pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Predicting Breast Cancer Survival: A Survival Analysis Approach Using Log Odds and Clinical Variables
Authors: Opeyemi Sheu Alamu, Bismar Jorge Gutierrez Choque, Syed Wajeeh Abbs Rizvi, Samah Badr Hammed, Isameldin Elamin Medani, Md Kamrul Siam, Waqar Ahmad Tahir
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Survival Analysis

Breast cancer remains a significant global health challenge, with prognosis and treatment decisions largely dependent on clinical characteristics. Accurate prediction of patient outcomes is crucial for personalized treatment strategies. This study employs survival analysis techniques, including Cox proportional hazards and parametric survival models, to enhance the prediction of the log odds of survival in breast cancer patients. Clinical variables such as tumor size, hormone receptor status, HER2 status, age, and treatment history were analyzed to assess their impact on survival outcomes. Data from 1557 breast cancer patients were obtained from a publicly available dataset provided by the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. This dataset was preprocessed and analyzed using both univariate and multivariate approaches to evaluate survival outcomes. Kaplan-Meier survival curves were generated to visualize survival probabilities, while the Cox proportional hazards model identified key risk factors influencing mortality. The results showed that older age, larger tumor size, and HER2-positive status were significantly associated with an increased risk of mortality. In contrast, estrogen receptor positivity and breast-conserving surgery were linked to better survival outcomes. The findings suggest that integrating these clinical variables into predictive models improvesthe accuracy of survival predictions, helping to identify high-risk patients who may benefit from more aggressive interventions. This study demonstrates the potential of survival analysis in optimizing breast cancer care, particularly in resource-limited settings. Future research should focus on integrating genomic data and real-world clinical outcomes to further refine these models.
A Self-Constructing Multi-Expert Fuzzy System for High-dimensional Data Classification
Authors: Yingtao Ren, Yu-Cheng Chang, Thomas Do, Zehong Cao, Chin-Teng Lin
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00

Fuzzy Neural Networks (FNNs) are effective machine learning models for classification tasks, commonly based on the Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy system. However, when faced with high-dimensional data, especially with noise, FNNs encounter challenges such as vanishing gradients, excessive fuzzy rules, and limited access to prior knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose a novel fuzzy system, the Self-Constructing Multi-Expert Fuzzy System (SOME-FS). It combines two learning strategies: mixed structure learning and multi-expert advanced learning. The former enables each base classifier to effectively determine its structure without requiring prior knowledge, while the latter tackles the issue of vanishing gradients by enabling each rule to focus on its local region, thereby enhancing the robustness of the fuzzy classifiers. The overall ensemble architecture enhances the stability and prediction performance of the fuzzy system. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SOME-FS is effective in high-dimensional tabular data, especially in dealing with uncertainty. Moreover, our stable rule mining process can identify concise and core rules learned by the SOME-FS.
Data-Augmented Predictive Deep Neural Network: Enhancing the extrapolation capabilities of non-intrusive surrogate models
Authors: Shuwen Sun, Lihong Feng, Peter Benner
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Numerically solving a large parametric nonlinear dynamical system is challenging due to its high complexity and the high computational costs. In recent years, machine-learning-aided surrogates are being actively researched. However, many methods fail in accurately generalizing in the entire time interval $[0, T]$, when the training data is available only in a training time interval $[0, T_0]$, with $T_0<T$. To improve the extrapolation capabilities of the surrogate models in the entire time domain, we propose a new deep learning framework, where kernel dynamic mode decomposition (KDMD) is employed to evolve the dynamics of the latent space generated by the encoder part of a convolutional autoencoder (CAE). After adding the KDMD-decoder-extrapolated data into the original data set, we train the CAE along with a feed-forward deep neural network using the augmented data. The trained network can predict future states outside the training time interval at any out-of-training parameter samples. The proposed method is tested on two numerical examples: a FitzHugh-Nagumo model and a model of incompressible flow past a cylinder. Numerical results show accurate and fast prediction performance in both the time and the parameter domain.
Addressing Heterogeneity and Heterophily in Graphs: A Heterogeneous Heterophilic Spectral Graph Neural Network
Authors: Kangkang Lu, Yanhua Yu, Zhiyong Huang, Jia Li, Yuling Wang, Meiyu Liang, Xiting Qin, Yimeng Ren, Tat-Seng Chua, Xidian Wang
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have garnered significant scholarly attention for their powerful capabilities in modeling graph structures. Despite this, two primary challenges persist: heterogeneity and heterophily. Existing studies often address heterogeneous and heterophilic graphs separately, leaving a research gap in the understanding of heterogeneous heterophilic graphs-those that feature diverse node or relation types with dissimilar connected nodes. To address this gap, we investigate the application of spectral graph filters within heterogeneous graphs. Specifically, we propose a Heterogeneous Heterophilic Spectral Graph Neural Network (H2SGNN), which employs a dual-module approach: local independent filtering and global hybrid filtering. The local independent filtering module applies polynomial filters to each subgraph independently to adapt to different homophily, while the global hybrid filtering module captures interactions across different subgraphs. Extensive empirical evaluations on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of H2SGNN compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Statistical testing on generative AI anomaly detection tools in Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis
Authors: Rosemary He, Ichiro Takeuchi
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series

Alzheimer's Disease is challenging to diagnose due to our limited understanding of its mechanism and large heterogeneity among patients. Neurodegeneration is studied widely as a biomarker for clinical diagnosis, which can be measured from time series MRI progression. On the other hand, generative AI has shown promise in anomaly detection in medical imaging and used for tasks including tumor detection. However, testing the reliability of such data-driven methods is non-trivial due to the issue of double-dipping in hypothesis testing. In this work, we propose to solve this issue with selective inference and develop a reliable generative AI method for Alzheimer's prediction. We show that compared to traditional statistical methods with highly inflated p-values, selective inference successfully controls the false discovery rate under the desired alpha level while retaining statistical power. In practice, our pipeline could assist clinicians in Alzheimer's diagnosis and early intervention.
Do LLMs Overcome Shortcut Learning? An Evaluation of Shortcut Challenges in Large Language Models
Authors: Yu Yuan, Lili Zhao, Kai Zhang, Guangting Zheng, Qi Liu
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various natural language processing tasks. However, LLMs may rely on dataset biases as shortcuts for prediction, which can significantly impair their robustness and generalization capabilities. This paper presents Shortcut Suite, a comprehensive test suite designed to evaluate the impact of shortcuts on LLMs' performance, incorporating six shortcut types, five evaluation metrics, and four prompting strategies. Our extensive experiments yield several key findings: 1) LLMs demonstrate varying reliance on shortcuts for downstream tasks, significantly impairing their performance. 2) Larger LLMs are more likely to utilize shortcuts under zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning prompts. 3) Chain-of-thought prompting notably reduces shortcut reliance and outperforms other prompting strategies, while few-shot prompts generally underperform compared to zero-shot prompts. 4) LLMs often exhibit overconfidence in their predictions, especially when dealing with datasets that contain shortcuts. 5) LLMs generally have a lower explanation quality in shortcut-laden datasets, with errors falling into three types: distraction, disguised comprehension, and logical fallacy. Our findings offer new insights for evaluating robustness and generalization in LLMs and suggest potential directions for mitigating the reliance on shortcuts. The code is available at \url {https://github.com/yyhappier/ShortcutSuite.git}.
Limits to scalable evaluation at the frontier: LLM as Judge won't beat twice the data
Authors: Florian E. Dorner, Vivian Y. Nastl, Moritz Hardt
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00

High quality annotations are increasingly a bottleneck in the explosively growing machine learning ecosystem. Scalable evaluation methods that avoid costly annotation have therefore become an important research ambition. Many hope to use strong existing models in lieu of costly labels to provide cheap model evaluations. Unfortunately, this method of using models as judges introduces biases, such as self-preferencing, that can distort model comparisons. An emerging family of debiasing tools promises to fix these issues by using a few high quality labels to debias a large number of model judgments. In this paper, we study how far such debiasing methods, in principle, can go. Our main result shows that when the judge is no more accurate than the evaluated model, no debiasing method can decrease the required amount of ground truth labels by more than half. Our result speaks to the severe limitations of the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm at the evaluation frontier where the goal is to assess newly released models that are possibly better than the judge. Through an empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that the sample size savings achievable in practice are even more modest than what our theoretical limit suggests. Along the way, our work provides new observations about debiasing methods for model evaluation, and points out promising avenues for future work.
A theoretical perspective on mode collapse in variational inference
Authors: Roman Soletskyi, Marylou Gabrié, Bruno Loureiro
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

While deep learning has expanded the possibilities for highly expressive variational families, the practical benefits of these tools for variational inference (VI) are often limited by the minimization of the traditional Kullback-Leibler objective, which can yield suboptimal solutions. A major challenge in this context is \emph{mode collapse}: the phenomenon where a model concentrates on a few modes of the target distribution during training, despite being statistically capable of expressing them all. In this work, we carry a theoretical investigation of mode collapse for the gradient flow on Gaussian mixture models. We identify the key low-dimensional statistics characterizing the flow, and derive a closed set of low-dimensional equations governing their evolution. Leveraging this compact description, we show that mode collapse is present even in statistically favorable scenarios, and identify two key mechanisms driving it: mean alignment and vanishing weight. Our theoretical findings are consistent with the implementation of VI using normalizing flows, a class of popular generative models, thereby offering practical insights.
An Online Learning Approach to Prompt-based Selection of Generative Models
Authors: Xiaoyan Hu, Ho-fung Leung, Farzan Farnia
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to text

Selecting a sample generation scheme from multiple text-based generative models is typically addressed by choosing the model that maximizes an averaged evaluation score. However, this score-based selection overlooks the possibility that different models achieve the best generation performance for different types of text prompts. An online identification of the best generation model for various input prompts can reduce the costs associated with querying sub-optimal models. In this work, we explore the possibility of varying rankings of text-based generative models for different text prompts and propose an online learning framework to predict the best data generation model for a given input prompt. The proposed framework adapts the kernelized contextual bandit (CB) methodology to a CB setting with shared context variables across arms, utilizing the generated data to update a kernel-based function that predicts which model will achieve the highest score for unseen text prompts. Additionally, we apply random Fourier features (RFF) to the kernelized CB algorithm to accelerate the online learning process and establish a $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for the proposed RFF-based CB algorithm over T iterations. Our numerical experiments on real and simulated text-to-image and image-to-text generative models show RFF-UCB performs successfully in identifying the best generation model across different sample types.
A Human-in-the-Loop Fairness-Aware Model Selection Framework for Complex Fairness Objective Landscapes
Authors: Jake Robertson, Thorsten Schmidt, Frank Hutter, Noor Awad
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Model Selection, Navigate

Fairness-aware Machine Learning (FairML) applications are often characterized by complex social objectives and legal requirements, frequently involving multiple, potentially conflicting notions of fairness. Despite the well-known Impossibility Theorem of Fairness and extensive theoretical research on the statistical and socio-technical trade-offs between fairness metrics, many FairML tools still optimize or constrain for a single fairness objective. However, this one-sided optimization can inadvertently lead to violations of other relevant notions of fairness. In this socio-technical and empirical study, we frame fairness as a many-objective (MaO) problem by treating fairness metrics as conflicting objectives. We introduce ManyFairHPO, a human-in-the-loop, fairness-aware model selection framework that enables practitioners to effectively navigate complex and nuanced fairness objective landscapes. ManyFairHPO aids in the identification, evaluation, and balancing of fairness metric conflicts and their related social consequences, leading to more informed and socially responsible model-selection decisions. Through a comprehensive empirical evaluation and a case study on the Law School Admissions problem, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ManyFairHPO in balancing multiple fairness objectives, mitigating risks such as self-fulfilling prophecies, and providing interpretable insights to guide stakeholders in making fairness-aware modeling decisions.
FDF: Flexible Decoupled Framework for Time Series Forecasting with Conditional Denoising and Polynomial Modeling
Authors: Jintao Zhang, Mingyue Cheng, Xiaoyu Tao, Zhiding Liu, Daoyu Wang
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Denoising, GPU, Inductive Bias, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is vital in numerous web applications, influencing critical decision-making across industries. While diffusion models have recently gained increasing popularity for this task, we argue they suffer from a significant drawback: indiscriminate noise addition to the original time series followed by denoising, which can obscure underlying dynamic evolving trend and complicate forecasting. To address this limitation, we propose a novel flexible decoupled framework (FDF) that learns high-quality time series representations for enhanced forecasting performance. A key characteristic of our approach leverages the inherent inductive bias of time series data of its decomposed trend and seasonal components, each modeled separately to enable decoupled analysis and modeling. Specifically, we propose an innovative Conditional Denoising Seasonal Module (CDSM) within the diffusion model, which leverages statistical information from the historical window to conditionally model the complex seasonal component. Notably, we incorporate a Polynomial Trend Module (PTM) to effectively capture the smooth trend component, thereby enhancing the model's ability to represent temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating superior performance over existing methods and highlighting its flexibility in time series forecasting. The source code is available at https://github.com/zjt-gpu/FDF.
Balancing Label Quantity and Quality for Scalable Elicitation
Authors: Alex Mallen, Nora Belrose
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Language Modelling

Scalable oversight studies methods of training and evaluating AI systems in domains where human judgment is unreliable or expensive, such as scientific research and software engineering in complex codebases. Most work in this area has focused on methods of improving the quality of labels. Recent work by Burns et al. (2023) considers the complementary problem of training models with low-quality labels, finding that large pretrained models often have an inductive bias towards producing correct answers. In practice, however, neither label quantity nor quality is fixed: practitioners face a quantity-quality tradeoff. In this paper, we explore the microeconomics of the quantity-quality tradeoff on binary NLP classification tasks used in Burns et al. (2023). While sample-efficient learning has been studied extensively, little public research has focused on scalable elicitation: eliciting capabilities from pretrained models subject to labeling cost constraints. We find that this setting has novel dynamics caused by the tradeoff between label quantity and quality, as well as the model's existing latent capabilities. We observe three regimes of eliciting classification knowledge from pretrained models using supervised finetuning: quantity-dominant, quality-dominant, and a mixed regime involving the use of low- and high-quality data together to attain higher accuracy at a lower cost than using either alone. We explore sample-efficient elicitation methods that make use of two datasets of differing qualities, and establish a Pareto frontier of scalable elicitation methods that optimally trade off labeling cost and classifier performance. We find that the accuracy of supervised fine-tuning can be improved by up to 5 percentage points at a fixed labeling budget by adding a few-shot prompt to make use of the model's existing knowledge of the task.
L1-Regularized ICA: A Novel Method for Analysis of Task-related fMRI Data
Authors: Yusuke Endo, Koujin Takeda
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00

We propose a new method of independent component analysis (ICA) in order to extract appropriate features from high-dimensional data. In general, matrix factorization methods including ICA have a problem regarding the interpretability of extracted features. For the improvement of interpretability, it is considered that sparse constraint on a factorized matrix is helpful. With this background, we construct a new ICA method with sparsity. In our method, the L1-regularization term is added to the cost function of ICA, and minimization of the cost function is performed by difference of convex functions algorithm. For the validity of our proposed method, we apply it to synthetic data and real functional magnetic resonance imaging data.
Continuous normalizing flows for lattice gauge theories
Authors: Mathis Gerdes, Pim de Haan, Roberto Bondesan, Miranda C. N. Cheng
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00

Continuous normalizing flows are known to be highly expressive and flexible, which allows for easier incorporation of large symmetries and makes them a powerful tool for sampling in lattice field theories. Building on previous work, we present a general continuous normalizing flow architecture for matrix Lie groups that is equivariant under group transformations. We apply this to lattice gauge theories in two dimensions as a proof-of-principle and demonstrate competitive performance, showing its potential as a tool for future lattice sampling tasks.
Data Driven Environmental Awareness Using Wireless Signals
Authors: Hossein Nasiri, Seda Dogan-Tusha, Muhammad Iqbal Rochman, Monisha Ghosh
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Robust classification

Robust classification of the operational environment of wireless devices is becoming increasingly important for wireless network optimization, particularly in a shared spectrum environment. Distinguishing between indoor and outdoor devices can enhance reliability and improve coexistence with existing, outdoor, incumbents. For instance, the unlicensed but shared 6 GHz band (5.925 - 7.125 GHz) enables sharing by imposing lower transmit power for indoor unlicensed devices and a spectrum coordination requirement for outdoor devices. Further, indoor devices are prohibited from using battery power, external antennas, and weatherization to prevent outdoor operations. As these rules may be circumvented, we propose a robust indoor/outdoor classification method by leveraging the fact that the radio-frequency environment faced by a device are quite different indoors and outdoors. We first collect signal strength data from all cellular and Wi-Fi bands that can be received by a smartphone in various environments (indoor interior, indoor near windows, and outdoors), along with GPS accuracy, and then evaluate three machine learning (ML) methods: deep neural network (DNN), decision tree, and random forest to perform classification into these three categories. Our results indicate that the DNN model performs the best, particularly in minimizing the most important classification error, that of classifying outdoor devices as indoor interior devices.
Learning Efficient Representations of Neutrino Telescope Events
Authors: Felix J. Yu, Nicholas Kamp, Carlos A. Argüelles
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Descriptive

Neutrino telescopes detect rare interactions of particles produced in some of the most extreme environments in the Universe. This is accomplished by instrumenting a cubic-kilometer volume of naturally occurring transparent medium with light sensors. Given their substantial size and the high frequency of background interactions, these telescopes amass an enormous quantity of large variance, high-dimensional data. These attributes create substantial challenges for analyzing and reconstructing interactions, particularly when utilizing machine learning (ML) techniques. In this paper, we present a novel approach, called om2vec, that employs transformer-based variational autoencoders to efficiently represent neutrino telescope events by learning compact and descriptive latent representations. We demonstrate that these latent representations offer enhanced flexibility and improved computational efficiency, thereby facilitating downstream tasks in data analysis.