pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BADTV: Unveiling Backdoor Threats in Third-Party Task Vectors
Authors: Chia-Yi Hsu, Yu-Lin Tsai, Yu Zhe, Yan-Lun Chen, Chih-Hsun Lin, Chia-Mu Yu, Yang Zhang, Chun-Ying Huang, Jun Sakuma
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Task Arithmetic

Task arithmetic in large-scale pre-trained models enables agile adaptation to diverse downstream tasks without extensive retraining. By leveraging task vectors (TVs), users can perform modular updates through simple arithmetic operations like addition and subtraction. Yet, this flexibility presents new security challenges. In this paper, we investigate how TVs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, revealing how malicious actors can exploit them to compromise model integrity. By creating composite backdoors that are designed asymmetrically, we introduce BadTV, a backdoor attack specifically crafted to remain effective simultaneously under task learning, forgetting, and analogy operations. Extensive experiments show that BadTV achieves near-perfect attack success rates across diverse scenarios, posing a serious threat to models relying on task arithmetic. We also evaluate current defenses, finding they fail to detect or mitigate BadTV. Our results highlight the urgent need for robust countermeasures to secure TVs in real-world deployments.
Predicting two-dimensional spatiotemporal chaotic patterns with optimized high-dimensional hybrid reservoir computing
Authors: Tamon Nakano Sebastian Baur Christoph Räth
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Prediction

As an alternative approach for predicting complex dynamical systems where physics-based models are no longer reliable, reservoir computing (RC) has gained popularity. The hybrid approach is considered an interesting option for improving the prediction performance of RC. The idea is to combine a knowledge-based model (KBM) to support the fully data-driven RC prediction. There are three types of hybridization for RC, namely full hybrid (FH), input hybrid (IH) and output hybrid (OH), where it was shown that the latter one is superior in terms of the accuracy and the robustness for the prediction of low-dimensional chaotic systems. Here, we extend the formalism to the prediction of spatiotemporal patterns in two dimensions. To overcome the curse of dimensionality for this very high-dimensional case we employ the local states ansatz, where only a few locally adjacent time series are utilized for the RC-based prediction. Using simulation data from the Barkley model describing chaotic electrical wave propagation in cardiac tissue, we outline the formalism of high-dimensional hybrid RC and assess the performance of the different hybridization schemes. We find that all three methods (FH, IH and OH) perform better than reservoir only, where improvements are small when the model is very inaccurate. For small model errors and small reservoirs FH and OH perform nearly equally well and better than IH. Given the smaller CPU needs for OH and especially the better interpretability of it, OH is to be favored. For large reservoirs the performance of OH drops below that of FH and IH. Generally, it maybe advisable to test the three setups for a given application and select the best suited one that optimizes between the counteracting factors of prediction performance and CPU needs.
Easing Optimization Paths: a Circuit Perspective
Authors: Ambroise Odonnat, Wassim Bouaziz, Vivien Cabannes
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Gradient descent is the method of choice for training large artificial intelligence systems. As these systems become larger, a better understanding of the mechanisms behind gradient training would allow us to alleviate compute costs and help steer these systems away from harmful behaviors. To that end, we suggest utilizing the circuit perspective brought forward by mechanistic interpretability. After laying out our intuition, we illustrate how it enables us to design a curriculum for efficient learning in a controlled setting. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/facebookresearch/pal}.
When is the Computation of a Feature Attribution Method Tractable?
Authors: P. Barceló, R. Cominetti, M. Morgado
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Feature attribution methods have become essential for explaining machine learning models. Many popular approaches, such as SHAP and Banzhaf values, are grounded in power indices from cooperative game theory, which measure the contribution of features to model predictions. This work studies the computational complexity of power indices beyond SHAP, addressing the conditions under which they can be computed efficiently. We identify a simple condition on power indices that ensures that computation is polynomially equivalent to evaluating expected values, extending known results for SHAP. We also introduce Bernoulli power indices, showing that their computation can be simplified to a constant number of expected value evaluations. Furthermore, we explore interaction power indices that quantify the importance of feature subsets, proving that their computation complexity mirrors that of individual features.
Reweighting Improves Conditional Risk Bounds
Authors: Yikai Zhang, Jiahe Lin, Fengpei Li, Songzhu Zheng, Anant Raj, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

In this work, we study the weighted empirical risk minimization (weighted ERM) schema, in which an additional data-dependent weight function is incorporated when the empirical risk function is being minimized. We show that under a general ``balanceable" Bernstein condition, one can design a weighted ERM estimator to achieve superior performance in certain sub-regions over the one obtained from standard ERM, and the superiority manifests itself through a data-dependent constant term in the error bound. These sub-regions correspond to large-margin ones in classification settings and low-variance ones in heteroscedastic regression settings, respectively. Our findings are supported by evidence from synthetic data experiments.
On The Causal Network Of Face-selective Regions In Human Brain During Movie Watching
Authors: Ali Bavafa, Gholam-Ali Hossein-Zadeh
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Face Detection

Understanding the causal interactions in some brain tasks, such as face processing, remains a challenging and ambiguous process for researchers. In this study, we address this issue by employing a novel causal discovery method -Directed Acyclic Graphs via M-matrices for Acyclicity (DAGMA)- to investigate the causal structure of the brain's face-selective network and gain deeper insights into its mechanism. Using fMRI data of natural movie stimuli, we extract causal network of face-selective regions and analyze how frames containing faces influence this network. Specifically, our findings reveal that the presence of faces in the stimuli, causally affects the number of identified connections within the network. Additionally, our results highlight the crucial role of subcortical regions in satisfying causal sufficiency, emphasizing it's importance in causal studies of brain. This study provides a new perspective on understanding the causal architecture of the face-selective network of the brain, motivating further research on neural causality.
Analysis of Fluorescence Telescope Data Using Machine Learning Methods
Authors: Mikhail Zotov, Pavel Zakharov
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Fluorescence telescopes are among the key instruments used for studying ultra-high energy cosmic rays in all modern experiments. We use model data for a small ground-based telescope EUSO-TA to try some methods of machine learning and neural networks for recognizing tracks of extensive air showers in its data and for reconstruction of energy and arrival directions of primary particles. We also comment on the opportunities to use this approach for other fluorescence telescopes and outline possible ways of improving the performance of the suggested methods.
Beyond Log-Concavity and Score Regularity: Improved Convergence Bounds for Score-Based Generative Models in W2-distance
Authors: Marta Gentiloni-Silveri, Antonio Ocello
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) aim to sample from a target distribution by learning score functions using samples perturbed by Gaussian noise. Existing convergence bounds for SGMs in the $\mathcal{W}_2$-distance rely on stringent assumptions about the data distribution. In this work, we present a novel framework for analyzing $\mathcal{W}_2$-convergence in SGMs, significantly relaxing traditional assumptions such as log-concavity and score regularity. Leveraging the regularization properties of the Ornstein--Uhlenbeck (OU) process, we show that weak log-concavity of the data distribution evolves into log-concavity over time. This transition is rigorously quantified through a PDE-based analysis of the Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman equation governing the log-density of the forward process. Moreover, we establish that the drift of the time-reversed OU process alternates between contractive and non-contractive regimes, reflecting the dynamics of concavity. Our approach circumvents the need for stringent regularity conditions on the score function and its estimators, relying instead on milder, more practical assumptions. We demonstrate the wide applicability of this framework through explicit computations on Gaussian mixture models, illustrating its versatility and potential for broader classes of data distributions.
Robust Multi-Dimensional Scaling via Accelerated Alternating Projections
Authors: Tong Deng, Tianming Wang
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

We consider the robust multi-dimensional scaling (RMDS) problem in this paper. The goal is to localize point locations from pairwise distances that may be corrupted by outliers. Inspired by classic MDS theories, and nonconvex works for the robust principal component analysis (RPCA) problem, we propose an alternating projection based algorithm that is further accelerated by the tangent space projection technique. For the proposed algorithm, if the outliers are sparse enough, we can establish linear convergence of the reconstructed points to the original points after centering and rotation alignment. Numerical experiments verify the state-of-the-art performances of the proposed algorithm.
Digital Twin Calibration with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hua Zheng, Wei Xie, Ilya O. Ryzhov, Keilung Choy
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents a novel methodological framework, called the Actor-Simulator, that incorporates the calibration of digital twins into model-based reinforcement learning for more effective control of stochastic systems with complex nonlinear dynamics. Traditional model-based control often relies on restrictive structural assumptions (such as linear state transitions) and fails to account for parameter uncertainty in the model. These issues become particularly critical in industries such as biopharmaceutical manufacturing, where process dynamics are complex and not fully known, and only a limited amount of data is available. Our approach jointly calibrates the digital twin and searches for an optimal control policy, thus accounting for and reducing model error. We balance exploration and exploitation by using policy performance as a guide for data collection. This dual-component approach provably converges to the optimal policy, and outperforms existing methods in extensive numerical experiments based on the biopharmaceutical manufacturing domain.
Majorization-Minimization Dual Stagewise Algorithm for Generalized Lasso
Authors: Jianmin Chen, Kun Chen
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

The generalized lasso is a natural generalization of the celebrated lasso approach to handle structural regularization problems. Many important methods and applications fall into this framework, including fused lasso, clustered lasso, and constrained lasso. To elevate its effectiveness in large-scale problems, extensive research has been conducted on the computational strategies of generalized lasso. However, to our knowledge, most studies are under the linear setup, with limited advances in non-Gaussian and non-linear models. We propose a majorization-minimization dual stagewise (MM-DUST) algorithm to efficiently trace out the full solution paths of the generalized lasso problem. The majorization technique is incorporated to handle different convex loss functions through their quadratic majorizers. Utilizing the connection between primal and dual problems and the idea of ``slow-brewing'' from stagewise learning, the minimization step is carried out in the dual space through a sequence of simple coordinate-wise updates on the dual coefficients with a small step size. Consequently, selecting an appropriate step size enables a trade-off between statistical accuracy and computational efficiency. We analyze the computational complexity of MM-DUST and establish the uniform convergence of the approximated solution paths. Extensive simulation studies and applications with regularized logistic regression and Cox model demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
On LLM-Enhanced Mixed-Type Data Imputation with High-Order Message Passing
Authors: Jianwei Wang, Kai Wang, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Xiwei Xu, Xuemin Lin
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, Imputation, Missing Values

Missing data imputation, which aims to impute the missing values in the raw datasets to achieve the completeness of datasets, is crucial for modern data-driven models like large language models (LLMs) and has attracted increasing interest over the past decades. Despite its importance, existing solutions for missing data imputation either 1) only support numerical and categorical data or 2) show an unsatisfactory performance due to their design prioritizing text data and the lack of key properties for tabular data imputation. In this paper, we propose UnIMP, a Unified IMPutation framework that leverages LLM and high-order message passing to enhance the imputation of mixed-type data including numerical, categorical, and text data. Specifically, we first introduce a cell-oriented hypergraph to model the table. We then propose BiHMP, an efficient Bidirectional High-order Message-Passing network to aggregate global-local information and high-order relationships on the constructed hypergraph while capturing the inter-column heterogeneity and intra-column homogeneity. To effectively and efficiently align the capacity of the LLM with the information aggregated by BiHMP, we introduce Xfusion, which, together with BiHMP, acts as adapters for the LLM. We follow a pre-training and fine-tuning pipeline to train UnIMP, integrating two optimizations: chunking technique, which divides tables into smaller chunks to enhance efficiency; and progressive masking technique, which gradually adapts the model to learn more complex data patterns. Both theoretical proofs and empirical experiments on 10 real world datasets highlight the superiority of UnIMP over existing techniques.
SMDP-Based Dynamic Batching for Improving Responsiveness and Energy Efficiency of Batch Services
Authors: Yaodan Xu, Sheng Zhou, Zhisheng Niu
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

For servers incorporating parallel computing resources, batching is a pivotal technique for providing efficient and economical services at scale. Parallel computing resources exhibit heightened computational and energy efficiency when operating with larger batch sizes. However, in the realm of online services, the adoption of a larger batch size may lead to longer response times. This paper aims to provide a dynamic batching scheme that delicately balances latency and efficiency. The system is modeled as a batch service queue with size-dependent service times. Then, the design of dynamic batching is formulated as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) problem, with the objective of minimizing the weighted sum of average response time and average power consumption. A method is proposed to derive an approximate optimal SMDP solution, representing the chosen dynamic batching policy. By introducing an abstract cost to reflect the impact of "tail" states, the space complexity and the time complexity of the procedure can decrease by 63.5% and 98%, respectively. Numerical results showcase the superiority of SMDP-based batching policies across various parameter setups. Additionally, the proposed scheme exhibits noteworthy flexibility in balancing power consumption and latency.
Molecule-dynamic-based Aging Clock and Aging Roadmap Forecast with Sundial
Authors: Wei Wu, Zizhen Deng, Chi Zhang, Can Liao, Jinzhuo Wang
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Addressing the unavoidable bias inherent in supervised aging clocks, we introduce Sundial, a novel framework that models molecular dynamics through a diffusion field, capturing both the population-level aging process and the individual-level relative aging order. Sundial enables unbiasedestimation of biological age and the forecast of aging roadmap. Fasteraging individuals from Sundial exhibit a higher disease risk compared to those identified from supervised aging clocks. This framework opens new avenues for exploring key topics, including age- and sex-specific aging dynamics and faster yet healthy aging paths.
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit
Authors: Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Mingfu Liang, Yongkang Xiao, Srinivas Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, RAG, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recommender systems for predicting Click-Through Rates (CTR) necessitates a delicate balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. This paper presents an optimization framework that combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with an innovative multi-head early exit architecture to concurrently enhance both aspects. By integrating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) as efficient retrieval mechanisms, we are able to significantly reduce data retrieval times while maintaining high model performance. The early exit strategy employed allows for dynamic termination of model inference, utilizing real-time predictive confidence assessments across multiple heads. This not only quickens the responsiveness of LLMs but also upholds or improves their accuracy, making it ideal for real-time application scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate how this architecture effectively decreases computation time without sacrificing the accuracy needed for reliable recommendation delivery, establishing a new standard for efficient, real-time LLM deployment in commercial systems.
Exploring Secure Machine Learning Through Payload Injection and FGSM Attacks on ResNet-50
Authors: Umesh Yadav, Suman Niroula, Gaurav Kumar Gupta, Bicky Yadav
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

This paper investigates the resilience of a ResNet-50 image classification model under two prominent security threats: Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) adversarial attacks and malicious payload injection. Initially, the model attains a 53.33% accuracy on clean images. When subjected to FGSM perturbations, its overall accuracy remains unchanged; however, the model's confidence in incorrect predictions notably increases. Concurrently, a payload injection scheme is successfully executed in 93.33% of the tested samples, revealing how stealthy attacks can manipulate model predictions without degrading visual quality. These findings underscore the vulnerability of even high-performing neural networks and highlight the urgency of developing more robust defense mechanisms for security-critical applications.
How Your Location Relates to Health: Variable Importance and Interpretable Machine Learning for Environmental and Sociodemographic Data
Authors: Ishaan Maitra, Raymond Lin, Eric Chen, Jon Donnelly, Sanja Šćepanović, Cynthia Rudin
Date: 2025-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Additive models, Interpretable Machine Learning

Health outcomes depend on complex environmental and sociodemographic factors whose effects change over location and time. Only recently has fine-grained spatial and temporal data become available to study these effects, namely the MEDSAT dataset of English health, environmental, and sociodemographic information. Leveraging this new resource, we use a variety of variable importance techniques to robustly identify the most informative predictors across multiple health outcomes. We then develop an interpretable machine learning framework based on Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) and Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) to analyze both local and global spatial dependencies of each variable on various health outcomes. Our findings identify NO2 as a global predictor for asthma, hypertension, and anxiety, alongside other outcome-specific predictors related to occupation, marriage, and vegetation. Regional analyses reveal local variations with air pollution and solar radiation, with notable shifts during COVID. This comprehensive approach provides actionable insights for addressing health disparities, and advocates for the integration of interpretable machine learning in public health.
Learning Fricke signs from Maass form Coefficients
Authors: Joanna Bieri, Giorgi Butbaia, Edgar Costa, Alyson Deines, Kyu-Hwan Lee, David Lowry-Duda, Thomas Oliver, Yidi Qi, Tamara Veenstra
Date: 2025-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

In this paper, we conduct a data-scientific investigation of Maass forms. We find that averaging the Fourier coefficients of Maass forms with the same Fricke sign reveals patterns analogous to the recently discovered "murmuration" phenomenon, and that these patterns become more pronounced when parity is incorporated as an additional feature. Approximately 43% of the forms in our dataset have an unknown Fricke sign. For the remaining forms, we employ Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to machine learn their Fricke sign, achieving 96% (resp. 94%) accuracy for forms with even (resp. odd) parity. We apply the trained LDA model to forms with unknown Fricke signs to make predictions. The average values based on the predicted Fricke signs are computed and compared to those for forms with known signs to verify the reasonableness of the predictions. Additionally, a subset of these predictions is evaluated against heuristic guesses provided by Hejhal's algorithm, showing a match approximately 95% of the time. We also use neural networks to obtain results comparable to those from the LDA model.
Beyond CVaR: Leveraging Static Spectral Risk Measures for Enhanced Decision-Making in Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mehrdad Moghimi, Hyejin Ku
Date: 2025-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Distributional Reinforcement Learning

In domains such as finance, healthcare, and robotics, managing worst-case scenarios is critical, as failure to do so can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) provides a natural framework to incorporate risk sensitivity into decision-making processes. However, existing approaches face two key limitations: (1) the use of fixed risk measures at each decision step often results in overly conservative policies, and (2) the interpretation and theoretical properties of the learned policies remain unclear. While optimizing a static risk measure addresses these issues, its use in the DRL framework has been limited to the simple static CVaR risk measure. In this paper, we present a novel DRL algorithm with convergence guarantees that optimizes for a broader class of static Spectral Risk Measures (SRM). Additionally, we provide a clear interpretation of the learned policy by leveraging the distribution of returns in DRL and the decomposition of static coherent risk measures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model learns policies aligned with the SRM objective, and outperforms existing risk-neutral and risk-sensitive DRL models in various settings.