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The vulnerability of machine learning models in adversarial scenarios has garnered significant interest in the academic community over the past decade, resulting in a myriad of attacks and defenses. However, while the community appears to be overtly successful in devising new attacks across new contexts, the development of defenses has stalled. After a decade of research, we appear no closer to securing AI applications beyond additional training. Despite a lack of effective mitigations, AI development and its incorporation into existing systems charge full speed ahead with the rise of generative AI and large language models. Will our ineffectiveness in developing solutions to adversarial threats further extend to these new technologies? In this paper, we argue that overly permissive attack and overly restrictive defensive threat models have hampered defense development in the ML domain. Through the lens of adversarial evasion attacks against neural networks, we critically examine common attack assumptions, such as the ability to bypass any defense not explicitly built into the model. We argue that these flawed assumptions, seen as reasonable by the community based on paper acceptance, have encouraged the development of adversarial attacks that map poorly to real-world scenarios. In turn, new defenses evaluated against these very attacks are inadvertently required to be almost perfect and incorporated as part of the model. But do they need to? In practice, machine learning models are deployed as a small component of a larger system. We analyze adversarial machine learning from a system security perspective rather than an AI perspective and its implications for emerging AI paradigms.

Reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in perfect information games such as Go and Atari, enabling agents to compete at the highest levels against human players. However, research in reinforcement learning for imperfect information games has been relatively limited due to the more complex game structures and randomness. Traditional methods face challenges in training and improving performance in imperfect information games due to issues like inaccurate Q value estimation and reward sparsity. In this paper, we focus on Uno, an imperfect information game, and aim to address these problems by reducing Q value overestimation and reshaping reward function. We propose a novel algorithm that utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search to average the value estimations in Q function. Even though we choose Double Deep Q Learning as the foundational framework in this paper, our method can be generalized and used in any algorithm which needs Q value estimation, such as the Actor-Critic. Additionally, we employ Monte Carlo Tree Search to reshape the reward structure in the game environment. We compare our algorithm with several traditional methods applied to games such as Double Deep Q Learning, Deep Monte Carlo and Neural Fictitious Self Play, and the experiments demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms these approaches, especially as the number of players in Uno increases, indicating a higher level of difficulty.

As generative AI systems, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models, advance rapidly, their growing adoption has led to new and complex security risks often overlooked in traditional AI risk assessment frameworks. This paper introduces a novel formal framework for categorizing and mitigating these emergent security risks by integrating adaptive, real-time monitoring, and dynamic risk mitigation strategies tailored to generative models' unique vulnerabilities. We identify previously under-explored risks, including latent space exploitation, multi-modal cross-attack vectors, and feedback-loop-induced model degradation. Our framework employs a layered approach, incorporating anomaly detection, continuous red-teaming, and real-time adversarial simulation to mitigate these risks. We focus on formal verification methods to ensure model robustness and scalability in the face of evolving threats. Though theoretical, this work sets the stage for future empirical validation by establishing a detailed methodology and metrics for evaluating the performance of risk mitigation strategies in generative AI systems. This framework addresses existing gaps in AI safety, offering a comprehensive road map for future research and implementation., Comment: This paper was accepted in NeurIPS 2024 workshop on Red Teaming GenAI: What can we learn with Adversaries?

In an era marked by robust technological growth and swift information renewal, furnishing researchers and the populace with top-tier, avant-garde academic insights spanning various domains has become an urgent necessity. The KDD Cup 2024 AQA Challenge is geared towards advancing retrieval models to identify pertinent academic terminologies from suitable papers for scientific inquiries. This paper introduces the LLM-KnowSimFuser proposed by Robo Space, which wins the 2nd place in the competition. With inspirations drawed from the superior performance of LLMs on multiple tasks, after careful analysis of the provided datasets, we firstly perform fine-tuning and inference using LLM-enhanced pre-trained retrieval models to introduce the tremendous language understanding and open-domain knowledge of LLMs into this task, followed by a weighted fusion based on the similarity matrix derived from the inference results. Finally, experiments conducted on the competition datasets show the superiority of our proposal, which achieved a score of 0.20726 on the final leaderboard., Comment: The 2nd Place of KDD Cup 2024 OAG-Challenge AQA

Combining LiDAR and Camera-view data has become a common approach for 3D Object Detection. However, previous approaches combine the two input streams at a point-level, throwing away semantic information derived from camera features. In this paper we propose Cross-View Center Point-Fusion, a state-of-the-art model to perform 3D object detection by combining camera and LiDAR-derived features in the BEV space to preserve semantic density from the camera stream while incorporating spacial data from the LiDAR stream. Our architecture utilizes aspects from previously established algorithms, Cross-View Transformers and CenterPoint, and runs their backbones in parallel, allowing efficient computation for real-time processing and application. In this paper we find that while an implicitly calculated depth-estimate may be sufficiently accurate in a 2D map-view representation, explicitly calculated geometric and spacial information is needed for precise bounding box prediction in the 3D world-view space., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.02833 by other authors

While end-to-end multi-channel electroencephalography (EEG) learning approaches have shown significant promise, their applicability is often constrained in neurological diagnostics, such as intracranial EEG resources. When provided with a single-channel EEG, how can we learn representations that are robust to multi-channels and scalable across varied tasks, such as seizure prediction? In this paper, we present SplitSEE, a structurally splittable framework designed for effective temporal-frequency representation learning in single-channel EEG. The key concept of SplitSEE is a self-supervised framework incorporating a deep clustering task. Given an EEG, we argue that the time and frequency domains are two distinct perspectives, and hence, learned representations should share the same cluster assignment. To this end, we first propose two domain-specific modules that independently learn domain-specific representation and address the temporal-frequency tradeoff issue in conventional spectrogram-based methods. Then, we introduce a novel clustering loss to measure the information similarity. This encourages representations from both domains to coherently describe the same input by assigning them a consistent cluster. SplitSEE leverages a pre-training-to-fine-tuning framework within a splittable architecture and has following properties: (a) Effectiveness: it learns representations solely from single-channel EEG but has even outperformed multi-channel baselines. (b) Robustness: it shows the capacity to adapt across different channels with low performance variance. Superior performance is also achieved with our collected clinical dataset. (c) Scalability: With just one fine-tuning epoch, SplitSEE achieves high and stable performance using partial model layers., Comment: This paper has been accepted by ICDM2024

Closed-source large language models deliver strong performance but have limited downstream customizability. Semi-open models, combining both closed-source and public layers, were introduced to improve customizability. However, parameters in the closed-source layers are found vulnerable to recovery attacks. In this paper, we explore the design of semi-open models with fewer closed-source layers, aiming to increase customizability while ensuring resilience to recovery attacks. We analyze the contribution of closed-source layer to the overall resilience and theoretically prove that in a deep transformer-based model, there exists a transition layer such that even small recovery errors in layers before this layer can lead to recovery failure. Building on this, we propose \textbf{SCARA}, a novel approach that keeps only a few bottom layers as closed-source. SCARA employs a fine-tuning-free metric to estimate the maximum number of layers that can be publicly accessible for customization. We apply it to five models (1.3B to 70B parameters) to construct semi-open models, validating their customizability on six downstream tasks and assessing their resilience against various recovery attacks on sixteen benchmarks. We compare SCARA to baselines and observe that it generally improves downstream customization performance and offers similar resilience with over \textbf{10} times fewer closed-source parameters. We empirically investigate the existence of transition layers, analyze the effectiveness of our scheme and finally discuss its limitations., Comment: 10 pages for main content of the paper

This paper establishes statistical properties of deep neural network (DNN) estimators under dependent data. Two general results for nonparametric sieve estimators directly applicable to DNN estimators are given. The first establishes rates for convergence in probability under nonstationary data. The second provides non-asymptotic probability bounds on $\mathcal{L}^{2}$-errors under stationary $\beta$-mixing data. I apply these results to DNN estimators in both regression and classification contexts imposing only a standard H\"older smoothness assumption. The DNN architectures considered are common in applications, featuring fully connected feedforward networks with any continuous piecewise linear activation function, unbounded weights, and a width and depth that grows with sample size. The framework provided also offers potential for research into other DNN architectures and time-series applications., Comment: 85 pages, 2 figures, removed partially linear model section and uploaded as a separate paper (arXiv:2410.22574v1)

This paper considers the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback and a cardinality constraint on the super-arm size. Existing algorithms for solving this problem typically involve two key sub-routines: (1) a parameter estimation routine that sequentially estimates a set of base-arm parameters, and (2) a super-arm selection policy for selecting a subset of base arms deemed optimal based on these parameters. State-of-the-art algorithms assume access to an exact oracle for super-arm selection with unbounded computational power. At each instance, this oracle evaluates a list of score functions, the number of which grows as low as linearly and as high as exponentially with the number of arms. This can be prohibitive in the regime of a large number of arms. This paper introduces a novel realistic alternative to the perfect oracle. This algorithm uses a combination of group-testing for selecting the super arms and quantized Thompson sampling for parameter estimation. Under a general separability assumption on the reward function, the proposed algorithm reduces the complexity of the super-arm-selection oracle to be logarithmic in the number of base arms while achieving the same regret order as the state-of-the-art algorithms that use exact oracles. This translates to at least an exponential reduction in complexity compared to the oracle-based approaches., Comment: 26 pages

Mosques are worship places of Allah and must be preserved clean, immaculate, provide all the comforts of the worshippers in them. The prophet's mosque in Medina/ Saudi Arabia is one of the most important mosques for Muslims. It occupies second place after the sacred mosque in Mecca/ Saudi Arabia, which is in constant overcrowding by all Muslims to visit the prophet Mohammad's tomb. This paper aims to propose a smart dome model to preserve the fresh air and allow the sunlight to enter the mosque using artificial intelligence techniques. The proposed model controls domes movements based on the weather conditions and the overcrowding rates in the mosque. The data have been collected from two different resources, the first one from the database of Saudi Arabia weather's history, and the other from Shanghai Technology Database. Congested Scene Recognition Network (CSRNet) and Fuzzy techniques have applied using Python programming language to control the domes to be opened and closed for a specific time to renew the air inside the mosque. Also, this model consists of several parts that are connected for controlling the mechanism of opening/closing domes according to weather data and the situation of crowding in the mosque. Finally, the main goal of this paper has been achieved, and the proposed model has worked efficiently and specifies the exact duration time to keep the domes open automatically for a few minutes for each hour head.

Since the onset of COVID-19, rural communities worldwide have faced significant challenges in accessing healthcare due to the migration of experienced medical professionals to urban centers. Semi-trained caregivers, such as Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs), have stepped in to fill this gap, but often lack formal training. This paper proposes an advanced agentic medical assistant system designed to improve healthcare delivery in rural areas by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic approaches. The system is composed of five crucial components: translation, medical complexity assessment, expert network integration, final medical advice generation, and response simplification. Our innovative framework ensures context-sensitive, adaptive, and reliable medical assistance, capable of clinical triaging, diagnostics, and identifying cases requiring specialist intervention. The system is designed to handle cultural nuances and varying literacy levels, providing clear and actionable medical advice in local languages. Evaluation results using the MedQA, PubMedQA, and JAMA datasets demonstrate that this integrated approach significantly enhances the effectiveness of rural healthcare workers, making healthcare more accessible and understandable for underserved populations. All code and supplemental materials associated with the paper and IMAS are available at https://github.com/uheal/imas.

In this paper, we identify and analyze a recurring training loss pattern, which we term the \textit{Epochal Sawtooth Effect (ESE)}, commonly observed during training with adaptive gradient-based optimizers, particularly Adam optimizer. This pattern is characterized by a sharp drop in loss at the beginning of each epoch, followed by a gradual increase, resulting in a sawtooth-shaped loss curve. Through empirical observations, we demonstrate that while this effect is most pronounced with Adam, it persists, although less severely, with other optimizers such as RMSProp. We provide an in-depth explanation of the underlying mechanisms that lead to the Epochal Sawtooth Effect. The influences of factors like \(\beta\), batch size, data shuffling on this pattern have been studied. We quantify the influence of \(\beta_2\) on the shape of the loss curve, showing that higher values of \(\beta_2\) result in a nearly linear increase in loss, while lower values create a concave upward trend. Our analysis reveals that this behavior stems from the adaptive learning rate controlled by the second moment estimate, with \(\beta_1\) playing a minimal role when \(\beta_2\) is large. To support our analysis, we replicate this phenomenon through a controlled quadratic minimization task. By incrementally solving a series of quadratic optimization problems using Adam, we demonstrate that the Epochal Sawtooth Effect can emerge even in simple optimization scenarios, reinforcing the generality of this pattern. This paper provides both theoretical insights and quantitative analysis, offering a comprehensive understanding of this ubiquitous phenomenon in modern optimization techniques., Comment: 15 pages, 21 figures

In this paper, we study the data-dependent convergence and generalization behavior of gradient methods for neural networks with smooth activation. Our first result is a novel bound on the excess risk of deep networks trained by the logistic loss, via an alogirthmic stability analysis. Compared to previous works, our results improve upon the shortcomings of the well-established Rademacher complexity-based bounds. Importantly, the bounds we derive in this paper are tighter, hold even for neural networks of small width, do not scale unfavorably with width, are algorithm-dependent, and consequently capture the role of initialization on the sample complexity of gradient descent for deep nets. Specialized to noiseless data separable with margin $\gamma$ by neural tangent kernel (NTK) features of a network of width $\Omega(\poly(\log(n)))$, we show the test-error rate to be $e^{O(L)}/{\gamma^2 n}$, where $n$ is the training set size and $L$ denotes the number of hidden layers. This is an improvement in the test loss bound compared to previous works while maintaining the poly-logarithmic width conditions. We further investigate excess risk bounds for deep nets trained with noisy data, establishing that under a polynomial condition on the network width, gradient descent can achieve the optimal excess risk. Finally, we show that a large step-size significantly improves upon the NTK regime's results in classifying the XOR distribution. In particular, we show for a one-hidden-layer neural network of constant width $m$ with quadratic activation and standard Gaussian initialization that mini-batch SGD with linear sample complexity and with a large step-size $\eta=m$ reaches the perfect test accuracy after only $\ceil{\log(d)}$ iterations, where $d$ is the data dimension.

Privacy regulations like the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in the US allow users the right to remove their data ML applications. Machine unlearning addresses this by modifying the ML parameters in order to forget the influence of a specific data point on its weights. Recent literature has highlighted that the contribution from data point(s) can be forged with some other data points in the dataset with probability close to one. This allows a server to falsely claim unlearning without actually modifying the model's parameters. However, in distributed paradigms such as FL, where the server lacks access to the dataset and the number of clients are limited, claiming unlearning in such cases becomes a challenge. This paper introduces an efficient way to achieve federated unlearning, by employing a privacy model which allows the FL server to plausibly deny the client's participation in the training up to a certain extent. We demonstrate that the server can generate a Proof-of-Deniability, where each aggregated update can be associated with at least x number of client updates. This enables the server to plausibly deny a client's participation. However, in the event of frequent unlearning requests, the server is required to adopt an unlearning strategy and, accordingly, update its model parameters. We also perturb the client updates in a cluster in order to avoid inference from an honest but curious server. We show that the global model satisfies differential privacy after T number of communication rounds. The proposed methodology has been evaluated on multiple datasets in different privacy settings. The experimental results show that our framework achieves comparable utility while providing a significant reduction in terms of memory (30 times), as well as retraining time (1.6-500769 times). The source code for the paper is available., Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication in the journal track (Springer Machine Learning) of ACML 2024. Published version will be available after the conference. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ayush-Umu/Federated-Unlearning-under-Plausible-Deniability

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) as they allow attackers to manipulate model predictions with backdoor triggers. To address these security vulnerabilities, various backdoor purification methods have been proposed to purify compromised models. Typically, these purified models exhibit low Attack Success Rates (ASR), rendering them resistant to backdoored inputs. However, Does achieving a low ASR through current safety purification methods truly eliminate learned backdoor features from the pretraining phase? In this paper, we provide an affirmative answer to this question by thoroughly investigating the Post-Purification Robustness of current backdoor purification methods. We find that current safety purification methods are vulnerable to the rapid re-learning of backdoor behavior, even when further fine-tuning of purified models is performed using a very small number of poisoned samples. Based on this, we further propose the practical Query-based Reactivation Attack (QRA) which could effectively reactivate the backdoor by merely querying purified models. We find the failure to achieve satisfactory post-purification robustness stems from the insufficient deviation of purified models from the backdoored model along the backdoor-connected path. To improve the post-purification robustness, we propose a straightforward tuning defense, Path-Aware Minimization (PAM), which promotes deviation along backdoor-connected paths with extra model updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAM significantly improves post-purification robustness while maintaining a good clean accuracy and low ASR. Our work provides a new perspective on understanding the effectiveness of backdoor safety tuning and highlights the importance of faithfully assessing the model's safety., Comment: NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight paper. The first two authors contributed equally

This paper studies second-order methods for convex-concave minimax optimization. Monteiro and Svaiter (2012) proposed a method to solve the problem with an optimal iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ to find an $\epsilon$-saddle point. However, it is unclear whether the computational complexity, $\mathcal{O}((N+ d^2) d \epsilon^{-2/3})$, can be improved. In the above, we follow Doikov et al. (2023) and assume the complexity of obtaining a first-order oracle as $N$ and the complexity of obtaining a second-order oracle as $dN$. In this paper, we show that the computation cost can be reduced by reusing Hessian across iterations. Our methods take the overall computational complexity of $ \tilde{\mathcal{O}}( (N+d^2)(d+ d^{2/3}\epsilon^{-2/3}))$, which improves those of previous methods by a factor of $d^{1/3}$. Furthermore, we generalize our method to strongly-convex-strongly-concave minimax problems and establish the complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}((N+d^2) (d + d^{2/3} \kappa^{2/3}) )$ when the condition number of the problem is $\kappa$, enjoying a similar speedup upon the state-of-the-art method. Numerical experiments on both real and synthetic datasets also verify the efficiency of our method.

The demand for sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) methods, particularly Named Entity Recognition (NER), has increased due to the exponential growth of Marathi-language digital content. In particular, NER is essential for recognizing distant entities and for arranging and understanding unstructured Marathi text data. With an emphasis on managing long-range entities, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of current NER techniques designed for Marathi documents. It dives into current practices and investigates the BERT transformer model's potential for long-range Marathi NER. Along with analyzing the effectiveness of earlier methods, the report draws comparisons between NER in English literature and suggests adaptation strategies for Marathi literature. The paper discusses the difficulties caused by Marathi's particular linguistic traits and contextual subtleties while acknowledging NER's critical role in NLP. To conclude, this project is a major step forward in improving Marathi NER techniques, with potential wider applications across a range of NLP tasks and domains.

In this paper, we discuss learning algorithms and their importance in different types of applications which includes training to identify important patterns and features in a straightforward, easy-to-understand manner. We will review the main concepts of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and hybrid models. Some important subsets of Machine Learning algorithms such as supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning are also discussed in this paper. These techniques can be used for some important tasks like prediction, classification, and segmentation. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used for image and video processing and many more applications. We dive into the architecture of CNNs and how to integrate CNNs with ML algorithms to build hybrid models. This paper explores the vulnerability of learning algorithms to noise, leading to misclassification. We further discuss the integration of learning algorithms with Large Language Models (LLM) to generate coherent responses applicable to many domains such as healthcare, marketing, and finance by learning important patterns from large volumes of data. Furthermore, we discuss the next generation of learning algorithms and how we may have an unified Adaptive and Dynamic Network to perform important tasks. Overall, this article provides brief overview of learning algorithms, exploring their current state, applications and future direction.

The safety alignment ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is prone to be degraded by the integration of the vision module compared to its LLM backbone. We investigate this phenomenon, dubbed as ''safety alignment degradation'' in this paper, and show that the challenge arises from the representation gap that emerges when introducing vision modality to VLMs. In particular, we show that the representations of multi-modal inputs shift away from that of text-only inputs which represent the distribution that the LLM backbone is optimized for. At the same time, the safety alignment capabilities, initially developed within the textual embedding space, do not successfully transfer to this new multi-modal representation space. To reduce safety alignment degradation, we introduce Cross-Modality Representation Manipulation (CMRM), an inference time representation intervention method for recovering the safety alignment ability that is inherent in the LLM backbone of VLMs, while simultaneously preserving the functional capabilities of VLMs. The empirical results show that our framework significantly recovers the alignment ability that is inherited from the LLM backbone with minimal impact on the fluency and linguistic capabilities of pre-trained VLMs even without additional training. Specifically, the unsafe rate of LLaVA-7B on multi-modal input can be reduced from 61.53% to as low as 3.15% with only inference-time intervention. WARNING: This paper contains examples of toxic or harmful language., Comment: Preprint

Empirical, benchmark-driven testing is a fundamental paradigm in the current RL community. While using off-the-shelf benchmarks in reinforcement learning (RL) research is a common practice, this choice is rarely discussed. Benchmark choices are often done based on intuitive ideas like "legged robots" or "visual observations". In this paper, we argue that benchmarking in RL needs to be treated as a scientific discipline itself. To illustrate our point, we present a case study on different variants of the Hopper environment to show that the selection of standard benchmarking suites can drastically change how we judge performance of algorithms. The field does not have a cohesive notion of what the different Hopper environments are representative - they do not even seem to be representative of each other. Our experimental results suggests a larger issue in the deep RL literature: benchmark choices are neither commonly justified, nor does there exist a language that could be used to justify the selection of certain environments. This paper concludes with a discussion of the requirements for proper discussion and evaluations of benchmarks and recommends steps to start a dialogue towards this goal.

Few-shot graph anomaly detection (GAD) has recently garnered increasing attention, which aims to discern anomalous patterns among abundant unlabeled test nodes under the guidance of a limited number of labeled training nodes. Existing few-shot GAD approaches typically adopt meta-training methods trained on richly labeled auxiliary networks to facilitate rapid adaptation to target networks that possess sparse labels. However, these proposed methods often assume that the auxiliary and target networks exist in the same data distributions-an assumption rarely holds in practical settings. This paper explores a more prevalent and complex scenario of cross-domain few-shot GAD, where the goal is to identify anomalies within sparsely labeled target graphs using auxiliary graphs from a related, yet distinct domain. The challenge here is nontrivial owing to inherent data distribution discrepancies between the source and target domains, compounded by the uncertainties of sparse labeling in the target domain. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective framework, termed CDFS-GAD, specifically designed to tackle the aforementioned challenges. CDFS-GAD first introduces a domain-adaptive graph contrastive learning module, which is aimed at enhancing cross-domain feature alignment. Then, a prompt tuning module is further designed to extract domain-specific features tailored to each domain. Moreover, a domain-adaptive hypersphere classification loss is proposed to enhance the discrimination between normal and anomalous instances under minimal supervision, utilizing domain-sensitive norms. Lastly, a self-training strategy is introduced to further refine the predicted scores, enhancing its reliability in few-shot settings. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world cross-domain data pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CDFS-GAD framework in comparison to various existing GAD methods., Comment: Accepted by 24th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2024)

Machine learning (ML) has become a ubiquitous tool across various domains of data mining and big data analysis. The efficacy of ML models depends heavily on high-quality datasets, which are often complicated by the presence of missing values. Consequently, the performance and generalization of ML models are at risk in the face of such datasets. This paper aims to examine the nuanced impact of missing values on ML workflows, including their types, causes, and consequences. Our analysis focuses on the challenges posed by missing values, including biased inferences, reduced predictive power, and increased computational burdens. The paper further explores strategies for handling missing values, including imputation techniques and removal strategies, and investigates how missing values affect model evaluation metrics and introduces complexities in cross-validation and model selection. The study employs case studies and real-world examples to illustrate the practical implications of addressing missing values. Finally, the discussion extends to future research directions, emphasizing the need for handling missing values ethically and transparently. The primary goal of this paper is to provide insights into the pervasive impact of missing values on ML models and guide practitioners toward effective strategies for achieving robust and reliable model outcomes.

On-device adapting to continual, unpredictable domain shifts is essential for mobile applications like autonomous driving and augmented reality to deliver seamless user experiences in evolving environments. Test-time adaptation (TTA) emerges as a promising solution by tuning model parameters with unlabeled live data immediately before prediction. However, TTA's unique forward-backward-reforward pipeline notably increases the latency over standard inference, undermining the responsiveness in time-sensitive mobile applications. This paper presents AdaShadow, a responsive test-time adaptation framework for non-stationary mobile data distribution and resource dynamics via selective updates of adaptation-critical layers. Although the tactic is recognized in generic on-device training, TTA's unsupervised and online context presents unique challenges in estimating layer importance and latency, as well as scheduling the optimal layer update plan. AdaShadow addresses these challenges with a backpropagation-free assessor to rapidly identify critical layers, a unit-based runtime predictor to account for resource dynamics in latency estimation, and an online scheduler for prompt layer update planning. Also, AdaShadow incorporates a memory I/O-aware computation reuse scheme to further reduce latency in the reforward pass. Results show that AdaShadow achieves the best accuracy-latency balance under continual shifts. At low memory and energy costs, Adashadow provides a 2x to 3.5x speedup (ms-level) over state-of-the-art TTA methods with comparable accuracy and a 14.8% to 25.4% accuracy boost over efficient supervised methods with similar latency., Comment: This paper is accepted by SenSys 2024. Copyright may be transferred without notice

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) presents unique challenges as agents learn strategies through experiences. Gradient-based methods are often sensitive to hyperparameter selection and initial random seed variations. Concurrently, significant advances have been made in solving Variational Inequalities (VIs) which include equilibrium-finding problems particularly in addressing the non-converging rotational dynamics that impede convergence of traditional gradient based optimization methods. This paper explores the potential of leveraging VI-based techniques to improve MARL training. Specifically, we study the performance of VI method namely, Nested-Lookahead VI (nLA-VI) and Extragradient (EG) in enhancing the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) algorithm. We present a VI reformulation of the actor-critic algorithm for both single- and multi-agent settings. We introduce three algorithms that use nLA-VI, EG, and a combination of both, named LA-MADDPG, EG-MADDPG, and LA-EG-MADDPG, respectively. Our empirical results demonstrate that these VI-based approaches yield significant performance improvements in benchmark environments, such as the zero-sum games: rock-paper-scissors and matching pennies, where equilibrium strategies can be quantitatively assessed, and the Multi-Agent Particle Environment: Predator prey benchmark, where VI-based methods also yield balanced participation of agents from the same team.

Federated Edge Learning (FEL), an emerging distributed Machine Learning (ML) paradigm, enables model training in a distributed environment while ensuring user privacy by using physical separation for each user data. However, with the development of complex application scenarios such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Earth, the conventional resource allocation schemes can no longer effectively support these growing computational and communication demands. Therefore, joint resource optimization may be the key solution to the scaling problem. This paper simultaneously addresses the multifaceted challenges of computation and communication, with the growing multiple resource demands. We systematically review the joint allocation strategies for different resources (computation, data, communication, and network topology) in FEL, and summarize the advantages in improving system efficiency, reducing latency, enhancing resource utilization and enhancing robustness. In addition, we present the potential ability of joint optimization to enhance privacy preservation by reducing communication requirements, indirectly. This work not only provides theoretical support for resource management in federated learning (FL) systems, but also provides ideas for potential optimal deployment in multiple real-world scenarios. By thoroughly discussing the current challenges and future research directions, it also provides some important insights into multi-resource optimization in complex application environments., Comment: This paper has been submitted to CMC-Computers Materials & Continua

This paper investigates the challenges and potential solutions for improving machine learning systems for low-resource languages. State-of-the-art models in natural language processing (NLP), text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-text (STT), and vision-language models (VLM) rely heavily on large datasets, which are often unavailable for low-resource languages. This research explores key areas such as defining "quality data," developing methods for generating appropriate data and enhancing accessibility to model training. A comprehensive review of current methodologies, including data augmentation, multilingual transfer learning, synthetic data generation, and data selection techniques, highlights both advancements and limitations. Several open research questions are identified, providing a framework for future studies aimed at optimizing data utilization, reducing the required data quantity, and maintaining high-quality model performance. By addressing these challenges, the paper aims to make advanced machine learning models more accessible for low-resource languages, enhancing their utility and impact across various sectors.

This paper introduces a novel lossless compression method for compressing geometric attributes of point cloud data with bits-back coding. Our method specializes in using a deep learning-based probabilistic model to estimate the Shannon's entropy of the point cloud information, i.e., geometric attributes of the 3D floating points. Once the entropy of the point cloud dataset is estimated with a convolutional variational autoencoder (CVAE), we use the learned CVAE model to compress the geometric attributes of the point clouds with the bits-back coding technique. The novelty of our method with bits-back coding specializes in utilizing the learned latent variable model of the CVAE to compress the point cloud data. By using bits-back coding, we can capture the potential correlation between the data points, such as similar spatial features like shapes and scattering regions, into the lower-dimensional latent space to further reduce the compression ratio. The main insight of our method is that we can achieve a competitive compression ratio as conventional deep learning-based approaches, while significantly reducing the overhead cost of storage and/or communicating the compression codec, making our approach more applicable in practical scenarios. Throughout comprehensive evaluations, we found that the cost for the overhead is significantly small, compared to the reduction of the compression ratio when compressing large point cloud datasets. Experiment results show that our proposed approach can achieve a compression ratio of 1.56 bit-per-point on average, which is significantly lower than the baseline approach such as Google's Draco with a compression ratio of 1.83 bit-per-point., Comment: This paper is under reviewed in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Traditional information theory provides a valuable foundation for Reinforcement Learning, particularly through representation learning and entropy maximization for agent exploration. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on modeling the uncertainty associated with RL's random variables, neglecting the inherent structure within the state and action spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel Structural Information principles-based Effective Exploration framework, namely SI2E. Structural mutual information between two variables is defined to address the single-variable limitation in structural information, and an innovative embedding principle is presented to capture dynamics-relevant state-action representations. The SI2E analyzes value differences in the agent's policy between state-action pairs and minimizes structural entropy to derive the hierarchical state-action structure, referred to as the encoding tree. Under this tree structure, value-conditional structural entropy is defined and maximized to design an intrinsic reward mechanism that avoids redundant transitions and promotes enhanced coverage in the state-action space. Theoretical connections are established between SI2E and classical information-theoretic methodologies, highlighting our framework's rationality and advantage. Comprehensive evaluations in the MiniGrid, MetaWorld, and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks demonstrate that SI2E significantly outperforms state-of-the-art exploration baselines regarding final performance and sample efficiency, with maximum improvements of 37.63% and 60.25%, respectively., Comment: 10 pages in main paper and 15 pages in appendix

The inversion of diffusion model sampling, which aims to find the corresponding initial noise of a sample, plays a critical role in various tasks. Recently, several heuristic exact inversion samplers have been proposed to address the inexact inversion issue in a training-free manner. However, the theoretical properties of these heuristic samplers remain unknown and they often exhibit mediocre sampling quality. In this paper, we introduce a generic formulation, \emph{Bidirectional Explicit Linear Multi-step} (BELM) samplers, of the exact inversion samplers, which includes all previously proposed heuristic exact inversion samplers as special cases. The BELM formulation is derived from the variable-stepsize-variable-formula linear multi-step method via integrating a bidirectional explicit constraint. We highlight this bidirectional explicit constraint is the key of mathematically exact inversion. We systematically investigate the Local Truncation Error (LTE) within the BELM framework and show that the existing heuristic designs of exact inversion samplers yield sub-optimal LTE. Consequently, we propose the Optimal BELM (O-BELM) sampler through the LTE minimization approach. We conduct additional analysis to substantiate the theoretical stability and global convergence property of the proposed optimal sampler. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our O-BELM sampler establishes the exact inversion property while achieving high-quality sampling. Additional experiments in image editing and image interpolation highlight the extensive potential of applying O-BELM in varying applications., Comment: accepted paper by NeurIPS

Scientific discovery contributes largely to human society's prosperity, and recent progress shows that LLMs could potentially catalyze this process. However, it is still unclear whether LLMs can discover novel and valid hypotheses in chemistry. In this work, we investigate this central research question: Can LLMs automatically discover novel and valid chemistry research hypotheses given only a chemistry research background (consisting of a research question and/or a background survey), without limitation on the domain of the research question? After extensive discussions with chemistry experts, we propose an assumption that a majority of chemistry hypotheses can be resulted from a research background and several inspirations. With this key insight, we break the central question into three smaller fundamental questions. In brief, they are: (1) given a background question, whether LLMs can retrieve good inspirations; (2) with background and inspirations, whether LLMs can lead to hypothesis; and (3) whether LLMs can identify good hypotheses to rank them higher. To investigate these questions, we construct a benchmark consisting of 51 chemistry papers published in Nature, Science, or a similar level in 2024 (all papers are only available online since 2024). Every paper is divided by chemistry PhD students into three components: background, inspirations, and hypothesis. The goal is to rediscover the hypothesis, given only the background and a large randomly selected chemistry literature corpus consisting the ground truth inspiration papers, with LLMs trained with data up to 2023. We also develop an LLM-based multi-agent framework that leverages the assumption, consisting of three stages reflecting the three smaller questions. The proposed method can rediscover many hypotheses with very high similarity with the ground truth ones, covering the main innovations., Comment: Code and Benchmark are available at https://github.com/ZonglinY/MOOSE-Chem.git

Deep Generative Models (DGMs) have rapidly advanced in recent years, becoming essential tools in various fields due to their ability to learn complex data distributions and generate synthetic data. Their importance in transportation research is increasingly recognized, particularly for applications like traffic data generation, prediction, and feature extraction. This paper offers a comprehensive introduction and tutorial on DGMs, with a focus on their applications in transportation. It begins with an overview of generative models, followed by detailed explanations of fundamental models, a systematic review of the literature, and practical tutorial code to aid implementation. The paper also discusses current challenges and opportunities, highlighting how these models can be effectively utilized and further developed in transportation research. This paper serves as a valuable reference, guiding researchers and practitioners from foundational knowledge to advanced applications of DGMs in transportation research., Comment: 64 pages, 21 figures, 4 tables

The latent space of image generative models is a multi-dimensional space of compressed hidden visual knowledge. Its entity captivates computer scientists, digital artists, and media scholars alike. Latent space has become an aesthetic category in AI art, inspiring artistic techniques such as the latent space walk, exemplified by the works of Mario Klingemann and others. It is also viewed as cultural snapshots, encoding rich representations of our visual world. This paper proposes a double view of the latent space, as a multi-dimensional archive of culture and as a multi-dimensional space of potentiality. The paper discusses disentanglement as a method to elucidate the double nature of the space and as an interpretative direction to exploit its organization in human terms. The paper compares the role of disentanglement as potentiality to that of conditioning, as imagination, and confronts this interpretation with the philosophy of Deleuzian potentiality and Hume's imagination. Lastly, this paper notes the difference between traditional generative models and recent architectures., Comment: Published in xCoAx 2024, School of X's proceedings. DOI: 10.34626/2024_xcoax/classof24_002

Fairness in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models is becoming critically important, especially as decisions made by these systems impact diverse groups. In education, a vital sector for all countries, the widespread application of AI/ML systems raises specific concerns regarding fairness. Current research predominantly focuses on fairness for individual sensitive features, which limits the comprehensiveness of fairness assessments. This paper introduces FAIREDU, a novel and effective method designed to improve fairness across multiple sensitive features. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate FAIREDU effectiveness in enhancing fairness without compromising model performance. The results demonstrate that FAIREDU addresses intersectionality across features such as gender, race, age, and other sensitive features, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with minimal effect on model accuracy. The paper also explores potential future research directions to enhance further the method robustness and applicability to various machine-learning models and datasets.

Multiobject tracking (MOT) is an important task in robotics, autonomous driving, and maritime surveillance. Traditional work on MOT is model-based and aims to establish algorithms in the framework of sequential Bayesian estimation. More recent methods are fully data-driven and rely on the training of neural networks. The two approaches have demonstrated advantages in certain scenarios. In particular, in problems where plenty of labeled data for the training of neural networks is available, data-driven MOT tends to have advantages compared to traditional methods. A natural thought is whether a general and efficient framework can integrate the two approaches. This paper advances a recently introduced hybrid model-based and data-driven method called neural-enhanced belief propagation (NEBP). Compared to existing work on NEBP for MOT, it introduces a novel neural architecture that can improve data association and new object initialization, two critical aspects of MOT. The proposed tracking method is leading the nuScenes LiDAR-only tracking challenge at the time of submission of this paper.

An important line of research in the field of explainability is to extract a small subset of crucial rationales from the full input. The most widely used criterion for rationale extraction is the maximum mutual information (MMI) criterion. However, in certain datasets, there are spurious features non-causally correlated with the label and also get high mutual information, complicating the loss landscape of MMI. Although some penalty-based methods have been developed to penalize the spurious features (e.g., invariance penalty, intervention penalty, etc) to help MMI work better, these are merely remedial measures. In the optimization objectives of these methods, spurious features are still distinguished from plain noise, which hinders the discovery of causal rationales. This paper aims to develop a new criterion that treats spurious features as plain noise, allowing the model to work on datasets rich in spurious features as if it were working on clean datasets, thereby making rationale extraction easier. We theoretically observe that removing either plain noise or spurious features from the input does not alter the conditional distribution of the remaining components relative to the task label. However, significant changes in the conditional distribution occur only when causal features are eliminated. Based on this discovery, the paper proposes a criterion for \textbf{M}aximizing the \textbf{R}emaining \textbf{D}iscrepancy (MRD). Experiments on six widely used datasets show that our MRD criterion improves rationale quality (measured by the overlap with human-annotated rationales) by up to $10.4\%$ as compared to several recent competitive MMI variants. Code: \url{https://github.com/jugechengzi/Rationalization-MRD}., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2024. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2309.13391

The use of Autonomous Surface Vehicles, equipped with water quality sensors and artificial vision systems, allows for a smart and adaptive deployment in water resources environmental monitoring. This paper presents a real implementation of a vehicle prototype that to address the use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms and enhanced sensing techniques for water quality monitoring. The vehicle is fully equipped with high-quality sensors to measure water quality parameters and water depth. Furthermore, by means of a stereo-camera, it also can detect and locate macro-plastics in real environments by means of deep visual models, such as YOLOv5. In this paper, experimental results, carried out in Lago Mayor (Sevilla), has been presented as proof of the capabilities of the proposed architecture. The overall system, and the early results obtained, are expected to provide a solid example of a real platform useful for the water resource monitoring task, and to serve as a real case scenario for deploying Artificial Intelligence algorithms, such as path planning, artificial vision, etc.

This paper aims to discuss the impact of random initialization of neural networks in the neural tangent kernel (NTK) theory, which is ignored by most recent works in the NTK theory. It is well known that as the network's width tends to infinity, the neural network with random initialization converges to a Gaussian process $f^{\mathrm{GP}}$, which takes values in $L^{2}(\mathcal{X})$, where $\mathcal{X}$ is the domain of the data. In contrast, to adopt the traditional theory of kernel regression, most recent works introduced a special mirrored architecture and a mirrored (random) initialization to ensure the network's output is identically zero at initialization. Therefore, it remains a question whether the conventional setting and mirrored initialization would make wide neural networks exhibit different generalization capabilities. In this paper, we first show that the training dynamics of the gradient flow of neural networks with random initialization converge uniformly to that of the corresponding NTK regression with random initialization $f^{\mathrm{GP}}$. We then show that $\mathbf{P}(f^{\mathrm{GP}} \in [\mathcal{H}^{\mathrm{NT}}]^{s}) = 1$ for any $s < \frac{3}{d+1}$ and $\mathbf{P}(f^{\mathrm{GP}} \in [\mathcal{H}^{\mathrm{NT}}]^{s}) = 0$ for any $s \geq \frac{3}{d+1}$, where $[\mathcal{H}^{\mathrm{NT}}]^{s}$ is the real interpolation space of the RKHS $\mathcal{H}^{\mathrm{NT}}$ associated with the NTK. Consequently, the generalization error of the wide neural network trained by gradient descent is $\Omega(n^{-\frac{3}{d+3}})$, and it still suffers from the curse of dimensionality. On one hand, the result highlights the benefits of mirror initialization. On the other hand, it implies that NTK theory may not fully explain the superior performance of neural networks.

Probabilistic circuits (PCs) have emerged as a powerful framework to compactly represent probability distributions for efficient and exact probabilistic inference. It has been shown that PCs with a general directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure can be understood as a mixture of exponentially (in its height) many components, each of which is a product distribution over univariate marginals. However, existing structure learning algorithms for PCs often generate tree-structured circuits or use tree-structured circuits as intermediate steps to compress them into DAG-structured circuits. This leads to the intriguing question of whether there exists an exponential gap between DAGs and trees for the PC structure. In this paper, we provide a negative answer to this conjecture by proving that, for $n$ variables, there exists a quasi-polynomial upper bound $n^{O(\log n)}$ on the size of an equivalent tree computing the same probability distribution. On the other hand, we also show that given a depth restriction on the tree, there is a super-polynomial separation between tree and DAG-structured PCs. Our work takes an important step towards understanding the expressive power of tree-structured PCs, and our techniques may be of independent interest in the study of structure learning algorithms for PCs., Comment: This paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2024. This version uses a more accurate terminology for a complexity class, and adds a preliminary paragraph on relevant complexity classes

The unprecedented pace of machine learning research has lead to incredible advances, but also poses hard challenges. At present, the field lacks strong theoretical underpinnings, and many important achievements stem from ad hoc design choices which are hard to justify in principle and whose effectiveness often goes unexplained. Research debt is increasing and many papers are found not to be reproducible. This thesis is a survey that covers some recent work attempting to study machine learning categorically. Category theory is a branch of abstract mathematics that has found successful applications in many fields, both inside and outside mathematics. Acting as a lingua franca of mathematics and science, category theory might be able to give a unifying structure to the field of machine learning. This could solve some of the aforementioned problems. In this work, we mainly focus on the application of category theory to deep learning. Namely, we discuss the use of categorical optics to model gradient-based learning, the use of categorical algebras and integral transforms to link classical computer science to neural networks, the use of functors to link different layers of abstraction and preserve structure, and, finally, the use of string diagrams to provide detailed representations of neural network architectures., Comment: In the previous version of the survey, it was stated that the paper "Pooling Image Datasets with Multiple Covariate Shift and Imbalance" (Chytas, Lokhande, Singh) had been withdrawn by the authors. I have been informed that only an incomplete draft of the work was withdrawn after it was inadvertently uploaded. The complete work was actually published at ICLR and has never been withdrawn

This paper investigates the use of a pre-trained language model and siamese network to discern sibling relationships between text-based cybersecurity vulnerability data. The ultimate purpose of the approach presented in this paper is towards the construction of hierarchical attack models based on a set of text descriptions characterising potential/observed vulnerabilities in a given system. Due to the nature of the data, and the uncertainty sensitive environment in which the problem is presented, a practically oriented soft computing approach is necessary. Therefore, a key focus of this work is to investigate practical questions surrounding the reliability of predicted links towards the construction of such models, to which end conceptual and practical challenges and solutions associated with the proposed approach are outlined, such as dataset complexity and stability of predictions. Accordingly, the contributions of this paper focus on producing neural networks using a pre-trained language model for predicting sibling relationships between cybersecurity vulnerabilities, then outlining how to apply this capability towards the generation of hierarchical attack models. In addition, two data sampling mechanisms for tackling data complexity, and a consensus mechanism for reducing the amount of false positive predictions are outlined. Each of these approaches is compared and contrasted using empirical results from three sets of cybersecurity data to determine their effectiveness.

Nearest-neighbor search in large vector databases is crucial for various machine learning applications. This paper introduces a novel method using tensor-train (TT) low-rank tensor decomposition to efficiently represent point clouds and enable fast approximate nearest-neighbor searches. We propose a probabilistic interpretation and utilize density estimation losses like Sliced Wasserstein to train TT decompositions, resulting in robust point cloud compression. We reveal an inherent hierarchical structure within TT point clouds, facilitating efficient approximate nearest-neighbor searches. In our paper, we provide detailed insights into the methodology and conduct comprehensive comparisons with existing methods. We demonstrate its effectiveness in various scenarios, including out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problems and approximate nearest-neighbor (ANN) search tasks.

Accurate calibration of gravity adaptation zones is of great significance in fields such as underwater navigation, geophysical exploration, and marine engineering. With the increasing application of gravity field data in these areas, traditional calibration methods based on single features are becoming inadequate for capturing the complex characteristics of gravity fields and addressing the intricate interrelationships among multidimensional data. This paper proposes an attention-enhanced algorithm for gravity adaptation zone calibration. By introducing an attention mechanism, the algorithm adaptively fuses multidimensional gravity field features and dynamically assigns feature weights, effectively solving the problems of multicollinearity and redundancy inherent in traditional feature selection methods, significantly improving calibration accuracy and robustness.In addition, a large-scale gravity field dataset with over 10,000 sampling points was constructed, and Kriging interpolation was used to enhance the spatial resolution of the data, providing a reliable data foundation for model training and evaluation. We conducted both qualitative and quantitative experiments on several classical machine learning models (such as SVM, GBDT, and RF), and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves performance across these models, outperforming other traditional feature selection methods. The method proposed in this paper provides a new solution for gravity adaptation zone calibration, showing strong generalization ability and potential for application in complex environments. The code is available at \href{this link} {https://github.com/hulnifox/RF-ATTN}., Comment: 15pages

In this paper, we investigate the application of operator learning, specifically DeepONet, to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Unlike function learning methods that require training separate neural networks for each PDE, operator learning generalizes across different PDEs without retraining. We focus on the performance of DeepONet in Sobolev training, addressing two key questions: the approximation ability of deep branch and trunk networks, and the generalization error in Sobolev norms. Our findings highlight that deep branch networks offer significant performance benefits, while trunk networks are best kept simple. Moreover, standard sampling methods without adding derivative information in the encoding part are sufficient for minimizing generalization error in Sobolev training, based on generalization analysis. This paper fills a theoretical gap by providing error estimations for a wide range of physics-informed machine learning models and applications.

This paper presents a novel approach to credit risk prediction by employing Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNNs) to assess the creditworthiness of borrowers. Leveraging the power of big data and artificial intelligence, the proposed method addresses the challenges faced by traditional credit risk assessment models, particularly in handling imbalanced datasets and extracting meaningful features from complex relationships. The paper begins by transforming raw borrower data into graph-structured data, where borrowers and their relationships are represented as nodes and edges, respectively. A classic subgraph convolutional model is then applied to extract local features, followed by the introduction of a hybrid GCNN model that integrates both local and global convolutional operators to capture a comprehensive representation of node features. The hybrid model incorporates an attention mechanism to adaptively select features, mitigating issues of over-smoothing and insufficient feature consideration. The study demonstrates the potential of GCNNs in improving the accuracy of credit risk prediction, offering a robust solution for financial institutions seeking to enhance their lending decision-making processes.

This paper systematically explores neural functional networks (NFN) for transformer architectures. NFN are specialized neural networks that treat the weights, gradients, or sparsity patterns of a deep neural network (DNN) as input data and have proven valuable for tasks such as learnable optimizers, implicit data representations, and weight editing. While NFN have been extensively developed for MLP and CNN, no prior work has addressed their design for transformers, despite the importance of transformers in modern deep learning. This paper aims to address this gap by providing a systematic study of NFN for transformers. We first determine the maximal symmetric group of the weights in a multi-head attention module as well as a necessary and sufficient condition under which two sets of hyperparameters of the multi-head attention module define the same function. We then define the weight space of transformer architectures and its associated group action, which leads to the design principles for NFN in transformers. Based on these, we introduce Transformer-NFN, an NFN that is equivariant under this group action. Additionally, we release a dataset of more than 125,000 Transformers model checkpoints trained on two datasets with two different tasks, providing a benchmark for evaluating Transformer-NFN and encouraging further research on transformer training and performance.

Peer review is the quality assessment of a manuscript by one or more peer experts. Papers are submitted by the authors to scientific venues, and these papers must be reviewed by peers or other authors. The meta-reviewers then gather the peer reviews, assess them, and create a meta-review and decision for each manuscript. As the number of papers submitted to these venues has grown in recent years, it becomes increasingly challenging for meta-reviewers to collect these peer evaluations on time while still maintaining the quality that is the primary goal of meta-review creation. In this paper, we address two peer review aggregation challenges a meta-reviewer faces: paper acceptance decision-making and meta-review generation. Firstly, we propose to automate the process of acceptance decision prediction by applying traditional machine learning algorithms. We use pre-trained word embedding techniques BERT to process the reviews written in natural language text. For the meta-review generation, we propose a transfer learning model based on the T5 model. Experimental results show that BERT is more effective than the other word embedding techniques, and the recommendation score is an important feature for the acceptance decision prediction. In addition, we figure out that fine-tuned T5 outperforms other inference models. Our proposed system takes peer reviews and other relevant features as input to produce a meta-review and make a judgment on whether or not the paper should be accepted. In addition, experimental results show that the acceptance decision prediction system of our task outperforms the existing models, and the meta-review generation task shows significantly improved scores compared to the existing models. For the statistical test, we utilize the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to assess whether there is a statistically significant improvement between paired observations.

In this paper, we make a case for a proxy for large language models which has explicit support for cost-saving optimizations. We design LLMProxy, which supports three key optimizations: model selection, context management, and caching. These optimizations present tradeoffs in terms of cost, inference time, and response quality, which applications can navigate through our high level, bidirectional interface. As a case study, we implement a WhatsApp-based Q&A service that uses LLMProxy to provide a rich set of features to the users. This service is deployed on a small scale (100+ users) leveraging the cloud; it has been operational for 15+ weeks and users have asked 1400+ questions so far. We report on the experiences of running this service as well as microbenchmark the specific benefits of the various cost-optimizations we present in this paper.

This paper investigates dual sourcing problems with supply mode dependent failure rates, particularly relevant in managing spare parts for downtime-critical assets. To enhance resilience, businesses increasingly adopt dual sourcing strategies using both conventional and additive manufacturing techniques. This paper explores how these strategies can optimise sourcing by addressing variations in part properties and failure rates. A significant challenge is the distinct failure characteristics of parts produced by these methods, which influence future demand. To tackle this, we propose a new iterative heuristic and several reinforcement learning techniques combined with an endogenous parameterised learning (EPL) approach. This EPL approach - compatible with any learning method - allows a single policy to handle various input parameters for multiple items. In a stylised setting, our best policy achieves an average optimality gap of 0.4%. In a case study within the energy sector, our policies outperform the baseline in 91.1% of instances, yielding average cost savings up to 22.6%.

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the tokenization techniques employed by state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) and their implications on the cost and availability of services across different languages, especially low resource languages. The analysis considers multiple LLMs, including GPT-4 (using cl100k_base embeddings), GPT-3 (with p50k_base embeddings), and DaVinci (employing r50k_base embeddings), as well as the widely used BERT base tokenizer. The study evaluates the tokenization variability observed across these models and investigates the challenges of linguistic representation in subword tokenization. The research underscores the importance of fostering linguistically-aware development practices, especially for languages that are traditionally under-resourced. Moreover, this paper introduces case studies that highlight the real-world implications of tokenization choices, particularly in the context of electronic health record (EHR) systems. This research aims to promote generalizable Internationalization (I18N) practices in the development of AI services in this domain and beyond, with a strong emphasis on inclusivity, particularly for languages traditionally underrepresented in AI applications.

Semantic communication is a promising technology to improve communication efficiency by transmitting only the semantic information of the source data. However, traditional semantic communication methods primarily focus on data reconstruction tasks, which may not be efficient for emerging generative tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. To address this limitation, this paper develops a novel generative semantic communication framework for TTS synthesis, leveraging generative artificial intelligence technologies. Firstly, we utilize a pre-trained large speech model called WavLM and the residual vector quantization method to construct two semantic knowledge bases (KBs) at the transmitter and receiver, respectively. The KB at the transmitter enables effective semantic extraction, while the KB at the receiver facilitates lifelike speech synthesis. Then, we employ a transformer encoder and a diffusion model to achieve efficient semantic coding without introducing significant communication overhead. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that our framework achieves much higher fidelity for the generated speech than four baselines, in both cases with additive white Gaussian noise channel and Rayleigh fading channel., Comment: The paper has been accepted by IEEE Globecom Workshop