pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ELEMENTAL: Interactive Learning from Demonstrations and Vision-Language Models for Reward Design in Robotics
Authors: Letian Chen, Nina Moorman, Matthew Gombolay
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated compelling performance in robotic tasks, but its success often hinges on the design of complex, ad hoc reward functions. Researchers have explored how Large Language Models (LLMs) could enable non-expert users to specify reward functions more easily. However, LLMs struggle to balance the importance of different features, generalize poorly to out-of-distribution robotic tasks, and cannot represent the problem properly with only text-based descriptions. To address these challenges, we propose ELEMENTAL (intEractive LEarning froM dEmoNstraTion And Language), a novel framework that combines natural language guidance with visual user demonstrations to align robot behavior with user intentions better. By incorporating visual inputs, ELEMENTAL overcomes the limitations of text-only task specifications, while leveraging inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to balance feature weights and match the demonstrated behaviors optimally. ELEMENTAL also introduces an iterative feedback-loop through self-reflection to improve feature, reward, and policy learning. Our experiment results demonstrate that ELEMENTAL outperforms prior work by 42.3% on task success, and achieves 41.3% better generalization in out-of-distribution tasks, highlighting its robustness in LfD.
One-Step Early Stopping Strategy using Neural Tangent Kernel Theory and Rademacher Complexity
Authors: Daniel Martin Xavier, Ludovic Chamoin, Jawher Jerray, Laurent Fribourg
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00

The early stopping strategy consists in stopping the training process of a neural network (NN) on a set $S$ of input data before training error is minimal. The advantage is that the NN then retains good generalization properties, i.e. it gives good predictions on data outside $S$, and a good estimate of the statistical error (``population loss'') is obtained. We give here an analytical estimation of the optimal stopping time involving basically the initial training error vector and the eigenvalues of the ``neural tangent kernel''. This yields an upper bound on the population loss which is well-suited to the underparameterized context (where the number of parameters is moderate compared with the number of data). Our method is illustrated on the example of an NN simulating the MPC control of a Van der Pol oscillator.
Stratified Non-Negative Tensor Factorization
Authors: Alexander Sietsema, Zerrin Vural, James Chapman, Yotam Yaniv, Deanna Needell
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and non-negative tensor factorization (NTF) decompose non-negative high-dimensional data into non-negative low-rank components. NMF and NTF methods are popular for their intrinsic interpretability and effectiveness on large-scale data. Recent work developed Stratified-NMF, which applies NMF to regimes where data may come from different sources (strata) with different underlying distributions, and seeks to recover both strata-dependent information and global topics shared across strata. Applying Stratified-NMF to multi-modal data requires flattening across modes, and therefore loses geometric structure contained implicitly within the tensor. To address this problem, we extend Stratified-NMF to the tensor setting by developing a multiplicative update rule and demonstrating the method on text and image data. We find that Stratified-NTF can identify interpretable topics with lower memory requirements than Stratified-NMF. We also introduce a regularized version of the method and demonstrate its effects on image data.
Graph Max Shift: A Hill-Climbing Method for Graph Clustering
Authors: Ery Arias-Castro, Elizabeth Coda, Wanli Qiao
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Clustering

We present a method for graph clustering that is analogous with gradient ascent methods previously proposed for clustering points in space. We show that, when applied to a random geometric graph with data iid from some density with Morse regularity, the method is asymptotically consistent. Here, consistency is understood with respect to a density-level clustering defined by the partition of the support of the density induced by the basins of attraction of the density modes.
Investigating Plausibility of Biologically Inspired Bayesian Learning in ANNs
Authors: Ram Zaveri
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Continual Learning, Lifelong learning

Catastrophic forgetting has been the leading issue in the domain of lifelong learning in artificial systems. Current artificial systems are reasonably good at learning domains they have seen before; however, as soon as they encounter something new, they either go through a significant performance deterioration or if you try to teach them the new distribution of data, they forget what they have learned before. Additionally, they are also prone to being overly confident when performing inference on seen as well as unseen data, causing significant reliability issues when lives are at stake. Therefore, it is extremely important to dig into this problem and formulate an approach that will be continually adaptable as well as reliable. If we move away from the engineering domain of such systems and look into biological systems, we can realize that these very systems are very efficient at computing the reliance as well as the uncertainty of accurate predictions that further help them refine the inference in a life-long setting. These systems are not perfect; however, they do give us a solid understanding of the reasoning under uncertainty which takes us to the domain of Bayesian reasoning. We incorporate this Bayesian inference with thresholding mechanism as to mimic more biologically inspired models, but only at spatial level. Further, we reproduce a recent study on Bayesian Inference with Spiking Neural Networks for Continual Learning to compare against it as a suitable biologically inspired Bayesian framework. Overall, we investigate the plausibility of biologically inspired Bayesian Learning in artificial systems on a vision dataset, MNIST, and show relative performance improvement under the conditions when the model is forced to predict VS when the model is not.
Classification of Deceased Patients from Non-Deceased Patients using Random Forest and Support Vector Machine Classifiers
Authors: Dheeman Saha, Aaron Segura, Biraj Tiwari
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00

Analyzing large datasets and summarizing it into useful information is the heart of the data mining process. In healthcare, information can be converted into knowledge about patient historical patterns and possible future trends. During the COVID-19 pandemic, data mining COVID-19 patient information poses an opportunity to discover patterns that may signal that the patient is at high risk for death. COVID-19 patients die from sepsis, a complex disease process involving multiple organ systems. We extracted the variables physicians are most concerned about regarding viral septic infections. With the aim of distinguishing COVID-19 patients who survive their hospital stay and those COVID-19 who do not, the authors of this study utilize the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and the Random Forest (RF) classification techniques to classify patients according to their demographics, laboratory test results, and preexisting health conditions. After conducting a 10-fold validation procedure, we assessed the performance of the classification through a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, and a Confusion Matrix was used to determine the accuracy of the classifiers. We also performed a cluster analysis on the binary factors, such as if the patient had a preexisting condition and if sepsis was identified, and the numeric values from patient demographics and laboratory test results as predictors.
Cyber-Attack Technique Classification Using Two-Stage Trained Large Language Models
Authors: Weiqiu You, Youngja Park
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Sentence, Sentence Classification

Understanding the attack patterns associated with a cyberattack is crucial for comprehending the attacker's behaviors and implementing the right mitigation measures. However, majority of the information regarding new attacks is typically presented in unstructured text, posing significant challenges for security analysts in collecting necessary information. In this paper, we present a sentence classification system that can identify the attack techniques described in natural language sentences from cyber threat intelligence (CTI) reports. We propose a new method for utilizing auxiliary data with the same labels to improve classification for the low-resource cyberattack classification task. The system first trains the model using the augmented training data and then trains more using only the primary data. We validate our model using the TRAM data1 and the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Experiments show that our method enhances Macro-F1 by 5 to 9 percentage points and keeps Micro-F1 scores competitive when compared to the baseline performance on the TRAM dataset.
Locally Differentially Private Online Federated Learning With Correlated Noise
Authors: Jiaojiao Zhang, Linglingzhi Zhu, Dominik Fay, Mikael Johansson
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

We introduce a locally differentially private (LDP) algorithm for online federated learning that employs temporally correlated noise to improve utility while preserving privacy. To address challenges posed by the correlated noise and local updates with streaming non-IID data, we develop a perturbed iterate analysis that controls the impact of the noise on the utility. Moreover, we demonstrate how the drift errors from local updates can be effectively managed for several classes of nonconvex loss functions. Subject to an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-LDP budget, we establish a dynamic regret bound that quantifies the impact of key parameters and the intensity of changes in the dynamic environment on the learning performance. Numerical experiments confirm the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.
Inference Privacy: Properties and Mechanisms
Authors: Fengwei Tian, Ravi Tandon
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Privacy Preserving

Ensuring privacy during inference stage is crucial to prevent malicious third parties from reconstructing users' private inputs from outputs of public models. Despite a large body of literature on privacy preserving learning (which ensures privacy of training data), there is no existing systematic framework to ensure the privacy of users' data during inference. Motivated by this problem, we introduce the notion of Inference Privacy (IP), which can allow a user to interact with a model (for instance, a classifier, or an AI-assisted chat-bot) while providing a rigorous privacy guarantee for the users' data at inference. We establish fundamental properties of the IP privacy notion and also contrast it with the notion of Local Differential Privacy (LDP). We then present two types of mechanisms for achieving IP: namely, input perturbations and output perturbations which are customizable by the users and can allow them to navigate the trade-off between utility and privacy. We also demonstrate the usefulness of our framework via experiments and highlight the resulting trade-offs between utility and privacy during inference.
Foundation Models in Radiology: What, How, When, Why and Why Not
Authors: Magdalini Paschali, Zhihong Chen, Louis Blankemeier, Maya Varma, Alaa Youssef, Christian Bluethgen, Curtis Langlotz, Sergios Gatidis, Akshay Chaudhari
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have witnessed the emergence of large-scale deep learning models capable of interpreting and generating both textual and imaging data. Such models, typically referred to as foundation models, are trained on extensive corpora of unlabeled data and demonstrate high performance across various tasks. Foundation models have recently received extensive attention from academic, industry, and regulatory bodies. Given the potentially transformative impact that foundation models can have on the field of radiology, this review aims to establish a standardized terminology concerning foundation models, with a specific focus on the requirements of training data, model training paradigms, model capabilities, and evaluation strategies. We further outline potential pathways to facilitate the training of radiology-specific foundation models, with a critical emphasis on elucidating both the benefits and challenges associated with such models. Overall, we envision that this review can unify technical advances and clinical needs in the training of foundation models for radiology in a safe and responsible manner, for ultimately benefiting patients, providers, and radiologists.
Addressing bias in Recommender Systems: A Case Study on Data Debiasing Techniques in Mobile Games
Authors: Yixiong Wang, Maria Paskevich, Hui Wang
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

The mobile gaming industry, particularly the free-to-play sector, has been around for more than a decade, yet it still experiences rapid growth. The concept of games-as-service requires game developers to pay much more attention to recommendations of content in their games. With recommender systems (RS), the inevitable problem of bias in the data comes hand in hand. A lot of research has been done on the case of bias in RS for online retail or services, but much less is available for the specific case of the game industry. Also, in previous works, various debiasing techniques were tested on explicit feedback datasets, while it is much more common in mobile gaming data to only have implicit feedback. This case study aims to identify and categorize potential bias within datasets specific to model-based recommendations in mobile games, review debiasing techniques in the existing literature, and assess their effectiveness on real-world data gathered through implicit feedback. The effectiveness of these methods is then evaluated based on their debiasing quality, data requirements, and computational demands.
Exponential Moving Average of Weights in Deep Learning: Dynamics and Benefits
Authors: Daniel Morales-Brotons, Thijs Vogels, Hadrien Hendrikx
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Weight averaging of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) iterates is a popular method for training deep learning models. While it is often used as part of complex training pipelines to improve generalization or serve as a `teacher' model, weight averaging lacks proper evaluation on its own. In this work, we present a systematic study of the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of weights. We first explore the training dynamics of EMA, give guidelines for hyperparameter tuning, and highlight its good early performance, partly explaining its success as a teacher. We also observe that EMA requires less learning rate decay compared to SGD since averaging naturally reduces noise, introducing a form of implicit regularization. Through extensive experiments, we show that EMA solutions differ from last-iterate solutions. EMA models not only generalize better but also exhibit improved i) robustness to noisy labels, ii) prediction consistency, iii) calibration and iv) transfer learning. Therefore, we suggest that an EMA of weights is a simple yet effective plug-in to improve the performance of deep learning models.
What fifty-one years of Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence research tell us about their correlation: A scientometric review
Authors: Mohammed Q. Shormani
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

There is a strong correlation between linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI), best manifested by deep learning language models. This study provides a thorough scientometric analysis of this correlation, synthesizing the intellectual production during 51 years, from 1974 to 2024. It involves 5750 Web of Science-indexed articles published in 2124 journals, which are written by 20835 authors belonging to 13773 research centers in 794 countries. Two powerful software, viz., CiteSpace and VOSviewer, were used to generate mapping visualizations of the intellectual landscape, trending issues and (re)emerging hotspots. The results indicate that in the 1980s and 1990s, linguistics and AI research was not robust, characterized by unstable publication over time. It has, however, witnessed a remarkable increase of publication since then, reaching 1478 articles in 2023, and 546 articles in January-March timespan in 2024, involving emerging issues and hotspots, addressing new horizons, new topics, and launching new applications and powerful deep learning language models including ChatGPT.
Artificial intelligence contribution to translation industry: looking back and forward
Authors: Mohammed Q. Shormani
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Machine Translation, Translation

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) contribution to translation industry (ACTI) research, synthesizing it over forty-one years from 1980-2024. 13220 articles were retrieved from three sources, namely WoS, Scopus, and Lens. We provided two types of analysis, viz., scientometric and thematic, focusing on cluster, subject categories, keywords, burstness, centrality and research centers as for the former. For the latter, we thematically review 18 articles, selected purposefully from the articles involved, centering on purpose, approach, findings, and contribution to ACTI future directions. The findings reveal that in the past AI contribution to translation industry was not rigorous, resulting in rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translation whose output was not satisfactory. However, the more AI develops, the more machine translation develops, incorporating Neural Networking Algorithms and (Deep) Language Learning Models like ChatGPT whose translation output has developed considerably. However, much rigorous research is still needed to overcome several problems encountering translation industry, specifically concerning low-source languages, multi-dialectical and free word order languages, and cultural and religious registers.
Sensitive Content Classification in Social Media: A Holistic Resource and Evaluation
Authors: Dimosthenis Antypas, Indira Sen, Carla Perez-Almendros, Jose Camacho-Collados, Francesco Barbieri
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00

The detection of sensitive content in large datasets is crucial for ensuring that shared and analysed data is free from harmful material. However, current moderation tools, such as external APIs, suffer from limitations in customisation, accuracy across diverse sensitive categories, and privacy concerns. Additionally, existing datasets and open-source models focus predominantly on toxic language, leaving gaps in detecting other sensitive categories such as substance abuse or self-harm. In this paper, we put forward a unified dataset tailored for social media content moderation across six sensitive categories: conflictual language, profanity, sexually explicit material, drug-related content, self-harm, and spam. By collecting and annotating data with consistent retrieval strategies and guidelines, we address the shortcomings of previous focalised research. Our analysis demonstrates that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on this novel dataset yields significant improvements in detection performance compared to open off-the-shelf models such as LLaMA, and even proprietary OpenAI models, which underperform by 10-15% overall. This limitation is even more pronounced on popular moderation APIs, which cannot be easily tailored to specific sensitive content categories, among others.
SDR-GNN: Spectral Domain Reconstruction Graph Neural Network for Incomplete Multimodal Learning in Conversational Emotion Recognition
Authors: Fangze Fu, Wei Ai, Fan Yang, Yuntao Shou, Tao Meng, Keqin Li
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Graph Neural Network, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) aims to classify utterance emotions using textual, auditory, and visual modal features. Most existing MERC methods assume each utterance has complete modalities, overlooking the common issue of incomplete modalities in real-world scenarios. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved notable results in Incomplete Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (IMERC). However, traditional GNNs focus on binary relationships between nodes, limiting their ability to capture more complex, higher-order information. Moreover, repeated message passing can cause over-smoothing, reducing their capacity to preserve essential high-frequency details. To address these issues, we propose a Spectral Domain Reconstruction Graph Neural Network (SDR-GNN) for incomplete multimodal learning in conversational emotion recognition. SDR-GNN constructs an utterance semantic interaction graph using a sliding window based on both speaker and context relationships to model emotional dependencies. To capture higher-order and high-frequency information, SDR-GNN utilizes weighted relationship aggregation, ensuring consistent semantic feature extraction across utterances. Additionally, it performs multi-frequency aggregation in the spectral domain, enabling efficient recovery of incomplete modalities by extracting both high- and low-frequency information. Finally, multi-head attention is applied to fuse and optimize features for emotion recognition. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach is effective in incomplete multimodal learning and outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
INCLUDE: Evaluating Multilingual Language Understanding with Regional Knowledge
Authors: Angelika Romanou, Negar Foroutan, Anna Sotnikova, Zeming Chen, Sree Harsha Nelaturu, Shivalika Singh, Rishabh Maheshwary, Micol Altomare, Mohamed A. Haggag, Snegha A, Alfonso Amayuelas, Azril Hafizi Amirudin, Viraat Aryabumi, Danylo Boiko, Michael Chang, Jenny Chim, Gal Cohen, Aditya Kumar Dalmia, Abraham Diress, Sharad Duwal, Daniil Dzenhaliou, Daniel Fernando Erazo Florez, Fabian Farestam, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Shayekh Bin Islam, Perttu Isotalo, Maral Jabbarishiviari, Börje F. Karlsson, Eldar Khalilov, Christopher Klamm, Fajri Koto, Dominik Krzemiński, Gabriel Adriano de Melo, Syrielle Montariol, Yiyang Nan, Joel Niklaus, Jekaterina Novikova, Johan Samir Obando Ceron, Debjit Paul, Esther Ploeger, Jebish Purbey, Swati Rajwal, Selvan Sunitha Ravi, Sara Rydell, Roshan Santhosh, Drishti Sharma, Marjana Prifti Skenduli, Arshia Soltani Moakhar, Bardia Soltani Moakhar, Ran Tamir, Ayush Kumar Tarun, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Thenuka Ovin Weerasinghe, Serhan Yilmaz, Mike Zhang, Imanol Schlag, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker, Antoine Bosselut
Date: 2024-11-29 00:00:00

The performance differential of large language models (LLM) between languages hinders their effective deployment in many regions, inhibiting the potential economic and societal value of generative AI tools in many communities. However, the development of functional LLMs in many languages (\ie, multilingual LLMs) is bottlenecked by the lack of high-quality evaluation resources in languages other than English. Moreover, current practices in multilingual benchmark construction often translate English resources, ignoring the regional and cultural knowledge of the environments in which multilingual systems would be used. In this work, we construct an evaluation suite of 197,243 QA pairs from local exam sources to measure the capabilities of multilingual LLMs in a variety of regional contexts. Our novel resource, INCLUDE, is a comprehensive knowledge- and reasoning-centric benchmark across 44 written languages that evaluates multilingual LLMs for performance in the actual language environments where they would be deployed.