pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Assessing ML Classification Algorithms and NLP Techniques for Depression Detection: An Experimental Case Study
Authors: Giuliano Lorenzoni, Cristina Tavares, Nathalia Nascimento, Paulo Alencar, Donald Cowan
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Depression Detection, feature selection

Depression has affected millions of people worldwide and has become one of the most common mental disorders. Early mental disorder detection can reduce costs for public health agencies and prevent other major comorbidities. Additionally, the shortage of specialized personnel is very concerning since Depression diagnosis is highly dependent on expert professionals and is time-consuming. Recent research has evidenced that machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and techniques have significantly bene ted the diagnosis of depression. However, there are still several challenges in the assessment of depression detection approaches in which other conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are present. These challenges include assessing alternatives in terms of data cleaning and pre-processing techniques, feature selection, and appropriate ML classification algorithms. This paper tackels such an assessment based on a case study that compares different ML classifiers, specifically in terms of data cleaning and pre-processing, feature selection, parameter setting, and model choices. The case study is based on the Distress Analysis Interview Corpus - Wizard-of-Oz (DAIC-WOZ) dataset, which is designed to support the diagnosis of mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Besides the assessment of alternative techniques, we were able to build models with accuracy levels around 84% with Random Forest and XGBoost models, which is significantly higher than the results from the comparable literature which presented the level of accuracy of 72% from the SVM model.
Similar Data Points Identification with LLM: A Human-in-the-loop Strategy Using Summarization and Hidden State Insights
Authors: Xianlong Zeng, Yijing Gao, Fanghao Song, Ang Liu
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

This study introduces a simple yet effective method for identifying similar data points across non-free text domains, such as tabular and image data, using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our two-step approach involves data point summarization and hidden state extraction. Initially, data is condensed via summarization using an LLM, reducing complexity and highlighting essential information in sentences. Subsequently, the summarization sentences are fed through another LLM to extract hidden states, serving as compact, feature-rich representations. This approach leverages the advanced comprehension and generative capabilities of LLMs, offering a scalable and efficient strategy for similarity identification across diverse datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in identifying similar data points on multiple datasets. Additionally, our approach enables non-technical domain experts, such as fraud investigators or marketing operators, to quickly identify similar data points tailored to specific scenarios, demonstrating its utility in practical applications. In general, our results open new avenues for leveraging LLMs in data analysis across various domains
Tensorized Ant Colony Optimization for GPU Acceleration
Authors: Luming Yang, Tao Jiang, Ran Cheng
Date: 2024-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is renowned for its effectiveness in solving Traveling Salesman Problems, yet it faces computational challenges in CPU-based environments, particularly with large-scale instances. In response, we introduce a Tensorized Ant Colony Optimization (TensorACO) to utilize the advancements of GPU acceleration. As the core, TensorACO fully transforms ant system and ant path into tensor forms, a process we refer to as tensorization. For the tensorization of ant system, we propose a preprocessing method to reduce the computational overhead by calculating the probability transition matrix. In the tensorization of ant path, we propose an index mapping method to accelerate the update of pheromone matrix by replacing the mechanism of sequential path update with parallel matrix operations. Additionally, we introduce an Adaptive Independent Roulette (AdaIR) method to overcome the challenges of parallelizing ACO's selection mechanism on GPUs. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of TensorACO achieving up to 1921$\times$ speedup over standard ACO. Moreover, the AdaIR method further improves TensorACO's convergence speed by 80% and solution quality by 2%. Source codes are available at https://github.com/EMI-Group/tensoraco.
The Origin and Evolution of Information Handling
Authors: Amahury Jafet López-Díaz, Hiroki Sayama, Carlos Gershenson
Date: 2024-04-05 00:00:00

Understanding the emergence and evolution of information handling is essential for unraveling the origins of life. Traditional genetic-first and metabolism-first models fall short in explaining how instructional information control systems naturally arise from molecular dynamics. To address this gap, we adopt an information-first approach, integrating Hofmeyr's (F, A)-systems -- an extension of Rosen's (M, R)-systems -- with temporal parametrization and multiscale causality. These models, which embody closure to efficient causation while remaining open to formal causation, provide a robust framework for primitive autopoiesis, anticipation, and adaptation. We establish a formal equivalence between extended (F, A)-systems and communicating X-machines, resolving self-referential challenges and demonstrating the hypercomputational nature of life processes. Our stepwise model traces the evolution of information handling from simple reaction networks that recognize regular languages to self-replicating chemical systems with memory and anticipatory capabilities. This transition from analog to digital architectures enhances evolutionary robustness and aligns with experimental evidence suggesting that chemical computation does not require life-specific chemistry. Furthermore, we incorporate open-ended evolutionary dynamics driven by computational undecidability and irreducibility, reinforcing the necessity of unconventional computing frameworks. This computational enactivist perspective provides a cohesive theoretical basis for a recently proposed trialectic between autopoiesis, anticipation and adaptation in order to solve the problem of relevance. By highlighting the critical role of hypercomputational processes in life's emergence and evolution, our framework offers new insights into the fundamental principles underlying biological information processing.
Maximally Forward-Looking Core Inflation
Authors: Philippe Goulet Coulombe, Karin Klieber, Christophe Barrette, Maximilian Goebel
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, regression

Timely monetary policy decision-making requires timely core inflation measures. We create a new core inflation series that is explicitly designed to succeed at that goal. Precisely, we introduce the Assemblage Regression, a generalized nonnegative ridge regression problem that optimizes the price index's subcomponent weights such that the aggregate is maximally predictive of future headline inflation. Ordering subcomponents according to their rank in each period switches the algorithm to be learning supervised trimmed inflation - or, put differently, the maximally forward-looking summary statistic of the realized price changes distribution. In an extensive out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the US and the euro area, we find substantial improvements for signaling medium-term inflation developments in both the pre- and post-Covid years. Those coming from the supervised trimmed version are particularly striking, and are attributable to a highly asymmetric trimming which contrasts with conventional indicators. We also find that this metric was indicating first upward pressures on inflation as early as mid-2020 and quickly captured the turning point in 2022. We also consider extensions, like assembling inflation from geographical regions, trimmed temporal aggregation, and building core measures specialized for either upside or downside inflation risks.
Generalized Criterion for Identifiability of Additive Noise Models Using Majorization
Authors: Aramayis Dallakyan, Yang Ni
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00

The discovery of causal relationships from observational data is very challenging. Many recent approaches rely on complexity or uncertainty concepts to impose constraints on probability distributions, aiming to identify specific classes of directed acyclic graph (DAG) models. In this paper, we introduce a novel identifiability criterion for DAGs that places constraints on the conditional variances of additive noise models. We demonstrate that this criterion extends and generalizes existing identifiability criteria in the literature that employ (conditional) variances as measures of uncertainty in (conditional) distributions. For linear Structural Equation Models, we present a new algorithm that leverages the concept of weak majorization applied to the diagonal elements of the Cholesky factor of the covariance matrix to learn a topological ordering of variables. Through extensive simulations and the analysis of bank connectivity data, we provide evidence of the effectiveness of our approach in successfully recovering DAGs. The code for reproducing the results in this paper is available in Supplementary Materials.
BARMPy: Bayesian Additive Regression Models Python Package
Authors: Danielle Van Boxel
Date: 2024-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We make Bayesian Additive Regression Networks (BARN) available as a Python package, \texttt{barmpy}, with documentation at \url{https://dvbuntu.github.io/barmpy/} for general machine learning practitioners. Our object-oriented design is compatible with SciKit-Learn, allowing usage of their tools like cross-validation. To ease learning to use \texttt{barmpy}, we produce a companion tutorial that expands on reference information in the documentation. Any interested user can \texttt{pip install barmpy} from the official PyPi repository. \texttt{barmpy} also serves as a baseline Python library for generic Bayesian Additive Regression Models.
MealRec$^+$: A Meal Recommendation Dataset with Meal-Course Affiliation for Personalization and Healthiness
Authors: Ming Li, Lin Li, Xiaohui Tao, Jimmy Xiangji Huang
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00

Meal recommendation, as a typical health-related recommendation task, contains complex relationships between users, courses, and meals. Among them, meal-course affiliation associates user-meal and user-course interactions. However, an extensive literature review demonstrates that there is a lack of publicly available meal recommendation datasets including meal-course affiliation. Meal recommendation research has been constrained in exploring the impact of cooperation between two levels of interaction on personalization and healthiness. To pave the way for meal recommendation research, we introduce a new benchmark dataset called MealRec$^+$. Due to constraints related to user health privacy and meal scenario characteristics, the collection of data that includes both meal-course affiliation and two levels of interactions is impeded. Therefore, a simulation method is adopted to derive meal-course affiliation and user-meal interaction from the user's dining sessions simulated based on user-course interaction data. Then, two well-known nutritional standards are used to calculate the healthiness scores of meals. Moreover, we experiment with several baseline models, including separate and cooperative interaction learning methods. Our experiment demonstrates that cooperating the two levels of interaction in appropriate ways is beneficial for meal recommendations. Furthermore, in response to the less healthy recommendation phenomenon found in the experiment, we explore methods to enhance the healthiness of meal recommendations. The dataset is available on GitHub (https://github.com/WUT-IDEA/MealRecPlus).
Beyond the Sequence: Statistics-Driven Pre-training for Stabilizing Sequential Recommendation Model
Authors: Sirui Wang, Peiguang Li, Yunsen Xian, Hongzhi Zhang
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Sequential Recommendation

The sequential recommendation task aims to predict the item that user is interested in according to his/her historical action sequence. However, inevitable random action, i.e. user randomly accesses an item among multiple candidates or clicks several items at random order, cause the sequence fails to provide stable and high-quality signals. To alleviate the issue, we propose the StatisTics-Driven Pre-traing framework (called STDP briefly). The main idea of the work lies in the exploration of utilizing the statistics information along with the pre-training paradigm to stabilize the optimization of recommendation model. Specifically, we derive two types of statistical information: item co-occurrence across sequence and attribute frequency within the sequence. And we design the following pre-training tasks: 1) The co-occurred items prediction task, which encourages the model to distribute its attention on multiple suitable targets instead of just focusing on the next item that may be unstable. 2) We generate a paired sequence by replacing items with their co-occurred items and enforce its representation close with the original one, thus enhancing the model's robustness to the random noise. 3) To reduce the impact of random on user's long-term preferences, we encourage the model to capture sequence-level frequent attributes. The significant improvement over six datasets demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposal, and further analysis verified the generalization of the STDP framework on other models.
Balancing Information Perception with Yin-Yang: Agent-Based Information Neutrality Model for Recommendation Systems
Authors: Mengyan Wang, Yuxuan Hu, Shiqing Wu, Weihua Li, Quan Bai, Verica Rupar
Date: 2024-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Recommendation Systems

While preference-based recommendation algorithms effectively enhance user engagement by recommending personalized content, they often result in the creation of ``filter bubbles''. These bubbles restrict the range of information users interact with, inadvertently reinforcing their existing viewpoints. Previous research has focused on modifying these underlying algorithms to tackle this issue. Yet, approaches that maintain the integrity of the original algorithms remain largely unexplored. This paper introduces an Agent-based Information Neutrality model grounded in the Yin-Yang theory, namely, AbIN. This innovative approach targets the imbalance in information perception within existing recommendation systems. It is designed to integrate with these preference-based systems, ensuring the delivery of recommendations with neutral information. Our empirical evaluation of this model proved its efficacy, showcasing its capacity to expand information diversity while respecting user preferences. Consequently, AbIN emerges as an instrumental tool in mitigating the negative impact of filter bubbles on information consumption.
Single-Server Pliable Private Information Retrieval with Identifiable Side Information
Authors: Megha Rayer, Charul Rajput, B. Sundar Rajan
Date: 2024-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

In Pliable Private Information Retrieval (PPIR) with a single server, messages are partitioned into $\Gamma$ non-overlapping classes. The user wants to retrieve a message from its desired class without revealing the identity of the desired class to the server. In S. A. Obead, H. Y. Lin and E. Rosnes, Single-Server Pliable Private Information Retrieval With Side Information, arXiv:2305.06857, authors consider the problem of PPIR with Side Information (PPIR-SI), where the user now has side information. The user wants to retrieve any new message (not included in the side information) from its desired class without revealing the identity of the desired class and its side information. A scheme for the PPIR-SI is given by Obead et al. for the case when the users side information is unidentified, and this case is referred to as PPIR with Unidentifiable SI (PPIR-USI). In this paper, we study the problem of PPIR for the single server case when the side information is partially identifiable, and we term this case as PPIR with Identifiable Side Information (PPIR-ISI). The user is well aware of the identity of the side information belonging to $\eta$ number of classes, where $1\leq \eta \leq \Gamma$. In this problem, The user wants to retrieve a message from its desired class without revealing the identity of the desired class to the server. We give a scheme for PPIR-ISI, and we prove that having identifiable side information is advantageous by comparing the rate of the proposed scheme to the rate of the PPIR-USI scheme given by Obead et al. for some cases. Further, we extend the problem of PPIR-ISI for multi-user case, where users can collaborately generate the query sets, and we give a scheme for this problem.
JobFormer: Skill-Aware Job Recommendation with Semantic-Enhanced Transformer
Authors: Zhihao Guan, Jia-Qi Yang, Yang Yang, HengShu Zhu, Wenjie Li, Hui Xiong
Date: 2024-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Representation Learning

Job recommendation aims to provide potential talents with suitable job descriptions (JDs) consistent with their career trajectory, which plays an essential role in proactive talent recruitment. In real-world management scenarios, the available JD-user records always consist of JDs, user profiles, and click data, in which the user profiles are typically summarized as the user's skill distribution for privacy reasons. Although existing sophisticated recommendation methods can be directly employed, effective recommendation still has challenges considering the information deficit of JD itself and the natural heterogeneous gap between JD and user profile. To address these challenges, we proposed a novel skill-aware recommendation model based on the designed semantic-enhanced transformer to parse JDs and complete personalized job recommendation. Specifically, we first model the relative items of each JD and then adopt an encoder with the local-global attention mechanism to better mine the intra-job and inter-job dependencies from JD tuples. Moreover, we adopt a two-stage learning strategy for skill-aware recommendation, in which we utilize the skill distribution to guide JD representation learning in the recall stage, and then combine the user profiles for final prediction in the ranking stage. Consequently, we can embed rich contextual semantic representations for learning JDs, while skill-aware recommendation provides effective JD-user joint representation for click-through rate (CTR) prediction. To validate the superior performance of our method for job recommendation, we present a thorough empirical analysis of large-scale real-world and public datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness and interpretability.
preon: Fast and accurate entity normalization for drug names and cancer types in precision oncology
Authors: Arik Ermshaus, Michael Piechotta, Gina Rüter, Ulrich Keilholz, Ulf Leser, Manuela Benary
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Bioinformatics 2024 3
Tasks: Data Integration, Medical Concept Normalization, Term Extraction

Motivation
In precision oncology (PO), clinicians aim to find the best treatment for any patient based on their molecular characterization. A major bottleneck is the manual annotation and evaluation of individual variants, for which usually a range of knowledge bases are screened. To incorporate and integrate the vast information of different databases, fast and accurate methods for harmonizing databases with different types of information are necessary. An essential step for harmonization in PO includes the normalization of tumor entities as well as therapy options for patients.

Summary
preon is a fast and accurate library for the normalization of drug names and cancer types in large-scale data integration.

Availability and implementation
preon is implemented in Python and freely available via the PyPI repository. Source code and the data underlying this article are available in GitHub at https://github.com/ermshaua/preon/.
Exploiting Commutativity For Practical Fast Replication
Authors: Seo Jin Park; John Ousterhout
Date: 2019-02-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation 2019 2

Traditional approaches to replication require client requests to be ordered before making them durable by copying them to replicas. As a result, clients must wait for two round-trip times (RTTs) before updates complete. In this paper, we show that this entanglement of ordering and durability is unnecessary for strong consistency. The Consistent Unordered Replication Protocol (CURP) allows clients to replicate requests that have not yet been ordered, as long as they are commutative. This strategy allows most operations to complete in 1 RTT (the same as an unreplicated system). We implemented CURP in the Redis and RAMCloud storage systems. In RAMCloud, CURP improved write latency by ∼2x (14 μs → 7.1 μs) and write throughput by 4x. Compared to unreplicated RAMCloud, CURP’s latency overhead for 3-way replication is just 1 μs (6.1 μs vs 7.1 μs). CURP transformed a non-durable Redis cache into a consistent and durable storage system with only a small performance overhead.
Two-Parameter CFAR Ship Detection Algorithm Based on Rayleigh Distribution in SAR Images
Authors: Ruochen Wu
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: Preprints 2021 12
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Image Segmentation, SAR Ship Detection

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active type of microwave remote sensing. Using the microwave imaging system, remote sensing monitoring of the land and global ocean can be done in any weather conditions around the clock. Detection of SAR image targets is one of the main needs of radar image interpretation applications. In this paper, an improved two-parameter CFAR algorithm based on Rayleigh distribution and morphological processing is proposed to perform ship detection and recognition in high resolution SAR images. Through simulation experiments, comprehensive study of the two algorithms for high resolution SAR image target detection is achieved. Finally, the results of ship detection experiments are compared and analyzed, and the effects of detection are evaluated according to the Rayleigh distribution model and algorithms.
Real-Time Polyp Segmentation Using U-Net with IoU Loss
Authors: George Batchkala, Sharib Ali
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation 2020 12
Tasks: Segmentation

Colonoscopy is the third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. While automated segmentation methods can help detect polyps and consequently improve their surgical removal, the clinical usability of these methods requires a trade-off between accuracy and speed. In this work, we exploit the traditional U-Net methods and compare different segmentation-loss functions. Our results demonstrate that IoU loss results in an improved segmentation performance (nearly 3% improvement on Dice) for real-time polyp segmentation.