pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
S-E Pipeline: A Vision Transformer (ViT) based Resilient Classification Pipeline for Medical Imaging Against Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Neha A S, Vivek Chaturvedi, Muhammad Shafique
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Enhancement, NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano

Vision Transformer (ViT) is becoming widely popular in automating accurate disease diagnosis in medical imaging owing to its robust self-attention mechanism. However, ViTs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that may thwart the diagnosis process by leading it to intentional misclassification of critical disease. In this paper, we propose a novel image classification pipeline, namely, S-E Pipeline, that performs multiple pre-processing steps that allow ViT to be trained on critical features so as to reduce the impact of input perturbations by adversaries. Our method uses a combination of segmentation and image enhancement techniques such as Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE), Unsharp Masking (UM), and High-Frequency Emphasis filtering (HFE) as preprocessing steps to identify critical features that remain intact even after adversarial perturbations. The experimental study demonstrates that our novel pipeline helps in reducing the effect of adversarial attacks by 72.22% for the ViT-b32 model and 86.58% for the ViT-l32 model. Furthermore, we have shown an end-to-end deployment of our proposed method on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano board to demonstrate its practical use case in modern hand-held devices that are usually resource-constrained.
Numerical Literals in Link Prediction: A Critical Examination of Models and Datasets
Authors: Moritz Blum, Basil Ell, Hannes Ill, Philipp Cimiano
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction

Link Prediction(LP) is an essential task over Knowledge Graphs(KGs), traditionally focussed on using and predicting the relations between entities. Textual entity descriptions have already been shown to be valuable, but models that incorporate numerical literals have shown minor improvements on existing benchmark datasets. It is unclear whether a model is actually better in using numerical literals, or better capable of utilizing the graph structure. This raises doubts about the effectiveness of these methods and about the suitability of the existing benchmark datasets. We propose a methodology to evaluate LP models that incorporate numerical literals. We propose i) a new synthetic dataset to better understand how well these models use numerical literals and ii) dataset ablations strategies to investigate potential difficulties with the existing datasets. We identify a prevalent trend: many models underutilize literal information and potentially rely on additional parameters for performance gains. Our investigation highlights the need for more extensive evaluations when releasing new models and datasets.
Automated Ensemble Multimodal Machine Learning for Healthcare
Authors: Fergus Imrie, Stefan Denner, Lucas S. Brunschwig, Klaus Maier-Hein, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Ensemble Learning

The application of machine learning in medicine and healthcare has led to the creation of numerous diagnostic and prognostic models. However, despite their success, current approaches generally issue predictions using data from a single modality. This stands in stark contrast with clinician decision-making which employs diverse information from multiple sources. While several multimodal machine learning approaches exist, significant challenges in developing multimodal systems remain that are hindering clinical adoption. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal framework, AutoPrognosis-M, that enables the integration of structured clinical (tabular) data and medical imaging using automated machine learning. AutoPrognosis-M incorporates 17 imaging models, including convolutional neural networks and vision transformers, and three distinct multimodal fusion strategies. In an illustrative application using a multimodal skin lesion dataset, we highlight the importance of multimodal machine learning and the power of combining multiple fusion strategies using ensemble learning. We have open-sourced our framework as a tool for the community and hope it will accelerate the uptake of multimodal machine learning in healthcare and spur further innovation.
Sparse Incremental Aggregation in Multi-Hop Federated Learning
Authors: Sourav Mukherjee, Nasrin Razmi, Armin Dekorsy, Petar Popovski, Bho Matthiesen
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

This paper investigates federated learning (FL) in a multi-hop communication setup, such as in constellations with inter-satellite links. In this setup, part of the FL clients are responsible for forwarding other client's results to the parameter server. Instead of using conventional routing, the communication efficiency can be improved significantly by using in-network model aggregation at each intermediate hop, known as incremental aggregation (IA). Prior works [1] have indicated diminishing gains for IA under gradient sparsification. Here we study this issue and propose several novel correlated sparsification methods for IA. Numerical results show that, for some of these algorithms, the full potential of IA is still available under sparsification without impairing convergence. We demonstrate a 15x improvement in communication efficiency over conventional routing and a 11x improvement over state-of-the-art (SoA) sparse IA.
AsEP: Benchmarking Deep Learning Methods for Antibody-specific Epitope Prediction
Authors: Chunan Liu, Lilian Denzler, Yihong Chen, Andrew Martin, Brooks Paige
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Learning, Link Prediction, Prediction

Epitope identification is vital for antibody design yet challenging due to the inherent variability in antibodies. While many deep learning methods have been developed for general protein binding site prediction tasks, whether they work for epitope prediction remains an understudied research question. The challenge is also heightened by the lack of a consistent evaluation pipeline with sufficient dataset size and epitope diversity. We introduce a filtered antibody-antigen complex structure dataset, AsEP (Antibody-specific Epitope Prediction). AsEP is the largest of its kind and provides clustered epitope groups, allowing the community to develop and test novel epitope prediction methods and evaluate their generalisability. AsEP comes with an easy-to-use interface in Python and pre-built graph representations of each antibody-antigen complex while also supporting customizable embedding methods. Using this new dataset, we benchmark several representative general protein-binding site prediction methods and find that their performances fall short of expectations for epitope prediction. To address this, we propose a novel method, WALLE, which leverages both unstructured modeling from protein language models and structural modeling from graph neural networks. WALLE demonstrate up to 3-10X performance improvement over the baseline methods. Our empirical findings suggest that epitope prediction benefits from combining sequential features provided by language models with geometrical information from graph representations. This provides a guideline for future epitope prediction method design. In addition, we reformulate the task as bipartite link prediction, allowing convenient model performance attribution and interpretability. We open source our data and code at https://github.com/biochunan/AsEP-dataset.
RIDA: A Robust Attack Framework on Incomplete Graphs
Authors: Jianke Yu, Hanchen Wang, Chen Chen, Xiaoyang Wang, Lu Qin, Wenjie Zhang, Ying Zhang, Xijuan Liu
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vital in data science but are increasingly susceptible to adversarial attacks. To help researchers develop more robust GNN models, it's essential to focus on designing strong attack models as foundational benchmarks and guiding references. Among adversarial attacks, gray-box poisoning attacks are noteworthy due to their effectiveness and fewer constraints. These attacks exploit GNNs' need for retraining on updated data, thereby impacting their performance by perturbing these datasets. However, current research overlooks the real-world scenario of incomplete graphs.To address this gap, we introduce the Robust Incomplete Deep Attack Framework (RIDA). It is the first algorithm for robust gray-box poisoning attacks on incomplete graphs. The approach innovatively aggregates distant vertex information and ensures powerful data utilization.Extensive tests against 9 SOTA baselines on 3 real-world datasets demonstrate RIDA's superiority in handling incompleteness and high attack performance on the incomplete graph.
Unlocking Tokens as Data Points for Generalization Bounds on Larger Language Models
Authors: Sanae Lotfi, Yilun Kuang, Brandon Amos, Micah Goldblum, Marc Finzi, Andrew Gordon Wilson
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters excel at predicting the next token in a sequence. Recent work computes non-vacuous compression-based generalization bounds for LLMs, but these bounds are vacuous for large models at the billion-parameter scale. Moreover, these bounds are obtained through restrictive compression techniques, bounding compressed models that generate low-quality text. Additionally, the tightness of these existing bounds depends on the number of IID documents in a training set rather than the much larger number of non-IID constituent tokens, leaving untapped potential for tighter bounds. In this work, we instead use properties of martingales to derive generalization bounds that benefit from the vast number of tokens in LLM training sets. Since a dataset contains far more tokens than documents, our generalization bounds not only tolerate but actually benefit from far less restrictive compression schemes. With Monarch matrices, Kronecker factorizations, and post-training quantization, we achieve non-vacuous generalization bounds for LLMs as large as LLaMA2-70B. Unlike previous approaches, our work achieves the first non-vacuous bounds for models that are deployed in practice and generate high-quality text.
StraightLine: An End-to-End Resource-Aware Scheduler for Machine Learning Application Requests
Authors: Cheng-Wei Ching, Boyuan Guan, Hailu Xu, Liting Hu
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00

The life cycle of machine learning (ML) applications consists of two stages: model development and model deployment. However, traditional ML systems (e.g., training-specific or inference-specific systems) focus on one particular stage or phase of the life cycle of ML applications. These systems often aim at optimizing model training or accelerating model inference, and they frequently assume homogeneous infrastructure, which may not always reflect real-world scenarios that include cloud data centers, local servers, containers, and serverless platforms. We present StraightLine, an end-to-end resource-aware scheduler that schedules the optimal resources (e.g., container, virtual machine, or serverless) for different ML application requests in a hybrid infrastructure. The key innovation is an empirical dynamic placing algorithm that intelligently places requests based on their unique characteristics (e.g., request frequency, input data size, and data distribution). In contrast to existing ML systems, StraightLine offers end-to-end resource-aware placement, thereby it can significantly reduce response time and failure rate for model deployment when facing different computing resources in the hybrid infrastructure.
IRIS: Wireless Ring for Vision-based Smart Home Interaction
Authors: Maruchi Kim, Antonio Glenn, Bandhav Veluri, Yunseo Lee, Eyoel Gebre, Aditya Bagaria, Shwetak Patel, Shyamnath Gollakota
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00

Integrating cameras into wireless smart rings has been challenging due to size and power constraints. We introduce IRIS, the first wireless vision-enabled smart ring system for smart home interactions. Equipped with a camera, Bluetooth radio, inertial measurement unit (IMU), and an onboard battery, IRIS meets the small size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements for ring devices. IRIS is context-aware, adapting its gesture set to the detected device, and can last for 16-24 hours on a single charge. IRIS leverages the scene semantics to achieve instance-level device recognition. In a study involving 23 participants, IRIS consistently outpaced voice commands, with a higher proportion of participants expressing a preference for IRIS over voice commands regarding toggling a device's state, granular control, and social acceptability. Our work pushes the boundary of what is possible with ring form-factor devices, addressing system challenges and opening up novel interaction capabilities.
Unsupervised Training of Neural Cellular Automata on Edge Devices
Authors: John Kalkhof, Amin Ranem, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

The disparity in access to machine learning tools for medical imaging across different regions significantly limits the potential for universal healthcare innovation, particularly in remote areas. Our research addresses this issue by implementing Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) training directly on smartphones for accessible X-ray lung segmentation. We confirm the practicality and feasibility of deploying and training these advanced models on five Android devices, improving medical diagnostics accessibility and bridging the tech divide to extend machine learning benefits in medical imaging to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We further enhance this approach with an unsupervised adaptation method using the novel Variance-Weighted Segmentation Loss (VWSL), which efficiently learns from unlabeled data by minimizing the variance from multiple NCA predictions. This strategy notably improves model adaptability and performance across diverse medical imaging contexts without the need for extensive computational resources or labeled datasets, effectively lowering the participation threshold. Our methodology, tested on three multisite X-ray datasets -- Padchest, ChestX-ray8, and MIMIC-III -- demonstrates improvements in segmentation Dice accuracy by 0.7 to 2.8%, compared to the classic Med-NCA. Additionally, in extreme cases where no digital copy is available and images must be captured by a phone from an X-ray lightbox or monitor, VWSL enhances Dice accuracy by 5-20%, demonstrating the method's robustness even with suboptimal image sources.
Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Coarse-Grained Socioeconomic Dynamics
Authors: James Koch, Pranab Roy Chowdhury, Heng Wan, Parin Bhaduri, Jim Yoon, Vivek Srikrishnan, W. Brent Daniel
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

We present a data-driven machine-learning approach for modeling space-time socioeconomic dynamics. Through coarse-graining fine-scale observations, our modeling framework simplifies these complex systems to a set of tractable mechanistic relationships -- in the form of ordinary differential equations -- while preserving critical system behaviors. This approach allows for expedited 'what if' studies and sensitivity analyses, essential for informed policy-making. Our findings, from a case study of Baltimore, MD, indicate that this machine learning-augmented coarse-grained model serves as a powerful instrument for deciphering the complex interactions between social factors, geography, and exogenous stressors, offering a valuable asset for system forecasting and resilience planning.
Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Stock Return Prediction Using Newsflow
Authors: Tian Guo, Emmanuel Hauptmann
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Portfolio Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) and their fine-tuning techniques have demonstrated superior performance in various language understanding and generation tasks. This paper explores fine-tuning LLMs for stock return forecasting with financial newsflow. In quantitative investing, return forecasting is fundamental for subsequent tasks like stock picking, portfolio optimization, etc. We formulate the model to include text representation and forecasting modules. We propose to compare the encoder-only and decoder-only LLMs, considering they generate text representations in distinct ways. The impact of these different representations on forecasting performance remains an open question. Meanwhile, we compare two simple methods of integrating LLMs' token-level representations into the forecasting module. The experiments on real news and investment universes reveal that: (1) aggregated representations from LLMs' token-level embeddings generally produce return predictions that enhance the performance of long-only and long-short portfolios; (2) in the relatively large investment universe, the decoder LLMs-based prediction model leads to stronger portfolios, whereas in the small universes, there are no consistent winners. Among the three LLMs studied (DeBERTa, Mistral, Llama), Mistral performs more robustly across different universes; (3) return predictions derived from LLMs' text representations are a strong signal for portfolio construction, outperforming conventional sentiment scores.
Principal-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Orchestrating AI Agents with Contracts
Authors: Dima Ivanov, Paul Dütting, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Tonghan Wang, David C. Parkes
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

The increasing deployment of AI is shaping the future landscape of the internet, which is set to become an integrated ecosystem of AI agents. Orchestrating the interaction among AI agents necessitates decentralized, self-sustaining mechanisms that harmonize the tension between individual interests and social welfare. In this paper we tackle this challenge by synergizing reinforcement learning with principal-agent theory from economics. Taken separately, the former allows unrealistic freedom of intervention, while the latter struggles to scale in sequential settings. Combining them achieves the best of both worlds. We propose a framework where a principal guides an agent in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) using a series of contracts, which specify payments by the principal based on observable outcomes of the agent's actions. We present and analyze a meta-algorithm that iteratively optimizes the policies of the principal and agent, showing its equivalence to a contraction operator on the principal's Q-function, and its convergence to subgame-perfect equilibrium. We then scale our algorithm with deep Q-learning and analyze its convergence in the presence of approximation error, both theoretically and through experiments with randomly generated binary game-trees. Extending our framework to multiple agents, we apply our methodology to the combinatorial Coin Game. Addressing this multi-agent sequential social dilemma is a promising first step toward scaling our approach to more complex, real-world instances.
Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Resilience Optimization in 5G RAN
Authors: Soumeya Kaada, Dinh-Hieu Tran, Nguyen Van Huynh, Marie-Line Alberi Morel, Sofiene Jelassi, Gerardo Rubino
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Resilience is defined as the ability of a network to resist, adapt, and quickly recover from disruptions, and to continue to maintain an acceptable level of services from users' perspective. With the advent of future radio networks, including advanced 5G and upcoming 6G, critical services become integral to future networks, requiring uninterrupted service delivery for end users. Unfortunately, with the growing network complexity, user mobility and diversity, it becomes challenging to scale current resilience management techniques that rely on local optimizations to large dense network deployments. This paper aims to address this problem by globally optimizing the resilience of a dense multi-cell network based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, our proposed solution can dynamically tilt cell antennas and reconfigure transmit power to mitigate outages and increase both coverage and service availability. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated to simultaneously satisfy resiliency constraints while maximizing the service quality in the network area in order to minimize the impact of outages on neighbouring cells. Extensive simulations then demonstrate that with our proposed solution, the average service availability in terms of user throughput can be increased by up to 50-60% on average, while reaching a coverage availability of 99% in best cases.
Cross-Vendor Reproducibility of Radiomics-based Machine Learning Models for Computer-aided Diagnosis
Authors: Jatin Chaudhary, Ivan Jambor, Hannu Aronen, Otto Ettala, Jani Saunavaara, Peter Boström, Jukka Heikkonen, Rajeev Kanth, Harri Merisaari
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, feature selection

Background: The reproducibility of machine-learning models in prostate cancer detection across different MRI vendors remains a significant challenge. Methods: This study investigates Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) models trained on radiomic features extracted from T2-weighted MRI images using Pyradiomics and MRCradiomics libraries. Feature selection was performed using the maximum relevance minimum redundancy (MRMR) technique. We aimed to enhance clinical decision support through multimodal learning and feature fusion. Results: Our SVM model, utilizing combined features from Pyradiomics and MRCradiomics, achieved an AUC of 0.74 on the Multi-Improd dataset (Siemens scanner) but decreased to 0.60 on the Philips test set. The RF model showed similar trends, with notable robustness for models using Pyradiomics features alone (AUC of 0.78 on Philips). Conclusions: These findings demonstrate the potential of multimodal feature integration to improve the robustness and generalizability of machine-learning models for clinical decision support in prostate cancer detection. This study marks a significant step towards developing reliable AI-driven diagnostic tools that maintain efficacy across various imaging platforms.
I can listen but cannot read: An evaluation of two-tower multimodal systems for instrument recognition
Authors: Yannis Vasilakis, Rachel Bittner, Johan Pauwels
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Instrument Recognition, Retrieval, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Music two-tower multimodal systems integrate audio and text modalities into a joint audio-text space, enabling direct comparison between songs and their corresponding labels. These systems enable new approaches for classification and retrieval, leveraging both modalities. Despite the promising results they have shown for zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks, closer inspection of the embeddings is needed. This paper evaluates the inherent zero-shot properties of joint audio-text spaces for the case-study of instrument recognition. We present an evaluation and analysis of two-tower systems for zero-shot instrument recognition and a detailed analysis of the properties of the pre-joint and joint embeddings spaces. Our findings suggest that audio encoders alone demonstrate good quality, while challenges remain within the text encoder or joint space projection. Specifically, two-tower systems exhibit sensitivity towards specific words, favoring generic prompts over musically informed ones. Despite the large size of textual encoders, they do not yet leverage additional textual context or infer instruments accurately from their descriptions. Lastly, a novel approach for quantifying the semantic meaningfulness of the textual space leveraging an instrument ontology is proposed. This method reveals deficiencies in the systems' understanding of instruments and provides evidence of the need for fine-tuning text encoders on musical data.