pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SkiLD: Unsupervised Skill Discovery Guided by Factor Interactions
Authors: Zizhao Wang, Jiaheng Hu, Caleb Chuck, Stephen Chen, Roberto Martín-Martín, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum, Peter Stone
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Inductive Bias, Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

Unsupervised skill discovery carries the promise that an intelligent agent can learn reusable skills through autonomous, reward-free environment interaction. Existing unsupervised skill discovery methods learn skills by encouraging distinguishable behaviors that cover diverse states. However, in complex environments with many state factors (e.g., household environments with many objects), learning skills that cover all possible states is impossible, and naively encouraging state diversity often leads to simple skills that are not ideal for solving downstream tasks. This work introduces Skill Discovery from Local Dependencies (Skild), which leverages state factorization as a natural inductive bias to guide the skill learning process. The key intuition guiding Skild is that skills that induce <b>diverse interactions</b> between state factors are often more valuable for solving downstream tasks. To this end, Skild develops a novel skill learning objective that explicitly encourages the mastering of skills that effectively induce different interactions within an environment. We evaluate Skild in several domains with challenging, long-horizon sparse reward tasks including a realistic simulated household robot domain, where Skild successfully learns skills with clear semantic meaning and shows superior performance compared to existing unsupervised reinforcement learning methods that only maximize state coverage.
Enhancing Feature-Specific Data Protection via Bayesian Coordinate Differential Privacy
Authors: Maryam Aliakbarpour, Syomantak Chaudhuri, Thomas A. Courtade, Alireza Fallah, Michael I. Jordan
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00

Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong privacy guarantees without requiring users to trust external parties. However, LDP applies uniform protection to all data features, including less sensitive ones, which degrades performance of downstream tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Bayesian framework, Bayesian Coordinate Differential Privacy (BCDP), that enables feature-specific privacy quantification. This more nuanced approach complements LDP by adjusting privacy protection according to the sensitivity of each feature, enabling improved performance of downstream tasks without compromising privacy. We characterize the properties of BCDP and articulate its connections with standard non-Bayesian privacy frameworks. We further apply our BCDP framework to the problems of private mean estimation and ordinary least-squares regression. The BCDP-based approach obtains improved accuracy compared to a purely LDP-based approach, without compromising on privacy.
Structure Language Models for Protein Conformation Generation
Authors: Jiarui Lu, Xiaoyin Chen, Stephen Zhewen Lu, Chence Shi, Hongyu Guo, Yoshua Bengio, Jian Tang
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Proteins adopt multiple structural conformations to perform their diverse biological functions, and understanding these conformations is crucial for advancing drug discovery. Traditional physics-based simulation methods often struggle with sampling equilibrium conformations and are computationally expensive. Recently, deep generative models have shown promise in generating protein conformations as a more efficient alternative. However, these methods predominantly rely on the diffusion process within a 3D geometric space, which typically centers around the vicinity of metastable states and is often inefficient in terms of runtime. In this paper, we introduce Structure Language Modeling (SLM) as a novel framework for efficient protein conformation generation. Specifically, the protein structures are first encoded into a compact latent space using a discrete variational auto-encoder, followed by conditional language modeling that effectively captures sequence-specific conformation distributions. This enables a more efficient and interpretable exploration of diverse ensemble modes compared to existing methods. Based on this general framework, we instantiate SLM with various popular LM architectures as well as proposing the ESMDiff, a novel BERT-like structure language model fine-tuned from ESM3 with masked diffusion. We verify our approach in various scenarios, including the equilibrium dynamics of BPTI, conformational change pairs, and intrinsically disordered proteins. SLM provides a highly efficient solution, offering a 20-100x speedup than existing methods in generating diverse conformations, shedding light on promising avenues for future research.
Low-Rank Tensor Learning by Generalized Nonconvex Regularization
Authors: Sijia Xia, Michael K. Ng, Xiongjun Zhang
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

In this paper, we study the problem of low-rank tensor learning, where only a few of training samples are observed and the underlying tensor has a low-rank structure. The existing methods are based on the sum of nuclear norms of unfolding matrices of a tensor, which may be suboptimal. In order to explore the low-rankness of the underlying tensor effectively, we propose a nonconvex model based on transformed tensor nuclear norm for low-rank tensor learning. Specifically, a family of nonconvex functions are employed onto the singular values of all frontal slices of a tensor in the transformed domain to characterize the low-rankness of the underlying tensor. An error bound between the stationary point of the nonconvex model and the underlying tensor is established under restricted strong convexity on the loss function (such as least squares loss and logistic regression) and suitable regularity conditions on the nonconvex penalty function. By reformulating the nonconvex function into the difference of two convex functions, a proximal majorization-minimization (PMM) algorithm is designed to solve the resulting model. Then the global convergence and convergence rate of PMM are established under very mild conditions. Numerical experiments are conducted on tensor completion and binary classification to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods.
Revisiting Differentiable Structure Learning: Inconsistency of $\ell_1$ Penalty and Beyond
Authors: Kaifeng Jin, Ignavier Ng, Kun Zhang, Biwei Huang
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00

Recent advances in differentiable structure learning have framed the combinatorial problem of learning directed acyclic graphs as a continuous optimization problem. Various aspects, including data standardization, have been studied to identify factors that influence the empirical performance of these methods. In this work, we investigate critical limitations in differentiable structure learning methods, focusing on settings where the true structure can be identified up to Markov equivalence classes, particularly in the linear Gaussian case. While Ng et al. (2024) highlighted potential non-convexity issues in this setting, we demonstrate and explain why the use of $\ell_1$-penalized likelihood in such cases is fundamentally inconsistent, even if the global optimum of the optimization problem can be found. To resolve this limitation, we develop a hybrid differentiable structure learning method based on $\ell_0$-penalized likelihood with hard acyclicity constraint, where the $\ell_0$ penalty can be approximated by different techniques including Gumbel-Softmax. Specifically, we first estimate the underlying moral graph, and use it to restrict the search space of the optimization problem, which helps alleviate the non-convexity issue. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances empirical performance both before and after data standardization, providing a more reliable path for future advancements in differentiable structure learning, especially for learning Markov equivalence classes.
A contrastive-learning approach for auditory attention detection
Authors: Seyed Ali Alavi Bajestan, Mark Pitt, Donald S. Williamson
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Self-Supervised Learning

Carrying conversations in multi-sound environments is one of the more challenging tasks, since the sounds overlap across time and frequency making it difficult to understand a single sound source. One proposed approach to help isolate an attended speech source is through decoding the electroencephalogram (EEG) and identifying the attended audio source using statistical or machine learning techniques. However, the limited amount of data in comparison to other machine learning problems and the distributional shift between different EEG recordings emphasizes the need for a self supervised approach that works with limited data to achieve a more robust solution. In this paper, we propose a method based on self supervised learning to minimize the difference between the latent representations of an attended speech signal and the corresponding EEG signal. This network is further finetuned for the auditory attention classification task. We compare our results with previously published methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the validation set.
Faster Algorithms for User-Level Private Stochastic Convex Optimization
Authors: Andrew Lowy, Daogao Liu, Hilal Asi
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00

We study private stochastic convex optimization (SCO) under user-level differential privacy (DP) constraints. In this setting, there are $n$ users (e.g., cell phones), each possessing $m$ data items (e.g., text messages), and we need to protect the privacy of each user's entire collection of data items. Existing algorithms for user-level DP SCO are impractical in many large-scale machine learning scenarios because: (i) they make restrictive assumptions on the smoothness parameter of the loss function and require the number of users to grow polynomially with the dimension of the parameter space; or (ii) they are prohibitively slow, requiring at least $(mn)^{3/2}$ gradient computations for smooth losses and $(mn)^3$ computations for non-smooth losses. To address these limitations, we provide novel user-level DP algorithms with state-of-the-art excess risk and runtime guarantees, without stringent assumptions. First, we develop a linear-time algorithm with state-of-the-art excess risk (for a non-trivial linear-time algorithm) under a mild smoothness assumption. Our second algorithm applies to arbitrary smooth losses and achieves optimal excess risk in $\approx (mn)^{9/8}$ gradient computations. Third, for non-smooth loss functions, we obtain optimal excess risk in $n^{11/8} m^{5/4}$ gradient computations. Moreover, our algorithms do not require the number of users to grow polynomially with the dimension.
Harnessing PU Learning for Enhanced Cloud-based DDoS Detection: A Comparative Analysis
Authors: Robert Dilworth, Charan Gudla
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

This paper explores the application of Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning for enhanced Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) detection in cloud environments. Utilizing the $\texttt{BCCC-cPacket-Cloud-DDoS-2024}$ dataset, we implement PU learning with four machine learning algorithms: XGBoost, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and Na\"{i}ve Bayes. Our results demonstrate the superior performance of ensemble methods, with XGBoost and Random Forest achieving $F_{1}$ scores exceeding 98%. We quantify the efficacy of each approach using metrics including $F_{1}$ score, ROC AUC, Recall, and Precision. This study bridges the gap between PU learning and cloud-based anomaly detection, providing a foundation for addressing Context-Aware DDoS Detection in multi-cloud environments. Our findings highlight the potential of PU learning in scenarios with limited labeled data, offering valuable insights for developing more robust and adaptive cloud security mechanisms.
Delta: A Cloud-assisted Data Enrichment Framework for On-Device Continual Learning
Authors: Chen Gong, Zhenzhe Zheng, Fan Wu, Xiaofeng Jia, Guihai Chen
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

In modern mobile applications, users frequently encounter various new contexts, necessitating on-device continual learning (CL) to ensure consistent model performance. While existing research predominantly focused on developing lightweight CL frameworks, we identify that data scarcity is a critical bottleneck for on-device CL. In this work, we explore the potential of leveraging abundant cloud-side data to enrich scarce on-device data, and propose a private, efficient and effective data enrichment framework Delta. Specifically, Delta first introduces a directory dataset to decompose the data enrichment problem into device-side and cloud-side sub-problems without sharing sensitive data. Next, Delta proposes a soft data matching strategy to effectively solve the device-side sub-problem with sparse user data, and an optimal data sampling scheme for cloud server to retrieve the most suitable dataset for enrichment with low computational complexity. Further, Delta refines the data sampling scheme by jointly considering the impact of enriched data on both new and past contexts, mitigating the catastrophic forgetting issue from a new aspect. Comprehensive experiments across four typical mobile computing tasks with varied data modalities demonstrate that Delta could enhance the overall model accuracy by an average of 15.1%, 12.4%, 1.1% and 5.6% for visual, IMU, audio and textual tasks compared with few-shot CL, and consistently reduce the communication costs by over 90% compared to federated CL.
Multi-objective Optimization in CPU Design Space Exploration: Attention is All You Need
Authors: Runzhen Xue, Hao Wu, Mingyu Yan, Ziheng Xiao, Xiaochun Ye, Dongrui Fan
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: All, CPU

Design space exploration (DSE) enables architects to systematically evaluate various design options, guiding decisions on the most suitable configurations to meet specific objectives such as optimizing performance, power, and area. However, the growing complexity of modern CPUs has dramatically increased the number of micro-architectural parameters and expanded the overall design space, making DSE more challenging and time-consuming. Existing DSE frameworks struggle in large-scale design spaces due to inaccurate models and limited insights into parameter impact, hindering efficient identification of optimal micro-architectures within tight timeframes. In this work, we introduce AttentionDSE. Its key idea is to use the attention mechanism to establish a direct mapping of micro-architectural parameters to their contributions to predicted performance. This approach enhances both the prediction accuracy and interpretability of the performance model. Furthermore, the weights are dynamically adjusted, enabling the model to respond to design changes and effectively pinpoint the key micro-architectural parameters/components responsible for performance bottlenecks. Thus, AttentionDSE accurately, purposefully, and rapidly discovers optimal designs. Experiments on SPEC 2017 demonstrate that AttentionDSE significantly reduces exploration time by over 80\% and achieves 3.9\% improvement in Pareto Hypervolume compared to state-of-the-art DSE frameworks while maintaining superior prediction accuracy and efficiency with an increasing number of parameters.
Assessing Alcohol Use Disorder: Insights from Lifestyle, Background, and Family History with Machine Learning Techniques
Authors: Chenlan Wang, Gaojian Huang, Yue Luo
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization

This study explored how lifestyle, personal background, and family history contribute to the risk of developing Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). Survey data from the All of Us Program was utilized to extract information on AUD status, lifestyle, personal background, and family history for 6,016 participants. Key determinants of AUD were identified using decision trees including annual income, recreational drug use, length of residence, sex/gender, marital status, education level, and family history of AUD. Data visualization and Chi-Square Tests of Independence were then used to assess associations between identified factors and AUD. Afterwards, machine learning techniques including decision trees, random forests, and Naive Bayes were applied to predict an individual's likelihood of developing AUD. Random forests were found to achieve the highest accuracy (82%), compared to Decision Trees and Naive Bayes. Findings from this study can offer insights that help parents, healthcare professionals, and educators develop strategies to reduce AUD risk, enabling early intervention and targeted prevention efforts.
Precision Soil Quality Analysis Using Transformer-based Data Fusion Strategies: A Systematic Review
Authors: Mahdi Saki, Rasool Keshavarz, Daniel Franklin, Mehran Abolhasan, Justin Lipman, Negin Shariati
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00

This review explores the most recent advancements in transformer-based data fusion techniques in agricultural remote sensing (RS), with a particular focus on soil analysis. Utilizing a systematic, data-driven approach, we demonstrate that transformers have significantly outperformed conventional deep learning and machine learning methods since 2022, achieving prediction performance between 92% and 97%. The review is specifically focused on soil analysis, due to the importance of soil condition in optimizing crop productivity and ensuring sustainable farming practices. Transformer-based models have shown remarkable capabilities in handling complex multivariate soil data, improving the accuracy of soil moisture prediction, soil element analysis, and other soil-related applications. This systematic review primarily focuses on 1) analysing research trends and patterns in the literature, both chronologically and technically, and 2) conducting a comparative analysis of data fusion approaches, considering factors such as data types, techniques, and RS applications. Finally, we propose a roadmap for implementing data fusion methods in agricultural RS.
FedBaF: Federated Learning Aggregation Biased by a Foundation Model
Authors: Jong-Ik Park, Srinivasa Pranav, José M. F. Moura, Carlee Joe-Wong
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Foundation models are now a major focus of leading technology organizations due to their ability to generalize across diverse tasks. Existing approaches for adapting foundation models to new applications often rely on Federated Learning (FL) and disclose the foundation model weights to clients when using it to initialize the global model. While these methods ensure client data privacy, they compromise model and information security. In this paper, we introduce Federated Learning Aggregation Biased by a Foundation Model (FedBaF), a novel method for dynamically integrating pre-trained foundation model weights during the FL aggregation phase. Unlike conventional methods, FedBaF preserves the confidentiality of the foundation model while still leveraging its power to train more accurate models, especially in non-IID and adversarial scenarios. Our comprehensive experiments use Pre-ResNet and foundation models like Vision Transformer to demonstrate that FedBaF not only matches, but often surpasses the test accuracy of traditional weight initialization methods by up to 11.4% in IID and up to 15.8% in non-IID settings. Additionally, FedBaF applied to a Transformer-based language model significantly reduced perplexity by up to 39.2%.
AdaEDL: Early Draft Stopping for Speculative Decoding of Large Language Models via an Entropy-based Lower Bound on Token Acceptance Probability
Authors: Sudhanshu Agrawal, Wonseok Jeon, Mingu Lee
Date: 2024-10-24 00:00:00

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique that attempts to circumvent the autoregressive constraint of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). The aim of speculative decoding techniques is to improve the average inference time of a large, target model without sacrificing its accuracy, by using a more efficient draft model to propose draft tokens which are then verified in parallel. The number of draft tokens produced in each drafting round is referred to as the draft length and is often a static hyperparameter chosen based on the acceptance rate statistics of the draft tokens. However, setting a static draft length can negatively impact performance, especially in scenarios where drafting is expensive and there is a high variance in the number of tokens accepted. Adaptive Entropy-based Draft Length (AdaEDL) is a simple, training and parameter-free criteria which allows for early stopping of the token drafting process by approximating a lower bound on the expected acceptance probability of the drafted token based on the currently observed entropy of the drafted logits. We show that AdaEDL consistently outperforms static draft-length speculative decoding by 10%-57% as well as other training-free draft-stopping techniques by upto 10% in a variety of settings and datasets. At the same time, we show that AdaEDL is more robust than these techniques and preserves performance in high-sampling-temperature scenarios. Since it is training-free, in contrast to techniques that rely on the training of dataset-specific draft-stopping predictors, AdaEDL can seamlessly be integrated into a variety of pre-existing LLM systems.
Unified Microphone Conversion: Many-to-Many Device Mapping via Feature-wise Linear Modulation
Authors: Myeonghoon Ryu, Hongseok Oh, Suji Lee, Han Park
Date: 2024-10-23 00:00:00

We present Unified Microphone Conversion, a unified generative framework designed to bolster sound event classification (SEC) systems against device variability. While our prior CycleGAN-based methods effectively simulate device characteristics, they require separate models for each device pair, limiting scalability. Our approach overcomes this constraint by conditioning the generator on frequency response data, enabling many-to-many device mappings through unpaired training. We integrate frequency-response information via Feature-wise Linear Modulation, further enhancing scalability. Additionally, incorporating synthetic frequency response differences improves the applicability of our framework for real-world application. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 2.6% and reduces variability by 0.8% in macro-average F1 score.