pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MODRL-TA:A Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Traffic Allocation in E-Commerce Search
Authors: Peng Cheng, Huimu Wang, Jinyuan Zhao, Yihao Wang, Enqiang Xu, Yu Zhao, Zhuojian Xiao, Songlin Wang, Guoyu Tang, Lin Liu, Sulong Xu
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Learning-To-Rank, Q-Learning

Traffic allocation is a process of redistributing natural traffic to products by adjusting their positions in the post-search phase, aimed at effectively fostering merchant growth, precisely meeting customer demands, and ensuring the maximization of interests across various parties within e-commerce platforms. Existing methods based on learning to rank neglect the long-term value of traffic allocation, whereas approaches of reinforcement learning suffer from balancing multiple objectives and the difficulties of cold starts within realworld data environments. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper propose a multi-objective deep reinforcement learning framework consisting of multi-objective Q-learning (MOQ), a decision fusion algorithm (DFM) based on the cross-entropy method(CEM), and a progressive data augmentation system(PDA). Specifically. MOQ constructs ensemble RL models, each dedicated to an objective, such as click-through rate, conversion rate, etc. These models individually determine the position of items as actions, aiming to estimate the long-term value of multiple objectives from an individual perspective. Then we employ DFM to dynamically adjust weights among objectives to maximize long-term value, addressing temporal dynamics in objective preferences in e-commerce scenarios. Initially, PDA trained MOQ with simulated data from offline logs. As experiments progressed, it strategically integrated real user interaction data, ultimately replacing the simulated dataset to alleviate distributional shifts and the cold start problem. Experimental results on real-world online e-commerce systems demonstrate the significant improvements of MODRL-TA, and we have successfully deployed MODRL-TA on an e-commerce search platform.
Merit-based Fair Combinatorial Semi-Bandit with Unrestricted Feedback Delays
Authors: Ziqun Chen, Kechao Cai, Zhuoyue Chen, Jinbei Zhang, John C. S. Lui
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We study the stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit problem with unrestricted feedback delays under merit-based fairness constraints. This is motivated by applications such as crowdsourcing, and online advertising, where immediate feedback is not immediately available and fairness among different choices (or arms) is crucial. We consider two types of unrestricted feedback delays: reward-independent delays where the feedback delays are independent of the rewards, and reward-dependent delays where the feedback delays are correlated with the rewards. Furthermore, we introduce merit-based fairness constraints to ensure a fair selection of the arms. We define the reward regret and the fairness regret and present new bandit algorithms to select arms under unrestricted feedback delays based on their merits. We prove that our algorithms all achieve sublinear expected reward regret and expected fairness regret, with a dependence on the quantiles of the delay distribution. We also conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and real-world data and show that our algorithms can fairly select arms with different feedback delays.
Real-Time Image Analysis Software Suitable for Resource-Constrained Computing
Authors: Alexandre Matov
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Methods: We have developed a software suite (DataSet Tracker) for real-time analysis designed to run on computers, smartphones, and smart glasses hardware and suitable for resource-constrained, on-the-fly computing in microscopes without internet connectivity; a demo is available for viewing at datasetanalysis.com. Our objective is to present the community with an integrated, easy to use by all, tool for resolving the complex dynamics of the cytoskeletal meshworks, intracytoplasmic membranous networks, and vesicle trafficking. Our software is optimized for resource-constrained computing and can be installed even on microscopes without internet connectivity. Results: Our computational platform can provide high-content analyses and functional secondary screening of novel compounds that are in the process of approval, or at a pre-clinical stage of development, and putative combination therapies based on FDA-approved drugs. Importantly, dissecting the mechanisms of drug action with quantitative detail will allow the design of drugs that impede relapse and optimal dose regimens with minimal harmful side effects by carefully exploiting disease-specific aberrations. Conclusions: DataSet Tracker, the real-time optical flow feature tracking software presented in this contribution, can serve as the base module of an integrated platform of existing and future algorithms for real-time cellular analysis. The computational assay we propose could successfully be applied to evaluate treatment strategies for any human organ. It is our goal to have this integrated tool approved for use in the clinical practice.
Resource-Efficient Federated Multimodal Learning via Layer-wise and Progressive Training
Authors: Ye Lin Tun, Chu Myaet Thwal, Minh N. H. Nguyen, Choong Seon Hong
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Combining different data modalities enables deep neural networks to tackle complex tasks more effectively, making multimodal learning increasingly popular. To harness multimodal data closer to end users, it is essential to integrate multimodal learning with privacy-preserving approaches like federated learning (FL). However, compared to conventional unimodal learning, multimodal setting requires dedicated encoders for each modality, resulting in larger and more complex models. Training these models requires significant resources, presenting a substantial challenge for FL clients operating with limited computation and communication resources. To address these challenges, we introduce LW-FedMML, a layer-wise federated multimodal learning approach which decomposes the training process into multiple stages. Each stage focuses on training only a portion of the model, thereby significantly reducing the memory and computational requirements. Moreover, FL clients only need to exchange the trained model portion with the central server, lowering the resulting communication cost. We conduct extensive experiments across various FL and multimodal learning settings to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The results demonstrate that LW-FedMML can compete with conventional end-to-end federated multimodal learning (FedMML) while significantly reducing the resource burden on FL clients. Specifically, LW-FedMML reduces memory usage by up to $2.7\times$, computational operations (FLOPs) by $2.4\times$, and total communication cost by $2.3\times$. We also explore a progressive training approach called Prog-FedMML. While it offers lesser resource efficiency than LW-FedMML, Prog-FedMML has the potential to surpass the performance of end-to-end FedMML, making it a viable option for scenarios with fewer resource constraints.
Privacy-Preserving Multi-Center Differential Protein Abundance Analysis with FedProt
Authors: Yuliya Burankova, Miriam Abele, Mohammad Bakhtiari, Christine von Törne, Teresa Barth, Lisa Schweizer, Pieter Giesbertz, Johannes R. Schmidt, Stefan Kalkhof, Janina Müller-Deile, Peter A van Veelen, Yassene Mohammed, Elke Hammer, Lis Arend, Klaudia Adamowicz, Tanja Laske, Anne Hartebrodt, Tobias Frisch, Chen Meng, Julian Matschinske, Julian Späth, Richard Röttger, Veit Schwämmle, Stefanie M. Hauck, Stefan Lichtenthaler, Axel Imhof, Matthias Mann, Christina Ludwig, Bernhard Kuster, Jan Baumbach, Olga Zolotareva
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Quantitative mass spectrometry has revolutionized proteomics by enabling simultaneous quantification of thousands of proteins. Pooling patient-derived data from multiple institutions enhances statistical power but raises significant privacy concerns. Here we introduce FedProt, the first privacy-preserving tool for collaborative differential protein abundance analysis of distributed data, which utilizes federated learning and additive secret sharing. In the absence of a multicenter patient-derived dataset for evaluation, we created two, one at five centers from LFQ E.coli experiments and one at three centers from TMT human serum. Evaluations using these datasets confirm that FedProt achieves accuracy equivalent to DEqMS applied to pooled data, with completely negligible absolute differences no greater than $\text{$4 \times 10^{-12}$}$. In contrast, -log10(p-values) computed by the most accurate meta-analysis methods diverged from the centralized analysis results by up to 25-27. FedProt is available as a web tool with detailed documentation as a FeatureCloud App.
Fever Detection with Infrared Thermography: Enhancing Accuracy through Machine Learning Techniques
Authors: Parsa Razmara, Tina Khezresmaeilzadeh, B. Keith Jenkins
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Feature Engineering

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the necessity for advanced diagnostic tools in global health systems. Infrared Thermography (IRT) has proven to be a crucial non-contact method for measuring body temperature, vital for identifying febrile conditions associated with infectious diseases like COVID-19. Traditional non-contact infrared thermometers (NCITs) often exhibit significant variability in readings. To address this, we integrated machine learning algorithms with IRT to enhance the accuracy and reliability of temperature measurements. Our study systematically evaluated various regression models using heuristic feature engineering techniques, focusing on features' physiological relevance and statistical significance. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, utilizing these techniques, achieved the lowest RMSE of 0.2223, demonstrating superior performance compared to results reported in previous literature. Among non-neural network models, the Binning method achieved the best performance with an RMSE of 0.2296. Our findings highlight the potential of combining advanced feature engineering with machine learning to improve diagnostic tools' effectiveness, with implications extending to other non-contact or remote sensing biomedical applications. This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of these methodologies, providing a foundation for future research in the field of non-invasive medical diagnostics.
TimeInf: Time Series Data Contribution via Influence Functions
Authors: Yizi Zhang, Jingyan Shen, Xiaoxue Xiong, Yongchan Kwon
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Time Series

Evaluating the contribution of individual data points to a model's prediction is critical for interpreting model predictions and improving model performance. Existing data contribution methods have been applied to various data types, including tabular data, images, and texts; however, their primary focus has been on i.i.d. settings. Despite the pressing need for principled approaches tailored to time series datasets, the problem of estimating data contribution in such settings remains unexplored, possibly due to challenges associated with handling inherent temporal dependencies. This paper introduces TimeInf, a data contribution estimation method for time-series datasets. TimeInf uses influence functions to attribute model predictions to individual time points while preserving temporal structures. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate that TimeInf outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identifying harmful anomalies and helpful time points for forecasting. Additionally, TimeInf offers intuitive and interpretable attributions of data values, allowing us to easily distinguish diverse anomaly patterns through visualizations.
Temporal Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning with Offline Data
Authors: Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari, Anurita Ghosh, Ambedkar Dukkipati
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Standard reinforcement learning algorithms with a single policy perform poorly on tasks in complex environments involving sparse rewards, diverse behaviors, or long-term planning. This led to the study of algorithms that incorporate temporal abstraction by training a hierarchy of policies that plan over different time scales. The options framework has been introduced to implement such temporal abstraction by learning low-level options that act as extended actions controlled by a high-level policy. The main challenge in applying these algorithms to real-world problems is that they suffer from high sample complexity to train multiple levels of the hierarchy, which is impossible in online settings. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose an offline hierarchical RL method that can learn options from existing offline datasets collected by other unknown agents. This is a very challenging problem due to the distribution mismatch between the learned options and the policies responsible for the offline dataset and to our knowledge, this is the first work in this direction. In this work, we propose a framework by which an online hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm can be trained on an offline dataset of transitions collected by an unknown behavior policy. We validate our method on Gym MuJoCo locomotion environments and robotic gripper block-stacking tasks in the standard as well as transfer and goal-conditioned settings.
Deep State Space Recurrent Neural Networks for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Hugo Inzirillo
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, State Space Models, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

We explore various neural network architectures for modeling the dynamics of the cryptocurrency market. Traditional linear models often fall short in accurately capturing the unique and complex dynamics of this market. In contrast, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in time series forecasting. This papers introduces novel neural network framework that blend the principles of econometric state space models with the dynamic capabilities of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We propose state space models using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Residual Units (GRU) and Temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (TKANs). According to the results, TKANs, inspired by Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and LSTM, demonstrate promising outcomes.
Adversarial Circuit Evaluation
Authors: Niels uit de Bos, Adrià Garriga-Alonso
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00

Circuits are supposed to accurately describe how a neural network performs a specific task, but do they really? We evaluate three circuits found in the literature (IOI, greater-than, and docstring) in an adversarial manner, considering inputs where the circuit's behavior maximally diverges from the full model. Concretely, we measure the KL divergence between the full model's output and the circuit's output, calculated through resample ablation, and we analyze the worst-performing inputs. Our results show that the circuits for the IOI and docstring tasks fail to behave similarly to the full model even on completely benign inputs from the original task, indicating that more robust circuits are needed for safety-critical applications.
Rocket Landing Control with Random Annealing Jump Start Reinforcement Learning
Authors: YuXuan Jiang, Yujie Yang, Zhiqian Lan, Guojian Zhan, Shengbo Eben Li, Qi Sun, Jian Ma, Tianwen Yu, Changwu Zhang
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Rocket recycling is a crucial pursuit in aerospace technology, aimed at reducing costs and environmental impact in space exploration. The primary focus centers on rocket landing control, involving the guidance of a nonlinear underactuated rocket with limited fuel in real-time. This challenging task prompts the application of reinforcement learning (RL), yet goal-oriented nature of the problem poses difficulties for standard RL algorithms due to the absence of intermediate reward signals. This paper, for the first time, significantly elevates the success rate of rocket landing control from 8% with a baseline controller to 97% on a high-fidelity rocket model using RL. Our approach, called Random Annealing Jump Start (RAJS), is tailored for real-world goal-oriented problems by leveraging prior feedback controllers as guide policy to facilitate environmental exploration and policy learning in RL. In each episode, the guide policy navigates the environment for the guide horizon, followed by the exploration policy taking charge to complete remaining steps. This jump-start strategy prunes exploration space, rendering the problem more tractable to RL algorithms. The guide horizon is sampled from a uniform distribution, with its upper bound annealing to zero based on performance metrics, mitigating distribution shift and mismatch issues in existing methods. Additional enhancements, including cascading jump start, refined reward and terminal condition, and action smoothness regulation, further improve policy performance and practical applicability. The proposed method is validated through extensive evaluation and Hardware-in-the-Loop testing, affirming the effectiveness, real-time feasibility, and smoothness of the proposed controller.
Statistical Models for Outbreak Detection of Measles in North Cotabato, Philippines
Authors: Julienne Kate N. Kintanar, Roel F. Ceballos
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Epidemiology

A measles outbreak occurs when the number of cases of measles in the population exceeds the typical level. Outbreaks that are not detected and managed early can increase mortality and morbidity and incur costs from activities responding to these events. The number of measles cases in the Province of North Cotabato, Philippines, was used in this study. Weekly reported cases of measles from January 2016 to December 2021 were provided by the Epidemiology and Surveillance Unit of the North Cotabato Provincial Health Office. Several integer-valued autoregressive (INAR) time series models were used to explore the possibility of detecting and identifying measles outbreaks in the province along with the classical ARIMA model. These models were evaluated based on goodness of fit, measles outbreak detection accuracy, and timeliness. The results of this study confirmed that INAR models have the conceptual advantage over ARIMA since the latter produces non-integer forecasts, which are not realistic for count data such as measles cases. Among the INAR models, the ZINGINAR (1) model was recommended for having a good model fit and timely and accurate detection of outbreaks. Furthermore, policymakers and decision-makers from relevant government agencies can use the ZINGINAR (1) model to improve disease surveillance and implement preventive measures against contagious diseases beforehand.
All Against Some: Efficient Integration of Large Language Models for Message Passing in Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Ajay Jaiswal, Nurendra Choudhary, Ravinarayana Adkathimar, Muthu P. Alagappan, Gaurush Hiranandani, Ying Ding, Zhangyang Wang, Edward W Huang, Karthik Subbian
Date: 2024-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Graph Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have attracted immense attention in the past decade due to their numerous real-world applications built around graph-structured data. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) with extensive pretrained knowledge and powerful semantic comprehension abilities have recently shown a remarkable ability to benefit applications using vision and text data. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs can be leveraged in a computationally efficient fashion to benefit rich graph-structured data, a modality relatively unexplored in LLM literature. Prior works in this area exploit LLMs to augment every node features in an ad-hoc fashion (not scalable for large graphs), use natural language to describe the complex structural information of graphs, or perform computationally expensive finetuning of LLMs in conjunction with GNNs. We propose E-LLaGNN (Efficient LLMs augmented GNNs), a framework with an on-demand LLM service that enriches message passing procedure of graph learning by enhancing a limited fraction of nodes from the graph. More specifically, E-LLaGNN relies on sampling high-quality neighborhoods using LLMs, followed by on-demand neighborhood feature enhancement using diverse prompts from our prompt catalog, and finally information aggregation using message passing from conventional GNN architectures. We explore several heuristics-based active node selection strategies to limit the computational and memory footprint of LLMs when handling millions of nodes. Through extensive experiments & ablation on popular graph benchmarks of varying scales (Cora, PubMed, ArXiv, & Products), we illustrate the effectiveness of our E-LLaGNN framework and reveal many interesting capabilities such as improved gradient flow in deep GNNs, LLM-free inference ability etc.
Addressing Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning of Cox Proportional Hazards Models
Authors: Navid Seidi, Satyaki Roy, Sajal K. Das, Ardhendu Tripathy
Date: 2024-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Epidemiology, Federated Learning, Survival Analysis

The diversity in disease profiles and therapeutic approaches between hospitals and health professionals underscores the need for patient-centric personalized strategies in healthcare. Alongside this, similarities in disease progression across patients can be utilized to improve prediction models in survival analysis. The need for patient privacy and the utility of prediction models can be simultaneously addressed in the framework of Federated Learning (FL). This paper outlines an approach in the domain of federated survival analysis, specifically the Cox Proportional Hazards (CoxPH) model, with a specific focus on mitigating data heterogeneity and elevating model performance. We present an FL approach that employs feature-based clustering to enhance model accuracy across synthetic datasets and real-world applications, including the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Furthermore, we consider an event-based reporting strategy that provides a dynamic approach to model adaptation by responding to local data changes. Our experiments show the efficacy of our approach and discuss future directions for a practical application of FL in healthcare.
Strongly Isomorphic Neural Optimal Transport Across Incomparable Spaces
Authors: Athina Sotiropoulou, David Alvarez-Melis
Date: 2024-07-20 00:00:00

Optimal Transport (OT) has recently emerged as a powerful framework for learning minimal-displacement maps between distributions. The predominant approach involves a neural parametrization of the Monge formulation of OT, typically assuming the same space for both distributions. However, the setting across ``incomparable spaces'' (e.g., of different dimensionality), corresponding to the Gromov- Wasserstein distance, remains underexplored, with existing methods often imposing restrictive assumptions on the cost function. In this paper, we present a novel neural formulation of the Gromov-Monge (GM) problem rooted in one of its fundamental properties: invariance to strong isomorphisms. We operationalize this property by decomposing the learnable OT map into two components: (i) an approximate strong isomorphism between the source distribution and an intermediate reference distribution, and (ii) a GM-optimal map between this reference and the target distribution. Our formulation leverages and extends the Monge gap regularizer of Uscidda & Cuturi (2023) to eliminate the need for complex architectural requirements of other neural OT methods, yielding a simple but practical method that enjoys favorable theoretical guarantees. Our preliminary empirical results show that our framework provides a promising approach to learn OT maps across diverse spaces.