pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Certifiably Byzantine-Robust Federated Conformal Prediction
Authors: Mintong Kang, Zhen Lin, Jimeng Sun, Cao Xiao, Bo Li
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Conformal prediction has shown impressive capacity in constructing statistically rigorous prediction sets for machine learning models with exchangeable data samples. The siloed datasets, coupled with the escalating privacy concerns related to local data sharing, have inspired recent innovations extending conformal prediction into federated environments with distributed data samples. However, this framework for distributed uncertainty quantification is susceptible to Byzantine failures. A minor subset of malicious clients can significantly compromise the practicality of coverage guarantees. To address this vulnerability, we introduce a novel framework Rob-FCP, which executes robust federated conformal prediction, effectively countering malicious clients capable of reporting arbitrary statistics with the conformal calibration process. We theoretically provide the conformal coverage bound of Rob-FCP in the Byzantine setting and show that the coverage of Rob-FCP is asymptotically close to the desired coverage level. We also propose a malicious client number estimator to tackle a more challenging setting where the number of malicious clients is unknown to the defender and theoretically shows its effectiveness. We empirically demonstrate the robustness of Rob-FCP against diverse proportions of malicious clients under a variety of Byzantine attacks on five standard benchmark and real-world healthcare datasets.
Improving Generalization in Aerial and Terrestrial Mobile Robots Control Through Delayed Policy Learning
Authors: Ricardo B. Grando, Raul Steinmetz, Victor A. Kich, Alisson H. Kolling, Pablo M. Furik, Junior C. de Jesus, Bruna V. Guterres, Daniel T. Gamarra, Rodrigo S. Guerra, Paulo L. J. Drews-Jr
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing motion control and decision-making through a wide range of robotic applications. While prior research has demonstrated the efficacy of DRL algorithms in facilitating autonomous mapless navigation for aerial and terrestrial mobile robots, these methods often grapple with poor generalization when faced with unknown tasks and environments. This paper explores the impact of the Delayed Policy Updates (DPU) technique on fostering generalization to new situations, and bolstering the overall performance of agents. Our analysis of DPU in aerial and terrestrial mobile robots reveals that this technique significantly curtails the lack of generalization and accelerates the learning process for agents, enhancing their efficiency across diverse tasks and unknown scenarios.
A Comparative Study of Sampling Methods with Cross-Validation in the FedHome Framework
Authors: Arash Ahmadi, Sarah S. Sharif, Yaser M. Banad
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

This paper presents a comparative study of sampling methods within the FedHome framework, designed for personalized in-home health monitoring. FedHome leverages federated learning (FL) and generative convolutional autoencoders (GCAE) to train models on decentralized edge devices while prioritizing data privacy. A notable challenge in this domain is the class imbalance in health data, where critical events such as falls are underrepresented, adversely affecting model performance. To address this, the research evaluates six oversampling techniques using Stratified K-fold cross-validation: SMOTE, Borderline-SMOTE, Random OverSampler, SMOTE-Tomek, SVM-SMOTE, and SMOTE-ENN. These methods are tested on FedHome's public implementation over 200 training rounds with and without stratified K-fold cross-validation. The findings indicate that SMOTE-ENN achieves the most consistent test accuracy, with a standard deviation range of 0.0167-0.0176, demonstrating stable performance compared to other samplers. In contrast, SMOTE and SVM-SMOTE exhibit higher variability in performance, as reflected by their wider standard deviation ranges of 0.0157-0.0180 and 0.0155-0.0180, respectively. Similarly, the Random OverSampler method shows a significant deviation range of 0.0155-0.0176. SMOTE-Tomek, with a deviation range of 0.0160-0.0175, also shows greater stability but not as much as SMOTE-ENN. This finding highlights the potential of SMOTE-ENN to enhance the reliability and accuracy of personalized health monitoring systems within the FedHome framework.
Enhancing Trust in LLMs: Algorithms for Comparing and Interpreting LLMs
Authors: Nik Bear Brown
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Fairness, Few-Shot Learning, Hallucination, Transfer Learning

This paper surveys evaluation techniques to enhance the trustworthiness and understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs). As reliance on LLMs grows, ensuring their reliability, fairness, and transparency is crucial. We explore algorithmic methods and metrics to assess LLM performance, identify weaknesses, and guide development towards more trustworthy applications. Key evaluation metrics include Perplexity Measurement, NLP metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, BERTScore, GLEU, Word Error Rate, Character Error Rate), Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning Performance, Transfer Learning Evaluation, Adversarial Testing, and Fairness and Bias Evaluation. We introduce innovative approaches like LLMMaps for stratified evaluation, Benchmarking and Leaderboards for competitive assessment, Stratified Analysis for in-depth understanding, Visualization of Blooms Taxonomy for cognitive level accuracy distribution, Hallucination Score for quantifying inaccuracies, Knowledge Stratification Strategy for hierarchical analysis, and Machine Learning Models for Hierarchy Generation. Human Evaluation is highlighted for capturing nuances that automated metrics may miss. These techniques form a framework for evaluating LLMs, aiming to enhance transparency, guide development, and establish user trust. Future papers will describe metric visualization and demonstrate each approach on practical examples.
Speeding up Policy Simulation in Supply Chain RL
Authors: Vivek Farias, Joren Gijsbrechts, Aryan Khojandi, Tianyi Peng, Andrew Zheng
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Simulating a single trajectory of a dynamical system under some state-dependent policy is a core bottleneck in policy optimization (PO) algorithms. The many inherently serial policy evaluations that must be performed in a single simulation constitute the bulk of this bottleneck. In applying PO to supply chain optimization (SCO) problems, simulating a single sample path corresponding to one month of a supply chain can take several hours. We present an iterative algorithm to accelerate policy simulation, dubbed Picard Iteration. This scheme carefully assigns policy evaluation tasks to independent processes. Within an iteration, any given process evaluates the policy only on its assigned tasks while assuming a certain "cached" evaluation for other tasks; the cache is updated at the end of the iteration. Implemented on GPUs, this scheme admits batched evaluation of the policy across a single trajectory. We prove that the structure afforded by many SCO problems allows convergence in a small number of iterations independent of the horizon. We demonstrate practical speedups of 400x on large-scale SCO problems even with a single GPU, and also demonstrate practical efficacy in other RL environments.
Fast networked data selection via distributed smoothed quantile estimation
Authors: Xu Zhang, Marcos M. Vasconcelos
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00

Collecting the most informative data from a large dataset distributed over a network is a fundamental problem in many fields, including control, signal processing and machine learning. In this paper, we establish a connection between selecting the most informative data and finding the top-$k$ elements of a multiset. The top-$k$ selection in a network can be formulated as a distributed nonsmooth convex optimization problem known as quantile estimation. Unfortunately, the lack of smoothness in the local objective functions leads to extremely slow convergence and poor scalability with respect to the network size. To overcome the deficiency, we propose an accelerated method that employs smoothing techniques. Leveraging the piecewise linearity of the local objective functions in quantile estimation, we characterize the iteration complexity required to achieve top-$k$ selection, a challenging task due to the lack of strong convexity. Several numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the algorithm and the correctness of the theory.
Research on the Application of Computer Vision Based on Deep Learning in Autonomous Driving Technology
Authors: Jingyu Zhang, Jin Cao, JingHao Chang, Xinjin Li, Houze Liu, Zhenglin Li
Date: 2024-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning

This research aims to explore the application of deep learning in autonomous driving computer vision technology and its impact on improving system performance. By using advanced technologies such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), multi-task joint learning methods, and deep reinforcement learning, this article analyzes in detail the application of deep learning in image recognition, real-time target tracking and classification, environment perception and decision support, and path planning and navigation. Application process in key areas. Research results show that the proposed system has an accuracy of over 98% in image recognition, target tracking and classification, and also demonstrates efficient performance and practicality in environmental perception and decision support, path planning and navigation. The conclusion points out that deep learning technology can significantly improve the accuracy and real-time response capabilities of autonomous driving systems. Although there are still challenges in environmental perception and decision support, with the advancement of technology, it is expected to achieve wider applications and greater capabilities in the future. potential.
Navigating the Future of Federated Recommendation Systems with Foundation Models
Authors: Zhiwei Li, Guodong Long, Chunxu Zhang, Honglei Zhang, Jing Jiang, Chengqi Zhang
Date: 2024-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Multimodal Recommendation, Position, Privacy Preserving, Recommendation Systems, Self-Supervised Learning, Transfer Learning

Federated Recommendation Systems (FRSs) offer a privacy-preserving alternative to traditional centralized approaches by decentralizing data storage. However, they face persistent challenges such as data sparsity and heterogeneity, largely due to isolated client environments. Recent advances in Foundation Models (FMs), particularly large language models like ChatGPT, present an opportunity to surmount these issues through powerful, cross-task knowledge transfer. In this position paper, we systematically examine the convergence of FRSs and FMs, illustrating how FM-enhanced frameworks can substantially improve client-side personalization, communication efficiency, and server-side aggregation. We also delve into pivotal challenges introduced by this integration, including privacy-security trade-offs, non-IID data, and resource constraints in federated setups, and propose prospective research directions in areas such as multimodal recommendation, real-time FM adaptation, and explainable federated reasoning. By unifying FRSs with FMs, our position paper provides a forward-looking roadmap for advancing privacy-preserving, high-performance recommendation systems that fully leverage large-scale pre-trained knowledge to enhance local performance.
CODE: Contrasting Self-generated Description to Combat Hallucination in Large Multi-modal Models
Authors: Junho Kim, Hyunjun Kim, Yeonju Kim, Yong Man Ro
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Informativeness, Response Generation

Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable abilities in visual context understanding and coherent response generation. However, alongside these advancements, the issue of hallucinations has emerged as a significant challenge, producing erroneous responses that are unrelated to the visual contents. In this paper, we introduce a novel contrastive-based decoding method, COuntering DEscription Contrastive Decoding (CODE), which leverages self-generated descriptions as contrasting references during the decoding phase of LMMs to address hallucination issues. CODE utilizes the comprehensive descriptions from model itself as visual counterpart to correct and improve response alignment with actual visual content. By dynamically adjusting the information flow and distribution of next-token predictions in the LMM's vocabulary, CODE enhances the coherence and informativeness of generated responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucinations and improves cross-modal consistency across various benchmarks and cutting-edge LMMs. Our method provides a simple yet effective decoding strategy that can be integrated to existing LMM frameworks without additional training.
Decoupled Alignment for Robust Plug-and-Play Adaptation
Authors: Haozheng Luo, Jiahao Yu, Wenxin Zhang, Jialong Li, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Xinyu Xing, Han Liu
Date: 2024-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

We introduce a low-resource safety enhancement method for aligning large language models (LLMs) without the need for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Our main idea is to exploit knowledge distillation to extract the alignment information from existing well-aligned LLMs and integrate it into unaligned LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Methodology, we employ delta debugging to identify the critical components of knowledge necessary for effective distillation. On the harmful question dataset, our method significantly enhances the average defense success rate by approximately 14.41%, reaching as high as 51.39%, in 17 unaligned pre-trained LLMs, without compromising performance.
GOMAA-Geo: GOal Modality Agnostic Active Geo-localization
Authors: Anindya Sarkar, Srikumar Sastry, Aleksis Pirinen, Chongjie Zhang, Nathan Jacobs, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, geo-localization, Zero-shot Generalization

We consider the task of active geo-localization (AGL) in which an agent uses a sequence of visual cues observed during aerial navigation to find a target specified through multiple possible modalities. This could emulate a UAV involved in a search-and-rescue operation navigating through an area, observing a stream of aerial images as it goes. The AGL task is associated with two important challenges. Firstly, an agent must deal with a goal specification in one of multiple modalities (e.g., through a natural language description) while the search cues are provided in other modalities (aerial imagery). The second challenge is limited localization time (e.g., limited battery life, urgency) so that the goal must be localized as efficiently as possible, i.e. the agent must effectively leverage its sequentially observed aerial views when searching for the goal. To address these challenges, we propose GOMAA-Geo - a goal modality agnostic active geo-localization agent - for zero-shot generalization between different goal modalities. Our approach combines cross-modality contrastive learning to align representations across modalities with supervised foundation model pretraining and reinforcement learning to obtain highly effective navigation and localization policies. Through extensive evaluations, we show that GOMAA-Geo outperforms alternative learnable approaches and that it generalizes across datasets - e.g., to disaster-hit areas without seeing a single disaster scenario during training - and goal modalities - e.g., to ground-level imagery or textual descriptions, despite only being trained with goals specified as aerial views. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/mvrl/GOMAA-Geo/tree/main.
HPE-CogVLM: Advancing Vision Language Models with a Head Pose Grounding Task
Authors: Yu Tian, Tianqi Shao, Tsukasa Demizu, Xuyang Wu, Hsin-Tai Wu
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Head Pose Estimation, Language Modelling, object-detection, Object Detection, Pose Estimation, Task Arithmetic, Visual Grounding

Head pose estimation (HPE) requires a sophisticated understanding of 3D spatial relationships to generate precise yaw, pitch, and roll angles. Previous HPE models, primarily CNN-based, rely on cropped close-up human head images as inputs and often lack robustness in real-world scenario. Vision Language Models (VLMs) can analyze entire images while focusing on specific objects through their attention mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to improve the HPE accuracy by leveraging the object detection grounding capability of a VLM, referred to as CogVLM. We empirically find that directly LoRA fine-tuning of this VLM for the HPE task fails to achieve desirable HPE accuracy, while some model merging methods can improve accuracy but frequently produce blended invalid response formats, struggling to handle both object detection and HPE tasks simultaneously. To integrate HPE capability into CogVLM effectively, we develop a novel LoRA layer-based model merging method. This merging approach applies a high cosine similarity threshold and a winner-takes-all layer selection strategy, aligning attention to the HPE task while preserving original object detection knowledge. It successfully resolves issues with blended invalid response formats and improves accuracy. Results show that our HPE-CogVLM achieves a 31.5\% reduction in Mean Absolute Error over the current state-of-the-art CNN model, 6DRepNet, in cross-dataset evaluation. Furthermore, HPE-CogVLM outperforms both directly LoRA fine-tuned and task arithmetic-based merged VLMs across all HPE metrics.
Generating Synthetic Net Load Data with Physics-informed Diffusion Model
Authors: Shaorong Zhang, Yuanbin Cheng, Nanpeng Yu
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diversity

This paper presents a novel physics-informed diffusion model for generating synthetic net load data, addressing the challenges of data scarcity and privacy concerns. The proposed framework embeds physical models within denoising networks, offering a versatile approach that can be readily generalized to unforeseen scenarios. A conditional denoising neural network is designed to jointly train the parameters of the transition kernel of the diffusion model and the parameters of the physics-informed function. Utilizing the real-world smart meter data from Pecan Street, we validate the proposed method and conduct a thorough numerical study comparing its performance with state-of-the-art generative models, including generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, normalizing flows, and a well calibrated baseline diffusion model. A comprehensive set of evaluation metrics is used to assess the accuracy and diversity of the generated synthetic net load data. The numerical study results demonstrate that the proposed physics-informed diffusion model outperforms state-of-the-art models across all quantitative metrics, yielding at least 20% improvement.
Large Language Model-Enabled Multi-Agent Manufacturing Systems
Authors: Jonghan Lim, Birgit Vogel-Heuser, Ilya Kovalenko
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

Traditional manufacturing faces challenges adapting to dynamic environments and quickly responding to manufacturing changes. The use of multi-agent systems has improved adaptability and coordination but requires further advancements in rapid human instruction comprehension, operational adaptability, and coordination through natural language integration. Large language models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 enhance multi-agent manufacturing systems by enabling agents to communicate in natural language and interpret human instructions for decision-making. This research introduces a novel framework where large language models enhance the capabilities of agents in manufacturing, making them more adaptable, and capable of processing context-specific instructions. A case study demonstrates the practical application of this framework, showing how agents can effectively communicate, understand tasks, and execute manufacturing processes, including precise G-code allocation among agents. The findings highlight the importance of continuous large language model integration into multi-agent manufacturing systems and the development of sophisticated agent communication protocols for a more flexible manufacturing system.
HBTP: Heuristic Behavior Tree Planning with Large Language Model Reasoning
Authors: Yishuai Cai, Xinglin Chen, Yunxin Mao, Minglong Li, Shaowu Yang, Wenjing Yang, Ji Wang
Date: 2024-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Behavior Trees (BTs) are increasingly becoming a popular control structure in robotics due to their modularity, reactivity, and robustness. In terms of BT generation methods, BT planning shows promise for generating reliable BTs. However, the scalability of BT planning is often constrained by prolonged planning times in complex scenarios, largely due to a lack of domain knowledge. In contrast, pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated task reasoning capabilities across various domains, though the correctness and safety of their planning remain uncertain. This paper proposes integrating BT planning with LLM reasoning, introducing Heuristic Behavior Tree Planning (HBTP)-a reliable and efficient framework for BT generation. The key idea in HBTP is to leverage LLMs for task-specific reasoning to generate a heuristic path, which BT planning can then follow to expand efficiently. We first introduce the heuristic BT expansion process, along with two heuristic variants designed for optimal planning and satisficing planning, respectively. Then, we propose methods to address the inaccuracies of LLM reasoning, including action space pruning and reflective feedback, to further enhance both reasoning accuracy and planning efficiency. Experiments demonstrate the theoretical bounds of HBTP, and results from four datasets confirm its practical effectiveness in everyday service robot applications.
HoneyGPT: Breaking the Trilemma in Terminal Honeypots with Large Language Model
Authors: Ziyang Wang, Jianzhou You, Haining Wang, Tianwei Yuan, Shichao Lv, Yang Wang, Limin Sun
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering

Honeypots, as a strategic cyber-deception mechanism designed to emulate authentic interactions and bait unauthorized entities, often struggle with balancing flexibility, interaction depth, and deception. They typically fail to adapt to evolving attacker tactics, with limited engagement and information gathering. Fortunately, the emergent capabilities of large language models and innovative prompt-based engineering offer a transformative shift in honeypot technologies. This paper introduces HoneyGPT, a pioneering shell honeypot architecture based on ChatGPT, characterized by its cost-effectiveness and proactive engagement. In particular, we propose a structured prompt engineering framework that incorporates chain-of-thought tactics to improve long-term memory and robust security analytics, enhancing deception and engagement. Our evaluation of HoneyGPT comprises a baseline comparison based on a collected dataset and a three-month field evaluation. The baseline comparison demonstrates HoneyGPT's remarkable ability to strike a balance among flexibility, interaction depth, and deceptive capability. The field evaluation further validates HoneyGPT's superior performance in engaging attackers more deeply and capturing a wider array of novel attack vectors.