pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Gaussian Graph Operator: Learning parametric partial differential equations in arbitrary discrete mechanics problems
Authors: Chu Wang, Jinhong Wu, Yanzhi Wang, Zhijian Zha, Qi Zhou
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Operator learning

Deep learning methods have access to be employed for solving physical systems governed by parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) due to massive scientific data. It has been refined to operator learning that focuses on learning non-linear mapping between infinite-dimensional function spaces, offering interface from observations to solutions. However, state-of-the-art neural operators are limited to constant and uniform discretization, thereby leading to deficiency in generalization on arbitrary discretization schemes for computational domain. In this work, we propose a novel operator learning algorithm, referred to as Dynamic Gaussian Graph Operator (DGGO) that expands neural operators to learning parametric PDEs in arbitrary discrete mechanics problems. The Dynamic Gaussian Graph (DGG) kernel learns to map the observation vectors defined in general Euclidean space to metric vectors defined in high-dimensional uniform metric space. The DGG integral kernel is parameterized by Gaussian kernel weighted Riemann sum approximating and using dynamic message passing graph to depict the interrelation within the integral term. Fourier Neural Operator is selected to localize the metric vectors on spatial and frequency domains. Metric vectors are regarded as located on latent uniform domain, wherein spatial and spectral transformation offer highly regular constraints on solution space. The efficiency and robustness of DGGO are validated by applying it to solve numerical arbitrary discrete mechanics problems in comparison with mainstream neural operators. Ablation experiments are implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of spatial transformation in the DGG kernel. The proposed method is utilized to forecast stress field of hyper-elastic material with geometrically variable void as engineering application.
DPPA: Pruning Method for Large Language Model to Model Merging
Authors: Yaochen Zhu, Rui Xia, Jiajun Zhang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

Model merging is to combine fine-tuned models derived from multiple domains, with the intent of enhancing the model's proficiency across various domains. The principal concern is the resolution of parameter conflicts. A substantial amount of existing research remedy this issue during the merging stage, with the latest study focusing on resolving this issue throughout the pruning stage. The DARE approach has exhibited promising outcomes when applied to a simplistic fine-tuned model. However, the efficacy of this method tends to wane when employed on complex fine-tuned models that show a significant parameter bias relative to the baseline model. In this paper, we introduce a dual-stage method termed Dynamic Pruning Partition Amplification (DPPA), devised to tackle the challenge of merging complex fine-tuned models. Initially, we introduce Dynamically Pruning (DP), an improved approach based on magnitude pruning, which aim is to enhance performance at higher pruning rates. Subsequently, we propose Dynamically Partition Amplification (DPA), a rescaling strategy, is designed to dynamically amplify parameter partitions in relation to their significance levels. The experimental results show that our method maintains a mere 20% of domain-specific parameters and yet delivers a performance comparable to other methodologies that preserve up to 90% of parameters. Furthermore, our method displays outstanding performance post-pruning, leading to a significant improvement of nearly 20% performance in model merging. We make our code on Github.
Evaluating and Optimizing Educational Content with Large Language Model Judgments
Authors: Joy He-Yueya, Noah D. Goodman, Emma Brunskill
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Math

Creating effective educational materials generally requires expensive and time-consuming studies of student learning outcomes. To overcome this barrier, one idea is to build computational models of student learning and use them to optimize instructional materials. However, it is difficult to model the cognitive processes of learning dynamics. We propose an alternative approach that uses Language Models (LMs) as educational experts to assess the impact of various instructions on learning outcomes. Specifically, we use GPT-3.5 to evaluate the overall effect of instructional materials on different student groups and find that it can replicate well-established educational findings such as the Expertise Reversal Effect and the Variability Effect. This demonstrates the potential of LMs as reliable evaluators of educational content. Building on this insight, we introduce an instruction optimization approach in which one LM generates instructional materials using the judgments of another LM as a reward function. We apply this approach to create math word problem worksheets aimed at maximizing student learning gains. Human teachers' evaluations of these LM-generated worksheets show a significant alignment between the LM judgments and human teacher preferences. We conclude by discussing potential divergences between human and LM opinions and the resulting pitfalls of automating instructional design.
A Distance Metric Learning Model Based On Variational Information Bottleneck
Authors: YaoDan Zhang, Zidong Wang, Ru Jia, Ru Li
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning

In recent years, personalized recommendation technology has flourished and become one of the hot research directions. The matrix factorization model and the metric learning model which proposed successively have been widely studied and applied. The latter uses the Euclidean distance instead of the dot product used by the former to measure the latent space vector. While avoiding the shortcomings of the dot product, the assumption of Euclidean distance is neglected, resulting in limited recommendation quality of the model. In order to solve this problem, this paper combines the Variationl Information Bottleneck with metric learning model for the first time, and proposes a new metric learning model VIB-DML (Variational Information Bottleneck Distance Metric Learning) for rating prediction, which limits the mutual information of the latent space feature vector to improve the robustness of the model and satisfiy the assumption of Euclidean distance by decoupling the latent space feature vector. In this paper, the experimental results are compared with the root mean square error (RMSE) on the three public datasets. The results show that the generalization ability of VIB-DML is excellent. Compared with the general metric learning model MetricF, the prediction error is reduced by 7.29%. Finally, the paper proves the strong robustness of VIBDML through experiments.
Semi-Supervised Graph Representation Learning with Human-centric Explanation for Predicting Fatty Liver Disease
Authors: So Yeon Kim, Sehee Wang, Eun Kyung Choe
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Addressing the challenge of limited labeled data in clinical settings, particularly in the prediction of fatty liver disease, this study explores the potential of graph representation learning within a semi-supervised learning framework. Leveraging graph neural networks (GNNs), our approach constructs a subject similarity graph to identify risk patterns from health checkup data. The effectiveness of various GNN approaches in this context is demonstrated, even with minimal labeled samples. Central to our methodology is the inclusion of human-centric explanations through explainable GNNs, providing personalized feature importance scores for enhanced interpretability and clinical relevance, thereby underscoring the potential of our approach in advancing healthcare practices with a keen focus on graph representation learning and human-centric explanation.
Where the Really Hard Quadratic Assignment Problems Are: the QAP-SAT instances
Authors: Sébastien Verel, Sarah Thomson, Omar Rifki
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is one of the major domains in the field of evolutionary computation, and more widely in combinatorial optimization. This paper studies the phase transition of the QAP, which can be described as a dramatic change in the problem's computational complexity and satisfiability, within a narrow range of the problem parameters. To approach this phenomenon, we introduce a new QAP-SAT design of the initial problem based on submodularity to capture its difficulty with new features. This decomposition is studied experimentally using branch-and-bound and tabu search solvers. A phase transition parameter is then proposed. The critical parameter of phase transition satisfaction and that of the solving effort are shown to be highly correlated for tabu search, thus allowing the prediction of difficult instances.
EasyQuant: An Efficient Data-free Quantization Algorithm for LLMs
Authors: Hanlin Tang, Yifu Sun, Decheng Wu, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Zhanhui Kang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Free Quantization, Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be very superior to conventional methods in various tasks. However, their expensive computations and high memory requirements are prohibitive for deployment. Model quantization is an effective method for reducing this overhead. The problem is that in most previous works, the quantized model was calibrated using few samples from the training data, which might affect the generalization of the quantized LLMs to unknown cases and tasks. Hence in this work, we explore an important question: Can we design a data-independent quantization method for LLMs to guarantee its generalization performance? In this work, we propose EasyQuant, a training-free and data-independent weight-only quantization algorithm for LLMs. Our observation indicates that two factors: outliers in the weight and quantization ranges, are essential for reducing the quantization error. Therefore, in EasyQuant, we leave the outliers (less than 1%) unchanged and optimize the quantization range to reduce the reconstruction error. With these methods, we surprisingly find that EasyQuant achieves comparable performance to the original model. Since EasyQuant does not depend on any training data, the generalization performance of quantized LLMs is safely guaranteed. Moreover, EasyQuant can be implemented in parallel so that the quantized model could be attained in a few minutes even for LLMs over 100B. To our best knowledge, we are the first work that achieves almost lossless quantization performance for LLMs under a data-independent setting and our algorithm runs over 10 times faster than the data-dependent methods.
Rehabilitation Exercise Quality Assessment through Supervised Contrastive Learning with Hard and Soft Negatives
Authors: Mark Karlov, Ali Abedi, Shehroz S. Khan
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Exercise-based rehabilitation programs have proven to be effective in enhancing the quality of life and reducing mortality and rehospitalization rates. AI-driven virtual rehabilitation, which allows patients to independently complete exercises at home, utilizes AI algorithms to analyze exercise data, providing feedback to patients and updating clinicians on their progress. These programs commonly prescribe a variety of exercise types, leading to a distinct challenge in rehabilitation exercise assessment datasets: while abundant in overall training samples, these datasets often have a limited number of samples for each individual exercise type. This disparity hampers the ability of existing approaches to train generalizable models with such a small sample size per exercise type. Addressing this issue, this paper introduces a novel supervised contrastive learning framework with hard and soft negative samples that effectively utilizes the entire dataset to train a single model applicable to all exercise types. This model, with a Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) architecture, demonstrated enhanced generalizability across exercises and a decrease in overall complexity. Through extensive experiments on three publicly available rehabilitation exercise assessment datasets, UI-PRMD, IRDS, and KIMORE, our method has proven to surpass existing methods, setting a new benchmark in rehabilitation exercise quality assessment.
Emerging Synergies Between Large Language Models and Machine Learning in Ecommerce Recommendations
Authors: Xiaonan Xu, Yichao Wu, Penghao Liang, Yuhang He, Han Wang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

With the boom of e-commerce and web applications, recommender systems have become an important part of our daily lives, providing personalized recommendations based on the user's preferences. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant progress in improving recommendation systems by simulating the interaction between users and items and incorporating their textual information, these DNN-based approaches still have some limitations, such as the difficulty of effectively understanding users' interests and capturing textual information. It is not possible to generalize to different seen/unseen recommendation scenarios and reason about their predictions. At the same time, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), represented by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) due to their superior capabilities in the basic tasks of language understanding and generation, and their impressive generalization and reasoning capabilities. As a result, recent research has sought to harness the power of LLM to improve recommendation systems. Given the rapid development of this research direction in the field of recommendation systems, there is an urgent need for a systematic review of existing LLM-driven recommendation systems for researchers and practitioners in related fields to gain insight into. More specifically, we first introduced a representative approach to learning user and item representations using LLM as a feature encoder. We then reviewed the latest advances in LLMs techniques for collaborative filtering enhanced recommendation systems from the three paradigms of pre-training, fine-tuning, and prompting. Finally, we had a comprehensive discussion on the future direction of this emerging field.
Speckle Noise Reduction in Ultrasound Images using Denoising Auto-encoder with Skip Connection
Authors: Suraj Bhute, Subhamoy Mandal, Debashree Guha
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diagnostic, Image Enhancement

Ultrasound is a widely used medical tool for non-invasive diagnosis, but its images often contain speckle noise which can lower their resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio. This can make it more difficult to extract, recognize, and analyze features in the images, as well as impair the accuracy of computer-assisted diagnostic techniques and the ability of doctors to interpret the images. Reducing speckle noise, therefore, is a crucial step in the preprocessing of ultrasound images. Researchers have proposed several speckle reduction methods, but no single method takes all relevant factors into account. In this paper, we compare seven such methods: Median, Gaussian, Bilateral, Average, Weiner, Anisotropic and Denoising auto-encoder without and with skip connections in terms of their ability to preserve features and edges while effectively reducing noise. In an experimental study, a convolutional noise-removing auto-encoder with skip connection, a deep learning method, was used to improve ultrasound images of breast cancer. This method involved adding speckle noise at various levels. The results of the deep learning method were compared to those of traditional image enhancement methods, and it was found that the proposed method was more effective. To assess the performance of these algorithms, we use three established evaluation metrics and present both filtered images and statistical data.
CURATRON: Complete and Robust Preference Data for Rigorous Alignment of Large Language Models
Authors: Son The Nguyen, Niranjan Uma Naresh, Theja Tulabandhula
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

This paper addresses the challenges of aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values via preference learning (PL), focusing on incomplete and corrupted data in preference datasets. We propose a novel method for robustly and completely recalibrating values within these datasets to enhance LLMs' resilience against the issues. In particular, we devise a guaranteed polynomial time ranking algorithm that robustifies several existing models, such as the classic Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) (Bradley and Terry, 1952) model and certain generalizations of it. To the best of our knowledge, our present work is the first to propose an algorithm that provably recovers an $\epsilon$-optimal ranking with high probability while allowing as large as $O(n)$ perturbed pairwise comparison results per model response. Furthermore, we show robust recovery results in the partially observed setting. Our experiments confirm that our algorithms handle adversarial noise and unobserved comparisons well in both general and LLM preference dataset settings. This work contributes to the development and scaling of more reliable and ethically aligned AI models by equipping the dataset curation pipeline with the ability to handle missing and maliciously manipulated inputs.
Bootstrapping Rare Object Detection in High-Resolution Satellite Imagery
Authors: Akram Zaytar, Caleb Robinson, Gilles Q. Hacheme, Girmaw A. Tadesse, Rahul Dodhia, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Lacey F. Hughey, Jared A. Stabach, Irene Amoke
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Rare object detection is a fundamental task in applied geospatial machine learning, however is often challenging due to large amounts of high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery and few or no labeled positive samples to start with. This paper addresses the problem of bootstrapping such a rare object detection task assuming there is no labeled data and no spatial prior over the area of interest. We propose novel offline and online cluster-based approaches for sampling patches that are significantly more efficient, in terms of exposing positive samples to a human annotator, than random sampling. We apply our methods for identifying bomas, or small enclosures for herd animals, in the Serengeti Mara region of Kenya and Tanzania. We demonstrate a significant enhancement in detection efficiency, achieving a positive sampling rate increase from 2% (random) to 30%. This advancement enables effective machine learning mapping even with minimal labeling budgets, exemplified by an F1 score on the boma detection task of 0.51 with a budget of 300 total patches.
HARGPT: Are LLMs Zero-Shot Human Activity Recognizers?
Authors: Sijie Ji, Xinzhe Zheng, Chenshu Wu
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition

There is an ongoing debate regarding the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as foundational models seamlessly integrated with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) for interpreting the physical world. In this paper, we carry out a case study to answer the following question: Are LLMs capable of zero-shot human activity recognition (HAR). Our study, HARGPT, presents an affirmative answer by demonstrating that LLMs can comprehend raw IMU data and perform HAR tasks in a zero-shot manner, with only appropriate prompts. HARGPT inputs raw IMU data into LLMs and utilizes the role-play and think step-by-step strategies for prompting. We benchmark HARGPT on GPT4 using two public datasets of different inter-class similarities and compare various baselines both based on traditional machine learning and state-of-the-art deep classification models. Remarkably, LLMs successfully recognize human activities from raw IMU data and consistently outperform all the baselines on both datasets. Our findings indicate that by effective prompting, LLMs can interpret raw IMU data based on their knowledge base, possessing a promising potential to analyze raw sensor data of the physical world effectively.
Bias in Generative AI
Authors: Mi Zhou, Vibhanshu Abhishek, Timothy Derdenger, Jaymo Kim, Kannan Srinivasan
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

This study analyzed images generated by three popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools - Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALLE 2 - representing various occupations to investigate potential bias in AI generators. Our analysis revealed two overarching areas of concern in these AI generators, including (1) systematic gender and racial biases, and (2) subtle biases in facial expressions and appearances. Firstly, we found that all three AI generators exhibited bias against women and African Americans. Moreover, we found that the evident gender and racial biases uncovered in our analysis were even more pronounced than the status quo when compared to labor force statistics or Google images, intensifying the harmful biases we are actively striving to rectify in our society. Secondly, our study uncovered more nuanced prejudices in the portrayal of emotions and appearances. For example, women were depicted as younger with more smiles and happiness, while men were depicted as older with more neutral expressions and anger, posing a risk that generative AI models may unintentionally depict women as more submissive and less competent than men. Such nuanced biases, by their less overt nature, might be more problematic as they can permeate perceptions unconsciously and may be more difficult to rectify. Although the extent of bias varied depending on the model, the direction of bias remained consistent in both commercial and open-source AI generators. As these tools become commonplace, our study highlights the urgency to identify and mitigate various biases in generative AI, reinforcing the commitment to ensuring that AI technologies benefit all of humanity for a more inclusive future.
Minimum Topology Attacks for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Mengmei Zhang, Xiao Wang, Chuan Shi, Lingjuan Lyu, Tianchi Yang, Junping Du
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

With the great popularity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), their robustness to adversarial topology attacks has received significant attention. Although many attack methods have been proposed, they mainly focus on fixed-budget attacks, aiming at finding the most adversarial perturbations within a fixed budget for target node. However, considering the varied robustness of each node, there is an inevitable dilemma caused by the fixed budget, i.e., no successful perturbation is found when the budget is relatively small, while if it is too large, the yielding redundant perturbations will hurt the invisibility. To break this dilemma, we propose a new type of topology attack, named minimum-budget topology attack, aiming to adaptively find the minimum perturbation sufficient for a successful attack on each node. To this end, we propose an attack model, named MiBTack, based on a dynamic projected gradient descent algorithm, which can effectively solve the involving non-convex constraint optimization on discrete topology. Extensive results on three GNNs and four real-world datasets show that MiBTack can successfully lead all target nodes misclassified with the minimum perturbation edges. Moreover, the obtained minimum budget can be used to measure node robustness, so we can explore the relationships of robustness, topology, and uncertainty for nodes, which is beyond what the current fixed-budget topology attacks can offer.