pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Similarity and Dissimilarity Guided Co-association Matrix Construction for Ensemble Clustering
Authors: Xu Zhang, Yuheng Jia, Mofei Song, Ran Wang
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Ensemble clustering aggregates multiple weak clusterings to achieve a more accurate and robust consensus result. The Co-Association matrix (CA matrix) based method is the mainstream ensemble clustering approach that constructs the similarity relationships between sample pairs according the weak clustering partitions to generate the final clustering result. However, the existing methods neglect that the quality of cluster is related to its size, i.e., a cluster with smaller size tends to higher accuracy. Moreover, they also do not consider the valuable dissimilarity information in the base clusterings which can reflect the varying importance of sample pairs that are completely disconnected. To this end, we propose the Similarity and Dissimilarity Guided Co-association matrix (SDGCA) to achieve ensemble clustering. First, we introduce normalized ensemble entropy to estimate the quality of each cluster, and construct a similarity matrix based on this estimation. Then, we employ the random walk to explore high-order proximity of base clusterings to construct a dissimilarity matrix. Finally, the adversarial relationship between the similarity matrix and the dissimilarity matrix is utilized to construct a promoted CA matrix for ensemble clustering. We compared our method with 13 state-of-the-art methods across 12 datasets, and the results demonstrated the superiority clustering ability and robustness of the proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/xuz2019/SDGCA.
E2E-AFG: An End-to-End Model with Adaptive Filtering for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Yun Jiang, Zilong Xie, Wei zhang, Yun Fang, Shuai Pan
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Text Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation methods often neglect the quality of content retrieved from external knowledge bases, resulting in irrelevant information or potential misinformation that negatively affects the generation results of large language models. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end model with adaptive filtering for retrieval-augmented generation (E2E-AFG), which integrates answer existence judgment and text generation into a single end-to-end framework. This enables the model to focus more effectively on relevant content while reducing the influence of irrelevant information and generating accurate answers. We evaluate E2E-AFG on six representative knowledge-intensive language datasets, and the results show that it consistently outperforms baseline models across all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.
Integrating Fuzzy Logic into Deep Symbolic Regression
Authors: Wout Gerdes, Erman Acar
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, regression, Symbolic Regression

Credit card fraud detection is a critical concern for financial institutions, intensified by the rise of contactless payment technologies. While deep learning models offer high accuracy, their lack of explainability poses significant challenges in financial settings. This paper explores the integration of fuzzy logic into Deep Symbolic Regression (DSR) to enhance both performance and explainability in fraud detection. We investigate the effectiveness of different fuzzy logic implications, specifically {\L}ukasiewicz, G\"odel, and Product, in handling the complexity and uncertainty of fraud detection datasets. Our analysis suggest that the {\L}ukasiewicz implication achieves the highest F1-score and overall accuracy, while the Product implication offers a favorable balance between performance and explainability. Despite having a performance lower than state-of-the-art (SOTA) models due to information loss in data transformation, our approach provides novelty and insights into into integrating fuzzy logic into DSR for fraud detection, providing a comprehensive comparison between different implications and methods.
DARD: A Multi-Agent Approach for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
Authors: Aman Gupta, Anirudh Ravichandran, Ziji Zhang, Swair Shah, Anurag Beniwal, Narayanan Sadagopan
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Task-oriented dialogue systems are essential for applications ranging from customer service to personal assistants and are widely used across various industries. However, developing effective multi-domain systems remains a significant challenge due to the complexity of handling diverse user intents, entity types, and domain-specific knowledge across several domains. In this work, we propose DARD (Domain Assigned Response Delegation), a multi-agent conversational system capable of successfully handling multi-domain dialogs. DARD leverages domain-specific agents, orchestrated by a central dialog manager agent. Our extensive experiments compare and utilize various agent modeling approaches, combining the strengths of smaller fine-tuned models (Flan-T5-large & Mistral-7B) with their larger counterparts, Large Language Models (LLMs) (Claude Sonnet 3.0). We provide insights into the strengths and limitations of each approach, highlighting the benefits of our multi-agent framework in terms of flexibility and composability. We evaluate DARD using the well-established MultiWOZ benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art performance by improving the dialogue inform rate by 6.6% and the success rate by 4.1% over the best-performing existing approaches. Additionally, we discuss various annotator discrepancies and issues within the MultiWOZ dataset and its evaluation system.
Self-Evolved Reward Learning for LLMs
Authors: Chenghua Huang, Zhizhen Fan, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Zeqi Lin, QIngwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a crucial technique for aligning language models with human preferences, playing a pivotal role in the success of conversational models like GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Llama 2. A core challenge in employing RLHF lies in training a reliable reward model (RM), which relies on high-quality labels typically provided by human experts or advanced AI system. These methods can be costly and may introduce biases that affect the language model's responses. As language models improve, human input may become less effective in further enhancing their performance. In this paper, we propose Self-Evolved Reward Learning (SER), a novel approach where the RM generates additional training data to iteratively improve itself. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple datasets such as HH-RLHF and UltraFeedback, using models like Mistral and Llama 3, and compare SER against various baselines. Our results demonstrate that even with limited human-annotated data, learning from self-feedback can robustly enhance RM performance, thereby boosting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
On the Opportunities of Large Language Models for Programming Process Data
Authors: John Edwards, Arto Hellas, Juho Leinonen
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00

Computing educators and researchers have used programming process data to understand how programs are constructed and what sorts of problems students struggle with. Although such data shows promise for using it for feedback, fully automated programming process feedback systems have still been an under-explored area. The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) have yielded additional opportunities for researchers in a wide variety of fields. LLMs are efficient at transforming content from one format to another, leveraging the body of knowledge they have been trained with in the process. In this article, we discuss opportunities of using LLMs for analyzing programming process data. To complement our discussion, we outline a case study where we have leveraged LLMs for automatically summarizing the programming process and for creating formative feedback on the programming process. Overall, our discussion and findings highlight that the computing education research and practice community is again one step closer to automating formative programming process-focused feedback.
Differentiable architecture search with multi-dimensional attention for spiking neural networks
Authors: Yilei Man, Linhai Xie, Shushan Qiao, Yumei Zhou, Delong Shang
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained enormous popularity in the field of artificial intelligence due to their low power consumption. However, the majority of SNN methods directly inherit the structure of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), usually leading to sub-optimal model performance in SNNs. To alleviate this problem, we integrate Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method and propose Multi-Attention Differentiable Architecture Search (MA-DARTS) to directly automate the search for the optimal network structure of SNNs. Initially, we defined a differentiable two-level search space and conducted experiments within micro architecture under a fixed layer. Then, we incorporated a multi-dimensional attention mechanism and implemented the MA-DARTS algorithm in this search space. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on classification compared to other methods under the same parameters with 94.40% accuracy on CIFAR10 dataset and 76.52% accuracy on CIFAR100 dataset. Additionally, we monitored and assessed the number of spikes (NoS) in each cell during the whole experiment. Notably, the number of spikes of the whole model stabilized at approximately 110K in validation and 100k in training on datasets.
Adapting While Learning: Grounding LLMs for Scientific Problems with Intelligent Tool Usage Adaptation
Authors: Bohan Lyu, Yadi Cao, Duncan Watson-Parris, Leon Bergen, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Rose Yu
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Epidemiology, Knowledge Distillation, World Knowledge

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in solving simple scientific problems but often produce hallucinations for complex ones. While integrating LLMs with tools can increase reliability, this approach typically results in over-reliance on tools, diminishing the model's ability to solve simple problems through basic reasoning. In contrast, human experts first assess problem complexity using domain knowledge before choosing an appropriate solution approach. Inspired by this human problem-solving process, we propose a novel two-component fine-tuning method. In the first component World Knowledge Distillation (WKD), LLMs learn directly from solutions generated using tool's information to internalize domain knowledge. In the second component Tool Usage Adaptation (TUA), we partition problems into easy and hard categories based on the model's direct answering accuracy. While maintaining the same alignment target for easy problems as in WKD, we train the model to intelligently switch to tool usage for more challenging problems. We validate our method on six scientific benchmark datasets, spanning mathematics, climate science and epidemiology. On average, our models demonstrate a 28.18% improvement in answer accuracy and a 13.89% increase in tool usage precision across all datasets, surpassing state-of-the-art models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5.
Statistical Guarantees for Lifelong Reinforcement Learning using PAC-Bayes Theory
Authors: Zhi Zhang, Chris Chow, Yasi Zhang, Yanchao Sun, Haochen Zhang, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Han Liu, Furong Huang, Yuchen Cui, Oscar Hernan Madrid Padilla
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) has been developed as a paradigm for extending single-task RL to more realistic, dynamic settings. In lifelong RL, the "life" of an RL agent is modeled as a stream of tasks drawn from a task distribution. We propose EPIC (Empirical PAC-Bayes that Improves Continuously), a novel algorithm designed for lifelong RL using PAC-Bayes theory. EPIC learns a shared policy distribution, referred to as the world policy, which enables rapid adaptation to new tasks while retaining valuable knowledge from previous experiences. Our theoretical analysis establishes a relationship between the algorithm's generalization performance and the number of prior tasks preserved in memory. We also derive the sample complexity of EPIC in terms of RL regret. Extensive experiments on a variety of environments demonstrate that EPIC significantly outperforms existing methods in lifelong RL, offering both theoretical guarantees and practical efficacy through the use of the world policy.
Right this way: Can VLMs Guide Us to See More to Answer Questions?
Authors: Li Liu, Diji Yang, Sijia Zhong, Kalyana Suma Sree Tholeti, Lei Ding, Yi Zhang, Leilani H. Gilpin
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

In question-answering scenarios, humans can assess whether the available information is sufficient and seek additional information if necessary, rather than providing a forced answer. In contrast, Vision Language Models (VLMs) typically generate direct, one-shot responses without evaluating the sufficiency of the information. To investigate this gap, we identify a critical and challenging task in the Visual Question Answering (VQA) scenario: can VLMs indicate how to adjust an image when the visual information is insufficient to answer a question? This capability is especially valuable for assisting visually impaired individuals who often need guidance to capture images correctly. To evaluate this capability of current VLMs, we introduce a human-labeled dataset as a benchmark for this task. Additionally, we present an automated framework that generates synthetic training data by simulating ``where to know'' scenarios. Our empirical results show significant performance improvements in mainstream VLMs when fine-tuned with this synthetic data. This study demonstrates the potential to narrow the gap between information assessment and acquisition in VLMs, bringing their performance closer to humans.
Advantages of Neural Population Coding for Deep Learning
Authors: Heiko Hoffmann
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Scalar variables, e.g., the orientation of a shape in an image, are commonly predicted using a single output neuron in a neural network. In contrast, the mammalian cortex represents variables with a population of neurons. In this population code, each neuron is most active at its preferred value and shows partial activity for other values. Here, we investigate the benefit of using a population code for the output layer of a neural network. We compare population codes against single-neuron outputs and one-hot vectors. First, we show theoretically and in experiments with synthetic data that population codes improve robustness to input noise in networks of stacked linear layers. Second, we demonstrate the benefit of using population codes to encode ambiguous outputs, such as the pose of symmetric objects. Using the T-LESS dataset of feature-less real-world objects, we show that population codes improve the accuracy of predicting 3D object orientation from image input.
Preventing Dimensional Collapse in Self-Supervised Learning via Orthogonality Regularization
Authors: Junlin He, Jinxiao Du, Wei Ma
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has rapidly advanced in recent years, approaching the performance of its supervised counterparts through the extraction of representations from unlabeled data. However, dimensional collapse, where a few large eigenvalues dominate the eigenspace, poses a significant obstacle for SSL. When dimensional collapse occurs on features (e.g. hidden features and representations), it prevents features from representing the full information of the data; when dimensional collapse occurs on weight matrices, their filters are self-related and redundant, limiting their expressive power. Existing studies have predominantly concentrated on the dimensional collapse of representations, neglecting whether this can sufficiently prevent the dimensional collapse of the weight matrices and hidden features. To this end, we first time propose a mitigation approach employing orthogonal regularization (OR) across the encoder, targeting both convolutional and linear layers during pretraining. OR promotes orthogonality within weight matrices, thus safeguarding against the dimensional collapse of weight matrices, hidden features, and representations. Our empirical investigations demonstrate that OR significantly enhances the performance of SSL methods across diverse benchmarks, yielding consistent gains with both CNNs and Transformer-based architectures.
MetaMetrics-MT: Tuning Meta-Metrics for Machine Translation via Human Preference Calibration
Authors: David Anugraha, Garry Kuwanto, Lucky Susanto, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Genta Indra Winata
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Gaussian Processes, Machine Translation, Translation

We present MetaMetrics-MT, an innovative metric designed to evaluate machine translation (MT) tasks by aligning closely with human preferences through Bayesian optimization with Gaussian Processes. MetaMetrics-MT enhances existing MT metrics by optimizing their correlation with human judgments. Our experiments on the WMT24 metric shared task dataset demonstrate that MetaMetrics-MT outperforms all existing baselines, setting a new benchmark for state-of-the-art performance in the reference-based setting. Furthermore, it achieves comparable results to leading metrics in the reference-free setting, offering greater efficiency.
Certified Robustness for Deep Equilibrium Models via Serialized Random Smoothing
Authors: Weizhi Gao, Zhichao Hou, Han Xu, Xiaorui Liu
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Implicit models such as Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs) have emerged as promising alternative approaches for building deep neural networks. Their certified robustness has gained increasing research attention due to security concerns. Existing certified defenses for DEQs employing deterministic certification methods such as interval bound propagation and Lipschitz-bounds can not certify on large-scale datasets. Besides, they are also restricted to specific forms of DEQs. In this paper, we provide the first randomized smoothing certified defense for DEQs to solve these limitations. Our study reveals that simply applying randomized smoothing to certify DEQs provides certified robustness generalized to large-scale datasets but incurs extremely expensive computation costs. To reduce computational redundancy, we propose a novel Serialized Randomized Smoothing (SRS) approach that leverages historical information. Additionally, we derive a new certified radius estimation for SRS to theoretically ensure the correctness of our algorithm. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on image recognition demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly accelerate the certification of DEQs by up to 7x almost without sacrificing the certified accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/WeizhiGao/Serialized-Randomized-Smoothing.
Generalizability of Memorization Neural Networks
Authors: Lijia Yu, Xiao-Shan Gao, Lijun Zhang, Yibo Miao
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

The neural network memorization problem is to study the expressive power of neural networks to interpolate a finite dataset. Although memorization is widely believed to have a close relationship with the strong generalizability of deep learning when using over-parameterized models, to the best of our knowledge, there exists no theoretical study on the generalizability of memorization neural networks. In this paper, we give the first theoretical analysis of this topic. Since using i.i.d. training data is a necessary condition for a learning algorithm to be generalizable, memorization and its generalization theory for i.i.d. datasets are developed under mild conditions on the data distribution. First, algorithms are given to construct memorization networks for an i.i.d. dataset, which have the smallest number of parameters and even a constant number of parameters. Second, we show that, in order for the memorization networks to be generalizable, the width of the network must be at least equal to the dimension of the data, which implies that the existing memorization networks with an optimal number of parameters are not generalizable. Third, a lower bound for the sample complexity of general memorization algorithms and the exact sample complexity for memorization algorithms with constant number of parameters are given. It is also shown that there exist data distributions such that, to be generalizable for them, the memorization network must have an exponential number of parameters in the data dimension. Finally, an efficient and generalizable memorization algorithm is given when the number of training samples is greater than the efficient memorization sample complexity of the data distribution.
Replace-then-Perturb: Targeted Adversarial Attacks With Visual Reasoning for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Jonggyu Jang, Hyeonsu Lyu, Jungyeon Koh, Hyun Jong Yang
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Contrastive Learning, Visual Reasoning

The conventional targeted adversarial attacks add a small perturbation to an image to make neural network models estimate the image as a predefined target class, even if it is not the correct target class. Recently, for visual-language models (VLMs), the focus of targeted adversarial attacks is to generate a perturbation that makes VLMs answer intended target text outputs. For example, they aim to make a small perturbation on an image to make VLMs' answers change from "there is an apple" to "there is a baseball." However, answering just intended text outputs is insufficient for tricky questions like "if there is a baseball, tell me what is below it." This is because the target of the adversarial attacks does not consider the overall integrity of the original image, thereby leading to a lack of visual reasoning. In this work, we focus on generating targeted adversarial examples with visual reasoning against VLMs. To this end, we propose 1) a novel adversarial attack procedure -- namely, Replace-then-Perturb and 2) a contrastive learning-based adversarial loss -- namely, Contrastive-Adv. In Replace-then-Perturb, we first leverage a text-guided segmentation model to find the target object in the image. Then, we get rid of the target object and inpaint the empty space with the desired prompt. By doing this, we can generate a target image corresponding to the desired prompt, while maintaining the overall integrity of the original image. Furthermore, in Contrastive-Adv, we design a novel loss function to obtain better adversarial examples. Our extensive benchmark results demonstrate that Replace-then-Perturb and Contrastive-Adv outperform the baseline adversarial attack algorithms. We note that the source code to reproduce the results will be available.