pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GraphDART: Graph Distillation for Efficient Advanced Persistent Threat Detection
Authors: Saba Fathi Rabooki, Bowen Li, Falih Gozi Febrinanto, Ciyuan Peng, Elham Naghizade, Fengling Han, Feng Xia
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Computational Efficiency

Cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) have emerged in many applications over recent decades, requiring increased attention to security concerns. The rise of sophisticated threats like Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) makes ensuring security in CPSSs particularly challenging. Provenance graph analysis has proven effective for tracing and detecting anomalies within systems, but the sheer size and complexity of these graphs hinder the efficiency of existing methods, especially those relying on graph neural networks (GNNs). To address these challenges, we present GraphDART, a modular framework designed to distill provenance graphs into compact yet informative representations, enabling scalable and effective anomaly detection. GraphDART can take advantage of diverse graph distillation techniques, including classic and modern graph distillation methods, to condense large provenance graphs while preserving essential structural and contextual information. This approach significantly reduces computational overhead, allowing GNNs to learn from distilled graphs efficiently and enhance detection performance. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate the robustness of GraphDART in detecting malicious activities across cyber-physical-social systems. By optimizing computational efficiency, GraphDART provides a scalable and practical solution to safeguard interconnected environments against APTs.
Orthogonal greedy algorithm for linear operator learning with shallow neural network
Authors: Ye Lin, Jiwei Jia, Young Ju Lee, Ran Zhang
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Operator learning

Greedy algorithms, particularly the orthogonal greedy algorithm (OGA), have proven effective in training shallow neural networks for fitting functions and solving partial differential equations (PDEs). In this paper, we extend the application of OGA to the tasks of linear operator learning, which is equivalent to learning the kernel function through integral transforms. Firstly, a novel greedy algorithm is developed for kernel estimation rate in a new semi-inner product, which can be utilized to approximate the Green's function of linear PDEs from data. Secondly, we introduce the OGA for point-wise kernel estimation to further improve the approximation rate, achieving orders of accuracy improvement across various tasks and baseline models. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis on the kernel estimation problem and the optimal approximation rates for both algorithms, establishing their efficacy and potential for future applications in PDEs and operator learning tasks.
From Dense to Sparse: Event Response for Enhanced Residential Load Forecasting
Authors: Xin Cao, Qinghua Tao, Yingjie Zhou, Lu Zhang, Le Zhang, Dongjin Song, Dapeng Oliver Wu, Ce Zhu
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Load Forecasting, Scheduling

Residential load forecasting (RLF) is crucial for resource scheduling in power systems. Most existing methods utilize all given load records (dense data) to indiscriminately extract the dependencies between historical and future time series. However, there exist important regular patterns residing in the event-related associations among different appliances (sparse knowledge), which have yet been ignored. In this paper, we propose an Event-Response Knowledge Guided approach (ERKG) for RLF by incorporating the estimation of electricity usage events for different appliances, mining event-related sparse knowledge from the load series. With ERKG, the event-response estimation enables portraying the electricity consumption behaviors of residents, revealing regular variations in appliance operational states. To be specific, ERKG consists of knowledge extraction and guidance: i) a forecasting model is designed for the electricity usage events by estimating appliance operational states, aiming to extract the event-related sparse knowledge; ii) a novel knowledge-guided mechanism is established by fusing such state estimates of the appliance events into the RLF model, which can give particular focuses on the patterns of users' electricity consumption behaviors. Notably, ERKG can flexibly serve as a plug-in module to boost the capability of existing forecasting models by leveraging event response. In numerical experiments, extensive comparisons and ablation studies have verified the effectiveness of our ERKG, e.g., over 8% MAE can be reduced on the tested state-of-the-art forecasting models.
Learn A Flexible Exploration Model for Parameterized Action Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Zijian Wang, Bin Wang, Mingwen Shao, Hongbo Dou, Boxiang Tao
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Hybrid action models are widely considered an effective approach to reinforcement learning (RL) modeling. The current mainstream method is to train agents under Parameterized Action Markov Decision Processes (PAMDPs), which performs well in specific environments. Unfortunately, these models either exhibit drastic low learning efficiency in complex PAMDPs or lose crucial information in the conversion between raw space and latent space. To enhance the learning efficiency and asymptotic performance of the agent, we propose a model-based RL (MBRL) algorithm, FLEXplore. FLEXplore learns a parameterized-action-conditioned dynamics model and employs a modified Model Predictive Path Integral control. Unlike conventional MBRL algorithms, we carefully design the dynamics loss function and reward smoothing process to learn a loose yet flexible model. Additionally, we use the variational lower bound to maximize the mutual information between the state and the hybrid action, enhancing the exploration effectiveness of the agent. We theoretically demonstrate that FLEXplore can reduce the regret of the rollout trajectory through the Wasserstein Metric under given Lipschitz conditions. Our empirical results on several standard benchmarks show that FLEXplore has outstanding learning efficiency and asymptotic performance compared to other baselines.
Beyond $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ Regret: Decoupling Learning and Decision-making in Online Linear Programming
Authors: Wenzhi Gao, Dongdong Ge, Chenyu Xue, Chunlin Sun, Yinyu Ye
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

Online linear programming plays an important role in both revenue management and resource allocation, and recent research has focused on developing efficient first-order online learning algorithms. Despite the empirical success of first-order methods, they typically achieve a regret no better than $\mathcal{O} ( \sqrt{T} )$, which is suboptimal compared to the $\mathcal{O} (\log T)$ bound guaranteed by the state-of-the-art linear programming (LP)-based online algorithms. This paper establishes a general framework that improves upon the $\mathcal{O} ( \sqrt{T} )$ result when the LP dual problem exhibits certain error bound conditions. For the first time, we show that first-order learning algorithms achieve $o( \sqrt{T} )$ regret in the continuous support setting and $\mathcal{O} (\log T)$ regret in the finite support setting beyond the non-degeneracy assumption. Our results significantly improve the state-of-the-art regret results and provide new insights for sequential decision-making.
CHAT: Beyond Contrastive Graph Transformer for Link Prediction in Heterogeneous Networks
Authors: Shengming Zhang, Le Zhang, Jingbo Zhou, Hui Xiong
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Prediction

Link prediction in heterogeneous networks is crucial for understanding the intricacies of network structures and forecasting their future developments. Traditional methodologies often face significant obstacles, including over-smoothing-wherein the excessive aggregation of node features leads to the loss of critical structural details-and a dependency on human-defined meta-paths, which necessitate extensive domain knowledge and can be inherently restrictive. These limitations hinder the effective prediction and analysis of complex heterogeneous networks. In response to these challenges, we propose the Contrastive Heterogeneous grAph Transformer (CHAT). CHAT introduces a novel sampling-based graph transformer technique that selectively retains nodes of interest, thereby obviating the need for predefined meta-paths. The method employs an innovative connection-aware transformer to encode node sequences and their interconnections with high fidelity, guided by a dual-faceted loss function specifically designed for heterogeneous network link prediction. Additionally, CHAT incorporates an ensemble link predictor that synthesizes multiple samplings to achieve enhanced prediction accuracy. We conducted comprehensive evaluations of CHAT using three distinct drug-target interaction (DTI) datasets. The empirical results underscore CHAT's superior performance, outperforming both general-task approaches and models specialized in DTI prediction. These findings substantiate the efficacy of CHAT in addressing the complex problem of link prediction in heterogeneous networks.
Sequence Complementor: Complementing Transformers For Time Series Forecasting with Learnable Sequences
Authors: Xiwen Chen, Peijie Qiu, Wenhui Zhu, Huayu Li, Hao Wang, Aristeidis Sotiras, Yalin Wang, Abolfazl Razi
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal tokens. Follow-up studies have largely involved altering the tokenization and self-attention modules to better adapt Transformers for addressing special challenges like non-stationarity, channel-wise dependency, and variable correlation in time series. However, we found that the expressive capability of sequence representation is a key factor influencing Transformer performance in time forecasting after investigating several representative methods, where there is an almost linear relationship between sequence representation entropy and mean square error, with more diverse representations performing better. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism with Sequence Complementors and prove feasible from an information theory perspective, where these learnable sequences are able to provide complementary information beyond current input to feed attention. We further enhance the Sequence Complementors via a diversification loss that is theoretically covered. The empirical evaluation of both long-term and short-term forecasting has confirmed its superiority over the recent state-of-the-art methods.
Learning Stochastic Nonlinear Dynamics with Embedded Latent Transfer Operators
Authors: Naichang Ke, Ryogo Tanaka, Yoshinobu Kawahara
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

We consider an operator-based latent Markov representation of a stochastic nonlinear dynamical system, where the stochastic evolution of the latent state embedded in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space is described with the corresponding transfer operator, and develop a spectral method to learn this representation based on the theory of stochastic realization. The embedding may be learned simultaneously using reproducing kernels, for example, constructed with feed-forward neural networks. We also address the generalization of sequential state-estimation (Kalman filtering) in stochastic nonlinear systems, and of operator-based eigen-mode decomposition of dynamics, for the representation. Several examples with synthetic and real-world data are shown to illustrate the empirical characteristics of our methods, and to investigate the performance of our model in sequential state-estimation and mode decomposition.
Knowledge Distillation with Adapted Weight
Authors: Sirong Wu, Xi Luo, Junjie Liu, Yuhui Deng
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Fairness, Knowledge Distillation

Although large models have shown a strong capacity to solve large-scale problems in many areas including natural language and computer vision, their voluminous parameters are hard to deploy in a real-time system due to computational and energy constraints. Addressing this, knowledge distillation through Teacher-Student architecture offers a sustainable pathway to compress the knowledge of large models into more manageable sizes without significantly compromising performance. To enhance the robustness and interpretability of this framework, it is critical to understand how individual training data impact model performance, which is an area that remains underexplored. We propose the \textbf{Knowledge Distillation with Adaptive Influence Weight (KD-AIF)} framework which leverages influence functions from robust statistics to assign weights to training data, grounded in the four key SAFE principles: Sustainability, Accuracy, Fairness, and Explainability. This novel approach not only optimizes distillation but also increases transparency by revealing the significance of different data. The exploration of various update mechanisms within the KD-AIF framework further elucidates its potential to significantly improve learning efficiency and generalization in student models, marking a step toward more explainable and deployable Large Models. KD-AIF is effective in knowledge distillation while also showing exceptional performance in semi-supervised learning with outperforms existing baselines and methods in multiple benchmarks (CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10-4k, SVHN-1k, and GLUE).
Persistence of Backdoor-based Watermarks for Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Evaluation
Authors: Anh Tu Ngo, Chuan Song Heng, Nandish Chattopadhyay, Anupam Chattopadhyay
Date: 2025-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have gained considerable traction in recent years due to the unparalleled results they gathered. However, the cost behind training such sophisticated models is resource intensive, resulting in many to consider DNNs to be intellectual property (IP) to model owners. In this era of cloud computing, high-performance DNNs are often deployed all over the internet so that people can access them publicly. As such, DNN watermarking schemes, especially backdoor-based watermarks, have been actively developed in recent years to preserve proprietary rights. Nonetheless, there lies much uncertainty on the robustness of existing backdoor watermark schemes, towards both adversarial attacks and unintended means such as fine-tuning neural network models. One reason for this is that no complete guarantee of robustness can be assured in the context of backdoor-based watermark. In this paper, we extensively evaluate the persistence of recent backdoor-based watermarks within neural networks in the scenario of fine-tuning, we propose/develop a novel data-driven idea to restore watermark after fine-tuning without exposing the trigger set. Our empirical results show that by solely introducing training data after fine-tuning, the watermark can be restored if model parameters do not shift dramatically during fine-tuning. Depending on the types of trigger samples used, trigger accuracy can be reinstated to up to 100%. Our study further explores how the restoration process works using loss landscape visualization, as well as the idea of introducing training data in fine-tuning stage to alleviate watermark vanishing.
Improving Quantum Machine Learning via Heat-Bath Algorithmic Cooling
Authors: Nayeli A. Rodríguez-Briones, Daniel K. Park
Date: 2025-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning

This work introduces an approach rooted in quantum thermodynamics to enhance sampling efficiency in quantum machine learning (QML). We propose conceptualizing quantum supervised learning as a thermodynamic cooling process. Building on this concept, we develop a quantum refrigerator protocol that enhances sample efficiency during training and prediction without the need for Grover iterations or quantum phase estimation. Inspired by heat-bath algorithmic cooling protocols, our method alternates entropy compression and thermalization steps to decrease the entropy of qubits, increasing polarization towards the dominant bias. This technique minimizes the computational overhead associated with estimating classification scores and gradients, presenting a practical and efficient solution for QML algorithms compatible with noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
Exploring a Datasets Statistical Effect Size Impact on Model Performance, and Data Sample-Size Sufficiency
Authors: Arya Hatamian, Lionel Levine, Haniyeh Ehsani Oskouie, Majid Sarrafzadeh
Date: 2025-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Experimental Design

Having a sufficient quantity of quality data is a critical enabler of training effective machine learning models. Being able to effectively determine the adequacy of a dataset prior to training and evaluating a model's performance would be an essential tool for anyone engaged in experimental design or data collection. However, despite the need for it, the ability to prospectively assess data sufficiency remains an elusive capability. We report here on two experiments undertaken in an attempt to better ascertain whether or not basic descriptive statistical measures can be indicative of how effective a dataset will be at training a resulting model. Leveraging the effect size of our features, this work first explores whether or not a correlation exists between effect size, and resulting model performance (theorizing that the magnitude of the distinction between classes could correlate to a classifier's resulting success). We then explore whether or not the magnitude of the effect size will impact the rate of convergence of our learning rate, (theorizing again that a greater effect size may indicate that the model will converge more rapidly, and with a smaller sample size needed). Our results appear to indicate that this is not an effective heuristic for determining adequate sample size or projecting model performance, and therefore that additional work is still needed to better prospectively assess adequacy of data.
Re-examining Granger Causality from Causal Bayesian Networks Perspective
Authors: S. A. Adedayo
Date: 2025-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Time Series

Characterizing cause-effect relationships in complex systems could be critical to understanding these systems. For many, Granger causality (GC) remains a computational tool of choice to identify causal relations in time series data. Like other causal discovery tools, GC has limitations and has been criticized as a non-causal framework. Here, we addressed one of the recurring criticisms of GC by endowing it with proper causal interpretation. This was achieved by analyzing GC from Reichenbach's Common Cause Principles (RCCPs) and causal Bayesian networks (CBNs) lenses. We showed theoretically and graphically that this reformulation endowed GC with a proper causal interpretation under certain assumptions and achieved satisfactory results on simulation.
Incentive-Compatible Federated Learning with Stackelberg Game Modeling
Authors: Simin Javaherian, Bryce Turney, Li Chen, Nian-Feng Tzeng
Date: 2025-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has gained prominence as a decentralized machine learning paradigm, allowing clients to collaboratively train a global model while preserving data privacy. Despite its potential, FL faces significant challenges in heterogeneous environments, where varying client resources and capabilities can undermine overall system performance. Existing approaches primarily focus on maximizing global model accuracy, often at the expense of unfairness among clients and suboptimal system efficiency, particularly in non-IID (non-Independent and Identically Distributed) settings. In this paper, we introduce FLamma, a novel Federated Learning framework based on adaptive gamma-based Stackelberg game, designed to address the aforementioned limitations and promote fairness. Our approach allows the server to act as the leader, dynamically adjusting a decay factor while clients, acting as followers, optimally select their number of local epochs to maximize their utility. Over time, the server incrementally balances client influence, initially rewarding higher-contributing clients and gradually leveling their impact, driving the system toward a Stackelberg Equilibrium. Extensive simulations on both IID and non-IID datasets show that our method significantly improves fairness in accuracy distribution without compromising overall model performance or convergence speed, outperforming traditional FL baselines.
A New Interpretation of the Certainty-Equivalence Approach for PAC Reinforcement Learning with a Generative Model
Authors: Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Sheel Shah, Santhosh Kumar Guguloth
Date: 2025-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables an agent interacting with an unknown MDP $M$ to optimise its behaviour by observing transitions sampled from $M$. A natural entity that emerges in the agent's reasoning is $\widehat{M}$, the maximum likelihood estimate of $M$ based on the observed transitions. The well-known \textit{certainty-equivalence} method (CEM) dictates that the agent update its behaviour to $\widehat{\pi}$, which is an optimal policy for $\widehat{M}$. Not only is CEM intuitive, it has been shown to enjoy minimax-optimal sample complexity in some regions of the parameter space for PAC RL with a generative model~\citep{Agarwal2020GenModel}. A seemingly unrelated algorithm is the ``trajectory tree method'' (TTM)~\citep{Kearns+MN:1999}, originally developed for efficient decision-time planning in large POMDPs. This paper presents a theoretical investigation that stems from the surprising finding that CEM may indeed be viewed as an application of TTM. The qualitative benefits of this view are (1) new and simple proofs of sample complexity upper bounds for CEM, in fact under a (2) weaker assumption on the rewards than is prevalent in the current literature. Our analysis applies to both non-stationary and stationary MDPs. Quantitatively, we obtain (3) improvements in the sample-complexity upper bounds for CEM both for non-stationary and stationary MDPs, in the regime that the ``mistake probability'' $\delta$ is small. Additionally, we show (4) a lower bound on the sample complexity for finite-horizon MDPs, which establishes the minimax-optimality of our upper bound for non-stationary MDPs in the small-$\delta$ regime.