pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HyperSBINN: A Hypernetwork-Enhanced Systems Biology-Informed Neural Network for Efficient Drug Cardiosafety Assessment
Authors: Inass Soukarieh, Gerhard Hessler, Hervé Minoux, Marcel Mohr, Friedemann Schmidt, Jan Wenzel, Pierre Barbillon, Hugo Gangloff, Pierre Gloaguen
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Meta-Learning

Mathematical modeling in systems toxicology enables a comprehensive understanding of the effects of pharmaceutical substances on cardiac health. However, the complexity of these models limits their widespread application in early drug discovery. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to solving parameterized models of cardiac action potentials by combining meta-learning techniques with Systems Biology-Informed Neural Networks (SBINNs). The proposed method, HyperSBINN, effectively addresses the challenge of predicting the effects of various compounds at different concentrations on cardiac action potentials, outperforming traditional differential equation solvers in speed. Our model efficiently handles scenarios with limited data and complex parameterized differential equations. The HyperSBINN model demonstrates robust performance in predicting APD90 values, indicating its potential as a reliable tool for modeling cardiac electrophysiology and aiding in preclinical drug development. This framework represents an advancement in computational modeling, offering a scalable and efficient solution for simulating and understanding complex biological systems.
Integrated Brain Connectivity Analysis with fMRI, DTI, and sMRI Powered by Interpretable Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Gang Qu, Ziyu Zhou, Vince D. Calhoun, Aiying Zhang, Yu-Ping Wang
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Functional Connectivity

Multimodal neuroimaging modeling has becomes a widely used approach but confronts considerable challenges due to heterogeneity, which encompasses variability in data types, scales, and formats across modalities. This variability necessitates the deployment of advanced computational methods to integrate and interpret these diverse datasets within a cohesive analytical framework. In our research, we amalgamate functional magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion tensor imaging, and structural MRI into a cohesive framework. This integration capitalizes on the unique strengths of each modality and their inherent interconnections, aiming for a comprehensive understanding of the brain's connectivity and anatomical characteristics. Utilizing the Glasser atlas for parcellation, we integrate imaging derived features from various modalities: functional connectivity from fMRI, structural connectivity from DTI, and anatomical features from sMRI within consistent regions. Our approach incorporates a masking strategy to differentially weight neural connections, thereby facilitating a holistic amalgamation of multimodal imaging data. This technique enhances interpretability at connectivity level, transcending traditional analyses centered on singular regional attributes. The model is applied to the Human Connectome Project's Development study to elucidate the associations between multimodal imaging and cognitive functions throughout youth. The analysis demonstrates improved predictive accuracy and uncovers crucial anatomical features and essential neural connections, deepening our understanding of brain structure and function.
An Evaluation of Explanation Methods for Black-Box Detectors of Machine-Generated Text
Authors: Loris Schoenegger, Yuxi Xia, Benjamin Roth
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Prediction

The increasing difficulty to distinguish language-model-generated from human-written text has led to the development of detectors of machine-generated text (MGT). However, in many contexts, a black-box prediction is not sufficient, it is equally important to know on what grounds a detector made that prediction. Explanation methods that estimate feature importance promise to provide indications of which parts of an input are used by classifiers for prediction. However, the quality of different explanation methods has not previously been assessed for detectors of MGT. This study conducts the first systematic evaluation of explanation quality for this task. The dimensions of faithfulness and stability are assessed with five automated experiments, and usefulness is evaluated in a user study. We use a dataset of ChatGPT-generated and human-written documents, and pair predictions of three existing language-model-based detectors with the corresponding SHAP, LIME, and Anchor explanations. We find that SHAP performs best in terms of faithfulness, stability, and in helping users to predict the detector's behavior. In contrast, LIME, perceived as most useful by users, scores the worst in terms of user performance at predicting the detectors' behavior.
FSDEM: Feature Selection Dynamic Evaluation Metric
Authors: Muhammad Rajabinasab, Anton D. Lautrup, Tobias Hyrup, Arthur Zimek
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Expressive evaluation metrics are indispensable for informative experiments in all areas, and while several metrics are established in some areas, in others, such as feature selection, only indirect or otherwise limited evaluation metrics are found. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation metric to address several problems of its predecessors and allow for flexible and reliable evaluation of feature selection algorithms. The proposed metric is a dynamic metric with two properties that can be used to evaluate both the performance and the stability of a feature selection algorithm. We conduct several empirical experiments to illustrate the use of the proposed metric in the successful evaluation of feature selection algorithms. We also provide a comparison and analysis to show the different aspects involved in the evaluation of the feature selection algorithms. The results indicate that the proposed metric is successful in carrying out the evaluation task for feature selection algorithms. This paper is an extended version of a paper published at SISAP 2024.
Provable Imbalanced Point Clustering
Authors: David Denisov, Dan Feldman, Shlomi Dolev, Michael Segal
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We suggest efficient and provable methods to compute an approximation for imbalanced point clustering, that is, fitting $k$-centers to a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for any $d,k\geq 1$. To this end, we utilize \emph{coresets}, which, in the context of the paper, are essentially weighted sets of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that approximate the fitting loss for every model in a given set, up to a multiplicative factor of $1\pm\varepsilon$. We provide [Section 3 and Section E in the appendix] experiments that show the empirical contribution of our suggested methods for real images (novel and reference), synthetic data, and real-world data. We also propose choice clustering, which by combining clustering algorithms yields better performance than each one separately.
Lemon and Orange Disease Classification using CNN-Extracted Features and Machine Learning Classifier
Authors: Khandoker Nosiba Arifin, Sayma Akter Rupa, Md Musfique Anwar, Israt Jahan
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00

Lemons and oranges, both are the most economically significant citrus fruits globally. The production of lemons and oranges is severely affected due to diseases in its growth stages. Fruit quality has degraded due to the presence of flaws. Thus, it is necessary to diagnose the disease accurately so that we can avoid major loss of lemons and oranges. To improve citrus farming, we proposed a disease classification approach for lemons and oranges. This approach would enable early disease detection and intervention, reduce yield losses, and optimize resource allocation. For the initial modeling of disease classification, the research uses innovative deep learning architectures such as VGG16, VGG19 and ResNet50. In addition, for achieving better accuracy, the basic machine learning algorithms used for classification problems include Random Forest, Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Logistic Regression. The lemon and orange fruits diseases are classified more accurately (95.0% for lemon and 99.69% for orange) by the model. The model's base features were extracted from the ResNet50 pre-trained model and the diseases are classified by the Logistic Regression which beats the performance given by VGG16 and VGG19 for other classifiers. Experimental outcomes show that the proposed model also outperforms existing models in which most of them classified the diseases using the Softmax classifier without using any individual classifiers.
TSAK: Two-Stage Semantic-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Wearable Modality and Model Optimization in Manufacturing Lines
Authors: Hymalai Bello, Daniel Geißler, Sungho Suh, Bo Zhou, Paul Lukowicz
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition, Knowledge Distillation, Model Optimization

Smaller machine learning models, with less complex architectures and sensor inputs, can benefit wearable sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) systems in many ways, from complexity and cost to battery life. In the specific case of smart factories, optimizing human-robot collaboration hinges on the implementation of cutting-edge, human-centric AI systems. To this end, workers' activity recognition enables accurate quantification of performance metrics, improving efficiency holistically. We present a two-stage semantic-aware knowledge distillation (KD) approach, TSAK, for efficient, privacy-aware, and wearable HAR in manufacturing lines, which reduces the input sensor modalities as well as the machine learning model size, while reaching similar recognition performance as a larger multi-modal and multi-positional teacher model. The first stage incorporates a teacher classifier model encoding attention, causal, and combined representations. The second stage encompasses a semantic classifier merging the three representations from the first stage. To evaluate TSAK, we recorded a multi-modal dataset at a smart factory testbed with wearable and privacy-aware sensors (IMU and capacitive) located on both workers' hands. In addition, we evaluated our approach on OpenPack, the only available open dataset mimicking the wearable sensor placements on both hands in the manufacturing HAR scenario. We compared several KD strategies with different representations to regulate the training process of a smaller student model. Compared to the larger teacher model, the student model takes fewer sensor channels from a single hand, has 79% fewer parameters, runs 8.88 times faster, and requires 96.6% less computing power (FLOPS).
Neighborhood and Global Perturbations Supported SAM in Federated Learning: From Local Tweaks To Global Awareness
Authors: Boyuan Li, Zihao Peng, Yafei Li, Mingliang Xu, Shengbo Chen, Baofeng Ji, Cong Shen
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated Learning (FL) can be coordinated under the orchestration of a central server to collaboratively build a privacy-preserving model without the need for data exchange. However, participant data heterogeneity leads to local optima divergence, subsequently affecting convergence outcomes. Recent research has focused on global sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) and dynamic regularization techniques to enhance consistency between global and local generalization and optimization objectives. Nonetheless, the estimation of global SAM introduces additional computational and memory overhead, while dynamic regularization suffers from bias in the local and global dual variables due to training isolation. In this paper, we propose a novel FL algorithm, FedTOGA, designed to consider optimization and generalization objectives while maintaining minimal uplink communication overhead. By linking local perturbations to global updates, global generalization consistency is improved. Additionally, global updates are used to correct local dynamic regularizers, reducing dual variables bias and enhancing optimization consistency. Global updates are passively received by clients, reducing overhead. We also propose neighborhood perturbation to approximate local perturbation, analyzing its strengths and limitations. Theoretical analysis shows FedTOGA achieves faster convergence $O(1/T)$ under non-convex functions. Empirical studies demonstrate that FedTOGA outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, with a 1\% accuracy increase and 30\% faster convergence, achieving state-of-the-art.
Theoretical Proportion Label Perturbation for Learning from Label Proportions in Large Bags
Authors: Shunsuke Kubo, Shinnosuke Matsuo, Daiki Suehiro, Kazuhiro Terada, Hiroaki Ito, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Ryoma Bise
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Weakly-supervised Learning

Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a kind of weakly supervised learning that trains an instance-level classifier from label proportions of bags, which consist of sets of instances without using instance labels. A challenge in LLP arises when the number of instances in a bag (bag size) is numerous, making the traditional LLP methods difficult due to GPU memory limitations. This study aims to develop an LLP method capable of learning from bags with large sizes. In our method, smaller bags (mini-bags) are generated by sampling instances from large-sized bags (original bags), and these mini-bags are used in place of the original bags. However, the proportion of a mini-bag is unknown and differs from that of the original bag, leading to overfitting. To address this issue, we propose a perturbation method for the proportion labels of sampled mini-bags to mitigate overfitting to noisy label proportions. This perturbation is added based on the multivariate hypergeometric distribution, which is statistically modeled. Additionally, loss weighting is implemented to reduce the negative impact of proportions sampled from the tail of the distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proportion label perturbation and loss weighting achieve classification accuracy comparable to that obtained without sampling. Our codes are available at https://github.com/stainlessnight/LLP-LargeBags.
Enhancing Fairness through Reweighting: A Path to Attain the Sufficiency Rule
Authors: Xuan Zhao, Klaus Broelemann, Salvatore Ruggieri, Gjergji Kasneci
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We introduce an innovative approach to enhancing the empirical risk minimization (ERM) process in model training through a refined reweighting scheme of the training data to enhance fairness. This scheme aims to uphold the sufficiency rule in fairness by ensuring that optimal predictors maintain consistency across diverse sub-groups. We employ a bilevel formulation to address this challenge, wherein we explore sample reweighting strategies. Unlike conventional methods that hinge on model size, our formulation bases generalization complexity on the space of sample weights. We discretize the weights to improve training speed. Empirical validation of our method showcases its effectiveness and robustness, revealing a consistent improvement in the balance between prediction performance and fairness metrics across various experiments.
Towards Lifelong Learning Embeddings: An Algorithmic Approach to Dynamically Extend Embeddings
Authors: Miguel Alves Gomes, Philipp Meisen, Tobias Meisen
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning

The rapid evolution of technology has transformed business operations and customer interactions worldwide, with personalization emerging as a key opportunity for e-commerce companies to engage customers more effectively. The application of machine learning, particularly that of deep learning models, has gained significant traction due to its ability to rapidly recognize patterns in large datasets, thereby offering numerous possibilities for personalization. These models use embeddings to map discrete information, such as product IDs, into a latent vector space, a method increasingly popular in recent years. However, e-commerce's dynamic nature, characterized by frequent new product introductions, poses challenges for these embeddings, which typically require fixed dimensions and inputs, leading to the need for periodic retraining from scratch. This paper introduces a modular algorithm that extends embedding input size while preserving learned knowledge, addressing the challenges posed by e-commerce's dynamism. The proposed algorithm also incorporates strategies to mitigate the cold start problem associated with new products. The results of initial experiments suggest that this method outperforms traditional embeddings.
Hierarchical Learning and Computing over Space-Ground Integrated Networks
Authors: Jingyang Zhu, Yuanming Shi, Yong Zhou, Chunxiao Jiang, Linling Kuang
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00

Space-ground integrated networks hold great promise for providing global connectivity, particularly in remote areas where large amounts of valuable data are generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but lacking terrestrial communication infrastructure. The massive data is conventionally transferred to the cloud server for centralized artificial intelligence (AI) models training, raising huge communication overhead and privacy concerns. To address this, we propose a hierarchical learning and computing framework, which leverages the lowlatency characteristic of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites and the global coverage of geostationary-earth-orbit (GEO) satellites, to provide global aggregation services for locally trained models on ground IoT devices. Due to the time-varying nature of satellite network topology and the energy constraints of LEO satellites, efficiently aggregating the received local models from ground devices on LEO satellites is highly challenging. By leveraging the predictability of inter-satellite connectivity, modeling the space network as a directed graph, we formulate a network energy minimization problem for model aggregation, which turns out to be a Directed Steiner Tree (DST) problem. We propose a topologyaware energy-efficient routing (TAEER) algorithm to solve the DST problem by finding a minimum spanning arborescence on a substitute directed graph. Extensive simulations under realworld space-ground integrated network settings demonstrate that the proposed TAEER algorithm significantly reduces energy consumption and outperforms benchmarks.
ReLExS: Reinforcement Learning Explanations for Stackelberg No-Regret Learners
Authors: Xiangge Huang, Jingyuan Li, Jiaqing Xie
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

With the constraint of a no regret follower, will the players in a two-player Stackelberg game still reach Stackelberg equilibrium? We first show when the follower strategy is either reward-average or transform-reward-average, the two players can always get the Stackelberg Equilibrium. Then, we extend that the players can achieve the Stackelberg equilibrium in the two-player game under the no regret constraint. Also, we show a strict upper bound of the follower's utility difference between with and without no regret constraint. Moreover, in constant-sum two-player Stackelberg games with non-regret action sequences, we ensure the total optimal utility of the game remains also bounded.
Score-based change point detection via tracking the best of infinitely many experts
Authors: Anna Markovich, Nikita Puchkin
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Point Detection

We suggest a novel algorithm for online change point detection based on sequential score function estimation and tracking the best expert approach. The core of the procedure is a version of the fixed share forecaster for the case of infinite number of experts and quadratic loss functions. The algorithm shows a promising performance in numerical experiments on artificial and real-world data sets. We also derive new upper bounds on the dynamic regret of the fixed share forecaster with varying parameter, which are of independent interest.
Bridging the gap between Learning-to-plan, Motion Primitives and Safe Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Piotr Kicki, Davide Tateo, Puze Liu, Jonas Guenster, Jan Peters, Krzysztof Walas
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning, Trajectory Planning

Trajectory planning under kinodynamic constraints is fundamental for advanced robotics applications that require dexterous, reactive, and rapid skills in complex environments. These constraints, which may represent task, safety, or actuator limitations, are essential for ensuring the proper functioning of robotic platforms and preventing unexpected behaviors. Recent advances in kinodynamic planning demonstrate that learning-to-plan techniques can generate complex and reactive motions under intricate constraints. However, these techniques necessitate the analytical modeling of both the robot and the entire task, a limiting assumption when systems are extremely complex or when constructing accurate task models is prohibitive. This paper addresses this limitation by combining learning-to-plan methods with reinforcement learning, resulting in a novel integration of black-box learning of motion primitives and optimization. We evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art safe reinforcement learning methods, showing that our technique, particularly when exploiting task structure, outperforms baseline methods in challenging scenarios such as planning to hit in robot air hockey. This work demonstrates the potential of our integrated approach to enhance the performance and safety of robots operating under complex kinodynamic constraints.
Re-Mix: Optimizing Data Mixtures for Large Scale Imitation Learning
Authors: Joey Hejna, Chethan Bhateja, Yichen Jian, Karl Pertsch, Dorsa Sadigh
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Robot Manipulation

Increasingly large imitation learning datasets are being collected with the goal of training foundation models for robotics. However, despite the fact that data selection has been of utmost importance in vision and natural language processing, little work in robotics has questioned what data such models should actually be trained on. In this work we investigate how to weigh different subsets or ``domains'' of robotics datasets for robot foundation model pre-training. Concrete, we use distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to maximize worst-case performance across all possible downstream domains. Our method, Re-Mix, addresses the wide range of challenges that arise when applying DRO to robotics datasets including variability in action spaces and dynamics across different datasets. Re-Mix employs early stopping, action normalization, and discretization to counteract these issues. Through extensive experimentation on the largest open-source robot manipulation dataset, the Open X-Embodiment dataset, we demonstrate that data curation can have an outsized impact on downstream performance. Specifically, domain weights learned by Re-Mix outperform uniform weights by 38\% on average and outperform human-selected weights by 32\% on datasets used to train existing generalist robot policies, specifically the RT-X models.