pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
How Transliterations Improve Crosslingual Alignment
Authors: Yihong Liu, Mingyang Wang, Amir Hossein Kargaran, Ayyoob Imani, Orgest Xhelili, Haotian Ye, Chunlan Ma, François Yvon, Hinrich Schütze
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Transliteration

Recent studies have shown that post-aligning multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) using alignment objectives on both original and transliterated data can improve crosslingual alignment. This improvement further leads to better crosslingual transfer performance. However, it remains unclear how and why a better crosslingual alignment is achieved, as this technique only involves transliterations, and does not use any parallel data. This paper attempts to explicitly evaluate the crosslingual alignment and identify the key elements in transliteration-based approaches that contribute to better performance. For this, we train multiple models under varying setups for two pairs of related languages: (1) Polish and Ukrainian and (2) Hindi and Urdu. To assess alignment, we define four types of similarities based on sentence representations. Our experimental results show that adding transliterations alone improves the overall similarities, even for random sentence pairs. With the help of auxiliary transliteration-based alignment objectives, especially the contrastive objective, the model learns to distinguish matched from random pairs, leading to better crosslingual alignment. However, we also show that better alignment does not always yield better downstream performance, suggesting that further research is needed to clarify the connection between alignment and performance. The code implementation is based on \url{https://github.com/cisnlp/Transliteration-PPA}.
Relating Superconducting Optoelectronic Networks to Classical Neurodynamics
Authors: Jeffrey M. Shainline, Bryce A. Primavera, Ryan O'Loughlin
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00

The circuits comprising superconducting optoelectronic synapses, dendrites, and neurons are described by numerically cumbersome and formally opaque coupled differential equations. Reference 1 showed that a phenomenological model of superconducting loop neurons eliminates the need to solve the Josephson circuit equations that describe synapses and dendrites. The initial goal of the model was to decrease the time required for simulations, yet an additional benefit of the model was increased transparency of the underlying neural circuit operations and conceptual clarity regarding the connection of loop neurons to other physical systems. Whereas the original model simplified the treatment of the Josephson-junction dynamics, essentially by only considering low-pass versions of the dendritic outputs, the model resorted to an awkward treatment of spikes generated by semiconductor transmitter circuits that required explicitly checking for threshold crossings and distinct treatment of time steps wherein somatic threshold is reached. Here we extend that model to simplify the treatment of spikes coming from somas, again making use of the fact that in neural systems the downstream recipients of spike events almost always perform low-pass filtering. We provide comparisons between the first and second phenomenological models, quantifying the accuracy of the additional approximations. We identify regions of circuit parameter space in which the extended model works well and regions where it works poorly. For some circuit parameters it is possible to represent the downstream dendritic response to a single spike as well as coincidences or sequences of spikes, indicating the model is not simply a reduction to rate coding. The governing equations are shown to be nearly identical to those ubiquitous in the neuroscience literature for modeling leaky-integrator dendrites and neurons.
VVTEAM: A Compact Behavioral Model for Volatile Memristors
Authors: Tanay Patni, Rishona Daniels, Shahar Kvatinsky
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Volatile memristors have recently gained popularity as promising devices for neuromorphic circuits, capable of mimicking the leaky function of neurons and offering advantages over capacitor-based circuits in terms of power dissipation and area. Additionally, volatile memristors are useful as selector devices and for hardware security circuits such as physical unclonable functions. To facilitate the design and simulation of circuits, a compact behavioral model is essential. This paper proposes V-VTEAM, a compact, simple, general, and flexible behavioral model for volatile memristors, inspired by the VTEAM nonvolatile memristor model and developed in MATLAB. The validity of the model is demonstrated by fitting it to an ion drift/diffusion-based Ag/SiOx/C/W volatile memristor, achieving a relative root mean error square of 4.5%.
Spatial embedding promotes a specific form of modularity with low entropy and heterogeneous spectral dynamics
Authors: Cornelia Sheeran, Andrew S. Ham, Duncan E. Astle, Jascha Achterberg, Danyal Akarca
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

Understanding how biological constraints shape neural computation is a central goal of computational neuroscience. Spatially embedded recurrent neural networks provide a promising avenue to study how modelled constraints shape the combined structural and functional organisation of networks over learning. Prior work has shown that spatially embedded systems like this can combine structure and function into single artificial models during learning. But it remains unclear precisely how, in general, structural constraints bound the range of attainable configurations. In this work, we show that it is possible to study these restrictions through entropic measures of the neural weights and eigenspectrum, across both rate and spiking neural networks. Spatial embedding, in contrast to baseline models, leads to networks with a highly specific low entropy modularity where connectivity is readily interpretable given the known spatial and communication constraints acting on them. Crucially, these networks also demonstrate systematically modulated spectral dynamics, revealing how they exploit heterogeneity in their function to overcome the constraints imposed on their structure. This work deepens our understanding of constrained learning in neural networks, across coding schemes and tasks, where solutions to simultaneous structural and functional objectives must be accomplished in tandem.
Memory Networks: Towards Fully Biologically Plausible Learning
Authors: Jacobo Ruiz, Manas Gupta
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

The field of artificial intelligence faces significant challenges in achieving both biological plausibility and computational efficiency, particularly in visual learning tasks. Current artificial neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks, rely on techniques like backpropagation and weight sharing, which do not align with the brain's natural information processing methods. To address these issues, we propose the Memory Network, a model inspired by biological principles that avoids backpropagation and convolutions, and operates in a single pass. This approach enables rapid and efficient learning, mimicking the brain's ability to adapt quickly with minimal exposure to data. Our experiments demonstrate that the Memory Network achieves efficient and biologically plausible learning, showing strong performance on simpler datasets like MNIST. However, further refinement is needed for the model to handle more complex datasets such as CIFAR10, highlighting the need to develop new algorithms and techniques that closely align with biological processes while maintaining computational efficiency.
End-to-end guarantees for indirect data-driven control of bilinear systems with finite stochastic data
Authors: Nicolas Chatzikiriakos, Robin Strässer, Frank Allgöwer, Andrea Iannelli
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

In this paper we propose an end-to-end algorithm for indirect data-driven control for bilinear systems with stability guarantees. We consider the case where the collected i.i.d. data is affected by probabilistic noise with possibly unbounded support and leverage tools from statistical learning theory to derive finite sample identification error bounds. To this end, we solve the bilinear identification problem by solving a set of linear and affine identification problems, by a particular choice of a control input during the data collection phase. We provide a priori as well as data-dependent finite sample identification error bounds on the individual matrices as well as ellipsoidal bounds, both of which are structurally suitable for control. Further, we integrate the structure of the derived identification error bounds in a robust controller design to obtain an exponentially stable closed-loop. By means of an extensive numerical study we showcase the interplay between the controller design and the derived identification error bounds. Moreover, we note appealing connections of our results to indirect data-driven control of general nonlinear systems through Koopman operator theory and discuss how our results may be applied in this setup.
Bi-Filtration and Stability of TDA Mapper for Point Cloud Data
Authors: Wako Bungula, Isabel Darcy
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Carlsson, Singh and Memoli's TDA mapper takes a point cloud dataset and outputs a graph that depends on several parameter choices. Dey, Memoli, and Wang developed Multiscale Mapper for abstract topological spaces so that parameter choices can be analyzed via persistent homology. However, when applied to actual data, one does not always obtain filtrations of mapper graphs. DBSCAN, one of the most common clustering algorithms used in the TDA mapper software, has two parameters, \textbf{$\epsilon$} and \textbf{MinPts}. If \textbf{MinPts = 1} then DBSCAN is equivalent to single linkage clustering with cutting height \textbf{$\epsilon$}. We show that if DBSCAN clustering is used with \textbf{MinPts $>$ 2}, a filtration of mapper graphs may not exist except in the absence of free-border points; but such filtrations exist if DBSCAN clustering is used with \textbf{MinPts = 1} or \textbf{2} as the cover size increases, \textbf{$\epsilon$} increases, and/or \textbf{MinPts} decreases. However, the 1-dimensional filtration is unstable. If one adds noise to a data set so that each data point has been perturbed by a distance at most \textbf{$\delta$}, the persistent homology of the mapper graph of the perturbed data set can be significantly different from that of the original data set. We show that we can obtain stability by increasing both the cover size and \textbf{$\epsilon$} at the same time. In particular, we show that the bi-filtrations of the homology groups with respect to cover size and $\epsilon$ between these two datasets are \textbf{2$\delta$}-interleaved.
Report on the Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA 2024) at SIGIR 2024
Authors: Timo Breuer, Christin Katharina Kreutz, Norbert Fuhr, Krisztian Balog, Philipp Schaer, Nolwenn Bernard, Ingo Frommholz, Marcel Gohsen, Kaixin Ji, Gareth J. F. Jones, Jüri Keller, Jiqun Liu, Martin Mladenov, Gabriella Pasi, Johanne Trippas, Xi Wang, Saber Zerhoudi, ChengXiang Zhai
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00

This paper is a report of the Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA) workshop at SIGIR 2024. The workshop had two keynotes, a panel discussion, nine lightning talks, and two breakout sessions. Key takeaways were user simulation's importance in academia and industry, the possible bridging of online and offline evaluation, and the issues of organizing a companion shared task around user simulations for information access. We report on how we organized the workshop, provide a brief overview of what happened at the workshop, and summarize the main topics and findings of the workshop and future work.
Enhancing Tourism Recommender Systems for Sustainable City Trips Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Ashmi Banerjee, Adithi Satish, Wolfgang Wörndl
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Recommendation Systems, Reranking, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Tourism Recommender Systems (TRS) have traditionally focused on providing personalized travel suggestions, often prioritizing user preferences without considering broader sustainability goals. Integrating sustainability into TRS has become essential with the increasing need to balance environmental impact, local community interests, and visitor satisfaction. This paper proposes a novel approach to enhancing TRS for sustainable city trips using Large Language Models (LLMs) and a modified Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline. We enhance the traditional RAG system by incorporating a sustainability metric based on a city's popularity and seasonal demand during the prompt augmentation phase. This modification, called Sustainability Augmented Reranking (SAR), ensures the system's recommendations align with sustainability goals. Evaluations using popular open-source LLMs, such as Llama-3.1-Instruct-8B and Mistral-Instruct-7B, demonstrate that the SAR-enhanced approach consistently matches or outperforms the baseline (without SAR) across most metrics, highlighting the benefits of incorporating sustainability into TRS.
Value Identification in Multistakeholder Recommender Systems for Humanities and Historical Research: The Case of the Digital Archive Monasterium.net
Authors: Florian Atzenhofer-Baumgartner, Bernhard C. Geiger, Georg Vogeler, Dominik Kowald
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems remain underutilized in humanities and historical research, despite their potential to enhance the discovery of cultural records. This paper offers an initial value identification of the multiple stakeholders that might be impacted by recommendations in Monasterium.net, a digital archive for historical legal documents. Specifically, we discuss the diverse values and objectives of its stakeholders, such as editors, aggregators, platform owners, researchers, publishers, and funding agencies. These in-depth insights into the potentially conflicting values of stakeholder groups allow designing and adapting recommender systems to enhance their usefulness for humanities and historical research. Additionally, our findings will support deeper engagement with additional stakeholders to refine value models and evaluation metrics for recommender systems in the given domains. Our conclusions are embedded in and applicable to other digital archives and a broader cultural heritage context.
Improving the Shortest Plank: Vulnerability-Aware Adversarial Training for Robust Recommender System
Authors: Kaike Zhang, Qi Cao, Yunfan Wu, Fei Sun, HuaWei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in mitigating information overload in various fields. Nonetheless, the inherent openness of these systems introduces vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to insert fake users into the system's training data to skew the exposure of certain items, known as poisoning attacks. Adversarial training has emerged as a notable defense mechanism against such poisoning attacks within recommender systems. Existing adversarial training methods apply perturbations of the same magnitude across all users to enhance system robustness against attacks. Yet, in reality, we find that attacks often affect only a subset of users who are vulnerable. These perturbations of indiscriminate magnitude make it difficult to balance effective protection for vulnerable users without degrading recommendation quality for those who are not affected. To address this issue, our research delves into understanding user vulnerability. Considering that poisoning attacks pollute the training data, we note that the higher degree to which a recommender system fits users' training data correlates with an increased likelihood of users incorporating attack information, indicating their vulnerability. Leveraging these insights, we introduce the Vulnerability-aware Adversarial Training (VAT), designed to defend against poisoning attacks in recommender systems. VAT employs a novel vulnerability-aware function to estimate users' vulnerability based on the degree to which the system fits them. Guided by this estimation, VAT applies perturbations of adaptive magnitude to each user, not only reducing the success ratio of attacks but also preserving, and potentially enhancing, the quality of recommendations. Comprehensive experiments confirm VAT's superior defensive capabilities across different recommendation models and against various types of attacks.
Towards More Relevant Product Search Ranking Via Large Language Models: An Empirical Study
Authors: Qi Liu, Atul Singh, Jingbo Liu, Cun Mu, Zheng Yan
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank

Training Learning-to-Rank models for e-commerce product search ranking can be challenging due to the lack of a gold standard of ranking relevance. In this paper, we decompose ranking relevance into content-based and engagement-based aspects, and we propose to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for both label and feature generation in model training, primarily aiming to improve the model's predictive capability for content-based relevance. Additionally, we introduce different sigmoid transformations on the LLM outputs to polarize relevance scores in labeling, enhancing the model's ability to balance content-based and engagement-based relevances and thus prioritize highly relevant items overall. Comprehensive online tests and offline evaluations are also conducted for the proposed design. Our work sheds light on advanced strategies for integrating LLMs into e-commerce product search ranking model training, offering a pathway to more effective and balanced models with improved ranking relevance.
Long or Short or Both? An Exploration on Lookback Time Windows of Behavioral Features in Product Search Ranking
Authors: Qi Liu, Atul Singh, Jingbo Liu, Cun Mu, Zheng Yan, Jan Pedersen
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00

Customer shopping behavioral features are core to product search ranking models in eCommerce. In this paper, we investigate the effect of lookback time windows when aggregating these features at the (query, product) level over history. By studying the pros and cons of using long and short time windows, we propose a novel approach to integrating these historical behavioral features of different time windows. In particular, we address the criticality of using query-level vertical signals in ranking models to effectively aggregate all information from different behavioral features. Anecdotal evidence for the proposed approach is also provided using live product search traffic on Walmart.com.
On the Vulnerability of Applying Retrieval-Augmented Generation within Knowledge-Intensive Application Domains
Authors: Xun Xian, Ganghua Wang, Xuan Bi, Jayanth Srinivasa, Ashish Kundu, Charles Fleming, Mingyi Hong, Jie Ding
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been empirically shown to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive domains such as healthcare, finance, and legal contexts. Given a query, RAG retrieves relevant documents from a corpus and integrates them into the LLMs' generation process. In this study, we investigate the adversarial robustness of RAG, focusing specifically on examining the retrieval system. First, across 225 different setup combinations of corpus, retriever, query, and targeted information, we show that retrieval systems are vulnerable to universal poisoning attacks in medical Q\&A. In such attacks, adversaries generate poisoned documents containing a broad spectrum of targeted information, such as personally identifiable information. When these poisoned documents are inserted into a corpus, they can be accurately retrieved by any users, as long as attacker-specified queries are used. To understand this vulnerability, we discovered that the deviation from the query's embedding to that of the poisoned document tends to follow a pattern in which the high similarity between the poisoned document and the query is retained, thereby enabling precise retrieval. Based on these findings, we develop a new detection-based defense to ensure the safe use of RAG. Through extensive experiments spanning various Q\&A domains, we observed that our proposed method consistently achieves excellent detection rates in nearly all cases.
Mamba for Scalable and Efficient Personalized Recommendations
Authors: Andrew Starnes, Clayton Webster
Date: 2024-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Mamba, Music Recommendation, Recommendation Systems, State Space Models

In this effort, we propose using the Mamba for handling tabular data in personalized recommendation systems. We present the \textit{FT-Mamba} (Feature Tokenizer\,$+$\,Mamba), a novel hybrid model that replaces Transformer layers with Mamba layers within the FT-Transformer architecture, for handling tabular data in personalized recommendation systems. The \textit{Mamba model} offers an efficient alternative to Transformers, reducing computational complexity from quadratic to linear by enhancing the capabilities of State Space Models (SSMs). FT-Mamba is designed to improve the scalability and efficiency of recommendation systems while maintaining performance. We evaluate FT-Mamba in comparison to a traditional Transformer-based model within a Two-Tower architecture on three datasets: Spotify music recommendation, H\&M fashion recommendation, and vaccine messaging recommendation. Each model is trained on 160,000 user-action pairs, and performance is measured using precision (P), recall (R), Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), and Hit Ratio (HR) at several truncation values. Our results demonstrate that FT-Mamba outperforms the Transformer-based model in terms of computational efficiency while maintaining or exceeding performance across key recommendation metrics. By leveraging Mamba layers, FT-Mamba provides a scalable and effective solution for large-scale personalized recommendation systems, showcasing the potential of the Mamba architecture to enhance both efficiency and accuracy.
COLLEGE TRAINING AND PLACEMENT SYSTEM PROJECT.
Authors: Kamal Acharya
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Authorea 2024 8

In today’s world everyone is travelling for jobs after Completion of their graduation. It has became need for each and every student, but for that they need to travel worldwide in searching of jobs. For simplicity of this whole hectic procedures we had proposed Online Training and Placement System because of earlier system is totally done manually by maintaining records ,time consuming and very difficult to maintain coordination between student and companies. The project is aimed at developing an online web application for the training and placement department of the college. The system is an online web application that can be accessed throughout the Institute with proper login provided. This system can be used as an application for the TPO of the college to manage the student information with regard to placement. Student logging should be able to upload their information. Organizations representatives logging in may also access/search an information put up by the students. TPO have to collect the information and manage them manually according to various streams. If any modification is required that is also to be done manually. Overall it will reduce the paper work and utilize the maximum capability of the setup and organization as well as it will save time and money.