pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Comprehensive Survey on Joint Resource Allocation Strategies in Federated Edge Learning
Authors: Jingbo Zhang, Qiong Wu, Pingyi Fan, Qiang Fan
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Edge Learning (FEL), an emerging distributed Machine Learning (ML) paradigm, enables model training in a distributed environment while ensuring user privacy by using physical separation for each user data. However, with the development of complex application scenarios such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Earth, the conventional resource allocation schemes can no longer effectively support these growing computational and communication demands. Therefore, joint resource optimization may be the key solution to the scaling problem. This paper simultaneously addresses the multifaceted challenges of computation and communication, with the growing multiple resource demands. We systematically review the joint allocation strategies for different resources (computation, data, communication, and network topology) in FEL, and summarize the advantages in improving system efficiency, reducing latency, enhancing resource utilization and enhancing robustness. In addition, we present the potential ability of joint optimization to enhance privacy preservation by reducing communication requirements, indirectly. This work not only provides theoretical support for resource management in federated learning (FL) systems, but also provides ideas for potential optimal deployment in multiple real-world scenarios. By thoroughly discussing the current challenges and future research directions, it also provides some important insights into multi-resource optimization in complex application environments.
Unsupervised Data Validation Methods for Efficient Model Training
Authors: Yurii Paniv
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, model, Speech-to-Text, Synthetic Data Generation, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Transfer Learning

This paper investigates the challenges and potential solutions for improving machine learning systems for low-resource languages. State-of-the-art models in natural language processing (NLP), text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-text (STT), and vision-language models (VLM) rely heavily on large datasets, which are often unavailable for low-resource languages. This research explores key areas such as defining "quality data," developing methods for generating appropriate data and enhancing accessibility to model training. A comprehensive review of current methodologies, including data augmentation, multilingual transfer learning, synthetic data generation, and data selection techniques, highlights both advancements and limitations. Several open research questions are identified, providing a framework for future studies aimed at optimizing data utilization, reducing the required data quantity, and maintaining high-quality model performance. By addressing these challenges, the paper aims to make advanced machine learning models more accessible for low-resource languages, enhancing their utility and impact across various sectors.
Scalable Representation Learning for Multimodal Tabular Transactions
Authors: Natraj Raman, Sumitra Ganesh, Manuela Veloso
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Quantization, Representation Learning

Large language models (LLMs) are primarily designed to understand unstructured text. When directly applied to structured formats such as tabular data, they may struggle to discern inherent relationships and overlook critical patterns. While tabular representation learning methods can address some of these limitations, existing efforts still face challenges with sparse high-cardinality fields, precise numerical reasoning, and column-heavy tables. Furthermore, leveraging these learned representations for downstream tasks through a language based interface is not apparent. In this paper, we present an innovative and scalable solution to these challenges. Concretely, our approach introduces a multi-tier partitioning mechanism that utilizes power-law dynamics to handle large vocabularies, an adaptive quantization mechanism to impose priors on numerical continuity, and a distinct treatment of core-columns and meta-information columns. To facilitate instruction tuning on LLMs, we propose a parameter efficient decoder that interleaves transaction and text modalities using a series of adapter layers, thereby exploiting rich cross-task knowledge. We validate the efficacy of our solution on a large-scale dataset of synthetic payments transactions.
Protect Before Generate: Error Correcting Codes within Discrete Deep Generative Models
Authors: María Martínez-García, Grace Villacrés, David Mitchell, Pablo M. Olmos
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

Despite significant advancements in deep probabilistic models, learning low-dimensional discrete latent representations remains a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that enhances variational inference in discrete latent variable models by leveraging Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) to introduce redundancy in the latent representations. This redundancy is then exploited by the variational posterior to yield more accurate estimates, thereby narrowing the variational gap. Inspired by ECCs commonly used in digital communications and data storage, we demonstrate proof-of-concept using a Discrete Variational Autoencoder (DVAE) with binary latent variables and block repetition codes. We further extend this idea to a hierarchical structure based on polar codes, where certain latent bits are more robustly protected. Our method improves generation quality, data reconstruction, and uncertainty calibration compared to the uncoded DVAE, even when trained with tighter bounds such as the Importance Weighted Autoencoder (IWAE) objective. In particular, we demonstrate superior performance on MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR10, and Tiny ImageNet datasets. The general approach of integrating ECCs into variational inference is compatible with existing techniques to boost variational inference, such as importance sampling or Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We also outline the key properties ECCs must have to effectively enhance discrete variational inference.
A note on the VC dimension of 1-dimensional GNNs
Authors: Noah Daniëls, Floris Geerts
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become an essential tool for analyzing graph-structured data, leveraging their ability to capture complex relational information. While the expressivity of GNNs, particularly their equivalence to the Weisfeiler-Leman (1-WL) isomorphism test, has been well-documented, understanding their generalization capabilities remains critical. This paper focuses on the generalization of GNNs by investigating their Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension. We extend previous results to demonstrate that 1-dimensional GNNs with a single parameter have an infinite VC dimension for unbounded graphs. Furthermore, we show that this also holds for GNNs using analytic non-polynomial activation functions, including the 1-dimensional GNNs that were recently shown to be as expressive as the 1-WL test. These results suggest inherent limitations in the generalization ability of even the most simple GNNs, when viewed from the VC dimension perspective.
Linguistically-Informed Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Is There an Optimal Set of Languages to Tune?
Authors: Gürkan Soykan, Gözde Gül Şahin
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

Multilingual language models often perform unevenly across different languages due to limited generalization capabilities for some languages. This issue is significant because of the growing interest in making universal language models that work well for all languages. Instruction tuning with multilingual instruction-response pairs has been used to improve model performance across various languages. However, this approach is challenged by high computational costs, a lack of quality tuning data for all languages, and the "curse of multilinguality" -- the performance drop per language after adding many languages. Recent studies have found that working with datasets with few languages and a smaller number of instances can be beneficial. Yet, there exists no systematic investigation into how choosing different languages affects multilingual instruction tuning. Our study proposes a method to select languages for instruction tuning in a linguistically informed way, aiming to boost model performance across languages and tasks. We use a simple algorithm to choose diverse languages and test their effectiveness on various benchmarks and open-ended questions. Our results show that this careful selection generally leads to better outcomes than choosing languages at random. We suggest a new and simple way of enhancing multilingual models by selecting diverse languages based on linguistic features that could help develop better multilingual systems and guide dataset creation efforts. All resources, including the code for language selection and multilingual instruction tuning, are made available in our official repository at https://github.com/GGLAB-KU/ling-informed-mit enabling reproducibility and further research in this area.
Deep and Probabilistic Solar Irradiance Forecast at the Arctic Circle
Authors: Niklas Erdmann, Lars Ø. Bentsen, Roy Stenbro, Heine N. Riise, Narada Warakagoda, Paal Engelstad
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: quantile regression

Solar irradiance forecasts can be dynamic and unreliable due to changing weather conditions. Near the Arctic circle, this also translates into a distinct set of further challenges. This work is forecasting solar irradiance with Norwegian data using variations of Long-Short-Term Memory units (LSTMs). In order to gain more trustworthiness of results, the probabilistic approaches Quantile Regression (QR) and Maximum Likelihood (MLE) are optimized on top of the LSTMs, providing measures of uncertainty for the results. MLE is further extended by using a Johnson's SU distribution, a Johnson's SB distribution, and a Weibull distribution in addition to a normal Gaussian to model parameters. Contrary to a Gaussian, Weibull, Johnson's SU and Johnson's SB can return skewed distributions, enabling it to fit the non-normal solar irradiance distribution more optimally. The LSTMs are compared against each other, a simple Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), and a smart-persistence estimator. The proposed LSTMs are found to be more accurate than smart persistence and the MLP for a multi-horizon, day-ahead (36 hours) forecast. The deterministic LSTM showed better root mean squared error (RMSE), but worse mean absolute error (MAE) than a MLE with Johnson's SB distribution. Probabilistic uncertainty estimation is shown to fit relatively well across the distribution of observed irradiance. While QR shows better uncertainty estimation calibration, MLE with Johnson's SB, Johnson's SU, or Gaussian show better performance in the other metrics employed. Optimizing and comparing the models against each other reveals a seemingly inherent trade-off between point-prediction and uncertainty estimation calibration.
MGMD-GAN: Generalization Improvement of Generative Adversarial Networks with Multiple Generator Multiple Discriminator Framework Against Membership Inference Attacks
Authors: Nirob Arefin
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are among the widely used Generative models in various applications. However, the original GAN architecture may memorize the distribution of the training data and, therefore, poses a threat to Membership Inference Attacks. In this work, we propose a new GAN framework that consists of Multiple Generators and Multiple Discriminators (MGMD-GAN). Disjoint partitions of the training data are used to train this model and it learns the mixture distribution of all the training data partitions. In this way, our proposed model reduces the generalization gap which makes our MGMD-GAN less vulnerable to Membership Inference Attacks. We provide an experimental analysis of our model and also a comparison with other GAN frameworks.
Mind the Gap: a Spectral Analysis of Rank Collapse and Signal Propagation in Attention Layers
Authors: Alireza Naderi, Thiziri Nait Saada, Jared Tanner
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

Attention layers are the core component of transformers, the current state-of-the-art neural network architecture. Alternatives to softmax-based attention are being explored due to its tendency to hinder effective information flow. Even at initialisation, it remains poorly understood why the propagation of signals and gradients through these random networks can be pathological, resulting in issues known as (i) vanishing/exploding gradients and (ii) rank collapse $\textit{in depth}$, i.e. when all tokens converge to a single representation along layers. While rank collapse in depth naturally arises from repeated matrix multiplications$\unicode{x2013}$a common pattern across various architectures$\unicode{x2013}$we identify an additional and previously unknown challenge unique to softmax attention layers: (iii) rank collapse $\textit{in width}$, which occurs as the context length increases. Using Random Matrix Theory, we conduct a rigorous analysis that uncovers a spectral gap between the two largest singular values of the attention matrix as the cause of (iii), which in turn exacerbates (i) and (ii). Building on this insight, we propose a novel yet simple practical solution to mitigate rank collapse in width by removing the outlier eigenvalue(s). Our theoretical framework offers a fresh perspective on recent practical studies, such as (Ye et al., 2024; Ali et al., 2023), whose ad hoc solutions can now be interpreted as implicit efforts to address the spectral gap issue. This work provides valuable theoretical support for ongoing large-scale empirical research, bringing theory and practice one step closer in the understanding of transformers.
Orthogonal Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with the Kullback-Leibler divergence
Authors: Jean Pacifique Nkurunziza, Fulgence Nahayo, Nicolas Gillis
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Classification

Orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (ONMF) has become a standard approach for clustering. As far as we know, most works on ONMF rely on the Frobenius norm to assess the quality of the approximation. This paper presents a new model and algorithm for ONMF that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. As opposed to the Frobenius norm which assumes Gaussian noise, the KL divergence is the maximum likelihood estimator for Poisson-distributed data, which can model better sparse vectors of word counts in document data sets and photo counting processes in imaging. We develop an algorithm based on alternating optimization, KL-ONMF, and show that it performs favorably with the Frobenius-norm based ONMF for document classification and hyperspectral image unmixing.
On the grid-sampling limit SDE
Authors: Christian Bender, Nguyen Tran Thuan
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In our recent work [3] we introduced the grid-sampling SDE as a proxy for modeling exploration in continuous-time reinforcement learning. In this note, we provide further motivation for the use of this SDE and discuss its wellposedness in the presence of jumps.
Towards Quantifying The Privacy Of Redacted Text
Authors: Vaibhav Gusain, Douglas Leith
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Sentence, Sentence Similarity

In this paper we propose use of a k-anonymity-like approach for evaluating the privacy of redacted text. Given a piece of redacted text we use a state of the art transformer-based deep learning network to reconstruct the original text. This generates multiple full texts that are consistent with the redacted text, i.e. which are grammatical, have the same non-redacted words etc, and represents each of these using an embedding vector that captures sentence similarity. In this way we can estimate the number, diversity and quality of full text consistent with the redacted text and so evaluate privacy.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy Approach to LLM Prompting
Authors: Oxana Vitman, Nika Amaglobeli, Paul Plachinda
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, StrategyQA

Large language models demonstrated state-of-the-art results on various reasoning tasks when applying the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting technique. CoT prompting guides the model into breaking tasks into a few intermediate steps and provides step-by-step demonstrations. However, solving complex reasoning tasks remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel prompting strategy inspired by Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). DBT, a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy, aims to help individuals cope with stress by developing a system of reasoning. We applied DBT's basic concepts of shaping dialog to construct prompts and conducted experiments on different datasets and LLMs with various numbers of parameters. Our results show that prompts crafted with DBT techniques significantly improve results on smaller models, achieving a 7% increase in accuracy on the StrategyQA, 4.8% on Aqua dataset using 8b parameters model, and a 16.2% increase on the StrategyQA, 5.3% on GSM8K dataset with 14b parameters model.
Explaining Hypergraph Neural Networks: From Local Explanations to Global Concepts
Authors: Shiye Su, Iulia Duta, Lucie Charlotte Magister, Pietro Liò
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

Hypergraph neural networks are a class of powerful models that leverage the message passing paradigm to learn over hypergraphs, a generalization of graphs well-suited to describing relational data with higher-order interactions. However, such models are not naturally interpretable, and their explainability has received very limited attention. We introduce SHypX, the first model-agnostic post-hoc explainer for hypergraph neural networks that provides both local and global explanations. At the instance-level, it performs input attribution by discretely sampling explanation subhypergraphs optimized to be faithful and concise. At the model-level, it produces global explanation subhypergraphs using unsupervised concept extraction. Extensive experiments across four real-world and four novel, synthetic hypergraph datasets demonstrate that our method finds high-quality explanations which can target a user-specified balance between faithfulness and concision, improving over baselines by 25 percent points in fidelity on average.
QoS-Nets: Adaptive Approximate Neural Network Inference
Authors: Elias Trommer, Bernd Waschneck, Akash Kumar
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

In order to vary the arithmetic resource consumption of neural network applications at runtime, this work proposes the flexible reuse of approximate multipliers for neural network layer computations. We introduce a search algorithm that chooses an appropriate subset of approximate multipliers of a user-defined size from a larger search space and enables retraining to maximize task performance. Unlike previous work, our approach can output more than a single, static assignment of approximate multiplier instances to layers. These different operating points allow a system to gradually adapt its Quality of Service (QoS) to changing environmental conditions by increasing or decreasing its accuracy and resource consumption. QoS-Nets achieves this by reassigning the selected approximate multiplier instances to layers at runtime. To combine multiple operating points with the use of retraining, we propose a fine-tuning scheme that shares the majority of parameters between operating points, with only a small amount of additional parameters required per operating point. In our evaluation on MobileNetV2, QoS-Nets is used to select four approximate multiplier instances for three different operating points. These operating points result in power savings for multiplications between 15.3% and 42.8% at a Top-5 accuracy loss between 0.3 and 2.33 percentage points. Through our fine-tuning scheme, all three operating points only increase the model's parameter count by only 2.75%.
Benign Overfitting in Single-Head Attention
Authors: Roey Magen, Shuning Shang, Zhiwei Xu, Spencer Frei, Wei Hu, Gal Vardi
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

The phenomenon of benign overfitting, where a trained neural network perfectly fits noisy training data but still achieves near-optimal test performance, has been extensively studied in recent years for linear models and fully-connected/convolutional networks. In this work, we study benign overfitting in a single-head softmax attention model, which is the fundamental building block of Transformers. We prove that under appropriate conditions, the model exhibits benign overfitting in a classification setting already after two steps of gradient descent. Moreover, we show conditions where a minimum-norm/maximum-margin interpolator exhibits benign overfitting. We study how the overfitting behavior depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the data distribution, namely, the ratio between norms of signal and noise tokens, and prove that a sufficiently large SNR is both necessary and sufficient for benign overfitting.
SLIM: Let LLM Learn More and Forget Less with Soft LoRA and Identity Mixture
Authors: Jiayi Han, Liang Du, Hongwei Du, Xiangguo Zhou, Yiwen Wu, Weibo Zheng, Donghong Han
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Although many efforts have been made, it is still a challenge to balance the training budget, downstream performance, and the general capabilities of the LLMs in many applications. Training the whole model for downstream tasks is expensive, and could easily result in catastrophic forgetting. By introducing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), the training cost could be reduced, but it still suffers from forgetting, and limits the learning on the downstream tasks. To efficiently fine-tune the LLMs with less limitation to their downstream performance while mitigating the forgetting of general capabilities, we propose a novel mixture of expert (MoE) framework based on Soft LoRA and Identity Mixture (SLIM), that allows dynamic routing between LoRA adapters and skipping connection, enables the suppression of forgetting. We adopt weight-yielding with sliding clustering for better out-of-domain distinguish to enhance the routing. We also propose to convert the mixture of low-rank adapters to the model merging formulation and introduce fast dynamic merging of LoRA adapters to keep the general capabilities of the base model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SLIM is comparable to the state-of-the-art PEFT approaches on the downstream tasks while achieving the leading performance in mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
Plug-and-Play Performance Estimation for LLM Services without Relying on Labeled Data
Authors: Can Wang, Dianbo Sui, Hongliang Sun, Hao Ding, Bolin Zhang, Zhiying Tu
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large Language Model (LLM) services exhibit impressive capability on unlearned tasks leveraging only a few examples by in-context learning (ICL). However, the success of ICL varies depending on the task and context, leading to heterogeneous service quality. Directly estimating the performance of LLM services at each invocation can be laborious, especially requiring abundant labeled data or internal information within the LLM. This paper introduces a novel method to estimate the performance of LLM services across different tasks and contexts, which can be "plug-and-play" utilizing only a few unlabeled samples like ICL. Our findings suggest that the negative log-likelihood and perplexity derived from LLM service invocation can function as effective and significant features. Based on these features, we utilize four distinct meta-models to estimate the performance of LLM services. Our proposed method is compared against unlabeled estimation baselines across multiple LLM services and tasks. And it is experimentally applied to two scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in the selection and further optimization of LLM services.