pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Jiajun Xu, Zhiyuan Li, Wei Chen, Qun Wang, Xin Gao, Qi Cai, Ziyuan Ling
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Quantization

The advent of large language models (LLMs) revolutionized natural language processing applications, and running LLMs on edge devices has become increasingly attractive for reasons including reduced latency, data localization, and personalized user experiences. This comprehensive review examines the challenges of deploying computationally expensive LLMs on resource-constrained devices and explores innovative solutions across multiple domains. The paper investigates the development of on-device language models, their efficient architectures, including parameter sharing and modular designs, as well as state-of-the-art compression techniques like quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Hardware acceleration strategies and collaborative edge-cloud deployment approaches are analyzed, highlighting the intricate balance between performance and resource utilization. Case studies of on-device language models from major mobile manufacturers demonstrate real-world applications and potential benefits. The review also addresses critical aspects such as adaptive learning, multi-modal capabilities, and personalization. By identifying key research directions and open challenges, this paper provides a roadmap for future advancements in on-device language models, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary efforts to realize the full potential of ubiquitous, intelligent computing while ensuring responsible and ethical deployment. For a comprehensive review of research work and educational resources on on-device large language models (LLMs), please visit https://github.com/NexaAI/Awesome-LLMs-on-device. To download and run on-device LLMs, visit https://www.nexaai.com/models.
Analyzing Correlations Between Intrinsic and Extrinsic Bias Metrics of Static Word Embeddings With Their Measuring Biases Aligned
Authors: Taisei Katô, Yusuke Miyao
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

We examine the abilities of intrinsic bias metrics of static word embeddings to predict whether Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems exhibit biased behavior. A word embedding is one of the fundamental NLP technologies that represents the meanings of words through real vectors, and problematically, it also learns social biases such as stereotypes. An intrinsic bias metric measures bias by examining a characteristic of vectors, while an extrinsic bias metric checks whether an NLP system trained with a word embedding is biased. A previous study found that a common intrinsic bias metric usually does not correlate with extrinsic bias metrics. However, the intrinsic and extrinsic bias metrics did not measure the same bias in most cases, which makes us question whether the lack of correlation is genuine. In this paper, we extract characteristic words from datasets of extrinsic bias metrics and analyze correlations with intrinsic bias metrics with those words to ensure both metrics measure the same bias. We observed moderate to high correlations with some extrinsic bias metrics but little to no correlations with the others. This result suggests that intrinsic bias metrics can predict biased behavior in particular settings but not in others. Experiment codes are available at GitHub.
NovAScore: A New Automated Metric for Evaluating Document Level Novelty
Authors: Lin Ai, Ziwei Gong, Harshsaiprasad Deshpande, Alexander Johnson, Emmy Phung, Ahmad Emami, Julia Hirschberg
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Novelty Detection

The rapid expansion of online content has intensified the issue of information redundancy, underscoring the need for solutions that can identify genuinely new information. Despite this challenge, the research community has seen a decline in focus on novelty detection, particularly with the rise of large language models (LLMs). Additionally, previous approaches have relied heavily on human annotation, which is time-consuming, costly, and particularly challenging when annotators must compare a target document against a vast number of historical documents. In this work, we introduce NovAScore (Novelty Evaluation in Atomicity Score), an automated metric for evaluating document-level novelty. NovAScore aggregates the novelty and salience scores of atomic information, providing high interpretability and a detailed analysis of a document's novelty. With its dynamic weight adjustment scheme, NovAScore offers enhanced flexibility and an additional dimension to assess both the novelty level and the importance of information within a document. Our experiments show that NovAScore strongly correlates with human judgments of novelty, achieving a 0.626 Point-Biserial correlation on the TAP-DLND 1.0 dataset and a 0.920 Pearson correlation on an internal human-annotated dataset.
ReCLAP: Improving Zero Shot Audio Classification by Describing Sounds
Authors: Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, Oriol Nieto, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2024-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Descriptive, Text Retrieval, Zero-shot Audio Classification

Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.
Towards Precision Characterization of Communication Disorders using Models of Perceived Pragmatic Similarity
Authors: Nigel G. Ward, Andres Segura, Georgina Bugarini, Heike Lehnert-LeHouillier, Dancheng Liu, JinJun Xiong, Olac Fuentes
Date: 2024-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The diagnosis and treatment of individuals with communication disorders offers many opportunities for the application of speech technology, but research so far has not adequately considered: the diversity of conditions, the role of pragmatic deficits, and the challenges of limited data. This paper explores how a general-purpose model of perceived pragmatic similarity may overcome these limitations. It explains how it might support several use cases for clinicians and clients, and presents evidence that a simple model can provide value, and in particular can capture utterance aspects that are relevant to diagnoses of autism and specific language impairment.
DomURLs_BERT: Pre-trained BERT-based Model for Malicious Domains and URLs Detection and Classification
Authors: Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Salima Lamsiyah, Meryem Janati Idrissi, Hamza Alami, Zakaria Yartaoui, Ismail Berrada
Date: 2024-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Multi-class Classification

Detecting and classifying suspicious or malicious domain names and URLs is fundamental task in cybersecurity. To leverage such indicators of compromise, cybersecurity vendors and practitioners often maintain and update blacklists of known malicious domains and URLs. However, blacklists frequently fail to identify emerging and obfuscated threats. Over the past few decades, there has been significant interest in developing machine learning models that automatically detect malicious domains and URLs, addressing the limitations of blacklists maintenance and updates. In this paper, we introduce DomURLs_BERT, a pre-trained BERT-based encoder adapted for detecting and classifying suspicious/malicious domains and URLs. DomURLs_BERT is pre-trained using the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective on a large multilingual corpus of URLs, domain names, and Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) dataset. In order to assess the performance of DomURLs_BERT, we have conducted experiments on several binary and multi-class classification tasks involving domain names and URLs, covering phishing, malware, DGA, and DNS tunneling. The evaluations results show that the proposed encoder outperforms state-of-the-art character-based deep learning models and cybersecurity-focused BERT models across multiple tasks and datasets. The pre-training dataset, the pre-trained DomURLs_BERT encoder, and the experiments source code are publicly available.
AccentBox: Towards High-Fidelity Zero-Shot Accent Generation
Authors: Jinzuomu Zhong, Korin Richmond, Zhiba Su, Siqi Sun
Date: 2024-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech

While recent Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech (ZS-TTS) models have achieved high naturalness and speaker similarity, they fall short in accent fidelity and control. To address this issue, we propose zero-shot accent generation that unifies Foreign Accent Conversion (FAC), accented TTS, and ZS-TTS, with a novel two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on Accent Identification (AID) with 0.56 f1 score on unseen speakers. In the second stage, we condition a ZS-TTS system on the pretrained speaker-agnostic accent embeddings extracted by the AID model. The proposed system achieves higher accent fidelity on inherent/cross accent generation, and enables unseen accent generation.
An Evaluation of GPT-4V for Transcribing the Urban Renewal Hand-Written Collection
Authors: Myeong Lee, Julia H. P. Hsu
Date: 2024-09-11 00:00:00

Between 1960 and 1980, urban renewal transformed many cities, creating vast handwritten records. These documents posed a significant challenge for researchers due to their volume and handwritten nature. The launch of GPT-4V in November 2023 offered a breakthrough, enabling large-scale, efficient transcription and analysis of these historical urban renewal documents.
Fixed-Parameter Tractability of the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm on Random Planted Vertex Covers
Authors: Jack Kearney, Frank Neumann, Andrew M. Sutton
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00

We present the first parameterized analysis of a standard (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm on a distribution of vertex cover problems. We show that if the planted cover is at most logarithmic, restarting the (1+1) EA every $O(n \log n)$ steps will find a cover at least as small as the planted cover in polynomial time for sufficiently dense random graphs $p > 0.71$. For superlogarithmic planted covers, we prove that the (1+1) EA finds a solution in fixed-parameter tractable time in expectation. We complement these theoretical investigations with a number of computational experiments that highlight the interplay between planted cover size, graph density and runtime.
ORS: A novel Olive Ridley Survival inspired Meta-heuristic Optimization Algorithm
Authors: Niranjan Panigrahi, Sourav Kumar Bhoi, Debasis Mohapatra, Rashmi Ranjan Sahoo, Kshira Sagar Sahoo, Anil Mohapatra
Date: 2024-09-13 00:00:00

Meta-heuristic algorithmic development has been a thrust area of research since its inception. In this paper, a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, Olive Ridley Survival (ORS), is proposed which is inspired from survival challenges faced by hatchlings of Olive Ridley sea turtle. A major fact about survival of Olive Ridley reveals that out of one thousand Olive Ridley hatchlings which emerge from nest, only one survive at sea due to various environmental and other factors. This fact acts as the backbone for developing the proposed algorithm. The algorithm has two major phases: hatchlings survival through environmental factors and impact of movement trajectory on its survival. The phases are mathematically modelled and implemented along with suitable input representation and fitness function. The algorithm is analysed theoretically. To validate the algorithm, fourteen mathematical benchmark functions from standard CEC test suites are evaluated and statistically tested. Also, to study the efficacy of ORS on recent complex benchmark functions, ten benchmark functions of CEC-06-2019 are evaluated. Further, three well-known engineering problems are solved by ORS and compared with other state-of-the-art meta-heuristics. Simulation results show that in many cases, the proposed ORS algorithm outperforms some state-of-the-art meta-heuristic optimization algorithms. The sub-optimal behavior of ORS in some recent benchmark functions is also observed.
Y-Drop: A Conductance based Dropout for fully connected layers
Authors: Efthymios Georgiou, Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Alexandros Potamianos
Date: 2024-09-11 00:00:00

In this work, we introduce Y-Drop, a regularization method that biases the dropout algorithm towards dropping more important neurons with higher probability. The backbone of our approach is neuron conductance, an interpretable measure of neuron importance that calculates the contribution of each neuron towards the end-to-end mapping of the network. We investigate the impact of the uniform dropout selection criterion on performance by assigning higher dropout probability to the more important units. We show that forcing the network to solve the task at hand in the absence of its important units yields a strong regularization effect. Further analysis indicates that Y-Drop yields solutions where more neurons are important, i.e have high conductance, and yields robust networks. In our experiments we show that the regularization effect of Y-Drop scales better than vanilla dropout w.r.t. the architecture size and consistently yields superior performance over multiple datasets and architecture combinations, with little tuning.
Multidimensional Deconvolution with Profiling
Authors: Huanbiao Zhu, Krish Desai, Mikael Kuusela, Vinicius Mikuni, Benjamin Nachman, Larry Wasserman
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00

In many experimental contexts, it is necessary to statistically remove the impact of instrumental effects in order to physically interpret measurements. This task has been extensively studied in particle physics, where the deconvolution task is called unfolding. A number of recent methods have shown how to perform high-dimensional, unbinned unfolding using machine learning. However, one of the assumptions in all of these methods is that the detector response is correctly modeled in the Monte Carlo simulation. In practice, the detector response depends on a number of nuisance parameters that can be constrained with data. We propose a new algorithm called Profile OmniFold, which works in a similar iterative manner as the OmniFold algorithm while being able to simultaneously profile the nuisance parameters. We illustrate the method with a Gaussian example as a proof of concept highlighting its promising capabilities.
Econometric Inference for High Dimensional Predictive Regressions
Authors: Zhan Gao, Ji Hyung Lee, Ziwei Mei, Zhentao Shi
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

LASSO introduces shrinkage bias into estimated coefficients, which can adversely affect the desirable asymptotic normality and invalidate the standard inferential procedure based on the $t$-statistic. The desparsified LASSO has emerged as a well-known remedy for this issue. In the context of high dimensional predictive regression, the desparsified LASSO faces an additional challenge: the Stambaugh bias arising from nonstationary regressors. To restore the standard inferential procedure, we propose a novel estimator called IVX-desparsified LASSO (XDlasso). XDlasso eliminates the shrinkage bias and the Stambaugh bias simultaneously and does not require prior knowledge about the identities of nonstationary and stationary regressors. We establish the asymptotic properties of XDlasso for hypothesis testing, and our theoretical findings are supported by Monte Carlo simulations. Applying our method to real-world applications from the FRED-MD database -- which includes a rich set of control variables -- we investigate two important empirical questions: (i) the predictability of the U.S. stock returns based on the earnings-price ratio, and (ii) the predictability of the U.S. inflation using the unemployment rate.
Towards a Unified Theory for Semiparametric Data Fusion with Individual-Level Data
Authors: Ellen Graham, Marco Carone, Andrea Rotnitzky
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00

We address the goal of conducting inference about a smooth finite-dimensional parameter by utilizing individual-level data from various independent sources. Recent advancements have led to the development of a comprehensive theory capable of handling scenarios where different data sources align with, possibly distinct subsets of, conditional distributions of a single factorization of the joint target distribution. While this theory proves effective in many significant contexts, it falls short in certain common data fusion problems, such as two-sample instrumental variable analysis, settings that integrate data from epidemiological studies with diverse designs (e.g., prospective cohorts and retrospective case-control studies), and studies with variables prone to measurement error that are supplemented by validation studies. In this paper, we extend the aforementioned comprehensive theory to allow for the fusion of individual-level data from sources aligned with conditional distributions that do not correspond to a single factorization of the target distribution. Assuming conditional and marginal distribution alignments, we provide universal results that characterize the class of all influence functions of regular asymptotically linear estimators and the efficient influence function of any pathwise differentiable parameter, irrespective of the number of data sources, the specific parameter of interest, or the statistical model for the target distribution. This theory paves the way for machine-learning debiased, semiparametric efficient estimation.
CHARM: Creating Halos with Auto-Regressive Multi-stage networks
Authors: Shivam Pandey, Chirag Modi, Benjamin D. Wandelt, Deaglan J. Bartlett, Adrian E. Bayer, Greg L. Bryan, Matthew Ho, Guilhem Lavaux, T. Lucas Makinen, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro
Date: 2024-09-13 00:00:00

To maximize the amount of information extracted from cosmological datasets, simulations that accurately represent these observations are necessary. However, traditional simulations that evolve particles under gravity by estimating particle-particle interactions (N-body simulations) are computationally expensive and prohibitive to scale to the large volumes and resolutions necessary for the upcoming datasets. Moreover, modeling the distribution of galaxies typically involves identifying virialized dark matter halos, which is also a time- and memory-consuming process for large N-body simulations, further exacerbating the computational cost. In this study, we introduce CHARM, a novel method for creating mock halo catalogs by matching the spatial, mass, and velocity statistics of halos directly from the large-scale distribution of the dark matter density field. We develop multi-stage neural spline flow-based networks to learn this mapping at redshift z=0.5 directly with computationally cheaper low-resolution particle mesh simulations instead of relying on the high-resolution N-body simulations. We show that the mock halo catalogs and painted galaxy catalogs have the same statistical properties as obtained from $N$-body simulations in both real space and redshift space. Finally, we use these mock catalogs for cosmological inference using redshift-space galaxy power spectrum, bispectrum, and wavelet-based statistics using simulation-based inference, performing the first inference with accelerated forward model simulations and finding unbiased cosmological constraints with well-calibrated posteriors. The code was developed as part of the Simons Collaboration on Learning the Universe and is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/shivampcosmo/CHARM}.
Bounds on the Generalization Error in Active Learning
Authors: Vincent Menden, Yahya Saleh, Armin Iske
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Informativeness

We establish empirical risk minimization principles for active learning by deriving a family of upper bounds on the generalization error. Aligning with empirical observations, the bounds suggest that superior query algorithms can be obtained by combining both informativeness and representativeness query strategies, where the latter is assessed using integral probability metrics. To facilitate the use of these bounds in application, we systematically link diverse active learning scenarios, characterized by their loss functions and hypothesis classes to their corresponding upper bounds. Our results show that regularization techniques used to constraint the complexity of various hypothesis classes are sufficient conditions to ensure the validity of the bounds. The present work enables principled construction and empirical quality-evaluation of query algorithms in active learning.
beeFormer: Bridging the Gap Between Semantic and Interaction Similarity in Recommender Systems
Authors: Vojtěch Vančura, Pavel Kordík, Milan Straka
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence

Recommender systems often use text-side information to improve their predictions, especially in cold-start or zero-shot recommendation scenarios, where traditional collaborative filtering approaches cannot be used. Many approaches to text-mining side information for recommender systems have been proposed over recent years, with sentence Transformers being the most prominent one. However, these models are trained to predict semantic similarity without utilizing interaction data with hidden patterns specific to recommender systems. In this paper, we propose beeFormer, a framework for training sentence Transformer models with interaction data. We demonstrate that our models trained with beeFormer can transfer knowledge between datasets while outperforming not only semantic similarity sentence Transformers but also traditional collaborative filtering methods. We also show that training on multiple datasets from different domains accumulates knowledge in a single model, unlocking the possibility of training universal, domain-agnostic sentence Transformer models to mine text representations for recommender systems. We release the source code, trained models, and additional details allowing replication of our experiments at https://github.com/recombee/beeformer.