pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Privacy-Preserving Large Language Models: Mechanisms, Applications, and Future Directions
Authors: Guoshenghui Zhao, Eric Song
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Survey

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling applications in diverse domains such as healthcare, finance and education. However, the growing reliance on extensive data for training and inference has raised significant privacy concerns, ranging from data leakage to adversarial attacks. This survey comprehensively explores the landscape of privacy-preserving mechanisms tailored for LLMs, including differential privacy, federated learning, cryptographic protocols, and trusted execution environments. We examine their efficacy in addressing key privacy challenges, such as membership inference and model inversion attacks, while balancing trade-offs between privacy and model utility. Furthermore, we analyze privacy-preserving applications of LLMs in privacy-sensitive domains, highlighting successful implementations and inherent limitations. Finally, this survey identifies emerging research directions, emphasizing the need for novel frameworks that integrate privacy by design into the lifecycle of LLMs. By synthesizing state-of-the-art approaches and future trends, this paper provides a foundation for developing robust, privacy-preserving large language models that safeguard sensitive information without compromising performance.
DECO: Life-Cycle Management of Enterprise-Grade Copilots
Authors: Yiwen Zhu, Mathieu Demarne, Kai Deng, Wenjing Wang, Nutan Sahoo, Divya Vermareddy, Hannah Lerner, Yunlei Lu, Swati Bararia, Anjali Bhavan, William Zhang, Xia Li, Katherine Lin, Miso Cilimdzic, Subru Krishnan
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Software engineers frequently grapple with the challenge of accessing disparate documentation and telemetry data, including TroubleShooting Guides (TSGs), incident reports, code repositories, and various internal tools developed by multiple stakeholders. While on-call duties are inevitable, incident resolution becomes even more daunting due to the obscurity of legacy sources and the pressures of strict time constraints. To enhance the efficiency of on-call engineers (OCEs) and streamline their daily workflows, we introduced DECO-a comprehensive framework for developing, deploying, and managing enterprise-grade copilots tailored to improve productivity in engineering routines. This paper details the design and implementation of the DECO framework, emphasizing its innovative NL2SearchQuery functionality and a lightweight agentic framework. These features support efficient and customized retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) algorithms that not only extract relevant information from diverse sources but also select the most pertinent skills in response to user queries. This enables the addressing of complex technical questions and provides seamless, automated access to internal resources. Additionally, DECO incorporates a robust mechanism for converting unstructured incident logs into user-friendly, structured guides, effectively bridging the documentation gap. Since its launch in September 2023, DECO has demonstrated its effectiveness through widespread adoption, enabling tens of thousands of interactions and engaging hundreds of monthly active users (MAU) across dozens of organizations within the company.
Order Theory in the Context of Machine Learning
Authors: Eric Dolores-Cuenca, Aldo Guzman-Saenz, Sangil Kim, Susana Lopez-Moreno, Jose Mendoza-Cortes
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00

The paper ``Tropical Geometry of Deep Neural Networks'' by L. Zhang et al. introduces an equivalence between integer-valued neural networks (IVNN) with $\text{ReLU}_{t}$ and tropical rational functions, which come with a map to polytopes. Here, IVNN refers to a network with integer weights but real biases, and $\text{ReLU}_{t}$ is defined as $\text{ReLU}_{t}(x)=\max(x,t)$ for $t\in\mathbb{R}\cup\{-\infty\}$. For every poset with $n$ points, there exists a corresponding order polytope, i.e., a convex polytope in the unit cube $[0,1]^n$ whose coordinates obey the inequalities of the poset. We study neural networks whose associated polytope is an order polytope. We then explain how posets with four points induce neural networks that can be interpreted as $2\times 2$ convolutional filters. These poset filters can be added to any neural network, not only IVNN. Similarly to maxout, poset pooling filters update the weights of the neural network during backpropagation with more precision than average pooling, max pooling, or mixed pooling, without the need to train extra parameters. We report experiments that support our statements. We also define the structure of algebra over the operad of posets on poset neural networks and tropical polynomials. This formalism allows us to study the composition of poset neural network arquitectures and the effect on their corresponding Newton polytopes, via the introduction of the generalization of two operations on polytopes: the Minkowski sum and the convex envelope.
Trust No AI: Prompt Injection Along The CIA Security Triad
Authors: Johann Rehberger
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The CIA security triad - Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability - is a cornerstone of data and cybersecurity. With the emergence of large language model (LLM) applications, a new class of threat, known as prompt injection, was first identified in 2022. Since then, numerous real-world vulnerabilities and exploits have been documented in production LLM systems, including those from leading vendors like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and Google. This paper compiles real-world exploits and proof-of concept examples, based on the research conducted and publicly documented by the author, demonstrating how prompt injection undermines the CIA triad and poses ongoing risks to cybersecurity and AI systems at large.
A4-Unet: Deformable Multi-Scale Attention Network for Brain Tumor Segmentation
Authors: Ruoxin Wang, Tianyi Tang, Haiming Du, Yuxuan Cheng, Yu Wang, Lingjie Yang, Xiaohui Duan, Yunfang Yu, Yu Zhou, Donglong Chen
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Decoder, Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation models have aided diagnosis in recent years. However, they face MRI complexity and variability challenges, including irregular shapes and unclear boundaries, leading to noise, misclassification, and incomplete segmentation, thereby limiting accuracy. To address these issues, we adhere to an outstanding Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) design paradigm and propose a novel network named A4-Unet. In A4-Unet, Deformable Large Kernel Attention (DLKA) is incorporated in the encoder, allowing for improved capture of multi-scale tumors. Swin Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SSPP) with cross-channel attention is employed in a bottleneck further to study long-distance dependencies within images and channel relationships. To enhance accuracy, a Combined Attention Module (CAM) with Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) orthogonality for channel weighting and convolutional element-wise multiplication is introduced for spatial weighting in the decoder. Attention gates (AG) are added in the skip connection to highlight the foreground while suppressing irrelevant background information. The proposed network is evaluated on three authoritative MRI brain tumor benchmarks and a proprietary dataset, and it achieves a 94.4% Dice score on the BraTS 2020 dataset, thereby establishing multiple new state-of-the-art benchmarks. The code is available here: https://github.com/WendyWAAAAANG/A4-Unet.
Ethnography and Machine Learning: Synergies and New Directions
Authors: Zhuofan Li, Corey M. Abramson
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Ethnography (social scientific methods that illuminate how people understand, navigate and shape the real world contexts in which they live their lives) and machine learning (computational techniques that use big data and statistical learning models to perform quantifiable tasks) are each core to contemporary social science. Yet these tools have remained largely separate in practice. This chapter draws on a growing body of scholarship that argues that ethnography and machine learning can be usefully combined, particularly for large comparative studies. Specifically, this paper (a) explains the value (and challenges) of using machine learning alongside qualitative field research for certain types of projects, (b) discusses recent methodological trends to this effect, (c) provides examples that illustrate workflow drawn from several large projects, and (d) concludes with a roadmap for enabling productive coevolution of field methods and machine learning.
GVDepth: Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Estimation for Ground Vehicles based on Probabilistic Cue Fusion
Authors: Karlo Koledic, Luka Petrovic, Ivan Markovic, Ivan Petrovic
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

Generalizing metric monocular depth estimation presents a significant challenge due to its ill-posed nature, while the entanglement between camera parameters and depth amplifies issues further, hindering multi-dataset training and zero-shot accuracy. This challenge is particularly evident in autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics, where data is collected with fixed camera setups, limiting the geometric diversity. Yet, this context also presents an opportunity: the fixed relationship between the camera and the ground plane imposes additional perspective geometry constraints, enabling depth regression via vertical image positions of objects. However, this cue is highly susceptible to overfitting, thus we propose a novel canonical representation that maintains consistency across varied camera setups, effectively disentangling depth from specific parameters and enhancing generalization across datasets. We also propose a novel architecture that adaptively and probabilistically fuses depths estimated via object size and vertical image position cues. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach on five autonomous driving datasets, achieving accurate metric depth estimation for varying resolutions, aspect ratios and camera setups. Notably, we achieve comparable accuracy to existing zero-shot methods, despite training on a single dataset with a single-camera setup.
KaSA: Knowledge-Aware Singular-Value Adaptation of Large Language Models
Authors: Fan Wang, Juyong Jiang, Chansung Park, Sunghun Kim, Jing Tang
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Natural Language Understanding, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

The increasing sizes of large language models (LLMs) result in significant computational overhead and memory usage when adapting these models to specific tasks or domains. Various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been devised to mitigate these challenges by training a small set of parameters for the task-specific updates of the model weights. Among PEFT methods, LoRA stands out for its simplicity and efficiency, inspiring the development of a series of variants. However, LoRA and its successors disregard the knowledge that is noisy or irrelevant to the targeted task, detrimentally impacting model performance and leading to suboptimality. To address this limitation, we introduce Knowledge-aware Singular-value Adaptation (KaSA), a PEFT method that leverages singular value decomposition (SVD) with knowledge-aware singular values to dynamically activate knowledge based on its relevance to the task at hand. We conduct extensive experiments across a range of LLMs on tasks spanning natural language understanding (NLU), generation (NLG), instruction following, and commonsense reasoning. The experimental results demonstrate that KaSA consistently outperforms FFT and 14 popular PEFT baselines across 16 benchmarks and 4 synthetic datasets, underscoring our method's efficacy and adaptability. The source code of our method is available at https://github.com/juyongjiang/KaSA.
Fuzzy Norm-Explicit Product Quantization for Recommender Systems
Authors: Mohammadreza Jamalifard, Javier Andreu-Perez, Hani Hagras, Luis Martínez López
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Recommendation Systems

As the data resources grow, providing recommendations that best meet the demands has become a vital requirement in business and life to overcome the information overload problem. However, building a system suggesting relevant recommendations has always been a point of debate. One of the most cost-efficient techniques in terms of producing relevant recommendations at a low complexity is Product Quantization (PQ). PQ approaches have continued developing in recent years. This system's crucial challenge is improving product quantization performance in terms of recall measures without compromising its complexity. This makes the algorithm suitable for problems that require a greater number of potentially relevant items without disregarding others, at high-speed and low-cost to keep up with traffic. This is the case of online shops where the recommendations for the purpose are important, although customers can be susceptible to scoping other products. This research proposes a fuzzy approach to perform norm-based product quantization. Type-2 Fuzzy sets (T2FSs) define the codebook allowing sub-vectors (T2FSs) to be associated with more than one element of the codebook, and next, its norm calculus is resolved by means of integration. Our method finesses the recall measure up, making the algorithm suitable for problems that require querying at most possible potential relevant items without disregarding others. The proposed method outperforms all PQ approaches such as NEQ, PQ, and RQ up to +6%, +5%, and +8% by achieving a recall of 94%, 69%, 59% in Netflix, Audio, Cifar60k datasets, respectively. More and over, computing time and complexity nearly equals the most computationally efficient existing PQ method in the state-of-the-art.
Curse of Attention: A Kernel-Based Perspective for Why Transformers Fail to Generalize on Time Series Forecasting and Beyond
Authors: Yekun Ke, YIngyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Chiwun Yang
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

The application of transformer-based models on time series forecasting (TSF) tasks has long been popular to study. However, many of these works fail to beat the simple linear residual model, and the theoretical understanding of this issue is still limited. In this work, we propose the first theoretical explanation of the inefficiency of transformers on TSF tasks. We attribute the mechanism behind it to {\bf Asymmetric Learning} in training attention networks. When the sign of the previous step is inconsistent with the sign of the current step in the next-step-prediction time series, attention fails to learn the residual features. This makes it difficult to generalize on out-of-distribution (OOD) data, especially on the sign-inconsistent next-step-prediction data, with the same representation pattern, whereas a linear residual network could easily accomplish it. We hope our theoretical insights provide important necessary conditions for designing the expressive and efficient transformer-based architecture for practitioners.
Steering Large Language Models to Evaluate and Amplify Creativity
Authors: Matthew Lyle Olson, Neale Ratzlaff, Musashi Hinck, Shao-Yen Tseng, Vasudev Lal
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00

Although capable of generating creative text, Large Language Models (LLMs) are poor judges of what constitutes "creativity". In this work, we show that we can leverage this knowledge of how to write creatively in order to better judge what is creative. We take a mechanistic approach that extracts differences in the internal states of an LLM when prompted to respond "boringly" or "creatively" to provide a robust measure of creativity that corresponds strongly with human judgment. We also show these internal state differences can be applied to enhance the creativity of generated text at inference time.
Cloud Platforms for Developing Generative AI Solutions: A Scoping Review of Tools and Services
Authors: Dhavalkumar Patel, Ganesh Raut, Satya Narayan Cheetirala, Girish N Nadkarni, Robert Freeman, Benjamin S. Glicksberg, Eyal Klang, Prem Timsina
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Edge-computing, Management

Generative AI is transforming enterprise application development by enabling machines to create content, code, and designs. These models, however, demand substantial computational power and data management. Cloud computing addresses these needs by offering infrastructure to train, deploy, and scale generative AI models. This review examines cloud services for generative AI, focusing on key providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. It compares their strengths, weaknesses, and impact on enterprise growth. We explore the role of high-performance computing (HPC), serverless architectures, edge computing, and storage in supporting generative AI. We also highlight the significance of data management, networking, and AI-specific tools in building and deploying these models. Additionally, the review addresses security concerns, including data privacy, compliance, and AI model protection. It assesses the performance and cost efficiency of various cloud providers and presents case studies from healthcare, finance, and entertainment. We conclude by discussing challenges and future directions, such as technical hurdles, vendor lock-in, sustainability, and regulatory issues. Put together, this work can serve as a guide for practitioners and researchers looking to adopt cloud-based generative AI solutions, serving as a valuable guide to navigating the intricacies of this evolving field.
The AI Double Standard: Humans Judge All AIs for the Actions of One
Authors: Aikaterina Manoli, Janet V. T. Pauketat, Jacy Reese Anthis
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Chatbot

Robots and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems are widely perceived as moral agents responsible for their actions. As AI proliferates, these perceptions may become entangled via the moral spillover of attitudes towards one AI to attitudes towards other AIs. We tested how the seemingly harmful and immoral actions of an AI or human agent spill over to attitudes towards other AIs or humans in two preregistered experiments. In Study 1 (N = 720), we established the moral spillover effect in human-AI interaction by showing that immoral actions increased attributions of negative moral agency (i.e., acting immorally) and decreased attributions of positive moral agency (i.e., acting morally) and moral patiency (i.e., deserving moral concern) to both the agent (a chatbot or human assistant) and the group to which they belong (all chatbot or human assistants). There was no significant difference in the spillover effects between the AI and human contexts. In Study 2 (N = 684), we tested whether spillover persisted when the agent was individuated with a name and described as an AI or human, rather than specifically as a chatbot or personal assistant. We found that spillover persisted in the AI context but not in the human context, possibly because AIs were perceived as more homogeneous due to their outgroup status relative to humans. This asymmetry suggests a double standard whereby AIs are judged more harshly than humans when one agent morally transgresses. With the proliferation of diverse, autonomous AI systems, HCI research and design should account for the fact that experiences with one AI could easily generalize to perceptions of all AIs and negative HCI outcomes, such as reduced trust.
Can Generative AI Solve Your In-Context Learning Problem? A Martingale Perspective
Authors: Andrew Jesson, Nicolas Beltran-Velez, David Blei
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

This work is about estimating when a conditional generative model (CGM) can solve an in-context learning (ICL) problem. An in-context learning (ICL) problem comprises a CGM, a dataset, and a prediction task. The CGM could be a multi-modal foundation model; the dataset, a collection of patient histories, test results, and recorded diagnoses; and the prediction task to communicate a diagnosis to a new patient. A Bayesian interpretation of ICL assumes that the CGM computes a posterior predictive distribution over an unknown Bayesian model defining a joint distribution over latent explanations and observable data. From this perspective, Bayesian model criticism is a reasonable approach to assess the suitability of a given CGM for an ICL problem. However, such approaches -- like posterior predictive checks (PPCs) -- often assume that we can sample from the likelihood and posterior defined by the Bayesian model, which are not explicitly given for contemporary CGMs. To address this, we show when ancestral sampling from the predictive distribution of a CGM is equivalent to sampling datasets from the posterior predictive of the assumed Bayesian model. Then we develop the generative predictive $p$-value, which enables PPCs and their cousins for contemporary CGMs. The generative predictive $p$-value can then be used in a statistical decision procedure to determine when the model is appropriate for an ICL problem. Our method only requires generating queries and responses from a CGM and evaluating its response log probability. We empirically evaluate our method on synthetic tabular, imaging, and natural language ICL tasks using large language models.
Imputation Matters: A Deeper Look into an Overlooked Step in Longitudinal Health and Behavior Sensing Research
Authors: Akshat Choube, Rahul Majethia, Sohini Bhattacharya, Vedant Das Swain, Jiachen Li, Varun Mishra
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation

Longitudinal passive sensing studies for health and behavior outcomes often have missing and incomplete data. Handling missing data effectively is thus a critical data processing and modeling step. Our formative interviews with researchers working in longitudinal health and behavior passive sensing revealed a recurring theme: most researchers consider imputation a low-priority step in their analysis and inference pipeline, opting to use simple and off-the-shelf imputation strategies without comprehensively evaluating its impact on study outcomes. Through this paper, we call attention to the importance of imputation. Using publicly available passive sensing datasets for depression, we show that prioritizing imputation can significantly impact the study outcomes -- with our proposed imputation strategies resulting in up to 31% improvement in AUROC to predict depression over the original imputation strategy. We conclude by discussing the challenges and opportunities with effective imputation in longitudinal sensing studies.