pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
STAL: Spike Threshold Adaptive Learning Encoder for Classification of Pain-Related Biosignal Data
Authors: Freek Hens, Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi, Leila Bagheriye, Mahyar Shahsavari, Ana Tajadura-Jiménez
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

This paper presents the first application of spiking neural networks (SNNs) for the classification of chronic lower back pain (CLBP) using the EmoPain dataset. Our work has two main contributions. We introduce Spike Threshold Adaptive Learning (STAL), a trainable encoder that effectively converts continuous biosignals into spike trains. Additionally, we propose an ensemble of Spiking Recurrent Neural Network (SRNN) classifiers for the multi-stream processing of sEMG and IMU data. To tackle the challenges of small sample size and class imbalance, we implement minority over-sampling with weighted sample replacement during batch creation. Our method achieves outstanding performance with an accuracy of 80.43%, AUC of 67.90%, F1 score of 52.60%, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.437, surpassing traditional rate-based and latency-based encoding methods. The STAL encoder shows superior performance in preserving temporal dynamics and adapting to signal characteristics. Importantly, our approach (STAL-SRNN) outperforms the best deep learning method in terms of MCC, indicating better balanced class prediction. This research contributes to the development of neuromorphic computing for biosignal analysis. It holds promise for energy-efficient, wearable solutions in chronic pain management.
AutoBencher: Creating Salient, Novel, Difficult Datasets for Language Models
Authors: Xiang Lisa Li, Evan Zheran Liu, Percy Liang, Tatsunori Hashimoto
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Math, Model Selection, Question Answering, Reranking

Evaluation is critical for assessing capabilities, tracking scientific progress, and informing model selection. In this paper, we present three desiderata for a good benchmark for language models: (i) salience (e.g., knowledge about World War II is more salient than a random day in history), (ii) novelty (i.e., the benchmark reveals new trends in model rankings not shown by previous benchmarks), and (iii) difficulty (i.e., the benchmark should be difficult for existing models, leaving headroom for future improvement). We operationalize these three desiderata and cast benchmark creation as a search problem, that of finding benchmarks that that satisfy all three desiderata. To tackle this search problem, we present AutoBencher, which uses a language model to automatically search for datasets that meet the three desiderata. AutoBencher uses privileged information (e.g. relevant documents) to construct reliable datasets, and adaptivity with reranking to optimize for the search objective. We use AutoBencher to create datasets for math, multilingual, and knowledge-intensive question answering. The scalability of AutoBencher allows it to test fine-grained categories and tail knowledge, creating datasets that are on average 27% more novel and 22% more difficult than existing benchmarks. A closer investigation of our constructed datasets shows that we can identify specific gaps in LM knowledge in language models that are not captured by existing benchmarks, such as Gemini Pro performing much worse on question answering about the Permian Extinction and Fordism, while OpenAGI-7B performing surprisingly well on QA about COVID-19.
SLRL: Structured Latent Representation Learning for Multi-view Clustering
Authors: Zhangci Xiong, Meng Cao
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Learning, Representation Learning

In recent years, Multi-View Clustering (MVC) has attracted increasing attention for its potential to reduce the annotation burden associated with large datasets. The aim of MVC is to exploit the inherent consistency and complementarity among different views, thereby integrating information from multiple perspectives to improve clustering outcomes. Despite extensive research in MVC, most existing methods focus predominantly on harnessing complementary information across views to enhance clustering effectiveness, often neglecting the structural information among samples, which is crucial for exploring sample correlations. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework, termed Structured Latent Representation Learning based Multi-View Clustering method (SLRL). SLRL leverages both the complementary and structural information. Initially, it learns a common latent representation for all views. Subsequently, to exploit the structural information among samples, a k-nearest neighbor graph is constructed from this common latent representation. This graph facilitates enhanced sample interaction through graph learning techniques, leading to a structured latent representation optimized for clustering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLRL not only competes well with existing methods but also sets new benchmarks in various multi-view datasets.
FedLog: Personalized Federated Classification with Less Communication and More Flexibility
Authors: Haolin Yu, Guojun Zhang, Pascal Poupart
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Federated Learning, Representation Learning

Federated representation learning (FRL) aims to learn personalized federated models with effective feature extraction from local data. FRL algorithms that share the majority of the model parameters face significant challenges with huge communication overhead. This overhead stems from the millions of neural network parameters and slow aggregation progress of the averaging heuristic. To reduce the overhead, we propose to share sufficient data summaries instead of raw model parameters. The data summaries encode minimal sufficient statistics of an exponential family, and Bayesian inference is utilized for global aggregation. It helps to reduce message sizes and communication frequency. To further ensure formal privacy guarantee, we extend it with differential privacy framework. Empirical results demonstrate high learning accuracy with low communication overhead of our method.
HDT: Hierarchical Document Transformer
Authors: Haoyu He, Markus Flicke, Jan Buchmann, Iryna Gurevych, Andreas Geiger
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

In this paper, we propose the Hierarchical Document Transformer (HDT), a novel sparse Transformer architecture tailored for structured hierarchical documents. Such documents are extremely important in numerous domains, including science, law or medicine. However, most existing solutions are inefficient and fail to make use of the structure inherent to documents. HDT exploits document structure by introducing auxiliary anchor tokens and redesigning the attention mechanism into a sparse multi-level hierarchy. This approach facilitates information exchange between tokens at different levels while maintaining sparsity, thereby enhancing computational and memory efficiency while exploiting the document structure as an inductive bias. We address the technical challenge of implementing HDT's sample-dependent hierarchical attention pattern by developing a novel sparse attention kernel that considers the hierarchical structure of documents. As demonstrated by our experiments, utilizing structural information present in documents leads to faster convergence, higher sample efficiency and better performance on downstream tasks.
Refining ADHD diagnosis with EEG: The impact of preprocessing and temporal segmentation on classification accuracy
Authors: Sandra García-Ponsoda, Alejandro Maté, Juan Trujillo
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Segmentation

Background: EEG signals are commonly used in ADHD diagnosis, but they are often affected by noise and artifacts. Effective preprocessing and segmentation methods can significantly enhance the accuracy and reliability of ADHD classification. Methods: We applied filtering, ASR, and ICA preprocessing techniques to EEG data from children with ADHD and neurotypical controls. The EEG recordings were segmented, and features were extracted and selected based on statistical significance. Classification was performed using various EEG segments and channels with Machine Learning models (SVM, KNN, and XGBoost) to identify the most effective combinations for accurate ADHD diagnosis. Results: Our findings show that models trained on later EEG segments achieved significantly higher accuracy, indicating the potential role of cognitive fatigue in distinguishing ADHD. The highest classification accuracy (86.1%) was achieved using data from the P3, P4, and C3 channels, with key features such as Kurtosis, Katz fractal dimension, and power spectrums in the Delta, Theta, and Alpha bands contributing to the results. Conclusion: This study highlights the importance of preprocessing and segmentation in improving the reliability of ADHD diagnosis through EEG. The results suggest that further research on cognitive fatigue and segmentation could enhance diagnostic accuracy in ADHD patients.
Improving Molecular Modeling with Geometric GNNs: an Empirical Study
Authors: Ali Ramlaoui, Théo Saulus, Basile Terver, Victor Schmidt, David Rolnick, Fragkiskos D. Malliaros, Alexandre Duval
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

Rapid advancements in machine learning (ML) are transforming materials science by significantly speeding up material property calculations. However, the proliferation of ML approaches has made it challenging for scientists to keep up with the most promising techniques. This paper presents an empirical study on Geometric Graph Neural Networks for 3D atomic systems, focusing on the impact of different (1) canonicalization methods, (2) graph creation strategies, and (3) auxiliary tasks, on performance, scalability and symmetry enforcement. Our findings and insights aim to guide researchers in selecting optimal modeling components for molecular modeling tasks.
Q-GaLore: Quantized GaLore with INT4 Projection and Layer-Adaptive Low-Rank Gradients
Authors: Zhenyu Zhang, Ajay Jaiswal, Lu Yin, Shiwei Liu, Jiawei Zhao, Yuandong Tian, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is memory-intensive due to the large number of parameters and associated optimization states. GaLore, a recent method, reduces memory usage by projecting weight gradients into a low-rank subspace without compromising performance. However, GaLore relies on time-consuming Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) operations to identify the subspace, and the frequent subspace updates lead to significant training time overhead. Moreover, GaLore offers minimal improvements in accuracy and efficiency compared to LoRA in more accessible fine-tuning scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce Q-Galore, a novel approach that substantially reduces memory usage by combining quantization and low-rank projection, surpassing the benefits of GaLore. Our method is based on two key observations: (i) the gradient subspace exhibits diverse properties, with some layers converging early in training while others are subject to frequent changes; (ii) the projection matrices are highly resilient to low-bit quantization. Leveraging these insights, Q-GaLore adaptively updates the gradient subspace based on its convergence statistics, achieving comparable performance while significantly reducing the number of SVD operations. We maintain the projection matrices in INT4 format and weights in INT8 format, incorporating stochastic rounding to capture accumulated gradient information. This approach enables a high-precision training trajectory using only low-precision weights. We demonstrate that Q-GaLore achieves highly competitive performance with exceptional memory efficiency. At pre-training, Q-GaLore facilitates training a LLaMA-7B model from scratch on a single NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti with only 16 GB memory. At fine-tuning, it reduces memory consumption by up to 50% compared to LoRA and GaLore, while consistently outperforming QLoRA at the same memory cost.
AoA-Based Physical Layer Authentication in Analog Arrays under Impersonation Attacks
Authors: Muralikrishnan Srinivasan, Linda Senigagliesi, Hui Chen, Arsenia Chorti, Marco Baldi, Henk Wymeersch
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

We discuss the use of angle of arrival (AoA) as an authentication measure in analog array multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. A base station equipped with an analog array authenticates users based on the AoA estimated from certified pilot transmissions, while active attackers manipulate their transmitted signals to mount impersonation attacks. We study several attacks of increasing intensity (captured through the availability of side information at the attackers) and assess the performance of AoA-based authentication using one-class classifiers. Our results show that some attack techniques with knowledge of the combiners at the verifier are effective in falsifying the AoA and compromising the security of the considered type of physical layer authentication.
Explainability of Sub-Field Level Crop Yield Prediction using Remote Sensing
Authors: Hiba Najjar, Miro Miranda, Marlon Nuske, Ribana Roscher, Andreas Dengel
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Crop Yield Prediction, Decision Making, Feature Importance

Crop yield forecasting plays a significant role in addressing growing concerns about food security and guiding decision-making for policymakers and farmers. When deep learning is employed, understanding the learning and decision-making processes of the models, as well as their interaction with the input data, is crucial for establishing trust in the models and gaining insight into their reliability. In this study, we focus on the task of crop yield prediction, specifically for soybean, wheat, and rapeseed crops in Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany. Our goal is to develop and explain predictive models for these crops, using a large dataset of satellite images, additional data modalities, and crop yield maps. We employ a long short-term memory network and investigate the impact of using different temporal samplings of the satellite data and the benefit of adding more relevant modalities. For model explainability, we utilize feature attribution methods to quantify input feature contributions, identify critical growth stages, analyze yield variability at the field level, and explain less accurate predictions. The modeling results show an improvement when adding more modalities or using all available instances of satellite data. The explainability results reveal distinct feature importance patterns for each crop and region. We further found that the most influential growth stages on the prediction are dependent on the temporal sampling of the input data. We demonstrated how these critical growth stages, which hold significant agronomic value, closely align with the existing literature in agronomy and crop development biology.
Gaussian process interpolation with conformal prediction: methods and comparative analysis
Authors: Aurélien Pion, Emmanuel Vazquez
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, Uncertainty Quantification

This article advocates the use of conformal prediction (CP) methods for Gaussian process (GP) interpolation to enhance the calibration of prediction intervals. We begin by illustrating that using a GP model with parameters selected by maximum likelihood often results in predictions that are not optimally calibrated. CP methods can adjust the prediction intervals, leading to better uncertainty quantification while maintaining the accuracy of the underlying GP model. We compare different CP variants and introduce a novel variant based on an asymmetric score. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CP methods in improving calibration without compromising accuracy. This work aims to facilitate the adoption of CP methods in the GP community.
An Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Locating Manipulated Region in partially fake Audio
Authors: Siding Zeng, Jiangyan Yi, JianHua Tao, Yujie Chen, Shan Liang, Yong Ren, Xiaohui Zhang
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Domain Adaptation, Mixture-of-Experts, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

When the task of locating manipulation regions in partially-fake audio (PFA) involves cross-domain datasets, the performance of deep learning models drops significantly due to the shift between the source and target domains. To address this issue, existing approaches often employ data augmentation before training. However, they overlook the characteristics in target domain that are absent in source domain. Inspired by the mixture-of-experts model, we propose an unsupervised method named Samples mining with Diversity and Entropy (SDE). Our method first learns from a collection of diverse experts that achieve great performance from different perspectives in the source domain, but with ambiguity on target samples. We leverage these diverse experts to select the most informative samples by calculating their entropy. Furthermore, we introduced a label generation method tailored for these selected samples that are incorporated in the training process in source domain integrating the target domain information. We applied our method to a cross-domain partially fake audio detection dataset, ADD2023Track2. By introducing 10% of unknown samples from the target domain, we achieved an F1 score of 43.84%, which represents a relative increase of 77.2% compared to the second-best method.
Differentially Private Neural Network Training under Hidden State Assumption
Authors: Ding Chen, Chen Liu
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

We present a novel approach called differentially private stochastic block coordinate descent (DP-SBCD) for training neural networks with provable guarantees of differential privacy under the hidden state assumption. Our methodology incorporates Lipschitz neural networks and decomposes the training process of the neural network into sub-problems, each corresponding to the training of a specific layer. By doing so, we extend the analysis of differential privacy under the hidden state assumption to encompass non-convex problems and algorithms employing proximal gradient descent. Furthermore, in contrast to existing methods, we adopt a novel approach by utilizing calibrated noise sampled from adaptive distributions, yielding improved empirical trade-offs between utility and privacy.
SwishReLU: A Unified Approach to Activation Functions for Enhanced Deep Neural Networks Performance
Authors: Jamshaid Ul Rahman, Rubiqa Zulfiqar, Asad Khan, Nimra
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

ReLU, a commonly used activation function in deep neural networks, is prone to the issue of "Dying ReLU". Several enhanced versions, such as ELU, SeLU, and Swish, have been introduced and are considered to be less commonly utilized. However, replacing ReLU can be somewhat challenging due to its inconsistent advantages. While Swish offers a smoother transition similar to ReLU, its utilization generally incurs a greater computational burden compared to ReLU. This paper proposes SwishReLU, a novel activation function combining elements of ReLU and Swish. Our findings reveal that SwishReLU outperforms ReLU in performance with a lower computational cost than Swish. This paper undertakes an examination and comparison of different types of ReLU variants with SwishReLU. Specifically, we compare ELU and SeLU along with Tanh on three datasets: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and MNIST. Notably, applying SwishReLU in the VGG16 model described in Algorithm 2 yields a 6% accuracy improvement on the CIFAR-10 dataset.
Enhancing Performance and User Engagement in Everyday Stress Monitoring: A Context-Aware Active Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Seyed Amir Hossein Aqajari, Ziyu Wang, Ali Tazarv, Sina Labbaf, Salar Jafarlou, Brenda Nguyen, Nikil Dutt, Marco Levorato, Amir M. Rahmani
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Photoplethysmography (PPG), Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In today's fast-paced world, accurately monitoring stress levels is crucial. Sensor-based stress monitoring systems often need large datasets for training effective models. However, individual-specific models are necessary for personalized and interactive scenarios. Traditional methods like Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMAs) assess stress but struggle with efficient data collection without burdening users. The challenge is to timely send EMAs, especially during stress, balancing monitoring efficiency and user convenience. This paper introduces a novel context-aware active reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for enhanced stress detection using Photoplethysmography (PPG) data from smartwatches and contextual data from smartphones. Our approach dynamically selects optimal times for deploying EMAs, utilizing the user's immediate context to maximize label accuracy and minimize intrusiveness. Initially, the study was executed in an offline environment to refine the label collection process, aiming to increase accuracy while reducing user burden. Later, we integrated a real-time label collection mechanism, transitioning to an online methodology. This shift resulted in an 11% improvement in stress detection efficiency. Incorporating contextual data improved model accuracy by 4%. Personalization studies indicated a 10% enhancement in AUC-ROC scores, demonstrating better stress level differentiation. This research marks a significant move towards personalized, context-driven real-time stress monitoring methods.
OPIMA: Optical Processing-In-Memory for Convolutional Neural Network Acceleration
Authors: Febin Sunny, Amin Shafiee, Abhishek Balasubramaniam, Mahdi Nikdast, Sudeep Pasricha
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have spotlighted the pressing need for computing architectures that bridge the gap between memory bandwidth and processing power. The advent of deep neural networks has pushed traditional Von Neumann architectures to their limits due to the high latency and energy consumption costs associated with data movement between the processor and memory for these workloads. One of the solutions to overcome this bottleneck is to perform computation within the main memory through processing-in-memory (PIM), thereby limiting data movement and the costs associated with it. However, DRAM-based PIM struggles to achieve high throughput and energy efficiency due to internal data movement bottlenecks and the need for frequent refresh operations. In this work, we introduce OPIMA, a PIM-based ML accelerator, architected within an optical main memory. OPIMA has been designed to leverage the inherent massive parallelism within main memory while performing high-speed, low-energy optical computation to accelerate ML models based on convolutional neural networks. We present a comprehensive analysis of OPIMA to guide design choices and operational mechanisms. Additionally, we evaluate the performance and energy consumption of OPIMA, comparing it with conventional electronic computing systems and emerging photonic PIM architectures. The experimental results show that OPIMA can achieve 2.98x higher throughput and 137x better energy efficiency than the best-known prior work.
Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It
Authors: Dora Zhao, Jerone T. A. Andrews, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Alice Xiang
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Position

Machine learning (ML) datasets, often perceived as neutral, inherently encapsulate abstract and disputed social constructs. Dataset curators frequently employ value-laden terms such as diversity, bias, and quality to characterize datasets. Despite their prevalence, these terms lack clear definitions and validation. Our research explores the implications of this issue by analyzing "diversity" across 135 image and text datasets. Drawing from social sciences, we apply principles from measurement theory to identify considerations and offer recommendations for conceptualizing, operationalizing, and evaluating diversity in datasets. Our findings have broader implications for ML research, advocating for a more nuanced and precise approach to handling value-laden properties in dataset construction.