pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Deep Learning with Optimized Gradient Descent: Bridging Numerical Methods and Neural Network Training
Authors: Yuhan Ma, Dan Sun, Erdi Gao, Ningjing Sang, Iris Li, Guanming Huang
Date: 2024-09-07 00:00:00

Optimization theory serves as a pivotal scientific instrument for achieving optimal system performance, with its origins in economic applications to identify the best investment strategies for maximizing benefits. Over the centuries, from the geometric inquiries of ancient Greece to the calculus contributions by Newton and Leibniz, optimization theory has significantly advanced. The persistent work of scientists like Lagrange, Cauchy, and von Neumann has fortified its progress. The modern era has seen an unprecedented expansion of optimization theory applications, particularly with the growth of computer science, enabling more sophisticated computational practices and widespread utilization across engineering, decision analysis, and operations research. This paper delves into the profound relationship between optimization theory and deep learning, highlighting the omnipresence of optimization problems in the latter. We explore the gradient descent algorithm and its variants, which are the cornerstone of optimizing neural networks. The chapter introduces an enhancement to the SGD optimizer, drawing inspiration from numerical optimization methods, aiming to enhance interpretability and accuracy. Our experiments on diverse deep learning tasks substantiate the improved algorithm's efficacy. The paper concludes by emphasizing the continuous development of optimization theory and its expanding role in solving intricate problems, enhancing computational capabilities, and informing better policy decisions.
A Multi-scenario Attention-based Generative Model for Personalized Blood Pressure Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Cheng Wan, Chenjie Xie, Longfei Liu, Dan Wu, Ye Li
Date: 2024-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Representation Learning, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring is essential for timely diagnosis and intervention in critical care settings. However, BP varies significantly across individuals, this inter-patient variability motivates the development of personalized models tailored to each patient's physiology. In this work, we propose a personalized BP forecasting model mainly using electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals. This time-series model incorporates 2D representation learning to capture complex physiological relationships. Experiments are conducted on datasets collected from three diverse scenarios with BP measurements from 60 subjects total. Results demonstrate that the model achieves accurate and robust BP forecasts across scenarios within the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standard criteria. This reliable early detection of abnormal fluctuations in BP is crucial for at-risk patients undergoing surgery or intensive care. The proposed model provides a valuable addition for continuous BP tracking to reduce mortality and improve prognosis.
Hierarchical Sparse Representation Clustering for High-Dimensional Data Streams
Authors: Jie Chen, Hua Mao, Yuanbiao Gou, Xi Peng
Date: 2024-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Data stream clustering reveals patterns within continuously arriving, potentially unbounded data sequences. Numerous data stream algorithms have been proposed to cluster data streams. The existing data stream clustering algorithms still face significant challenges when addressing high-dimensional data streams. First, it is intractable to measure the similarities among high-dimensional data objects via Euclidean distances when constructing and merging microclusters. Second, these algorithms are highly sensitive to the noise contained in high-dimensional data streams. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical sparse representation clustering (HSRC) method for clustering high-dimensional data streams. HSRC first employs an $l_1$-minimization technique to learn an affinity matrix for data objects in individual landmark windows with fixed sizes, where the number of neighboring data objects is automatically selected. This approach ensures that highly correlated data samples within clusters are grouped together. Then, HSRC applies a spectral clustering technique to the affinity matrix to generate microclusters. These microclusters are subsequently merged into macroclusters based on their sparse similarity degrees (SSDs). Additionally, HSRC introduces sparsity residual values (SRVs) to adaptively select representative data objects from the current landmark window. These representatives serve as dictionary samples for the next landmark window. Finally, HSRC refines each macrocluster through fine-tuning. In particular, HSRC enables the detection of outliers in high-dimensional data streams via the associated SRVs. The experimental results obtained on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of HSRC.
QueryBuilder: Human-in-the-Loop Query Development for Information Retrieval
Authors: Hemanth Kandula, Damianos Karakos, Haoling Qiu, Benjamin Rozonoyer, Ian Soboroff, Lee Tarlin, Bonan Min
Date: 2024-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval, Efficient Exploration, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Frequently, users of an Information Retrieval (IR) system start with an overarching information need (a.k.a., an analytic task) and proceed to define finer-grained queries covering various important aspects (i.e., sub-topics) of that analytic task. We present a novel, interactive system called $\textit{QueryBuilder}$, which allows a novice, English-speaking user to create queries with a small amount of effort, through efficient exploration of an English development corpus in order to rapidly develop cross-lingual information retrieval queries corresponding to the user's information needs. QueryBuilder performs near real-time retrieval of documents based on user-entered search terms; the user looks through the retrieved documents and marks sentences as relevant to the information needed. The marked sentences are used by the system as additional information in query formation and refinement: query terms (and, optionally, event features, which capture event $'triggers'$ (indicator terms) and agent/patient roles) are appropriately weighted, and a neural-based system, which better captures textual meaning, retrieves other relevant content. The process of retrieval and marking is repeated as many times as desired, giving rise to increasingly refined queries in each iteration. The final product is a fine-grained query used in Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR). Our experiments using analytic tasks and requests from the IARPA BETTER IR datasets show that with a small amount of effort (at most 10 minutes per sub-topic), novice users can form $\textit{useful}$ fine-grained queries including in languages they don't understand. QueryBuilder also provides beneficial capabilities to the traditional corpus exploration and query formation process. A demonstration video is released at https://vimeo.com/734795835
IIFE: Interaction Information Based Automated Feature Engineering
Authors: Tom Overman, Diego Klabjan, Jean Utke
Date: 2024-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Feature Engineering, Feature Engineering

Automated feature engineering (AutoFE) is the process of automatically building and selecting new features that help improve downstream predictive performance. While traditional feature engineering requires significant domain expertise and time-consuming iterative testing, AutoFE strives to make feature engineering easy and accessible to all data science practitioners. We introduce a new AutoFE algorithm, IIFE, based on determining which feature pairs synergize well through an information-theoretic perspective called interaction information. We demonstrate the superior performance of IIFE over existing algorithms. We also show how interaction information can be used to improve existing AutoFE algorithms. Finally, we highlight several critical experimental setup issues in the existing AutoFE literature and their effects on performance.
Generalization vs. Memorization in the Presence of Statistical Biases in Transformers
Authors: John Mitros, Damien Teney
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

This study aims to understand how statistical biases affect the model's ability to generalize to in-distribution and out-of-distribution data on algorithmic tasks. Prior research indicates that transformers may inadvertently learn to rely on these spurious correlations, leading to an overestimation of their generalization capabilities. To investigate this, we evaluate transformer models on several synthetic algorithmic tasks, systematically introducing and varying the presence of these biases. We also analyze how different components of the transformer models impact their generalization. Our findings suggest that statistical biases impair the model's performance on out-of-distribution data, providing a overestimation of its generalization capabilities. The models rely heavily on these spurious correlations for inference, as indicated by their performance on tasks including such biases.
Privacy-Preserving Race/Ethnicity Estimation for Algorithmic Bias Measurement in the U.S
Authors: Saikrishna Badrinarayanan, Osonde Osoba, Miao Cheng, Ryan Rogers, Sakshi Jain, Rahul Tandra, Natesh S. Pillai
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Privacy Preserving

AI fairness measurements, including tests for equal treatment, often take the form of disaggregated evaluations of AI systems. Such measurements are an important part of Responsible AI operations. These measurements compare system performance across demographic groups or sub-populations and typically require member-level demographic signals such as gender, race, ethnicity, and location. However, sensitive member-level demographic attributes like race and ethnicity can be challenging to obtain and use due to platform choices, legal constraints, and cultural norms. In this paper, we focus on the task of enabling AI fairness measurements on race/ethnicity for \emph{U.S. LinkedIn members} in a privacy-preserving manner. We present the Privacy-Preserving Probabilistic Race/Ethnicity Estimation (PPRE) method for performing this task. PPRE combines the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) model, a sparse LinkedIn survey sample of self-reported demographics, and privacy-enhancing technologies like secure two-party computation and differential privacy to enable meaningful fairness measurements while preserving member privacy. We provide details of the PPRE method and its privacy guarantees. We then illustrate sample measurement operations. We conclude with a review of open research and engineering challenges for expanding our privacy-preserving fairness measurement capabilities.
Stacked Universal Successor Feature Approximators for Safety in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ian Cannon, Washington Garcia, Thomas Gresavage, Joseph Saurine, Ian Leong, Jared Culbertson
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Real-world problems often involve complex objective structures that resist distillation into reinforcement learning environments with a single objective. Operation costs must be balanced with multi-dimensional task performance and end-states' effects on future availability, all while ensuring safety for other agents in the environment and the reinforcement learning agent itself. System redundancy through secondary backup controllers has proven to be an effective method to ensure safety in real-world applications where the risk of violating constraints is extremely high. In this work, we investigate the utility of a stacked, continuous-control variation of universal successor feature approximation (USFA) adapted for soft actor-critic (SAC) and coupled with a suite of secondary safety controllers, which we call stacked USFA for safety (SUSFAS). Our method improves performance on secondary objectives compared to SAC baselines using an intervening secondary controller such as a runtime assurance (RTA) controller.
Enhancing Quantum Security over Federated Learning via Post-Quantum Cryptography
Authors: Pingzhi Li, Tianlong Chen, Junyu Liu
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has become one of the standard approaches for deploying machine learning models on edge devices, where private training data are distributed across clients, and a shared model is learned by aggregating locally computed updates from each client. While this paradigm enhances communication efficiency by only requiring updates at the end of each training epoch, the transmitted model updates remain vulnerable to malicious tampering, posing risks to the integrity of the global model. Although current digital signature algorithms can protect these communicated model updates, they fail to ensure quantum security in the era of large-scale quantum computing. Fortunately, various post-quantum cryptography algorithms have been developed to address this vulnerability, especially the three NIST-standardized algorithms - Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+. In this work, we empirically investigate the impact of these three NIST-standardized PQC algorithms for digital signatures within the FL procedure, covering a wide range of models, tasks, and FL settings. Our results indicate that Dilithium stands out as the most efficient PQC algorithm for digital signature in federated learning. Additionally, we offer an in-depth discussion of the implications of our findings and potential directions for future research.
Notes on Sampled Gaussian Mechanism
Authors: Nikita P. Kalinin
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

In these notes, we prove a recent conjecture posed in the paper by R\"ais\"a, O. et al. [Subsampling is not Magic: Why Large Batch Sizes Work for Differentially Private Stochastic Optimization (2024)]. Theorem 6.2 of the paper asserts that for the Sampled Gaussian Mechanism - a composition of subsampling and additive Gaussian noise, the effective noise level, $\sigma_{\text{eff}} = \frac{\sigma(q)}{q}$, decreases as a function of the subsampling rate $q$. Consequently, larger subsampling rates are preferred for better privacy-utility trade-offs. Our notes provide a rigorous proof of Conjecture 6.3, which was left unresolved in the original paper, thereby completing the proof of Theorem 6.2.
Detection of False Data Injection Attacks (FDIA) on Power Dynamical Systems With a State Prediction Method
Authors: Abhijeet Sahu, Truc Nguyen, Kejun Chen, Xiangyu Zhang, Malik Hassanaly
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00

With the deeper penetration of inverter-based resources in power systems, false data injection attacks (FDIA) are a growing cyber-security concern. They have the potential to disrupt the system's stability like frequency stability, thereby leading to catastrophic failures. Therefore, an FDIA detection method would be valuable to protect power systems. FDIAs typically induce a discrepancy between the desired and the effective behavior of the power system dynamics. A suitable detection method can leverage power dynamics predictions to identify whether such a discrepancy was induced by an FDIA. This work investigates the efficacy of temporal and spatio-temporal state prediction models, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a combination of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) with LSTM, for predicting frequency dynamics in the absence of an FDIA but with noisy measurements, and thereby identify FDIA events. For demonstration purposes, the IEEE 39 New England Kron-reduced model simulated with a swing equation is considered. It is shown that the proposed state prediction models can be used as a building block for developing an effective FDIA detection method that can maintain high detection accuracy across various attack and deployment settings. It is also shown how the FDIA detection should be deployed to limit its exposure to detection inaccuracies and mitigate its computational burden.
Whittle Index Learning Algorithms for Restless Bandits with Constant Stepsizes
Authors: Vishesh Mittal, Rahul Meshram, Surya Prakash
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits, Q-Learning

We study the Whittle index learning algorithm for restless multi-armed bandits. We consider index learning algorithm with Q-learning. We first present Q-learning algorithm with exploration policies -- epsilon-greedy, softmax, epsilon-softmax with constant stepsizes. We extend the study of Q-learning to index learning for single-armed restless bandit. The algorithm of index learning is two-timescale variant of stochastic approximation, on slower timescale we update index learning scheme and on faster timescale we update Q-learning assuming fixed index value. In Q-learning updates are in asynchronous manner. We study constant stepsizes two timescale stochastic approximation algorithm. We provide analysis of two-timescale stochastic approximation for index learning with constant stepsizes. Further, we present study on index learning with deep Q-network (DQN) learning and linear function approximation with state-aggregation method. We describe the performance of our algorithms using numerical examples. We have shown that index learning with Q learning, DQN and function approximations learns the Whittle index.
Training quantum machine learning models on cloud without uploading the data
Authors: Guang Ping He
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning

Based on the linearity of quantum unitary operations, we propose a method that runs the parameterized quantum circuits before encoding the input data. This enables a dataset owner to train machine learning models on quantum cloud computation platforms, without the risk of leaking the information about the data. It is also capable of encoding a vast amount of data effectively at a later time using classical computations, thus saving runtime on quantum computation devices. The trained quantum machine learning models can be run completely on classical computers, meaning the dataset owner does not need to have any quantum hardware, nor even quantum simulators. Moreover, our method mitigates the encoding bottleneck by reducing the required circuit depth from $O(2^{n})$ to $O(n)$, and relax the tolerance on the precision of the quantum gates for the encoding. These results demonstrate yet another advantage of quantum and quantum-inspired machine learning models over existing classical neural networks, and broaden the approaches to data security.
Detecting Buggy Contracts via Smart Testing
Authors: Sally Junsong Wang, Jianan Yao, Kexin Pei, Hidedaki Takahashi, Junfeng Yang
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Smart contracts are susceptible to critical vulnerabilities. Hybrid dynamic analyses, such as concolic execution assisted fuzzing and foundation model assisted fuzzing, have emerged as highly effective testing techniques for smart contract bug detection recently. This hybrid approach has shown initial promise in real-world benchmarks, but it still suffers from low scalability to find deep bugs buried in complex code patterns. We observe that performance bottlenecks of existing dynamic analyses and model hallucination are two main factors limiting the scalability of this hybrid approach in finding deep bugs. To overcome the challenges, we design an interactive, self-deciding foundation model based system, called SmartSys, to support hybrid smart contract dynamic analyses. The key idea is to teach foundation models about performance bottlenecks of different dynamic analysis techniques, making it possible to forecast the right technique and generates effective fuzz targets that can reach deep, hidden bugs. To prune hallucinated, incorrect fuzz targets, SmartSys feeds foundation models with feedback from dynamic analysis during compilation and at runtime. The interesting results of SmartSys include: i) discovering a smart contract protocol vulnerability that has escaped eleven tools and survived multiple audits for over a year; ii) improving coverage by up to 14.3\% on real-world benchmarks compared to the baselines.
CubicML: Automated ML for Large ML Systems Co-design with ML Prediction of Performance
Authors: Wei Wen, Quanyu Zhu, Weiwei Chu, Wen-Yen Chen, Jiyan Yang
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00

Scaling up deep learning models has been proven effective to improve intelligence of machine learning (ML) models, especially for industry recommendation models and large language models. The co-design of large distributed ML systems and algorithms (to maximize training performance) plays a pivotal role for its success. As it scales, the number of co-design hyper-parameters grows rapidly which brings challenges to feasibly find the optimal setup for system performance maximization. In this paper, we propose CubicML which uses ML to automatically optimize training performance of large distributed ML systems. In CubicML, we use an ML model as a proxy to predict the training performance for search efficiency and performance modeling flexibility. We proved that CubicML can effectively optimize training speed of in-house ads recommendation models with 73 billion parameters and large language models up to 405 billion parameters at Meta.
DeepTTV: Deep Learning Prediction of Hidden Exoplanet From Transit Timing Variations
Authors: Chen Chen, Lingkai Kong, Gongjie Li, Molei Tao
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00

Transit timing variation (TTV) provides rich information about the mass and orbital properties of exoplanets, which are often obtained by solving an inverse problem via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In this paper, we design a new data-driven approach, which potentially can be applied to problems that are hard to traditional MCMC methods, such as the case with only one planet transiting. Specifically, we use a deep learning approach to predict the parameters of non-transit companion for the single transit system with transit information (i.e., TTV, and Transit Duration Variation (TDV)) as input. Thanks to a newly constructed \textit{Transformer}-based architecture that can extract long-range interactions from TTV sequential data, this previously difficult task can now be accomplished with high accuracy, with an overall fractional error of $\sim$2\% on mass and eccentricity.
How Does Code Pretraining Affect Language Model Task Performance?
Authors: Jackson Petty, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Tal Linzen
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Semantic Parsing, World Knowledge

Large language models are increasingly trained on corpora containing both natural language and non-linguistic data like source code. Aside from aiding programming-related tasks, anecdotal evidence suggests that including code in pretraining corpora may improve performance on other, unrelated tasks, yet to date no work has been able to establish a causal connection by controlling between language and code data. Here we do just this. We pretrain language models on datasets which interleave natural language and code in two different settings: additive, in which the total volume of data seen during pretraining is held constant; and competitive, in which the volume of language data is held constant. We study how the pretraining mixture affects performance on (a) a diverse collection of tasks included in the BigBench benchmark, and (b) compositionality, measured by generalization accuracy on semantic parsing and syntactic transformations. We find that pretraining on higher proportions of code improves performance on compositional tasks involving structured output (like semantic parsing), and mathematics. Conversely, increase code mixture can harm performance on other tasks, including on tasks that requires sensitivity to linguistic structure such as syntax or morphology, and tasks measuring real-world knowledge.