pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DNN Task Assignment in UAV Networks: A Generative AI Enhanced Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Xin Tang, Qian Chen, Wenjie Weng, Binhan Liao, Jiacheng Wang, Xianbin Cao, Xiaohuan Li
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) possess high mobility and flexible deployment capabilities, prompting the development of UAVs for various application scenarios within the Internet of Things (IoT). The unique capabilities of UAVs give rise to increasingly critical and complex tasks in uncertain and potentially harsh environments. The substantial amount of data generated from these applications necessitates processing and analysis through deep neural networks (DNNs). However, UAVs encounter challenges due to their limited computing resources when managing DNN models. This paper presents a joint approach that combines multiple-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and generative diffusion models (GDM) for assigning DNN tasks to a UAV swarm, aimed at reducing latency from task capture to result output. To address these challenges, we first consider the task size of the target area to be inspected and the shortest flying path as optimization constraints, employing a greedy algorithm to resolve the subproblem with a focus on minimizing the UAV's flying path and the overall system cost. In the second stage, we introduce a novel DNN task assignment algorithm, termed GDM-MADDPG, which utilizes the reverse denoising process of GDM to replace the actor network in multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG). This approach generates specific DNN task assignment actions based on agents' observations in a dynamic environment. Simulation results indicate that our algorithm performs favorably compared to benchmarks in terms of path planning, Age of Information (AoI), energy consumption, and task load balancing.
TowerDebias: A Novel Unfairness Removal Method Based on the Tower Property
Authors: Norman Matloff, Aditya Mittal
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

Decision-making processes have increasingly come to rely on sophisticated machine learning tools, raising critical concerns about the fairness of their predictions with respect to sensitive groups. The widespread adoption of commercial "black-box" models necessitates careful consideration of their legal and ethical implications for consumers. When users interact with such black-box models, a key challenge arises: how can the influence of sensitive attributes, such as race or gender, be mitigated or removed from its predictions? We propose towerDebias (tDB), a novel post-processing method designed to reduce the influence of sensitive attributes in predictions made by black-box models. Our tDB approach leverages the Tower Property from probability theory to improve prediction fairness without requiring retraining of the original model. This method is highly versatile, as it requires no prior knowledge of the original algorithm's internal structure and is adaptable to a diverse range of applications. We present a formal fairness improvement theorem for tDB and showcase its effectiveness in both regression and classification tasks using multiple real-world datasets.
RESOLVE: Relational Reasoning with Symbolic and Object-Level Features Using Vector Symbolic Processing
Authors: Mohamed Mejri, Chandramouli Amarnath, Abhijit Chatterjee
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Math, Relational Reasoning

Modern transformer-based encoder-decoder architectures struggle with reasoning tasks due to their inability to effectively extract relational information between input objects (data/tokens). Recent work introduced the Abstractor module, embedded between transformer layers, to address this gap. However, the Abstractor layer while excelling at capturing relational information (pure relational reasoning), faces challenges in tasks that require both object and relational-level reasoning (partial relational reasoning). To address this, we propose RESOLVE, a neuro-vector symbolic architecture that combines object-level features with relational representations in high-dimensional spaces, using fast and efficient operations such as bundling (summation) and binding (Hadamard product) allowing both object-level features and relational representations to coexist within the same structure without interfering with one another. RESOLVE is driven by a novel attention mechanism that operates in a bipolar high dimensional space, allowing fast attention score computation compared to the state-of-the-art. By leveraging this design, the model achieves both low compute latency and memory efficiency. RESOLVE also offers better generalizability while achieving higher accuracy in purely relational reasoning tasks such as sorting as well as partial relational reasoning tasks such as math problem-solving compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Hashing for Protein Structure Similarity Search
Authors: Jin Han, Wu-Jun Li
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design, Protein Function Prediction

Protein structure similarity search (PSSS), which tries to search proteins with similar structures, plays a crucial role across diverse domains from drug design to protein function prediction and molecular evolution. Traditional alignment-based PSSS methods, which directly calculate alignment on the protein structures, are highly time-consuming with high memory cost. Recently, alignment-free methods, which represent protein structures as fixed-length real-valued vectors, are proposed for PSSS. Although these methods have lower time and memory cost than alignment-based methods, their time and memory cost is still too high for large-scale PSSS, and their accuracy is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called $\underline{\text{p}}$r$\underline{\text{o}}$tein $\underline{\text{s}}$tructure $\underline{\text{h}}$ashing (POSH), for PSSS. POSH learns a binary vector representation for each protein structure, which can dramatically reduce the time and memory cost for PSSS compared with real-valued vector representation based methods. Furthermore, in POSH we also propose expressive hand-crafted features and a structure encoder to well model both node and edge interactions in proteins. Experimental results on real datasets show that POSH can outperform other methods to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. Furthermore, POSH achieves a memory saving of more than six times and speed improvement of more than four times, compared with other methods.
Knowledge Bases in Support of Large Language Models for Processing Web News
Authors: Yihe Zhang, Nabin Pakka, Nian-Feng Tzeng
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have received considerable interest in wide applications lately. During pre-training via massive datasets, such a model implicitly memorizes the factual knowledge of trained datasets in its hidden parameters. However, knowledge held implicitly in parameters often makes its use by downstream applications ineffective due to the lack of common-sense reasoning. In this article, we introduce a general framework that permits to build knowledge bases with an aid of LLMs, tailored for processing Web news. The framework applies a rule-based News Information Extractor (NewsIE) to news items for extracting their relational tuples, referred to as knowledge bases, which are then graph-convoluted with the implicit knowledge facts of news items obtained by LLMs, for their classification. It involves two lightweight components: 1) NewsIE: for extracting the structural information of every news item, in the form of relational tuples; 2) BERTGraph: for graph convoluting the implicit knowledge facts with relational tuples extracted by NewsIE. We have evaluated our framework under different news-related datasets for news category classification, with promising experimental results.
GPTree: Towards Explainable Decision-Making via LLM-powered Decision Trees
Authors: Sichao Xiong, Yigit Ihlamur, Fuat Alican, Aaron Ontoyin Yin
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Feature Engineering, Few-Shot Learning

Traditional decision tree algorithms are explainable but struggle with non-linear, high-dimensional data, limiting its applicability in complex decision-making. Neural networks excel at capturing complex patterns but sacrifice explainability in the process. In this work, we present GPTree, a novel framework combining explainability of decision trees with the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs. GPTree eliminates the need for feature engineering and prompt chaining, requiring only a task-specific prompt and leveraging a tree-based structure to dynamically split samples. We also introduce an expert-in-the-loop feedback mechanism to further enhance performance by enabling human intervention to refine and rebuild decision paths, emphasizing the harmony between human expertise and machine intelligence. Our decision tree achieved a 7.8% precision rate for identifying "unicorn" startups at the inception stage of a startup, surpassing gpt-4o with few-shot learning as well as the best human decision-makers (3.1% to 5.6%).
VALTEST: Automated Validation of Language Model Generated Test Cases
Authors: Hamed Taherkhani, Hadi Hemmati
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: HumanEval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, mbpp, software testing, Test Case Creation, valid

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in automating software testing, specifically in generating unit test cases. However, the validation of LLM-generated test cases remains a challenge, particularly when the ground truth is unavailable. This paper introduces VALTEST, a novel framework designed to automatically validate test cases generated by LLMs by leveraging token probabilities. We evaluate VALTEST using nine test suites generated from three datasets (HumanEval, MBPP, and LeetCode) across three LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-turbo, and LLama3.1 8b). By extracting statistical features from token probabilities, we train a machine learning model to predict test case validity. VALTEST increases the validity rate of test cases by 6.2% to 24%, depending on the dataset and LLM. Our results suggest that token probabilities are reliable indicators for distinguishing between valid and invalid test cases, which provides a robust solution for improving the correctness of LLM-generated test cases in software testing. In addition, we found that replacing the identified invalid test cases by VALTEST, using a Chain-of-Thought prompting results in a more effective test suite while keeping the high validity rates.
Retrieval Augmented Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Kutay Tire, Ege Onur Taga, Muhammed Emrullah Ildız, Samet Oymak
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a central component of modern LLM systems, particularly in scenarios where up-to-date information is crucial for accurately responding to user queries or when queries exceed the scope of the training data. The advent of time-series foundation models (TSFM), such as Chronos, and the need for effective zero-shot forecasting performance across various time-series domains motivates the question: Do benefits of RAG similarly carry over to time series forecasting? In this paper, we advocate that the dynamic and event-driven nature of time-series data makes RAG a crucial component of TSFMs and introduce a principled RAG framework for time-series forecasting, called Retrieval Augmented Forecasting (RAF). Within RAF, we develop efficient strategies for retrieving related time-series examples and incorporating them into forecast. Through experiments and mechanistic studies, we demonstrate that RAF indeed improves the forecasting accuracy across diverse time series domains and the improvement is more significant for larger TSFM sizes.
Deceiving Question-Answering Models: A Hybrid Word-Level Adversarial Approach
Authors: Jiyao Li, Mingze Ni, Yongshun Gong, Wei Liu
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Machine Translation, NMT, Question Answering

Deep learning underpins most of the currently advanced natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as textual classification, neural machine translation (NMT), abstractive summarization and question-answering (QA). However, the robustness of the models, particularly QA models, against adversarial attacks is a critical concern that remains insufficiently explored. This paper introduces QA-Attack (Question Answering Attack), a novel word-level adversarial strategy that fools QA models. Our attention-based attack exploits the customized attention mechanism and deletion ranking strategy to identify and target specific words within contextual passages. It creates deceptive inputs by carefully choosing and substituting synonyms, preserving grammatical integrity while misleading the model to produce incorrect responses. Our approach demonstrates versatility across various question types, particularly when dealing with extensive long textual inputs. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that QA-Attack successfully deceives baseline QA models and surpasses existing adversarial techniques regarding success rate, semantics changes, BLEU score, fluency and grammar error rate.
A Social Outcomes and Priorities centered (SOP) Framework for AI policy
Authors: Mohak Shah
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00

Rapid developments in AI and its adoption across various domains have necessitated a need to build robust guardrails and risk containment plans while ensuring equitable benefits for the betterment of society. The current technology-centered approach has resulted in a fragmented, reactive, and ineffective policy apparatus. This paper highlights the immediate and urgent need to pivot to a society-centered approach to develop comprehensive, coherent, forward-looking AI policy. To this end, we present a Social Outcomes and Priorities centered (SOP) framework for AI policy along with proposals on implementation of its various components. While the SOP framework is presented from a US-centric view, the takeaways are general and applicable globally.
DPU: Dynamic Prototype Updating for Multimodal Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Shawn Li, Huixian Gong, Hao Dong, Tiankai Yang, Zhengzhong Tu, Yue Zhao
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for ensuring the robustness of machine learning models by identifying samples that deviate from the training distribution. While traditional OOD detection has primarily focused on single-modality inputs, such as images, recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated the potential of leveraging multiple modalities (e.g., video, optical flow, audio) to enhance detection performance. However, existing methods often overlook intra-class variability within in-distribution (ID) data, assuming that samples of the same class are perfectly cohesive and consistent. This assumption can lead to performance degradation, especially when prediction discrepancies are uniformly amplified across all samples. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Prototype Updating (DPU), a novel plug-and-play framework for multimodal OOD detection that accounts for intra-class variations. Our method dynamically updates class center representations for each class by measuring the variance of similar samples within each batch, enabling adaptive adjustments. This approach allows us to amplify prediction discrepancies based on the updated class centers, thereby improving the model's robustness and generalization across different modalities. Extensive experiments on two tasks, five datasets, and nine base OOD algorithms demonstrate that DPU significantly improves OOD detection performance, setting a new state-of-the-art in multimodal OOD detection, with improvements of up to 80 percent in Far-OOD detection. To facilitate accessibility and reproducibility, our code is publicly available on GitHub.
PERFT: Parameter-Efficient Routed Fine-Tuning for Mixture-of-Expert Model
Authors: Yilun Liu, Yunpu Ma, Shuo Chen, Zifeng Ding, Bailan He, Zhen Han, Volker Tresp
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Arithmetic Reasoning, Mixture-of-Experts, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm has emerged as a powerful approach for scaling transformers with improved resource utilization. However, efficiently fine-tuning MoE models remains largely underexplored. Inspired by recent works on Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), we present a unified framework for integrating PEFT modules directly into the MoE mechanism. Aligning with the core principles and architecture of MoE, our framework encompasses a set of design dimensions including various functional and composition strategies. By combining design choices within our framework, we introduce Parameter-Efficient Routed Fine-Tuning (PERFT) as a flexible and scalable family of PEFT strategies tailored for MoE models. Extensive experiments on adapting OLMoE-1B-7B and Mixtral-8$\times$7B for commonsense and arithmetic reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and intriguing dynamics of PERFT. Additionally, we provide empirical findings for each specific design choice to facilitate better application of MoE and PEFT.
What Representational Similarity Measures Imply about Decodable Information
Authors: Sarah E. Harvey, David Lipshutz, Alex H. Williams
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00

Neural responses encode information that is useful for a variety of downstream tasks. A common approach to understand these systems is to build regression models or ``decoders'' that reconstruct features of the stimulus from neural responses. Popular neural network similarity measures like centered kernel alignment (CKA), canonical correlation analysis (CCA), and Procrustes shape distance, do not explicitly leverage this perspective and instead highlight geometric invariances to orthogonal or affine transformations when comparing representations. Here, we show that many of these measures can, in fact, be equivalently motivated from a decoding perspective. Specifically, measures like CKA and CCA quantify the average alignment between optimal linear readouts across a distribution of decoding tasks. We also show that the Procrustes shape distance upper bounds the distance between optimal linear readouts and that the converse holds for representations with low participation ratio. Overall, our work demonstrates a tight link between the geometry of neural representations and the ability to linearly decode information. This perspective suggests new ways of measuring similarity between neural systems and also provides novel, unifying interpretations of existing measures.
An Explainable Machine Learning Approach for Age and Gender Estimation in Living Individuals Using Dental Biometrics
Authors: Mohsin Ali, Haider Raza, John Q Gan, Ariel Pokhojaev, Matanel Katz, Esra Kosan, Dian Agustin Wahjuningrum, Omnina Saleh, Rachel Sarig, Akhilanada Chaurasia
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Age and Gender Estimation, Age Estimation, Ensemble Learning

Objectives: Age and gender estimation is crucial for various applications, including forensic investigations and anthropological studies. This research aims to develop a predictive system for age and gender estimation in living individuals, leveraging dental measurements such as Coronal Height (CH), Coronal Pulp Cavity Height (CPCH), and Tooth Coronal Index (TCI). Methods: Machine learning models were employed in our study, including Cat Boost Classifier (Catboost), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Ada Boost Classifier (AdaBoost), Random Forest (RF), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGB), and Extra Trees Classifier (ETC), to analyze dental data from 862 living individuals (459 males and 403 females). Specifically, periapical radiographs from six teeth per individual were utilized, including premolars and molars from both maxillary and mandibular. A novel ensemble learning technique was developed, which uses multiple models each tailored to distinct dental metrics, to estimate age and gender accurately. Furthermore, an explainable AI model has been created utilizing SHAP, enabling dental experts to make judicious decisions based on comprehensible insight. Results: The RF and XGB models were particularly effective, yielding the highest F1 score for age and gender estimation. Notably, the XGB model showed a slightly better performance in age estimation, achieving an F1 score of 73.26%. A similar trend for the RF model was also observed in gender estimation, achieving a F1 score of 77.53%. Conclusions: This study marks a significant advancement in dental forensic methods, showcasing the potential of machine learning to automate age and gender estimation processes with improved accuracy.
TractoEmbed: Modular Multi-level Embedding framework for white matter tract segmentation
Authors: Anoushkrit Goel, Bipanjit Singh, Ankita Joshi, Ranjeet Ranjan Jha, Chirag Ahuja, Aditya Nigam, Arnav Bhavsar
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

White matter tract segmentation is crucial for studying brain structural connectivity and neurosurgical planning. However, segmentation remains challenging due to issues like class imbalance between major and minor tracts, structural similarity, subject variability, symmetric streamlines between hemispheres etc. To address these challenges, we propose TractoEmbed, a modular multi-level embedding framework, that encodes localized representations through learning tasks in respective encoders. In this paper, TractoEmbed introduces a novel hierarchical streamline data representation that captures maximum spatial information at each level i.e. individual streamlines, clusters, and patches. Experiments show that TractoEmbed outperforms state-of-the-art methods in white matter tract segmentation across different datasets, and spanning various age groups. The modular framework directly allows the integration of additional embeddings in future works.
SCORE: Syntactic Code Representations for Static Script Malware Detection
Authors: Ecenaz Erdemir, Kyuhong Park, Michael J. Morais, Vianne R. Gao, Marion Marschalek, Yi Fan
Date: 2024-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Detection

As businesses increasingly adopt cloud technologies, they also need to be aware of new security challenges, such as server-side script attacks, to ensure the integrity of their systems and data. These scripts can steal data, compromise credentials, and disrupt operations. Unlike executables with standardized formats (e.g., ELF, PE), scripts are plaintext files with diverse syntax, making them harder to detect using traditional methods. As a result, more sophisticated approaches are needed to protect cloud infrastructures from these evolving threats. In this paper, we propose novel feature extraction and deep learning (DL)-based approaches for static script malware detection, targeting server-side threats. We extract features from plain-text code using two techniques: syntactic code highlighting (SCH) and abstract syntax tree (AST) construction. SCH leverages complex regexes to parse syntactic elements of code, such as keywords, variable names, etc. ASTs generate a hierarchical representation of a program's syntactic structure. We then propose a sequential and a graph-based model that exploits these feature representations to detect script malware. We evaluate our approach on more than 400K server-side scripts in Bash, Python and Perl. We use a balanced dataset of 90K scripts for training, validation, and testing, with the remaining from 400K reserved for further analysis. Experiments show that our method achieves a true positive rate (TPR) up to 81% higher than leading signature-based antivirus solutions, while maintaining a low false positive rate (FPR) of 0.17%. Moreover, our approach outperforms various neural network-based detectors, demonstrating its effectiveness in learning code maliciousness for accurate detection of script malware.