy, which categorizes self-supervised graph models by the specific graph knowledge utilized. Our taxonomy consists of microscopic (nodes, links, etc.), mesoscopic (context, clusters, etc.), and macroscopic knowledge (global structure, manifolds, etc.). It covers a total of 9 knowledge categories and more than 25 pretext tasks for pre-training GFMs, as well as various downstream task generalization strategies. Such a knowledge-based taxonomy allows us to re-examine graph models based on new architectures more clearly, such as graph language models, as well as provide more in-depth insights for constructing GFMs.
Runtime Monitoring and Fault Detection for Neural Network-Controlled Systems
Authors: Jianglin Lan, Siyuan Zhan, Ron Patton, Xianxian Zhao
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection

There is an emerging trend in applying deep learning methods to control complex nonlinear systems. This paper considers enhancing the runtime safety of nonlinear systems controlled by neural networks in the presence of disturbance and measurement noise. A robustly stable interval observer is designed to generate sound and precise lower and upper bounds for the neural network, nonlinear function, and system state. The obtained interval is utilised to monitor the real-time system safety and detect faults in the system outputs or actuators. An adaptive cruise control vehicular system is simulated to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed design.
A Codesign of Scheduling and Parallelization for Large Model Training in Heterogeneous Clusters
Authors: Chunyu Xue, Weihao Cui, Han Zhao, Quan Chen, Shulai Zhang, Pengyu Yang, Jing Yang, Shaobo Li, Minyi Guo
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Scheduling

Joint consideration of scheduling and adaptive parallelism offers great opportunities for improving the training efficiency of large models on heterogeneous GPU clusters. However, integrating adaptive parallelism into a cluster scheduler expands the cluster scheduling space. The new space is the product of the original scheduling space and the parallelism exploration space of adaptive parallelism (also a product of pipeline, data, and tensor parallelism). The exponentially enlarged scheduling space and ever-changing optimal parallelism plan from adaptive parallelism together result in the contradiction between low-overhead and accurate performance data acquisition for efficient cluster scheduling. This paper presents Crius, a training system for efficiently scheduling multiple large models with adaptive parallelism in a heterogeneous cluster. Crius proposes a novel scheduling granularity called Cell. It represents a job with deterministic resources and pipeline stages. The exploration space of Cell is shrunk to the product of only data and tensor parallelism, thus exposing the potential for accurate and low-overhead performance estimation. Crius then accurately estimates Cells and efficiently schedules training jobs. When a Cell is selected as a scheduling choice, its represented job runs with the optimal parallelism plan explored. Experimental results show that Crius reduces job completion time by up to 48.9% and schedules large models with up to 1.49x cluster throughput improvement.
A Multi-Label Dataset of French Fake News: Human and Machine Insights
Authors: Benjamin Icard, François Maine, Morgane Casanova, Géraud Faye, Julien Chanson, Guillaume Gadek, Ghislain Atemezing, François Bancilhon, Paul Égré
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00

We present a corpus of 100 documents, OBSINFOX, selected from 17 sources of French press considered unreliable by expert agencies, annotated using 11 labels by 8 annotators. By collecting more labels than usual, by more annotators than is typically done, we can identify features that humans consider as characteristic of fake news, and compare them to the predictions of automated classifiers. We present a topic and genre analysis using Gate Cloud, indicative of the prevalence of satire-like text in the corpus. We then use the subjectivity analyzer VAGO, and a neural version of it, to clarify the link between ascriptions of the label Subjective and ascriptions of the label Fake News. The annotated dataset is available online at the following url: https://github.com/obs-info/obsinfox Keywords: Fake News, Multi-Labels, Subjectivity, Vagueness, Detail, Opinion, Exaggeration, French Press
LLMs as Compiler for Arabic Programming Language
Authors: Serry Sibaee, Omar Najar, Lahouri Ghouti, Anis Koubaa
Date: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

In this paper we introduce APL (Arabic Programming Language) that uses Large language models (LLM) as semi-compiler to covert Arabic text code to python code then run the code. Designing a full pipeline from the structure of the APL text then a prompt (using prompt engineering) then running the prodcued python code using PyRunner. This project has a three parts first python library, a playground with simple interface and this research paper.