pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Transfer Learning for Molecular Property Predictions from Small Data Sets
Authors: Thorren Kirschbaum, Annika Bande
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Machine learning has emerged as a new tool in chemistry to bypass expensive experiments or quantum-chemical calculations, for example, in high-throughput screening applications. However, many machine learning studies rely on small data sets, making it difficult to efficiently implement powerful deep learning architectures such as message passing neural networks. In this study, we benchmark common machine learning models for the prediction of molecular properties on two small data sets, for which the best results are obtained with the message passing neural network PaiNN, as well as SOAP molecular descriptors concatenated to a set of simple molecular descriptors tailored to gradient boosting with regression trees. To further improve the predictive capabilities of PaiNN, we present a transfer learning strategy that uses large data sets to pre-train the respective models and allows to obtain more accurate models after fine-tuning on the original data sets. The pre-training labels are obtained from computationally cheap ab initio or semi-empirical models and both data sets are normalized to mean zero and standard deviation one to align the labels' distributions. This study covers two small chemistry data sets, the Harvard Organic Photovoltaics data set (HOPV, HOMO-LUMO-gaps), for which excellent results are obtained, and on the Freesolv data set (solvation energies), where this method is less successful, probably due to a complex underlying learning task and the dissimilar methods used to obtain pre-training and fine-tuning labels. Finally, we find that for the HOPV data set, the final training results do not improve monotonically with the size of the pre-training data set, but pre-training with fewer data points can lead to more biased pre-trained models and higher accuracy after fine-tuning.
Online Planning of Power Flows for Power Systems Against Bushfires Using Spatial Context
Authors: Jianyu Xu, Qiuzhuang Sun, Yang Yang, Huadong Mo, Daoyi Dong
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00

The 2019-20 Australia bushfire incurred numerous economic losses and significantly affected the operations of power systems. A power station or transmission line can be significantly affected due to bushfires, leading to an increase in operational costs. We study a fundamental but challenging problem of planning the optimal power flow (OPF) for power systems subject to bushfires. Considering the stochastic nature of bushfire spread, we develop a model to capture such dynamics based on Moore's neighborhood model. Under a periodic inspection scheme that reveals the in-situ bushfire status, we propose an online optimization modeling framework that sequentially plans the power flows in the electricity network. Our framework assumes that the spread of bushfires is non-stationary over time, and the spread and containment probabilities are unknown. To meet these challenges, we develop a contextual online learning algorithm that treats the in-situ geographical information of the bushfire as a 'spatial context'. The online learning algorithm learns the unknown probabilities sequentially based on the observed data and then makes the OPF decision accordingly. The sequential OPF decisions aim to minimize the regret function, which is defined as the cumulative loss against the clairvoyant strategy that knows the true model parameters. We provide a theoretical guarantee of our algorithm by deriving a bound on the regret function, which outperforms the regret bound achieved by other benchmark algorithms. Our model assumptions are verified by the real bushfire data from NSW, Australia, and we apply our model to two power systems to illustrate its applicability.
DNA: Differentially private Neural Augmentation for contact tracing
Authors: Rob Romijnders, Christos Louizos, Yuki M. Asano, Max Welling
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00

The COVID19 pandemic had enormous economic and societal consequences. Contact tracing is an effective way to reduce infection rates by detecting potential virus carriers early. However, this was not generally adopted in the recent pandemic, and privacy concerns are cited as the most important reason. We substantially improve the privacy guarantees of the current state of the art in decentralized contact tracing. Whereas previous work was based on statistical inference only, we augment the inference with a learned neural network and ensure that this neural augmentation satisfies differential privacy. In a simulator for COVID19, even at epsilon=1 per message, this can significantly improve the detection of potentially infected individuals and, as a result of targeted testing, reduce infection rates. This work marks an important first step in integrating deep learning into contact tracing while maintaining essential privacy guarantees.
MahaSQuAD: Bridging Linguistic Divides in Marathi Question-Answering
Authors: Ruturaj Ghatage, Aditya Kulkarni, Rajlaxmi Patil, Sharvi Endait, Raviraj Joshi
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Translation

Question-answering systems have revolutionized information retrieval, but linguistic and cultural boundaries limit their widespread accessibility. This research endeavors to bridge the gap of the absence of efficient QnA datasets in low-resource languages by translating the English Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) using a robust data curation approach. We introduce MahaSQuAD, the first-ever full SQuAD dataset for the Indic language Marathi, consisting of 118,516 training, 11,873 validation, and 11,803 test samples. We also present a gold test set of manually verified 500 examples. Challenges in maintaining context and handling linguistic nuances are addressed, ensuring accurate translations. Moreover, as a QnA dataset cannot be simply converted into any low-resource language using translation, we need a robust method to map the answer translation to its span in the translated passage. Hence, to address this challenge, we also present a generic approach for translating SQuAD into any low-resource language. Thus, we offer a scalable approach to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps present in low-resource languages, in the realm of question-answering systems. The datasets and models are shared publicly at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP .
Breaking the Memory Wall for Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Progressive Training
Authors: Yebo Wu, Li Li, Chengzhong Xu
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

This paper presents ProFL, a new framework that effectively addresses the memory constraints in FL. Rather than updating the full model during local training, ProFL partitions the model into blocks based on its original architecture and trains each block in a progressive fashion. It first trains the front blocks and safely freezes them after convergence. Training of the next block is then triggered. This process progressively grows the model to be trained until the training of the full model is completed. In this way, the peak memory footprint is effectively reduced for feasible deployment on heterogeneous devices. In order to preserve the feature representation of each block, the training process is divided into two stages: model shrinking and model growing. During the model shrinking stage, we meticulously design corresponding output modules to assist each block in learning the expected feature representation and obtain the initialization model parameters. Subsequently, the obtained output modules and initialization model parameters are utilized in the corresponding model growing stage, which progressively trains the full model. Additionally, a novel metric from the scalar perspective is proposed to assess the learning status of each block, enabling us to securely freeze it after convergence and initiate the training of the next one. Finally, we theoretically prove the convergence of ProFL and conduct extensive experiments on representative models and datasets to evaluate its effectiveness. The results demonstrate that ProFL effectively reduces the peak memory footprint by up to 57.4% and improves model accuracy by up to 82.4%.
Socialized Learning: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift for Edge Intelligence in Networked Systems
Authors: Xiaofei Wang, Yunfeng Zhao, Chao Qiu, QinGhua Hu, Victor C. M. Leung
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Amidst the robust impetus from artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, edge intelligence (EI) has emerged as a nascent computing paradigm, synthesizing AI with edge computing (EC) to become an exemplary solution for unleashing the full potential of AI services. Nonetheless, challenges in communication costs, resource allocation, privacy, and security continue to constrain its proficiency in supporting services with diverse requirements. In response to these issues, this paper introduces socialized learning (SL) as a promising solution, further propelling the advancement of EI. SL is a learning paradigm predicated on social principles and behaviors, aimed at amplifying the collaborative capacity and collective intelligence of agents within the EI system. SL not only enhances the system's adaptability but also optimizes communication, and networking processes, essential for distributed intelligence across diverse devices and platforms. Therefore, a combination of SL and EI may greatly facilitate the development of collaborative intelligence in the future network. This paper presents the findings of a literature review on the integration of EI and SL, summarizing the latest achievements in existing research on EI and SL. Subsequently, we delve comprehensively into the limitations of EI and how it could benefit from SL. Special emphasis is placed on the communication challenges and networking strategies and other aspects within these systems, underlining the role of optimized network solutions in improving system efficiency. Based on these discussions, we elaborate in detail on three integrated components: socialized architecture, socialized training, and socialized inference, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we identify some possible future applications of combining SL and EI, discuss open problems and suggest some future research.
EHRFL: Federated Learning Framework for Institution-Specific Model Construction using Electronic Health Records
Authors: Jiyoun Kim, Junu Kim, Kyunghoon Hur, Edward Choi
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

The increasing volume of electronic health records (EHRs) across healthcare institutions presents the opportunity to enhance model accuracy and robustness in clinical prediction tasks. Federated learning enables training on data from multiple institutions while preserving patient privacy and complying to regulatory constraints. However, most federated learning research focuses on constructing a global model for multiple clients, overlooking the practical need for institution-specific models. In this work, we introduce EHRFL, a federated learning framework using EHRs designed to develop a model tailored to a single healthcare institution. Our framework addresses two key challenges: (1) enabling federated learning across institutions with heterogeneous EHR systems using text-based EHR modeling, and (2) reducing the costs associated with federated learning by selecting suitable participating clients using averaged patient embeddings, which enables optimizing the number of participants without compromising model performance for the institution. Our experiment results on multiple open-source EHR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of EHRFL in addressing the two challenges, establishing it as a practical solution for institution-specific model development in federated learning.
On the stability of Lipschitz continuous control problems and its application to reinforcement learning
Authors: Namkyeong Cho, Yeoneung Kim
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We address the crucial yet underexplored stability properties of the Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) equation in model-free reinforcement learning contexts, specifically for Lipschitz continuous optimal control problems. We bridge the gap between Lipschitz continuous optimal control problems and classical optimal control problems in the viscosity solutions framework, offering new insights into the stability of the value function of Lipschitz continuous optimal control problems. By introducing structural assumptions on the dynamics and reward functions, we further study the rate of convergence of value functions. Moreover, we introduce a generalized framework for Lipschitz continuous control problems that incorporates the original problem and leverage it to propose a new HJB-based reinforcement learning algorithm. The stability properties and performance of the proposed method are tested with well-known benchmark examples in comparison with existing approaches.
Latent Schr{ö}dinger Bridge Diffusion Model for Generative Learning
Authors: Yuling Jiao, Lican Kang, Huazhen Lin, Jin Liu, Heng Zuo
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

This paper aims to conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis of current diffusion models. We introduce a novel generative learning methodology utilizing the Schr{\"o}dinger bridge diffusion model in latent space as the framework for theoretical exploration in this domain. Our approach commences with the pre-training of an encoder-decoder architecture using data originating from a distribution that may diverge from the target distribution, thus facilitating the accommodation of a large sample size through the utilization of pre-existing large-scale models. Subsequently, we develop a diffusion model within the latent space utilizing the Schr{\"o}dinger bridge framework. Our theoretical analysis encompasses the establishment of end-to-end error analysis for learning distributions via the latent Schr{\"o}dinger bridge diffusion model. Specifically, we control the second-order Wasserstein distance between the generated distribution and the target distribution. Furthermore, our obtained convergence rates effectively mitigate the curse of dimensionality, offering robust theoretical support for prevailing diffusion models.
Predicting Diabetes with Machine Learning Analysis of Income and Health Factors
Authors: Fariba Jafari Horestani, M. Mehdi Owrang O
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00

In this study, we delve into the intricate relationships between diabetes and a range of health indicators, with a particular focus on the newly added variable of income. Utilizing data from the 2015 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we analyze the impact of various factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol, BMI, smoking habits, and more on the prevalence of diabetes. Our comprehensive analysis not only investigates each factor in isolation but also explores their interdependencies and collective influence on diabetes. A novel aspect of our research is the examination of income as a determinant of diabetes risk, which to the best of our knowledge has been relatively underexplored in previous studies. We employ statistical and machine learning techniques to unravel the complex interplay between socio-economic status and diabetes, providing new insights into how financial well-being influences health outcomes. Our research reveals a discernible trend where lower income brackets are associated with a higher incidence of diabetes. In analyzing a blend of 33 variables, including health factors and lifestyle choices, we identified that features such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cholesterol checks, income, and Body Mass Index (BMI) are of considerable significance. These elements stand out among the myriad of factors examined, suggesting that they play a pivotal role in the prevalence and management of diabetes.
ST-Mamba: Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space Model for Traffic Flow Prediction
Authors: Zhiqi Shao, Michael G. H. Bell, Ze Wang, D. Glenn Geers, Haoning Xi, Junbin Gao
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Mamba, Management, Prediction, Traffic Prediction

Traffic flow prediction, a critical aspect of intelligent transportation systems, has been increasingly popular in the field of artificial intelligence, driven by the availability of extensive traffic data. The current challenges of traffic flow prediction lie in integrating diverse factors while balancing the trade-off between computational complexity and the precision necessary for effective long-range and large-scale predictions. To address these challenges, we introduce a Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space (ST-Mamba) model, which is the first to leverage the power of spatial-temporal learning in traffic flow prediction without using graph modeling. The ST-Mamba model can effectively capture the long-range dependency for traffic flow data, thereby avoiding the issue of over-smoothing. The proposed ST-Mamba model incorporates an effective Spatial-Temporal Mixer (ST-Mixer) to seamlessly integrate spatial and temporal data processing into a unified framework and employs a Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space (ST-SSM) block to improve computational efficiency. The proposed ST-Mamba model, specifically designed for spatial-temporal data, simplifies processing procedure and enhances generalization capabilities, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of long-range traffic flow prediction. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, the proposed ST-Mamba model achieves a 61.11\% improvement in computational speed and increases prediction accuracy by 0.67\%. Extensive experiments with real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that the \textsf{ST-Mamba} model sets a new benchmark in traffic flow prediction, achieving SOTA performance in computational efficiency for both long- and short-range predictions and significantly improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of traffic management.
Intelligent Agents for Auction-based Federated Learning: A Survey
Authors: Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Xiaoxiao Li, Sarit Kraus
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Survey

Auction-based federated learning (AFL) is an important emerging category of FL incentive mechanism design, due to its ability to fairly and efficiently motivate high-quality data owners to join data consumers' (i.e., servers') FL training tasks. To enhance the efficiency in AFL decision support for stakeholders (i.e., data consumers, data owners, and the auctioneer), intelligent agent-based techniques have emerged. However, due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of this field and the lack of a comprehensive survey providing an accessible perspective, it is a challenge for researchers to enter and contribute to this field. This paper bridges this important gap by providing a first-of-its-kind survey on the Intelligent Agents for AFL (IA-AFL) literature. We propose a unique multi-tiered taxonomy that organises existing IA-AFL works according to 1) the stakeholders served, 2) the auction mechanism adopted, and 3) the goals of the agents, to provide readers with a multi-perspective view into this field. In addition, we analyse the limitations of existing approaches, summarise the commonly adopted performance evaluation metrics, and discuss promising future directions leading towards effective and efficient stakeholder-oriented decision support in IA-AFL ecosystems.
Learning In Reverse Causal Strategic Environments With Ramifications on Two Sided Markets
Authors: Seamus Somerstep, Yuekai Sun, Ya'acov Ritov
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00

Motivated by equilibrium models of labor markets, we develop a formulation of causal strategic classification in which strategic agents can directly manipulate their outcomes. As an application, we compare employers that anticipate the strategic response of a labor force with employers that do not. We show through a combination of theory and experiment that employers with performatively optimal hiring policies improve employer reward, labor force skill level, and in some cases labor force equity. On the other hand, we demonstrate that performative employers harm labor force utility and fail to prevent discrimination in other cases.
TrialDura: Hierarchical Attention Transformer for Interpretable Clinical Trial Duration Prediction
Authors: Ling Yue, Jonathan Li, Sixue Xing, Md Zabirul Islam, Bolun Xia, Tianfan Fu, Jintai Chen
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00

The clinical trial process, a critical phase in drug development, is essential for developing new treatments. The primary goal of interventional clinical trials is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of drug-based treatments for specific diseases. However, these trials are often lengthy, labor-intensive, and expensive. The duration of a clinical trial significantly impacts overall costs, making efficient timeline management crucial for controlling budgets and ensuring the economic feasibility of research. To address this issue, We propose TrialDura, a machine learning-based method that estimates the duration of clinical trials using multimodal data, including disease names, drug molecules, trial phases, and eligibility criteria. Then, we encode them into Bio-BERT embeddings specifically tuned for biomedical contexts to provide a deeper and more relevant semantic understanding of clinical trial data. Finally, the model's hierarchical attention mechanism connects all of the embeddings to capture their interactions and predict clinical trial duration. Our proposed model demonstrated superior performance with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.04 years and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.39 years compared to the other models, indicating more accurate clinical trial duration prediction. Publicly available code can be found at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrialDura-F196.
Model-Based Counterfactual Explanations Incorporating Feature Space Attributes for Tabular Data
Authors: Yuta Sumiya, Hayaru Shouno
Date: 2024-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Decision Making

Machine-learning models, which are known to accurately predict patterns from large datasets, are crucial in decision making. Consequently, counterfactual explanations-methods explaining predictions by introducing input perturbations-have become prominent. These perturbations often suggest ways to alter the predictions, leading to actionable recommendations. However, the current techniques require resolving the optimization problems for each input change, rendering them computationally expensive. In addition, traditional encoding methods inadequately address the perturbations of categorical variables in tabular data. Thus, this study propose FastDCFlow, an efficient counterfactual explanation method using normalizing flows. The proposed method captures complex data distributions, learns meaningful latent spaces that retain proximity, and improves predictions. For categorical variables, we employed TargetEncoding, which respects ordinal relationships and includes perturbation costs. The proposed method outperformed existing methods in multiple metrics, striking a balance between trade offs for counterfactual explanations. The source code is available in the following repository: https://github.com/sumugit/FastDCFlow.