pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Drift-Resilient TabPFN: In-Context Learning Temporal Distribution Shifts on Tabular Data
Authors: Kai Helli, David Schnurr, Noah Hollmann, Samuel Müller, Frank Hutter
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, In-Context Learning, Inductive Bias

While most ML models expect independent and identically distributed data, this assumption is often violated in real-world scenarios due to distribution shifts, resulting in the degradation of machine learning model performance. Until now, no tabular method has consistently outperformed classical supervised learning, which ignores these shifts. To address temporal distribution shifts, we present Drift-Resilient TabPFN, a fresh approach based on In-Context Learning with a Prior-Data Fitted Network that learns the learning algorithm itself: it accepts the entire training dataset as input and makes predictions on the test set in a single forward pass. Specifically, it learns to approximate Bayesian inference on synthetic datasets drawn from a prior that specifies the model's inductive bias. This prior is based on structural causal models (SCM), which gradually shift over time. To model shifts of these causal models, we use a secondary SCM, that specifies changes in the primary model parameters. The resulting Drift-Resilient TabPFN can be applied to unseen data, runs in seconds on small to moderately sized datasets and needs no hyperparameter tuning. Comprehensive evaluations across 18 synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate large performance improvements over a wide range of baselines, such as XGB, CatBoost, TabPFN, and applicable methods featured in the Wild-Time benchmark. Compared to the strongest baselines, it improves accuracy from 0.688 to 0.744 and ROC AUC from 0.786 to 0.832 while maintaining stronger calibration. This approach could serve as significant groundwork for further research on out-of-distribution prediction.
KAT to KANs: A Review of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks and the Neural Leap Forward
Authors: Divesh Basina, Joseph Raj Vishal, Aarya Choudhary, Bharatesh Chakravarthi
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

The curse of dimensionality poses a significant challenge to modern multilayer perceptron-based architectures, often causing performance stagnation and scalability issues. Addressing this limitation typically requires vast amounts of data. In contrast, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks have gained attention in the machine learning community for their bold claim of being unaffected by the curse of dimensionality. This paper explores the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem and the mathematical principles underlying Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, which enable their scalability and high performance in high-dimensional spaces. We begin with an introduction to foundational concepts necessary to understand Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, including interpolation methods and Basis-splines, which form their mathematical backbone. This is followed by an overview of perceptron architectures and the Universal approximation theorem, a key principle guiding modern machine learning. This is followed by an overview of the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, including its mathematical formulation and implications for overcoming dimensionality challenges. Next, we review the architecture and error-scaling properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, demonstrating how these networks achieve true freedom from the curse of dimensionality. Finally, we discuss the practical viability of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, highlighting scenarios where their unique capabilities position them to excel in real-world applications. This review aims to offer insights into Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks' potential to redefine scalability and performance in high-dimensional learning tasks.
Electrical Load Forecasting in Smart Grid: A Personalized Federated Learning Approach
Authors: Ratun Rahman, Neeraj Kumar, Dinh C. Nguyen
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Load Forecasting, Meta-Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Electric load forecasting is essential for power management and stability in smart grids. This is mainly achieved via advanced metering infrastructure, where smart meters (SMs) are used to record household energy consumption. Traditional machine learning (ML) methods are often employed for load forecasting but require data sharing which raises data privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) can address this issue by running distributed ML models at local SMs without data exchange. However, current FL-based approaches struggle to achieve efficient load forecasting due to imbalanced data distribution across heterogeneous SMs. This paper presents a novel personalized federated learning (PFL) method to load prediction under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) metering data settings. Specifically, we introduce meta-learning, where the learning rates are manipulated using the meta-learning idea to maximize the gradient for each client in each global round. Clients with varying processing capacities, data sizes, and batch sizes can participate in global model aggregation and improve their local load forecasting via personalized learning. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art ML and FL methods in terms of better load forecasting accuracy.
Attraction-Repulsion Swarming: A Generalized Framework of t-SNE via Force Normalization and Tunable Interactions
Authors: Jingcheng Lu, Jeff Calder
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization

We propose a new method for data visualization based on attraction-repulsion swarming (ARS) dynamics, which we call ARS visualization. ARS is a generalized framework that is based on viewing the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) visualization technique as a swarm of interacting agents driven by attraction and repulsion. Motivated by recent developments in swarming, we modify the t-SNE dynamics to include a normalization by the \emph{total influence}, which results in better posed dynamics in which we can use a data size independent time step (of $h=1$) and a simple iteration, without the need for the array of optimization tricks employed in t-SNE. ARS also includes the ability to separately tune the attraction and repulsion kernels, which gives the user control over the tightness within clusters and the spacing between them in the visualization. In contrast with t-SNE, our proposed ARS data visualization method is not gradient descent on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be viewed solely as an interacting particle system driven by attraction and repulsion forces. We provide theoretical results illustrating how the choice of interaction kernel affects the dynamics, and experimental results to validate our method and compare to t-SNE on the MNIST and Cifar-10 data sets.
To Shuffle or not to Shuffle: Auditing DP-SGD with Shuffling
Authors: Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva Annamalai, Borja Balle, Jamie Hayes, Emiliano De Cristofaro
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

The Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) algorithm allows the training of machine learning (ML) models with formal Differential Privacy (DP) guarantees. Since DP-SGD processes training data in batches, it employs Poisson sub-sampling to select each batch at every step. However, it has become common practice to replace sub-sampling with shuffling owing to better compatibility and computational overhead. At the same time, we do not know how to compute tight theoretical guarantees for shuffling; thus, DP guarantees of models privately trained with shuffling are often reported as though Poisson sub-sampling was used. This prompts the need to verify whether gaps exist between the theoretical DP guarantees reported by state-of-the-art models and their actual leakage. To do so, we introduce a novel DP auditing procedure to analyze DP-SGD with shuffling and show that DP models trained with this approach have considerably overestimated privacy guarantees (up to 4 times). In the process, we assess the impact on privacy leakage of several parameters, including batch size, privacy budget, and threat model. Finally, we study two common variations of the shuffling procedure that result in even further privacy leakage (up to 10 times). Overall, our work attests to the risk of using shuffling instead of Poisson sub-sampling vis-\`a-vis privacy leakage from DP-SGD.
Being Considerate as a Pathway Towards Pluralistic Alignment for Agentic AI
Authors: Parand A. Alamdari, Toryn Q. Klassen, Rodrigo Toro Icarte, Sheila A. McIlraith
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Pluralistic alignment is concerned with ensuring that an AI system's objectives and behaviors are in harmony with the diversity of human values and perspectives. In this paper we study the notion of pluralistic alignment in the context of agentic AI, and in particular in the context of an agent that is trying to learn a policy in a manner that is mindful of the values and perspective of others in the environment. To this end, we show how being considerate of the future wellbeing and agency of other (human) agents can promote a form of pluralistic alignment.
AmoebaLLM: Constructing Any-Shape Large Language Models for Efficient and Instant Deployment
Authors: Yonggan Fu, Zhongzhi Yu, Junwei Li, Jiayi Qian, Yongan Zhang, Xiangchi Yuan, Dachuan Shi, Roman Yakunin, Yingyan Celine Lin
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

Motivated by the transformative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across various natural language tasks, there has been a growing demand to deploy these models effectively across diverse real-world applications and platforms. However, the challenge of efficiently deploying LLMs has become increasingly pronounced due to the varying application-specific performance requirements and the rapid evolution of computational platforms, which feature diverse resource constraints and deployment flows. These varying requirements necessitate LLMs that can adapt their structures (depth and width) for optimal efficiency across different platforms and application specifications. To address this critical gap, we propose AmoebaLLM, a novel framework designed to enable the instant derivation of LLM subnets of arbitrary shapes, which achieve the accuracy-efficiency frontier and can be extracted immediately after a one-time fine-tuning. In this way, AmoebaLLM significantly facilitates rapid deployment tailored to various platforms and applications. Specifically, AmoebaLLM integrates three innovative components: (1) a knowledge-preserving subnet selection strategy that features a dynamic-programming approach for depth shrinking and an importance-driven method for width shrinking; (2) a shape-aware mixture of LoRAs to mitigate gradient conflicts among subnets during fine-tuning; and (3) an in-place distillation scheme with loss-magnitude balancing as the fine-tuning objective. Extensive experiments validate that AmoebaLLM not only sets new standards in LLM adaptability but also successfully delivers subnets that achieve state-of-the-art trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency.
Learning Quantitative Automata Modulo Theories
Authors: Eric Hsiung, Swarat Chaudhuri, Joydeep Biswas
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, valid

Quantitative automata are useful representations for numerous applications, including modeling probability distributions over sequences to Markov chains and reward machines. Actively learning such automata typically occurs using explicitly gathered input-output examples under adaptations of the L-star algorithm. However, obtaining explicit input-output pairs can be expensive, and there exist scenarios, including preference-based learning or learning from rankings, where providing constraints is a less exerting and a more natural way to concisely describe desired properties. Consequently, we propose the problem of learning deterministic quantitative automata from sets of constraints over the valuations of input sequences. We present QUINTIC, an active learning algorithm, wherein the learner infers a valid automaton through deductive reasoning, by applying a theory to a set of currently available constraints and an assumed preference model and quantitative automaton class. QUINTIC performs a complete search over the space of automata, and is guaranteed to be minimal and correctly terminate. Our evaluations utilize theory of rationals in order to learn summation, discounted summation, product, and classification quantitative automata, and indicate QUINTIC is effective at learning these types of automata.
Hysteresis Activation Function for Efficient Inference
Authors: Moshe Kimhi, Idan Kashani, Avi Mendelson, Chaim Baskin
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Natural Language Understanding

The widely used ReLU is favored for its hardware efficiency, {as the implementation at inference is a one bit sign case,} yet suffers from issues such as the ``dying ReLU'' problem, where during training, neurons fail to activate and constantly remain at zero, as highlighted by Lu et al. Traditional approaches to mitigate this issue often introduce more complex and less hardware-friendly activation functions. In this work, we propose a Hysteresis Rectified Linear Unit (HeLU), an efficient activation function designed to address the ``dying ReLU'' problem with minimal complexity. Unlike traditional activation functions with fixed thresholds for training and inference, HeLU employs a variable threshold that refines the backpropagation. This refined mechanism allows simpler activation functions to achieve competitive performance comparable to their more complex counterparts without introducing unnecessary complexity or requiring inductive biases. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that HeLU enhances model generalization across diverse datasets, offering a promising solution for efficient and effective inference suitable for a wide range of neural network architectures.
Low-Rank Optimal Transport through Factor Relaxation with Latent Coupling
Authors: Peter Halmos, Xinhao Liu, Julian Gold, Benjamin J Raphael
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Clustering

Optimal transport (OT) is a general framework for finding a minimum-cost transport plan, or coupling, between probability distributions, and has many applications in machine learning. A key challenge in applying OT to massive datasets is the quadratic scaling of the coupling matrix with the size of the dataset. [Forrow et al. 2019] introduced a factored coupling for the k-Wasserstein barycenter problem, which [Scetbon et al. 2021] adapted to solve the primal low-rank OT problem. We derive an alternative parameterization of the low-rank problem based on the $\textit{latent coupling}$ (LC) factorization previously introduced by [Lin et al. 2021] generalizing [Forrow et al. 2019]. The LC factorization has multiple advantages for low-rank OT including decoupling the problem into three OT problems and greater flexibility and interpretability. We leverage these advantages to derive a new algorithm $\textit{Factor Relaxation with Latent Coupling}$ (FRLC), which uses $\textit{coordinate}$ mirror descent to compute the LC factorization. FRLC handles multiple OT objectives (Wasserstein, Gromov-Wasserstein, Fused Gromov-Wasserstein), and marginal constraints (balanced, unbalanced, and semi-relaxed) with linear space complexity. We provide theoretical results on FRLC, and demonstrate superior performance on diverse applications -- including graph clustering and spatial transcriptomics -- while demonstrating its interpretability.
BioNeMo Framework: a modular, high-performance library for AI model development in drug discovery
Authors: Peter St. John, Dejun Lin, Polina Binder, Malcolm Greaves, Vega Shah, John St. John, Adrian Lange, Patrick Hsu, Rajesh Illango, Arvind Ramanathan, Anima Anandkumar, David H Brookes, Akosua Busia, Abhishaike Mahajan, Stephen Malina, Neha Prasad, Sam Sinai, Lindsay Edwards, Thomas Gaudelet, Cristian Regep, Martin Steinegger, Burkhard Rost, Alexander Brace, Kyle Hippe, Luca Naef, Keisuke Kamata, George Armstrong, Kevin Boyd, Zhonglin Cao, Han-Yi Chou, Simon Chu, Allan dos Santos Costa, Sajad Darabi, Eric Dawson, Kieran Didi, Cong Fu, Mario Geiger, Michelle Gill, Darren J Hsu, Gagan Kaushik, Maria Korshunova, Steven Kothen-Hill, Youhan Lee, Meng Liu, Micha Livne, Zachary McClure, Jonathan Mitchell, Alireza Moradzadeh, Ohad Mosafi, Youssef Nashed, Yuxing Peng, Sara Rabhi, Farhad Ramezanghorbani, Danny Reidenbach, Camir Ricketts, Brian C Roland, Kushal Shah, Tyler Shimko, Hassan Sirelkhatim, Savitha Srinivasan, Abraham C Stern, Dorota Toczydlowska, Srimukh Prasad Veccham, Niccolò Alberto Elia Venanzi, Anton Vorontsov, Jared Wilber, Isabel Wilkinson, Wei Jing Wong, Eva Xue, Cory Ye, Xin Yu, Yang Zhang, Guoqing Zhou, Becca Zandstein, Alejandro Chacòn, Prashant Sohani, Maximilian Stadler, Christian Hundt, Feiwen Zhu, Christian Dallago, Bruno Trentini, Emine Kucukbenli, Saee Paliwal, Timur Rvachov, Eddie Calleja, Johnny Israeli, Harry Clifford, Risto Haukioja, Nicholas Haemel, Kyle Tretina, Neha Tadimeti, Anthony B Costa
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Artificial Intelligence models encoding biology and chemistry are opening new routes to high-throughput and high-quality in-silico drug development. However, their training increasingly relies on computational scale, with recent protein language models (pLM) training on hundreds of graphical processing units (GPUs). We introduce the BioNeMo Framework to facilitate the training of computational biology and chemistry AI models across hundreds of GPUs. Its modular design allows the integration of individual components, such as data loaders, into existing workflows and is open to community contributions. We detail technical features of the BioNeMo Framework through use cases such as pLM pre-training and fine-tuning. On 256 NVIDIA A100s, BioNeMo Framework trains a three billion parameter BERT-based pLM on over one trillion tokens in 4.2 days. The BioNeMo Framework is open-source and free for everyone to use.
Efficient Alignment of Large Language Models via Data Sampling
Authors: Amrit Khera, Rajat Ghosh, Debojyoti Dutta
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

LLM alignment ensures that large language models behave safely and effectively by aligning their outputs with human values, goals, and intentions. Aligning LLMs employ huge amounts of data, computation, and time. Moreover, curating data with human feedback is expensive and takes time. Recent research depicts the benefit of data engineering in the fine-tuning and pre-training paradigms to bring down such costs. However, alignment differs from the afore-mentioned paradigms and it is unclear if data efficient alignment is feasible. In this work, we first aim to understand how the performance of LLM alignment scales with data. We find out that LLM alignment performance follows an exponential plateau pattern which tapers off post a rapid initial increase. Based on this, we identify data subsampling as a viable method to reduce resources required for alignment. Further, we propose an information theory-based methodology for efficient alignment by identifying a small high quality subset thereby reducing the computation and time required by alignment. We evaluate the proposed methodology over multiple datasets and compare the results. We find that the model aligned using our proposed methodology outperforms other sampling methods and performs comparable to the model aligned with the full dataset while using less than 10% data, leading to greater than 90% savings in costs, resources, and faster LLM alignment.
Debias-CLR: A Contrastive Learning Based Debiasing Method for Algorithmic Fairness in Healthcare Applications
Authors: Ankita Agarwal, Tanvi Banerjee, William Romine, Mia Cajita
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Diagnostic, Fairness

Artificial intelligence based predictive models trained on the clinical notes can be demographically biased. This could lead to adverse healthcare disparities in predicting outcomes like length of stay of the patients. Thus, it is necessary to mitigate the demographic biases within these models. We proposed an implicit in-processing debiasing method to combat disparate treatment which occurs when the machine learning model predict different outcomes for individuals based on the sensitive attributes like gender, ethnicity, race, and likewise. For this purpose, we used clinical notes of heart failure patients and used diagnostic codes, procedure reports and physiological vitals of the patients. We used Clinical BERT to obtain feature embeddings within the diagnostic codes and procedure reports, and LSTM autoencoders to obtain feature embeddings within the physiological vitals. Then, we trained two separate deep learning contrastive learning frameworks, one for gender and the other for ethnicity to obtain debiased representations within those demographic traits. We called this debiasing framework Debias-CLR. We leveraged clinical phenotypes of the patients identified in the diagnostic codes and procedure reports in the previous study to measure fairness statistically. We found that Debias-CLR was able to reduce the Single-Category Word Embedding Association Test (SC-WEAT) effect size score when debiasing for gender and ethnicity. We further found that to obtain fair representations in the embedding space using Debias-CLR, the accuracy of the predictive models on downstream tasks like predicting length of stay of the patients did not get reduced as compared to using the un-debiased counterparts for training the predictive models. Hence, we conclude that our proposed approach, Debias-CLR is fair and representative in mitigating demographic biases and can reduce health disparities.
SoftLMs: Efficient Adaptive Low-Rank Approximation of Language Models using Soft-Thresholding Mechanism
Authors: Priyansh Bhatnagar, Linfeng Wen, Mingu Kang
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Decoder, Mamba

Extensive efforts have been made to boost the performance in the domain of language models by introducing various attention-based transformers. However, the inclusion of linear layers with large dimensions contributes to significant computational and memory overheads. The escalating computational demands of these models necessitate the development of various compression techniques to ensure their deployment on devices, particularly in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we propose a novel compression methodology that dynamically determines the rank of each layer using a soft thresholding mechanism, which clips the singular values with a small magnitude in a differentiable form. This approach automates the decision-making process to identify the optimal degree of compression for each layer. We have successfully applied the proposed technique to attention-based architectures, including BERT for discriminative tasks and GPT2 and TinyLlama for generative tasks. Additionally, we have validated our method on Mamba, a recently proposed state-space model. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves a speed-up of 1.33X to 1.72X in the encoder/ decoder with a 50% reduction in total parameters.