pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Measuring the Reliability of Causal Probing Methods: Tradeoffs, Limitations, and the Plight of Nullifying Interventions
Authors: Marc Canby, Adam Davies, Chirag Rastogi, Julia Hockenmaier
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Causal probing aims to analyze foundation models by examining how intervening on their representation of various latent properties impacts their outputs. Recent works have cast doubt on the theoretical basis of several leading causal probing methods, but it has been unclear how to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of these methods in practice. To address this, we formally define and quantify two key causal probing desiderata: completeness (how thoroughly the representation of the target property has been transformed) and selectivity (how little non-targeted properties have been impacted). We introduce an empirical analysis framework to measure and evaluate these quantities, allowing us to make the first direct comparisons of the reliability of different families of causal probing methods (e.g., linear vs. nonlinear or counterfactual vs. nullifying interventions). We find that: (1) there is an inherent tradeoff between completeness and selectivity; (2) no leading probing method is able to consistently satisfy both criteria at once; (3) methods with more favorable tradeoffs have a more consistent impact on LLM behavior; and (4) nullifying interventions are far less complete than counterfactual interventions, suggesting that nullifying methods may not be an effective approach to causal probing.
EmoAttack: Utilizing Emotional Voice Conversion for Speech Backdoor Attacks on Deep Speech Classification Models
Authors: Wenhan Yao, Zedong XingXiarun Chen, Jia Liu, Yongqiang He, Weiping Wen
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Backdoor Attack, Keyword Spotting, Speaker Verification, Voice Conversion

Deep speech classification tasks, mainly including keyword spotting and speaker verification, play a crucial role in speech-based human-computer interaction. Recently, the security of these technologies has been demonstrated to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Specifically speaking, speech samples are attacked by noisy disruption and component modification in present triggers. We suggest that speech backdoor attacks can strategically focus on emotion, a higher-level subjective perceptual attribute inherent in speech. Furthermore, we proposed that emotional voice conversion technology can serve as the speech backdoor attack trigger, and the method is called EmoAttack. Based on this, we conducted attack experiments on two speech classification tasks, showcasing that EmoAttack method owns impactful trigger effectiveness and its remarkable attack success rate and accuracy variance. Additionally, the ablation experiments found that speech with intensive emotion is more suitable to be targeted for attacks.
What Machine Learning Tells Us About the Mathematical Structure of Concepts
Authors: Jun Otsuka
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

This paper examines the connections among various approaches to understanding concepts in philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning, with a particular focus on their mathematical nature. By categorizing these approaches into Abstractionism, the Similarity Approach, the Functional Approach, and the Invariance Approach, the study highlights how each framework provides a distinct mathematical perspective for modeling concepts. The synthesis of these approaches bridges philosophical theories and contemporary machine learning models, providing a comprehensive framework for future research. This work emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue, aiming to enrich our understanding of the complex relationship between human cognition and artificial intelligence.
RoboSense: Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Egocentric Robot Perception and Navigation in Crowded and Unstructured Environments
Authors: Haisheng Su, Feixiang Song, Cong Ma, Wei Wu, Junchi Yan
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Navigation, object-detection, Object Detection, Robust Object Detection, Scene Understanding, Temporal Sequences

Reliable embodied perception from an egocentric perspective is challenging yet essential for autonomous navigation technology of intelligent mobile agents. With the growing demand of social robotics, near-field scene understanding becomes an important research topic in the areas of egocentric perceptual tasks related to navigation in both crowded and unstructured environments. Due to the complexity of environmental conditions and difficulty of surrounding obstacles owing to truncation and occlusion, the perception capability under this circumstance is still inferior. To further enhance the intelligence of mobile robots, in this paper, we setup an egocentric multi-sensor data collection platform based on 3 main types of sensors (Camera, LiDAR and Fisheye), which supports flexible sensor configurations to enable dynamic sight of view from ego-perspective, capturing either near or farther areas. Meanwhile, a large-scale multimodal dataset is constructed, named RoboSense, to facilitate egocentric robot perception. Specifically, RoboSense contains more than 133K synchronized data with 1.4M 3D bounding box and IDs annotated in the full $360^{\circ}$ view, forming 216K trajectories across 7.6K temporal sequences. It has $270\times$ and $18\times$ as many annotations of surrounding obstacles within near ranges as the previous datasets collected for autonomous driving scenarios such as KITTI and nuScenes. Moreover, we define a novel matching criterion for near-field 3D perception and prediction metrics. Based on RoboSense, we formulate 6 popular tasks to facilitate the future research development, where the detailed analysis as well as benchmarks are also provided accordingly. Data desensitization measures have been conducted for privacy protection.
MODULI: Unlocking Preference Generalization via Diffusion Models for Offline Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yifu Yuan, Zhenrui Zheng, Zibin Dong, Jianye Hao
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) seeks to develop policies that simultaneously optimize multiple conflicting objectives, but it requires extensive online interactions. Offline MORL provides a promising solution by training on pre-collected datasets to generalize to any preference upon deployment. However, real-world offline datasets are often conservatively and narrowly distributed, failing to comprehensively cover preferences, leading to the emergence of out-of-distribution (OOD) preference areas. Existing offline MORL algorithms exhibit poor generalization to OOD preferences, resulting in policies that do not align with preferences. Leveraging the excellent expressive and generalization capabilities of diffusion models, we propose MODULI (Multi-objective Diffusion Planner with Sliding Guidance), which employs a preference-conditioned diffusion model as a planner to generate trajectories that align with various preferences and derive action for decision-making. To achieve accurate generation, MODULI introduces two return normalization methods under diverse preferences for refining guidance. To further enhance generalization to OOD preferences, MODULI proposes a novel sliding guidance mechanism, which involves training an additional slider adapter to capture the direction of preference changes. Incorporating the slider, it transitions from in-distribution (ID) preferences to generating OOD preferences, patching, and extending the incomplete Pareto front. Extensive experiments on the D4MORL benchmark demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art Offline MORL baselines, exhibiting excellent generalization to OOD preferences.
Deep Learning to Predict Late-Onset Breast Cancer Metastasis: the Single Hyperparameter Grid Search (SHGS) Strategy for Meta Tuning Concerning Deep Feed-forward Neural Network
Authors: Yijun Zhou, Om Arora-Jain, Xia Jiang
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00

While machine learning has advanced in medicine, its widespread use in clinical applications, especially in predicting breast cancer metastasis, is still limited. We have been dedicated to constructing a DFNN model to predict breast cancer metastasis n years in advance. However, the challenge lies in efficiently identifying optimal hyperparameter values through grid search, given the constraints of time and resources. Issues such as the infinite possibilities for continuous hyperparameters like l1 and l2, as well as the time-consuming and costly process, further complicate the task. To address these challenges, we developed Single Hyperparameter Grid Search (SHGS) strategy, serving as a preselection method before grid search. Our experiments with SHGS applied to DFNN models for breast cancer metastasis prediction focus on analyzing eight target hyperparameters: epochs, batch size, dropout, L1, L2, learning rate, decay, and momentum. We created three figures, each depicting the experiment results obtained from three LSM-I-10-Plus-year datasets. These figures illustrate the relationship between model performance and the target hyperparameter values. For each hyperparameter, we analyzed whether changes in this hyperparameter would affect model performance, examined if there were specific patterns, and explored how to choose values for the particular hyperparameter. Our experimental findings reveal that the optimal value of a hyperparameter is not only dependent on the dataset but is also significantly influenced by the settings of other hyperparameters. Additionally, our experiments suggested some reduced range of values for a target hyperparameter, which may be helpful for low-budget grid search. This approach serves as a prior experience and foundation for subsequent use of grid search to enhance model performance.
Remove Symmetries to Control Model Expressivity
Authors: Liu Ziyin, Yizhou Xu, Isaac Chuang
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: model

When symmetry is present in the loss function, the model is likely to be trapped in a low-capacity state that is sometimes known as a "collapse." Being trapped in these low-capacity states can be a major obstacle to training across many scenarios where deep learning technology is applied. We first prove two concrete mechanisms through which symmetries lead to reduced capacities and ignored features during training. We then propose a simple and theoretically justified algorithm, syre, to remove almost all symmetry-induced low-capacity states in neural networks. The proposed method is shown to improve the training of neural networks in scenarios when this type of entrapment is especially a concern. A remarkable merit of the proposed method is that it is model-agnostic and does not require any knowledge of the symmetry.
CTRQNets & LQNets: Continuous Time Recurrent and Liquid Quantum Neural Networks
Authors: Alejandro Mayorga, Alexander Yuan, Andrew Yuan, Tyler Wooldridge, Xiaodi Wang
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

Neural networks have continued to gain prevalence in the modern era for their ability to model complex data through pattern recognition and behavior remodeling. However, the static construction of traditional neural networks inhibits dynamic intelligence. This makes them inflexible to temporal changes in data and unfit to capture complex dependencies. With the advent of quantum technology, there has been significant progress in creating quantum algorithms. In recent years, researchers have developed quantum neural networks that leverage the capabilities of qubits to outperform classical networks. However, their current formulation exhibits a static construction limiting the system's dynamic intelligence. To address these weaknesses, we develop a Liquid Quantum Neural Network (LQNet) and a Continuous Time Recurrent Quantum Neural Network (CTRQNet). Both models demonstrate a significant improvement in accuracy compared to existing quantum neural networks (QNNs), achieving accuracy increases as high as 40\% on CIFAR 10 through binary classification. We propose LQNets and CTRQNets might shine a light on quantum machine learning's black box.
Pathfinding with Lazy Successor Generation
Authors: Keisuke Okumura
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00

We study a pathfinding problem where only locations (i.e., vertices) are given, and edges are implicitly defined by an oracle answering the connectivity of two locations. Despite its simple structure, this problem becomes non-trivial with a massive number of locations, due to posing a huge branching factor for search algorithms. Limiting the number of successors, such as with nearest neighbors, can reduce search efforts but compromises completeness. Instead, we propose a novel LaCAS* algorithm, which does not generate successors all at once but gradually generates successors as the search progresses. This scheme is implemented with k-nearest neighbors search on a k-d tree. LaCAS* is a complete and anytime algorithm that eventually converges to the optima. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of LaCAS*, e.g., solving complex pathfinding instances quickly, where conventional methods falter.
Online Event-Triggered Switching for Frequency Control in Power Grids with Variable Inertia
Authors: Jie Feng, Wenqi Cui, Jorge Cortés, Yuanyuan Shi
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00

The increasing integration of renewable energy resources into power grids has led to time-varying system inertia and consequent degradation in frequency dynamics. A promising solution to alleviate performance degradation is using power electronics interfaced energy resources, such as renewable generators and battery energy storage for primary frequency control, by adjusting their power output set-points in response to frequency deviations. However, designing a frequency controller under time-varying inertia is challenging. Specifically, the stability or optimality of controllers designed for time-invariant systems can be compromised once applied to a time-varying system. We model the frequency dynamics under time-varying inertia as a nonlinear switching system, where the frequency dynamics under each mode are described by the nonlinear swing equations and different modes represent different inertia levels. We identify a key controller structure, named Neural Proportional-Integral (Neural-PI) controller, that guarantees exponential input-to-state stability for each mode. To further improve performance, we present an online event-triggered switching algorithm to select the most suitable controller from a set of Neural-PI controllers, each optimized for specific inertia levels. Simulations on the IEEE 39-bus system validate the effectiveness of the proposed online switching control method with stability guarantees and optimized performance for frequency control under time-varying inertia.
Fast and Modular Autonomy Software for Autonomous Racing Vehicles
Authors: Andrew Saba, Aderotimi Adetunji, Adam Johnson, Aadi Kothari, Matthew Sivaprakasam, Joshua Spisak, Prem Bharatia, Arjun Chauhan, Brendan Duff Jr., Noah Gasparro, Charles King, Ryan Larkin, Brian Mao, Micah Nye, Anjali Parashar, Joseph Attias, Aurimas Balciunas, Austin Brown, Chris Chang, Ming Gao, Cindy Heredia, Andrew Keats, Jose Lavariega, William Muckelroy III, Andre Slavescu, Nickolas Stathas, Nayana Suvarna, Chuan Tian Zhang, Sebastian Scherer, Deva Ramanan
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Racing, Motion Planning

Autonomous motorsports aim to replicate the human racecar driver with software and sensors. As in traditional motorsports, Autonomous Racing Vehicles (ARVs) are pushed to their handling limits in multi-agent scenarios at extremely high ($\geq 150mph$) speeds. This Operational Design Domain (ODD) presents unique challenges across the autonomy stack. The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is an international competition aiming to advance autonomous vehicle development through ARV competitions. While far from challenging what a human racecar driver can do, the IAC is pushing the state of the art by facilitating full-sized ARV competitions. This paper details the MIT-Pitt-RW Team's approach to autonomous racing in the IAC. In this work, we present our modular and fast approach to agent detection, motion planning and controls to create an autonomy stack. We also provide analysis of the performance of the software stack in single and multi-agent scenarios for rapid deployment in a fast-paced competition environment. We also cover what did and did not work when deployed on a physical system the Dallara AV-21 platform and potential improvements to address these shortcomings. Finally, we convey lessons learned and discuss limitations and future directions for improvement.
Simultaneous Training of First- and Second-Order Optimizers in Population-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Felix Pfeiffer, Shahram Eivazi
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The tuning of hyperparameters in reinforcement learning (RL) is critical, as these parameters significantly impact an agent's performance and learning efficiency. Dynamic adjustment of hyperparameters during the training process can significantly enhance both the performance and stability of learning. Population-based training (PBT) provides a method to achieve this by continuously tuning hyperparameters throughout the training. This ongoing adjustment enables models to adapt to different learning stages, resulting in faster convergence and overall improved performance. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to PBT by simultaneously utilizing both first- and second-order optimizers within a single population. We conducted a series of experiments using the TD3 algorithm across various MuJoCo environments. Our results, for the first time, empirically demonstrate the potential of incorporating second-order optimizers within PBT-based RL. Specifically, the combination of the K-FAC optimizer with Adam led to up to a 10% improvement in overall performance compared to PBT using only Adam. Additionally, in environments where Adam occasionally fails, such as the Swimmer environment, the mixed population with K-FAC exhibited more reliable learning outcomes, offering a significant advantage in training stability without a substantial increase in computational time.
Intertwined Biases Across Social Media Spheres: Unpacking Correlations in Media Bias Dimensions
Authors: Yifan Liu, Yike Li, Dong Wang
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00

Media bias significantly shapes public perception by reinforcing stereotypes and exacerbating societal divisions. Prior research has often focused on isolated media bias dimensions such as \textit{political bias} or \textit{racial bias}, neglecting the complex interrelationships among various bias dimensions across different topic domains. Moreover, we observe that models trained on existing media bias benchmarks fail to generalize effectively on recent social media posts, particularly in certain bias identification tasks. This shortfall primarily arises because these benchmarks do not adequately reflect the rapidly evolving nature of social media content, which is characterized by shifting user behaviors and emerging trends. In response to these limitations, our research introduces a novel dataset collected from YouTube and Reddit over the past five years. Our dataset includes automated annotations for YouTube content across a broad spectrum of bias dimensions, such as gender, racial, and political biases, as well as hate speech, among others. It spans diverse domains including politics, sports, healthcare, education, and entertainment, reflecting the complex interplay of biases across different societal sectors. Through comprehensive statistical analysis, we identify significant differences in bias expression patterns and intra-domain bias correlations across these domains. By utilizing our understanding of the correlations among various bias dimensions, we lay the groundwork for creating advanced systems capable of detecting multiple biases simultaneously. Overall, our dataset advances the field of media bias identification, contributing to the development of tools that promote fairer media consumption. The comprehensive awareness of existing media bias fosters more ethical journalism, promotes cultural sensitivity, and supports a more informed and equitable public discourse.
A Statistical Framework for Data-dependent Retrieval-Augmented Models
Authors: Soumya Basu, Ankit Singh Rawat, Manzil Zaheer
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval

Modern ML systems increasingly augment input instances with additional relevant information to enhance final prediction. Despite growing interest in such retrieval-augmented models, their fundamental properties and training are not well understood. We propose a statistical framework to study such models with two components: 1) a {\em retriever} to identify the relevant information out of a large corpus via a data-dependent metric; and 2) a {\em predictor} that consumes the input instances along with the retrieved information to make the final predictions. We present a principled method for end-to-end training of both components and draw connections with various training approaches in the literature. Furthermore, we establish excess risk bounds for retrieval-augmented models while delineating the contributions of both retriever and predictor towards the model performance. We validate the utility of our proposed training methods along with the key takeaways from our statistical analysis on open domain question answering task where retrieval augmentation is important.
SCAN-Edge: Finding MobileNet-speed Hybrid Networks for Diverse Edge Devices via Hardware-Aware Evolutionary Search
Authors: Hung-Yueh Chiang, Diana Marculescu
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Hardware Aware Neural Architecture Search, Neural Architecture Search

Designing low-latency and high-efficiency hybrid networks for a variety of low-cost commodity edge devices is both costly and tedious, leading to the adoption of hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) for finding optimal architectures. However, unifying NAS for a wide range of edge devices presents challenges due to the variety of hardware designs, supported operations, and compilation optimizations. Existing methods often fix the search space of architecture choices (e.g., activation, convolution, or self-attention) and estimate latency using hardware-agnostic proxies (e.g., FLOPs), which fail to achieve proclaimed latency across various edge devices. To address this issue, we propose SCAN-Edge, a unified NAS framework that jointly searches for self-attention, convolution, and activation to accommodate the wide variety of edge devices, including CPU-, GPU-, and hardware accelerator-based systems. To handle the large search space, SCAN-Edge relies on with a hardware-aware evolutionary algorithm that improves the quality of the search space to accelerate the sampling process. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate that our hybrid networks match the actual MobileNetV2 latency for 224x224 input resolution on various commodity edge devices.