pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Introducing Super RAGs in Mistral 8x7B-v1
Authors: Ayush Thakur, Raghav Gupta
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The relentless pursuit of enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the advent of Super Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Super RAGs), a novel approach designed to elevate the performance of LLMs by integrating external knowledge sources with minimal structural modifications. This paper presents the integration of Super RAGs into the Mistral 8x7B v1, a state-of-the-art LLM, and examines the resultant improvements in accuracy, speed, and user satisfaction. Our methodology uses a fine-tuned instruct model setup and a cache tuning fork system, ensuring efficient and relevant data retrieval. The evaluation, conducted over several epochs, demonstrates significant enhancements across all metrics. The findings suggest that Super RAGs can effectively augment LLMs, paving the way for more sophisticated and reliable AI systems. This research contributes to the field by providing empirical evidence of the benefits of Super RAGs and offering insights into their potential applications.
Developing An Attention-Based Ensemble Learning Framework for Financial Portfolio Optimisation
Authors: Zhenglong Li, Vincent Tam
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning

In recent years, deep or reinforcement learning approaches have been applied to optimise investment portfolios through learning the spatial and temporal information under the dynamic financial market. Yet in most cases, the existing approaches may produce biased trading signals based on the conventional price data due to a lot of market noises, which possibly fails to balance the investment returns and risks. Accordingly, a multi-agent and self-adaptive portfolio optimisation framework integrated with attention mechanisms and time series, namely the MASAAT, is proposed in this work in which multiple trading agents are created to observe and analyse the price series and directional change data that recognises the significant changes of asset prices at different levels of granularity for enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio of price series. Afterwards, by reconstructing the tokens of financial data in a sequence, the attention-based cross-sectional analysis module and temporal analysis module of each agent can effectively capture the correlations between assets and the dependencies between time points. Besides, a portfolio generator is integrated into the proposed framework to fuse the spatial-temporal information and then summarise the portfolios suggested by all trading agents to produce a newly ensemble portfolio for reducing biased trading actions and balancing the overall returns and risks. The experimental results clearly demonstrate that the MASAAT framework achieves impressive enhancement when compared with many well-known portfolio optimsation approaches on three challenging data sets of DJIA, S&P 500 and CSI 300. More importantly, our proposal has potential strengths in many possible applications for future study.
On the best approximation by finite Gaussian mixtures
Authors: Yun Ma, Yihong Wu, Pengkun Yang
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00

We consider the problem of approximating a general Gaussian location mixture by finite mixtures. The minimum order of finite mixtures that achieve a prescribed accuracy (measured by various $f$-divergences) is determined within constant factors for the family of mixing distributions with compactly support or appropriate assumptions on the tail probability including subgaussian and subexponential. While the upper bound is achieved using the technique of local moment matching, the lower bound is established by relating the best approximation error to the low-rank approximation of certain trigonometric moment matrices, followed by a refined spectral analysis of their minimum eigenvalue. In the case of Gaussian mixing distributions, this result corrects a previous lower bound in [Allerton Conference 48 (2010) 620-628].
Enhancing path-integral approximation for non-linear diffusion with neural network
Authors: Anna Knezevic
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00

Enhancing the existing solution for pricing of fixed income instruments within Black-Karasinski model structure, with neural network at various parameterisation points to demonstrate that the method is able to achieve superior outcomes for multiple calibrations across extended projection horizons.
Bullion: A Column Store for Machine Learning
Authors: Gang Liao, Ye Liu, Jianjun Chen, Daniel J. Abadi
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Recommendation Systems

The past two decades have witnessed significant success in applying columnar storage to data warehousing and analytics. However, the rapid growth of machine learning poses new challenges. This paper presents Bullion, a columnar storage system tailored for machine learning workloads. Bullion addresses the complexities of data compliance, optimizes the encoding of long sequence sparse features, efficiently manages wide-table projections, introduces feature quantization in storage, enables quality-aware sequential reads for multimodal training data, and provides a comprehensive cascading encoding framework that unifies diverse encoding schemes through modular, composable interfaces. By aligning with the evolving requirements of ML applications, Bullion facilitates the application of columnar storage and processing to modern application scenarios such as those within advertising, recommendation systems, and Generative AI. Preliminary experimental results and theoretical analysis demonstrate Bullion's improved ability to deliver strong performance in the face of the unique demands of machine learning workloads compared to existing columnar storage solutions. Bullion significantly reduces I/O costs for deletion compliance, achieves substantial storage savings with its optimized encoding scheme for sparse features, and improves metadata parsing speed for wide-table projections. These advancements enable Bullion to become an important component in the future of machine learning infrastructure, enabling organizations to efficiently manage and process the massive volumes of data required for training and inference in modern AI applications.
Early detection of disease outbreaks and non-outbreaks using incidence data
Authors: Shan Gao, Amit K. Chakraborty, Russell Greiner, Mark A. Lewis, Hao Wang
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Classification

Forecasting the occurrence and absence of novel disease outbreaks is essential for disease management. Here, we develop a general model, with no real-world training data, that accurately forecasts outbreaks and non-outbreaks. We propose a novel framework, using a feature-based time series classification method to forecast outbreaks and non-outbreaks. We tested our methods on synthetic data from a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model for slowly changing, noisy disease dynamics. Outbreak sequences give a transcritical bifurcation within a specified future time window, whereas non-outbreak (null bifurcation) sequences do not. We identified incipient differences in time series of infectives leading to future outbreaks and non-outbreaks. These differences are reflected in 22 statistical features and 5 early warning signal indicators. Classifier performance, given by the area under the receiver-operating curve, ranged from 0.99 for large expanding windows of training data to 0.7 for small rolling windows. Real-world performances of classifiers were tested on two empirical datasets, COVID-19 data from Singapore and SARS data from Hong Kong, with two classifiers exhibiting high accuracy. In summary, we showed that there are statistical features that distinguish outbreak and non-outbreak sequences long before outbreaks occur. We could detect these differences in synthetic and real-world data sets, well before potential outbreaks occur.
Towards Enhancing Health Coaching Dialogue in Low-Resource Settings
Authors: Yue Zhou, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian Ziebart, Lisa Sharp, Bing Liu, Ben Gerber, Nikolaos Agadakos, Shweta Yadav
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Empathetic Response Generation, Response Generation

Health coaching helps patients identify and accomplish lifestyle-related goals, effectively improving the control of chronic diseases and mitigating mental health conditions. However, health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized and labor-intensive nature. In this paper, we propose to build a dialogue system that converses with the patients, helps them create and accomplish specific goals, and can address their emotions with empathy. However, building such a system is challenging since real-world health coaching datasets are limited and empathy is subtle. Thus, we propose a modularized health coaching dialogue system with simplified NLU and NLG frameworks combined with mechanism-conditioned empathetic response generation. Through automatic and human evaluation, we show that our system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses and outperforms the state-of-the-art in NLU tasks while requiring less annotation. We view our approach as a key step towards building automated and more accessible health coaching systems.
Countering Mainstream Bias via End-to-End Adaptive Local Learning
Authors: Jinhao Pan, Ziwei Zhu, Jianling Wang, Allen Lin, James Caverlee
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Mixture-of-Experts

Collaborative filtering (CF) based recommendations suffer from mainstream bias -- where mainstream users are favored over niche users, leading to poor recommendation quality for many long-tail users. In this paper, we identify two root causes of this mainstream bias: (i) discrepancy modeling, whereby CF algorithms focus on modeling mainstream users while neglecting niche users with unique preferences; and (ii) unsynchronized learning, where niche users require more training epochs than mainstream users to reach peak performance. Targeting these causes, we propose a novel end-To-end Adaptive Local Learning (TALL) framework to provide high-quality recommendations to both mainstream and niche users. TALL uses a loss-driven Mixture-of-Experts module to adaptively ensemble experts to provide customized local models for different users. Further, it contains an adaptive weight module to synchronize the learning paces of different users by dynamically adjusting weights in the loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed model. Code and data are provided at \url{https://github.com/JP-25/end-To-end-Adaptive-Local-Leanring-TALL-}
Is Next Token Prediction Sufficient for GPT? Exploration on Code Logic Comprehension
Authors: MengNan Qi, Yufan Huang, Yongqiang Yao, Maoquan Wang, Bin Gu, Neel Sundaresan
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Completion, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding

Large language models (LLMs) has experienced exponential growth, they demonstrate remarkable performance across various tasks. Notwithstanding, contemporary research primarily centers on enhancing the size and quality of pretraining data, still utilizing the next token prediction task on autoregressive transformer model structure. The efficacy of this task in truly facilitating the model's comprehension of code logic remains questionable, we speculate that it still interprets code as mere text, while human emphasizes the underlying logical knowledge. In order to prove it, we introduce a new task, "Logically Equivalent Code Selection," which necessitates the selection of logically equivalent code from a candidate set, given a query code. Our experimental findings indicate that current LLMs underperform in this task, since they understand code by unordered bag of keywords. To ameliorate their performance, we propose an advanced pretraining task, "Next Token Prediction+". This task aims to modify the sentence embedding distribution of the LLM without sacrificing its generative capabilities. Our experimental results reveal that following this pretraining, both Code Llama and StarCoder, the prevalent code domain pretraining models, display significant improvements on our logically equivalent code selection task and the code completion task.
Generative AI Agent for Next-Generation MIMO Design: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Vision
Authors: Zhe Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Hongyang Du, Ruichen Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Bo Ai, Khaled B. Letaief
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Next-generation multiple input multiple output (MIMO) is expected to be intelligent and scalable. In this paper, we study generative artificial intelligence (AI) agent-enabled next-generation MIMO design. Firstly, we provide an overview of the development, fundamentals, and challenges of the next-generation MIMO. Then, we propose the concept of the generative AI agent, which is capable of generating tailored and specialized contents with the aid of large language model (LLM) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Next, we comprehensively discuss the features and advantages of the generative AI agent framework. More importantly, to tackle existing challenges of next-generation MIMO, we discuss generative AI agent-enabled next-generation MIMO design, from the perspective of performance analysis, signal processing, and resource allocation. Furthermore, we present two compelling case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging the generative AI agent for performance analysis in complex configuration scenarios. These examples highlight how the integration of generative AI agents can significantly enhance the analysis and design of next-generation MIMO systems. Finally, we discuss important potential research future directions.
Aligning the Objective of LLM-based Program Repair
Authors: Junjielong Xu, Ying Fu, Shin Hwei Tan, Pinjia He
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault localization, Program Repair

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved decent results on automated program repair (APR). However, the next token prediction training objective of decoder-only LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) is misaligned with the masked span prediction objective of current infilling-style methods, which impedes LLMs from fully leveraging pre-trained knowledge for program repair. In addition, while some LLMs can locate and repair bugs in certain functions using the related artifacts (e.g., test cases), existing methods still depend on statement-level fault localization methods to provide a list of buggy hunks for repair. This restriction hinders LLMs from exploring potential patches beyond the given locations. In this paper, we investigate a new approach to adapt LLMs to program repair. Our core insight is that LLM's APR capability can be greatly improved by simply aligning the output to their training objective and allowing them to refine the whole program without first identifying faulty statements. Based on this insight, we designed D4C, a straightforward prompting framework for APR. D4C can repair 180 bugs correctly in Defects4J, with each patch being sampled only 10 times. This surpasses the SOTA APR methods with perfect fault localization by 10% and reduces the patch sampling number by 90%. Our findings reveal that (1) objective alignment is crucial for fully exploiting LLM's pre-trained capability, and (2) replacing the traditional localize-buggy-hunks-then-repair workflow with direct debugging is more effective for LLM-based APR methods. Thus, we believe this paper introduces a new mindset for harnessing LLMs in APR.
LLM In-Context Recall is Prompt Dependent
Authors: Daniel Machlab, Rick Battle
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlights the critical importance of conducting thorough evaluations to discern their comparative advantages, limitations, and optimal use cases. Particularly important is assessing their capacity to accurately retrieve information included in a given prompt. A model's ability to do this significantly influences how effectively it can utilize contextual details, thus impacting its practical efficacy and dependability in real-world applications. Our research analyzes the in-context recall performance of various LLMs using the needle-in-a-haystack method. In this approach, a factoid (the "needle") is embedded within a block of filler text (the "haystack"), which the model is asked to retrieve. We assess the recall performance of each model across various haystack lengths and with varying needle placements to identify performance patterns. This study demonstrates that an LLM's recall capability is not only contingent upon the prompt's content but also may be compromised by biases in its training data. Conversely, adjustments to model architecture, training strategy, or fine-tuning can improve performance. Our analysis provides insight into LLM behavior, offering direction for the development of more effective applications of LLMs.
Enhancing Mobile "How-to" Queries with Automated Search Results Verification and Reranking
Authors: Lei Ding, Jeshwanth Bheemanpally, Yi Zhang
Date: 2024-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Reranking

Many people use search engines to find online guidance to solve computer or mobile device problems. Users frequently encounter challenges in identifying effective solutions from search results, often wasting time trying ineffective solutions that seem relevant yet fail to solve real problems. This paper introduces a novel approach to improving the accuracy and relevance of online technical support search results through automated search results verification and reranking. Taking "How-to" queries specific to on-device execution as a starting point, we developed the first solution that allows an AI agent to interpret and execute step-by-step instructions in the search results in a controlled Android environment. We further integrated the agent's findings into a reranking mechanism that orders search results based on the success indicators of the tested solutions. The paper details the architecture of our solution and a comprehensive evaluation of the system through a series of tests across various application domains. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in the quality and reliability of the top-ranked results. Our findings suggest a paradigm shift in how search engine ranking for online technical support help can be optimized, offering a scalable and automated solution to the pervasive challenge of finding effective and reliable online help.
WROOM: An Autonomous Driving Approach for Off-Road Navigation
Authors: Dvij Kalaria, Shreya Sharma, Sarthak Bhagat, Haoru Xue, John M. Dolan
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Trajectory Planning, Unity

Off-road navigation is a challenging problem both at the planning level to get a smooth trajectory and at the control level to avoid flipping over, hitting obstacles, or getting stuck at a rough patch. There have been several recent works using classical approaches involving depth map prediction followed by smooth trajectory planning and using a controller to track it. We design an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) system for an autonomous vehicle in off-road environments using a custom-designed simulator in the Unity game engine. We warm-start the agent by imitating a rule-based controller and utilize Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to improve the policy based on a reward that incorporates Control Barrier Functions (CBF), facilitating the agent's ability to generalize effectively to real-world scenarios. The training involves agents concurrently undergoing domain-randomized trials in various environments. We also propose a novel simulation environment to replicate off-road driving scenarios and deploy our proposed approach on a real buggy RC car. Videos and additional results: https://sites.google.com/view/wroom-utd/home
LazyDP: Co-Designing Algorithm-Software for Scalable Training of Differentially Private Recommendation Models
Authors: Juntaek Lim, Youngeun Kwon, Ranggi Hwang, Kiwan Maeng, G. Edward Suh, Minsoo Rhu
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Differential privacy (DP) is widely being employed in the industry as a practical standard for privacy protection. While private training of computer vision or natural language processing applications has been studied extensively, the computational challenges of training of recommender systems (RecSys) with DP have not been explored. In this work, we first present our detailed characterization of private RecSys training using DP-SGD, root-causing its several performance bottlenecks. Specifically, we identify DP-SGD's noise sampling and noisy gradient update stage to suffer from a severe compute and memory bandwidth limitation, respectively, causing significant performance overhead in training private RecSys. Based on these findings, we propose LazyDP, an algorithm-software co-design that addresses the compute and memory challenges of training RecSys with DP-SGD. Compared to a state-of-the-art DP-SGD training system, we demonstrate that LazyDP provides an average 119x training throughput improvement while also ensuring mathematically equivalent, differentially private RecSys models to be trained.
Experimental Design for Active Transductive Inference in Large Language Models
Authors: Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Anusha Lalitha, Aniket Deshmukh, Ge Liu, Yifei Ma, Branislav Kveton
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Experimental Design

One emergent ability of large language models (LLMs) is that query-specific examples can be included in the prompt at inference time. In this work, we use active learning for adaptive prompt design and call it Active In-context Prompt Design (AIPD). We design the LLM prompt by adaptively choosing few-shot examples from a training set to optimize performance on a test set. The training examples are initially unlabeled and we obtain the label of the most informative ones, which maximally reduces uncertainty in the LLM prediction. We propose two algorithms, GO and SAL, which differ in how the few-shot examples are chosen. We analyze these algorithms in linear models: first GO and then use its equivalence with SAL. We experiment with many different tasks in small, medium-sized, and large language models; and show that GO and SAL outperform other methods for choosing few-shot examples in the LLM prompt at inference time.
Multiply-Robust Causal Change Attribution
Authors: Victor Quintas-Martinez, Mohammad Taha Bahadori, Eduardo Santiago, Jeff Mu, Dominik Janzing, David Heckerman
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00

Comparing two samples of data, we observe a change in the distribution of an outcome variable. In the presence of multiple explanatory variables, how much of the change can be explained by each possible cause? We develop a new estimation strategy that, given a causal model, combines regression and re-weighting methods to quantify the contribution of each causal mechanism. Our proposed methodology is multiply robust, meaning that it still recovers the target parameter under partial misspecification. We prove that our estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal. Moreover, it can be incorporated into existing frameworks for causal attribution, such as Shapley values, which will inherit the consistency and large-sample distribution properties. Our method demonstrates excellent performance in Monte Carlo simulations, and we show its usefulness in an empirical application. Our method is implemented as part of the Python library DoWhy (arXiv:2011.04216, arXiv:2206.06821).