pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SFedCA: Credit Assignment-Based Active Client Selection Strategy for Spiking Federated Learning
Authors: Qiugang Zhan, Jinbo Cao, Xiurui Xie, Malu Zhang, Huajin Tang, Guisong Liu
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Spiking federated learning is an emerging distributed learning paradigm that allows resource-constrained devices to train collaboratively at low power consumption without exchanging local data. It takes advantage of both the privacy computation property in federated learning (FL) and the energy efficiency in spiking neural networks (SNN). Thus, it is highly promising to revolutionize the efficient processing of multimedia data. However, existing spiking federated learning methods employ a random selection approach for client aggregation, assuming unbiased client participation. This neglect of statistical heterogeneity affects the convergence and accuracy of the global model significantly. In our work, we propose a credit assignment-based active client selection strategy, the SFedCA, to judiciously aggregate clients that contribute to the global sample distribution balance. Specifically, the client credits are assigned by the firing intensity state before and after local model training, which reflects the local data distribution difference from the global model. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on various non-identical and independent distribution (non-IID) scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that the SFedCA outperforms the existing state-of-the-art spiking federated learning methods, and requires fewer communication rounds.
Quantum Compiling with Reinforcement Learning on a Superconducting Processor
Authors: Z. T. Wang, Qiuhao Chen, Yuxuan Du, Z. H. Yang, Xiaoxia Cai, Kaixuan Huang, Jingning Zhang, Kai Xu, Jun Du, Yinan Li, Yuling Jiao, Xingyao Wu, Wu Liu, Xiliang Lu, Huikai Xu, Yirong Jin, Ruixia Wang, Haifeng Yu, S. P. Zhao
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Unity

To effectively implement quantum algorithms on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors is a central task in modern quantum technology. NISQ processors feature tens to a few hundreds of noisy qubits with limited coherence times and gate operations with errors, so NISQ algorithms naturally require employing circuits of short lengths via quantum compilation. Here, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL)-based quantum compiler for a superconducting processor and demonstrate its capability of discovering novel and hardware-amenable circuits with short lengths. We show that for the three-qubit quantum Fourier transformation, a compiled circuit using only seven CZ gates with unity circuit fidelity can be achieved. The compiler is also able to find optimal circuits under device topological constraints, with lengths considerably shorter than those by the conventional method. Our study exemplifies the codesign of the software with hardware for efficient quantum compilation, offering valuable insights for the advancement of RL-based compilers.
Review and Prospect of Algebraic Research in Equivalent Framework between Statistical Mechanics and Machine Learning Theory
Authors: Sumio Watanabe
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

Mathematical equivalence between statistical mechanics and machine learning theory has been known since the 20th century, and research based on this equivalence has provided novel methodologies in both theoretical physics and statistical learning theory. It is well known that algebraic approaches in statistical mechanics such as operator algebra enable us to analyze phase transition phenomena mathematically. In this paper, we review and prospect algebraic research in machine learning theory for theoretical physicists who are interested in artificial intelligence. If a learning machine has a hierarchical structure or latent variables, then the random Hamiltonian cannot be expressed by any quadratic perturbation because it has singularities. To study an equilibrium state defined by such a singular random Hamiltonian, algebraic approaches are necessary to derive the asymptotic form of the free energy and the generalization error. We also introduce the most recent advance: the theoretical foundation for the alignment of artificial intelligence is now being constructed based on algebraic learning theory. This paper is devoted to the memory of Professor Huzihiro Araki who is a pioneering founder of algebraic research in both statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.
Adaptive Collaborative Correlation Learning-based Semi-Supervised Multi-Label Feature Selection
Authors: Yanyong Huang, Li Yang, Dongjie Wang, Ke Li, Xiuwen Yi, Fengmao Lv, Tianrui Li
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Missing Labels, regression

Semi-supervised multi-label feature selection has recently been developed to solve the curse of dimensionality problem in high-dimensional multi-label data with certain samples missing labels. Although many efforts have been made, most existing methods use a predefined graph approach to capture the sample similarity or the label correlation. In this manner, the presence of noise and outliers within the original feature space can undermine the reliability of the resulting sample similarity graph. It also fails to precisely depict the label correlation due to the existence of unknown labels. Besides, these methods only consider the discriminative power of selected features, while neglecting their redundancy. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Collaborative Correlation lEarning-based Semi-Supervised Multi-label Feature Selection (Access-MFS) method to address these issues. Specifically, a generalized regression model equipped with an extended uncorrelated constraint is introduced to select discriminative yet irrelevant features and maintain consistency between predicted and ground-truth labels in labeled data, simultaneously. Then, the instance correlation and label correlation are integrated into the proposed regression model to adaptively learn both the sample similarity graph and the label similarity graph, which mutually enhance feature selection performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Access-MFS over other state-of-the-art methods.
Exploring the Impact of a Transformer's Latent Space Geometry on Downstream Task Performance
Authors: Anna C. Marbut, John W. Chandler, Travis J. Wheeler
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

It is generally thought that transformer-based large language models benefit from pre-training by learning generic linguistic knowledge that can be focused on a specific task during fine-tuning. However, we propose that much of the benefit from pre-training may be captured by geometric characteristics of the latent space representations, divorced from any specific linguistic knowledge. In this work we explore the relationship between GLUE benchmarking task performance and a variety of measures applied to the latent space resulting from BERT-type contextual language models. We find that there is a strong linear relationship between a measure of quantized cell density and average GLUE performance and that these measures may be predictive of otherwise surprising GLUE performance for several non-standard BERT-type models from the literature. These results may be suggestive of a strategy for decreasing pre-training requirements, wherein model initialization can be informed by the geometric characteristics of the model's latent space.
Efficient Sequential Decision Making with Large Language Models
Authors: Dingyang Chen, Qi Zhang, Yinglun Zhu
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Model Selection, Sequential Decision Making

This paper focuses on extending the success of large language models (LLMs) to sequential decision making. Existing efforts either (i) re-train or finetune LLMs for decision making, or (ii) design prompts for pretrained LLMs. The former approach suffers from the computational burden of gradient updates, and the latter approach does not show promising results. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages online model selection algorithms to efficiently incorporate LLMs agents into sequential decision making. Statistically, our approach significantly outperforms both traditional decision making algorithms and vanilla LLM agents. Computationally, our approach avoids the need for expensive gradient updates of LLMs, and throughout the decision making process, it requires only a small number of LLM calls. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach. As an example, on a large-scale Amazon dataset, our approach achieves more than a $6$x performance gain over baselines while calling LLMs in only $1.5$\% of the time steps.
Thermodynamic Transferability in Coarse-Grained Force Fields using Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Emily Shinkle, Aleksandra Pachalieva, Riti Bahl, Sakib Matin, Brendan Gifford, Galen T. Craven, Nicholas Lubbers
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00

Coarse-graining is a molecular modeling technique in which an atomistic system is represented in a simplified fashion that retains the most significant system features that contribute to a target output, while removing the degrees of freedom that are less relevant. This reduction in model complexity allows coarse-grained molecular simulations to reach increased spatial and temporal scales compared to corresponding all-atom models. A core challenge in coarse-graining is to construct a force field that represents the interactions in the new representation in a way that preserves the atomistic-level properties. Many approaches to building coarse-grained force fields have limited transferability between different thermodynamic conditions as a result of averaging over internal fluctuations at a specific thermodynamic state point. Here, we use a graph-convolutional neural network architecture, the Hierarchically Interacting Particle Neural Network with Tensor Sensitivity (HIP-NN-TS), to develop a highly automated training pipeline for coarse grained force fields which allows for studying the transferability of coarse-grained models based on the force-matching approach. We show that this approach not only yields highly accurate force fields, but also that these force fields are more transferable through a variety of thermodynamic conditions. These results illustrate the potential of machine learning techniques such as graph neural networks to improve the construction of transferable coarse-grained force fields.
CUQDS: Conformal Uncertainty Quantification under Distribution Shift for Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Huiqun Huang, Sihong He, Fei Miao
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, regression, Time Series Forecasting, Trajectory Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Trajectory prediction models that can infer both finite future trajectories and their associated uncertainties of the target vehicles in an online setting (e.g., real-world application scenarios) is crucial for ensuring the safe and robust navigation and path planning of autonomous vehicle motion. However, the majority of existing trajectory prediction models have neither considered reducing the uncertainty as one objective during the training stage nor provided reliable uncertainty quantification during inference stage under potential distribution shift. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the Conformal Uncertainty Quantification under Distribution Shift framework, CUQDS, to quantify the uncertainty of the predicted trajectories of existing trajectory prediction models under potential data distribution shift, while considering improving the prediction accuracy of the models and reducing the estimated uncertainty during the training stage. Specifically, CUQDS includes 1) a learning-based Gaussian process regression module that models the output distribution of the base model (any existing trajectory prediction or time series forecasting neural networks) and reduces the estimated uncertainty by additional loss term, and 2) a statistical-based Conformal P control module to calibrate the estimated uncertainty from the Gaussian process regression module in an online setting under potential distribution shift between training and testing data.
Is poisoning a real threat to LLM alignment? Maybe more so than you think
Authors: Pankayaraj Pathmanathan, Souradip Chakraborty, Xiangyu Liu, Yongyuan Liang, Furong Huang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) have significantly impacted the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). The sensitivity of reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has led to new line work on Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which treats RLHF in a supervised learning framework. The increased practical use of these RLHF methods warrants an analysis of their vulnerabilities. In this work, we investigate the vulnerabilities of DPO to poisoning attacks under different scenarios and compare the effectiveness of preference poisoning, a first of its kind. We comprehensively analyze DPO's vulnerabilities under different types of attacks, i.e., backdoor and non-backdoor attacks, and different poisoning methods across a wide array of language models, i.e., LLama 7B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma 7B. We find that unlike PPO-based methods, which, when it comes to backdoor attacks, require at least 4\% of the data to be poisoned to elicit harmful behavior, we exploit the true vulnerabilities of DPO more simply so we can poison the model with only as much as 0.5\% of the data. We further investigate the potential reasons behind the vulnerability and how well this vulnerability translates into backdoor vs non-backdoor attacks.
Mutual Learning for Finetuning Click-Through Rate Prediction Models
Authors: Ibrahim Can Yilmaz, Said Aldemir
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Knowledge Distillation, Prediction

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction has become an essential task in digital industries, such as digital advertising or online shopping. Many deep learning-based methods have been implemented and have become state-of-the-art models in the domain. To further improve the performance of CTR models, Knowledge Distillation based approaches have been widely used. However, most of the current CTR prediction models do not have much complex architectures, so it's hard to call one of them 'cumbersome' and the other one 'tiny'. On the other hand, the performance gap is also not very large between complex and simple models. So, distilling knowledge from one model to the other could not be worth the effort. Under these considerations, Mutual Learning could be a better approach, since all the models could be improved mutually. In this paper, we showed how useful the mutual learning algorithm could be when it is between equals. In our experiments on the Criteo and Avazu datasets, the mutual learning algorithm improved the performance of the model by up to 0.66% relative improvement.
STNAGNN: Data-driven Spatio-temporal Brain Connectivity beyond FC
Authors: Jiyao Wang, Nicha C. Dvornek, Peiyu Duan, Lawrence H. Staib, Pamela Ventola, James S. Duncan
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely applied in the analysis of brain fMRI, yet defining the connectivity between ROIs remains a challenge in noisy fMRI data. Among all approaches, Functional Connectome (FC) is the most popular method. Computed by the correlation coefficients between ROI time series, FC is a powerful and computationally efficient way to estimate ROI connectivity. However, it is well known for neglecting structural connections and causality in ROI interactions. Also, FC becomes much more noisy in the short spatio-temporal sliding-window subsequences of fMRI. Effective Connectome (EC) is proposed as a directional alternative, but is difficult to accurately estimate. Furthermore, for optimal GNN performance, usually only a small percentage of the strongest connections are selected as sparse edges, resulting in oversimplification of complex brain connections. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Node Attention Graph Neural Network (STNAGNN) as a data-driven alternative that combines sparse predefined FC with dense data-driven spatio-temporal connections, allowing for flexible and spatio-temporal learning of ROI interaction patterns.
Entropic Regression DMD (ERDMD) Discovers Informative Sparse and Nonuniformly Time Delayed Models
Authors: Christopher W. Curtis, Erik Bollt, Daniel Jay Alford-Lago
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

In this work, we present a method which determines optimal multi-step dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) models via entropic regression, which is a nonlinear information flow detection algorithm. Motivated by the higher-order DMD (HODMD) method of \cite{clainche}, and the entropic regression (ER) technique for network detection and model construction found in \cite{bollt, bollt2}, we develop a method that we call ERDMD that produces high fidelity time-delay DMD models that allow for nonuniform time space, and the time spacing is discovered by consider most informativity based on ER. These models are shown to be highly efficient and robust. We test our method over several data sets generated by chaotic attractors and show that we are able to build excellent reconstructions using relatively minimal models. We likewise are able to better identify multiscale features via our models which enhances the utility of dynamic mode decomposition.
Not Eliminate but Aggregate: Post-Hoc Control over Mixture-of-Experts to Address Shortcut Shifts in Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Ukyo Honda, Tatsushi Oka, Peinan Zhang, Masato Mita
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Natural Language Understanding

Recent models for natural language understanding are inclined to exploit simple patterns in datasets, commonly known as shortcuts. These shortcuts hinge on spurious correlations between labels and latent features existing in the training data. At inference time, shortcut-dependent models are likely to generate erroneous predictions under distribution shifts, particularly when some latent features are no longer correlated with the labels. To avoid this, previous studies have trained models to eliminate the reliance on shortcuts. In this study, we explore a different direction: pessimistically aggregating the predictions of a mixture-of-experts, assuming each expert captures relatively different latent features. The experimental results demonstrate that our post-hoc control over the experts significantly enhances the model's robustness to the distribution shift in shortcuts. Besides, we show that our approach has some practical advantages. We also analyze our model and provide results to support the assumption.
A Scalable and Effective Alternative to Graph Transformers
Authors: Kaan Sancak, Zhigang Hua, Jin Fang, Yan Xie, Andrey Malevich, Bo Long, Muhammed Fatih Balin, Ümit V. Çatalyürek
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown impressive performance in graph representation learning, but they face challenges in capturing long-range dependencies due to their limited expressive power. To address this, Graph Transformers (GTs) were introduced, utilizing self-attention mechanism to effectively model pairwise node relationships. Despite their advantages, GTs suffer from quadratic complexity w.r.t. the number of nodes in the graph, hindering their applicability to large graphs. In this work, we present Graph-Enhanced Contextual Operator (GECO), a scalable and effective alternative to GTs that leverages neighborhood propagation and global convolutions to effectively capture local and global dependencies in quasilinear time. Our study on synthetic datasets reveals that GECO reaches 169x speedup on a graph with 2M nodes w.r.t. optimized attention. Further evaluations on diverse range of benchmarks showcase that GECO scales to large graphs where traditional GTs often face memory and time limitations. Notably, GECO consistently achieves comparable or superior quality compared to baselines, improving the SOTA up to 4.5%, and offering a scalable and effective solution for large-scale graph learning.
Learning Molecular Representation in a Cell
Authors: Gang Liu, Srijit Seal, John Arevalo, Zhenwen Liang, Anne E. Carpenter, Meng Jiang, Shantanu Singh
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Molecular Property Prediction, molecular representation, Property Prediction, Representation Learning

Predicting drug efficacy and safety in vivo requires information on biological responses (e.g., cell morphology and gene expression) to small molecule perturbations. However, current molecular representation learning methods do not provide a comprehensive view of cell states under these perturbations and struggle to remove noise, hindering model generalization. We introduce the Information Alignment (InfoAlign) approach to learn molecular representations through the information bottleneck method in cells. We integrate molecules and cellular response data as nodes into a context graph, connecting them with weighted edges based on chemical, biological, and computational criteria. For each molecule in a training batch, InfoAlign optimizes the encoder's latent representation with a minimality objective to discard redundant structural information. A sufficiency objective decodes the representation to align with different feature spaces from the molecule's neighborhood in the context graph. We demonstrate that the proposed sufficiency objective for alignment is tighter than existing encoder-based contrastive methods. Empirically, we validate representations from InfoAlign in two downstream applications: molecular property prediction against up to 27 baseline methods across four datasets, plus zero-shot molecule-morphology matching.
Self-MoE: Towards Compositional Large Language Models with Self-Specialized Experts
Authors: Junmo Kang, Leonid Karlinsky, Hongyin Luo, Zhen Wang, Jacob Hansen, James Glass, David Cox, Rameswar Panda, Rogerio Feris, Alan Ritter
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

We present Self-MoE, an approach that transforms a monolithic LLM into a compositional, modular system of self-specialized experts, named MiXSE (MiXture of Self-specialized Experts). Our approach leverages self-specialization, which constructs expert modules using self-generated synthetic data, each equipping a shared base LLM with distinct domain-specific capabilities, activated via self-optimized routing. This allows for dynamic and capability-specific handling of various target tasks, enhancing overall capabilities, without extensive human-labeled data and added parameters. Our empirical results reveal that specializing LLMs may exhibit potential trade-offs in performances on non-specialized tasks. On the other hand, our Self-MoE demonstrates substantial improvements (6.5%p on average) over the base LLM across diverse benchmarks such as knowledge, reasoning, math, and coding. It also consistently outperforms other methods, including instance merging and weight merging, while offering better flexibility and interpretability by design with semantic experts and routing. Our findings highlight the critical role of modularity, the applicability of Self-MoE to multiple base LLMs, and the potential of self-improvement in achieving efficient, scalable, and adaptable systems.