pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A proximal policy optimization based intelligent home solar management
Authors: Kode Creer, Imitiaz Parvez
Date: 2024-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Management

In the smart grid, the prosumers can sell unused electricity back to the power grid, assuming the prosumers own renewable energy sources and storage units. The maximizing of their profits under a dynamic electricity market is a problem that requires intelligent planning. To address this, we propose a framework based on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) using recurrent rewards. By using the information about the rewards modeled effectively with PPO to maximize our objective, we were able to get over 30\% improvement over the other naive algorithms in accumulating total profits. This shows promise in getting reinforcement learning algorithms to perform tasks required to plan their actions in complex domains like financial markets. We also introduce a novel method for embedding longs based on soliton waves that outperformed normal embedding in our use case with random floating point data augmentation.
SAAS: Solving Ability Amplification Strategy for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Hyeonwoo Kim, Gyoungjin Gim, Yungi Kim, Jihoo Kim, Byungju Kim, Wonseok Lee, Chanjun Park
Date: 2024-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

This study presents a novel learning approach designed to enhance both mathematical reasoning and problem-solving abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We focus on integrating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and the Program-of-Thought (PoT) learning, hypothesizing that prioritizing the learning of mathematical reasoning ability is helpful for the amplification of problem-solving ability. Thus, the initial learning with CoT is essential for solving challenging mathematical problems. To this end, we propose a sequential learning approach, named SAAS (Solving Ability Amplification Strategy), which strategically transitions from CoT learning to PoT learning. Our empirical study, involving an extensive performance comparison using several benchmarks, demonstrates that our SAAS achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. The results underscore the effectiveness of our sequential learning approach, marking a significant advancement in the field of mathematical reasoning in LLMs.
Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Zero-Shot Scalable Collaboration
Authors: Xudong Guo, Daming Shi, Junjie Yu, Wenhui Fan
Date: 2024-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, SMAC, SMAC+, Starcraft

The emergence of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is significantly transforming various fields like autonomous vehicle networks. However, real-world multi-agent systems typically contain multiple roles, and the scale of these systems dynamically fluctuates. Consequently, in order to achieve zero-shot scalable collaboration, it is essential that strategies for different roles can be updated flexibly according to the scales, which is still a challenge for current MARL frameworks. To address this, we propose a novel MARL framework named Scalable and Heterogeneous Proximal Policy Optimization (SHPPO), integrating heterogeneity into parameter-shared PPO-based MARL networks. We first leverage a latent network to learn strategy patterns for each agent adaptively. Second, we introduce a heterogeneous layer to be inserted into decision-making networks, whose parameters are specifically generated by the learned latent variables. Our approach is scalable as all the parameters are shared except for the heterogeneous layer, and gains both inter-individual and temporal heterogeneity, allowing SHPPO to adapt effectively to varying scales. SHPPO exhibits superior performance in classic MARL environments like Starcraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) and Google Research Football (GRF), showcasing enhanced zero-shot scalability, and offering insights into the learned latent variables' impact on team performance by visualization.
Extract, Define, Canonicalize: An LLM-based Framework for Knowledge Graph Construction
Authors: BoWen Zhang, Harold Soh
Date: 2024-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, Open Information Extraction, Retrieval-augmented Generation

In this work, we are interested in automated methods for knowledge graph creation (KGC) from input text. Progress on large language models (LLMs) has prompted a series of recent works applying them to KGC, e.g., via zero/few-shot prompting. Despite successes on small domain-specific datasets, these models face difficulties scaling up to text common in many real-world applications. A principal issue is that, in prior methods, the KG schema has to be included in the LLM prompt to generate valid triplets; larger and more complex schemas easily exceed the LLMs' context window length. Furthermore, there are scenarios where a fixed pre-defined schema is not available and we would like the method to construct a high-quality KG with a succinct self-generated schema. To address these problems, we propose a three-phase framework named Extract-Define-Canonicalize (EDC): open information extraction followed by schema definition and post-hoc canonicalization. EDC is flexible in that it can be applied to settings where a pre-defined target schema is available and when it is not; in the latter case, it constructs a schema automatically and applies self-canonicalization. To further improve performance, we introduce a trained component that retrieves schema elements relevant to the input text; this improves the LLMs' extraction performance in a retrieval-augmented generation-like manner. We demonstrate on three KGC benchmarks that EDC is able to extract high-quality triplets without any parameter tuning and with significantly larger schemas compared to prior works. Code for EDC is available at https://github.com/clear-nus/edc.
A Block-Coordinate Descent EMO Algorithm: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis
Authors: Benjamin Doerr, Joshua Knowles, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

We consider whether conditions exist under which block-coordinate descent is asymptotically efficient in evolutionary multi-objective optimization, addressing an open problem. Block-coordinate descent, where an optimization problem is decomposed into $k$ blocks of decision variables and each of the blocks is optimized (with the others fixed) in a sequence, is a technique used in some large-scale optimization problems such as airline scheduling, however its use in multi-objective optimization is less studied. We propose a block-coordinate version of GSEMO and compare its running time to the standard GSEMO algorithm. Theoretical and empirical results on a bi-objective test function, a variant of LOTZ, serve to demonstrate the existence of cases where block-coordinate descent is faster. The result may yield wider insights into this class of algorithms.
PARIS3D: Reasoning-based 3D Part Segmentation Using Large Multimodal Model
Authors: Amrin Kareem, Jean Lahoud, Hisham Cholakkal
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Part Segmentation, Benchmarking, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, World Knowledge

Recent advancements in 3D perception systems have significantly improved their ability to perform visual recognition tasks such as segmentation. However, these systems still heavily rely on explicit human instruction to identify target objects or categories, lacking the capability to actively reason and comprehend implicit user intentions. We introduce a novel segmentation task known as reasoning part segmentation for 3D objects, aiming to output a segmentation mask based on complex and implicit textual queries about specific parts of a 3D object. To facilitate evaluation and benchmarking, we present a large 3D dataset comprising over 60k instructions paired with corresponding ground-truth part segmentation annotations specifically curated for reasoning-based 3D part segmentation. We propose a model that is capable of segmenting parts of 3D objects based on implicit textual queries and generating natural language explanations corresponding to 3D object segmentation requests. Experiments show that our method achieves competitive performance to models that use explicit queries, with the additional abilities to identify part concepts, reason about them, and complement them with world knowledge. Our source code, dataset, and trained models are available at https://github.com/AmrinKareem/PARIS3D.
BiSHop: Bi-Directional Cellular Learning for Tabular Data with Generalized Sparse Modern Hopfield Model
Authors: Chenwei Xu, Yu-Chao Huang, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Weijian Li, Ammar Gilani, Hsi-Sheng Goan, Han Liu
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

We introduce the \textbf{B}i-Directional \textbf{S}parse \textbf{Hop}field Network (\textbf{BiSHop}), a novel end-to-end framework for deep tabular learning. BiSHop handles the two major challenges of deep tabular learning: non-rotationally invariant data structure and feature sparsity in tabular data. Our key motivation comes from the recent established connection between associative memory and attention mechanisms. Consequently, BiSHop uses a dual-component approach, sequentially processing data both column-wise and row-wise through two interconnected directional learning modules. Computationally, these modules house layers of generalized sparse modern Hopfield layers, a sparse extension of the modern Hopfield model with adaptable sparsity. Methodologically, BiSHop facilitates multi-scale representation learning, capturing both intra-feature and inter-feature interactions, with adaptive sparsity at each scale. Empirically, through experiments on diverse real-world datasets, we demonstrate that BiSHop surpasses current SOTA methods with significantly less HPO runs, marking it a robust solution for deep tabular learning.
Outlier-Efficient Hopfield Layers for Large Transformer-Based Models
Authors: Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Pei-Hsuan Chang, Robin Luo, Hong-Yu Chen, Weijian Li, Wei-Po Wang, Han Liu
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Quantization, Retrieval

We introduce an Outlier-Efficient Modern Hopfield Model (termed $\mathrm{OutEffHop}$) and use it to address the outlier inefficiency problem of {training} gigantic transformer-based models. Our main contribution is a novel associative memory model facilitating \textit{outlier-efficient} associative memory retrievals. Interestingly, this memory model manifests a model-based interpretation of an outlier-efficient attention mechanism (${\rm Softmax}_1$): it is an approximation of the memory retrieval process of $\mathrm{OutEffHop}$. Methodologically, this allows us to introduce novel outlier-efficient Hopfield layers as powerful alternatives to traditional attention mechanisms, with superior post-quantization performance. Theoretically, the Outlier-Efficient Modern Hopfield Model retains and improves the desirable properties of standard modern Hopfield models, including fixed point convergence and exponential storage capacity. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model across large-scale transformer-based and Hopfield-based models (including BERT, OPT, ViT, and STanHop-Net), benchmarking against state-of-the-art methods like $\mathtt{Clipped\_Softmax}$ and $\mathtt{Gated\_Attention}$. Notably, $\mathrm{OutEffHop}$ achieves an average reduction of 22+\% in average kurtosis and 26+\% in the maximum infinity norm of model outputs across four models. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/MAGICS-LAB/OutEffHop}{GitHub}; models are on \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/magicslabnu/outeffhop-6610fcede8d2cda23009a98f}{Hugging Face Hub}; future updates are on \href{https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03828}{arXiv}.
Uniform Memory Retrieval with Larger Capacity for Modern Hopfield Models
Authors: Dennis Wu, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Han Liu
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

We propose a two-stage memory retrieval dynamics for modern Hopfield models, termed $\mathtt{U\text{-}Hop}$, with enhanced memory capacity. Our key contribution is a learnable feature map $\Phi$ which transforms the Hopfield energy function into kernel space. This transformation ensures convergence between the local minima of energy and the fixed points of retrieval dynamics within the kernel space. Consequently, the kernel norm induced by $\Phi$ serves as a novel similarity measure. It utilizes the stored memory patterns as learning data to enhance memory capacity across all modern Hopfield models. Specifically, we accomplish this by constructing a separation loss $\mathcal{L}_\Phi$ that separates the local minima of kernelized energy by separating stored memory patterns in kernel space. Methodologically, $\mathtt{U\text{-}Hop}$ memory retrieval process consists of: (Stage I) minimizing separation loss for a more uniform memory (local minimum) distribution, followed by (Stage II) standard Hopfield energy minimization for memory retrieval. This results in a significant reduction of possible metastable states in the Hopfield energy function, thus enhancing memory capacity by preventing memory confusion. Empirically, with real-world datasets, we demonstrate that $\mathtt{U\text{-}Hop}$ outperforms all existing modern Hopfield models and state-of-the-art similarity measures, achieving substantial improvements in both associative memory retrieval and deep learning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/MAGICS-LAB/UHop ; future updates are on arXiv:2404.03827
Language-Guided Instance-Aware Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Elham Amin Mansour, Ozan Unal, Suman Saha, Benjamin Bejar, Luc van Gool
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Adaptation, Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The increasing relevance of panoptic segmentation is tied to the advancements in autonomous driving and AR/VR applications. However, the deployment of such models has been limited due to the expensive nature of dense data annotation, giving rise to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). A key challenge in panoptic UDA is reducing the domain gap between a labeled source and an unlabeled target domain while harmonizing the subtasks of semantic and instance segmentation to limit catastrophic interference. While considerable progress has been achieved, existing approaches mainly focus on the adaptation of semantic segmentation. In this work, we focus on incorporating instance-level adaptation via a novel instance-aware cross-domain mixing strategy IMix. IMix significantly enhances the panoptic quality by improving instance segmentation performance. Specifically, we propose inserting high-confidence predicted instances from the target domain onto source images, retaining the exhaustiveness of the resulting pseudo-labels while reducing the injected confirmation bias. Nevertheless, such an enhancement comes at the cost of degraded semantic performance, attributed to catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate this issue, we regularize our semantic branch by employing CLIP-based domain alignment (CDA), exploiting the domain-robustness of natural language prompts. Finally, we present an end-to-end model incorporating these two mechanisms called LIDAPS, achieving state-of-the-art results on all popular panoptic UDA benchmarks.
Quantifying Uncertainty in Motion Prediction with Variational Bayesian Mixture
Authors: Juanwu Lu, Can Cui, Yunsheng Ma, Aniket Bera, Ziran Wang
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, motion prediction

Safety and robustness are crucial factors in developing trustworthy autonomous vehicles. One essential aspect of addressing these factors is to equip vehicles with the capability to predict future trajectories for all moving objects in the surroundings and quantify prediction uncertainties. In this paper, we propose the Sequential Neural Variational Agent (SeNeVA), a generative model that describes the distribution of future trajectories for a single moving object. Our approach can distinguish Out-of-Distribution data while quantifying uncertainty and achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on the Argoverse 2 and INTERACTION datasets. Specifically, a 0.446 meters minimum Final Displacement Error, a 0.203 meters minimum Average Displacement Error, and a 5.35% Miss Rate are achieved on the INTERACTION test set. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis is also provided to evaluate the proposed model. Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/seneva.
Layerwise Early Stopping for Test Time Adaptation
Authors: Sabyasachi Sahoo, Mostafa ElAraby, Jonas Ngnawe, Yann Pequignot, Frederic Precioso, Christian Gagne
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Test-time Adaptation

Test Time Adaptation (TTA) addresses the problem of distribution shift by enabling pretrained models to learn new features on an unseen domain at test time. However, it poses a significant challenge to maintain a balance between learning new features and retaining useful pretrained features. In this paper, we propose Layerwise EArly STopping (LEAST) for TTA to address this problem. The key idea is to stop adapting individual layers during TTA if the features being learned do not appear beneficial for the new domain. For that purpose, we propose using a novel gradient-based metric to measure the relevance of the current learnt features to the new domain without the need for supervised labels. More specifically, we propose to use this metric to determine dynamically when to stop updating each layer during TTA. This enables a more balanced adaptation, restricted to layers benefiting from it, and only for a certain number of steps. Such an approach also has the added effect of limiting the forgetting of pretrained features useful for dealing with new domains. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Layerwise Early Stopping improves the performance of existing TTA approaches across multiple datasets, domain shifts, model architectures, and TTA losses.
A Systems Theoretic Approach to Online Machine Learning
Authors: Anli du Preez, Peter A. Beling, Tyler Cody
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection

The machine learning formulation of online learning is incomplete from a systems theoretic perspective. Typically, machine learning research emphasizes domains and tasks, and a problem solving worldview. It focuses on algorithm parameters, features, and samples, and neglects the perspective offered by considering system structure and system behavior or dynamics. Online learning is an active field of research and has been widely explored in terms of statistical theory and computational algorithms, however, in general, the literature still lacks formal system theoretical frameworks for modeling online learning systems and resolving systems-related concept drift issues. Furthermore, while the machine learning formulation serves to classify methods and literature, the systems theoretic formulation presented herein serves to provide a framework for the top-down design of online learning systems, including a novel definition of online learning and the identification of key design parameters. The framework is formulated in terms of input-output systems and is further divided into system structure and system behavior. Concept drift is a critical challenge faced in online learning, and this work formally approaches it as part of the system behavior characteristics. Healthcare provider fraud detection using machine learning is used as a case study throughout the paper to ground the discussion in a real-world online learning challenge.
A Reinforcement Learning based Reset Policy for CDCL SAT Solvers
Authors: Chunxiao Li, Charlie Liu, Jonathan Chung, Zhengyang Lu, Piyush Jha, Vijay Ganesh
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Thompson Sampling

Restart policy is an important technique used in modern Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) solvers, wherein some parts of the solver state are erased at certain intervals during the run of the solver. In most solvers, variable activities are preserved across restart boundaries, resulting in solvers continuing to search parts of the assignment tree that are not far from the one immediately prior to a restart. To enable the solver to search possibly "distant" parts of the assignment tree, we study the effect of resets, a variant of restarts which not only erases the assignment trail, but also randomizes the activity scores of the variables of the input formula after reset, thus potentially enabling a better global exploration of the search space. In this paper, we model the problem of whether to trigger reset as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, and propose two reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive reset policies using the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) and Thompson sampling algorithms. These two algorithms balance the exploration-exploitation tradeoff by adaptively choosing arms (reset vs. no reset) based on their estimated rewards during the solver's run. We implement our reset policies in four baseline SOTA CDCL solvers and compare the baselines against the reset versions on Satcoin benchmarks and SAT Competition instances. Our results show that RL-based reset versions outperform the corresponding baseline solvers on both Satcoin and the SAT competition instances, suggesting that our RL policy helps to dynamically and profitably adapt the reset frequency for any given input instance. We also introduce the concept of a partial reset, where at least a constant number of variable activities are retained across reset boundaries. Building on previous results, we show that there is an exponential separation between O(1) vs. $\Omega(n)$-length partial resets.
GenQREnsemble: Zero-Shot LLM Ensemble Prompting for Generative Query Reformulation
Authors: Kaustubh Dhole, Eugene Agichtein
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Passage Ranking, Retrieval

Query Reformulation(QR) is a set of techniques used to transform a user's original search query to a text that better aligns with the user's intent and improves their search experience. Recently, zero-shot QR has been shown to be a promising approach due to its ability to exploit knowledge inherent in large language models. By taking inspiration from the success of ensemble prompting strategies which have benefited many tasks, we investigate if they can help improve query reformulation. In this context, we propose an ensemble based prompting technique, GenQREnsemble which leverages paraphrases of a zero-shot instruction to generate multiple sets of keywords ultimately improving retrieval performance. We further introduce its post-retrieval variant, GenQREnsembleRF to incorporate pseudo relevant feedback. On evaluations over four IR benchmarks, we find that GenQREnsemble generates better reformulations with relative nDCG@10 improvements up to 18% and MAP improvements upto 24% over the previous zero-shot state-of-art. On the MSMarco Passage Ranking task, GenQREnsembleRF shows relative gains of 5% MRR using pseudo-relevance feedback, and 9% nDCG@10 using relevant feedback documents.