pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fast Ensembling with Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge
Authors: Hyunsu Kim, Jongmin Yoon, Juho Lee
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00

Deep Ensemble (DE) approach is a straightforward technique used to enhance the performance of deep neural networks by training them from different initial points, converging towards various local optima. However, a limitation of this methodology lies in its high computational overhead for inference, arising from the necessity to store numerous learned parameters and execute individual forward passes for each parameter during the inference stage. We propose a novel approach called Diffusion Bridge Network (DBN) to address this challenge. Based on the theory of the Schr\"odinger bridge, this method directly learns to simulate an Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) that connects the output distribution of a single ensemble member to the output distribution of the ensembled model, allowing us to obtain ensemble prediction without having to invoke forward pass through all the ensemble models. By substituting the heavy ensembles with this lightweight neural network constructing DBN, we achieved inference with reduced computational cost while maintaining accuracy and uncertainty scores on benchmark datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/kim-hyunsu/dbn.
GeckOpt: LLM System Efficiency via Intent-Based Tool Selection
Authors: Michael Fore, Simranjit Singh, Dimitrios Stamoulis
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00

In this preliminary study, we investigate a GPT-driven intent-based reasoning approach to streamline tool selection for large language models (LLMs) aimed at system efficiency. By identifying the intent behind user prompts at runtime, we narrow down the API toolset required for task execution, reducing token consumption by up to 24.6\%. Early results on a real-world, massively parallel Copilot platform with over 100 GPT-4-Turbo nodes show cost reductions and potential towards improving LLM-based system efficiency.
Large Language Models as In-context AI Generators for Quality-Diversity
Authors: Bryan Lim, Manon Flageat, Antoine Cully
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Quality-Diversity (QD) approaches are a promising direction to develop open-ended processes as they can discover archives of high-quality solutions across diverse niches. While already successful in many applications, QD approaches usually rely on combining only one or two solutions to generate new candidate solutions. As observed in open-ended processes such as technological evolution, wisely combining large diversity of these solutions could lead to more innovative solutions and potentially boost the productivity of QD search. In this work, we propose to exploit the pattern-matching capabilities of generative models to enable such efficient solution combinations. We introduce In-context QD, a framework of techniques that aim to elicit the in-context capabilities of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate interesting solutions using few-shot and many-shot prompting with quality-diverse examples from the QD archive as context. Applied to a series of common QD domains, In-context QD displays promising results compared to both QD baselines and similar strategies developed for single-objective optimization. Additionally, this result holds across multiple values of parameter sizes and archive population sizes, as well as across domains with distinct characteristics from BBO functions to policy search. Finally, we perform an extensive ablation that highlights the key prompt design considerations that encourage the generation of promising solutions for QD.
Real-Time Compressed Sensing for Joint Hyperspectral Image Transmission and Restoration for CubeSat
Authors: Chih-Chung Hsu, Chih-Yu Jian, Eng-Shen Tu, Chia-Ming Lee, Guan-Lin Chen
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Decoder, Hyperspectral image analysis

This paper addresses the challenges associated with hyperspectral image (HSI) reconstruction from miniaturized satellites, which often suffer from stripe effects and are computationally resource-limited. We propose a Real-Time Compressed Sensing (RTCS) network designed to be lightweight and require only relatively few training samples for efficient and robust HSI reconstruction in the presence of the stripe effect and under noisy transmission conditions. The RTCS network features a simplified architecture that reduces the required training samples and allows for easy implementation on integer-8-based encoders, facilitating rapid compressed sensing for stripe-like HSI, which exactly matches the moderate design of miniaturized satellites on push broom scanning mechanism. This contrasts optimization-based models that demand high-precision floating-point operations, making them difficult to deploy on edge devices. Our encoder employs an integer-8-compatible linear projection for stripe-like HSI data transmission, ensuring real-time compressed sensing. Furthermore, based on the novel two-streamed architecture, an efficient HSI restoration decoder is proposed for the receiver side, allowing for edge-device reconstruction without needing a sophisticated central server. This is particularly crucial as an increasing number of miniaturized satellites necessitates significant computing resources on the ground station. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our approach, offering new and vital capabilities for existing miniaturized satellite systems.
Toward Physics-Aware Deep Learning Architectures for LiDAR Intensity Simulation
Authors: Vivek Anand, Bharat Lohani, Gaurav Pandey, Rakesh Mishra
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Learning, Generative Adversarial Network

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) heavily rely on LiDAR perception for environment understanding and navigation. LiDAR intensity provides valuable information about the reflected laser signals and plays a crucial role in enhancing the perception capabilities of AVs. However, accurately simulating LiDAR intensity remains a challenge due to the unavailability of material properties of the objects in the environment, and complex interactions between the laser beam and the environment. The proposed method aims to improve the accuracy of intensity simulation by incorporating physics-based modalities within the deep learning framework. One of the key entities that captures the interaction between the laser beam and the objects is the angle of incidence. In this work we demonstrate that the addition of the LiDAR incidence angle as a separate input to the deep neural networks significantly enhances the results. We present a comparative study between two prominent deep learning architectures: U-NET a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Pix2Pix a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We implemented these two architectures for the intensity prediction task and used SemanticKITTI and VoxelScape datasets for experiments. The comparative analysis reveals that both architectures benefit from the incidence angle as an additional input. Moreover, the Pix2Pix architecture outperforms U-NET, especially when the incidence angle is incorporated.
Unifying Bayesian Flow Networks and Diffusion Models through Stochastic Differential Equations
Authors: Kaiwen Xue, Yuhao Zhou, Shen Nie, Xu Min, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Chongxuan Li
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Bayesian flow networks (BFNs) iteratively refine the parameters, instead of the samples in diffusion models (DMs), of distributions at various noise levels through Bayesian inference. Owing to its differentiable nature, BFNs are promising in modeling both continuous and discrete data, while simultaneously maintaining fast sampling capabilities. This paper aims to understand and enhance BFNs by connecting them with DMs through stochastic differential equations (SDEs). We identify the linear SDEs corresponding to the noise-addition processes in BFNs, demonstrate that BFN's regression losses are aligned with denoise score matching, and validate the sampler in BFN as a first-order solver for the respective reverse-time SDE. Based on these findings and existing recipes of fast sampling in DMs, we propose specialized solvers for BFNs that markedly surpass the original BFN sampler in terms of sample quality with a limited number of function evaluations (e.g., 10) on both image and text datasets. Notably, our best sampler achieves an increase in speed of 5~20 times for free. Our code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/BFN-Solver.
Debiasing Machine Unlearning with Counterfactual Examples
Authors: Ziheng Chen, Jia Wang, Jun Zhuang, Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy, Fabrizio Silvestri, Jin Huang, Kaushiki Nag, Kun Kuang, Xin Ning, Gabriele Tolomei
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Machine Unlearning

The right to be forgotten (RTBF) seeks to safeguard individuals from the enduring effects of their historical actions by implementing machine-learning techniques. These techniques facilitate the deletion of previously acquired knowledge without requiring extensive model retraining. However, they often overlook a critical issue: unlearning processes bias. This bias emerges from two main sources: (1) data-level bias, characterized by uneven data removal, and (2) algorithm-level bias, which leads to the contamination of the remaining dataset, thereby degrading model accuracy. In this work, we analyze the causal factors behind the unlearning process and mitigate biases at both data and algorithmic levels. Typically, we introduce an intervention-based approach, where knowledge to forget is erased with a debiased dataset. Besides, we guide the forgetting procedure by leveraging counterfactual examples, as they maintain semantic data consistency without hurting performance on the remaining dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing machine unlearning baselines on evaluation metrics.
Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models
Authors: Jacob Pfau, William Merrill, Samuel R. Bowman
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00

Chain-of-thought responses from language models improve performance across most benchmarks. However, it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater computation that additional tokens allow. We show that transformers can use meaningless filler tokens (e.g., '......') in place of a chain of thought to solve two hard algorithmic tasks they could not solve when responding without intermediate tokens. However, we find empirically that learning to use filler tokens is difficult and requires specific, dense supervision to converge. We also provide a theoretical characterization of the class of problems where filler tokens are useful in terms of the quantifier depth of a first-order formula. For problems satisfying this characterization, chain-of-thought tokens need not provide information about the intermediate computational steps involved in multi-token computations. In summary, our results show that additional tokens can provide computational benefits independent of token choice. The fact that intermediate tokens can act as filler tokens raises concerns about large language models engaging in unauditable, hidden computations that are increasingly detached from the observed chain-of-thought tokens.
Guided-SPSA: Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation assisted by the Parameter Shift Rule
Authors: Maniraman Periyasamy, Axel Plinge, Christopher Mutschler, Daniel D. Scherer, Wolfgang Mauerer
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning

The study of variational quantum algorithms (VQCs) has received significant attention from the quantum computing community in recent years. These hybrid algorithms, utilizing both classical and quantum components, are well-suited for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Though estimating exact gradients using the parameter-shift rule to optimize the VQCs is realizable in NISQ devices, they do not scale well for larger problem sizes. The computational complexity, in terms of the number of circuit evaluations required for gradient estimation by the parameter-shift rule, scales linearly with the number of parameters in VQCs. On the other hand, techniques that approximate the gradients of the VQCs, such as the simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA), do not scale with the number of parameters but struggle with instability and often attain suboptimal solutions. In this work, we introduce a novel gradient estimation approach called Guided-SPSA, which meaningfully combines the parameter-shift rule and SPSA-based gradient approximation. The Guided-SPSA results in a 15% to 25% reduction in the number of circuit evaluations required during training for a similar or better optimality of the solution found compared to the parameter-shift rule. The Guided-SPSA outperforms standard SPSA in all scenarios and outperforms the parameter-shift rule in scenarios such as suboptimal initialization of the parameters. We demonstrate numerically the performance of Guided-SPSA on different paradigms of quantum machine learning, such as regression, classification, and reinforcement learning.
SPARO: Selective Attention for Robust and Compositional Transformer Encodings for Vision
Authors: Ankit Vani, Bac Nguyen, Samuel Lavoie, Ranjay Krishna, Aaron Courville
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Representation Learning

Selective attention helps us focus on task-relevant aspects in the constant flood of our sensory input. This constraint in our perception allows us to robustly generalize under distractions and to new compositions of perceivable concepts. Transformers employ a similar notion of attention in their architecture, but representation learning models with transformer backbones like CLIP and DINO often fail to demonstrate robustness and compositionality. We highlight a missing architectural prior: unlike human perception, transformer encodings do not separately attend over individual concepts. In response, we propose SPARO, a read-out mechanism that partitions encodings into separately-attended slots, each produced by a single attention head. Using SPARO with CLIP imparts an inductive bias that the vision and text modalities are different views of a shared compositional world with the same corresponding concepts. Using SPARO, we demonstrate improvements on downstream recognition, robustness, retrieval, and compositionality benchmarks with CLIP (up to +14% for ImageNet, +4% for SugarCrepe), and on nearest neighbors and linear probe for ImageNet with DINO (+3% each). We also showcase a powerful ability to intervene and select individual SPARO concepts to further improve downstream task performance (up from +4% to +9% for SugarCrepe) and use this ability to study the robustness of SPARO's representation structure. Finally, we provide insights through ablation experiments and visualization of learned concepts.
Ada-DF: An Adaptive Label Distribution Fusion Network For Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Shu Liu, Yan Xu, Tongming Wan, Xiaoyan Kui
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Facial expression recognition (FER) plays a significant role in our daily life. However, annotation ambiguity in the datasets could greatly hinder the performance. In this paper, we address FER task via label distribution learning paradigm, and develop a dual-branch Adaptive Distribution Fusion (Ada-DF) framework. One auxiliary branch is constructed to obtain the label distributions of samples. The class distributions of emotions are then computed through the label distributions of each emotion. Finally, those two distributions are adaptively fused according to the attention weights to train the target branch. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets, RAF-DB, AffectNet and SFEW, where our Ada-DF shows advantages over the state-of-the-art works.
Efficient Multi-Model Fusion with Adversarial Complementary Representation Learning
Authors: Zuheng Kang, Yayun He, Jianzong Wang, Junqing Peng, Jing Xiao
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, image-classification, Image Classification, Representation Learning, Speaker Verification

Single-model systems often suffer from deficiencies in tasks such as speaker verification (SV) and image classification, relying heavily on partial prior knowledge during decision-making, resulting in suboptimal performance. Although multi-model fusion (MMF) can mitigate some of these issues, redundancy in learned representations may limits improvements. To this end, we propose an adversarial complementary representation learning (ACoRL) framework that enables newly trained models to avoid previously acquired knowledge, allowing each individual component model to learn maximally distinct, complementary representations. We make three detailed explanations of why this works and experimental results demonstrate that our method more efficiently improves performance compared to traditional MMF. Furthermore, attribution analysis validates the model trained under ACoRL acquires more complementary knowledge, highlighting the efficacy of our approach in enhancing efficiency and robustness across tasks.
DeepFeatureX Net: Deep Features eXtractors based Network for discriminating synthetic from real images
Authors: Orazio Pontorno, Luca Guarnera, Sebastiano Battiato
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00

Deepfakes, synthetic images generated by deep learning algorithms, represent one of the biggest challenges in the field of Digital Forensics. The scientific community is working to develop approaches that can discriminate the origin of digital images (real or AI-generated). However, these methodologies face the challenge of generalization, that is, the ability to discern the nature of an image even if it is generated by an architecture not seen during training. This usually leads to a drop in performance. In this context, we propose a novel approach based on three blocks called Base Models, each of which is responsible for extracting the discriminative features of a specific image class (Diffusion Model-generated, GAN-generated, or real) as it is trained by exploiting deliberately unbalanced datasets. The features extracted from each block are then concatenated and processed to discriminate the origin of the input image. Experimental results showed that this approach not only demonstrates good robust capabilities to JPEG compression but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods in several generalization tests. Code, models and dataset are available at https://github.com/opontorno/block-based_deepfake-detection.
Automated Creation of Source Code Variants of a Cryptographic Hash Function Implementation Using Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Models
Authors: Elijah Pelofske, Vincent Urias, Lorie M. Liebrock
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: C++ code, Compiler Optimization

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT's) are a type of large language machine learning model that are unusually adept at producing novel, and coherent, natural language. In this study the ability of GPT models to generate novel and correct versions, and notably very insecure versions, of implementations of the cryptographic hash function SHA-1 is examined. The GPT models Llama-2-70b-chat-h, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1, and zephyr-7b-alpha are used. The GPT models are prompted to re-write each function using a modified version of the localGPT framework and langchain to provide word embedding context of the full source code and header files to the model, resulting in over 150,000 function re-write GPT output text blocks, approximately 50,000 of which were able to be parsed as C code and subsequently compiled. The generated code is analyzed for being compilable, correctness of the algorithm, memory leaks, compiler optimization stability, and character distance to the reference implementation. Remarkably, several generated function variants have a high implementation security risk of being correct for some test vectors, but incorrect for other test vectors. Additionally, many function implementations were not correct to the reference algorithm of SHA-1, but produced hashes that have some of the basic characteristics of hash functions. Many of the function re-writes contained serious flaws such as memory leaks, integer overflows, out of bounds accesses, use of uninitialised values, and compiler optimization instability. Compiler optimization settings and SHA-256 hash checksums of the compiled binaries are used to cluster implementations that are equivalent but may not have identical syntax - using this clustering over 100,000 novel and correct versions of the SHA-1 codebase were generated where each component C function of the reference implementation is different from the original code.
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs
Authors: Yu Xia, Rui Wang, Xu Liu, Mingyan Li, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Julian McAuley, Shuai Li
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been a widely adopted prompting method, eliciting impressive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Inspired by the sequential thought structure of CoT, a number of Chain-of-X (CoX) methods have been developed to address various challenges across diverse domains and tasks involving LLMs. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of Chain-of-X methods for LLMs in different contexts. Specifically, we categorize them by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. We also discuss the findings and implications of existing CoX methods, as well as potential future directions. Our survey aims to serve as a detailed and up-to-date resource for researchers seeking to apply the idea of CoT to broader scenarios.
FedSI: Federated Subnetwork Inference for Efficient Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Hui Chen, Hengyu Liu, Zhangkai Wu, Xuhui Fan, Longbing Cao
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning, Uncertainty Quantification

While deep neural networks (DNNs) based personalized federated learning (PFL) is demanding for addressing data heterogeneity and shows promising performance, existing methods for federated learning (FL) suffer from efficient systematic uncertainty quantification. The Bayesian DNNs-based PFL is usually questioned of either over-simplified model structures or high computational and memory costs. In this paper, we introduce FedSI, a novel Bayesian DNNs-based subnetwork inference PFL framework. FedSI is simple and scalable by leveraging Bayesian methods to incorporate systematic uncertainties effectively. It implements a client-specific subnetwork inference mechanism, selects network parameters with large variance to be inferred through posterior distributions, and fixes the rest as deterministic ones. FedSI achieves fast and scalable inference while preserving the systematic uncertainties to the fullest extent. Extensive experiments on three different benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedSI outperforms existing Bayesian and non-Bayesian FL baselines in heterogeneous FL scenarios.