pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Foundations and Frontiers of Graph Learning Theory
Authors: Yu Huang, Min Zhou, Menglin Yang, Zhen Wang, Muhan Zhang, Jie Wang, Hong Xie, Hao Wang, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Learning Theory

Recent advancements in graph learning have revolutionized the way to understand and analyze data with complex structures. Notably, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), i.e. neural network architectures designed for learning graph representations, have become a popular paradigm. With these models being usually characterized by intuition-driven design or highly intricate components, placing them within the theoretical analysis framework to distill the core concepts, helps understand the key principles that drive the functionality better and guide further development. Given this surge in interest, this article provides a comprehensive summary of the theoretical foundations and breakthroughs concerning the approximation and learning behaviors intrinsic to prevalent graph learning models. Encompassing discussions on fundamental aspects such as expressiveness power, generalization, optimization, and unique phenomena such as over-smoothing and over-squashing, this piece delves into the theoretical foundations and frontier driving the evolution of graph learning. In addition, this article also presents several challenges and further initiates discussions on possible solutions.
How Reliable and Stable are Explanations of XAI Methods?
Authors: José Ribeiro, Lucas Cardoso, Vitor Santos, Eduardo Carvalho, Níkolas Carneiro, Ronnie Alves
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Black box models are increasingly being used in the daily lives of human beings living in society. Along with this increase, there has been the emergence of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods aimed at generating additional explanations regarding how the model makes certain predictions. In this sense, methods such as Dalex, Eli5, eXirt, Lofo and Shap emerged as different proposals and methodologies for generating explanations of black box models in an agnostic way. Along with the emergence of these methods, questions arise such as "How Reliable and Stable are XAI Methods?". With the aim of shedding light on this main question, this research creates a pipeline that performs experiments using the diabetes dataset and four different machine learning models (LGBM, MLP, DT and KNN), creating different levels of perturbations of the test data and finally generates explanations from the eXirt method regarding the confidence of the models and also feature relevances ranks from all XAI methods mentioned, in order to measure their stability in the face of perturbations. As a result, it was found that eXirt was able to identify the most reliable models among all those used. It was also found that current XAI methods are sensitive to perturbations, with the exception of one specific method.
Conformal Prediction for Causal Effects of Continuous Treatments
Authors: Maresa Schröder, Dennis Frauen, Jonas Schweisthal, Konstantin Heß, Valentyn Melnychuk, Stefan Feuerriegel
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

Uncertainty quantification of causal effects is crucial for safety-critical applications such as personalized medicine. A powerful approach for this is conformal prediction, which has several practical benefits due to model-agnostic finite-sample guarantees. Yet, existing methods for conformal prediction of causal effects are limited to binary/discrete treatments and make highly restrictive assumptions such as known propensity scores. In this work, we provide a novel conformal prediction method for potential outcomes of continuous treatments. We account for the additional uncertainty introduced through propensity estimation so that our conformal prediction intervals are valid even if the propensity score is unknown. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We derive finite-sample prediction intervals for potential outcomes of continuous treatments. (2) We provide an algorithm for calculating the derived intervals. (3) We demonstrate the effectiveness of the conformal prediction intervals in experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose conformal prediction for continuous treatments when the propensity score is unknown and must be estimated from data.
Revisiting the Performance of Deep Learning-Based Vulnerability Detection on Realistic Datasets
Authors: Partha Chakraborty, Krishna Kanth Arumugam, Mahmoud Alfadel, Meiyappan Nagappan, Shane McIntosh
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Vulnerability Detection

The impact of software vulnerabilities on everyday software systems is significant. Despite deep learning models being proposed for vulnerability detection, their reliability is questionable. Prior evaluations show high recall/F1 scores of up to 99%, but these models underperform in practical scenarios, particularly when assessed on entire codebases rather than just the fixing commit. This paper introduces Real-Vul, a comprehensive dataset representing real-world scenarios for evaluating vulnerability detection models. Evaluating DeepWukong, LineVul, ReVeal, and IVDetect shows a significant drop in performance, with precision decreasing by up to 95 percentage points and F1 scores by up to 91 points. Furthermore, Model performance fluctuates based on vulnerability characteristics, with better F1 scores for information leaks or code injection than for path resolution or predictable return values. The results highlight a significant performance gap that needs addressing before deploying deep learning-based vulnerability detection in practical settings. Overfitting is identified as a key issue, and an augmentation technique is proposed, potentially improving performance by up to 30%. Contributions include a dataset creation approach for better model evaluation, Real-Vul dataset, and empirical evidence of deep learning models struggling in real-world settings.
Effective Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Efficient Hypernetwork-based Weight Generation
Authors: Yujin Shin, Kichang Lee, Sungmin Lee, You Rim Choi, Hyung-Sin Kim, JeongGil Ko
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

While federated learning leverages distributed client resources, it faces challenges due to heterogeneous client capabilities. This necessitates allocating models suited to clients' resources and careful parameter aggregation to accommodate this heterogeneity. We propose HypeMeFed, a novel federated learning framework for supporting client heterogeneity by combining a multi-exit network architecture with hypernetwork-based model weight generation. This approach aligns the feature spaces of heterogeneous model layers and resolves per-layer information disparity during weight aggregation. To practically realize HypeMeFed, we also propose a low-rank factorization approach to minimize computation and memory overhead associated with hypernetworks. Our evaluations on a real-world heterogeneous device testbed indicate that \system enhances accuracy by 5.12% over FedAvg, reduces the hypernetwork memory requirements by 98.22%, and accelerates its operations by 1.86x compared to a naive hypernetwork approach. These results demonstrate HypeMeFed's effectiveness in leveraging and engaging heterogeneous clients for federated learning.
Artificial Inductive Bias for Synthetic Tabular Data Generation in Data-Scarce Scenarios
Authors: Patricia A. Apellániz, Ana Jiménez, Borja Arroyo Galende, Juan Parras, Santiago Zazo
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Inductive Bias, Meta-Learning, Tabular Data Generation, Transfer Learning

While synthetic tabular data generation using Deep Generative Models (DGMs) offers a compelling solution to data scarcity and privacy concerns, their effectiveness relies on substantial training data, often unavailable in real-world applications. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a novel methodology for generating realistic and reliable synthetic tabular data with DGMs in limited real-data environments. Our approach proposes several ways to generate an artificial inductive bias in a DGM through transfer learning and meta-learning techniques. We explore and compare four different methods within this framework, demonstrating that transfer learning strategies like pre-training and model averaging outperform meta-learning approaches, like Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning, and Domain Randomized Search. We validate our approach using two state-of-the-art DGMs, namely, a Variational Autoencoder and a Generative Adversarial Network, to show that our artificial inductive bias fuels superior synthetic data quality, as measured by Jensen-Shannon divergence, achieving relative gains of up to 50\% when using our proposed approach. This methodology has broad applicability in various DGMs and machine learning tasks, particularly in areas like healthcare and finance, where data scarcity is often a critical issue.
Federated Learning for Zero-Day Attack Detection in 5G and Beyond V2X Networks
Authors: Abdelaziz Amara korba, Abdelwahab Boualouache, Bouziane Brik, Rabah Rahal, Yacine Ghamri-Doudane, Sidi Mohammed Senouci
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Intrusion Detection

Deploying Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) on top of 5G and Beyond networks (5GB) makes them vulnerable to increasing vectors of security and privacy attacks. In this context, a wide range of advanced machine/deep learning based solutions have been designed to accurately detect security attacks. Specifically, supervised learning techniques have been widely applied to train attack detection models. However, the main limitation of such solutions is their inability to detect attacks different from those seen during the training phase, or new attacks, also called zero-day attacks. Moreover, training the detection model requires significant data collection and labeling, which increases the communication overhead, and raises privacy concerns. To address the aforementioned limits, we propose in this paper a novel detection mechanism that leverages the ability of the deep auto-encoder method to detect attacks relying only on the benign network traffic pattern. Using federated learning, the proposed intrusion detection system can be trained with large and diverse benign network traffic, while preserving the CAVs privacy, and minimizing the communication overhead. The in-depth experiment on a recent network traffic dataset shows that the proposed system achieved a high detection rate while minimizing the false positive rate, and the detection delay.
xApp Distillation: AI-based Conflict Mitigation in B5G O-RAN
Authors: Hakan Erdol, Xiaoyang Wang, Robert Piechocki, George Oikonomou, Arjun Parekh
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Management

The advancements of machine learning-based (ML) decision-making algorithms created various research and industrial opportunities. One of these areas is ML-based near-real-time network management applications (xApps) in Open-Radio Access Network (O-RAN). Normally, xApps are designed solely for the desired objectives, and fine-tuned for deployment. However, telecommunication companies can employ multiple xApps and deploy them in overlapping areas. Consider the different design objectives of xApps, the deployment might cause conflicts. To prevent such conflicts, we proposed the xApp distillation method that distills knowledge from multiple xApps, then uses this knowledge to train a single model that has retained the capabilities of Previous xApps. Performance evaluations show that compared conflict mitigation schemes can cause up to six times more network outages than xApp distillation in some cases.
FairJob: A Real-World Dataset for Fairness in Online Systems
Authors: Mariia Vladimirova, Federico Pavone, Eustache Diemert
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness

We introduce a fairness-aware dataset for job recommendations in advertising, designed to foster research in algorithmic fairness within real-world scenarios. It was collected and prepared to comply with privacy standards and business confidentiality. An additional challenge is the lack of access to protected user attributes such as gender, for which we propose a solution to obtain a proxy estimate. Despite being anonymized and including a proxy for a sensitive attribute, our dataset preserves predictive power and maintains a realistic and challenging benchmark. This dataset addresses a significant gap in the availability of fairness-focused resources for high-impact domains like advertising -- the actual impact being having access or not to precious employment opportunities, where balancing fairness and utility is a common industrial challenge. We also explore various stages in the advertising process where unfairness can occur and introduce a method to compute a fair utility metric for the job recommendations in online systems case from a biased dataset. Experimental evaluations of bias mitigation techniques on the released dataset demonstrate potential improvements in fairness and the associated trade-offs with utility. The dataset is hosted at https://huggingface.co/datasets/criteo/FairJob. Source code for the experiments is hosted at https://github.com/criteo-research/FairJob-dataset/.
Improving Zero-shot Generalization of Learned Prompts via Unsupervised Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Marco Mistretta, Alberto Baldrati, Marco Bertini, Andrew D. Bagdanov
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Knowledge Distillation, Prompt Learning, Zero-shot Generalization

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks, but fall short of the performance of supervised methods in generalizing to downstream tasks with limited data. Prompt learning is emerging as a parameter-efficient method for adapting VLMs, but state-of-the-art approaches require annotated samples. In this paper we propose a novel approach to prompt learning based on unsupervised knowledge distillation from more powerful models. Our approach, which we call Knowledge Distillation Prompt Learning (KDPL), can be integrated into existing prompt learning techniques and eliminates the need for labeled examples during adaptation. Our experiments on more than ten standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that KDPL is very effective at improving generalization of learned prompts for zero-shot domain generalization, zero-shot cross-dataset generalization, and zero-shot base-to-novel class generalization problems. KDPL requires no ground-truth labels for adaptation, and moreover we show that even in the absence of any knowledge of training class names it can be used to effectively transfer knowledge. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/KDPL.
Enhancements for Real-Time Monte-Carlo Tree Search in General Video Game Playing
Authors: Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Chiara F. Sironi, Torsten Schuster, Mark H. M. Winands
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00

General Video Game Playing (GVGP) is a field of Artificial Intelligence where agents play a variety of real-time video games that are unknown in advance. This limits the use of domain-specific heuristics. Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a search technique for game playing that does not rely on domain-specific knowledge. This paper discusses eight enhancements for MCTS in GVGP; Progressive History, N-Gram Selection Technique, Tree Reuse, Breadth-First Tree Initialization, Loss Avoidance, Novelty-Based Pruning, Knowledge-Based Evaluations, and Deterministic Game Detection. Some of these are known from existing literature, and are either extended or introduced in the context of GVGP, and some are novel enhancements for MCTS. Most enhancements are shown to provide statistically significant increases in win percentages when applied individually. When combined, they increase the average win percentage over sixty different games from 31.0% to 48.4% in comparison to a vanilla MCTS implementation, approaching a level that is competitive with the best agents of the GVG-AI competition in 2015.
Raw Text is All you Need: Knowledge-intensive Multi-turn Instruction Tuning for Large Language Model
Authors: Xia Hou, QiFeng Li, Jian Yang, Tongliang Li, Linzheng Chai, Xianjie Wu, Hangyuan Ji, Zhoujun Li, Jixuan Nie, Jingbo Dun, Wenfeng Song
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Instruction tuning as an effective technique aligns the outputs of large language models (LLMs) with human preference. But how to generate the seasonal multi-turn dialogues from raw documents for instruction tuning still requires further exploration. In this paper, we present a novel framework named R2S that leverages the CoD-Chain of Dialogue logic to guide large language models (LLMs) in generating knowledge-intensive multi-turn dialogues for instruction tuning. By integrating raw documents from both open-source datasets and domain-specific web-crawled documents into a benchmark K-BENCH, we cover diverse areas such as Wikipedia (English), Science (Chinese), and Artifacts (Chinese). Our approach first decides the logic flow of the current dialogue and then prompts LLMs to produce key phrases for sourcing relevant response content. This methodology enables the creation of the G I NSTRUCT instruction dataset, retaining raw document knowledge within dialoguestyle interactions. Utilizing this dataset, we fine-tune GLLM, a model designed to transform raw documents into structured multi-turn dialogues, thereby injecting comprehensive domain knowledge into the SFT model for enhanced instruction tuning. This work signifies a stride towards refining the adaptability and effectiveness of LLMs in processing and generating more accurate, contextually nuanced responses across various fields.
NLP Sampling: Combining MCMC and NLP Methods for Diverse Constrained Sampling
Authors: Marc Toussaint, Cornelius V. Braun, Joaquim Ortiz-Haro
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Generating diverse samples under hard constraints is a core challenge in many areas. With this work we aim to provide an integrative view and framework to combine methods from the fields of MCMC, constrained optimization, as well as robotics, and gain insights in their strengths from empirical evaluations. We propose NLP Sampling as a general problem formulation, propose a family of restarting two-phase methods as a framework to integrated methods from across the fields, and evaluate them on analytical and robotic manipulation planning problems. Complementary to this, we provide several conceptual discussions, e.g. on the role of Lagrange parameters, global sampling, and the idea of a Diffused NLP and a corresponding model-based denoising sampler.
Attention Incorporated Network for Sharing Low-rank, Image and K-space Information during MR Image Reconstruction to Achieve Single Breath-hold Cardiac Cine Imaging
Authors: Siying Xu, Kerstin Hammernik, Andreas Lingg, Jens Kuebler, Patrick Krumm, Daniel Rueckert, Sergios Gatidis, Thomas Kuestner
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, MRI Reconstruction

Cardiac Cine Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides an accurate assessment of heart morphology and function in clinical practice. However, MRI requires long acquisition times, with recent deep learning-based methods showing great promise to accelerate imaging and enhance reconstruction quality. Existing networks exhibit some common limitations that constrain further acceleration possibilities, including single-domain learning, reliance on a single regularization term, and equal feature contribution. To address these limitations, we propose to embed information from multiple domains, including low-rank, image, and k-space, in a novel deep learning network for MRI reconstruction, which we denote as A-LIKNet. A-LIKNet adopts a parallel-branch structure, enabling independent learning in the k-space and image domain. Coupled information sharing layers realize the information exchange between domains. Furthermore, we introduce attention mechanisms into the network to assign greater weights to more critical coils or important temporal frames. Training and testing were conducted on an in-house dataset, including 91 cardiovascular patients and 38 healthy subjects scanned with 2D cardiac Cine using retrospective undersampling. Additionally, we evaluated A-LIKNet on the real-time 8x prospectively undersampled data from the OCMR dataset. The results demonstrate that our proposed A-LIKNet outperforms existing methods and provides high-quality reconstructions. The network can effectively reconstruct highly retrospectively undersampled dynamic MR images up to 24x accelerations, indicating its potential for single breath-hold imaging.
Qifusion-Net: Layer-adapted Stream/Non-stream Model for End-to-End Multi-Accent Speech Recognition
Authors: Jinming Chen, Jingyi Fang, Yuanzhong Zheng, Yaoxuan Wang, Haojun Fei
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Currently, end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition methods have achieved promising performance. However, auto speech recognition (ASR) models still face challenges in recognizing multi-accent speech accurately. We propose a layer-adapted fusion (LAF) model, called Qifusion-Net, which does not require any prior knowledge about the target accent. Based on dynamic chunk strategy, our approach enables streaming decoding and can extract frame-level acoustic feature, facilitating fine-grained information fusion. Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform the baseline with relative reductions of 22.1$\%$ and 17.2$\%$ in character error rate (CER) across multi accent test datasets on KeSpeech and MagicData-RMAC.
An Organism Starts with a Single Pix-Cell: A Neural Cellular Diffusion for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
Authors: Marawan Elbatel, Konstantinos Kamnitsas, Xiaomeng Li
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Generative modeling seeks to approximate the statistical properties of real data, enabling synthesis of new data that closely resembles the original distribution. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) represent significant advancements in generative modeling, drawing inspiration from game theory and thermodynamics, respectively. Nevertheless, the exploration of generative modeling through the lens of biological evolution remains largely untapped. In this paper, we introduce a novel family of models termed Generative Cellular Automata (GeCA), inspired by the evolution of an organism from a single cell. GeCAs are evaluated as an effective augmentation tool for retinal disease classification across two imaging modalities: Fundus and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). In the context of OCT imaging, where data is scarce and the distribution of classes is inherently skewed, GeCA significantly boosts the performance of 11 different ophthalmological conditions, achieving a 12% increase in the average F1 score compared to conventional baselines. GeCAs outperform both diffusion methods that incorporate UNet or state-of-the art variants with transformer-based denoising models, under similar parameter constraints. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/GeCA.