pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Length Optimization in Conformal Prediction
Authors: Shayan Kiyani, George Pappas, Hamed Hassani
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multiple-choice, Prediction, Question Answering, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

Conditional validity and length efficiency are two crucial aspects of conformal prediction (CP). Conditional validity ensures accurate uncertainty quantification for data subpopulations, while proper length efficiency ensures that the prediction sets remain informative. Despite significant efforts to address each of these issues individually, a principled framework that reconciles these two objectives has been missing in the CP literature. In this paper, we develop Conformal Prediction with Length-Optimization (CPL) - a novel and practical framework that constructs prediction sets with (near-) optimal length while ensuring conditional validity under various classes of covariate shifts, including the key cases of marginal and group-conditional coverage. In the infinite sample regime, we provide strong duality results which indicate that CPL achieves conditional validity and length optimality. In the finite sample regime, we show that CPL constructs conditionally valid prediction sets. Our extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate the superior prediction set size performance of CPL compared to state-of-the-art methods across diverse real-world and synthetic datasets in classification, regression, and large language model-based multiple choice question answering. An Implementation of our algorithm can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/shayankiyani98/CP.
A Survey on Privacy Attacks Against Digital Twin Systems in AI-Robotics
Authors: Ivan A. Fernandez, Subash Neupane, Trisha Chakraborty, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Nisha Pillai, Jingdao Chen, Shahram Rahimi
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00

Industry 4.0 has witnessed the rise of complex robots fueled by the integration of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) and Digital Twin (DT) technologies. While these technologies offer numerous benefits, they also introduce potential privacy and security risks. This paper surveys privacy attacks targeting robots enabled by AI and DT models. Exfiltration and data leakage of ML models are discussed in addition to the potential extraction of models derived from first-principles (e.g., physics-based). We also discuss design considerations with DT-integrated robotics touching on the impact of ML model training, responsible AI and DT safeguards, data governance and ethical considerations on the effectiveness of these attacks. We advocate for a trusted autonomy approach, emphasizing the need to combine robotics, AI, and DT technologies with robust ethical frameworks and trustworthiness principles for secure and reliable AI robotic systems.
All Random Features Representations are Equivalent
Authors: Luke Sernau, Silvano Bonacina, Rif A. Saurous
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Random features are a powerful technique for rewriting positive-definite kernels as linear products. They bring linear tools to bear in important nonlinear domains like KNNs and attention. Unfortunately, practical implementations require approximating an expectation, usually via sampling. This has led to the development of increasingly elaborate representations with ever lower sample error. We resolve this arms race by deriving an optimal sampling policy. Under this policy all random features representations have the same approximation error, which we show is the lowest possible. This means that we are free to choose whatever representation we please, provided we sample optimally.
Infinite Width Models That Work: Why Feature Learning Doesn't Matter as Much as You Think
Authors: Luke Sernau
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00

Common infinite-width architectures such as Neural Tangent Kernels (NTKs) have historically shown weak performance compared to finite models. This is usually attributed to the absence of feature learning. We show that this explanation is insufficient. Specifically, we show that infinite width NTKs obviate the need for feature learning. They can learn identical behavior by selecting relevant subfeatures from their (infinite) frozen feature vector. Furthermore, we show experimentally that NTKs under-perform traditional finite models even when feature learning is artificially disabled. Instead, we show that weak performance is at least partly due to the fact that existing constructions depend on weak optimizers like SGD. We provide a new infinite width limit based on ADAM-like learning dynamics and demonstrate empirically that the resulting models erase this performance gap.
MUMU: Bootstrapping Multimodal Image Generation from Text-to-Image Data
Authors: William Berman, Alexander Peysakhovich
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, GPU, Image Captioning, Image Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Style Transfer

We train a model to generate images from multimodal prompts of interleaved text and images such as "a <picture of a man> man and his <picture of a dog> dog in an <picture of a cartoon> animated style." We bootstrap a multimodal dataset by extracting semantically meaningful image crops corresponding to words in the image captions of synthetically generated and publicly available text-image data. Our model, MUMU, is composed of a vision-language model encoder with a diffusion decoder and is trained on a single 8xH100 GPU node. Despite being only trained on crops from the same image, MUMU learns to compose inputs from different images into a coherent output. For example, an input of a realistic person and a cartoon will output the same person in the cartoon style, and an input of a standing subject and a scooter will output the subject riding the scooter. As a result, our model generalizes to tasks such as style transfer and character consistency. Our results show the promise of using multimodal models as general purpose controllers for image generation.
WV-Net: A foundation model for SAR WV-mode satellite imagery trained using contrastive self-supervised learning on 10 million images
Authors: Yannik Glaser, Justin E. Stopa, Linnea M. Wolniewicz, Ralph Foster, Doug Vandemark, Alexis Mouche, Bertrand Chapron, Peter Sadowski
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning

The European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-1 (S-1) mission is a constellation of C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites that provide unprecedented monitoring of the world's oceans. S-1's wave mode (WV) captures 20x20 km image patches at 5 m pixel resolution and is unaffected by cloud cover or time-of-day. The mission's open data policy has made SAR data easily accessible for a range of applications, but the need for manual image annotations is a bottleneck that hinders the use of machine learning methods. This study uses nearly 10 million WV-mode images and contrastive self-supervised learning to train a semantic embedding model called WV-Net. In multiple downstream tasks, WV-Net outperforms a comparable model that was pre-trained on natural images (ImageNet) with supervised learning. Experiments show improvements for estimating wave height (0.50 vs 0.60 RMSE using linear probing), estimating near-surface air temperature (0.90 vs 0.97 RMSE), and performing multilabel-classification of geophysical and atmospheric phenomena (0.96 vs 0.95 micro-averaged AUROC). WV-Net embeddings are also superior in an unsupervised image-retrieval task and scale better in data-sparse settings. Together, these results demonstrate that WV-Net embeddings can support geophysical research by providing a convenient foundation model for a variety of data analysis and exploration tasks.
Conformalized Link Prediction on Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Tianyi Zhao, Jian Kang, Lu Cheng
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Link Prediction, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in diverse tasks, yet their applications in high-stakes domains are often hampered by unreliable predictions. Although numerous uncertainty quantification methods have been proposed to address this limitation, they often lack \textit{rigorous} uncertainty estimates. This work makes the first attempt to introduce a distribution-free and model-agnostic uncertainty quantification approach to construct a predictive interval with a statistical guarantee for GNN-based link prediction. We term it as \textit{conformalized link prediction.} Our approach builds upon conformal prediction (CP), a framework that promises to construct statistically robust prediction sets or intervals. We first theoretically and empirically establish a permutation invariance condition for the application of CP in link prediction tasks, along with an exact test-time coverage. Leveraging the important structural information in graphs, we then identify a novel and crucial connection between a graph's adherence to the power law distribution and the efficiency of CP. This insight leads to the development of a simple yet effective sampling-based method to align the graph structure with a power law distribution prior to the standard CP procedure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that for conformalized link prediction, our approach achieves the desired marginal coverage while significantly improving the efficiency of CP compared to baseline methods.
The Impact of Feature Representation on the Accuracy of Photonic Neural Networks
Authors: Mauricio Gomes de Queiroz, Paul Jimenez, Raphael Cardoso, Mateus Vidaletti Costa, Mohab Abdalla, Ian O'Connor, Alberto Bosio, Fabio Pavanello
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

Photonic Neural Networks (PNNs) are gaining significant interest in the research community due to their potential for high parallelization, low latency, and energy efficiency. PNNs compute using light, which leads to several differences in implementation when compared to electronics, such as the need to represent input features in the photonic domain before feeding them into the network. In this encoding process, it is common to combine multiple features into a single input to reduce the number of inputs and associated devices, leading to smaller and more energy-efficient PNNs. Although this alters the network's handling of input data, its impact on PNNs remains understudied. This paper addresses this open question, investigating the effect of commonly used encoding strategies that combine features on the performance and learning capabilities of PNNs. Here, using the concept of feature importance, we develop a mathematical methodology for analyzing feature combination. Through this methodology, we demonstrate that encoding multiple features together in a single input determines their relative importance, thus limiting the network's ability to learn from the data. Given some prior knowledge of the data, however, this can also be leveraged for higher accuracy. By selecting an optimal encoding method, we achieve up to a 12.3% improvement in accuracy of PNNs trained on the Iris dataset compared to other encoding techniques, surpassing the performance of networks where features are not combined. These findings highlight the importance of carefully choosing the encoding to the accuracy and decision-making strategies of PNNs, particularly in size or power constrained applications.
A Stem-Agnostic Single-Decoder System for Music Source Separation Beyond Four Stems
Authors: Karn N. Watcharasupat, Alexander Lerch
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Source Separation, Decoder, Instrument Recognition, Music Source Separation

Despite significant recent progress across multiple subtasks of audio source separation, few music source separation systems support separation beyond the four-stem vocals, drums, bass, and other (VDBO) setup. Of the very few current systems that support source separation beyond this setup, most continue to rely on an inflexible decoder setup that can only support a fixed pre-defined set of stems. Increasing stem support in these inflexible systems correspondingly requires increasing computational complexity, rendering extensions of these systems computationally infeasible for long-tail instruments. In this work, we propose Banquet, a system that allows source separation of multiple stems using just one decoder. A bandsplit source separation model is extended to work in a query-based setup in tandem with a music instrument recognition PaSST model. On the MoisesDB dataset, Banquet, at only 24.9 M trainable parameters, approached the performance level of the significantly more complex 6-stem Hybrid Transformer Demucs on VDBO stems and outperformed it on guitar and piano. The query-based setup allows for the separation of narrow instrument classes such as clean acoustic guitars, and can be successfully applied to the extraction of less common stems such as reeds and organs. Implementation is available at https://github.com/kwatcharasupat/query-bandit.
Decentralized Semantic Traffic Control in AVs Using RL and DQN for Dynamic Roadblocks
Authors: Emanuel Figetakis, Yahuza Bello, Ahmed Refaey, Abdallah Shami
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making, Navigate, Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), furnished with sensors capable of capturing essential vehicle dynamics such as speed, acceleration, and precise location, possess the capacity to execute intelligent maneuvers, including lane changes, in anticipation of approaching roadblocks. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of sensory data and the processing necessary to derive informed decisions can often overwhelm the vehicles, rendering them unable to handle the task independently. Consequently, a common approach in traffic scenarios involves transmitting the data to servers for processing, a practice that introduces challenges, particularly in situations demanding real-time processing. In response to this challenge, we present a novel DL-based semantic traffic control system that entrusts semantic encoding responsibilities to the vehicles themselves. This system processes driving decisions obtained from a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, streamlining the decision-making process. Specifically, our framework envisions scenarios where abrupt roadblocks materialize due to factors such as road maintenance, accidents, or vehicle repairs, necessitating vehicles to make determinations concerning lane-keeping or lane-changing actions to navigate past these obstacles. To formulate this scenario mathematically, we employ a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and harness the Deep Q Learning (DQN) algorithm to unearth viable solutions.
WavRx: a Disease-Agnostic, Generalizable, and Privacy-Preserving Speech Health Diagnostic Model
Authors: Yi Zhu, Tiago Falk
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Privacy Preserving

Speech is known to carry health-related attributes, which has emerged as a novel venue for remote and long-term health monitoring. However, existing models are usually tailored for a specific type of disease, and have been shown to lack generalizability across datasets. Furthermore, concerns have been raised recently towards the leakage of speaker identity from health embeddings. To mitigate these limitations, we propose WavRx, a speech health diagnostics model that captures the respiration and articulation related dynamics from a universal speech representation. Our in-domain and cross-domain experiments on six pathological speech datasets demonstrate WavRx as a new state-of-the-art health diagnostic model. Furthermore, we show that the amount of speaker identity entailed in the WavRx health embeddings is significantly reduced without extra guidance during training. An in-depth analysis of the model was performed, thus providing physiological interpretation of its improved generalizability and privacy-preserving ability.
Fast Optimizer Benchmark
Authors: Simon Blauth, Tobias Bürger, Zacharias Häringer, Jörg Franke, Frank Hutter
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Graph Learning, Hyperparameter Optimization

In this paper, we present the Fast Optimizer Benchmark (FOB), a tool designed for evaluating deep learning optimizers during their development. The benchmark supports tasks from multiple domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning. The focus is on convenient usage, featuring human-readable YAML configurations, SLURM integration, and plotting utilities. FOB can be used together with existing hyperparameter optimization (HPO) tools as it handles training and resuming of runs. The modular design enables integration into custom pipelines, using it simply as a collection of tasks. We showcase an optimizer comparison as a usage example of our tool. FOB can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/automl/FOB.
Learning to Correct for QA Reasoning with Black-box LLMs
Authors: Jaehyung Kim, Dongyoung Kim, Yiming Yang
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00

An open challenge in recent machine learning is about how to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) in a black-box setting, i.e., without access to detailed information such as output token probabilities. Existing approaches either rely on accessibility (which is often unrealistic) or involve significantly increased train- and inference-time costs. This paper addresses those limitations or shortcomings by proposing a novel approach, namely CoBB (Correct for improving QA reasoning of Black-Box LLMs). It uses a trained adaptation model to perform a seq2seq mapping from the often-imperfect reasonings of the original black-box LLM to the correct or improved reasonings. Specifically, the adaptation model is initialized with a relatively small open-source LLM and adapted over a collection of sub-sampled training pairs. To select the representative pairs of correct and incorrect reasonings, we formulated the dataset construction as an optimization problem that minimizes the statistical divergence between the sampled subset and the entire collection, and solved it via a genetic algorithm. We then train the adaptation model over the sampled pairs by contrasting the likelihoods of correct and incorrect reasonings. Our experimental results demonstrate that CoBB significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various QA benchmarks, compared to the best-performing adaptation baselines.
Petal-X: Human-Centered Visual Explanations to Improve Cardiovascular Risk Communication
Authors: Diego Rojo, Houda Lamqaddam, Lucija Gosak, Katrien Verbert
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), the leading cause of death worldwide, can be prevented in most cases through behavioral interventions. Therefore, effective communication of CVD risk and projected risk reduction by risk factor modification plays a crucial role in reducing CVD risk at the individual level. However, despite interest in refining risk estimation with improved prediction models such as SCORE2, the guidelines for presenting these risk estimations in clinical practice remained essentially unchanged in the last few years, with graphical score charts (GSCs) continuing to be one of the prevalent systems. This work describes the design and implementation of Petal-X, a novel tool to support clinician-patient shared decision-making by explaining the CVD risk contributions of different factors and facilitating what-if analysis. Petal-X relies on a novel visualization, Petal Product Plots, and a tailor-made global surrogate model of SCORE2, whose fidelity is comparable to that of the GSCs used in clinical practice. We evaluated Petal-X compared to GSCs in a controlled experiment with 88 healthcare students, all but one with experience with chronic patients. The results show that Petal-X outperforms GSC in critical tasks, such as comparing the contribution to the patient's 10-year CVD risk of each modifiable risk factor, without a significant loss of perceived transparency, trust, or intent to use. Our study provides an innovative approach to the visualization and explanation of risk in clinical practice that, due to its model-agnostic nature, could continue to support next-generation artificial intelligence risk assessment models.
The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm
Authors: Aakanksha, Arash Ahmadian, Beyza Ermis, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Julia Kreutzer, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Red Teaming, Safety Alignment

A key concern with the concept of "alignment" is the implicit question of "alignment to what?". AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms common in Western-centric datasets. Here, we explore the viability of different alignment approaches when balancing dual objectives: addressing and optimizing for a non-homogeneous set of languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms. We collect the first set of human annotated red-teaming prompts in different languages distinguishing between global and local harm, which serve as a laboratory for understanding the reliability of alignment techniques when faced with preference distributions that are non-stationary across geographies and languages. While this setting is seldom covered by the literature to date, which primarily centers on English harm mitigation, it captures real-world interactions with AI systems around the world. We establish a new precedent for state-of-the-art alignment techniques across 6 languages with minimal degradation in general performance. Our work provides important insights into cross-lingual transfer and novel optimization approaches to safeguard AI systems designed to serve global populations.
Speakers Unembedded: Embedding-free Approach to Long-form Neural Diarization
Authors: Xiang Li, Vivek Govindan, Rohit Paturi, Sundararajan Srinivasan
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Form, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization

End-to-end neural diarization (EEND) models offer significant improvements over traditional embedding-based Speaker Diarization (SD) approaches but falls short on generalizing to long-form audio with large number of speakers. EEND-vector-clustering method mitigates this by combining local EEND with global clustering of speaker embeddings from local windows, but this requires an additional speaker embedding framework alongside the EEND module. In this paper, we propose a novel framework applying EEND both locally and globally for long-form audio without separate speaker embeddings. This approach achieves significant relative DER reduction of 13% and 10% over the conventional 1-pass EEND on Callhome American English and RT03-CTS datasets respectively and marginal improvements over EEND-vector-clustering without the need for additional speaker embeddings. Furthermore, we discuss the computational complexity of our proposed framework and explore strategies for reducing processing times.