pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Regression for Spatial-Temporal Air Quality Sensor Fusion
Authors: Keivan Faghih Niresi, Ismail Nejjar, Olga Fink
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Sensor Fusion, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The deployment of affordable Internet of Things (IoT) sensors for air pollution monitoring has increased in recent years due to their scalability and cost-effectiveness. However, accurately calibrating these sensors in uncontrolled environments remains a significant challenge. While expensive reference sensors can provide accurate ground truth data, they are often deployed on a limited scale due to high costs, leading to a scarcity of labeled data. In diverse urban environments, data distributions constantly shift due to varying factors such as traffic patterns, industrial activities, and weather conditions, which impact sensor readings. Consequently, traditional machine learning models -- despite their increasing deployment for environmental sensor calibration -- often struggle to provide reliable pollutant measurements across different locations due to domain shifts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method specifically tailored for regression tasks on graph-structured data. Our approach leverages Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model the relationships between sensors. To effectively capture critical spatial-temporal interactions, we incorporate spatial-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs), which extend GNNs by incorporating temporal dynamics. To handle the resulting larger embeddings, we propose a domain adaptation method using a closed-form solution inspired by the Tikhonov-regularized least-squares problem. This method leverages Cholesky decomposition and power iteration to align the subspaces between source and target domains. By aligning these subspaces, our approach allows low-cost IoT sensors to learn calibration parameters from expensive reference sensors. This facilitates reliable pollutant measurements in new locations without the need for additional costly equipment.
SPARTAN: A Sparse Transformer Learning Local Causation
Authors: Anson Lei, Bernhard Schölkopf, Ingmar Posner
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Causal structures play a central role in world models that flexibly adapt to changes in the environment. While recent works motivate the benefits of discovering local causal graphs for dynamics modelling, in this work we demonstrate that accurately capturing these relationships in complex settings remains challenging for the current state-of-the-art. To remedy this shortcoming, we postulate that sparsity is a critical ingredient for the discovery of such local causal structures. To this end we present the SPARse TrANsformer World model (SPARTAN), a Transformer-based world model that learns local causal structures between entities in a scene. By applying sparsity regularisation on the attention pattern between object-factored tokens, SPARTAN identifies sparse local causal models that accurately predict future object states. Furthermore, we extend our model to capture sparse interventions with unknown targets on the dynamics of the environment. This results in a highly interpretable world model that can efficiently adapt to changes. Empirically, we evaluate SPARTAN against the current state-of-the-art in object-centric world models on observation-based environments and demonstrate that our model can learn accurate local causal graphs and achieve significantly improved few-shot adaptation to changes in the dynamics of the environment as well as robustness against removing irrelevant distractors.
WassFFed: Wasserstein Fair Federated Learning
Authors: Zhongxuan Han, Li Zhang, Chaochao Chen, Xiaolin Zheng, Fei Zheng, Yuyuan Li, Jianwei Yin
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) employs a training approach to address scenarios where users' data cannot be shared across clients. Achieving fairness in FL is imperative since training data in FL is inherently geographically distributed among diverse user groups. Existing research on fairness predominantly assumes access to the entire training data, making direct transfer to FL challenging. However, the limited existing research on fairness in FL does not effectively address two key challenges, i.e., (CH1) Current methods fail to deal with the inconsistency between fair optimization results obtained with surrogate functions and fair classification results. (CH2) Directly aggregating local fair models does not always yield a globally fair model due to non Identical and Independent data Distributions (non-IID) among clients. To address these challenges, we propose a Wasserstein Fair Federated Learning framework, namely WassFFed. To tackle CH1, we ensure that the outputs of local models, rather than the loss calculated with surrogate functions or classification results with a threshold, remain independent of various user groups. To resolve CH2, we employ a Wasserstein barycenter calculation of all local models' outputs for each user group, bringing local model outputs closer to the global output distribution to ensure consistency between the global model and local models. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, demonstrating that WassFFed outperforms existing approaches in striking a balance between accuracy and fairness.
Effect sizes as a statistical feature-selector-based learning to detect breast cancer
Authors: Nicolas Masino, Antonio Quintero-Rincon
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Breast Cancer Detection, feature selection

Breast cancer detection is still an open research field, despite a tremendous effort devoted to work in this area. Effect size is a statistical concept that measures the strength of the relationship between two variables on a numeric scale. Feature selection is widely used to reduce the dimensionality of data by selecting only a subset of predictor variables to improve a learning model. In this work, an algorithm and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of developing a statistical feature-selector-based learning tool capable of reducing the data dimensionality using parametric effect size measures from features extracted from cell nuclei images. The SVM classifier with a linear kernel as a learning tool achieved an accuracy of over 90%. These excellent results suggest that the effect size is within the standards of the feature-selector methods
Generative Feature Training of Thin 2-Layer Networks
Authors: Johannes Hertrich, Sebastian Neumayer
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

We consider the approximation of functions by 2-layer neural networks with a small number of hidden weights based on the squared loss and small datasets. Due to the highly non-convex energy landscape, gradient-based training often suffers from local minima. As a remedy, we initialize the hidden weights with samples from a learned proposal distribution, which we parameterize as a deep generative model. To train this model, we exploit the fact that with fixed hidden weights, the optimal output weights solve a linear equation. After learning the generative model, we refine the sampled weights with a gradient-based post-processing in the latent space. Here, we also include a regularization scheme to counteract potential noise. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by numerical examples.
Spatially Constrained Transformer with Efficient Global Relation Modelling for Spatio-Temporal Prediction
Authors: Ashutosh Sao, Simon Gottschalk
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

Accurate spatio-temporal prediction is crucial for the sustainable development of smart cities. However, current approaches often struggle to capture important spatio-temporal relationships, particularly overlooking global relations among distant city regions. Most existing techniques predominantly rely on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to capture global relations. However, CNNs exhibit neighbourhood bias, making them insufficient for capturing distant relations. To address this limitation, we propose ST-SampleNet, a novel transformer-based architecture that combines CNNs with self-attention mechanisms to capture both local and global relations effectively. Moreover, as the number of regions increases, the quadratic complexity of self-attention becomes a challenge. To tackle this issue, we introduce a lightweight region sampling strategy that prunes non-essential regions and enhances the efficiency of our approach. Furthermore, we introduce a spatially constrained position embedding that incorporates spatial neighbourhood information into the self-attention mechanism, aiding in semantic interpretation and improving the performance of ST-SampleNet. Our experimental evaluation on three real-world datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of ST-SampleNet. Additionally, our efficient variant achieves a 40% reduction in computational costs with only a marginal compromise in performance, approximately 1%.
Optimized Quality of Service prediction in FSO Links over South Africa using Ensemble Learning
Authors: S. O. Adebusola, P. A. Owolawi, J. S. Ojo, P. S. Maswikaneng
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, regression

Fibre optic communication system is expected to increase exponentially in terms of application due to the numerous advantages over copper wires. The optical network evolution presents several advantages such as over long-distance, low-power requirement, higher carrying capacity and high bandwidth among others Such network bandwidth surpasses methods of transmission that include copper cables and microwaves. Despite these benefits, free-space optical communications are severely impacted by harsh weather situations like mist, precipitation, blizzard, fume, soil, and drizzle debris in the atmosphere, all of which have an impact on the Quality of Service (QoS) rendered by the systems. The primary goal of this article is to optimize the QoS using the ensemble learning models Random Forest, ADaBoost Regression, Stacking Regression, Gradient Boost Regression, and Multilayer Neural Network. To accomplish the stated goal, meteorological data, visibility, wind speed, and altitude were obtained from the South Africa Weather Services archive during a ten-year period (2010 to 2019) at four different locations: Polokwane, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, and George. We estimated the data rate, power received, fog-induced attenuation, bit error rate and power penalty using the collected and processed data. The RMSE and R-squared values of the model across all the study locations, Polokwane, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, and George, are 0.0073 and 0.9951, 0.0065 and 0.9998, 0.0060 and 0.9941, and 0.0032 and 0.9906, respectively. The result showed that using ensemble learning techniques in transmission modeling can significantly enhance service quality and meet customer service level agreements and ensemble method was successful in efficiently optimizing the signal to noise ratio, which in turn enhanced the QoS at the point of reception.
Adaptive Conditional Expert Selection Network for Multi-domain Recommendation
Authors: Kuiyao Dong, Xingyu Lou, Feng Liu, Ruian Wang, Wenyi Yu, Ping Wang, Jun Wang
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Mixture-of-Experts

Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) has recently become the de facto standard in Multi-domain recommendation (MDR) due to its powerful expressive ability. However, such MOE-based method typically employs all experts for each instance, leading to scalability issue and low-discriminability between domains and experts. Furthermore, the design of commonly used domain-specific networks exacerbates the scalability issues. To tackle the problems, We propose a novel method named CESAA consists of Conditional Expert Selection (CES) Module and Adaptive Expert Aggregation (AEA) Module to tackle these challenges. Specifically, CES first combines a sparse gating strategy with domain-shared experts. Then AEA utilizes mutual information loss to strengthen the correlations between experts and specific domains, and significantly improve the distinction between experts. As a result, only domain-shared experts and selected domain-specific experts are activated for each instance, striking a balance between computational efficiency and model performance. Experimental results on both public ranking and industrial retrieval datasets verify the effectiveness of our method in MDR tasks.
Large Language Model in Medical Informatics: Direct Classification and Enhanced Text Representations for Automatic ICD Coding
Authors: Zeyd Boukhers, AmeerAli Khan, Qusai Ramadan, Cong Yang
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Code Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Addressing the complexity of accurately classifying International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes from medical discharge summaries is challenging due to the intricate nature of medical documentation. This paper explores the use of Large Language Models (LLM), specifically the LLAMA architecture, to enhance ICD code classification through two methodologies: direct application as a classifier and as a generator of enriched text representations within a Multi-Filter Residual Convolutional Neural Network (MultiResCNN) framework. We evaluate these methods by comparing them against state-of-the-art approaches, revealing LLAMA's potential to significantly improve classification outcomes by providing deep contextual insights into medical texts.
Streetwise Agents: Empowering Offline RL Policies to Outsmart Exogenous Stochastic Disturbances in RTC
Authors: Aditya Soni, Mayukh Das, Anjaly Parayil, Supriyo Ghosh, Shivam Shandilya, Ching-An Cheng, Vishak Gopal, Sami Khairy, Gabriel Mittag, Yasaman Hosseinkashi, Chetan Bansal
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL

The difficulty of exploring and training online on real production systems limits the scope of real-time online data/feedback-driven decision making. The most feasible approach is to adopt offline reinforcement learning from limited trajectory samples. However, after deployment, such policies fail due to exogenous factors that temporarily or permanently disturb/alter the transition distribution of the assumed decision process structure induced by offline samples. This results in critical policy failures and generalization errors in sensitive domains like Real-Time Communication (RTC). We solve this crucial problem of identifying robust actions in presence of domain shifts due to unseen exogenous stochastic factors in the wild. As it is impossible to learn generalized offline policies within the support of offline data that are robust to these unseen exogenous disturbances, we propose a novel post-deployment shaping of policies (Streetwise), conditioned on real-time characterization of out-of-distribution sub-spaces. This leads to robust actions in bandwidth estimation (BWE) of network bottlenecks in RTC and in standard benchmarks. Our extensive experimental results on BWE and other standard offline RL benchmark environments demonstrate a significant improvement ($\approx$ 18% on some scenarios) in final returns wrt. end-user metrics over state-of-the-art baselines.
Predicting ionic conductivity in solids from the machine-learned potential energy landscape
Authors: Artem Maevskiy, Alexandra Carvalho, Emil Sataev, Volha Turchyna, Keian Noori, Aleksandr Rodin, A. H. Castro Neto, Andrey Ustyuzhanin
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Discovering new superionic materials is essential for advancing solid-state batteries, which offer improved energy density and safety compared to the traditional lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes. Conventional computational methods for identifying such materials are resource-intensive and not easily scalable. Recently, universal interatomic potential models have been developed using equivariant graph neural networks. These models are trained on extensive datasets of first-principles force and energy calculations. One can achieve significant computational advantages by leveraging them as the foundation for traditional methods of assessing the ionic conductivity, such as molecular dynamics or nudged elastic band techniques. However, the generalization error from model inference on diverse atomic structures arising in such calculations can compromise the reliability of the results. In this work, we propose an approach for the quick and reliable screening of ionic conductors through the analysis of a universal interatomic potential. Our method incorporates a set of heuristic structure descriptors that effectively employ the rich knowledge of the underlying model while requiring minimal generalization capabilities. Using our descriptors, we rank lithium-containing materials in the Materials Project database according to their expected ionic conductivity. Eight out of the ten highest-ranked materials are confirmed to be superionic at room temperature in first-principles calculations. Notably, our method achieves a speed-up factor of approximately 50 compared to molecular dynamics driven by a machine-learning potential, and is at least 3,000 times faster compared to first-principles molecular dynamics.
Structuring the Processing Frameworks for Data Stream Evaluation and Application
Authors: Joanna Komorniczak, Paweł Ksieniewicz, Paweł Zyblewski
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Drift Detection

The following work addresses the problem of frameworks for data stream processing that can be used to evaluate the solutions in an environment that resembles real-world applications. The definition of structured frameworks stems from a need to reliably evaluate the data stream classification methods, considering the constraints of delayed and limited label access. The current experimental evaluation often boundlessly exploits the assumption of their complete and immediate access to monitor the recognition quality and to adapt the methods to the changing concepts. The problem is leveraged by reviewing currently described methods and techniques for data stream processing and verifying their outcomes in simulated environment. The effect of the work is a proposed taxonomy of data stream processing frameworks, showing the linkage between drift detection and classification methods considering a natural phenomenon of label delay.
White-Box Diffusion Transformer for single-cell RNA-seq generation
Authors: Zhuorui Cui, Shengze Dong, Ding Liu
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Dimensionality Reduction

As a powerful tool for characterizing cellular subpopulations and cellular heterogeneity, single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology offers advantages of high throughput and multidimensional analysis. However, the process of data acquisition is often constrained by high cost and limited sample availability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a hybrid model based on Diffusion model and White-Box transformer that aims to generate synthetic and biologically plausible scRNA-seq data. Diffusion model progressively introduce noise into the data and then recover the original data through a denoising process, a forward and reverse process that is particularly suitable for generating complex data distributions. White-Box transformer is a deep learning architecture that emphasizes mathematical interpretability. By minimizing the encoding rate of the data and maximizing the sparsity of the representation, it not only reduces the computational burden, but also provides clear insight into underlying structure. Our White-Box Diffusion Transformer combines the generative capabilities of Diffusion model with the mathematical interpretability of White-Box transformer. Through experiments using six different single-cell RNA-Seq datasets, we visualize both generated and real data using t-SNE dimensionality reduction technique, as well as quantify similarity between generated and real data using various metrics to demonstrate comparable performance of White-Box Diffusion Transformer and Diffusion Transformer in generating scRNA-seq data alongside significant improvements in training efficiency and resource utilization. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingximamo/White-Box-Diffusion-Transformer
Model Partition and Resource Allocation for Split Learning in Vehicular Edge Networks
Authors: Lu Yu, Zheng Chang, Yunjian Jia, Geyong Min
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning

The integration of autonomous driving technologies with vehicular networks presents significant challenges in privacy preservation, communication efficiency, and resource allocation. This paper proposes a novel U-shaped split federated learning (U-SFL) framework to address these challenges on the way of realizing in vehicular edge networks. U-SFL is able to enhance privacy protection by keeping both raw data and labels on the vehicular user (VU) side while enabling parallel processing across multiple vehicles. To optimize communication efficiency, we introduce a semantic-aware auto-encoder (SAE) that significantly reduces the dimensionality of transmitted data while preserving essential semantic information. Furthermore, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based algorithm to solve the NP-hard problem of dynamic resource allocation and split point selection. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that U-SFL achieves comparable classification performance to traditional split learning (SL) while substantially reducing data transmission volume and communication latency. The proposed DRL-based optimization algorithm shows good convergence in balancing latency, energy consumption, and learning performance.
Sketched Adaptive Federated Deep Learning: A Sharp Convergence Analysis
Authors: Zhijie Chen, Qiaobo Li, Arindam Banerjee
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Federated Learning, Quantization

Combining gradient compression methods (e.g., CountSketch, quantization) and adaptive optimizers (e.g., Adam, AMSGrad) is a desirable goal in federated learning (FL), with potential benefits on both fewer communication rounds and less per-round communication. In spite of the preliminary empirical success of sketched adaptive methods, existing convergence analyses show the communication cost to have a linear dependence on the ambient dimension, i.e., number of parameters, which is prohibitively high for modern deep learning models. In this work, we introduce specific sketched adaptive federated learning (SAFL) algorithms and, as our main contribution, provide theoretical convergence analyses in different FL settings with guarantees on communication cost depending only logarithmically (instead of linearly) on the ambient dimension. Unlike existing analyses, we show that the entry-wise sketching noise existent in the preconditioners and the first moments of SAFL can be implicitly addressed by leveraging the recently-popularized anisotropic curvatures in deep learning losses, e.g., fast decaying loss Hessian eigen-values. In the i.i.d. client setting of FL, we show that SAFL achieves asymptotic $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence, and converges faster in the initial epochs. In the non-i.i.d. client setting, where non-adaptive methods lack convergence guarantees, we show that SACFL (SAFL with clipping) algorithms can provably converge in spite of the additional heavy-tailed noise. Our theoretical claims are supported by empirical studies on vision and language tasks, and in both fine-tuning and training-from-scratch regimes. Surprisingly, as a by-product of our analysis, the proposed SAFL methods are competitive with the state-of-the-art communication-efficient federated learning algorithms based on error feedback.