pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Attack-Aware Noise Calibration for Differential Privacy
Authors: Bogdan Kulynych, Juan Felipe Gomez, Georgios Kaissis, Flavio du Pin Calmon, Carmela Troncoso
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Sensitivity, Specificity

Differential privacy (DP) is a widely used approach for mitigating privacy risks when training machine learning models on sensitive data. DP mechanisms add noise during training to limit the risk of information leakage. The scale of the added noise is critical, as it determines the trade-off between privacy and utility. The standard practice is to select the noise scale to satisfy a given privacy budget $\varepsilon$. This privacy budget is in turn interpreted in terms of operational attack risks, such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of inference attacks aimed to recover information about the training data records. We show that first calibrating the noise scale to a privacy budget $\varepsilon$, and then translating {\epsilon} to attack risk leads to overly conservative risk assessments and unnecessarily low utility. Instead, we propose methods to directly calibrate the noise scale to a desired attack risk level, bypassing the step of choosing $\varepsilon$. For a given notion of attack risk, our approach significantly decreases noise scale, leading to increased utility at the same level of privacy. We empirically demonstrate that calibrating noise to attack sensitivity/specificity, rather than $\varepsilon$, when training privacy-preserving ML models substantially improves model accuracy for the same risk level. Our work provides a principled and practical way to improve the utility of privacy-preserving ML without compromising on privacy. The code is available at https://github.com/Felipe-Gomez/riskcal
An Interpretable Alternative to Neural Representation Learning for Rating Prediction -- Transparent Latent Class Modeling of User Reviews
Authors: Giuseppe Serra, Peter Tino, Zhao Xu, Xin Yao
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

Nowadays, neural network (NN) and deep learning (DL) techniques are widely adopted in many applications, including recommender systems. Given the sparse and stochastic nature of collaborative filtering (CF) data, recent works have critically analyzed the effective improvement of neural-based approaches compared to simpler and often transparent algorithms for recommendation. Previous results showed that NN and DL models can be outperformed by traditional algorithms in many tasks. Moreover, given the largely black-box nature of neural-based methods, interpretable results are not naturally obtained. Following on this debate, we first present a transparent probabilistic model that topologically organizes user and product latent classes based on the review information. In contrast to popular neural techniques for representation learning, we readily obtain a statistical, visualization-friendly tool that can be easily inspected to understand user and product characteristics from a textual-based perspective. Then, given the limitations of common embedding techniques, we investigate the possibility of using the estimated interpretable quantities as model input for a rating prediction task. To contribute to the recent debates, we evaluate our results in terms of both capacity for interpretability and predictive performances in comparison with popular text-based neural approaches. The results demonstrate that the proposed latent class representations can yield competitive predictive performances, compared to popular, but difficult-to-interpret approaches.
Towards Training Music Taggers on Synthetic Data
Authors: Nadine Kroher, Steven Manangu, Aggelos Pikrakis
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Music Tagging, Transfer Learning

Most contemporary music tagging systems rely on large volumes of annotated data. As an alternative, we investigate the extent to which synthetically generated music excerpts can improve tagging systems when only small annotated collections are available. To this end, we release GTZAN-synth, a synthetic dataset that follows the taxonomy of the well-known GTZAN dataset while being ten times larger in data volume. We first observe that simply adding this synthetic dataset to the training split of GTZAN does not result into performance improvements. We then proceed to investigating domain adaptation, transfer learning and fine-tuning strategies for the task at hand and draw the conclusion that the last two options yield an increase in accuracy. Overall, the proposed approach can be considered as a first guide in a promising field for future research.
GemmAr: Enhancing LLMs Through Arabic Instruction-Tuning
Authors: Hasna Chouikhi, Manel Aloui, Cyrine Ben Hammou, Ghaith Chaabane, Haithem Kchaou, Chehir Dhaouadi
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have greatly impacted the natural language processing (NLP) field, particularly for the English language. These models have demonstrated capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. The success of language models largely depends on the availability of high-quality instruction datasets, which consist of detailed task descriptions and corresponding responses that are essential for training the models to address a variety of prompts accurately. However, the availability and quality of these resources vary by language. While models perform well in English, they often need help with languages like Arabic, due to the lack of datasets for fine-tuning Arabic-specific tasks. To address this issue, we introduce InstAr-500k, a new Arabic instruction dataset created by generating and collecting content that covers several domains and instruction types. We assess this dataset by fine-tuning an open-source Gemma-7B model on several downstream tasks to improve its functionality. Based on multiple evaluations, our fine-tuned model achieves excellent performance on several Arabic NLP benchmarks. These outcomes emphasize the effectiveness of our dataset in elevating the capabilities of language models for Arabic. Our instruction dataset bridges the performance gap between English and Arabic language models by providing resources that amplify Arabic NLP development. Building on this foundation, we developed a model, GemmAr-7B-V1, specifically tuned to excel at a wide range of Arabic NLP tasks.
Cost-Effective Proxy Reward Model Construction with On-Policy and Active Learning
Authors: Yifang Chen, Shuohang Wang, ZiYi Yang, Hiteshi Sharma, Nikos Karampatziakis, Donghan Yu, Kevin Jamieson, Simon Shaolei Du, Yelong Shen
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, MMLU

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), as a widely adopted approach in current large language model pipelines, is \textit{bottlenecked by the size of human preference data}. While traditional methods rely on offline preference dataset constructions, recent approaches have shifted towards online settings, where a learner uses a small amount of labeled seed data and a large pool of unlabeled prompts to iteratively construct new preference data through self-generated responses and high-quality reward/preference feedback. However, most current online algorithms still focus on preference labeling during policy model updating with given feedback oracles, which incurs significant expert query costs. \textit{We are the first to explore cost-effective proxy reward oracles construction strategies for further labeling preferences or rewards with extremely limited labeled data and expert query budgets}. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (1) on-policy query to avoid OOD and imbalance issues in seed data, and (2) active learning to select the most informative data for preference queries. Using these methods, we train a evaluation model with minimal expert-labeled data, which then effectively labels nine times more preference pairs for further RLHF training. For instance, our model using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) gains around over 1% average improvement on AlpacaEval2, MMLU-5shot and MMLU-0shot, with only 1.7K query cost. Our methodology is orthogonal to other direct expert query-based strategies and therefore might be integrated with them to further reduce query costs.
A Data-Centric Perspective on Evaluating Machine Learning Models for Tabular Data
Authors: Andrej Tschalzev, Sascha Marton, Stefan Lüdtke, Christian Bartelt, Heiner Stuckenschmidt
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Hyperparameter Optimization, Model Selection, Test-time Adaptation

Tabular data is prevalent in real-world machine learning applications, and new models for supervised learning of tabular data are frequently proposed. Comparative studies assessing the performance of models typically consist of model-centric evaluation setups with overly standardized data preprocessing. This paper demonstrates that such model-centric evaluations are biased, as real-world modeling pipelines often require dataset-specific preprocessing and feature engineering. Therefore, we propose a data-centric evaluation framework. We select 10 relevant datasets from Kaggle competitions and implement expert-level preprocessing pipelines for each dataset. We conduct experiments with different preprocessing pipelines and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) regimes to quantify the impact of model selection, HPO, feature engineering, and test-time adaptation. Our main findings are: 1. After dataset-specific feature engineering, model rankings change considerably, performance differences decrease, and the importance of model selection reduces. 2. Recent models, despite their measurable progress, still significantly benefit from manual feature engineering. This holds true for both tree-based models and neural networks. 3. While tabular data is typically considered static, samples are often collected over time, and adapting to distribution shifts can be important even in supposedly static data. These insights suggest that research efforts should be directed toward a data-centric perspective, acknowledging that tabular data requires feature engineering and often exhibits temporal characteristics. Our framework is available under: https://github.com/atschalz/dc_tabeval.
HRSAM: Efficient Interactive Segmentation in High-Resolution Images
Authors: You Huang, Wenbin Lai, Jiayi Ji, Liujuan Cao, Shengchuan Zhang, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, GPU, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation, State Space Models

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has advanced interactive segmentation but is limited by the high computational cost on high-resolution images. This requires downsampling to meet GPU constraints, sacrificing the fine-grained details needed for high-precision interactive segmentation. To address SAM's limitations, we focus on visual length extrapolation and propose a lightweight model named HRSAM. The extrapolation enables HRSAM trained on low resolutions to generalize to high resolutions. We begin by finding the link between the extrapolation and attention scores, which leads us to base HRSAM on Swin attention. We then introduce the Flexible Local Attention (FLA) framework, using CUDA-optimized Efficient Memory Attention to accelerate HRSAM. Within FLA, we implement Flash Swin attention, achieving over a 35% speedup compared to traditional Swin attention, and propose a KV-only padding mechanism to enhance extrapolation. We also develop the Cycle-scan module that uses State Space models to efficiently expand HRSAM's receptive field. We further develop the HRSAM++ within FLA by adding an anchor map, providing multi-scale data augmentation for the extrapolation and a larger receptive field at slight computational cost. Experiments show that, under standard training, HRSAMs surpass the previous SOTA with only 38% of the latency. With SAM-distillation, the extrapolation enables HRSAMs to outperform the teacher model at lower latency. Further finetuning achieves performance significantly exceeding the previous SOTA.
Automated Knowledge Graph Learning in Industrial Processes
Authors: Lolitta Ammann, Jorge Martinez-Gil, Michael Mayr, Georgios C. Chasparis
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Graph Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Time Series

Industrial processes generate vast amounts of time series data, yet extracting meaningful relationships and insights remains challenging. This paper introduces a framework for automated knowledge graph learning from time series data, specifically tailored for industrial applications. Our framework addresses the complexities inherent in industrial datasets, transforming them into knowledge graphs that improve decision-making, process optimization, and knowledge discovery. Additionally, it employs Granger causality to identify key attributes that can inform the design of predictive models. To illustrate the practical utility of our approach, we also present a motivating use case demonstrating the benefits of our framework in a real-world industrial scenario. Further, we demonstrate how the automated conversion of time series data into knowledge graphs can identify causal influences or dependencies between important process parameters.
MARLIN: A Cloud Integrated Robotic Solution to Support Intralogistics in Retail
Authors: Dennis Mronga, Andreas Bresser, Fabian Maas, Adrian Danzglock, Simon Stelter, Alina Hawkin, Hoang Giang Nguyen, Michael Beetz, Frank Kirchner
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Task Planning

In this paper, we present the service robot MARLIN and its integration with the K4R platform, a cloud system for complex AI applications in retail. At its core, this platform contains so-called semantic digital twins, a semantically annotated representation of the retail store. MARLIN continuously exchanges data with the K4R platform, improving the robot's capabilities in perception, autonomous navigation, and task planning. We exploit these capabilities in a retail intralogistics scenario, specifically by assisting store employees in stocking shelves. We demonstrate that MARLIN is able to update the digital representation of the retail store by detecting and classifying obstacles, autonomously planning and executing replenishment missions, adapting to unforeseen changes in the environment, and interacting with store employees. Experiments are conducted in simulation, in a laboratory environment, and in a real store. We also describe and evaluate a novel algorithm for autonomous navigation of articulated tractor-trailer systems. The algorithm outperforms the manufacturer's proprietary navigation approach and improves MARLIN's navigation capabilities in confined spaces.
Latent Diffusion Model for Generating Ensembles of Climate Simulations
Authors: Johannes Meuer, Maximilian Witte, Tobias Sebastian Finn, Claudia Timmreck, Thomas Ludwig, Christopher Kadow
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Dimensionality Reduction, Uncertainty Quantification

Obtaining accurate estimates of uncertainty in climate scenarios often requires generating large ensembles of high-resolution climate simulations, a computationally expensive and memory intensive process. To address this challenge, we train a novel generative deep learning approach on extensive sets of climate simulations. The model consists of two components: a variational autoencoder for dimensionality reduction and a denoising diffusion probabilistic model that generates multiple ensemble members. We validate our model on the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble and show that it achieves good agreement with the original ensemble in terms of variability. By leveraging the latent space representation, our model can rapidly generate large ensembles on-the-fly with minimal memory requirements, which can significantly improve the efficiency of uncertainty quantification in climate simulations.
Are Data Augmentation Methods in Named Entity Recognition Applicable for Uncertainty Estimation?
Authors: Wataru Hashimoto, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

This work investigates the impact of data augmentation on confidence calibration and uncertainty estimation in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. For the future advance of NER in safety-critical fields like healthcare and finance, it is essential to achieve accurate predictions with calibrated confidence when applying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), as a real-world application. However, DNNs are prone to miscalibration, which limits their applicability. Moreover, existing methods for calibration and uncertainty estimation are computational expensive. Our investigation in NER found that data augmentation improves calibration and uncertainty in cross-genre and cross-lingual setting, especially in-domain setting. Furthermore, we showed that the calibration for NER tends to be more effective when the perplexity of the sentences generated by data augmentation is lower, and that increasing the size of the augmentation further improves calibration and uncertainty.
Terminating Differentiable Tree Experts
Authors: Jonathan Thomm, Michael Hersche, Giacomo Camposampiero, Aleksandar Terzić, Bernhard Schölkopf, Abbas Rahimi
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts

We advance the recently proposed neuro-symbolic Differentiable Tree Machine, which learns tree operations using a combination of transformers and Tensor Product Representations. We investigate the architecture and propose two key components. We first remove a series of different transformer layers that are used in every step by introducing a mixture of experts. This results in a Differentiable Tree Experts model with a constant number of parameters for any arbitrary number of steps in the computation, compared to the previous method in the Differentiable Tree Machine with a linear growth. Given this flexibility in the number of steps, we additionally propose a new termination algorithm to provide the model the power to choose how many steps to make automatically. The resulting Terminating Differentiable Tree Experts model sluggishly learns to predict the number of steps without an oracle. It can do so while maintaining the learning capabilities of the model, converging to the optimal amount of steps.
Abstract Dialectical Frameworks are Boolean Networks (full version)
Authors: Jesse Heyninck, Matthias Knorr, João Leite
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

Dialectical frameworks are a unifying model of formal argumentation, where argumentative relations between arguments are represented by assigning acceptance conditions to atomic arguments. Their generality allow them to cover a number of different approaches with varying forms of representing the argumentation structure. Boolean regulatory networks are used to model the dynamics of complex biological processes, taking into account the interactions of biological compounds, such as proteins or genes. These models have proven highly useful for comprehending such biological processes, allowing to reproduce known behaviour and testing new hypotheses and predictions in silico, for example in the context of new medical treatments. While both these approaches stem from entirely different communities, it turns out that there are striking similarities in their appearence. In this paper, we study the relation between these two formalisms revealing their communalities as well as their differences, and introducing a correspondence that allows to establish novel results for the individual formalisms.
Revolutionising Role-Playing Games with ChatGPT
Authors: Rita Stampfl, Barbara Geyer, Marie Deissl-O'Meara, Igor Ivkić
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Decision Making

Digitalisation in education and its influence on teaching methods is the focus of this study, which examines the use of ChatGPT in a role-playing game used in the Cloud Computing Engineering Master's programme at the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland. The aim of the study was to analyse the impact of AI-based simulations on students' learning experience. Based on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, ChatGPT was used to give students a deeper understanding of strategic decision-making processes in simulated business scenarios. The methodological approach included role-playing and qualitative content analysis of 20 student reflections. The findings suggest that ChatGPT enhances students' engagement, critical thinking, and communication skills, in addition to contributing to the effective application of theoretical knowledge. Furthermore, simulations can contribute to the effective application of theoretical knowledge. The results underscore the significance of adaptive teaching approaches in promoting digital literacy and equipping learners for the digital workplace. The integration of AI into curricula and the need for ongoing innovation in higher education are also emphasised as a means of guaranteeing excellent, future-focused instruction. The findings highlight the potential of AI and ChatGPT in particular, as an innovative cutting-edge educational tool that can both enhance the learning experience and help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through education.
Fake News Detection and Manipulation Reasoning via Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Ruihan Jin, Ruibo Fu, Zhengqi Wen, Shuai Zhang, Yukun Liu, JianHua Tao
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Fake News Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Fake news becomes a growing threat to information security and public opinion with the rapid sprawl of media manipulation. Therefore, fake news detection attracts widespread attention from academic community. Traditional fake news detection models demonstrate remarkable performance on authenticity binary classification but their ability to reason detailed faked traces based on the news content remains under-explored. Furthermore, due to the lack of external knowledge, the performance of existing methods on fact-related news is questionable, leaving their practical implementation unclear. In this paper, we propose a new multi-media research topic, namely manipulation reasoning. Manipulation reasoning aims to reason manipulations based on news content. To support the research, we introduce a benchmark for fake news detection and manipulation reasoning, referred to as Human-centric and Fact-related Fake News (HFFN). The benchmark highlights the centrality of human and the high factual relevance, with detailed manual annotations. HFFN encompasses four realistic domains with fake news samples generated through three manipulation approaches. Moreover, a Multi-modal news Detection and Reasoning langUage Model (M-DRUM) is presented not only to judge on the authenticity of multi-modal news, but also raise analytical reasoning about potential manipulations. On the feature extraction level, a cross-attention mechanism is employed to extract fine-grained fusion features from multi-modal inputs. On the reasoning level, a large vision-language model (LVLM) serves as the backbone to facilitate fact-related reasoning. A two-stage training framework is deployed to better activate the capacity of identification and reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) fake news detection models and powerful LVLMs like GPT-4 and LLaVA.