pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Distribution-Free Calibration of Statistical Confidence Sets
Authors: Luben M. C. Cabezas, Guilherme P. Soares, Thiago R. Ramos, Rafael B. Stern, Rafael Izbicki
Date: 2024-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

Constructing valid confidence sets is a crucial task in statistical inference, yet traditional methods often face challenges when dealing with complex models or limited observed sample sizes. These challenges are frequently encountered in modern applications, such as Likelihood-Free Inference (LFI). In these settings, confidence sets may fail to maintain a confidence level close to the nominal value. In this paper, we introduce two novel methods, TRUST and TRUST++, for calibrating confidence sets to achieve distribution-free conditional coverage. These methods rely entirely on simulated data from the statistical model to perform calibration. Leveraging insights from conformal prediction techniques adapted to the statistical inference context, our methods ensure both finite-sample local coverage and asymptotic conditional coverage as the number of simulations increases, even if n is small. They effectively handle nuisance parameters and provide computationally efficient uncertainty quantification for the estimated confidence sets. This allows users to assess whether additional simulations are necessary for robust inference. Through theoretical analysis and experiments on models with both tractable and intractable likelihoods, we demonstrate that our methods outperform existing approaches, particularly in small-sample regimes. This work bridges the gap between conformal prediction and statistical inference, offering practical tools for constructing valid confidence sets in complex models.
Spatiotemporal Density Correction of Multivariate Global Climate Model Projections using Deep Learning
Authors: Reetam Majumder, Shiqi Fang, A. Sankarasubramanian, Emily C. Hector, Brian J. Reich
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, quantile regression

Global Climate Models (GCMs) are numerical models that simulate complex physical processes within the Earth's climate system and are essential for understanding and predicting climate change. However, GCMs suffer from systemic biases due to simplifications made to the underlying physical processes. GCM output therefore needs to be bias corrected before it can be used for future climate projections. Most common bias correction methods, however, cannot preserve spatial, temporal, or inter-variable dependencies. We propose a new semi-parametric conditional density estimation (SPCDE) for density correction of the joint distribution of daily precipitation and maximum temperature data obtained from gridded GCM spatial fields. The Vecchia approximation is employed to preserve dependencies in the observed field during the density correction process, which is carried out using semi-parametric quantile regression. The ability to calibrate joint distributions of GCM projections has potential advantages not only in estimating extremes, but also in better estimating compound hazards, like heat waves and drought, under potential climate change. Illustration on historical data from 1951-2014 over two 5x5 spatial grids in the US indicate that SPCDE can preserve key marginal and joint distribution properties of precipitation and maximum temperature, and predictions obtained using SPCDE are better calibrated compared to predictions using asynchronous quantile mapping and canonical correlation analysis, two commonly used bias correction approaches.
On Explaining Recommendations with Large Language Models: A Review
Authors: Alan Said
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Recommendation Systems, Systematic Literature Review

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as LLaMA and ChatGPT, has opened new opportunities for enhancing recommender systems through improved explainability. This paper provides a systematic literature review focused on leveraging LLMs to generate explanations for recommendations -- a critical aspect for fostering transparency and user trust. We conducted a comprehensive search within the ACM Guide to Computing Literature, covering publications from the launch of ChatGPT (November 2022) to the present (November 2024). Our search yielded 232 articles, but after applying inclusion criteria, only six were identified as directly addressing the use of LLMs in explaining recommendations. This scarcity highlights that, despite the rise of LLMs, their application in explainable recommender systems is still in an early stage. We analyze these select studies to understand current methodologies, identify challenges, and suggest directions for future research. Our findings underscore the potential of LLMs improving explanations of recommender systems and encourage the development of more transparent and user-centric recommendation explanation solutions.
Zero-Indexing Internet Search Augmented Generation for Large Language Models
Authors: Guangxin He, Zonghong Dai, Jiangcheng Zhu, Binqiang Zhao, Qicheng Hu, Chenyue Li, You Peng, Chen Wang, Binhang Yuan
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval augmented generation has emerged as an effective method to enhance large language model performance. This approach typically relies on an internal retrieval module that uses various indexing mechanisms to manage a static pre-processed corpus. However, such a paradigm often falls short when it is necessary to integrate the most up-to-date information that has not been updated into the corpus during generative inference time. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that leverages standard search engine APIs to dynamically integrate the latest online information (without maintaining any index for any fixed corpus), thereby improving the quality of generated content. We design a collaborative LLM-based paradigm, where we include: (i) a parser-LLM that determines if the Internet augmented generation is demanded and extracts the search keywords if so with a single inference; (ii) a mixed ranking strategy that re-ranks the retrieved HTML files to eliminate bias introduced from the search engine API; and (iii) an extractor-LLM that can accurately and efficiently extract relevant information from the fresh content in each HTML file. We conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate the performance of this Internet search augmented generation paradigm. The experimental results demonstrate that our method generates content with significantly improved quality. Our system has been successfully deployed in a production environment to serve 01.AI's generative inference requests.
Parallel and Mini-Batch Stable Matching for Large-Scale Reciprocal Recommender Systems
Authors: Kento Nakada, Kazuki Kawamura, Ryosuke Furukawa
Date: 2024-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Reciprocal recommender systems (RRSs) are crucial in online two-sided matching platforms, such as online job or dating markets, as they need to consider the preferences of both sides of the match. The concentration of recommendations to a subset of users on these platforms undermines their match opportunities and reduces the total number of matches. To maximize the total number of expected matches among market participants, stable matching theory with transferable utility has been applied to RRSs. However, computational complexity and memory efficiency quadratically increase with the number of users, making it difficult to implement stable matching algorithms for several users. In this study, we propose novel methods using parallel and mini-batch computations for reciprocal recommendation models to improve the computational time and space efficiency of the optimization process for stable matching. Experiments on both real and synthetic data confirmed that our stable matching theory-based RRS increased the computation speed and enabled tractable large-scale data processing of up to one million samples with a single graphics processing unit graphics board, without losing the match count.
Headache to Overstock? Promoting Long-tail Items through Debiased Product Bundling
Authors: Shuo Xu, Haokai Ma, Yunshan Ma, Xiaohao Liu, Lei Meng, Xiangxu Meng, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2024-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Navigate, Transfer Learning

Product bundling aims to organize a set of thematically related items into a combined bundle for shipment facilitation and item promotion. To increase the exposure of fresh or overstocked products, sellers typically bundle these items with popular products for inventory clearance. This specific task can be formulated as a long-tail product bundling scenario, which leverages the user-item interactions to define the popularity of each item. The inherent popularity bias in the pre-extracted user feedback features and the insufficient utilization of other popularity-independent knowledge may force the conventional bundling methods to find more popular items, thereby struggling with this long-tail bundling scenario. Through intuitive and empirical analysis, we navigate the core solution for this challenge, which is maximally mining the popularity-free features and effectively incorporating them into the bundling process. To achieve this, we propose a Distilled Modality-Oriented Knowledge Transfer framework (DieT) to effectively counter the popularity bias misintroduced by the user feedback features and adhere to the original intent behind the real-world bundling behaviors. Specifically, DieT first proposes the Popularity-free Collaborative Distribution Modeling module (PCD) to capture the popularity-independent information from the bundle-item view, which is proven most effective in the long-tail bundling scenario to enable the directional information transfer. With the tailored Unbiased Bundle-aware Knowledge Transferring module (UBT), DieT can highlight the significance of popularity-free features while mitigating the negative effects of user feedback features in the long-tail scenario via the knowledge distillation paradigm. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DieT over a list of SOTA methods in the long-tail bundling scenario.
Counterfactual Learning-Driven Representation Disentanglement for Search-Enhanced Recommendation
Authors: Jiajun Cui, Xu Chen, Shuai Xiao, Chen Ju, Jinsong Lan, Qingwen Liu, Wei zhang
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, counterfactual, Data Augmentation, Disentanglement, Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

For recommender systems in internet platforms, search activities provide additional insights into user interest through query-click interactions with items, and are thus widely used for enhancing personalized recommendation. However, these interacted items not only have transferable features matching users' interest helpful for the recommendation domain, but also have features related to users' unique intents in the search domain. Such domain gap of item features is neglected by most current search-enhanced recommendation methods. They directly incorporate these search behaviors into recommendation, and thus introduce partial negative transfer. To address this, we propose a Counterfactual learning-driven representation disentanglement framework for search-enhanced recommendation, based on the common belief that a user would click an item under a query not solely because of the item-query match but also due to the item's query-independent general features (e.g., color or style) that interest the user. These general features exclude the reflection of search-specific intents contained in queries, ensuring a pure match to users' underlying interest to complement recommendation. According to counterfactual thinking, how would user preferences and query match change for items if we removed their query-related features in search, we leverage search queries to construct counterfactual signals to disentangle item representations, isolating only query-independent general features. These representations subsequently enable feature augmentation and data augmentation for the recommendation scenario. Comprehensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate ClardRec is effective in both collaborative filtering and sequential recommendation scenarios.
श्री राष्ट्रीय परशुराम सेना संघ बीकानेर
Authors: अर्जुन पंचारिया सिंधू
Date: 2024-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: By official biography page 2024 12

श्री राष्ट्रीय परशुराम सेना संघ बीकानेर के युवा मोर्चा जिलाध्यक्ष अर्जुन पंचारिया है तथा 26 अक्टूबर 2024 को अर्जुन पंचारिया सिंधू को जिलाधयक्ष के पद पर राष्ट्र अध्यक्ष दिनेश रानेजा और कार्य कारी निदेशक सुरज करण शर्मा द्वारा नियुक्त किया गया था
Early Versus Late Traffic Management For Autonomous Agents
Authors: Salman Ghori, Ania Adil, Eric Feron
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Intersections pose critical challenges in traffic management, where maintaining operational constraints and ensuring safety are essential for efficient flow. This paper investigates the effect of intervention timing in management strategies on maintaining operational constraints at intersections while ensuring safe separation distance, avoiding collisions, and minimizing delay. We introduce control regions, represented as circles around the intersection, which refers to the timing of interventions by a centralized control system when agents approach the intersection. We use a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach to optimize the system's performance. To analyze the effectiveness of early and late control measures, a simulation study is conducted, focusing on the safe, efficient, and robust management of agent movement within the control regions.
IndMask: Inductive Explanation for Multivariate Time Series Black-Box Models
Authors: Seham Nasr, Sandipan Sikdar
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Conference 2024 10
Tasks: Explanation Generation, Time Series, Time Series Classification, Time Series Prediction

In this paper, we introduce IndMask, a framework for explaining decisions of black-box time series models. While there exists a plethora of methods for providing explanations of machine learning models, time series data requires additional considerations. One needs to consider the time aspect in the explanations as well as deal with a large number of input features. Recent work has proposed explaining a time series prediction by generating a mask over the input time series. Each entry in the mask corresponds to an importance score for each feature at each time step. However, these methods only generate instancewise explanations, which means a mask needs to be computed for each input individually, thereby making them unsuited for inductive settings, where explanations need to be generated for numerous inputs, and instancewise explanation generation is severely prohibitive. Additionally, these methods have mostly been evaluated on simple recurrent neural networks and are often only applicable to a specific downstream task. Our proposed framework IndMask addresses these issues by utilizing a parameterized model for mask generation. We also go beyond recurrent neural networks and deploy IndMask to transformer architectures, thereby genuinely demonstrating its model-agnostic nature. The effectiveness of IndMask is further demonstrated through experiments over real-world datasets and time series classification and forecasting tasks. It is also computationally efficient and can be deployed in conjunction with any time series model.
Comparative Analysis of Control Observer-Based Methods for State Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries in Practical Scenarios
Authors: Muhammad Saeed, Arash Khalatbarisoltani, Zhongwei Deng, Wenxue Liu, Faisal Altaf, Shuai Lu, Xiaosong Hu
Date: 2024-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

The reliability, lower computational complexity, and ease of implementation of control observers make them one of the most promising methods for the state estimation of Li-ion batteries (LIBs) in commercial applications. To pave their way, this study performs a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of four main categories of control observer-based methods in different practical scenarios considering estimation accuracy, computational time convergence speed, stability, and robustness against measurement uncertainties. Observers are designed using a second-order equivalent circuit model whose observability against different scenarios is rigorously investigated to verify the feasibility of the proposed analysis. Established techniques then are validated against driving datasets and their comparative usefulness is evaluated using an experimental setup. The analysis also evaluates the adaptability of different techniques to electric vehicle field data. The results indicate better accuracy, stability, robustness, and faster convergence for the PI and PID, while the estimations of the Luenberger observers find it hard to converge against highly dynamic loadfiles. Moreover, this study also discusses the sensitivity of observer-based techniques to battery ohmic polarization and voltage-related measurement uncertainties. The most remarkable contribution of the proposed study lies in providing guidance for researchers when choosing the control observers for online state estimation of LIBs.
Prior Biological Knowledge And Epigenetic Information Enhances Prediction Accuracy Of Bayesian Wnt Pathway
Authors: Shriprakash Sinha, Marcel J. T. Reinders, Wim Verhaegh
Date: 2013-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Computational modeling of Wnt signaling pathway has gained prominence for its use as computer aided diagnostic tool to develop therapeutic cancer target drugs and predict of test samples as cancerous and non cancerous. This manuscript focuses on development of simple static bayesian network models of varying complexity that encompasses prior partially available biological knowledge about intra and extra cellular factors affecting the Wnt pathway and incorporates epigenetic information like methylation and histone modification of a few genes known to have inhibitory affect on Wnt pathway. It might be expected that such models not only increase cancer prediction accuracies and also form basis for understanding Wnt signaling activity in different states of tumorigenesis. Initial results in human colorectal cancer cases indicate that incorporation of epigenetic information increases prediction accuracy of test samples as being tumorous or normal. Receiver Operator Curves (ROC) and their respective area under the curve (AUC) measurements, obtained from predictions of state of test sample and corresponding predictions of the state of activation of transcription complex of the Wnt pathway for the test sample, indicate that there is significant difference between the Wnt pathway being on (off) and its association with the sample being tumorous (normal). Two sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test confirm the statistical deviation between the distributions of these predictions. At a preliminary stage, use of these models may help in understanding the yet unknown effect of certain factors like DKK2, DKK3-1 and SFRP-2/3/5 on {\beta}-catenin transcription complex.
Radio Frequency Ray Tracing with Neural Object Representation
Authors: Xingyu Chen, Zihao Feng, Kun Qian, Xinyu Zhang
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Radio frequency (RF) propagation modeling poses unique electromagnetic simulation challenges. While recent neural representations have shown success in visible spectrum rendering, the fundamentally different scales and physics of RF signals require novel modeling paradigms. In this paper, we introduce RFScape, a novel framework that bridges the gap between neural scene representation and RF propagation modeling. Our key insight is that complex RF-object interactions can be captured through object-centric neural representations while preserving the composability of traditional ray tracing. Unlike previous approaches that either rely on crude geometric approximations or require dense spatial sampling of entire scenes, RFScape learns per-object electromagnetic properties and enables flexible scene composition. Through extensive evaluation on real-world RF testbeds, we demonstrate that our approach achieves 13 dB improvement over conventional ray tracing and 5 dB over state-of-the-art neural baselines in modeling accuracy while requiring only sparse training samples.
Volume Rendering of Human Hand Anatomy
Authors: Jingtao Huang, Bohan Wang, Zhiyuan Gao, Mianlun Zheng, George Matcuk, Jernej Barbic
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy

We study the design of transfer functions for volumetric rendering of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets of human hands. Human hands are anatomically complex, containing various organs within a limited space, which presents challenges for volumetric rendering. We focus on hand musculoskeletal organs because they are volumetrically the largest inside the hand, and most important for the hand's main function, namely manipulation of objects. While volumetric rendering is a mature field, the choice of the transfer function for the different organs is arguably just as important as the choice of the specific volume rendering algorithm; we demonstrate that it significantly influences the clarity and interpretability of the resulting images. We assume that the hand MRI scans have already been segmented into the different organs (bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, subcutaneous fat, etc.). Our method uses the hand MRI volume data, and the geometry of its inner organs and their known segmentation, to produce high-quality volume rendering images of the hand, and permits fine control over the appearance of each tissue. We contribute two families of transfer functions to emphasize different hand tissues of interest, while preserving the visual context of the hand. We also discuss and reduce artifacts present in standard volume ray-casting of human hands. We evaluate our volumetric rendering on five challenging hand motion sequences. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method improves hand anatomy visualization, compared to standard surface and volume rendering techniques.
Machine Learning for Spectrum Sharing: A Survey
Authors: Francisco R. V. Guimarães, José Mairton B. da Silva Jr., Charles Casimiro Cavalcante, Gabor Fodor, Mats Bengtsson, Carlo Fischione
Date: 2024-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Survey

The 5th generation (5G) of wireless systems is being deployed with the aim to provide many sets of wireless communication services, such as low data rates for a massive amount of devices, broadband, low latency, and industrial wireless access. Such an aim is even more complex in the next generation wireless systems (6G) where wireless connectivity is expected to serve any connected intelligent unit, such as software robots and humans interacting in the metaverse, autonomous vehicles, drones, trains, or smart sensors monitoring cities, buildings, and the environment. Because of the wireless devices will be orders of magnitude denser than in 5G cellular systems, and because of their complex quality of service requirements, the access to the wireless spectrum will have to be appropriately shared to avoid congestion, poor quality of service, or unsatisfactory communication delays. Spectrum sharing methods have been the objective of intense study through model-based approaches, such as optimization or game theories. However, these methods may fail when facing the complexity of the communication environments in 5G, 6G, and beyond. Recently, there has been significant interest in the application and development of data-driven methods, namely machine learning methods, to handle the complex operation of spectrum sharing. In this survey, we provide a complete overview of the state-of-theart of machine learning for spectrum sharing. First, we map the most prominent methods that we encounter in spectrum sharing. Then, we show how these machine learning methods are applied to the numerous dimensions and sub-problems of spectrum sharing, such as spectrum sensing, spectrum allocation, spectrum access, and spectrum handoff. We also highlight several open questions and future trends.