pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Knowledge Graphs as Context Sources for LLM-Based Explanations of Learning Recommendations
Authors: Hasan Abu-Rasheed, Christian Weber, Madjid Fathi
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Prompt Engineering

In the era of personalized education, the provision of comprehensible explanations for learning recommendations is of a great value to enhance the learner's understanding and engagement with the recommended learning content. Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI in general have recently opened new doors for generating human-like explanations, for and along learning recommendations. However, their precision is still far away from acceptable in a sensitive field like education. To harness the abilities of LLMs, while still ensuring a high level of precision towards the intent of the learners, this paper proposes an approach to utilize knowledge graphs (KG) as a source of factual context, for LLM prompts, reducing the risk of model hallucinations, and safeguarding against wrong or imprecise information, while maintaining an application-intended learning context. We utilize the semantic relations in the knowledge graph to offer curated knowledge about learning recommendations. With domain-experts in the loop, we design the explanation as a textual template, which is filled and completed by the LLM. Domain experts were integrated in the prompt engineering phase as part of a study, to ensure that explanations include information that is relevant to the learner. We evaluate our approach quantitatively using Rouge-N and Rouge-L measures, as well as qualitatively with experts and learners. Our results show an enhanced recall and precision of the generated explanations compared to those generated solely by the GPT model, with a greatly reduced risk of generating imprecise information in the final learning explanation.
Mem-elements based Neuromorphic Hardware for Neural Network Application
Authors: Ankur Singh
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

The thesis investigates the utilization of memristive and memcapacitive crossbar arrays in low-power machine learning accelerators, offering a comprehensive co-design framework for deep neural networks (DNN). The model, implemented through a hybrid Python and PyTorch approach, accounts for various non-idealities, achieving exceptional training accuracies of 90.02% and 91.03% for the CIFAR-10 dataset with memristive and memcapacitive crossbar arrays on an 8-layer VGG network. Additionally, the thesis introduces a novel approach to emulate meminductor devices using Operational Transconductance Amplifiers (OTA) and capacitors, showcasing adjustable behavior. Transistor-level simulations in 180 nm CMOS technology, operating at 60 MHz, demonstrate the proposed meminductor emulator's viability with a power consumption of 0.337 mW. The design is further validated in neuromorphic circuits and CNN accelerators, achieving training and testing accuracies of 91.04% and 88.82%, respectively. Notably, the exclusive use of MOS transistors ensures the feasibility of monolithic IC fabrication. This research significantly contributes to the exploration of advanced hardware solutions for efficient and high-performance machine-learning applications.
Mitigating Label Flipping Attacks in Malicious URL Detectors Using Ensemble Trees
Authors: Ehsan Nowroozi, Nada Jadalla, Samaneh Ghelichkhani, Alireza Jolfaei
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

Malicious URLs provide adversarial opportunities across various industries, including transportation, healthcare, energy, and banking which could be detrimental to business operations. Consequently, the detection of these URLs is of crucial importance; however, current Machine Learning (ML) models are susceptible to backdoor attacks. These attacks involve manipulating a small percentage of training data labels, such as Label Flipping (LF), which changes benign labels to malicious ones and vice versa. This manipulation results in misclassification and leads to incorrect model behavior. Therefore, integrating defense mechanisms into the architecture of ML models becomes an imperative consideration to fortify against potential attacks. The focus of this study is on backdoor attacks in the context of URL detection using ensemble trees. By illuminating the motivations behind such attacks, highlighting the roles of attackers, and emphasizing the critical importance of effective defense strategies, this paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to fortify ML models against adversarial threats within the ML domain in network security. We propose an innovative alarm system that detects the presence of poisoned labels and a defense mechanism designed to uncover the original class labels with the aim of mitigating backdoor attacks on ensemble tree classifiers. We conducted a case study using the Alexa and Phishing Site URL datasets and showed that LF attacks can be addressed using our proposed defense mechanism. Our experimental results prove that the LF attack achieved an Attack Success Rate (ASR) between 50-65% within 2-5%, and the innovative defense method successfully detected poisoned labels with an accuracy of up to 100%.
Localized Zeroth-Order Prompt Optimization
Authors: Wenyang Hu, Yao Shu, Zongmin Yu, Zhaoxuan Wu, Xiangqiang Lin, Zhongxiang Dai, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

The efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and generating natural language has aroused a wide interest in developing prompt-based methods to harness the power of black-box LLMs. Existing methodologies usually prioritize a global optimization for finding the global optimum, which however will perform poorly in certain tasks. This thus motivates us to re-think the necessity of finding a global optimum in prompt optimization. To answer this, we conduct a thorough empirical study on prompt optimization and draw two major insights. Contrasting with the rarity of global optimum, local optima are usually prevalent and well-performed, which can be more worthwhile for efficient prompt optimization (Insight I). The choice of the input domain, covering both the generation and the representation of prompts, affects the identification of well-performing local optima (Insight II). Inspired by these insights, we propose a novel algorithm, namely localized zeroth-order prompt optimization (ZOPO), which incorporates a Neural Tangent Kernel-based derived Gaussian process into standard zeroth-order optimization for an efficient search of well-performing local optima in prompt optimization. Remarkably, ZOPO outperforms existing baselines in terms of both the optimization performance and the query efficiency, which we demonstrate through extensive experiments.
Data Augmentation using Large Language Models: Data Perspectives, Learning Paradigms and Challenges
Authors: Bosheng Ding, Chengwei Qin, Ruochen Zhao, Tianze Luo, Xinze Li, Guizhen Chen, Wenhan Xia, Junjie Hu, Anh Tuan Luu, Shafiq Joty
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Survey

In the rapidly evolving field of large language models (LLMs), data augmentation (DA) has emerged as a pivotal technique for enhancing model performance by diversifying training examples without the need for additional data collection. This survey explores the transformative impact of LLMs on DA, particularly addressing the unique challenges and opportunities they present in the context of natural language processing (NLP) and beyond. From both data and learning perspectives, we examine various strategies that utilize LLMs for data augmentation, including a novel exploration of learning paradigms where LLM-generated data is used for diverse forms of further training. Additionally, this paper highlights the primary open challenges faced in this domain, ranging from controllable data augmentation to multi-modal data augmentation. This survey highlights a paradigm shift introduced by LLMs in DA, and aims to serve as a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners.
Evolution Transformer: In-Context Evolutionary Optimization
Authors: Robert Tjarko Lange, Yingtao Tian, Yujin Tang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

Evolutionary optimization algorithms are often derived from loose biological analogies and struggle to leverage information obtained during the sequential course of optimization. An alternative promising approach is to leverage data and directly discover powerful optimization principles via meta-optimization. In this work, we follow such a paradigm and introduce Evolution Transformer, a causal Transformer architecture, which can flexibly characterize a family of Evolution Strategies. Given a trajectory of evaluations and search distribution statistics, Evolution Transformer outputs a performance-improving update to the search distribution. The architecture imposes a set of suitable inductive biases, i.e. the invariance of the distribution update to the order of population members within a generation and equivariance to the order of the search dimensions. We train the model weights using Evolutionary Algorithm Distillation, a technique for supervised optimization of sequence models using teacher algorithm trajectories. The resulting model exhibits strong in-context optimization performance and shows strong generalization capabilities to otherwise challenging neuroevolution tasks. We analyze the resulting properties of the Evolution Transformer and propose a technique to fully self-referentially train the Evolution Transformer, starting from a random initialization and bootstrapping its own learning progress. We provide an open source implementation under https://github.com/RobertTLange/evosax.
Federated Learning Under Attack: Exposing Vulnerabilities through Data Poisoning Attacks in Computer Networks
Authors: Ehsan Nowroozi, Imran Haider, Rahim Taheri, Mauro Conti
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning (ML) approach that enables multiple decentralized devices or edge servers to collaboratively train a shared model without exchanging raw data. During the training and sharing of model updates between clients and servers, data and models are susceptible to different data-poisoning attacks. In this study, our motivation is to explore the severity of data poisoning attacks in the computer network domain because they are easy to implement but difficult to detect. We considered two types of data-poisoning attacks, label flipping (LF) and feature poisoning (FP), and applied them with a novel approach. In LF, we randomly flipped the labels of benign data and trained the model on the manipulated data. For FP, we randomly manipulated the highly contributing features determined using the Random Forest algorithm. The datasets used in this experiment were CIC and UNSW related to computer networks. We generated adversarial samples using the two attacks mentioned above, which were applied to a small percentage of datasets. Subsequently, we trained and tested the accuracy of the model on adversarial datasets. We recorded the results for both benign and manipulated datasets and observed significant differences between the accuracy of the models on different datasets. From the experimental results, it is evident that the LF attack failed, whereas the FP attack showed effective results, which proved its significance in fooling a server. With a 1% LF attack on the CIC, the accuracy was approximately 0.0428 and the ASR was 0.9564; hence, the attack is easily detectable, while with a 1% FP attack, the accuracy and ASR were both approximately 0.9600, hence, FP attacks are difficult to detect. We repeated the experiment with different poisoning percentages.
A General and Flexible Multi-concept Parsing Framework for Multilingual Semantic Matching
Authors: Dong Yao, Asaad Alghamdi, Qingrong Xia, Xiaoye Qu, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Yi Zheng, Baoxing Huai, Peilun Cheng, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Community Question Answering, How to refund a wrong transaction in PhonePe, MRPC, NER, QQP, Question Answering, Sentence

Sentence semantic matching is a research hotspot in natural language processing, which is considerably significant in various key scenarios, such as community question answering, searching, chatbot, and recommendation. Since most of the advanced models directly model the semantic relevance among words between two sentences while neglecting the \textit{keywords} and \textit{intents} concepts of them, DC-Match is proposed to disentangle keywords from intents and utilizes them to optimize the matching performance. Although DC-Match is a simple yet effective method for semantic matching, it highly depends on the external NER techniques to identify the keywords of sentences, which limits the performance of semantic matching for minor languages since satisfactory NER tools are usually hard to obtain. In this paper, we propose to generally and flexibly resolve the text into multi concepts for multilingual semantic matching to liberate the model from the reliance on NER models. To this end, we devise a \underline{M}ulti-\underline{C}oncept \underline{P}arsed \underline{S}emantic \underline{M}atching framework based on the pre-trained language models, abbreviated as \textbf{MCP-SM}, to extract various concepts and infuse them into the classification tokens. We conduct comprehensive experiments on English datasets QQP and MRPC, and Chinese dataset Medical-SM. Besides, we experiment on Arabic datasets MQ2Q and XNLI, the outstanding performance further prove MCP-SM's applicability in low-resource languages.
Evidence-Focused Fact Summarization for Knowledge-Augmented Zero-Shot Question Answering
Authors: Sungho Ko, Hyunjin Cho, Hyungjoo Chae, Jinyoung Yeo, Dongha Lee
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering

Recent studies have investigated utilizing Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to enhance Quesetion Answering (QA) performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet structured KG verbalization remains challengin. Existing methods, such as triple-form or free-form textual conversion of triple-form facts, encounter several issues. These include reduced evidence density due to duplicated entities or relationships, and reduced evidence clarity due to an inability to emphasize crucial evidence. To address these issues, we propose EFSum, an Evidence-focused Fact Summarization framework for enhanced QA with knowledge-augmented LLMs. We optimize an open-source LLM as a fact summarizer through distillation and preference alignment. Our extensive experiments show that EFSum improves LLM's zero-shot QA performance, and it is possible to ensure both the helpfulness and faithfulness of the summary.
ChatGPT and biometrics: an assessment of face recognition, gender detection, and age estimation capabilities
Authors: Ahmad Hassanpour, Yasamin Kowsari, Hatef Otroshi Shahreza, Bian Yang, Sebastien Marcel
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Face Recognition

This paper explores the application of large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, for biometric tasks. We specifically examine the capabilities of ChatGPT in performing biometric-related tasks, with an emphasis on face recognition, gender detection, and age estimation. Since biometrics are considered as sensitive information, ChatGPT avoids answering direct prompts, and thus we crafted a prompting strategy to bypass its safeguard and evaluate the capabilities for biometrics tasks. Our study reveals that ChatGPT recognizes facial identities and differentiates between two facial images with considerable accuracy. Additionally, experimental results demonstrate remarkable performance in gender detection and reasonable accuracy for the age estimation tasks. Our findings shed light on the promising potentials in the application of LLMs and foundation models for biometrics.
WikiTableEdit: A Benchmark for Table Editing by Natural Language Instruction
Authors: Zheng Li, Xiang Chen, Xiaojun Wan
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

Tabular data, as a crucial form of data representation, exists in diverse formats on the Web. When confronted with complex and irregular tables, manual modification becomes a laborious task. This paper investigates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of table editing tasks. Existing research mainly focuses on regular-shaped tables, wherein instructions are used to generate code in SQL, Python, or Excel Office-script for manipulating the tables. Nevertheless, editing tables with irregular structures, particularly those containing merged cells spanning multiple rows, poses a challenge when using code. To address this, we introduce the WikiTableEdit dataset. Leveraging 26,531 tables from the WikiSQL dataset, we automatically generate natural language instructions for six distinct basic operations and the corresponding outcomes, resulting in over 200,000 instances. Subsequently, we evaluate several representative large language models on the WikiTableEdit dataset to demonstrate the challenge of this task. The dataset will be released to the community to promote related researches.
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation
Authors: Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, XiaoJian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Decision Making, Information Retrieval

With the development of deep learning, natural language processing technology has effectively improved the efficiency of various aspects of the traditional judicial industry. However, most current efforts focus on tasks within individual judicial stages, making it difficult to handle complex tasks that span multiple stages. As the autonomous agents powered by large language models are becoming increasingly smart and able to make complex decisions in real-world settings, offering new insights for judicial intelligence. In this paper, (1) we propose a novel multi-agent framework, AgentsCourt, for judicial decision-making. Our framework follows the classic court trial process, consisting of court debate simulation, legal resources retrieval and decision-making refinement to simulate the decision-making of judge. (2) we introduce SimuCourt, a judicial benchmark that encompasses 420 Chinese judgment documents, spanning the three most common types of judicial cases. Furthermore, to support this task, we construct a large-scale legal knowledge base, Legal-KB, with multi-resource legal knowledge. (3) Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms the existing advanced methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles, where our model achieves significant improvements of 8.6% and 9.1% F1 score in the first and second instance settings, respectively.
Benchmarking the Text-to-SQL Capability of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Evaluation
Authors: Bin Zhang, Yuxiao Ye, Guoqing Du, Xiaoru Hu, Zhishuai Li, Sun Yang, Chi Harold Liu, Rui Zhao, Ziyue Li, Hangyu Mao
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, In-Context Learning, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful tool in advancing the Text-to-SQL task, significantly outperforming traditional methods. Nevertheless, as a nascent research field, there is still no consensus on the optimal prompt templates and design frameworks. Additionally, existing benchmarks inadequately explore the performance of LLMs across the various sub-tasks of the Text-to-SQL process, which hinders the assessment of LLMs' cognitive capabilities and the optimization of LLM-based solutions. To address the aforementioned issues, we firstly construct a new dataset designed to mitigate the risk of overfitting in LLMs. Then we formulate five evaluation tasks to comprehensively assess the performance of diverse methods across various LLMs throughout the Text-to-SQL process.Our study highlights the performance disparities among LLMs and proposes optimal in-context learning solutions tailored to each task. These findings offer valuable insights for enhancing the development of LLM-based Text-to-SQL systems.
SAFFIRA: a Framework for Assessing the Reliability of Systolic-Array-Based DNN Accelerators
Authors: Mahdi Taheri, Masoud Daneshtalab, Jaan Raik, Maksim Jenihhin, Salvatore Pappalardo, Paul Jimenez, Bastien Deveautour, Alberto Bosio
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

Systolic array has emerged as a prominent architecture for Deep Neural Network (DNN) hardware accelerators, providing high-throughput and low-latency performance essential for deploying DNNs across diverse applications. However, when used in safety-critical applications, reliability assessment is mandatory to guarantee the correct behavior of DNN accelerators. While fault injection stands out as a well-established practical and robust method for reliability assessment, it is still a very time-consuming process. This paper addresses the time efficiency issue by introducing a novel hierarchical software-based hardware-aware fault injection strategy tailored for systolic array-based DNN accelerators.
PaperWeaver: Enriching Topical Paper Alerts by Contextualizing Recommended Papers with User-collected Papers
Authors: Yoonjoo Lee, Hyeonsu B. Kang, Matt Latzke, Juho Kim, Jonathan Bragg, Joseph Chee Chang, Pao Siangliulue
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

With the rapid growth of scholarly archives, researchers subscribe to "paper alert" systems that periodically provide them with recommendations of recently published papers that are similar to previously collected papers. However, researchers sometimes struggle to make sense of nuanced connections between recommended papers and their own research context, as existing systems only present paper titles and abstracts. To help researchers spot these connections, we present PaperWeaver, an enriched paper alerts system that provides contextualized text descriptions of recommended papers based on user-collected papers. PaperWeaver employs a computational method based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer users' research interests from their collected papers, extract context-specific aspects of papers, and compare recommended and collected papers on these aspects. Our user study (N=15) showed that participants using PaperWeaver were able to better understand the relevance of recommended papers and triage them more confidently when compared to a baseline that presented the related work sections from recommended papers.
AdAM: Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Approximate Multiplier for Edge DNN Accelerators
Authors: Mahdi Taheri, Natalia Cherezova, Samira Nazari, Ahsan Rafiq, Ali Azarpeyvand, Tara Ghasempouri, Masoud Daneshtalab, Jaan Raik, Maksim Jenihhin
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose an architecture of a novel adaptive fault-tolerant approximate multiplier tailored for ASIC-based DNN accelerators.
Fuzzy Datalog$^\exists$ over Arbitrary t-Norms
Authors: Matthias Lanzinger, Stefano Sferrazza, Przemysław A. Wałęga, Georg Gottlob
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Logical Reasoning

One of the main challenges in the area of Neuro-Symbolic AI is to perform logical reasoning in the presence of both neural and symbolic data. This requires combining heterogeneous data sources such as knowledge graphs, neural model predictions, structured databases, crowd-sourced data, and many more. To allow for such reasoning, we generalise the standard rule-based language Datalog with existential rules (commonly referred to as tuple-generating dependencies) to the fuzzy setting, by allowing for arbitrary t-norms in the place of classical conjunctions in rule bodies. The resulting formalism allows us to perform reasoning about data associated with degrees of uncertainty while preserving computational complexity results and the applicability of reasoning techniques established for the standard Datalog setting. In particular, we provide fuzzy extensions of Datalog chases which produce fuzzy universal models and we exploit them to show that in important fragments of the language, reasoning has the same complexity as in the classical setting.