pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Just Label the Repeats for In-The-Wild Audio-to-Score Alignment
Authors: Irmak Bukey, Michael Feffer, Chris Donahue
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Music Transcription

We propose an efficient workflow for high-quality offline alignment of in-the-wild performance audio and corresponding sheet music scans (images). Recent work on audio-to-score alignment extends dynamic time warping (DTW) to be theoretically able to handle jumps in sheet music induced by repeat signs-this method requires no human annotations, but we show that it often yields low-quality alignments. As an alternative, we propose a workflow and interface that allows users to quickly annotate jumps (by clicking on repeat signs), requiring a small amount of human supervision but yielding much higher quality alignments on average. Additionally, we refine audio and score feature representations to improve alignment quality by: (1) integrating measure detection into the score feature representation, and (2) using raw onset prediction probabilities from a music transcription model instead of piano roll. We propose an evaluation protocol for audio-to-score alignment that computes the distance between the estimated and ground truth alignment in units of measures. Under this evaluation, we find that our proposed jump annotation workflow and improved feature representations together improve alignment accuracy by 150% relative to prior work (33% to 82%).
Comparing Targeting Strategies for Maximizing Social Welfare with Limited Resources
Authors: Vibhhu Sharma, Bryan Wilder
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Machine learning is increasingly used to select which individuals receive limited-resource interventions in domains such as human services, education, development, and more. However, it is often not apparent what the right quantity is for models to predict. Policymakers rarely have access to data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that would enable accurate estimates of which individuals would benefit more from the intervention, while observational data creates a substantial risk of bias in treatment effect estimates. Practitioners instead commonly use a technique termed ``risk-based targeting" where the model is just used to predict each individual's status quo outcome (an easier, non-causal task). Those with higher predicted risk are offered treatment. There is currently almost no empirical evidence to inform which choices lead to the most effective machine learning-informed targeting strategies in social domains. In this work, we use data from 5 real-world RCTs in a variety of domains to empirically assess such choices. We find that when treatment effects can be estimated with high accuracy (which we simulate by allowing the model to partially observe outcomes in advance), treatment effect based targeting substantially outperforms risk-based targeting, even when treatment effect estimates are biased. Moreover, these results hold even when the policymaker has strong normative preferences for assisting higher-risk individuals. However, the features and data actually available in most RCTs we examine do not suffice for accurate estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects. Our results suggest treatment effect targeting has significant potential benefits, but realizing these benefits requires improvements to data collection and model training beyond what is currently common in practice.
ODEStream: A Buffer-Free Online Learning Framework with ODE-based Adaptor for Streaming Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Futoon M. Abushaqra, Hao Xue, Yongli Ren, Flora D. Salim
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Addressing the challenges of irregularity and concept drift in streaming time series is crucial in real-world predictive modelling. Previous studies in time series continual learning often propose models that require buffering of long sequences, potentially restricting the responsiveness of the inference system. Moreover, these models are typically designed for regularly sampled data, an unrealistic assumption in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces ODEStream, a novel buffer-free continual learning framework that incorporates a temporal isolation layer that integrates temporal dependencies within the data. Simultaneously, it leverages the capability of neural ordinary differential equations to process irregular sequences and generate a continuous data representation, enabling seamless adaptation to changing dynamics in a data streaming scenario. Our approach focuses on learning how the dynamics and distribution of historical data change with time, facilitating the direct processing of streaming sequences. Evaluations on benchmark real-world datasets demonstrate that ODEStream outperforms the state-of-the-art online learning and streaming analysis baselines, providing accurate predictions over extended periods while minimising performance degradation over time by learning how the sequence dynamics change.
Identifying Differential Patient Care Through Inverse Intent Inference
Authors: Hyewon Jeong, Siddharth Nayak, Taylor Killian, Sanjat Kanjilal
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Imitation Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition defined by end-organ dysfunction due to a dysregulated host response to infection. Although the Surviving Sepsis Campaign has launched and has been releasing sepsis treatment guidelines to unify and normalize the care for sepsis patients, it has been reported in numerous studies that disparities in care exist across the trajectory of patient stay in the emergency department and intensive care unit. Here, we apply a number of reinforcement learning techniques including behavioral cloning, imitation learning, and inverse reinforcement learning, to learn the optimal policy in the management of septic patient subgroups using expert demonstrations. Then we estimate the counterfactual optimal policies by applying the model to another subset of unseen medical populations and identify the difference in cure by comparing it to the real policy. Our data comes from the sepsis cohort of MIMIC-IV and the clinical data warehouses of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. The ultimate objective of this work is to use the optimal learned policy function to estimate the counterfactual treatment policy and identify deviations across sub-populations of interest. We hope this approach would help us identify any disparities in care and also changes in cure in response to the publication of national sepsis treatment guidelines.
Factorised Active Inference for Strategic Multi-Agent Interactions
Authors: Jaime Ruiz-Serra, Patrick Sweeney, Michael S. Harré
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Understanding how individual agents make strategic decisions within collectives is important for advancing fields as diverse as economics, neuroscience, and multi-agent systems. Two complementary approaches can be integrated to this end. The Active Inference framework (AIF) describes how agents employ a generative model to adapt their beliefs about and behaviour within their environment. Game theory formalises strategic interactions between agents with potentially competing objectives. To bridge the gap between the two, we propose a factorisation of the generative model whereby each agent maintains explicit, individual-level beliefs about the internal states of other agents, and uses them for strategic planning in a joint context. We apply our model to iterated general-sum games with two and three players, and study the ensemble effects of game transitions, where the agents' preferences (game payoffs) change over time. This non-stationarity, beyond that caused by reciprocal adaptation, reflects a more naturalistic environment in which agents need to adapt to changing social contexts. Finally, we present a dynamical analysis of key AIF quantities: the variational free energy (VFE) and the expected free energy (EFE) from numerical simulation data. The ensemble-level EFE allows us to characterise the basins of attraction of games with multiple Nash Equilibria under different conditions, and we find that it is not necessarily minimised at the aggregate level. By integrating AIF and game theory, we can gain deeper insights into how intelligent collectives emerge, learn, and optimise their actions in dynamic environments, both cooperative and non-cooperative.
SynRL: Aligning Synthetic Clinical Trial Data with Human-preferred Clinical Endpoints Using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Trisha Das, Zifeng Wang, Afrah Shafquat, Mandis Beigi, Jason Mezey, Jimeng Sun
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Each year, hundreds of clinical trials are conducted to evaluate new medical interventions, but sharing patient records from these trials with other institutions can be challenging due to privacy concerns and federal regulations. To help mitigate privacy concerns, researchers have proposed methods for generating synthetic patient data. However, existing approaches for generating synthetic clinical trial data disregard the usage requirements of these data, including maintaining specific properties of clinical outcomes, and only use post hoc assessments that are not coupled with the data generation process. In this paper, we propose SynRL which leverages reinforcement learning to improve the performance of patient data generators by customizing the generated data to meet the user-specified requirements for synthetic data outcomes and endpoints. Our method includes a data value critic function to evaluate the quality of the generated data and uses reinforcement learning to align the data generator with the users' needs based on the critic's feedback. We performed experiments on four clinical trial datasets and demonstrated the advantages of SynRL in improving the quality of the generated synthetic data while keeping the privacy risks low. We also show that SynRL can be utilized as a general framework that can customize data generation of multiple types of synthetic data generators. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SynRL-DB0F/.
Anomaly Detection in OKTA Logs using Autoencoders
Authors: Jericho Cain, Hayden Beadles, Karthik Venkatesan
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Okta logs are used today to detect cybersecurity events using various rule-based models with restricted look back periods. These functions have limitations, such as a limited retrospective analysis, a predefined rule set, and susceptibility to generating false positives. To address this, we adopt unsupervised techniques, specifically employing autoencoders. To properly use an autoencoder, we need to transform and simplify the complexity of the log data we receive from our users. This transformed and filtered data is then fed into the autoencoder, and the output is evaluated.
Merit-Based Sortition in Decentralized Systems
Authors: J. M. Diederik Kruijssen, Renata Valieva, Kenneth Peluso, Nicholas Emmons, Steven N. Longmore
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

In decentralized systems, it is often necessary to select an 'active' subset of participants from the total participant pool, with the goal of satisfying computational limitations or optimizing resource efficiency. This selection can sometimes be made at random, mirroring the sortition practice invented in classical antiquity aimed at achieving a high degree of statistical representativeness. However, the recent emergence of specialized decentralized networks that solve concrete coordination problems and are characterized by measurable success metrics often requires prioritizing performance optimization over representativeness. We introduce a simple algorithm for 'merit-based sortition', in which the quality of each participant influences its probability of being drafted into the active set, while simultaneously retaining representativeness by allowing inactive participants an infinite number of chances to be drafted into the active set with non-zero probability. Using a suite of numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our algorithm boosts the quality metric describing the performance of the active set by $>2$ times the intrinsic stochasticity. This implies that merit-based sortition ensures a statistically significant performance boost to the drafted, 'active' set, while retaining the property of classical, random sortition that it enables upward mobility from a much larger 'inactive' set. This way, merit-based sortition fulfils a key requirement for decentralized systems in need of performance optimization.
Constructing Gaussian Processes via Samplets
Authors: Marcel Neugebauer
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, regression

Gaussian Processes face two primary challenges: constructing models for large datasets and selecting the optimal model. This master's thesis tackles these challenges in the low-dimensional case. We examine recent convergence results to identify models with optimal convergence rates and pinpoint essential parameters. Utilizing this model, we propose a Samplet-based approach to efficiently construct and train the Gaussian Processes, reducing the cubic computational complexity to a log-linear scale. This method facilitates optimal regression while maintaining efficient performance.
Empirical Quantum Advantage Analysis of Quantum Kernel in Gene Expression Data
Authors: Arpita Ghosh, MD Muhtasim Fuad, Seemanta Bhattacharjee
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Quantum Machine Learning

The incorporation of quantum ansatz with machine learning classification models demonstrates the ability to extract patterns from data for classification tasks. However, taking advantage of the enhanced computational power of quantum machine learning necessitates dealing with various constraints. In this paper, we focus on constraints like finding suitable datasets where quantum advantage is achievable and evaluating the relevance of features chosen by classical and quantum methods. Additionally, we compare quantum and classical approaches using benchmarks and estimate the computational complexity of quantum circuits to assess real-world usability. For our experimental validation, we selected the gene expression dataset, given the critical role of genetic variations in regulating physiological behavior and disease susceptibility. Through this study, we aim to contribute to the advancement of quantum machine learning methodologies, offering valuable insights into their potential for addressing complex classification challenges in various domains.
ASTD Patterns for Integrated Continuous Anomaly Detection In Data Logs
Authors: Chaymae El Jabri, Marc Frappier, Pierre-Martin Tardif
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

This paper investigates the use of the ASTD language for ensemble anomaly detection in data logs. It uses a sliding window technique for continuous learning in data streams, coupled with updating learning models upon the completion of each window to maintain accurate detection and align with current data trends. It proposes ASTD patterns for combining learning models, especially in the context of unsupervised learning, which is commonly used for data streams. To facilitate this, a new ASTD operator is proposed, the Quantified Flow, which enables the seamless combination of learning models while ensuring that the specification remains concise. Our contribution is a specification pattern, highlighting the capacity of ASTDs to abstract and modularize anomaly detection systems. The ASTD language provides a unique approach to develop data flow anomaly detection systems, grounded in the combination of processes through the graphical representation of the language operators. This simplifies the design task for developers, who can focus primarily on defining the functional operations that constitute the system.
SHARP: Unlocking Interactive Hallucination via Stance Transfer in Role-Playing Agents
Authors: Chuyi Kong, Ziyang Luo, Hongzhan Lin, Zhiyuan Fan, Yaxin Fan, Yuxi Sun, Jing Ma
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Hallucination, Multiple-choice, Stance Detection

The advanced role-playing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for developing Role-Playing Agents (RPAs). However, existing benchmarks in social interaction such as HPD and SocialBench have not investigated hallucination and face limitations like poor generalizability and implicit judgments for character fidelity. To address these issues, we propose a generalizable, explicit and effective paradigm to unlock the interactive patterns in diverse worldviews. Specifically, we define the interactive hallucination based on stance transfer and construct a benchmark, SHARP, by extracting relations from a general commonsense knowledge graph and leveraging the inherent hallucination properties of RPAs to simulate interactions across roles. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and stability of our paradigm. Our findings further explore the factors influencing these metrics and discuss the trade-off between blind loyalty to roles and adherence to facts in RPAs.
CryptoLLM: Unleashing the Power of Prompted LLMs for SmartQnA and Classification of Crypto Posts
Authors: Aniket Deroy, Subhankar Maity
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Robust classification

The rapid growth of social media has resulted in an large volume of user-generated content, particularly in niche domains such as cryptocurrency. This task focuses on developing robust classification models to accurately categorize cryptocurrency-related social media posts into predefined classes, including but not limited to objective, positive, negative, etc. Additionally, the task requires participants to identify the most relevant answers from a set of posts in response to specific questions. By leveraging advanced LLMs, this research aims to enhance the understanding and filtering of cryptocurrency discourse, thereby facilitating more informed decision-making in this volatile sector. We have used a prompt-based technique to solve the classification task for reddit posts and twitter posts. Also, we have used 64-shot technique along with prompts on GPT-4-Turbo model to determine whether a answer is relevant to a question or not.
Mapping the Podcast Ecosystem with the Structured Podcast Research Corpus
Authors: Benjamin Litterer, David Jurgens, Dallas Card
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00

Podcasts provide highly diverse content to a massive listener base through a unique on-demand modality. However, limited data has prevented large-scale computational analysis of the podcast ecosystem. To fill this gap, we introduce a massive dataset of over 1.1M podcast transcripts that is largely comprehensive of all English language podcasts available through public RSS feeds from May and June of 2020. This data is not limited to text, but rather includes audio features and speaker turns for a subset of 370K episodes, and speaker role inferences and other metadata for all 1.1M episodes. Using this data, we also conduct a foundational investigation into the content, structure, and responsiveness of this ecosystem. Together, our data and analyses open the door to continued computational research of this popular and impactful medium.
Verbosity $\neq$ Veracity: Demystify Verbosity Compensation Behavior of Large Language Models
Authors: Yusen Zhang, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Rui Zhang
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their strong capabilities in various tasks, recent work has revealed LLMs also exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as hallucination and toxicity, limiting their reliability and broader adoption. In this paper, we discover an understudied type of undesirable behavior of LLMs, which we term Verbosity Compensation (VC), similar to the hesitation behavior of humans under uncertainty, where they respond with excessive words such as repeating questions, introducing ambiguity, or providing excessive enumeration. We present the first work that defines and analyzes Verbosity Compensation, explores its causes, and proposes a simple mitigating approach. Our experiments, conducted on five datasets of knowledge and reasoning-based QA tasks with 14 newly developed LLMs, reveal three conclusions. 1) We reveal a pervasive presence of VC across all models and all datasets. Notably, GPT-4 exhibits a VC frequency of 50.40%. 2) We reveal the large performance gap between verbose and concise responses, with a notable difference of 27.61% on the Qasper dataset. We also demonstrate that this difference does not naturally diminish as LLM capability increases. Both 1) and 2) highlight the urgent need to mitigate the frequency of VC behavior and disentangle verbosity with veracity. We propose a simple yet effective cascade algorithm that replaces the verbose responses with the other model-generated responses. The results show that our approach effectively alleviates the VC of the Mistral model from 63.81% to 16.16% on the Qasper dataset. 3) We also find that verbose responses exhibit higher uncertainty across all five datasets, suggesting a strong connection between verbosity and model uncertainty. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/VerbosityLLM.
Query Optimization for Parametric Knowledge Refinement in Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
Authors: Youan Cong, Cheng Wang, Pritom Saha Akash, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

We introduce the Extract-Refine-Retrieve-Read (ERRR) framework, a novel approach designed to bridge the pre-retrieval information gap in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems through query optimization tailored to meet the specific knowledge requirements of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike conventional query optimization techniques used in RAG, the ERRR framework begins by extracting parametric knowledge from LLMs, followed by using a specialized query optimizer for refining these queries. This process ensures the retrieval of only the most pertinent information essential for generating accurate responses. Moreover, to enhance flexibility and reduce computational costs, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline that utilizes a smaller, tunable model as the query optimizer, which is refined through knowledge distillation from a larger teacher model. Our evaluations on various question-answering (QA) datasets and with different retrieval systems show that ERRR consistently outperforms existing baselines, proving to be a versatile and cost-effective module for improving the utility and accuracy of RAG systems.
Mitigating Bias in Queer Representation within Large Language Models: A Collaborative Agent Approach
Authors: Tianyi Huang, Arya Somasundaram
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Bias Detection, Fairness, Multi-agent Integration

Large Language Models (LLMs) often perpetuate biases in pronoun usage, leading to misrepresentation or exclusion of queer individuals. This paper addresses the specific problem of biased pronoun usage in LLM outputs, particularly the inappropriate use of traditionally gendered pronouns ("he," "she") when inclusive language is needed to accurately represent all identities. We introduce a collaborative agent pipeline designed to mitigate these biases by analyzing and optimizing pronoun usage for inclusivity. Our multi-agent framework includes specialized agents for both bias detection and correction. Experimental evaluations using the Tango dataset-a benchmark focused on gender pronoun usage-demonstrate that our approach significantly improves inclusive pronoun classification, achieving a 32.6 percentage point increase over GPT-4o in correctly disagreeing with inappropriate traditionally gendered pronouns $(\chi^2 = 38.57, p < 0.0001)$. These results accentuate the potential of agent-driven frameworks in enhancing fairness and inclusivity in AI-generated content, demonstrating their efficacy in reducing biases and promoting socially responsible AI.