pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Characteristic Learning for Provable One Step Generation
Authors: Zhao Ding, Chenguang Duan, Yuling Jiao, Ruoxuan Li, Jerry Zhijian Yang, Pingwen Zhang
Date: 2024-05-09 00:00:00

We propose the characteristic generator, a novel one-step generative model that combines the efficiency of sampling in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with the stable performance of flow-based models. Our model is driven by characteristics, along which the probability density transport can be described by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Specifically, We estimate the velocity field through nonparametric regression and utilize Euler method to solve the probability flow ODE, generating a series of discrete approximations to the characteristics. We then use a deep neural network to fit these characteristics, ensuring a one-step mapping that effectively pushes the prior distribution towards the target distribution. In the theoretical aspect, we analyze the errors in velocity matching, Euler discretization, and characteristic fitting to establish a non-asymptotic convergence rate for the characteristic generator in 2-Wasserstein distance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first thorough analysis for simulation-free one step generative models. Additionally, our analysis refines the error analysis of flow-based generative models in prior works. We apply our method on both synthetic and real datasets, and the results demonstrate that the characteristic generator achieves high generation quality with just a single evaluation of neural network.
Redefining Information Retrieval of Structured Database via Large Language Models
Authors: Mingzhu Wang, Yuzhe Zhang, Qihang Zhao, Junyi Yang, Hong Zhang
Date: 2024-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval

Retrieval augmentation is critical when Language Models (LMs) exploit non-parametric knowledge related to the query through external knowledge bases before reasoning. The retrieved information is incorporated into LMs as context alongside the query, enhancing the reliability of responses towards factual questions. Prior researches in retrieval augmentation typically follow a retriever-generator paradigm. In this context, traditional retrievers encounter challenges in precisely and seamlessly extracting query-relevant information from knowledge bases. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel retrieval augmentation framework called ChatLR that primarily employs the powerful semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) as retrievers to achieve precise and concise information retrieval. Additionally, we construct an LLM-based search and question answering system tailored for the financial domain by fine-tuning LLM on two tasks including Text2API and API-ID recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ChatLR in addressing user queries, achieving an overall information retrieval accuracy exceeding 98.8\%.
Multi-Scale Dilated Convolution Network for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Feifei Li, Suhan Guo, Feng Han, Jian Zhao, Furao Shen
Date: 2024-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Accurate forecasting of long-term time series has important applications for decision making and planning. However, it remains challenging to capture the long-term dependencies in time series data. To better extract long-term dependencies, We propose Multi Scale Dilated Convolution Network (MSDCN), a method that utilizes a shallow dilated convolution architecture to capture the period and trend characteristics of long time series. We design different convolution blocks with exponentially growing dilations and varying kernel sizes to sample time series data at different scales. Furthermore, we utilize traditional autoregressive model to capture the linear relationships within the data. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct experiments on eight challenging long-term time series forecasting benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the prior state-of-the-art approaches and shows significant inference speed improvements compared to several strong baseline methods.
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning With Adapters
Authors: Keyu Chen, Yuan Pang, Zi Yang
Date: 2024-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Question Answering

In the arena of language model fine-tuning, the traditional approaches, such as Domain-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT) and Task-Adaptive Pretraining (TAPT), although effective, but computational intensive. This research introduces a novel adaptation method utilizing the UniPELT framework as a base and added a PromptTuning Layer, which significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining competitive performance across various benchmarks. Our method employs adapters, which enable efficient transfer of pretrained models to new tasks with minimal retraining of the base model parameters. We evaluate our approach using three diverse datasets: the GLUE benchmark, a domain-specific dataset comprising four distinct areas, and the Stanford Question Answering Dataset 1.1 (SQuAD). Our results demonstrate that our customized adapter-based method achieves performance comparable to full model fine-tuning, DAPT+TAPT and UniPELT strategies while requiring fewer or equivalent amount of parameters. This parameter efficiency not only alleviates the computational burden but also expedites the adaptation process. The study underlines the potential of adapters in achieving high performance with significantly reduced resource consumption, suggesting a promising direction for future research in parameter-efficient fine-tuning.
A logifold structure on measure space
Authors: Inkee Jung, Siu-Cheong Lau
Date: 2024-05-09 00:00:00

In this paper,we develop a local-to-global and measure-theoretical approach to understand datasets. The idea is to take network models with restricted domains as local charts of datasets. We develop the mathematical foundations for these structures, and show in experiments how it can be used to find fuzzy domains and to improve accuracy in data classification problems.
FloorSet -- a VLSI Floorplanning Dataset with Design Constraints of Real-World SoCs
Authors: Uday Mallappa, Hesham Mostafa, Mikhail Galkin, Mariano Phielipp, Somdeb Majumdar
Date: 2024-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Floorplanning for systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) and its sub-systems is a crucial and non-trivial step of the physical design flow. It represents a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. A typical large scale SoC with 120 partitions generates a search-space of nearly 10E250. As novel machine learning (ML) approaches emerge to tackle such problems, there is a growing need for a modern benchmark that comprises a large training dataset and performance metrics that better reflect real-world constraints and objectives compared to existing benchmarks. To address this need, we present FloorSet -- two comprehensive datasets of synthetic fixed-outline floorplan layouts that reflect the distribution of real SoCs. Each dataset has 1M training samples and 100 test samples where each sample is a synthetic floor-plan. FloorSet-Prime comprises fully-abutted rectilinear partitions and near-optimal wire-length. A simplified dataset that reflects early design phases, FloorSet-Lite comprises rectangular partitions, with under 5 percent white-space and near-optimal wire-length. Both datasets define hard constraints seen in modern design flows such as shape constraints, edge-affinity, grouping constraints, and pre-placement constraints. FloorSet is intended to spur fundamental research on large-scale constrained optimization problems. Crucially, FloorSet alleviates the core issue of reproducibility in modern ML driven solutions to such problems. FloorSet is available as an open-source repository for the research community.
AFEN: Respiratory Disease Classification using Ensemble Learning
Authors: Rahul Nadkarni, Emmanouil Nikolakakis, Razvan Marinescu
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Classification, Data Augmentation, Diversity, Ensemble Learning

We present AFEN (Audio Feature Ensemble Learning), a model that leverages Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and XGBoost in an ensemble learning fashion to perform state-of-the-art audio classification for a range of respiratory diseases. We use a meticulously selected mix of audio features which provide the salient attributes of the data and allow for accurate classification. The extracted features are then used as an input to two separate model classifiers 1) a multi-feature CNN classifier and 2) an XGBoost Classifier. The outputs of the two models are then fused with the use of soft voting. Thus, by exploiting ensemble learning, we achieve increased robustness and accuracy. We evaluate the performance of the model on a database of 920 respiratory sounds, which undergoes data augmentation techniques to increase the diversity of the data and generalizability of the model. We empirically verify that AFEN sets a new state-of-the-art using Precision and Recall as metrics, while decreasing training time by 60%.
Poser: Unmasking Alignment Faking LLMs by Manipulating Their Internals
Authors: Joshua Clymer, Caden Juang, Severin Field
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00

Like a criminal under investigation, Large Language Models (LLMs) might pretend to be aligned while evaluated and misbehave when they have a good opportunity. Can current interpretability methods catch these 'alignment fakers?' To answer this question, we introduce a benchmark that consists of 324 pairs of LLMs fine-tuned to select actions in role-play scenarios. One model in each pair is consistently benign (aligned). The other model misbehaves in scenarios where it is unlikely to be caught (alignment faking). The task is to identify the alignment faking model using only inputs where the two models behave identically. We test five detection strategies, one of which identifies 98% of alignment-fakers.
GDGS: Gradient Domain Gaussian Splatting for Sparse Representation of Radiance Fields
Authors: Yuanhao Gong
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00

The 3D Gaussian splatting methods are getting popular. However, they work directly on the signal, leading to a dense representation of the signal. Even with some techniques such as pruning or distillation, the results are still dense. In this paper, we propose to model the gradient of the original signal. The gradients are much sparser than the original signal. Therefore, the gradients use much less Gaussian splats, leading to the more efficient storage and thus higher computational performance during both training and rendering. Thanks to the sparsity, during the view synthesis, only a small mount of pixels are needed, leading to much higher computational performance ($100\sim 1000\times$ faster). And the 2D image can be recovered from the gradients via solving a Poisson equation with linear computation complexity. Several experiments are performed to confirm the sparseness of the gradients and the computation performance of the proposed method. The method can be applied various applications, such as human body modeling and indoor environment modeling.
Evaluating Students' Open-ended Written Responses with LLMs: Using the RAG Framework for GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Claude-3, and Mistral-Large
Authors: Jussi S. Jauhiainen, Agustín Garagorry Guerra
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Evaluating open-ended written examination responses from students is an essential yet time-intensive task for educators, requiring a high degree of effort, consistency, and precision. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising opportunity to balance the need for thorough evaluation with efficient use of educators' time. In our study, we explore the effectiveness of LLMs ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, Claude-3, and Mistral-Large in assessing university students' open-ended answers to questions made about reference material they have studied. Each model was instructed to evaluate 54 answers repeatedly under two conditions: 10 times (10-shot) with a temperature setting of 0.0 and 10 times with a temperature of 0.5, expecting a total of 1,080 evaluations per model and 4,320 evaluations across all models. The RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) framework was used as the framework to make the LLMs to process the evaluation of the answers. As of spring 2024, our analysis revealed notable variations in consistency and the grading outcomes provided by studied LLMs. There is a need to comprehend strengths and weaknesses of LLMs in educational settings for evaluating open-ended written responses. Further comparative research is essential to determine the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of using LLMs for educational assessments.
How Generalizable Is My Behavior Cloning Policy? A Statistical Approach to Trustworthy Performance Evaluation
Authors: Joseph A. Vincent, Haruki Nishimura, Masha Itkina, Paarth Shah, Mac Schwager, Thomas Kollar
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00

With the rise of stochastic generative models in robot policy learning, end-to-end visuomotor policies are increasingly successful at solving complex tasks by learning from human demonstrations. Nevertheless, since real-world evaluation costs afford users only a small number of policy rollouts, it remains a challenge to accurately gauge the performance of such policies. This is exacerbated by distribution shifts causing unpredictable changes in performance during deployment. To rigorously evaluate behavior cloning policies, we present a framework that provides a tight lower-bound on robot performance in an arbitrary environment, using a minimal number of experimental policy rollouts. Notably, by applying the standard stochastic ordering to robot performance distributions, we provide a worst-case bound on the entire distribution of performance (via bounds on the cumulative distribution function) for a given task. We build upon established statistical results to ensure that the bounds hold with a user-specified confidence level and tightness, and are constructed from as few policy rollouts as possible. In experiments we evaluate policies for visuomotor manipulation in both simulation and hardware. Specifically, we (i) empirically validate the guarantees of the bounds in simulated manipulation settings, (ii) find the degree to which a learned policy deployed on hardware generalizes to new real-world environments, and (iii) rigorously compare two policies tested in out-of-distribution settings. Our experimental data, code, and implementation of confidence bounds are open-source.
Analysis and prevention of AI-based phishing email attacks
Authors: Chibuike Samuel Eze, Lior Shamir
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

Phishing email attacks are among the most common and most harmful cybersecurity attacks. With the emergence of generative AI, phishing attacks can be based on emails generated automatically, making it more difficult to detect them. That is, instead of a single email format sent to a large number of recipients, generative AI can be used to send each potential victim a different email, making it more difficult for cybersecurity systems to identify the scam email before it reaches the recipient. Here we describe a corpus of AI-generated phishing emails. We also use different machine learning tools to test the ability of automatic text analysis to identify AI-generated phishing emails. The results are encouraging, and show that machine learning tools can identify an AI-generated phishing email with high accuracy compared to regular emails or human-generated scam email. By applying descriptive analytic, the specific differences between AI-generated emails and manually crafted scam emails are profiled, and show that AI-generated emails are different in their style from human-generated phishing email scams. Therefore, automatic identification tools can be used as a warning for the user. The paper also describes the corpus of AI-generated phishing emails that is made open to the public, and can be used for consequent studies. While the ability of machine learning to detect AI-generated phishing email is encouraging, AI-generated phishing emails are different from regular phishing emails, and therefore it is important to train machine learning systems also with AI-generated emails in order to repel future phishing attacks that are powered by generative AI.
How Inverse Conditional Flows Can Serve as a Substitute for Distributional Regression
Authors: Lucas Kook, Chris Kolb, Philipp Schiele, Daniel Dold, Marcel Arpogaus, Cornelius Fritz, Philipp F. Baumann, Philipp Kopper, Tobias Pielok, Emilio Dorigatti, David Rügamer
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, regression, Time Series, Uncertainty Quantification

Neural network representations of simple models, such as linear regression, are being studied increasingly to better understand the underlying principles of deep learning algorithms. However, neural representations of distributional regression models, such as the Cox model, have received little attention so far. We close this gap by proposing a framework for distributional regression using inverse flow transformations (DRIFT), which includes neural representations of the aforementioned models. We empirically demonstrate that the neural representations of models in DRIFT can serve as a substitute for their classical statistical counterparts in several applications involving continuous, ordered, time-series, and survival outcomes. We confirm that models in DRIFT empirically match the performance of several statistical methods in terms of estimation of partial effects, prediction, and aleatoric uncertainty quantification. DRIFT covers both interpretable statistical models and flexible neural networks opening up new avenues in both statistical modeling and deep learning.
"They are uncultured": Unveiling Covert Harms and Social Threats in LLM Generated Conversations
Authors: Preetam Prabhu Srikar Dammu, Hayoung Jung, Anjali Singh, Monojit Choudhury, Tanushree Mitra
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an integral part of modern societies, powering user-facing applications such as personal assistants and enterprise applications like recruitment tools. Despite their utility, research indicates that LLMs perpetuate systemic biases. Yet, prior works on LLM harms predominantly focus on Western concepts like race and gender, often overlooking cultural concepts from other parts of the world. Additionally, these studies typically investigate "harm" as a singular dimension, ignoring the various and subtle forms in which harms manifest. To address this gap, we introduce the Covert Harms and Social Threats (CHAST), a set of seven metrics grounded in social science literature. We utilize evaluation models aligned with human assessments to examine the presence of covert harms in LLM-generated conversations, particularly in the context of recruitment. Our experiments reveal that seven out of the eight LLMs included in this study generated conversations riddled with CHAST, characterized by malign views expressed in seemingly neutral language unlikely to be detected by existing methods. Notably, these LLMs manifested more extreme views and opinions when dealing with non-Western concepts like caste, compared to Western ones such as race.
Arctic-Embed: Scalable, Efficient, and Accurate Text Embedding Models
Authors: Luke Merrick, Danmei Xu, Gaurav Nuti, Daniel Campos
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

This report describes the training dataset creation and recipe behind the family of \texttt{arctic-embed} text embedding models (a set of five models ranging from 22 to 334 million parameters with weights open-sourced under an Apache-2 license). At the time of their release, each model achieved state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy for models of their size on the MTEB Retrieval leaderboard, with the largest model, arctic-embed-l outperforming closed source embedding models such as Cohere's embed-v3 and Open AI's text-embed-3-large. In addition to the details of our training recipe, we have provided several informative ablation studies, which we believe are the cause of our model performance.
Offline Model-Based Optimization via Policy-Guided Gradient Search
Authors: Yassine Chemingui, Aryan Deshwal, Trong Nghia Hoang, Janardhan Rao Doppa
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00

Offline optimization is an emerging problem in many experimental engineering domains including protein, drug or aircraft design, where online experimentation to collect evaluation data is too expensive or dangerous. To avoid that, one has to optimize an unknown function given only its offline evaluation at a fixed set of inputs. A naive solution to this problem is to learn a surrogate model of the unknown function and optimize this surrogate instead. However, such a naive optimizer is prone to erroneous overestimation of the surrogate (possibly due to over-fitting on a biased sample of function evaluation) on inputs outside the offline dataset. Prior approaches addressing this challenge have primarily focused on learning robust surrogate models. However, their search strategies are derived from the surrogate model rather than the actual offline data. To fill this important gap, we introduce a new learning-to-search perspective for offline optimization by reformulating it as an offline reinforcement learning problem. Our proposed policy-guided gradient search approach explicitly learns the best policy for a given surrogate model created from the offline data. Our empirical results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the learned optimization policy can be combined with existing offline surrogates to significantly improve the optimization performance.
The Effect of Model Size on LLM Post-hoc Explainability via LIME
Authors: Henning Heyen, Amy Widdicombe, Noah Y. Siegel, Maria Perez-Ortiz, Philip Treleaven
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming bigger to boost performance. However, little is known about how explainability is affected by this trend. This work explores LIME explanations for DeBERTaV3 models of four different sizes on natural language inference (NLI) and zero-shot classification (ZSC) tasks. We evaluate the explanations based on their faithfulness to the models' internal decision processes and their plausibility, i.e. their agreement with human explanations. The key finding is that increased model size does not correlate with plausibility despite improved model performance, suggesting a misalignment between the LIME explanations and the models' internal processes as model size increases. Our results further suggest limitations regarding faithfulness metrics in NLI contexts.
Benchmarking Educational Program Repair
Authors: Charles Koutcheme, Nicola Dainese, Sami Sarsa, Juho Leinonen, Arto Hellas, Paul Denny
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Program Repair

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked enormous interest due to their potential application across a range of educational tasks. For example, recent work in programming education has used LLMs to generate learning resources, improve error messages, and provide feedback on code. However, one factor that limits progress within the field is that much of the research uses bespoke datasets and different evaluation metrics, making direct comparisons between results unreliable. Thus, there is a pressing need for standardization and benchmarks that facilitate the equitable comparison of competing approaches. One task where LLMs show great promise is program repair, which can be used to provide debugging support and next-step hints to students. In this article, we propose a novel educational program repair benchmark. We curate two high-quality publicly available programming datasets, present a unified evaluation procedure introducing a novel evaluation metric rouge@k for approximating the quality of repairs, and evaluate a set of five recent models to establish baseline performance.