pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Discrete Latent Variable Structures with Tensor Rank Conditions
Authors: Zhengming Chen, Ruichu Cai, Feng Xie, Jie Qiao, Anpeng Wu, Zijian Li, Zhifeng Hao, Kun Zhang
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

Unobserved discrete data are ubiquitous in many scientific disciplines, and how to learn the causal structure of these latent variables is crucial for uncovering data patterns. Most studies focus on the linear latent variable model or impose strict constraints on latent structures, which fail to address cases in discrete data involving non-linear relationships or complex latent structures. To achieve this, we explore a tensor rank condition on contingency tables for an observed variable set $\mathbf{X}_p$, showing that the rank is determined by the minimum support of a specific conditional set (not necessary in $\mathbf{X}_p$) that d-separates all variables in $\mathbf{X}_p$. By this, one can locate the latent variable through probing the rank on different observed variables set, and further identify the latent causal structure under some structure assumptions. We present the corresponding identification algorithm and conduct simulated experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method. In general, our results elegantly extend the identification boundary for causal discovery with discrete latent variables and expand the application scope of causal discovery with latent variables.
MoreauPruner: Robust Pruning of Large Language Models against Weight Perturbations
Authors: Zixiao Wang, Jingwei Zhang, Wenqian Zhao, Farzan Farnia, Bei Yu
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00

Few-shot gradient methods have been extensively utilized in existing model pruning methods, where the model weights are regarded as static values and the effects of potential weight perturbations are not considered. However, the widely used large language models (LLMs) have several billion model parameters, which could increase the fragility of few-shot gradient pruning. In this work, we experimentally show that one-shot gradient pruning algorithms could lead to unstable results under perturbations to model weights. And the minor error of switching between data formats bfloat16 and float16 could result in drastically different outcomes. To address such instabilities, we leverage optimization analysis and propose an LLM structural pruning method, called MoreauPruner, with provable robustness against weight perturbations. In MoreauPruner, the model weight importance is estimated based on the neural network's Moreau envelope, which can be flexibly combined with $\ell_1$-norm regularization techniques to induce the sparsity required in the pruning task. We extensively evaluate the MoreauPruner algorithm on several well-known LLMs, including LLaMA-7B, LLaMA-13B, LLaMA3-8B, and Vicuna-7B. Our numerical results suggest the robustness of MoreauPruner against weight perturbations, and indicate the MoreauPruner's successful accuracy-based scores in comparison to several existing pruning methods. We have released the code in \url{https://github.com/ShiningSord/MoreauPruner}.
DecoR: Deconfounding Time Series with Robust Regression
Authors: Felix Schur, Jonas Peters
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, regression, Time Series

Causal inference on time series data is a challenging problem, especially in the presence of unobserved confounders. This work focuses on estimating the causal effect between two time series that are confounded by a third, unobserved time series. Assuming spectral sparsity of the confounder, we show how in the frequency domain this problem can be framed as an adversarial outlier problem. We introduce Deconfounding by Robust regression (DecoR), a novel approach that estimates the causal effect using robust linear regression in the frequency domain. Considering two different robust regression techniques, we first improve existing bounds on the estimation error for such techniques. Crucially, our results do not require distributional assumptions on the covariates. We can therefore use them in time series settings. Applying these results to DecoR, we prove, under suitable assumptions, upper bounds for the estimation error of DecoR that imply consistency. We demonstrate DecoR's effectiveness through experiments on both synthetic and real-world data from Earth system science. The simulation experiments furthermore suggest that DecoR is robust with respect to model misspecification.
DNN Partitioning, Task Offloading, and Resource Allocation in Dynamic Vehicular Networks: A Lyapunov-Guided Diffusion-Based Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Zhang Liu, Hongyang Du, Junzhe Lin, Zhibin Gao, Lianfen Huang, Seyyedali Hosseinalipour, Dusit Niyato
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Edge-computing

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based tasks to the ecosystem of vehicular networks. These tasks are often computation-intensive, requiring substantial computation resources, which are beyond the capability of a single vehicle. To address this challenge, Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) has emerged as a solution, offering computing services for DNN-based tasks through resource pooling via Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Infrastructure (V2V/V2I) communications. In this paper, we formulate the problem of joint DNN partitioning, task offloading, and resource allocation in VEC as a dynamic long-term optimization. Our objective is to minimize the DNN-based task completion time while guaranteeing the system stability over time. To this end, we first leverage a Lyapunov optimization technique to decouple the original long-term optimization with stability constraints into a per-slot deterministic problem. Afterwards, we propose a Multi-Agent Diffusion-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (MAD2RL) algorithm, incorporating the innovative use of diffusion models to determine the optimal DNN partitioning and task offloading decisions. Furthermore, we integrate convex optimization techniques into MAD2RL as a subroutine to allocate computation resources, enhancing the learning efficiency. Through simulations under real-world movement traces of vehicles, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed algorithm compared to existing benchmark solutions.
On the Hölder Stability of Multiset and Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Yair Davidson, Nadav Dym
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

Extensive research efforts have been put into characterizing and constructing maximally separating multiset and graph neural networks. However, recent empirical evidence suggests the notion of separation itself doesn't capture several interesting phenomena. On the one hand, the quality of this separation may be very weak, to the extent that the embeddings of "separable" objects might even be considered identical when using fixed finite precision. On the other hand, architectures which aren't capable of separation in theory, somehow achieve separation when taking the network to be wide enough. In this work, we address both of these issues, by proposing a novel pair-wise separation quality analysis framework which is based on an adaptation of Lipschitz and \Holder{} stability to parametric functions. The proposed framework, which we name \emph{\Holder{} in expectation}, allows for separation quality analysis, without restricting the analysis to embeddings that can separate all the input space simultaneously. We prove that common sum-based models are lower-\Holder{} in expectation, with an exponent that decays rapidly with the network's depth . Our analysis leads to adversarial examples of graphs which can be separated by three 1-WL iterations, but cannot be separated in practice by standard maximally powerful Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). To remedy this, we propose two novel MPNNs with improved separation quality, one of which is lower Lipschitz in expectation. We show these MPNNs can easily classify our adversarial examples, and compare favorably with standard MPNNs on standard graph learning tasks.
AudioMarkBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Audio Watermarking
Authors: Hongbin Liu, Moyang Guo, Zhengyuan Jiang, Lun Wang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

The increasing realism of synthetic speech, driven by advancements in text-to-speech models, raises ethical concerns regarding impersonation and disinformation. Audio watermarking offers a promising solution via embedding human-imperceptible watermarks into AI-generated audios. However, the robustness of audio watermarking against common/adversarial perturbations remains understudied. We present AudioMarkBench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the robustness of audio watermarking against watermark removal and watermark forgery. AudioMarkBench includes a new dataset created from Common-Voice across languages, biological sexes, and ages, 3 state-of-the-art watermarking methods, and 15 types of perturbations. We benchmark the robustness of these methods against the perturbations in no-box, black-box, and white-box settings. Our findings highlight the vulnerabilities of current watermarking techniques and emphasize the need for more robust and fair audio watermarking solutions. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/moyangkuo/AudioMarkBench.
Cross-domain-aware Worker Selection with Training for Crowdsourced Annotation
Authors: Yushi Sun, Jiachuan Wang, Peng Cheng, Libin Zheng, Lei Chen, Jian Yin
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00

Annotation through crowdsourcing draws incremental attention, which relies on an effective selection scheme given a pool of workers. Existing methods propose to select workers based on their performance on tasks with ground truth, while two important points are missed. 1) The historical performances of workers in other tasks. In real-world scenarios, workers need to solve a new task whose correlation with previous tasks is not well-known before the training, which is called cross-domain. 2) The dynamic worker performance as workers will learn from the ground truth. In this paper, we consider both factors in designing an allocation scheme named cross-domain-aware worker selection with training approach. Our approach proposes two estimation modules to both statistically analyze the cross-domain correlation and simulate the learning gain of workers dynamically. A framework with a theoretical analysis of the worker elimination process is given. To validate the effectiveness of our methods, we collect two novel real-world datasets and generate synthetic datasets. The experiment results show that our method outperforms the baselines on both real-world and synthetic datasets.
Low Rank Multi-Dictionary Selection at Scale
Authors: Boya Ma, Maxwell McNeil, Abram Magner, Petko Bogdanov
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00

The sparse dictionary coding framework represents signals as a linear combination of a few predefined dictionary atoms. It has been employed for images, time series, graph signals and recently for 2-way (or 2D) spatio-temporal data employing jointly temporal and spatial dictionaries. Large and over-complete dictionaries enable high-quality models, but also pose scalability challenges which are exacerbated in multi-dictionary settings. Hence, an important problem that we address in this paper is: How to scale multi-dictionary coding for large dictionaries and datasets? We propose a multi-dictionary atom selection technique for low-rank sparse coding named LRMDS. To enable scalability to large dictionaries and datasets, it progressively selects groups of row-column atom pairs based on their alignment with the data and performs convex relaxation coding via the corresponding sub-dictionaries. We demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally that when the data has a low-rank encoding with a sparse subset of the atoms, LRMDS is able to select them with strong guarantees under mild assumptions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the scalability and quality of LRMDS in both synthetic and real-world datasets and for a range of coding dictionaries. It achieves 3X to 10X speed-up compared to baselines, while obtaining up to two orders of magnitude improvement in representation quality on some of the real world datasets given a fixed target number of atoms.
ElasticRec: A Microservice-based Model Serving Architecture Enabling Elastic Resource Scaling for Recommendation Models
Authors: Yujeong Choi, Jiin Kim, Minsoo Rhu
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

With the increasing popularity of recommendation systems (RecSys), the demand for compute resources in datacenters has surged. However, the model-wise resource allocation employed in current RecSys model serving architectures falls short in effectively utilizing resources, leading to sub-optimal total cost of ownership. We propose ElasticRec, a model serving architecture for RecSys providing resource elasticity and high memory efficiency. ElasticRec is based on a microservice-based software architecture for fine-grained resource allocation, tailored to the heterogeneous resource demands of RecSys. Additionally, ElasticRec achieves high memory efficiency via our utility-based resource allocation. Overall, ElasticRec achieves an average 3.3x reduction in memory allocation size and 8.1x increase in memory utility, resulting in an average 1.6x reduction in deployment cost compared to state-of-the-art RecSys inference serving system.
Distributional MIPLIB: a Multi-Domain Library for Advancing ML-Guided MILP Methods
Authors: Weimin Huang, Taoan Huang, Aaron M Ferber, Bistra Dilkina
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental tool for modeling combinatorial optimization problems. Recently, a growing body of research has used machine learning to accelerate MILP solving. Despite the increasing popularity of this approach, there is a lack of a common repository that provides distributions of similar MILP instances across different domains, at different hardness levels, with standardized test sets. In this paper, we introduce Distributional MIPLIB, a multi-domain library of problem distributions for advancing ML-guided MILP methods. We curate MILP distributions from existing work in this area as well as real-world problems that have not been used, and classify them into different hardness levels. It will facilitate research in this area by enabling comprehensive evaluation on diverse and realistic domains. We empirically illustrate the benefits of using Distributional MIPLIB as a research vehicle in two ways. We evaluate the performance of ML-guided variable branching on previously unused distributions to identify potential areas for improvement. Moreover, we propose to learn branching policies from a mix of distributions, demonstrating that mixed distributions achieve better performance compared to homogeneous distributions when there is limited data and generalize well to larger instances. The dataset is publicly available at https://sites.google.com/usc.edu/distributional-miplib/home.
Non-autoregressive Personalized Bundle Generation
Authors: Wenchuan Yang, Cheng Yang, Jichao Li, Yuejin Tan, Xin Lu, Chuan Shi
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Graph Neural Network, Inductive Bias

The personalized bundle generation problem, which aims to create a preferred bundle for user from numerous candidate items, receives increasing attention in recommendation. However, existing works ignore the order-invariant nature of the bundle and adopt sequential modeling methods as the solution, which might introduce inductive bias and cause a large latency in prediction. To address this problem, we propose to perform the bundle generation via non-autoregressive mechanism and design a novel encoder-decoder framework named BundleNAT, which can effectively output the targeted bundle in one-shot without relying on any inherent order. In detail, instead of learning sequential dependency, we propose to adopt pre-training techniques and graph neural network to fully embed user-based preference and item-based compatibility information, and use a self-attention based encoder to further extract global dependency pattern. We then design a permutation-equivariant decoding architecture that is able to directly output the desired bundle in a one-shot manner. Experiments on three real-world datasets from Youshu and Netease show the proposed BundleNAT significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in average by up to 35.92%, 10.97% and 23.67% absolute improvements in Precision, Precision+, and Recall, respectively.
Theoretical Study of Conflict-Avoidant Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yudan Wang, Peiyao Xiao, Hao Ban, Kaiyi Ji, Shaofeng Zou
Date: 2024-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) has shown great promise in many real-world applications. Existing MTRL algorithms often aim to learn a policy that optimizes individual objective functions simultaneously with a given prior preference (or weights) on different tasks. However, these methods often suffer from the issue of \textit{gradient conflict} such that the tasks with larger gradients dominate the update direction, resulting in a performance degeneration on other tasks. In this paper, we develop a novel dynamic weighting multi-task actor-critic algorithm (MTAC) under two options of sub-procedures named as CA and FC in task weight updates. MTAC-CA aims to find a conflict-avoidant (CA) update direction that maximizes the minimum value improvement among tasks, and MTAC-FC targets at a much faster convergence rate. We provide a comprehensive finite-time convergence analysis for both algorithms. We show that MTAC-CA can find a $\epsilon+\epsilon_{\text{app}}$-accurate Pareto stationary policy using $\mathcal{O}({\epsilon^{-5}})$ samples, while ensuring a small $\epsilon+\sqrt{\epsilon_{\text{app}}}$-level CA distance (defined as the distance to the CA direction), where $\epsilon_{\text{app}}$ is the function approximation error. The analysis also shows that MTAC-FC improves the sample complexity to $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$, but with a constant-level CA distance. Our experiments on MT10 demonstrate the improved performance of our algorithms over existing MTRL methods with fixed preference.
Training Dynamics of Nonlinear Contrastive Learning Model in the High Dimensional Limit
Authors: Lineghuan Meng, Chuang Wang
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, feature selection, L2 Regularization

This letter presents a high-dimensional analysis of the training dynamics for a single-layer nonlinear contrastive learning model. The empirical distribution of the model weights converges to a deterministic measure governed by a McKean-Vlasov nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE). Under L2 regularization, this PDE reduces to a closed set of low-dimensional ordinary differential equations (ODEs), reflecting the evolution of the model performance during the training process. We analyze the fixed point locations and their stability of the ODEs unveiling several interesting findings. First, only the hidden variable's second moment affects feature learnability at the state with uninformative initialization. Second, higher moments influence the probability of feature selection by controlling the attraction region, rather than affecting local stability. Finally, independent noises added in the data argumentation degrade performance but negatively correlated noise can reduces the variance of gradient estimation yielding better performance. Despite of the simplicity of the analyzed model, it exhibits a rich phenomena of training dynamics, paving a way to understand more complex mechanism behind practical large models.
On the Limitation of Kernel Dependence Maximization for Feature Selection
Authors: Keli Liu, Feng Ruan
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

A simple and intuitive method for feature selection consists of choosing the feature subset that maximizes a nonparametric measure of dependence between the response and the features. A popular proposal from the literature uses the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) as the nonparametric dependence measure. The rationale behind this approach to feature selection is that important features will exhibit a high dependence with the response and their inclusion in the set of selected features will increase the HSIC. Through counterexamples, we demonstrate that this rationale is flawed and that feature selection via HSIC maximization can miss critical features.
Nonlinear time-series embedding by monotone variational inequality
Authors: Jonathan Y. Zhou, Yao Xie
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Time Series

In the wild, we often encounter collections of sequential data such as electrocardiograms, motion capture, genomes, and natural language, and sequences may be multichannel or symbolic with nonlinear dynamics. We introduce a new method to learn low-dimensional representations of nonlinear time series without supervision and can have provable recovery guarantees. The learned representation can be used for downstream machine-learning tasks such as clustering and classification. The method is based on the assumption that the observed sequences arise from a common domain, but each sequence obeys its own autoregressive models that are related to each other through low-rank regularization. We cast the problem as a computationally efficient convex matrix parameter recovery problem using monotone Variational Inequality and encode the common domain assumption via low-rank constraint across the learned representations, which can learn the geometry for the entire domain as well as faithful representations for the dynamics of each individual sequence using the domain information in totality. We show the competitive performance of our method on real-world time-series data with the baselines and demonstrate its effectiveness for symbolic text modeling and RNA sequence clustering.
Transformers Provably Learn Sparse Token Selection While Fully-Connected Nets Cannot
Authors: Zixuan Wang, Stanley Wei, Daniel Hsu, Jason D. Lee
Date: 2024-06-11 00:00:00

The transformer architecture has prevailed in various deep learning settings due to its exceptional capabilities to select and compose structural information. Motivated by these capabilities, Sanford et al. proposed the sparse token selection task, in which transformers excel while fully-connected networks (FCNs) fail in the worst case. Building upon that, we strengthen the FCN lower bound to an average-case setting and establish an algorithmic separation of transformers over FCNs. Specifically, a one-layer transformer trained with gradient descent provably learns the sparse token selection task and, surprisingly, exhibits strong out-of-distribution length generalization. We provide empirical simulations to justify our theoretical findings.