pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ImageNet-RIB Benchmark: Large Pre-Training Datasets Don't Guarantee Robustness after Fine-Tuning
Authors: Jaedong Hwang, Brian Cheung, Zhang-Wei Hong, Akhilan Boopathy, Pulkit Agrawal, Ila Fiete
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Highly performant large-scale pre-trained models promise to also provide a valuable foundation for learning specialized tasks, by fine-tuning the model to the desired task. By starting from a good general-purpose model, the goal is to achieve both specialization in the target task and maintain robustness. To assess the robustness of models to out-of-distribution samples after fine-tuning on downstream datasets, we introduce a new robust fine-tuning benchmark, ImageNet-RIB (Robustness Inheritance Benchmark). The benchmark consists of a set of related but distinct specialized (downstream) tasks; pre-trained models are fine-tuned on one task in the set and their robustness is assessed on the rest, iterating across all tasks for fine-tuning and assessment. We find that the continual learning methods, EWC and LwF maintain robustness after fine-tuning though fine-tuning generally does reduce performance on generalization to related downstream tasks across models. Not surprisingly, models pre-trained on large and rich datasets exhibit higher initial robustness across datasets and suffer more pronounced degradation during fine-tuning. The distance between the pre-training and downstream datasets, measured by optimal transport, predicts this performance degradation on the pre-training dataset. However, counterintuitively, model robustness after fine-tuning on related downstream tasks is the worst when the pre-training dataset is the richest and the most diverse. This suggests that starting with the strongest foundation model is not necessarily the best approach for performance on specialist tasks. The benchmark thus offers key insights for developing more resilient fine-tuning strategies and building robust machine learning models. https://jd730.github.io/projects/ImageNet-RIB
A Generative Model Based Honeypot for Industrial OPC UA Communication
Authors: Olaf Sassnick, Georg Schäfer, Thomas Rosenstatter, Stefan Huber
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection

Industrial Operational Technology (OT) systems are increasingly targeted by cyber-attacks due to their integration with Information Technology (IT) systems in the Industry 4.0 era. Besides intrusion detection systems, honeypots can effectively detect these attacks. However, creating realistic honeypots for brownfield systems is particularly challenging. This paper introduces a generative model-based honeypot designed to mimic industrial OPC UA communication. Utilizing a Long ShortTerm Memory (LSTM) network, the honeypot learns the characteristics of a highly dynamic mechatronic system from recorded state space trajectories. Our contributions are twofold: first, we present a proof-of concept for a honeypot based on generative machine-learning models, and second, we publish a dataset for a cyclic industrial process. The results demonstrate that a generative model-based honeypot can feasibly replicate a cyclic industrial process via OPC UA communication. In the short-term, the generative model indicates a stable and plausible trajectory generation, while deviations occur over extended periods. The proposed honeypot implementation operates efficiently on constrained hardware, requiring low computational resources. Future work will focus on improving model accuracy, interaction capabilities, and extending the dataset for broader applications.
Thank You, Stingray: Multilingual Large Language Models Can Not (Yet) Disambiguate Cross-Lingual Word Sense
Authors: Samuel Cahyawijaya, Ruochen Zhang, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Elisa Gilbert, Hiroki Nomoto, Alham Fikri Aji
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence, but concerns arise regarding their reliability beyond English. This study addresses the gap in cross-lingual semantic evaluation by introducing a novel benchmark for cross-lingual sense disambiguation, StingrayBench. In this paper, we demonstrate using false friends -- words that are orthographically similar but have completely different meanings in two languages -- as a possible approach to pinpoint the limitation of cross-lingual sense disambiguation in LLMs. We collect false friends in four language pairs, namely Indonesian-Malay, Indonesian-Tagalog, Chinese-Japanese, and English-German; and challenge LLMs to distinguish the use of them in context. In our analysis of various models, we observe they tend to be biased toward higher-resource languages. We also propose new metrics for quantifying the cross-lingual sense bias and comprehension based on our benchmark. Our work contributes to developing more diverse and inclusive language modeling, promoting fairer access for the wider multilingual community.
Mitigating Gradient Overlap in Deep Residual Networks with Gradient Normalization for Improved Non-Convex Optimization
Authors: Juyoung Yun
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In deep learning, Residual Networks (ResNets) have proven effective in addressing the vanishing gradient problem, allowing for the successful training of very deep networks. However, skip connections in ResNets can lead to gradient overlap, where gradients from both the learned transformation and the skip connection combine, potentially resulting in overestimated gradients. This overestimation can cause inefficiencies in optimization, as some updates may overshoot optimal regions, affecting weight updates. To address this, we examine Z-score Normalization (ZNorm) as a technique to manage gradient overlap. ZNorm adjusts the gradient scale, standardizing gradients across layers and reducing the negative impact of overlapping gradients. Our experiments demonstrate that ZNorm improves training process, especially in non-convex optimization scenarios common in deep learning, where finding optimal solutions is challenging. These findings suggest that ZNorm can affect the gradient flow, enhancing performance in large-scale data processing where accuracy is critical.
Going Beyond H&E and Oncology: How Do Histopathology Foundation Models Perform for Multi-stain IHC and Immunology?
Authors: Amaya Gallagher-Syed, Elena Pontarini, Myles J. Lewis, Michael R. Barnes, Gregory Slabaugh
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Multiple Instance Learning

This study evaluates the generalisation capabilities of state-of-the-art histopathology foundation models on out-of-distribution multi-stain autoimmune Immunohistochemistry datasets. We compare 13 feature extractor models, including ImageNet-pretrained networks, and histopathology foundation models trained on both public and proprietary data, on Rheumatoid Arthritis subtyping and Sjogren's Disease detection tasks. Using a simple Attention-Based Multiple Instance Learning classifier, we assess the transferability of learned representations from cancer H&E images to autoimmune IHC images. Contrary to expectations, histopathology-pretrained models did not significantly outperform ImageNet-pretrained models. Furthermore, there was evidence of both autoimmune feature misinterpretation and biased feature importance. Our findings highlight the challenges in transferring knowledge from cancer to autoimmune histopathology and emphasise the need for careful evaluation of AI models across diverse histopathological tasks. The code to run this benchmark is available at https://github.com/AmayaGS/ImmunoHistoBench.
Bayesian Regression for Predicting Subscription to Bank Term Deposits in Direct Marketing Campaigns
Authors: Muhammad Farhan Tanvir, Md Maruf Hossain, Md Asifuzzaman Jishan
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Marketing, Model Selection

In the highly competitive environment of the banking industry, it is essential to precisely forecast the behavior of customers in order to maximize the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and improve financial consequences. The purpose of this research is to examine the efficacy of logit and probit models in predicting term deposit subscriptions using a Portuguese bank's direct marketing data. There are several demographic, economic, and behavioral characteristics in the dataset that affect the probability of subscribing. To increase model performance and provide an unbiased evaluation, the target variable was balanced, considering the inherent imbalance in the dataset. The two model's prediction abilities were evaluated using Bayesian techniques and Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOO-CV). The logit model performed better than the probit model in handling this classification problem. The results highlight the relevance of model selection when dealing with complicated decision-making processes in the financial services industry and imbalanced datasets. Findings from this study shed light on how banks can optimize their decision-making processes, improve their client segmentation, and boost their marketing campaigns by utilizing machine learning models.
L3Ms -- Lagrange Large Language Models
Authors: Guneet S. Dhillon, Xingjian Shi, Yee Whye Teh, Alex Smola
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and alignment of large language models (LLMs) are key steps in providing a good user experience. However, the concept of an appropriate alignment is inherently application-dependent, and current methods often rely on heuristic choices to drive optimization. In this work, we formulate SFT and alignment as a constrained optimization problem: the LLM is fine-tuned on a task while being required to meet application-specific requirements, without resorting to heuristics. To solve this, we propose Lagrange Large Language Models (L3Ms), which employ logarithmic barriers to enforce the constraints. This approach allows for the customization of L3Ms across diverse applications while avoiding heuristic-driven processes. We experimentally demonstrate the versatility and efficacy of L3Ms in achieving tailored alignments for various applications.
Sabotage Evaluations for Frontier Models
Authors: Joe Benton, Misha Wagner, Eric Christiansen, Cem Anil, Ethan Perez, Jai Srivastav, Esin Durmus, Deep Ganguli, Shauna Kravec, Buck Shlegeris, Jared Kaplan, Holden Karnofsky, Evan Hubinger, Roger Grosse, Samuel R. Bowman, David Duvenaud
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Sufficiently capable models could subvert human oversight and decision-making in important contexts. For example, in the context of AI development, models could covertly sabotage efforts to evaluate their own dangerous capabilities, to monitor their behavior, or to make decisions about their deployment. We refer to this family of abilities as sabotage capabilities. We develop a set of related threat models and evaluations. These evaluations are designed to provide evidence that a given model, operating under a given set of mitigations, could not successfully sabotage a frontier model developer or other large organization's activities in any of these ways. We demonstrate these evaluations on Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models. Our results suggest that for these models, minimal mitigations are currently sufficient to address sabotage risks, but that more realistic evaluations and stronger mitigations seem likely to be necessary soon as capabilities improve. We also survey related evaluations we tried and abandoned. Finally, we discuss the advantages of mitigation-aware capability evaluations, and of simulating large-scale deployments using small-scale statistics.
Efficient Training of Sparse Autoencoders for Large Language Models via Layer Groups
Authors: Davide Ghilardi, Federico Belotti, Marco Molinari
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00

Sparse AutoEnocders (SAEs) have recently been employed as an unsupervised approach for understanding the inner workings of Large Language Models (LLMs). They reconstruct the model's activations with a sparse linear combination of interpretable features. However, training SAEs is computationally intensive, especially as models grow in size and complexity. To address this challenge, we propose a novel training strategy that reduces the number of trained SAEs from one per layer to one for a given group of contiguous layers. Our experimental results on Pythia 160M highlight a speedup of up to 6x without compromising the reconstruction quality and performance on downstream tasks. Therefore, layer clustering presents an efficient approach to train SAEs in modern LLMs.
Towards Multi-dimensional Explanation Alignment for Medical Classification
Authors: Lijie Hu, Songning Lai, Wenshuo Chen, Hongru Xiao, Hongbin Lin, Lu Yu, Jingfeng Zhang, Di Wang
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Medical Image Analysis

The lack of interpretability in the field of medical image analysis has significant ethical and legal implications. Existing interpretable methods in this domain encounter several challenges, including dependency on specific models, difficulties in understanding and visualization, as well as issues related to efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework called Med-MICN (Medical Multi-dimensional Interpretable Concept Network). Med-MICN provides interpretability alignment for various angles, including neural symbolic reasoning, concept semantics, and saliency maps, which are superior to current interpretable methods. Its advantages include high prediction accuracy, interpretability across multiple dimensions, and automation through an end-to-end concept labeling process that reduces the need for extensive human training effort when working with new datasets. To demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of Med-MICN, we apply it to four benchmark datasets and compare it with baselines. The results clearly demonstrate the superior performance and interpretability of our Med-MICN.
Trustworthiness of Stochastic Gradient Descent in Distributed Learning
Authors: Hongyang Li, Caesar Wu, Mohammed Chadli, Said Mammar, Pascal Bouvry
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00

Distributed learning (DL) uses multiple nodes to accelerate training, enabling efficient optimization of large-scale models. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), a key optimization algorithm, plays a central role in this process. However, communication bottlenecks often limit scalability and efficiency, leading to increasing adoption of compressed SGD techniques to alleviate these challenges. Despite addressing communication overheads, compressed SGD introduces trustworthiness concerns, as gradient exchanges among nodes are vulnerable to attacks like gradient inversion (GradInv) and membership inference attacks (MIA). The trustworthiness of compressed SGD remains unexplored, leaving important questions about its reliability unanswered. In this paper, we provide a trustworthiness evaluation of compressed versus uncompressed SGD. Specifically, we conducted empirical studies using GradInv attacks, revealing that compressed SGD demonstrates significantly higher resistance to privacy leakage compared to uncompressed SGD. In addition, our findings suggest that MIA may not be a reliable metric for assessing privacy risks in distributed learning.
Can Large Language Models Act as Symbolic Reasoners?
Authors: Rob Sullivan, Nelly Elsayed
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00

The performance of Large language models (LLMs) across a broad range of domains has been impressive but have been critiqued as not being able to reason about their process and conclusions derived. This is to explain the conclusions draw, and also for determining a plan or strategy for their approach. This paper explores the current research in investigating symbolic reasoning and LLMs, and whether an LLM can inherently provide some form of reasoning or whether supporting components are necessary, and, if there is evidence for a reasoning capability, is this evident in a specific domain or is this a general capability? In addition, this paper aims to identify the current research gaps and future trends of LLM explainability, presenting a review of the literature, identifying current research into this topic and suggests areas for future work.
Enhancing CTR Prediction in Recommendation Domain with Search Query Representation
Authors: Yuening Wang, Man Chen, Yaochen Hu, Wei Guo, Yingxue Zhang, Huifeng Guo, Yong liu, Mark Coates
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Contrastive Learning, Denoising

Many platforms, such as e-commerce websites, offer both search and recommendation services simultaneously to better meet users' diverse needs. Recommendation services suggest items based on user preferences, while search services allow users to search for items before providing recommendations. Since users and items are often shared between the search and recommendation domains, there is a valuable opportunity to enhance the recommendation domain by leveraging user preferences extracted from the search domain. Existing approaches either overlook the shift in user intention between these domains or fail to capture the significant impact of learning from users' search queries on understanding their interests. In this paper, we propose a framework that learns from user search query embeddings within the context of user preferences in the recommendation domain. Specifically, user search query sequences from the search domain are used to predict the items users will click at the next time point in the recommendation domain. Additionally, the relationship between queries and items is explored through contrastive learning. To address issues of data sparsity, the diffusion model is incorporated to infer positive items the user will select after searching with certain queries in a denoising manner, which is particularly effective in preventing false positives. Effectively extracting this information, the queries are integrated into click-through rate prediction in the recommendation domain. Experimental analysis demonstrates that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in the recommendation domain.
AiSciVision: A Framework for Specializing Large Multimodal Models in Scientific Image Classification
Authors: Brendan Hogan, Anmol Kabra, Felipe Siqueira Pacheco, Laura Greenstreet, Joshua Fan, Aaron Ferber, Marta Ummus, Alecsander Brito, Olivia Graham, Lillian Aoki, Drew Harvell, Alex Flecker, Carla Gomes
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Retrieval-augmented Generation, scientific discovery

Trust and interpretability are crucial for the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in scientific research, but current models often operate as black boxes offering limited transparency and justifications for their outputs. We introduce AiSciVision, a framework that specializes Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) into interactive research partners and classification models for image classification tasks in niche scientific domains. Our framework uses two key components: (1) Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VisRAG) and (2) domain-specific tools utilized in an agentic workflow. To classify a target image, AiSciVision first retrieves the most similar positive and negative labeled images as context for the LMM. Then the LMM agent actively selects and applies tools to manipulate and inspect the target image over multiple rounds, refining its analysis before making a final prediction. These VisRAG and tooling components are designed to mirror the processes of domain experts, as humans often compare new data to similar examples and use specialized tools to manipulate and inspect images before arriving at a conclusion. Each inference produces both a prediction and a natural language transcript detailing the reasoning and tool usage that led to the prediction. We evaluate AiSciVision on three real-world scientific image classification datasets: detecting the presence of aquaculture ponds, diseased eelgrass, and solar panels. Across these datasets, our method outperforms fully supervised models in low and full-labeled data settings. AiSciVision is actively deployed in real-world use, specifically for aquaculture research, through a dedicated web application that displays and allows the expert users to converse with the transcripts. This work represents a crucial step toward AI systems that are both interpretable and effective, advancing their use in scientific research and scientific discovery.
TransformLLM: Adapting Large Language Models via LLM-Transformed Reading Comprehension Text
Authors: Iftach Arbel, Yehonathan Refael, Ofir Lindenbaum
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in highly-specialized domains, however challenges are still present in aspects of accuracy and costs. These limitations restrict the usage of existing models in domain-specific tasks. While fine-tuning pre-trained models have shown promising results, this process can be computationally expensive and require massive datasets of the specialized application in hand. In this work, we bridge that gap. We have developed Phi-2-Legal and Mistral-Legal-7B, which are language models specifically designed for legal applications. These models are based on Phi-2 and Mistral-7B-v0.1, and have gone through continued pre-training with over 500 million tokens of legal texts. Our innovative approach significantly improves capabilities in legal tasks by using Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert raw training data into reading comprehension text. Our legal LLMs have demonstrated superior performance in legal benchmarks, even outperforming models trained on much larger datasets with more resources. This work emphasizes the effectiveness of continued pre-training on domain-specific texts, while using affordable LLMs for data conversion, which gives these models domain expertise while retaining general language understanding capabilities. While this work uses the legal domain as a test case, our method can be scaled and applied to any pre-training dataset, resulting in significant improvements across different tasks. These findings underscore the potential of domain-adaptive pre-training and reading comprehension for the development of highly effective domain-specific language models.
Knowledge Distillation for Real-Time Classification of Early Media in Voice Communications
Authors: Kemal Altwlkany, Hadžem Hadžić, Amar Kurić, Emanuel Lacic
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Tagging, Classification, Knowledge Distillation

This paper investigates the industrial setting of real-time classification of early media exchanged during the initialization phase of voice calls. We explore the application of state-of-the-art audio tagging models and highlight some limitations when applied to the classification of early media. While most existing approaches leverage convolutional neural networks, we propose a novel approach for low-resource requirements based on gradient-boosted trees. Our approach not only demonstrates a substantial improvement in runtime performance, but also exhibits a comparable accuracy. We show that leveraging knowledge distillation and class aggregation techniques to train a simpler and smaller model accelerates the classification of early media in voice calls. We provide a detailed analysis of the results on a proprietary and publicly available dataset, regarding accuracy and runtime performance. We additionally report a case study of the achieved performance improvements at a regional data center in India.