pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedMAP: Unlocking Potential in Personalized Federated Learning through Bi-Level MAP Optimization
Authors: Fan Zhang, Carlos Esteve-Yagüe, Sören Dittmer, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Michael Roberts
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of machine learning models on decentralized data while preserving data privacy. However, data across clients often differs significantly due to class imbalance, feature distribution skew, sample size imbalance, and other phenomena. Leveraging information from these not identically distributed (non-IID) datasets poses substantial challenges. FL methods based on a single global model cannot effectively capture the variations in client data and underperform in non-IID settings. Consequently, Personalized FL (PFL) approaches that adapt to each client's data distribution but leverage other clients' data are essential but currently underexplored. We propose a novel Bayesian PFL framework using bi-level optimization to tackle the data heterogeneity challenges. Our proposed framework utilizes the global model as a prior distribution within a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation of personalized client models. This approach facilitates PFL by integrating shared knowledge from the prior, thereby enhancing local model performance, generalization ability, and communication efficiency. We extensively evaluated our bi-level optimization approach on real-world and synthetic datasets, demonstrating significant improvements in model accuracy compared to existing methods while reducing communication overhead. This study contributes to PFL by establishing a solid theoretical foundation for the proposed method and offering a robust, ready-to-use framework that effectively addresses the challenges posed by non-IID data in FL.
Kernel Semi-Implicit Variational Inference
Authors: Ziheng Cheng, Longlin Yu, Tianyu Xie, Shiyue Zhang, Cheng Zhang
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Variational Inference

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often resorts to surrogates of evidence lower bound (ELBO) that would introduce biases for training. A recent advancement in SIVI, named SIVI-SM, utilizes an alternative score matching objective made tractable via a minimax formulation, albeit requiring an additional lower-level optimization. In this paper, we propose kernel SIVI (KSIVI), a variant of SIVI-SM that eliminates the need for lower-level optimization through kernel tricks. Specifically, we show that when optimizing over a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), the lower-level problem has an explicit solution. This way, the upper-level objective becomes the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD), which is readily computable for stochastic gradient descent due to the hierarchical structure of semi-implicit variational distributions. An upper bound for the variance of the Monte Carlo gradient estimators of the KSD objective is derived, which allows us to establish novel convergence guarantees of KSIVI. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of KSIVI on both synthetic distributions and a variety of real data Bayesian inference tasks.
Robust Optimization in Protein Fitness Landscapes Using Reinforcement Learning in Latent Space
Authors: Minji Lee, Luiz Felipe Vecchietti, Hyunkyu Jung, Hyun Joo Ro, Meeyoung Cha, Ho Min Kim
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Protein Language Model

Proteins are complex molecules responsible for different functions in nature. Enhancing the functionality of proteins and cellular fitness can significantly impact various industries. However, protein optimization using computational methods remains challenging, especially when starting from low-fitness sequences. We propose LatProtRL, an optimization method to efficiently traverse a latent space learned by an encoder-decoder leveraging a large protein language model. To escape local optima, our optimization is modeled as a Markov decision process using reinforcement learning acting directly in latent space. We evaluate our approach on two important fitness optimization tasks, demonstrating its ability to achieve comparable or superior fitness over baseline methods. Our findings and in vitro evaluation show that the generated sequences can reach high-fitness regions, suggesting a substantial potential of LatProtRL in lab-in-the-loop scenarios.
Federated Learning under Partially Class-Disjoint Data via Manifold Reshaping
Authors: Ziqing Fan, Jiangchao Yao, Ruipeng Zhang, Lingjuan Lyu, Ya zhang, Yanfeng Wang
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Statistical heterogeneity severely limits the performance of federated learning (FL), motivating several explorations e.g., FedProx, MOON and FedDyn, to alleviate this problem. Despite effectiveness, their considered scenario generally requires samples from almost all classes during the local training of each client, although some covariate shifts may exist among clients. In fact, the natural case of partially class-disjoint data (PCDD), where each client contributes a few classes (instead of all classes) of samples, is practical yet underexplored. Specifically, the unique collapse and invasion characteristics of PCDD can induce the biased optimization direction in local training, which prevents the efficiency of federated learning. To address this dilemma, we propose a manifold reshaping approach called FedMR to calibrate the feature space of local training. Our FedMR adds two interplaying losses to the vanilla federated learning: one is intra-class loss to decorrelate feature dimensions for anti-collapse; and the other one is inter-class loss to guarantee the proper margin among categories in the feature expansion. We conduct extensive experiments on a range of datasets to demonstrate that our FedMR achieves much higher accuracy and better communication efficiency. Source code is available at: https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/FedMR.git.
MANO: Exploiting Matrix Norm for Unsupervised Accuracy Estimation Under Distribution Shifts
Authors: Renchunzi Xie, Ambroise Odonnat, Vasilii Feofanov, Weijian Deng, Jianfeng Zhang, Bo An
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Leveraging the models' outputs, specifically the logits, is a common approach to estimating the test accuracy of a pre-trained neural network on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples without requiring access to the corresponding ground truth labels. Despite their ease of implementation and computational efficiency, current logit-based methods are vulnerable to overconfidence issues, leading to prediction bias, especially under the natural shift. In this work, we first study the relationship between logits and generalization performance from the view of low-density separation assumption. Our findings motivate our proposed method MaNo which (1) applies a data-dependent normalization on the logits to reduce prediction bias, and (2) takes the $L_p$ norm of the matrix of normalized logits as the estimation score. Our theoretical analysis highlights the connection between the provided score and the model's uncertainty. We conduct an extensive empirical study on common unsupervised accuracy estimation benchmarks and demonstrate that MaNo achieves state-of-the-art performance across various architectures in the presence of synthetic, natural, or subpopulation shifts. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Renchunzi-Xie/MaNo}.
Hierarchical Classification Auxiliary Network for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Yanru Sun, Zongxia Xie, Dongyue Chen, Emadeldeen Eldele, QinGhua Hu
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Deep learning has significantly advanced time series forecasting through its powerful capacity to capture sequence relationships. However, training these models with the Mean Square Error (MSE) loss often results in over-smooth predictions, making it challenging to handle the complexity and learn high-entropy features from time series data with high variability and unpredictability. In this work, we introduce a novel approach by tokenizing time series values to train forecasting models via cross-entropy loss, while considering the continuous nature of time series data. Specifically, we propose a Hierarchical Classification Auxiliary Network, HCAN, a general model-agnostic component that can be integrated with any forecasting model. HCAN is based on a Hierarchy-Aware Attention module that integrates multi-granularity high-entropy features at different hierarchy levels. At each level, we assign a class label for timesteps to train an Uncertainty-Aware Classifier. This classifier mitigates the over-confidence in softmax loss via evidence theory. We also implement a Hierarchical Consistency Loss to maintain prediction consistency across hierarchy levels. Extensive experiments integrating HCAN with state-of-the-art forecasting models demonstrate substantial improvements over baselines on several real-world datasets.
Federated Learning with Bilateral Curation for Partially Class-Disjoint Data
Authors: Ziqing Fan, Ruipeng Zhang, Jiangchao Yao, Bo Han, Ya zhang, Yanfeng Wang
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Federated Learning

Partially class-disjoint data (PCDD), a common yet under-explored data formation where each client contributes a part of classes (instead of all classes) of samples, severely challenges the performance of federated algorithms. Without full classes, the local objective will contradict the global objective, yielding the angle collapse problem for locally missing classes and the space waste problem for locally existing classes. As far as we know, none of the existing methods can intrinsically mitigate PCDD challenges to achieve holistic improvement in the bilateral views (both global view and local view) of federated learning. To address this dilemma, we are inspired by the strong generalization of simplex Equiangular Tight Frame~(ETF) on the imbalanced data, and propose a novel approach called FedGELA where the classifier is globally fixed as a simplex ETF while locally adapted to the personal distributions. Globally, FedGELA provides fair and equal discrimination for all classes and avoids inaccurate updates of the classifier, while locally it utilizes the space of locally missing classes for locally existing classes. We conduct extensive experiments on a range of datasets to demonstrate that our FedGELA achieves promising performance~(averaged improvement of 3.9% to FedAvg and 1.5% to best baselines) and provide both local and global convergence guarantees. Source code is available at:https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/FedGELA.git.
MAGIC: Modular Auto-encoder for Generalisable Model Inversion with Bias Corrections
Authors: Yihang She, Clement Atzberger, Andrew Blake, Adriano Gualandi, Srinivasan Keshav
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Decoder

Scientists often model physical processes to understand the natural world and uncover the causation behind observations. Due to unavoidable simplification, discrepancies often arise between model predictions and actual observations, in the form of systematic biases, whose impact varies with model completeness. Classical model inversion methods such as Bayesian inference or regressive neural networks tend either to overlook biases or make assumptions about their nature during data preprocessing, potentially leading to implausible results. Inspired by recent work in inverse graphics, we replace the decoder stage of a standard autoencoder with a physical model followed by a bias-correction layer. This generalisable approach simultaneously inverts the model and corrects its biases in an end-to-end manner without making strong assumptions about the nature of the biases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using two physical models from disparate domains: a complex radiative transfer model from remote sensing; and a volcanic deformation model from geodesy. Our method matches or surpasses results from classical approaches without requiring biases to be explicitly filtered out, suggesting an effective pathway for understanding the causation of various physical processes.
Learning to Recover from Plan Execution Errors during Robot Manipulation: A Neuro-symbolic Approach
Authors: Namasivayam Kalithasan, Arnav Tuli, Vishal Bindal, Himanshu Gaurav Singh, Parag Singla, Rohan Paul
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Manipulation

Automatically detecting and recovering from failures is an important but challenging problem for autonomous robots. Most of the recent work on learning to plan from demonstrations lacks the ability to detect and recover from errors in the absence of an explicit state representation and/or a (sub-) goal check function. We propose an approach (blending learning with symbolic search) for automated error discovery and recovery, without needing annotated data of failures. Central to our approach is a neuro-symbolic state representation, in the form of dense scene graph, structured based on the objects present within the environment. This enables efficient learning of the transition function and a discriminator that not only identifies failures but also localizes them facilitating fast re-planning via computation of heuristic distance function. We also present an anytime version of our algorithm, where instead of recovering to the last correct state, we search for a sub-goal in the original plan minimizing the total distance to the goal given a re-planning budget. Experiments on a physics simulator with a variety of simulated failures show the effectiveness of our approach compared to existing baselines, both in terms of efficiency as well as accuracy of our recovery mechanism.
Predicting Many Crystal Properties via an Adaptive Transformer-based Framework
Authors: Haosheng Xu, Dongheng Qian, Jing Wang
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Interpretable Machine Learning

Machine learning has revolutionized many fields, including materials science. However, predicting properties of crystalline materials using machine learning faces challenges in input encoding, output versatility, and interpretability. We introduce CrystalBERT, an adaptable transformer-based framework integrating space group, elemental, and unit cell information. This novel structure can seamlessly combine diverse features and accurately predict various physical properties, including topological properties, superconducting transition temperatures, dielectric constants, and more. CrystalBERT provides insightful interpretations of features influencing target properties. Our results indicate that space group and elemental information are crucial for predicting topological and superconducting properties, underscoring their intricate nature. By incorporating these features, we achieve 91\% accuracy in topological classification, surpassing prior studies and identifying previously misclassified materials. This research demonstrates that integrating diverse material information enhances the prediction of complex material properties, paving the way for more accurate and interpretable machine learning models in materials science.
Content-Agnostic Moderation for Stance-Neutral Recommendation
Authors: Nan Li, Bo Kang, Tijl De Bie
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Personalized recommendation systems often drive users towards more extreme content, exacerbating opinion polarization. While (content-aware) moderation has been proposed to mitigate these effects, such approaches risk curtailing the freedom of speech and of information. To address this concern, we propose and explore the feasibility of \emph{content-agnostic} moderation as an alternative approach for reducing polarization. Content-agnostic moderation does not rely on the actual content being moderated, arguably making it less prone to forms of censorship. We establish theoretically that content-agnostic moderation cannot be guaranteed to work in a fully generic setting. However, we show that it can often be effectively achieved in practice with plausible assumptions. We introduce two novel content-agnostic moderation methods that modify the recommendations from the content recommender to disperse user-item co-clusters without relying on content features. To evaluate the potential of content-agnostic moderation in controlled experiments, we built a simulation environment to analyze the closed-loop behavior of a system with a given set of users, recommendation system, and moderation approach. Through comprehensive experiments in this environment, we show that our proposed moderation methods significantly enhance stance neutrality and maintain high recommendation quality across various data scenarios. Our results indicate that achieving stance neutrality without direct content information is not only feasible but can also help in developing more balanced and informative recommendation systems without substantially degrading user engagement.
HLOB -- Information Persistence and Structure in Limit Order Books
Authors: Antonio Briola, Silvia Bartolucci, Tomaso Aste
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We introduce a novel large-scale deep learning model for Limit Order Book mid-price changes forecasting, and we name it `HLOB'. This architecture (i) exploits the information encoded by an Information Filtering Network, namely the Triangulated Maximally Filtered Graph, to unveil deeper and non-trivial dependency structures among volume levels; and (ii) guarantees deterministic design choices to handle the complexity of the underlying system by drawing inspiration from the groundbreaking class of Homological Convolutional Neural Networks. We test our model against 9 state-of-the-art deep learning alternatives on 3 real-world Limit Order Book datasets, each including 15 stocks traded on the NASDAQ exchange, and we systematically characterize the scenarios where HLOB outperforms state-of-the-art architectures. Our approach sheds new light on the spatial distribution of information in Limit Order Books and on its degradation over increasing prediction horizons, narrowing the gap between microstructural modeling and deep learning-based forecasting in high-frequency financial markets.
LSPI: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network Classification Aggregation Algorithm Based on Size Neighbor Path Identification
Authors: Yufei Zhao, Shiduo Wang, Hua Duan
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Existing heterogeneous graph neural network algorithms (HGNNs) mostly rely on meta-paths to capture the rich semantic information contained in heterogeneous graphs (also known as heterogeneous information networks (HINs)), but most of these HGNNs focus on different ways of feature aggre gation and ignore the properties of the meta-paths themselves. This paper studies meta-paths in three commonly used data sets and finds that there are huge differences in the number of neighbors connected by different meta paths. At the same time, the noise information contained in large neigh bor paths will have an adverse impact on model performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network Classification and Aggregation Algorithm Based on Large and Small Neighbor Path Iden tification(LSPI). LSPI firstly divides the meta-paths into large and small neighbor paths through the path discriminator , and in order to reduce the noise interference problem in large neighbor paths, LSPI selects neighbor nodes with higher similarity from both topology and feature perspectives, and passes small neighbor paths and filtered large neighbor paths through different graph convolution components. Aggregation is performed to obtain feature information under different subgraphs, and then LSPI uses subgraph level attention to fuse the feature information under different subgraphs to generate the final node embedding. Finally this paper verifies the superiority of the method through extensive experiments and also gives suggestions on the number of nodes to be retained in large neighbor paths through exper iments. The complete reproducible code adn data has been published at: https://github.com/liuhua811/LSPIA.
A Mallows-like Criterion for Anomaly Detection with Random Forest Implementation
Authors: Gaoxiang Zhao, Lu Wang, Xiaoqiang Wang
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

The effectiveness of anomaly signal detection can be significantly undermined by the inherent uncertainty of relying on one specified model. Under the framework of model average methods, this paper proposes a novel criterion to select the weights on aggregation of multiple models, wherein the focal loss function accounts for the classification of extremely imbalanced data. This strategy is further integrated into Random Forest algorithm by replacing the conventional voting method. We have evaluated the proposed method on benchmark datasets across various domains, including network intrusion. The findings indicate that our proposed method not only surpasses the model averaging with typical loss functions but also outstrips common anomaly detection algorithms in terms of accuracy and robustness.
Federated Continual Learning Goes Online: Uncertainty-Aware Memory Management for Vision Tasks and Beyond
Authors: Giuseppe Serra, Florian Buettner
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Incremental Learning, Management

Given the ability to model more realistic and dynamic problems, Federated Continual Learning (FCL) has been increasingly investigated recently. A well-known problem encountered in this setting is the so-called catastrophic forgetting, for which the learning model is inclined to focus on more recent tasks while forgetting the previously learned knowledge. The majority of the current approaches in FCL propose generative-based solutions to solve said problem. However, this setting requires multiple training epochs over the data, implying an offline setting where datasets are stored locally and remain unchanged over time. Furthermore, the proposed solutions are tailored for vision tasks solely. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new approach to deal with different modalities in the online scenario where new data arrive in streams of mini-batches that can only be processed once. To solve catastrophic forgetting, we propose an uncertainty-aware memory-based approach. Specifically, we suggest using an estimator based on the Bregman Information (BI) to compute the model's variance at the sample level. Through measures of predictive uncertainty, we retrieve samples with specific characteristics, and - by retraining the model on such samples - we demonstrate the potential of this approach to reduce the forgetting effect in realistic settings while maintaining data confidentiality and competitive communication efficiency compared to state-of-the-art approaches.