pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Non-stationary and Sparsely-correlated Multi-output Gaussian Process with Spike-and-Slab Prior
Authors: Wang Xinming, Li Yongxiang, Yue Xiaowei, Wu Jianguo
Date: 2024-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Transfer Learning, Uncertainty Quantification

Multi-output Gaussian process (MGP) is commonly used as a transfer learning method to leverage information among multiple outputs. A key advantage of MGP is providing uncertainty quantification for prediction, which is highly important for subsequent decision-making tasks. However, traditional MGP may not be sufficiently flexible to handle multivariate data with dynamic characteristics, particularly when dealing with complex temporal correlations. Additionally, since some outputs may lack correlation, transferring information among them may lead to negative transfer. To address these issues, this study proposes a non-stationary MGP model that can capture both the dynamic and sparse correlation among outputs. Specifically, the covariance functions of MGP are constructed using convolutions of time-varying kernel functions. Then a dynamic spike-and-slab prior is placed on correlation parameters to automatically decide which sources are informative to the target output in the training process. An expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is proposed for efficient model fitting. Both numerical studies and a real case demonstrate its efficacy in capturing dynamic and sparse correlation structure and mitigating negative transfer for high-dimensional time-series data. Finally, a mountain-car reinforcement learning case highlights its potential application in decision making problems.
Towards Autonomous Cybersecurity: An Intelligent AutoML Framework for Autonomous Intrusion Detection
Authors: Li Yang, Abdallah Shami
Date: 2024-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Bayesian Optimization, Feature Engineering, feature selection, Hyperparameter Optimization, Intrusion Detection, Model Selection

The rapid evolution of mobile networks from 5G to 6G has necessitated the development of autonomous network management systems, such as Zero-Touch Networks (ZTNs). However, the increased complexity and automation of these networks have also escalated cybersecurity risks. Existing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) leveraging traditional Machine Learning (ML) techniques have shown effectiveness in mitigating these risks, but they often require extensive manual effort and expert knowledge. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)-based autonomous IDS framework towards achieving autonomous cybersecurity for next-generation networks. To achieve autonomous intrusion detection, the proposed AutoML framework automates all critical procedures of the data analytics pipeline, including data pre-processing, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and model ensemble. Specifically, it utilizes a Tabular Variational Auto-Encoder (TVAE) method for automated data balancing, tree-based ML models for automated feature selection and base model learning, Bayesian Optimization (BO) for hyperparameter optimization, and a novel Optimized Confidence-based Stacking Ensemble (OCSE) method for automated model ensemble. The proposed AutoML-based IDS was evaluated on two public benchmark network security datasets, CICIDS2017 and 5G-NIDD, and demonstrated improved performance compared to state-of-the-art cybersecurity methods. This research marks a significant step towards fully autonomous cybersecurity in next-generation networks, potentially revolutionizing network security applications.
GraphEx: A Graph-based Extraction Method for Advertiser Keyphrase Recommendation
Authors: Ashirbad Mishra, Soumik Dey, Marshall Wu, Jinyu Zhao, He Yu, Kaichen Ni, Binbin Li, Kamesh Madduri
Date: 2024-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Extreme Multi-Label Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Online sellers and advertisers are recommended keyphrases for their listed products, which they bid on to enhance their sales. One popular paradigm that generates such recommendations is Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMC), which involves tagging/mapping keyphrases to items. We outline the limitations of using traditional item-query based tagging or mapping techniques for keyphrase recommendations on E-Commerce platforms. We introduce GraphEx, an innovative graph-based approach that recommends keyphrases to sellers using extraction of token permutations from item titles. Additionally, we demonstrate that relying on traditional metrics such as precision/recall can be misleading in practical applications, thereby necessitating a combination of metrics to evaluate performance in real-world scenarios. These metrics are designed to assess the relevance of keyphrases to items and the potential for buyer outreach. GraphEx outperforms production models at eBay, achieving the objectives mentioned above. It supports near real-time inferencing in resource-constrained production environments and scales effectively for billions of items.
The AdEMAMix Optimizer: Better, Faster, Older
Authors: Matteo Pagliardini, Pierre Ablin, David Grangier
Date: 2024-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Momentum based optimizers are central to a wide range of machine learning applications. These typically rely on an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of gradients, which decays exponentially the present contribution of older gradients. This accounts for gradients being local linear approximations which lose their relevance as the iterate moves along the loss landscape. This work questions the use of a single EMA to accumulate past gradients and empirically demonstrates how this choice can be sub-optimal: a single EMA cannot simultaneously give a high weight to the immediate past, and a non-negligible weight to older gradients. Building on this observation, we propose AdEMAMix, a simple modification of the Adam optimizer with a mixture of two EMAs to better take advantage of past gradients. Our experiments on language modeling and image classification show -- quite surprisingly -- that gradients can stay relevant for tens of thousands of steps. They help to converge faster, and often to lower minima: e.g., a $1.3$B parameter AdEMAMix LLM trained on $101$B tokens performs comparably to an AdamW model trained on $197$B tokens ($+95\%$). Moreover, our method significantly slows-down model forgetting during training. Our work motivates further exploration of different types of functions to leverage past gradients, beyond EMAs.
Subsidy design for better social outcomes
Authors: Maria-Florina Balcan, Matteo Pozzi, Dravyansh Sharma
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00

Overcoming the impact of selfish behavior of rational players in multiagent systems is a fundamental problem in game theory. Without any intervention from a central agent, strategic users take actions in order to maximize their personal utility, which can lead to extremely inefficient overall system performance, often indicated by a high Price of Anarchy. Recent work (Lin et al. 2021) investigated and formalized yet another undesirable behavior of rational agents, that of avoiding freely available information about the game for selfish reasons, leading to worse social outcomes. A central planner can significantly mitigate these issues by injecting a subsidy to reduce certain costs associated with the system and obtain net gains in the system performance. Crucially, the planner needs to determine how to allocate this subsidy effectively. We formally show that designing subsidies that perfectly optimize the social good, in terms of minimizing the Price of Anarchy or preventing the information avoidance behavior, is computationally hard under standard complexity theoretic assumptions. On the positive side, we show that we can learn provably good values of subsidy in repeated games coming from the same domain. This data-driven subsidy design approach avoids solving computationally hard problems for unseen games by learning over polynomially many games. We also show that optimal subsidy can be learned with no-regret given an online sequence of games, under mild assumptions on the cost matrix. Our study focuses on two distinct games: a Bayesian extension of the well-studied fair cost-sharing game, and a component maintenance game with engineering applications.
Generative artificial intelligence for computational chemistry: a roadmap to predicting emergent phenomena
Authors: Pratyush Tiwary, Lukas Herron, Richard John, Suemin Lee, Disha Sanwal, Ruiyu Wang
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational chemistry

The recent surge in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced exciting possibilities for computational chemistry. Generative AI methods have made significant progress in sampling molecular structures across chemical species, developing force fields, and speeding up simulations. This Perspective offers a structured overview, beginning with the fundamental theoretical concepts in both Generative AI and computational chemistry. It then covers widely used Generative AI methods, including autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, reinforcement learning, flow models and language models, and highlights their selected applications in diverse areas including force field development, and protein/RNA structure prediction. A key focus is on the challenges these methods face before they become truly predictive, particularly in predicting emergent chemical phenomena. We believe that the ultimate goal of a simulation method or theory is to predict phenomena not seen before, and that Generative AI should be subject to these same standards before it is deemed useful for chemistry. We suggest that to overcome these challenges, future AI models need to integrate core chemical principles, especially from statistical mechanics.
Probing self-attention in self-supervised speech models for cross-linguistic differences
Authors: Sai Gopinath, Joselyn Rodriguez
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech models have gained traction thanks to increase in accuracy from novel transformer architectures. While this impressive increase in performance across automatic speech recognition (ASR) benchmarks is noteworthy, there is still much that is unknown about the use of attention mechanisms for speech-related tasks. For example, while it is assumed that these models are learning language-independent (i.e., universal) speech representations, there has not yet been an in-depth exploration of what it would mean for the models to be language-independent. In the current paper, we explore this question within the realm of self-attention mechanisms of one small self-supervised speech transformer model (TERA). We find that even with a small model, the attention heads learned are diverse ranging from almost entirely diagonal to almost entirely global regardless of the training language. We highlight some notable differences in attention patterns between Turkish and English and demonstrate that the models do learn important phonological information during pretraining. We also present a head ablation study which shows that models across languages primarily rely on diagonal heads to classify phonemes.
RoboKoop: Efficient Control Conditioned Representations from Visual Input in Robotics using Koopman Operator
Authors: Hemant Kumawat, Biswadeep Chakraborty, Saibal Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00

Developing agents that can perform complex control tasks from high-dimensional observations is a core ability of autonomous agents that requires underlying robust task control policies and adapting the underlying visual representations to the task. Most existing policies need a lot of training samples and treat this problem from the lens of two-stage learning with a controller learned on top of pre-trained vision models. We approach this problem from the lens of Koopman theory and learn visual representations from robotic agents conditioned on specific downstream tasks in the context of learning stabilizing control for the agent. We introduce a Contrastive Spectral Koopman Embedding network that allows us to learn efficient linearized visual representations from the agent's visual data in a high dimensional latent space and utilizes reinforcement learning to perform off-policy control on top of the extracted representations with a linear controller. Our method enhances stability and control in gradient dynamics over time, significantly outperforming existing approaches by improving efficiency and accuracy in learning task policies over extended horizons.
Leveraging Interpretability in the Transformer to Automate the Proactive Scaling of Cloud Resources
Authors: Amadou Ba, Pavithra Harsha, Chitra Subramanian
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

Modern web services adopt cloud-native principles to leverage the advantages of microservices. To consistently guarantee high Quality of Service (QoS) according to Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ensure satisfactory user experiences, and minimize operational costs, each microservice must be provisioned with the right amount of resources. However, accurately provisioning microservices with adequate resources is complex and depends on many factors, including workload intensity and the complex interconnections between microservices. To address this challenge, we develop a model that captures the relationship between an end-to-end latency, requests at the front-end level, and resource utilization. We then use the developed model to predict the end-to-end latency. Our solution leverages the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT), an attention-based architecture equipped with interpretability features. When the prediction results indicate SLA non-compliance, we use the feature importance provided by the TFT as covariates in Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR), with the response variable being the desired latency, to learn the parameters associated with the feature importance. These learned parameters reflect the adjustments required to the features to ensure SLA compliance. We demonstrate the merit of our approach with a microservice-based application and provide a roadmap to deployment.
An Introduction to Centralized Training for Decentralized Execution in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Christopher Amato
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has exploded in popularity in recent years. Many approaches have been developed but they can be divided into three main types: centralized training and execution (CTE), centralized training for decentralized execution (CTDE), and Decentralized training and execution (DTE). CTDE methods are the most common as they can use centralized information during training but execute in a decentralized manner -- using only information available to that agent during execution. CTDE is the only paradigm that requires a separate training phase where any available information (e.g., other agent policies, underlying states) can be used. As a result, they can be more scalable than CTE methods, do not require communication during execution, and can often perform well. CTDE fits most naturally with the cooperative case, but can be potentially applied in competitive or mixed settings depending on what information is assumed to be observed. This text is an introduction to CTDE in cooperative MARL. It is meant to explain the setting, basic concepts, and common methods. It does not cover all work in CTDE MARL as the subarea is quite extensive. I have included work that I believe is important for understanding the main concepts in the subarea and apologize to those that I have omitted.
NUMOSIM: A Synthetic Mobility Dataset with Anomaly Detection Benchmarks
Authors: Chris Stanford, Suman Adari, Xishun Liao, Yueshuai He, Qinhua Jiang, Chenchen Kuai, Jiaqi Ma, Emmanuel Tung, Yinlong Qian, Lingyi Zhao, ZiHao Zhou, Zeeshan Rasheed, Khurram Shafique
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Benchmarking

Collecting real-world mobility data is challenging. It is often fraught with privacy concerns, logistical difficulties, and inherent biases. Moreover, accurately annotating anomalies in large-scale data is nearly impossible, as it demands meticulous effort to distinguish subtle and complex patterns. These challenges significantly impede progress in geospatial anomaly detection research by restricting access to reliable data and complicating the rigorous evaluation, comparison, and benchmarking of methodologies. To address these limitations, we introduce a synthetic mobility dataset, NUMOSIM, that provides a controlled, ethical, and diverse environment for benchmarking anomaly detection techniques. NUMOSIM simulates a wide array of realistic mobility scenarios, encompassing both typical and anomalous behaviours, generated through advanced deep learning models trained on real mobility data. This approach allows NUMOSIM to accurately replicate the complexities of real-world movement patterns while strategically injecting anomalies to challenge and evaluate detection algorithms based on how effectively they capture the interplay between demographic, geospatial, and temporal factors. Our goal is to advance geospatial mobility analysis by offering a realistic benchmark for improving anomaly detection and mobility modeling techniques. To support this, we provide open access to the NUMOSIM dataset, along with comprehensive documentation, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results.
CLUE: Concept-Level Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Models
Authors: Yu-Hsiang Wang, Andrew Bai, Che-Ping Tsai, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Sentence, Story Generation, Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in various natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Previous studies suggest that LLMs' generation process involves uncertainty. However, existing approaches to uncertainty estimation mainly focus on sequence-level uncertainty, overlooking individual pieces of information within sequences. These methods fall short in separately assessing the uncertainty of each component in a sequence. In response, we propose a novel framework for Concept-Level Uncertainty Estimation (CLUE) for LLMs. We leverage LLMs to convert output sequences into concept-level representations, breaking down sequences into individual concepts and measuring the uncertainty of each concept separately. We conduct experiments to demonstrate that CLUE can provide more interpretable uncertainty estimation results compared with sentence-level uncertainty, and could be a useful tool for various tasks such as hallucination detection and story generation.
PIETRA: Physics-Informed Evidential Learning for Traversing Out-of-Distribution Terrain
Authors: Xiaoyi Cai, James Queeney, Tong Xu, Aniket Datar, Chenhui Pan, Max Miller, Ashton Flather, Philip R. Osteen, Nicholas Roy, Xuesu Xiao, Jonathan P. How
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning is a powerful approach for developing traversability models for off-road navigation, but these models often struggle with inputs unseen during training. Existing methods utilize techniques like evidential deep learning to quantify model uncertainty, helping to identify and avoid out-of-distribution terrain. However, always avoiding out-of-distribution terrain can be overly conservative, e.g., when novel terrain can be effectively analyzed using a physics-based model. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Physics-Informed Evidential Traversability (PIETRA), a self-supervised learning framework that integrates physics priors directly into the mathematical formulation of evidential neural networks and introduces physics knowledge implicitly through an uncertainty-aware, physics-informed training loss. Our evidential network seamlessly transitions between learned and physics-based predictions for out-of-distribution inputs. Additionally, the physics-informed loss regularizes the learned model, ensuring better alignment with the physics model. Extensive simulations and hardware experiments demonstrate that PIETRA improves both learning accuracy and navigation performance in environments with significant distribution shifts.
How DREAMS are made: Emulating Satellite Galaxy and Subhalo Populations with Diffusion Models and Point Clouds
Authors: Tri Nguyen, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Paul Torrey, Arya Farahi, Alex M. Garcia, Jonah C. Rose, Stephanie O'Neil, Mark Vogelsberger, Xuejian Shen, Cian Roche, Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, Nitya Kallivayalil, Julian B. Muñoz, Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine, Sandip Roy, Lina Necib, Kassidy E. Kollmann
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

The connection between galaxies and their host dark matter (DM) halos is critical to our understanding of cosmology, galaxy formation, and DM physics. To maximize the return of upcoming cosmological surveys, we need an accurate way to model this complex relationship. Many techniques have been developed to model this connection, from Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) to empirical and semi-analytic models to hydrodynamic. Hydrodynamic simulations can incorporate more detailed astrophysical processes but are computationally expensive; HODs, on the other hand, are computationally cheap but have limited accuracy. In this work, we present NeHOD, a generative framework based on variational diffusion model and Transformer, for painting galaxies/subhalos on top of DM with an accuracy of hydrodynamic simulations but at a computational cost similar to HOD. By modeling galaxies/subhalos as point clouds, instead of binning or voxelization, we can resolve small spatial scales down to the resolution of the simulations. For each halo, NeHOD predicts the positions, velocities, masses, and concentrations of its central and satellite galaxies. We train NeHOD on the TNG-Warm DM suite of the DREAMS project, which consists of 1024 high-resolution zoom-in hydrodynamic simulations of Milky Way-mass halos with varying warm DM mass and astrophysical parameters. We show that our model captures the complex relationships between subhalo properties as a function of the simulation parameters, including the mass functions, stellar-halo mass relations, concentration-mass relations, and spatial clustering. Our method can be used for a large variety of downstream applications, from galaxy clustering to strong lensing studies.
SDOoop: Capturing Periodical Patterns and Out-of-phase Anomalies in Streaming Data Analysis
Authors: Alexander Hartl, Félix Iglesias Vázquez, Tanja Zseby
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Intrusion Detection

Streaming data analysis is increasingly required in applications, e.g., IoT, cybersecurity, robotics, mechatronics or cyber-physical systems. Despite its relevance, it is still an emerging field with open challenges. SDO is a recent anomaly detection method designed to meet requirements of speed, interpretability and intuitive parameterization. In this work, we present SDOoop, which extends the capabilities of SDO's streaming version to retain temporal information of data structures. SDOoop spots contextual anomalies undetectable by traditional algorithms, while enabling the inspection of data geometries, clusters and temporal patterns. We used SDOoop to model real network communications in critical infrastructures and extract patterns that disclose their dynamics. Moreover, we evaluated SDOoop with data from intrusion detection and natural science domains and obtained performances equivalent or superior to state-of-the-art approaches. Our results show the high potential of new model-based methods to analyze and explain streaming data. Since SDOoop operates with constant per-sample space and time complexity, it is ideal for big data, being able to instantly process large volumes of information. SDOoop conforms to next-generation machine learning, which, in addition to accuracy and speed, is expected to provide highly interpretable and informative models.