pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Energy-Latency Manipulation of Multi-modal Large Language Models via Verbose Samples
Authors: Kuofeng Gao, Jindong Gu, Yang Bai, Shu-Tao Xia, Philip Torr, Wei Liu, Zhifeng Li
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Despite the exceptional performance of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), their deployment requires substantial computational resources. Once malicious users induce high energy consumption and latency time (energy-latency cost), it will exhaust computational resources and harm availability of service. In this paper, we investigate this vulnerability for MLLMs, particularly image-based and video-based ones, and aim to induce high energy-latency cost during inference by crafting an imperceptible perturbation. We find that high energy-latency cost can be manipulated by maximizing the length of generated sequences, which motivates us to propose verbose samples, including verbose images and videos. Concretely, two modality non-specific losses are proposed, including a loss to delay end-of-sequence (EOS) token and an uncertainty loss to increase the uncertainty over each generated token. In addition, improving diversity is important to encourage longer responses by increasing the complexity, which inspires the following modality specific loss. For verbose images, a token diversity loss is proposed to promote diverse hidden states. For verbose videos, a frame feature diversity loss is proposed to increase the feature diversity among frames. To balance these losses, we propose a temporal weight adjustment algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that our verbose samples can largely extend the length of generated sequences.
Developing Acoustic Models for Automatic Speech Recognition in Swedish
Authors: Giampiero Salvi
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper is concerned with automatic continuous speech recognition using trainable systems. The aim of this work is to build acoustic models for spoken Swedish. This is done employing hidden Markov models and using the SpeechDat database to train their parameters. Acoustic modeling has been worked out at a phonetic level, allowing general speech recognition applications, even though a simplified task (digits and natural number recognition) has been considered for model evaluation. Different kinds of phone models have been tested, including context independent models and two variations of context dependent models. Furthermore many experiments have been done with bigram language models to tune some of the system parameters. System performance over various speaker subsets with different sex, age and dialect has also been examined. Results are compared to previous similar studies showing a remarkable improvement.
SIDEs: Separating Idealization from Deceptive Explanations in xAI
Authors: Emily Sullivan
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Feature Importance, Philosophy

Explainable AI (xAI) methods are important for establishing trust in using black-box models. However, recent criticism has mounted against current xAI methods that they disagree, are necessarily false, and can be manipulated, which has started to undermine the deployment of black-box models. Rudin (2019) goes so far as to say that we should stop using black-box models altogether in high-stakes cases because xAI explanations "must be wrong". However, strict fidelity to the truth is historically not a desideratum in science. Idealizations -- the intentional distortions introduced to scientific theories and models -- are commonplace in the natural sciences and are seen as a successful scientific tool. Thus, it is not falsehood qua falsehood that is the issue. In this paper, I outline the need for xAI research to engage in idealization evaluation. Drawing on the use of idealizations in the natural sciences and philosophy of science, I introduce a novel framework for evaluating whether xAI methods engage in successful idealizations or deceptive explanations (SIDEs). SIDEs evaluates whether the limitations of xAI methods, and the distortions that they introduce, can be part of a successful idealization or are indeed deceptive distortions as critics suggest. I discuss the role that existing research can play in idealization evaluation and where innovation is necessary. Through a qualitative analysis we find that leading feature importance methods and counterfactual explanations are subject to idealization failure and suggest remedies for ameliorating idealization failure.
Global Concept Explanations for Graphs by Contrastive Learning
Authors: Jonas Teufel, Pascal Friederich
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Fairness, Graph Property Prediction, Prediction, Property Prediction

Beyond improving trust and validating model fairness, xAI practices also have the potential to recover valuable scientific insights in application domains where little to no prior human intuition exists. To that end, we propose a method to extract global concept explanations from the predictions of graph neural networks to develop a deeper understanding of the tasks underlying structure-property relationships. We identify concept explanations as dense clusters in the self-explaining Megan models subgraph latent space. For each concept, we optimize a representative prototype graph and optionally use GPT-4 to provide hypotheses about why each structure has a certain effect on the prediction. We conduct computational experiments on synthetic and real-world graph property prediction tasks. For the synthetic tasks we find that our method correctly reproduces the structural rules by which they were created. For real-world molecular property regression and classification tasks, we find that our method rediscovers established rules of thumb. More specifically, our results for molecular mutagenicity prediction indicate more fine-grained resolution of structural details than existing explainability methods, consistent with previous results from chemistry literature. Overall, our results show promising capability to extract the underlying structure-property relationships for complex graph property prediction tasks.
Exploring the Dynamics of Data Transmission in 5G Networks: A Conceptual Analysis
Authors: Nikita Smirnov, Sven Tomforde
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

This conceptual analysis examines the dynamics of data transmission in 5G networks. It addresses various aspects of sending data from cameras and LiDARs installed on a remote-controlled ferry to a land-based control center. The range of topics includes all stages of video and LiDAR data processing from acquisition and encoding to final decoding, all aspects of their transmission and reception via the WebRTC protocol, and all possible types of network problems such as handovers or congestion that could affect the quality of experience for end-users. A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the key aspects of the data transmission. These include simulation-based reproducible runs and real-world experiments conducted using open-source solutions we developed: "Gymir5G" - an OMNeT++-based 5G simulation and "GstWebRTCApp" - a GStreamer-based application for adaptive control of media streams over the WebRTC protocol. One of the goals of this study is to formulate the bandwidth and latency requirements for reliable real-time communication and to estimate their approximate values. This goal was achieved through simulation-based experiments involving docking maneuvers in the Bay of Kiel, Germany. The final latency for the entire data processing pipeline was also estimated during the real tests. In addition, a series of simulation-based experiments showed the impact of key WebRTC features and demonstrated the effectiveness of the WebRTC protocol, while the conducted video codec comparison showed that the hardware-accelerated H.264 codec is the best. Finally, the research addresses the topic of adaptive communication, where the traditional congestion avoidance and deep reinforcement learning approaches were analyzed. The comparison in a sandbox scenario shows that the AI-based solution outperforms the WebRTC baseline GCC algorithm in terms of data rates, latency, and packet loss.
Evaluating Consistency and Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
Authors: Yash Saxena, Sarthak Chopra, Arunendra Mani Tripathi
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extensively used today across various sectors, including academia, research, business, and finance, for tasks such as text generation, summarization, and translation. Despite their widespread adoption, these models often produce incorrect and misleading information, exhibiting a tendency to hallucinate. This behavior can be attributed to several factors, with consistency and reasoning capabilities being significant contributors. LLMs frequently lack the ability to generate explanations and engage in coherent reasoning, leading to inaccurate responses. Moreover, they exhibit inconsistencies in their outputs. This paper aims to evaluate and compare the consistency and reasoning capabilities of both public and proprietary LLMs. The experiments utilize the Boolq dataset as the ground truth, comprising questions, answers, and corresponding explanations. Queries from the dataset are presented as prompts to the LLMs, and the generated responses are evaluated against the ground truth answers. Additionally, explanations are generated to assess the models' reasoning abilities. Consistency is evaluated by repeatedly presenting the same query to the models and observing for variations in their responses. For measuring reasoning capabilities, the generated explanations are compared to the ground truth explanations using metrics such as BERT, BLEU, and F-1 scores. The findings reveal that proprietary models generally outperform public models in terms of both consistency and reasoning capabilities. However, even when presented with basic general knowledge questions, none of the models achieved a score of 90\% in both consistency and reasoning. This study underscores the direct correlation between consistency and reasoning abilities in LLMs and highlights the inherent reasoning challenges present in current language models.
DiffSeg: A Segmentation Model for Skin Lesions Based on Diffusion Difference
Authors: Zhihao Shuai, Yinan Chen, Shunqiang Mao, Yihan Zho, Xiaohong Zhang
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised medical image segmentation (MIS) using generative models is crucial for clinical diagnosis. However, the accuracy of the segmentation results is often limited by insufficient supervision and the complex nature of medical imaging. Existing models also only provide a single outcome, which does not allow for the measurement of uncertainty. In this paper, we introduce DiffSeg, a segmentation model for skin lesions based on diffusion difference which exploits diffusion model principles to ex-tract noise-based features from images with diverse semantic information. By discerning difference between these noise features, the model identifies diseased areas. Moreover, its multi-output capability mimics doctors' annotation behavior, facilitating the visualization of segmentation result consistency and ambiguity. Additionally, it quantifies output uncertainty using Generalized Energy Distance (GED), aiding interpretability and decision-making for physicians. Finally, the model integrates outputs through the Dense Conditional Random Field (DenseCRF) algorithm to refine the segmentation boundaries by considering inter-pixel correlations, which improves the accuracy and optimizes the segmentation results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffSeg on the ISIC 2018 Challenge dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art U-Net-based methods.
A Dual Perspective of Reinforcement Learning for Imposing Policy Constraints
Authors: Bram De Cooman, Johan Suykens
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Model-free reinforcement learning methods lack an inherent mechanism to impose behavioural constraints on the trained policies. Although certain extensions exist, they remain limited to specific types of constraints, such as value constraints with additional reward signals or visitation density constraints. In this work we unify these existing techniques and bridge the gap with classical optimization and control theory, using a generic primal-dual framework for value-based and actor-critic reinforcement learning methods. The obtained dual formulations turn out to be especially useful for imposing additional constraints on the learned policy, as an intrinsic relationship between such dual constraints (or regularization terms) and reward modifications in the primal is revealed. Furthermore, using this framework, we are able to introduce some novel types of constraints, allowing to impose bounds on the policy's action density or on costs associated with transitions between consecutive states and actions. From the adjusted primal-dual optimization problems, a practical algorithm is derived that supports various combinations of policy constraints that are automatically handled throughout training using trainable reward modifications. The proposed $\texttt{DualCRL}$ method is examined in more detail and evaluated under different (combinations of) constraints on two interpretable environments. The results highlight the efficacy of the method, which ultimately provides the designer of such systems with a versatile toolbox of possible policy constraints.
Towards Precise Observations of Neural Model Robustness in Classification
Authors: Wenchuan Mu, Kwan Hui Lim
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

In deep learning applications, robustness measures the ability of neural models that handle slight changes in input data, which could lead to potential safety hazards, especially in safety-critical applications. Pre-deployment assessment of model robustness is essential, but existing methods often suffer from either high costs or imprecise results. To enhance safety in real-world scenarios, metrics that effectively capture the model's robustness are needed. To address this issue, we compare the rigour and usage conditions of various assessment methods based on different definitions. Then, we propose a straightforward and practical metric utilizing hypothesis testing for probabilistic robustness and have integrated it into the TorchAttacks library. Through a comparative analysis of diverse robustness assessment methods, our approach contributes to a deeper understanding of model robustness in safety-critical applications.
Canonical Decision Diagrams Modulo Theories
Authors: Massimo Michelutti, Gabriele Masina, Giuseppe Spallitta, Roberto Sebastiani
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00

Decision diagrams (DDs) are powerful tools to represent effectively propositional formulas, which are largely used in many domains, in particular in formal verification and in knowledge compilation. Some forms of DDs (e.g., OBDDs, SDDs) are canonical, that is, (under given conditions on the atom list) they univocally represent equivalence classes of formulas. Given the limited expressiveness of propositional logic, a few attempts to leverage DDs to SMT level have been presented in the literature. Unfortunately, these techniques still suffer from some limitations: most procedures are theory-specific; some produce theory DDs (T-DDs) which do not univocally represent T-valid formulas or T-inconsistent formulas; none of these techniques provably produces theory-canonical T-DDs, which (under given conditions on the T-atom list) univocally represent T-equivalence classes of formulas. Also, these procedures are not easy to implement, and very few implementations are actually available. In this paper, we present a novel very-general technique to leverage DDs to SMT level, which has several advantages: it is very easy to implement on top of an AllSMT solver and a DD package, which are used as blackboxes; it works for every form of DDs and every theory, or combination thereof, supported by the AllSMT solver; it produces theory-canonical T-DDs if the propositional DD is canonical. We have implemented a prototype tool for both T-OBDDs and T-SDDs on top of OBDD and SDD packages and the MathSAT SMT solver. Some preliminary empirical evaluation supports the effectiveness of the approach.
Latent Modulated Function for Computational Optimal Continuous Image Representation
Authors: Zongyao He, Zhi Jin
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Super-Resolution

The recent work Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF) and subsequent Implicit Neural Representation (INR) based works have achieved remarkable success in Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution (ASSR) by using MLP to decode Low-Resolution (LR) features. However, these continuous image representations typically implement decoding in High-Resolution (HR) High-Dimensional (HD) space, leading to a quadratic increase in computational cost and seriously hindering the practical applications of ASSR. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Latent Modulated Function (LMF), which decouples the HR-HD decoding process into shared latent decoding in LR-HD space and independent rendering in HR Low-Dimensional (LD) space, thereby realizing the first computational optimal paradigm of continuous image representation. Specifically, LMF utilizes an HD MLP in latent space to generate latent modulations of each LR feature vector. This enables a modulated LD MLP in render space to quickly adapt to any input feature vector and perform rendering at arbitrary resolution. Furthermore, we leverage the positive correlation between modulation intensity and input image complexity to design a Controllable Multi-Scale Rendering (CMSR) algorithm, offering the flexibility to adjust the decoding efficiency based on the rendering precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that converting existing INR-based ASSR methods to LMF can reduce the computational cost by up to 99.9%, accelerate inference by up to 57 times, and save up to 76% of parameters, while maintaining competitive performance. The code is available at https://github.com/HeZongyao/LMF.
Contextual Categorization Enhancement through LLMs Latent-Space
Authors: Zineddine Bettouche, Anas Safi, Andreas Fischer
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Managing the semantic quality of the categorization in large textual datasets, such as Wikipedia, presents significant challenges in terms of complexity and cost. In this paper, we propose leveraging transformer models to distill semantic information from texts in the Wikipedia dataset and its associated categories into a latent space. We then explore different approaches based on these encodings to assess and enhance the semantic identity of the categories. Our graphical approach is powered by Convex Hull, while we utilize Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSWs) for the hierarchical approach. As a solution to the information loss caused by the dimensionality reduction, we modulate the following mathematical solution: an exponential decay function driven by the Euclidean distances between the high-dimensional encodings of the textual categories. This function represents a filter built around a contextual category and retrieves items with a certain Reconsideration Probability (RP). Retrieving high-RP items serves as a tool for database administrators to improve data groupings by providing recommendations and identifying outliers within a contextual framework.
Leveraging tropical reef, bird and unrelated sounds for superior transfer learning in marine bioacoustics
Authors: Ben Williams, Bart van Merriënboer, Vincent Dumoulin, Jenny Hamer, Eleni Triantafillou, Abram B. Fleishman, Matthew McKown, Jill E. Munger, Aaron N. Rice, Ashlee Lillis, Clemency E. White, Catherine A. D. Hobbs, Tries B. Razak, Kate E. Jones, Tom Denton
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Transfer Learning

Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for ecological assessments. However, high annotation and compute costs limit the field's efficacy. Generalizable pretrained networks can overcome these costs, but high-quality pretraining requires vast annotated libraries, limiting its current applicability primarily to bird taxa. Here, we identify the optimum pretraining strategy for a data-deficient domain using coral reef bioacoustics. We assemble ReefSet, a large annotated library of reef sounds, though modest compared to bird libraries at 2% of the sample count. Through testing few-shot transfer learning performance, we observe that pretraining on bird audio provides notably superior generalizability compared to pretraining on ReefSet or unrelated audio alone. However, our key findings show that cross-domain mixing which leverages bird, reef and unrelated audio during pretraining maximizes reef generalizability. SurfPerch, our pretrained network, provides a strong foundation for automated analysis of marine PAM data with minimal annotation and compute costs.
Decentralized Personalized Federated Learning based on a Conditional Sparse-to-Sparser Scheme
Authors: Qianyu Long, Qiyuan Wang, Christos Anagnostopoulos, Daning Bi
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) has become popular due to its robustness and avoidance of centralized coordination. In this paradigm, clients actively engage in training by exchanging models with their networked neighbors. However, DFL introduces increased costs in terms of training and communication. Existing methods focus on minimizing communication often overlooking training efficiency and data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we propose a novel \textit{sparse-to-sparser} training scheme: DA-DPFL. DA-DPFL initializes with a subset of model parameters, which progressively reduces during training via \textit{dynamic aggregation} and leads to substantial energy savings while retaining adequate information during critical learning periods. Our experiments showcase that DA-DPFL substantially outperforms DFL baselines in test accuracy, while achieving up to $5$ times reduction in energy costs. We provide a theoretical analysis of DA-DPFL's convergence by solidifying its applicability in decentralized and personalized learning. The code is available at:https://github.com/EricLoong/da-dpfl
Constructing Optimal Noise Channels for Enhanced Robustness in Quantum Machine Learning
Authors: David Winderl, Nicola Franco, Jeanette Miriam Lorenz
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning

With the rapid advancement of Quantum Machine Learning (QML), the critical need to enhance security measures against adversarial attacks and protect QML models becomes increasingly evident. In this work, we outline the connection between quantum noise channels and differential privacy (DP), by constructing a family of noise channels which are inherently $\epsilon$-DP: $(\alpha, \gamma)$-channels. Through this approach, we successfully replicate the $\epsilon$-DP bounds observed for depolarizing and random rotation channels, thereby affirming the broad generality of our framework. Additionally, we use a semi-definite program to construct an optimally robust channel. In a small-scale experimental evaluation, we demonstrate the benefits of using our optimal noise channel over depolarizing noise, particularly in enhancing adversarial accuracy. Moreover, we assess how the variables $\alpha$ and $\gamma$ affect the certifiable robustness and investigate how different encoding methods impact the classifier's robustness.