pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Explainable Light-Weight Deep Learning Pipeline for Improved Drought Stress Identification
Authors: Aswini Kumar Patra, Lingaraj Sahoo
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, object-detection, Object Detection

Early identification of drought stress in crops is vital for implementing effective mitigation measures and reducing yield loss. Non-invasive imaging techniques hold immense potential by capturing subtle physiological changes in plants under water deficit. Sensor based imaging data serves as a rich source of information for machine learning and deep learning algorithms, facilitating further analysis aimed at identifying drought stress. While these approaches yield favorable results, real-time field applications requires algorithms specifically designed for the complexities of natural agricultural conditions. Our work proposes a novel deep learning framework for classifying drought stress in potato crops captured by UAVs in natural settings. The novelty lies in the synergistic combination of a pre-trained network with carefully designed custom layers. This architecture leverages feature extraction capabilities of the pre-trained network while the custom layers enable targeted dimensionality reduction and enhanced regularization, ultimately leading to improved performance. A key innovation of our work involves the integration of Gradient-Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), an explainability technique. Grad-CAM sheds light on the internal workings of the deep learning model, typically referred to as a black box. By visualizing the focus areas of the model within the images, Grad-CAM fosters interpretability and builds trust in the decision-making process of the model. Our proposed framework achieves superior performance, particularly with the DenseNet121 pre-trained network, reaching a precision of 97% to identify the stressed class with an overall accuracy of 91%. Comparative analysis of existing state-of-the-art object detection algorithms reveals the superiority of our approach in significantly higher precision and accuracy.
Nearly Optimal Algorithms for Contextual Dueling Bandits from Adversarial Feedback
Authors: Qiwei Di, Jiafan He, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00

Learning from human feedback plays an important role in aligning generative models, such as large language models (LLM). However, the effectiveness of this approach can be influenced by adversaries, who may intentionally provide misleading preferences to manipulate the output in an undesirable or harmful direction. To tackle this challenge, we study a specific model within this problem domain--contextual dueling bandits with adversarial feedback, where the true preference label can be flipped by an adversary. We propose an algorithm namely robust contextual dueling bandit (\algo), which is based on uncertainty-weighted maximum likelihood estimation. Our algorithm achieves an $\tilde O(d\sqrt{T}+dC)$ regret bound, where $T$ is the number of rounds, $d$ is the dimension of the context, and $ 0 \le C \le T$ is the total number of adversarial feedback. We also prove a lower bound to show that our regret bound is nearly optimal, both in scenarios with and without ($C=0$) adversarial feedback. Additionally, we conduct experiments to evaluate our proposed algorithm against various types of adversarial feedback. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art dueling bandit algorithms in the presence of adversarial feedback.
TENG: Time-Evolving Natural Gradient for Solving PDEs With Deep Neural Nets Toward Machine Precision
Authors: Zhuo Chen, Jacob McCarran, Esteban Vizcaino, Marin Soljačić, Di Luo
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are instrumental for modeling dynamical systems in science and engineering. The advent of neural networks has initiated a significant shift in tackling these complexities though challenges in accuracy persist, especially for initial value problems. In this paper, we introduce the $\textit{Time-Evolving Natural Gradient (TENG)}$, generalizing time-dependent variational principles and optimization-based time integration, leveraging natural gradient optimization to obtain high accuracy in neural-network-based PDE solutions. Our comprehensive development includes algorithms like TENG-Euler and its high-order variants, such as TENG-Heun, tailored for enhanced precision and efficiency. TENG's effectiveness is further validated through its performance, surpassing current leading methods and achieving $\textit{machine precision}$ in step-by-step optimizations across a spectrum of PDEs, including the heat equation, Allen-Cahn equation, and Burgers' equation.
Finite-dimensional approximations of push-forwards on locally analytic functionals
Authors: Isao Ishikawa
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00

This paper introduces a novel theoretical framework for investigating analytic maps from finite discrete data. Our approach is to consider the push-forward on the space of locally analytic functionals, instead of directly handling the analytic map itself. We establish a methodology enabling appropriate finite-dimensional approximation of the push-forward from finite discrete data, through the theory of the Fourier--Borel transform and the Fock space. Moreover, we prove a rigorous convergence result with a convergence rate. As an application, we prove that it is not the least-squares polynomial, but the polynomial obtained by truncating its higher-degree terms, that approximates analytic functions and further allows for approximation beyond the support of the data distribution. One advantage of our theory is that it enables us to apply linear algebraic operations to the finite-dimensional approximation of the push-forward. Utilizing this, we prove the convergence of a method for approximating an analytic vector field from finite data of the flow map of an ordinary differential equation.
Confidential Federated Computations
Authors: Hubert Eichner, Daniel Ramage, Kallista Bonawitz, Dzmitry Huba, Tiziano Santoro, Brett McLarnon, Timon Van Overveldt, Nova Fallen, Peter Kairouz, Albert Cheu, Katharine Daly, Adria Gascon, Marco Gruteser, Brendan Mcmahan
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning and Analytics (FLA) have seen widespread adoption by technology platforms for processing sensitive on-device data. However, basic FLA systems have privacy limitations: they do not necessarily require anonymization mechanisms like differential privacy (DP), and provide limited protections against a potentially malicious service provider. Adding DP to a basic FLA system currently requires either adding excessive noise to each device's updates, or assuming an honest service provider that correctly implements the mechanism and only uses the privatized outputs. Secure multiparty computation (SMPC) -based oblivious aggregations can limit the service provider's access to individual user updates and improve DP tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs are still suboptimal, and they suffer from scalability challenges and susceptibility to Sybil attacks. This paper introduces a novel system architecture that leverages trusted execution environments (TEEs) and open-sourcing to both ensure confidentiality of server-side computations and provide externally verifiable privacy properties, bolstering the robustness and trustworthiness of private federated computations.
TorchSurv: A Lightweight Package for Deep Survival Analysis
Authors: Mélodie Monod, Peter Krusche, Qian Cao, Berkman Sahiner, Nicholas Petrick, David Ohlssen, Thibaud Coroller
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

TorchSurv is a Python package that serves as a companion tool to perform deep survival modeling within the PyTorch environment. Unlike existing libraries that impose specific parametric forms, TorchSurv enables the use of custom PyTorch-based deep survival models. With its lightweight design, minimal input requirements, full PyTorch backend, and freedom from restrictive survival model parameterizations, TorchSurv facilitates efficient deep survival model implementation and is particularly beneficial for high-dimensional and complex input data scenarios.
Laplace-HDC: Understanding the geometry of binary hyperdimensional computing
Authors: Saeid Pourmand, Wyatt D. Whiting, Alireza Aghasi, Nicholas F. Marshall
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

This paper studies the geometry of binary hyperdimensional computing (HDC), a computational scheme in which data are encoded using high-dimensional binary vectors. We establish a result about the similarity structure induced by the HDC binding operator and show that the Laplace kernel naturally arises in this setting, motivating our new encoding method Laplace-HDC, which improves upon previous methods. We describe how our results indicate limitations of binary HDC in encoding spatial information from images and discuss potential solutions, including using Haar convolutional features and the definition of a translation-equivariant HDC encoding. Several numerical experiments highlighting the improved accuracy of Laplace-HDC in contrast to alternative methods are presented. We also numerically study other aspects of the proposed framework such as robustness and the underlying translation-equivariant encoding.
Deep Learning and LLM-based Methods Applied to Stellar Lightcurve Classification
Authors: Yu-Yang Li, Yu Bai, Cunshi Wang, Mengwei Qu, Ziteng Lu, Roberto Soria, Jifeng Liu
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering

Light curves serve as a valuable source of information on stellar formation and evolution. With the rapid advancement of machine learning techniques, it can be effectively processed to extract astronomical patterns and information. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep-learning and large language model (LLM) based models for the automatic classification of variable star light curves, based on large datasets from the Kepler and K2 missions. Special emphasis is placed on Cepheids, RR Lyrae, and eclipsing binaries, examining the influence of observational cadence and phase distribution on classification precision. Employing AutoDL optimization, we achieve striking performance with the 1D-Convolution+BiLSTM architecture and the Swin Transformer, hitting accuracies of 94\% and 99\% correspondingly, with the latter demonstrating a notable 83\% accuracy in discerning the elusive Type II Cepheids-comprising merely 0.02\% of the total dataset.We unveil StarWhisper LightCurve (LC), an innovative Series comprising three LLM-based models: LLM, multimodal large language model (MLLM), and Large Audio Language Model (LALM). Each model is fine-tuned with strategic prompt engineering and customized training methods to explore the emergent abilities of these models for astronomical data. Remarkably, StarWhisper LC Series exhibit high accuracies around 90\%, significantly reducing the need for explicit feature engineering, thereby paving the way for streamlined parallel data processing and the progression of multifaceted multimodal models in astronomical applications. The study furnishes two detailed catalogs illustrating the impacts of phase and sampling intervals on deep learning classification accuracy, showing that a substantial decrease of up to 14\% in observation duration and 21\% in sampling points can be realized without compromising accuracy by more than 10\%.
Interpolation and differentiation of alchemical degrees of freedom in machine learning interatomic potentials
Authors: Juno Nam, Jiayu Peng, Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have become a workhorse of modern atomistic simulations, and recently published universal MLIPs, pre-trained on large datasets, have demonstrated remarkable accuracy and generalizability. However, the computational cost of MLIPs limits their applicability to chemically disordered systems requiring large simulation cells or to sample-intensive statistical methods. Here, we report the use of continuous and differentiable alchemical degrees of freedom in atomistic materials simulations, exploiting the fact that graph neural network MLIPs represent discrete elements as real-valued tensors. The proposed method introduces alchemical atoms with corresponding weights into the input graph, alongside modifications to the message-passing and readout mechanisms of MLIPs, and allows smooth interpolation between the compositional states of materials. The end-to-end differentiability of MLIPs enables efficient calculation of the gradient of energy with respect to the compositional weights. With this modification, we propose methodologies for optimizing the composition of solid solutions towards target macroscopic properties, characterizing order and disorder in multicomponent oxides, and conducting alchemical free energy simulations to quantify the free energy of vacancy formation and composition changes. The approach offers an avenue for extending the capabilities of universal MLIPs in the modeling of compositional disorder and characterizing the phase stability of complex materials systems.
Achieving Constant Regret in Linear Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Weitong Zhang, Zhiyuan Fan, Jiafan He, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We study the constant regret guarantees in reinforcement learning (RL). Our objective is to design an algorithm that incurs only finite regret over infinite episodes with high probability. We introduce an algorithm, Cert-LSVI-UCB, for misspecified linear Markov decision processes (MDPs) where both the transition kernel and the reward function can be approximated by some linear function up to misspecification level $\zeta$. At the core of Cert-LSVI-UCB is an innovative \method, which facilitates a fine-grained concentration analysis for multi-phase value-targeted regression, enabling us to establish an instance-dependent regret bound that is constant w.r.t. the number of episodes. Specifically, we demonstrate that for a linear MDP characterized by a minimal suboptimality gap $\Delta$, Cert-LSVI-UCB has a cumulative regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^3H^5/\Delta)$ with high probability, provided that the misspecification level $\zeta$ is below $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\Delta / (\sqrt{d}H^2))$. Here $d$ is the dimension of the feature space and $H$ is the horizon. Remarkably, this regret bound is independent of the number of episodes $K$. To the best of our knowledge, Cert-LSVI-UCB is the first algorithm to achieve a constant, instance-dependent, high-probability regret bound in RL with linear function approximation without relying on prior distribution assumptions.
Randomized Exploration in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hao-Lun Hsu, Weixin Wang, Miroslav Pajic, Pan Xu
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Thompson Sampling

We present the first study on provably efficient randomized exploration in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We propose a unified algorithm framework for randomized exploration in parallel Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and two Thompson Sampling (TS)-type algorithms, CoopTS-PHE and CoopTS-LMC, incorporating the perturbed-history exploration (PHE) strategy and the Langevin Monte Carlo exploration (LMC) strategy respectively, which are flexible in design and easy to implement in practice. For a special class of parallel MDPs where the transition is (approximately) linear, we theoretically prove that both CoopTS-PHE and CoopTS-LMC achieve a $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^{3/2}H^2\sqrt{MK})$ regret bound with communication complexity $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(dHM^2)$, where $d$ is the feature dimension, $H$ is the horizon length, $M$ is the number of agents, and $K$ is the number of episodes. This is the first theoretical result for randomized exploration in cooperative MARL. We evaluate our proposed method on multiple parallel RL environments, including a deep exploration problem (\textit{i.e.,} $N$-chain), a video game, and a real-world problem in energy systems. Our experimental results support that our framework can achieve better performance, even under conditions of misspecified transition models. Additionally, we establish a connection between our unified framework and the practical application of federated learning.
How Deep Networks Learn Sparse and Hierarchical Data: the Sparse Random Hierarchy Model
Authors: Umberto Tomasini, Matthieu Wyart
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00

Understanding what makes high-dimensional data learnable is a fundamental question in machine learning. On the one hand, it is believed that the success of deep learning lies in its ability to build a hierarchy of representations that become increasingly more abstract with depth, going from simple features like edges to more complex concepts. On the other hand, learning to be insensitive to invariances of the task, such as smooth transformations for image datasets, has been argued to be important for deep networks and it strongly correlates with their performance. In this work, we aim to explain this correlation and unify these two viewpoints. We show that by introducing sparsity to generative hierarchical models of data, the task acquires insensitivity to spatial transformations that are discrete versions of smooth transformations. In particular, we introduce the Sparse Random Hierarchy Model (SRHM), where we observe and rationalize that a hierarchical representation mirroring the hierarchical model is learnt precisely when such insensitivity is learnt, thereby explaining the strong correlation between the latter and performance. Moreover, we quantify how the sample complexity of CNNs learning the SRHM depends on both the sparsity and hierarchical structure of the task.
Automatic re-calibration of quantum devices by reinforcement learning
Authors: T. Crosta, L. Rebón, F. Vilariño, J. M. Matera, M. Bilkis
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

During their operation, due to shifts in environmental conditions, devices undergo various forms of detuning from their optimal settings. Typically, this is addressed through control loops, which monitor variables and the device performance, to maintain settings at their optimal values. Quantum devices are particularly challenging since their functionality relies on precisely tuning their parameters. At the same time, the detailed modeling of the environmental behavior is often computationally unaffordable, while a direct measure of the parameters defining the system state is costly and introduces extra noise in the mechanism. In this study, we investigate the application of reinforcement learning techniques to develop a model-free control loop for continuous recalibration of quantum device parameters. Furthermore, we explore the advantages of incorporating minimal environmental noise models. As an example, the application to numerical simulations of a Kennedy receiver-based long-distance quantum communication protocol is presented.
Dynamic Frequency-Based Fingerprinting Attacks against Modern Sandbox Environments
Authors: Debopriya Roy Dipta, Thore Tiemann, Berk Gulmezoglu, Eduard Marin, Thomas Eisenbarth
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, CPU

The cloud computing landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, embracing various sandboxes to meet the diverse demands of modern cloud applications. These sandboxes encompass container-based technologies like Docker and gVisor, microVM-based solutions like Firecracker, and security-centric sandboxes relying on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV. However, the practice of placing multiple tenants on shared physical hardware raises security and privacy concerns, most notably side-channel attacks. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of fingerprinting containers through CPU frequency reporting sensors in Intel and AMD CPUs. One key enabler of our attack is that the current CPU frequency information can be accessed by user-space attackers. We demonstrate that Docker images exhibit a unique frequency signature, enabling the distinction of different containers with up to 84.5% accuracy even when multiple containers are running simultaneously in different cores. Additionally, we assess the effectiveness of our attack when performed against several sandboxes deployed in cloud environments, including Google's gVisor, AWS' Firecracker, and TEE-based platforms like Gramine (utilizing Intel SGX) and AMD SEV. Our empirical results show that these attacks can also be carried out successfully against all of these sandboxes in less than 40 seconds, with an accuracy of over 70% in all cases. Finally, we propose a noise injection-based countermeasure to mitigate the proposed attack on cloud environments.
Network architecture search of X-ray based scientific applications
Authors: Adarsha Balaji, Ramyad Hadidi, Gregory Kollmer, Mohammed E. Fouda, Prasanna Balaprakash
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

X-ray and electron diffraction-based microscopy use bragg peak detection and ptychography to perform 3-D imaging at an atomic resolution. Typically, these techniques are implemented using computationally complex tasks such as a Psuedo-Voigt function or solving a complex inverse problem. Recently, the use of deep neural networks has improved the existing state-of-the-art approaches. However, the design and development of the neural network models depends on time and labor intensive tuning of the model by application experts. To that end, we propose a hyperparameter (HPS) and neural architecture search (NAS) approach to automate the design and optimization of the neural network models for model size, energy consumption and throughput. We demonstrate the improved performance of the auto-tuned models when compared to the manually tuned BraggNN and PtychoNN benchmark. We study and demonstrate the importance of the exploring the search space of tunable hyperparameters in enhancing the performance of bragg peak detection and ptychographic reconstruction. Our NAS and HPS of (1) BraggNN achieves a 31.03\% improvement in bragg peak detection accuracy with a 87.57\% reduction in model size, and (2) PtychoNN achieves a 16.77\% improvement in model accuracy and a 12.82\% reduction in model size when compared to the baseline PtychoNN model. When inferred on the Orin-AGX platform, the optimized Braggnn and Ptychonn models demonstrate a 10.51\% and 9.47\% reduction in inference latency and a 44.18\% and 15.34\% reduction in energy consumption when compared to their respective baselines, when inferred in the Orin-AGX edge platform.