pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
How Does Distribution Matching Help Domain Generalization: An Information-theoretic Analysis
Authors: Yuxin Dong, Tieliang Gong, Hong Chen, Shuangyong Song, Weizhan Zhang, Chen Li
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Domain generalization aims to learn invariance across multiple training domains, thereby enhancing generalization against out-of-distribution data. While gradient or representation matching algorithms have achieved remarkable success, these methods generally lack generalization guarantees or depend on strong assumptions, leaving a gap in understanding the underlying mechanism of distribution matching. In this work, we formulate domain generalization from a novel probabilistic perspective, ensuring robustness while avoiding overly conservative solutions. Through comprehensive information-theoretic analysis, we provide key insights into the roles of gradient and representation matching in promoting generalization. Our results reveal the complementary relationship between these two components, indicating that existing works focusing solely on either gradient or representation alignment are insufficient to solve the domain generalization problem. In light of these theoretical findings, we introduce IDM to simultaneously align the inter-domain gradients and representations. Integrated with the proposed PDM method for complex distribution matching, IDM achieves superior performance over various baseline methods.
Deep Symbolic Optimization for Combinatorial Optimization: Accelerating Node Selection by Discovering Potential Heuristics
Authors: Hongyu Liu, Haoyang Liu, Yufei Kuang, Jie Wang, Bin Li
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, CPU, GPU

Combinatorial optimization (CO) is one of the most fundamental mathematical models in real-world applications. Traditional CO solvers, such as Branch-and-Bound (B&B) solvers, heavily rely on expert-designed heuristics, which are reliable but require substantial manual tuning. Recent studies have leveraged deep learning (DL) models as an alternative to capture rich feature patterns for improved performance on GPU machines. Nonetheless, the drawbacks of high training and inference costs, as well as limited interpretability, severely hinder the adoption of DL methods in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel deep symbolic optimization learning framework that combines their advantages. Specifically, we focus on the node selection module within B&B solvers -- namely, deep symbolic optimization for node selection (Dso4NS). With data-driven approaches, Dso4NS guides the search for mathematical expressions within the high-dimensional discrete symbolic space and then incorporates the highest-performing mathematical expressions into a solver. The data-driven model captures the rich feature information in the input data and generates symbolic expressions, while the expressions deployed in solvers enable fast inference with high interpretability. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Dso4NS in learning high-quality expressions, outperforming existing approaches on a CPU machine. Encouragingly, the learned CPU-based policies consistently achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art GPU-based approaches.
When Will Gradient Regularization Be Harmful?
Authors: Yang Zhao, Hao Zhang, Xiuyuan Hu
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00

Gradient regularization (GR), which aims to penalize the gradient norm atop the loss function, has shown promising results in training modern over-parameterized deep neural networks. However, can we trust this powerful technique? This paper reveals that GR can cause performance degeneration in adaptive optimization scenarios, particularly with learning rate warmup. Our empirical and theoretical analyses suggest this is due to GR inducing instability and divergence in gradient statistics of adaptive optimizers at the initial training stage. Inspired by the warmup heuristic, we propose three GR warmup strategies, each relaxing the regularization effect to a certain extent during the warmup course to ensure the accurate and stable accumulation of gradients. With experiments on Vision Transformer family, we confirm the three GR warmup strategies can effectively circumvent these issues, thereby largely improving the model performance. Meanwhile, we note that scalable models tend to rely more on the GR warmup, where the performance can be improved by up to 3\% on Cifar10 compared to baseline GR. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}.
Speed-up of Data Analysis with Kernel Trick in Encrypted Domain
Authors: Joon Soo Yoo, Baek Kyung Song, Tae Min Ahn, Ji Won Heo, Ji Won Yoon
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is pivotal for secure computation on encrypted data, crucial in privacy-preserving data analysis. However, efficiently processing high-dimensional data in HE, especially for machine learning and statistical (ML/STAT) algorithms, poses a challenge. In this paper, we present an effective acceleration method using the kernel method for HE schemes, enhancing time performance in ML/STAT algorithms within encrypted domains. This technique, independent of underlying HE mechanisms and complementing existing optimizations, notably reduces costly HE multiplications, offering near constant time complexity relative to data dimension. Aimed at accessibility, this method is tailored for data scientists and developers with limited cryptography background, facilitating advanced data analysis in secure environments.
Large language model validity via enhanced conformal prediction methods
Authors: John J. Cherian, Isaac Gibbs, Emmanuel J. Candès
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Medical Question Answering, Prediction, Question Answering, valid

We develop new conformal inference methods for obtaining validity guarantees on the output of large language models (LLMs). Prior work in conformal language modeling identifies a subset of the text that satisfies a high-probability guarantee of correctness. These methods work by filtering claims from the LLM's original response if a scoring function evaluated on the claim fails to exceed a threshold calibrated via split conformal prediction. Existing methods in this area suffer from two deficiencies. First, the guarantee stated is not conditionally valid. The trustworthiness of the filtering step may vary based on the topic of the response. Second, because the scoring function is imperfect, the filtering step can remove many valuable and accurate claims. We address both of these challenges via two new conformal methods. First, we generalize the conditional conformal procedure of Gibbs et al. (2023) in order to adaptively issue weaker guarantees when they are required to preserve the utility of the output. Second, we show how to systematically improve the quality of the scoring function via a novel algorithm for differentiating through the conditional conformal procedure. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on biography and medical question-answering datasets.
Meta-Learning Loss Functions for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Christian Raymond
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Humans can often quickly and efficiently solve complex new learning tasks given only a small set of examples. In contrast, modern artificially intelligent systems often require thousands or millions of observations in order to solve even the most basic tasks. Meta-learning aims to resolve this issue by leveraging past experiences from similar learning tasks to embed the appropriate inductive biases into the learning system. Historically methods for meta-learning components such as optimizers, parameter initializations, and more have led to significant performance increases. This thesis aims to explore the concept of meta-learning to improve performance, through the often-overlooked component of the loss function. The loss function is a vital component of a learning system, as it represents the primary learning objective, where success is determined and quantified by the system's ability to optimize for that objective successfully.
An Efficient Approach to Regression Problems with Tensor Neural Networks
Authors: Yongxin Li, Yifan Wang, Zhongshuo Lin, Hehu Xie
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Numerical Integration, regression

This paper introduces a tensor neural network (TNN) to address nonparametric regression problems, leveraging its distinct sub-network structure to effectively facilitate variable separation and enhance the approximation of complex, high-dimensional functions. The TNN demonstrates superior performance compared to conventional Feed-Forward Networks (FFN) and Radial Basis Function Networks (RBN) in terms of both approximation accuracy and generalization capacity, even with a comparable number of parameters. A significant innovation in our approach is the integration of statistical regression and numerical integration within the TNN framework. This allows for efficient computation of high-dimensional integrals associated with the regression function and provides detailed insights into the underlying data structure. Furthermore, we employ gradient and Laplacian analysis on the regression outputs to identify key dimensions influencing the predictions, thereby guiding the design of subsequent experiments. These advancements make TNN a powerful tool for applications requiring precise high-dimensional data analysis and predictive modeling.
Explainable AI for Comparative Analysis of Intrusion Detection Models
Authors: Pap M. Corea, Yongxin Liu, Jian Wang, Shuteng Niu, Houbing Song
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Feature Engineering, Intrusion Detection, Multi-class Classification, regression

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become a widely discussed topic, the related technologies facilitate better understanding of conventional black-box models like Random Forest, Neural Networks and etc. However, domain-specific applications of XAI are still insufficient. To fill this gap, this research analyzes various machine learning models to the tasks of binary and multi-class classification for intrusion detection from network traffic on the same dataset using occlusion sensitivity. The models evaluated include Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest, Decision Trees, and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP). We trained all models to the accuracy of 90\% on the UNSW-NB15 Dataset. We found that most classifiers leverage only less than three critical features to achieve such accuracies, indicating that effective feature engineering could actually be far more important for intrusion detection than applying complicated models. We also discover that Random Forest provides the best performance in terms of accuracy, time efficiency and robustness. Data and code available at https://github.com/pcwhy/XML-IntrusionDetection.git
Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Convolutional and Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Yingchao Yu, Yuping Yan, Jisong Cai, Yaochu Jin
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Edge-computing, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for training models on decentralized data while safeguarding data privacy. Most existing FL systems, however, assume that all machine learning models are of the same type, although it becomes more likely that different edge devices adopt different types of AI models, including both conventional analogue artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biologically more plausible spiking neural networks (SNNs). This diversity empowers the efficient handling of specific tasks and requirements, showcasing the adaptability and versatility of edge computing platforms. One main challenge of such heterogeneous FL system lies in effectively aggregating models from the local devices in a privacy-preserving manner. To address the above issue, this work benchmarks FL systems containing both convoluntional neural networks (CNNs) and SNNs by comparing various aggregation approaches, including federated CNNs, federated SNNs, federated CNNs for SNNs, federated SNNs for CNNs, and federated CNNs with SNN fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the CNN-SNN fusion framework exhibits the best performance among the above settings on the MNIST dataset. Additionally, intriguing phenomena of competitive suppression are noted during the convergence process of multi-model FL.
Benchmarking Spectral Graph Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Study on Effectiveness and Efficiency
Authors: Ningyi Liao, Haoyu Liu, Zulun Zhu, Siqiang Luo, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

With the recent advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs), spectral GNNs have received increasing popularity by virtue of their specialty in capturing graph signals in the frequency domain, demonstrating promising capability in specific tasks. However, few systematic studies have been conducted on assessing their spectral characteristics. This emerging family of models also varies in terms of designs and settings, leading to difficulties in comparing their performance and deciding on the suitable model for specific scenarios, especially for large-scale tasks. In this work, we extensively benchmark spectral GNNs with a focus on the frequency perspective. We analyze and categorize over 30 GNNs with 27 corresponding filters. Then, we implement these spectral models under a unified framework with dedicated graph computations and efficient training schemes. Thorough experiments are conducted on the spectral models with inclusive metrics on effectiveness and efficiency, offering practical guidelines on evaluating and selecting spectral GNNs with desirable performance. Our implementation enables application on larger graphs with comparable performance and less overhead, which is available at: https://github.com/gdmnl/Spectral-GNN-Benchmark.
ScaLES: Scalable Latent Exploration Score for Pre-Trained Generative Networks
Authors: Omer Ronen, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Randall Balestriero, Richard Baraniuk, Bin Yu
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

We develop Scalable Latent Exploration Score (ScaLES) to mitigate over-exploration in Latent Space Optimization (LSO), a popular method for solving black-box discrete optimization problems. LSO utilizes continuous optimization within the latent space of a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and is known to be susceptible to over-exploration, which manifests in unrealistic solutions that reduce its practicality. ScaLES is an exact and theoretically motivated method leveraging the trained decoder's approximation of the data distribution. ScaLES can be calculated with any existing decoder, e.g. from a VAE, without additional training, architectural changes, or access to the training data. Our evaluation across five LSO benchmark tasks and three VAE architectures demonstrates that ScaLES enhances the quality of the solutions while maintaining high objective values, leading to improvements over existing solutions. We believe that new avenues to LSO will be opened by ScaLES ability to identify out of distribution areas, differentiability, and computational tractability. Open source code for ScaLES is available at https://github.com/OmerRonen/scales.
Coralai: Intrinsic Evolution of Embodied Neural Cellular Automata Ecosystems
Authors: Aidan Barbieux, Rodrigo Canaan
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, GPU

This paper presents Coralai, a framework for exploring diverse ecosystems of Neural Cellular Automata (NCA). Organisms in Coralai utilize modular, GPU-accelerated Taichi kernels to interact, enact environmental changes, and evolve through local survival, merging, and mutation operations implemented with HyperNEAT and PyTorch. We provide an exploratory experiment implementing physics inspired by slime mold behavior showcasing the emergence of competition between sessile and mobile organisms, cycles of resource depletion and recovery, and symbiosis between diverse organisms. We conclude by outlining future work to discover simulation parameters through measures of multi-scale complexity and diversity. Code for Coralai is available at https://github.com/aidanbx/coralai , video demos are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8IZQY02-8 .
Reinforced Decoder: Towards Training Recurrent Neural Networks for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Qi Sima, Xinze Zhang, Yukun Bao, Siyue Yang, Liang Shen
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Recurrent neural network-based sequence-to-sequence models have been extensively applied for multi-step-ahead time series forecasting. These models typically involve a decoder trained using either its previous forecasts or the actual observed values as the decoder inputs. However, relying on self-generated predictions can lead to the rapid accumulation of errors over multiple steps, while using the actual observations introduces exposure bias as these values are unavailable during the extrapolation stage. In this regard, this study proposes a novel training approach called reinforced decoder, which introduces auxiliary models to generate alternative decoder inputs that remain accessible when extrapolating. Additionally, a reinforcement learning algorithm is utilized to dynamically select the optimal inputs to improve accuracy. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms representative training methods over several datasets. Furthermore, the proposed approach also exhibits promising performance when generalized to self-attention-based sequence-to-sequence forecasting models.
TGB 2.0: A Benchmark for Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Heterogeneous Graphs
Authors: Julia Gastinger, Shenyang Huang, Mikhail Galkin, Erfan Loghmani, Ali Parviz, Farimah Poursafaei, Jacob Danovitch, Emanuele Rossi, Ioannis Koutis, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Reihaneh Rabbany, Guillaume Rabusseau
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Knowledge Graphs

Multi-relational temporal graphs are powerful tools for modeling real-world data, capturing the evolving and interconnected nature of entities over time. Recently, many novel models are proposed for ML on such graphs intensifying the need for robust evaluation and standardized benchmark datasets. However, the availability of such resources remains scarce and evaluation faces added complexity due to reproducibility issues in experimental protocols. To address these challenges, we introduce Temporal Graph Benchmark 2.0 (TGB 2.0), a novel benchmarking framework tailored for evaluating methods for predicting future links on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Temporal Heterogeneous Graphs with a focus on large-scale datasets, extending the Temporal Graph Benchmark. TGB 2.0 facilitates comprehensive evaluations by presenting eight novel datasets spanning five domains with up to 53 million edges. TGB 2.0 datasets are significantly larger than existing datasets in terms of number of nodes, edges, or timestamps. In addition, TGB 2.0 provides a reproducible and realistic evaluation pipeline for multi-relational temporal graphs. Through extensive experimentation, we observe that 1) leveraging edge-type information is crucial to obtain high performance, 2) simple heuristic baselines are often competitive with more complex methods, 3) most methods fail to run on our largest datasets, highlighting the need for research on more scalable methods.
RASPNet: A Benchmark Dataset for Radar Adaptive Signal Processing Applications
Authors: Shyam Venkatasubramanian, Bosung Kang, Ali Pezeshki, Muralidhar Rangaswamy, Vahid Tarokh
Date: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

We present a large-scale dataset for radar adaptive signal processing (RASP) applications to support the development of data-driven models within the adaptive radar community. The dataset, RASPNet, exceeds 16 TB in size and comprises 100 realistic scenarios compiled over a variety of topographies and land types from across the contiguous United States. For each scenario, RASPNet consists of 10,000 clutter realizations from an airborne radar setting, which can be used to benchmark radar and complex-valued learning algorithms. RASPNet intends to fill a prominent gap in the availability of a large-scale, realistic dataset that standardizes the evaluation of adaptive radar processing techniques and complex-valued neural networks. We outline its construction, organization, and several applications, including a transfer learning example to demonstrate how RASPNet can be used for realistic adaptive radar processing scenarios.
DrivAerNet++: A Large-Scale Multimodal Car Dataset with Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations and Deep Learning Benchmarks
Authors: Mohamed Elrefaie, Florin Morar, Angela Dai, Faez Ahmed
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

We present DrivAerNet++, the largest and most comprehensive multimodal dataset for aerodynamic car design. DrivAerNet++ comprises 8,000 diverse car designs modeled with high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The dataset includes diverse car configurations such as fastback, notchback, and estateback, with different underbody and wheel designs to represent both internal combustion engines and electric vehicles. Each entry in the dataset features detailed 3D meshes, parametric models, aerodynamic coefficients, and extensive flow and surface field data, along with segmented parts for car classification and point cloud data. This dataset supports a wide array of machine learning applications including data-driven design optimization, generative modeling, surrogate model training, CFD simulation acceleration, and geometric classification. With more than 39 TB of publicly available engineering data, DrivAerNet++ fills a significant gap in available resources, providing high-quality, diverse data to enhance model training, promote generalization, and accelerate automotive design processes. Along with rigorous dataset validation, we also provide ML benchmarking results on the task of aerodynamic drag prediction, showcasing the breadth of applications supported by our dataset. This dataset is set to significantly impact automotive design and broader engineering disciplines by fostering innovation and improving the fidelity of aerodynamic evaluations. Dataset and code available at: https://github.com/Mohamedelrefaie/DrivAerNet.
Trainability issues in quantum policy gradients
Authors: André Sequeira, Luis Paulo Santos, Luis Soares Barbosa
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00

This research explores the trainability of Parameterized Quantum circuit-based policies in Reinforcement Learning, an area that has recently seen a surge in empirical exploration. While some studies suggest improved sample complexity using quantum gradient estimation, the efficient trainability of these policies remains an open question. Our findings reveal significant challenges, including standard Barren Plateaus with exponentially small gradients and gradient explosion. These phenomena depend on the type of basis-state partitioning and mapping these partitions onto actions. For a polynomial number of actions, a trainable window can be ensured with a polynomial number of measurements if a contiguous-like partitioning of basis-states is employed. These results are empirically validated in a multi-armed bandit environment.