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2501.17343
Post-Training Quantization for 3D Medical Image Segmentation: A Practical Study on Real Inference Engines
cs.CV cs.AI
Quantizing deep neural networks ,reducing the precision (bit-width) of their computations, can remarkably decrease memory usage and accelerate processing, making these models more suitable for large-scale medical imaging applications with limited computational resources. However, many existing methods studied "fake quantization", which simulates lower precision operations during inference, but does not actually reduce model size or improve real-world inference speed. Moreover, the potential of deploying real 3D low-bit quantization on modern GPUs is still unexplored. In this study, we introduce a real post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that successfully implements true 8-bit quantization on state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D medical segmentation models, i.e., U-Net, SegResNet, SwinUNETR, nnU-Net, UNesT, TransUNet, ST-UNet,and VISTA3D. Our approach involves two main steps. First, we use TensorRT to perform fake quantization for both weights and activations with unlabeled calibration dataset. Second, we convert this fake quantization into real quantization via TensorRT engine on real GPUs, resulting in real-world reductions in model size and inference latency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively performs 8-bit quantization on GPUs without sacrificing model performance. This advancement enables the deployment of efficient deep learning models in medical imaging applications where computational resources are constrained. The code and models have been released, including U-Net, TransUNet pretrained on the BTCV dataset for abdominal (13-label) segmentation, UNesT pretrained on the Whole Brain Dataset for whole brain (133-label) segmentation, and nnU-Net, SegResNet, SwinUNETR and VISTA3D pretrained on TotalSegmentator V2 for full body (104-label) segmentation. https://github.com/hrlblab/PTQ.
2501.17345
Testing Conditional Mean Independence Using Generative Neural Networks
stat.ML cs.LG
Conditional mean independence (CMI) testing is crucial for statistical tasks including model determination and variable importance evaluation. In this work, we introduce a novel population CMI measure and a bootstrap-based testing procedure that utilizes deep generative neural networks to estimate the conditional mean functions involved in the population measure. The test statistic is thoughtfully constructed to ensure that even slowly decaying nonparametric estimation errors do not affect the asymptotic accuracy of the test. Our approach demonstrates strong empirical performance in scenarios with high-dimensional covariates and response variable, can handle multivariate responses, and maintains nontrivial power against local alternatives outside an $n^{-1/2}$ neighborhood of the null hypothesis. We also use numerical simulations and real-world imaging data applications to highlight the efficacy and versatility of our testing procedure.
2501.17347
Deep-and-Wide Learning: Enhancing Data-Driven Inference via Synergistic Learning of Inter- and Intra-Data Representations
cs.LG cs.AI
Advancements in deep learning are revolutionizing science and engineering. The immense success of deep learning is largely due to its ability to extract essential high-dimensional (HD) features from input data and make inference decisions based on this information. However, current deep neural network (DNN) models face several challenges, such as the requirements of extensive amounts of data and computational resources. Here, we introduce a new learning scheme, referred to as deep-and-wide learning (DWL), to systematically capture features not only within individual input data (intra-data features) but also across the data (inter-data features). Furthermore, we propose a dual-interactive-channel network (D-Net) to realize the DWL, which leverages our Bayesian formulation of low-dimensional (LD) inter-data feature extraction and its synergistic interaction with the conventional HD representation of the dataset, for substantially enhanced computational efficiency and inference. The proposed technique has been applied to data across various disciplines for both classification and regression tasks. Our results demonstrate that DWL surpasses state-of-the-art DNNs in accuracy by a substantial margin with limited training data and improves the computational efficiency by order(s) of magnitude. The proposed DWL strategy dramatically alters the data-driven learning techniques, including emerging large foundation models, and sheds significant insights into the evolving field of AI.
2501.17348
Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systems
cs.CL cs.HC
While theories of discourse and cognitive science have long recognized the value of unhurried pacing, recent dialogue research tends to minimize friction in conversational systems. Yet, frictionless dialogue risks fostering uncritical reliance on AI outputs, which can obscure implicit assumptions and lead to unintended consequences. To meet this challenge, we propose integrating positive friction into conversational AI, which promotes user reflection on goals, critical thinking on system response, and subsequent re-conditioning of AI systems. We hypothesize systems can improve goal alignment, modeling of user mental states, and task success by deliberately slowing down conversations in strategic moments to ask questions, reveal assumptions, or pause. We present an ontology of positive friction and collect expert human annotations on multi-domain and embodied goal-oriented corpora. Experiments on these corpora, along with simulated interactions using state-of-the-art systems, suggest incorporating friction not only fosters accountable decision-making, but also enhances machine understanding of user beliefs and goals, and increases task success rates.
2501.17349
An Efficient Numerical Function Optimization Framework for Constrained Nonlinear Robotic Problems
cs.RO math.OC
This paper presents a numerical function optimization framework designed for constrained optimization problems in robotics. The tool is designed with real-time considerations and is suitable for online trajectory and control input optimization problems. The proposed framework does not require any analytical representation of the problem and works with constrained block-box optimization functions. The method combines first-order gradient-based line search algorithms with constraint prioritization through nullspace projections onto constraint Jacobian space. The tool is implemented in C++ and provided online for community use, along with some numerical and robotic example implementations presented in this paper.
2501.17351
Realtime Limb Trajectory Optimization for Humanoid Running Through Centroidal Angular Momentum Dynamics
cs.RO
One of the essential aspects of humanoid robot running is determining the limb-swinging trajectories. During the flight phases, where the ground reaction forces are not available for regulation, the limb swinging trajectories are significant for the stability of the next stance phase. Due to the conservation of angular momentum, improper leg and arm swinging results in highly tilted and unsustainable body configurations at the next stance phase landing. In such cases, the robotic system fails to maintain locomotion independent of the stability of the center of mass trajectories. This problem is more apparent for fast and high flight time trajectories. This paper proposes a real-time nonlinear limb trajectory optimization problem for humanoid running. The optimization problem is tested on two different humanoid robot models, and the generated trajectories are verified using a running algorithm for both robots in a simulation environment.
2501.17354
Fundamental Computational Limits in Pursuing Invariant Causal Prediction and Invariance-Guided Regularization
math.ST cs.LG stat.ME stat.ML stat.TH
Pursuing invariant prediction from heterogeneous environments opens the door to learning causality in a purely data-driven way and has several applications in causal discovery and robust transfer learning. However, existing methods such as ICP [Peters et al., 2016] and EILLS [Fan et al., 2024] that can attain sample-efficient estimation are based on exponential time algorithms. In this paper, we show that such a problem is intrinsically hard in computation: the decision problem, testing whether a non-trivial prediction-invariant solution exists across two environments, is NP-hard even for the linear causal relationship. In the world where P$\neq$NP, our results imply that the estimation error rate can be arbitrarily slow using any computationally efficient algorithm. This suggests that pursuing causality is fundamentally harder than detecting associations when no prior assumption is pre-offered. Given there is almost no hope of computational improvement under the worst case, this paper proposes a method capable of attaining both computationally and statistically efficient estimation under additional conditions. Furthermore, our estimator is a distributionally robust estimator with an ellipse-shaped uncertain set where more uncertainty is placed on spurious directions than invariant directions, resulting in a smooth interpolation between the most predictive solution and the causal solution by varying the invariance hyper-parameter. Non-asymptotic results and empirical applications support the claim.
2501.17356
On the Coexistence and Ensembling of Watermarks
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CY
Watermarking, the practice of embedding imperceptible information into media such as images, videos, audio, and text, is essential for intellectual property protection, content provenance and attribution. The growing complexity of digital ecosystems necessitates watermarks for different uses to be embedded in the same media. However, to detect and decode all watermarks, they need to coexist well with one another. We perform the first study of coexistence of deep image watermarking methods and, contrary to intuition, we find that various open-source watermarks can coexist with only minor impacts on image quality and decoding robustness. The coexistence of watermarks also opens the avenue for ensembling watermarking methods. We show how ensembling can increase the overall message capacity and enable new trade-offs between capacity, accuracy, robustness and image quality, without needing to retrain the base models.
2501.17361
The M-factor: A Novel Metric for Evaluating Neural Architecture Search in Resource-Constrained Environments
cs.LG cs.AI
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to automate the design of deep neural networks. However, existing NAS techniques often focus on maximising accuracy, neglecting model efficiency. This limitation restricts their use in resource-constrained environments like mobile devices and edge computing systems. Moreover, current evaluation metrics prioritise performance over efficiency, lacking a balanced approach for assessing architectures suitable for constrained scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the M-factor, a novel metric combining model accuracy and size. Four diverse NAS techniques are compared: Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning, Regularised Evolution, Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE), and Multi-trial Random Search. These techniques represent different NAS paradigms, providing a comprehensive evaluation of the M-factor. The study analyses ResNet configurations on the CIFAR-10 dataset, with a search space of 19,683 configurations. Experiments reveal that Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning and Regularised Evolution achieved M-factor values of 0.84 and 0.82, respectively, while Multi-trial Random Search attained 0.75, and TPE reached 0.67. Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning exhibited performance changes after 39 trials, while Regularised Evolution optimised within 20 trials. The research investigates the optimisation dynamics and trade-offs between accuracy and model size for each strategy. Findings indicate that, in some cases, random search performed comparably to more complex algorithms when assessed using the M-factor. These results highlight how the M-factor addresses the limitations of existing metrics by guiding NAS towards balanced architectures, offering valuable insights for selecting strategies in scenarios requiring both performance and efficiency.
2501.17366
Forecasting S&P 500 Using LSTM Models
cs.LG cs.AI q-fin.CP q-fin.TR
With the volatile and complex nature of financial data influenced by external factors, forecasting the stock market is challenging. Traditional models such as ARIMA and GARCH perform well with linear data but struggle with non-linear dependencies. Machine learning and deep learning models, particularly Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, address these challenges by capturing intricate patterns and long-term dependencies. This report compares ARIMA and LSTM models in predicting the S&P 500 index, a major financial benchmark. Using historical price data and technical indicators, we evaluated these models using Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). The ARIMA model showed reasonable performance with an MAE of 462.1, RMSE of 614, and 89.8 percent accuracy, effectively capturing short-term trends but limited by its linear assumptions. The LSTM model, leveraging sequential processing capabilities, outperformed ARIMA with an MAE of 369.32, RMSE of 412.84, and 92.46 percent accuracy, capturing both short- and long-term dependencies. Notably, the LSTM model without additional features performed best, achieving an MAE of 175.9, RMSE of 207.34, and 96.41 percent accuracy, showcasing its ability to handle market data efficiently. Accurately predicting stock movements is crucial for investment strategies, risk assessments, and market stability. Our findings confirm the potential of deep learning models in handling volatile financial data compared to traditional ones. The results highlight the effectiveness of LSTM and suggest avenues for further improvements. This study provides insights into financial forecasting, offering a comparative analysis of ARIMA and LSTM while outlining their strengths and limitations.
2501.17370
Breaking the $\log(1/\Delta_2)$ Barrier: Better Batched Best Arm Identification with Adaptive Grids
cs.LG
We investigate the problem of batched best arm identification in multi-armed bandits, where we aim to identify the best arm from a set of $n$ arms while minimizing both the number of samples and batches. We introduce an algorithm that achieves near-optimal sample complexity and features an instance-sensitive batch complexity, which breaks the $\log(1/\Delta_2)$ barrier. The main contribution of our algorithm is a novel sample allocation scheme that effectively balances exploration and exploitation for batch sizes. Experimental results indicate that our approach is more batch-efficient across various setups. We also extend this framework to the problem of batched best arm identification in linear bandits and achieve similar improvements.
2501.17372
Data-Informed Model Complexity Metric for Optimizing Symbolic Regression Models
cs.LG cs.NE
Choosing models from a well-fitted evolved population that generalizes beyond training data is difficult. We introduce a pragmatic method to estimate model complexity using Hessian rank for post-processing selection. Complexity is approximated by averaging the model output Hessian rank across a few points (N=3), offering efficient and accurate rank estimates. This method aligns model selection with input data complexity, calculated using intrinsic dimensionality (ID) estimators. Using the StackGP system, we develop symbolic regression models for the Penn Machine Learning Benchmark and employ twelve scikit-dimension library methods to estimate ID, aligning model expressiveness with dataset ID. Our data-informed complexity metric finds the ideal complexity window, balancing model expressiveness and accuracy, enhancing generalizability without bias common in methods reliant on user-defined parameters, such as parsimony pressure in weight selection.
2501.17374
A Geometric Perspective for High-Dimensional Multiplex Graphs
cs.LG cs.AI
High-dimensional multiplex graphs are characterized by their high number of complementary and divergent dimensions. The existence of multiple hierarchical latent relations between the graph dimensions poses significant challenges to embedding methods. In particular, the geometric distortions that might occur in the representational space have been overlooked in the literature. This work studies the problem of high-dimensional multiplex graph embedding from a geometric perspective. We find that the node representations reside on highly curved manifolds, thus rendering their exploitation more challenging for downstream tasks. Moreover, our study reveals that increasing the number of graph dimensions can cause further distortions to the highly curved manifolds. To address this problem, we propose a novel multiplex graph embedding method that harnesses hierarchical dimension embedding and Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks. The proposed approach hierarchically extracts hyperbolic node representations that reside on Riemannian manifolds while gradually learning fewer and more expressive latent dimensions of the multiplex graph. Experimental results on real-world high-dimensional multiplex graphs show that the synergy between hierarchical and hyperbolic embeddings incurs much fewer geometric distortions and brings notable improvements over state-of-the-art approaches on downstream tasks.
2501.17377
ASAP: Learning Generalizable Online Bin Packing via Adaptive Selection After Pruning
cs.LG cs.AI
Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved promising results in solving online 3D Bin Packing Problems (3D-BPP). However, these DRL-based policies may perform poorly on new instances due to distribution shift. Besides generalization, we also consider adaptation, completely overlooked by previous work, which aims at rapidly finetuning these policies to a new test distribution. To tackle both generalization and adaptation issues, we propose Adaptive Selection After Pruning (ASAP), which decomposes a solver's decision-making into two policies, one for pruning and one for selection. The role of the pruning policy is to remove inherently bad actions, which allows the selection policy to choose among the remaining most valuable actions. To learn these policies, we propose a training scheme based on a meta-learning phase of both policies followed by a finetuning phase of the sole selection policy to rapidly adapt it to a test distribution. Our experiments demonstrate that ASAP exhibits excellent generalization and adaptation capabilities on in-distribution and out-of-distribution instances under both discrete and continuous setup.
2501.17379
Stable Tree Labelling for Accelerating Distance Queries on Dynamic Road Networks
cs.DS cs.DB
Finding the shortest-path distance between two arbitrary vertices is an important problem in road networks. Due to real-time traffic conditions, road networks undergo dynamic changes all the time. Current state-of-the-art methods incrementally maintain a distance labelling based on a hierarchy among vertices to support efficient distance computation. However, their labelling sizes are often large and cannot be efficiently maintained. To combat these issues, we present a simple yet efficient labelling method, namely \emph{Stable Tree Labelling} (STL), for answering distance queries on dynamic road networks. We observe that the properties of an underlying hierarchy play an important role in improving and balancing query and update performance. Thus, we introduce the notion of \emph{stable tree hierarchy} which lays the ground for developing efficient maintenance algorithms on dynamic road networks. Based on stable tree hierarchy, STL can be efficiently constructed as a 2-hop labelling. A crucial ingredient of STL is to only store distances within subgraphs in labels, rather than distances in the entire graph, which restricts the labels affected by dynamic changes. We further develop two efficient maintenance algorithms upon STL: \emph{Label Search algorithm} and \emph{Pareto Search algorithm}. Label Search algorithm identifies affected ancestors in a stable tree hierarchy and performs efficient searches to update labels from those ancestors. Pareto Search algorithm explores the interaction between search spaces of different ancestors, and combines searches from multiple ancestors into only two searches for each update, eliminating duplicate graph traversals. The experiments show that our algorithms significantly outperform state-of-the-art dynamic methods in maintaining the labelling and query processing, while requiring an order of magnitude less space.
2501.17381
Do We Really Need to Design New Byzantine-robust Aggregation Rules?
cs.CR cs.DC cs.LG
Federated learning (FL) allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a global machine learning model through a server, without exchanging their private training data. However, the decentralized aspect of FL makes it susceptible to poisoning attacks, where malicious clients can manipulate the global model by sending altered local model updates. To counter these attacks, a variety of aggregation rules designed to be resilient to Byzantine failures have been introduced. Nonetheless, these methods can still be vulnerable to sophisticated attacks or depend on unrealistic assumptions about the server. In this paper, we demonstrate that there is no need to design new Byzantine-robust aggregation rules; instead, FL can be secured by enhancing the robustness of well-established aggregation rules. To this end, we present FoundationFL, a novel defense mechanism against poisoning attacks. FoundationFL involves the server generating synthetic updates after receiving local model updates from clients. It then applies existing Byzantine-robust foundational aggregation rules, such as Trimmed-mean or Median, to combine clients' model updates with the synthetic ones. We theoretically establish the convergence performance of FoundationFL under Byzantine settings. Comprehensive experiments across several real-world datasets validate the efficiency of our FoundationFL method.
2501.17384
A Dual-Agent Adversarial Framework for Robust Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Recently, empowered with the powerful capabilities of neural networks, reinforcement learning (RL) has successfully tackled numerous challenging tasks. However, while these models demonstrate enhanced decision-making abilities, they are increasingly prone to overfitting. For instance, a trained RL model often fails to generalize to even minor variations of the same task, such as a change in background color or other minor semantic differences. To address this issue, we propose a dual-agent adversarial policy learning framework, which allows agents to spontaneously learn the underlying semantics without introducing any human prior knowledge. Specifically, our framework involves a game process between two agents: each agent seeks to maximize the impact of perturbing on the opponent's policy by producing representation differences for the same state, while maintaining its own stability against such perturbations. This interaction encourages agents to learn generalizable policies, capable of handling irrelevant features from the high-dimensional observations. Extensive experimental results on the Procgen benchmark demonstrate that the adversarial process significantly improves the generalization performance of both agents, while also being applied to various RL algorithms, e.g., Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). With the adversarial framework, the RL agent outperforms the baseline methods by a significant margin, especially in hard-level tasks, marking a significant step forward in the generalization capabilities of deep reinforcement learning.
2501.17386
Context-Aware Semantic Recomposition Mechanism for Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Context-aware processing mechanisms have increasingly become a critical area of exploration for improving the semantic and contextual capabilities of language generation models. The Context-Aware Semantic Recomposition Mechanism (CASRM) was introduced as a novel framework designed to address limitations in coherence, contextual adaptability, and error propagation in large-scale text generation tasks. Through the integration of dynamically generated context vectors and attention modulation layers, CASRM enhances the alignment between token-level representations and broader contextual dependencies. Experimental evaluations demonstrated significant improvements in semantic coherence across multiple domains, including technical, conversational, and narrative text. The ability to adapt to unseen domains and ambiguous inputs was evaluated using a diverse set of test scenarios, highlighting the robustness of the proposed mechanism. A detailed computational analysis revealed that while CASRM introduces additional processing overhead, the gains in linguistic precision and contextual relevance outweigh the marginal increase in complexity. The framework also successfully mitigates error propagation in sequential tasks, improving performance in dialogue continuation and multi-step text synthesis. Additional investigations into token-level attention distribution emphasized the dynamic focus shifts enabled through context-aware enhancements. The findings suggest that CASRM offers a scalable and flexible solution for integrating contextual intelligence into existing language model architectures.
2501.17387
Assessing the Capability of YOLO- and Transformer-based Object Detectors for Real-time Weed Detection
cs.CV
Spot spraying represents an efficient and sustainable method for reducing the amount of pesticides, particularly herbicides, used in agricultural fields. To achieve this, it is of utmost importance to reliably differentiate between crops and weeds, and even between individual weed species in situ and under real-time conditions. To assess suitability for real-time application, different object detection models that are currently state-of-the-art are compared. All available models of YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and RT-DETR are trained and evaluated with images from a real field situation. The images are separated into two distinct datasets: In the initial data set, each species of plants is trained individually; in the subsequent dataset, a distinction is made between monocotyledonous weeds, dicotyledonous weeds, and three chosen crops. The results demonstrate that while all models perform equally well in the metrics evaluated, the YOLOv9 models, particularly the YOLOv9s and YOLOv9e, stand out in terms of their strong recall scores (66.58 % and 72.36 %), as well as mAP50 (73.52 % and 79.86 %), and mAP50-95 (43.82 % and 47.00 %) in dataset 2. However, the RT-DETR models, especially RT-DETR-l, excel in precision with reaching 82.44 \% on dataset 1 and 81.46 % in dataset 2, making them particularly suitable for scenarios where minimizing false positives is critical. In particular, the smallest variants of the YOLO models (YOLOv8n, YOLOv9t, and YOLOv10n) achieve substantially faster inference times down to 7.58 ms for dataset 2 on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU for analyzing one frame, while maintaining competitive accuracy, highlighting their potential for deployment in resource-constrained embedded computing devices as typically used in productive setups.
2501.17391
Learning Free Token Reduction for Multi-Modal LLM
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a range of multimodal tasks; however, their practical deployment is often constrained by high computational costs and prolonged inference times. Since the vision modality typically carries more information than the text modality, compressing visual prompts offers a promising solution to alleviate these challenges. Existing approaches predominantly focus on refining model architectures or directly reducing the number of visual tokens. However, these methods often compromise inference performance due to a lack of consideration for the unique spatial and temporal characteristics of visual data. In this work, we propose a token compression paradigm that operates on both spatial and temporal dimensions. Our approach includes a learning-free, plug-and-play compression pipeline that can be seamlessly integrated into most Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) frameworks. By leveraging this method, we enhance the model inference capability while simultaneously reducing its computational cost. Experimental results on the Video-QA task demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showcasing significant improvements in efficiency without sacrificing performance.
2501.17392
Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning over Ring-All-Reduce Distributed Computing
cs.CR cs.LG
Federated learning (FL) has gained attention as a distributed learning paradigm for its data privacy benefits and accelerated convergence through parallel computation. Traditional FL relies on a server-client (SC) architecture, where a central server coordinates multiple clients to train a global model, but this approach faces scalability challenges due to server communication bottlenecks. To overcome this, the ring-all-reduce (RAR) architecture has been introduced, eliminating the central server and achieving bandwidth optimality. However, the tightly coupled nature of RAR's ring topology exposes it to unique Byzantine attack risks not present in SC-based FL. Despite its potential, designing Byzantine-robust RAR-based FL algorithms remains an open problem. To address this gap, we propose BRACE (Byzantine-robust ring-all-reduce), the first RAR-based FL algorithm to achieve both Byzantine robustness and communication efficiency. We provide theoretical guarantees for the convergence of BRACE under Byzantine attacks, demonstrate its bandwidth efficiency, and validate its practical effectiveness through experiments. Our work offers a foundational understanding of Byzantine-robust RAR-based FL design.
2501.17393
Intensional Inheritance Between Concepts: An Information-Theoretic Interpretation
cs.AI cs.IT math.IT
This paper addresses the problem of formalizing and quantifying the concept of "intensional inheritance" between two concepts. We begin by conceiving the intensional inheritance of $W$ from $F$ as the amount of information the proposition "x is $F$ " provides about the proposition "x is $W$. To flesh this out, we consider concepts $F$ and $W$ defined by sets of properties $\left\{F_{1}, F_{2}, \ldots, F_{n}\right\}$ and $\left\{W_{1}, W_{2}, \ldots, W_{m}\right\}$ with associated degrees $\left\{d_{1}, d_{2}, \ldots, d_{n}\right\}$ and $\left\{e_{1}, e_{2}, \ldots, e_{m}\right\}$, respectively, where the properties may overlap. We then derive formulas for the intensional inheritance using both Shannon information theory and algorithmic information theory, incorporating interaction information among properties. We examine a special case where all properties are mutually exclusive and calculate the intensional inheritance in this case in both frameworks. We also derive expressions for $P(W \mid F)$ based on the mutual information formula. Finally we consider the relationship between intensional inheritance and conventional set-theoretic "extensional" inheritance, concluding that in our information-theoretic framework, extensional inheritance emerges as a special case of intensional inheritance.
2501.17396
Poisoning Attacks and Defenses to Federated Unlearning
cs.CR cs.DC cs.LG
Federated learning allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model with the assistance of a server. However, its distributed nature makes it susceptible to poisoning attacks, where malicious clients can compromise the global model by sending harmful local model updates to the server. To unlearn an accurate global model from a poisoned one after identifying malicious clients, federated unlearning has been introduced. Yet, current research on federated unlearning has primarily concentrated on its effectiveness and efficiency, overlooking the security challenges it presents. In this work, we bridge the gap via proposing BadUnlearn, the first poisoning attacks targeting federated unlearning. In BadUnlearn, malicious clients send specifically designed local model updates to the server during the unlearning process, aiming to ensure that the resulting unlearned model remains poisoned. To mitigate these threats, we propose UnlearnGuard, a robust federated unlearning framework that is provably robust against both existing poisoning attacks and our BadUnlearn. The core concept of UnlearnGuard is for the server to estimate the clients' local model updates during the unlearning process and employ a filtering strategy to verify the accuracy of these estimations. Theoretically, we prove that the model unlearned through UnlearnGuard closely resembles one obtained by train-from-scratch. Empirically, we show that BadUnlearn can effectively corrupt existing federated unlearning methods, while UnlearnGuard remains secure against poisoning attacks.
2501.17397
Leveraging In-Context Learning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Automatic Question Generation in Educational Domains
cs.CL
Question generation in education is a time-consuming and cognitively demanding task, as it requires creating questions that are both contextually relevant and pedagogically sound. Current automated question generation methods often generate questions that are out of context. In this work, we explore advanced techniques for automated question generation in educational contexts, focusing on In-Context Learning (ICL), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and a novel Hybrid Model that merges both methods. We implement GPT-4 for ICL using few-shot examples and BART with a retrieval module for RAG. The Hybrid Model combines RAG and ICL to address these issues and improve question quality. Evaluation is conducted using automated metrics, followed by human evaluation metrics. Our results show that both the ICL approach and the Hybrid Model consistently outperform other methods, including baseline models, by generating more contextually accurate and relevant questions.
2501.17399
MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMs
cs.CL cs.AI
We present MultiChallenge, a pioneering benchmark evaluating large language models (LLMs) on conducting multi-turn conversations with human users, a crucial yet underexamined capability for their applications. MultiChallenge identifies four categories of challenges in multi-turn conversations that are not only common and realistic among current human-LLM interactions, but are also challenging to all current frontier LLMs. All 4 challenges require accurate instruction-following, context allocation, and in-context reasoning at the same time. We also develop LLM as judge with instance-level rubrics to facilitate an automatic evaluation method with fair agreement with experienced human raters. Despite achieving near-perfect scores on existing multi-turn evaluation benchmarks, all frontier models have less than 50% accuracy on MultiChallenge, with the top-performing Claude 3.5 Sonnet (June 2024) achieving just a 41.4% average accuracy.
2501.17400
A Model-Free Data-Driven Algorithm for Continuous-Time Control
math.OC cs.SY eess.SY
Presented is an algorithm to synthesize an infinite-horizon LQR optimal feedback controller for continuous-time systems. The algorithm does not require knowledge of the system dynamics, but instead uses only a finite-length sampling of (possibly suboptimal) input-output data. The algorithm is based on a constrained optimization problem that enforces a necessary condition on the dynamics of the optimal value function along an arbitrary trajectory. This paper presents the derivation as well as shows examples applied to both linear and nonlinear systems inspired by air vehicles.
2501.17403
General Scene Adaptation for Vision-and-Language Navigation
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks mainly evaluate agents based on one-time execution of individual instructions across multiple environments, aiming to develop agents capable of functioning in any environment in a zero-shot manner. However, real-world navigation robots often operate in persistent environments with relatively consistent physical layouts, visual observations, and language styles from instructors. Such a gap in the task setting presents an opportunity to improve VLN agents by incorporating continuous adaptation to specific environments. To better reflect these real-world conditions, we introduce GSA-VLN, a novel task requiring agents to execute navigation instructions within a specific scene and simultaneously adapt to it for improved performance over time. To evaluate the proposed task, one has to address two challenges in existing VLN datasets: the lack of OOD data, and the limited number and style diversity of instructions for each scene. Therefore, we propose a new dataset, GSA-R2R, which significantly expands the diversity and quantity of environments and instructions for the R2R dataset to evaluate agent adaptability in both ID and OOD contexts. Furthermore, we design a three-stage instruction orchestration pipeline that leverages LLMs to refine speaker-generated instructions and apply role-playing techniques to rephrase instructions into different speaking styles. This is motivated by the observation that each individual user often has consistent signatures or preferences in their instructions. We conducted extensive experiments on GSA-R2R to thoroughly evaluate our dataset and benchmark various methods. Based on our findings, we propose a novel method, GR-DUET, which incorporates memory-based navigation graphs with an environment-specific training strategy, achieving state-of-the-art results on all GSA-R2R splits.
2501.17409
Value Function Decomposition in Markov Recommendation Process
cs.IR
Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general solution framework incorporates a value function that estimates the user's expected cumulative rewards in the future and guides the training of the recommendation policy. To avoid local maxima, the policy may explore potential high-quality actions during inference to increase the chance of finding better future rewards. To accommodate the stepwise recommendation process, one widely adopted approach to learning the value function is learning from the difference between the values of two consecutive states of a user. However, we argue that this paradigm involves a challenge of Mixing Random Factors: there exist two random factors from the stochastic policy and the uncertain user environment, but they are not separately modeled in the standard temporal difference (TD) learning, which may result in a suboptimal estimation of the long-term rewards and less effective action exploration. As a solution, we show that these two factors can be separately approximated by decomposing the original temporal difference loss. The disentangled learning framework can achieve a more accurate estimation with faster learning and improved robustness against action exploration. As an empirical verification of our proposed method, we conduct offline experiments with simulated online environments built on the basis of public datasets.
2501.17411
A Genetic Algorithm-Based Approach for Automated Optimization of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks in Classification Tasks
cs.NE cs.AI cs.LG
To address the issue of interpretability in multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) are introduced in 2024. However, optimizing KAN structures is labor-intensive, typically requiring manual intervention and parameter tuning. This paper proposes GA-KAN, a genetic algorithm-based approach that automates the optimization of KANs, requiring no human intervention in the design process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that evolutionary computation is explored to optimize KANs automatically. Furthermore, inspired by the use of sparse connectivity in MLPs in effectively reducing the number of parameters, GA-KAN further explores sparse connectivity to tackle the challenge of extensive parameter spaces in KANs. GA-KAN is validated on two toy datasets, achieving optimal results without the manual tuning required by the original KAN. Additionally, GA-KAN demonstrates superior performance across five classification datasets, outperforming traditional methods on all datasets and providing interpretable symbolic formulae for the Wine and Iris datasets, thereby enhancing model transparency. Furthermore, GA-KAN significantly reduces the number of parameters over the standard KAN across all the five datasets. The core contributions of GA-KAN include automated optimization, a new encoding strategy, and a new decoding process, which together improve the accuracy and interpretability, and reduce the number of parameters.
2501.17412
Randomized Scheduling for Periodic Multi-Source Systems with PAoI Violation Guarantees
cs.IT math.IT
The Age of Information (AoI) has been recognized as a critical metric for assessing the freshness of information in modern communication systems. In this work, we examine an information update system where multiple information sources transmit updates to their respective destinations via a shared base station. Our main contribution is the proposal of a randomized scheduling algorithm that offers distinct statistical AoI guarantees for heterogeneous sources. Specifically, we rigorously derive an analytical upper bound on peak age of information (PAoI) violation probability by leveraging properties of the multivariate noncentral hypergeometric Wallenius distribution. Building on these analytical results, two designs of coefficients for the randomized policy are proposed to meet the outage constraints for all sources, tailored to the long and short sampling delay cases, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of our analysis on PAoI violation probability and also show that our proposed design always provides a feasible solution in most cases.
2501.17414
Reqo: A Robust and Explainable Query Optimization Cost Model
cs.DB cs.AI cs.LG
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning (ML) in query optimization to select more efficient plans. Existing learning-based query optimizers use certain model architectures to convert tree-structured query plans into representations suitable for downstream ML tasks. As the design of these architectures significantly impacts cost estimation, we propose a tree model architecture based on Bidirectional Graph Neural Networks (Bi-GNN) aggregated by Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to achieve more accurate cost estimates. The inherent uncertainty of data and model parameters also leads to inaccurate cost estimates, resulting in suboptimal plans and less robust query performance. To address this, we implement a novel learning-to-rank cost model that effectively quantifies the uncertainty in cost estimates using approximate probabilistic ML. This model adaptively integrates quantified uncertainty with estimated costs and learns from comparing pairwise plans, achieving more robust performance. In addition, we propose the first explainability technique specifically designed for learning-based cost models. This technique explains the contribution of any subgraphs in the query plan to the final predicted cost, which can be integrated and trained with any learning-based cost model to significantly boost the model's explainability. By incorporating these innovations, we propose a cost model for a Robust and Explainable Query Optimizer, Reqo, that improves the accuracy, robustness, and explainability of cost estimation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in all three dimensions.
2501.17415
si4onnx: A Python package for Selective Inference in Deep Learning Models
cs.LG stat.ML
In this paper, we introduce si4onnx, a package for performing selective inference on deep learning models. Techniques such as CAM in XAI and reconstruction-based anomaly detection using VAE can be interpreted as methods for identifying significant regions within input images. However, the identified regions may not always carry meaningful significance. Therefore, evaluating the statistical significance of these regions represents a crucial challenge in establishing the reliability of AI systems. si4onnx is a Python package that enables straightforward implementation of hypothesis testing with controlled type I error rates through selective inference. It is compatible with deep learning models constructed using common frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
2501.17420
Actions Speak Louder than Words: Agent Decisions Reveal Implicit Biases in Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI cs.HC
While advances in fairness and alignment have helped mitigate overt biases exhibited by large language models (LLMs) when explicitly prompted, we hypothesize that these models may still exhibit implicit biases when simulating human behavior. To test this hypothesis, we propose a technique to systematically uncover such biases across a broad range of sociodemographic categories by assessing decision-making disparities among agents with LLM-generated, sociodemographically-informed personas. Using our technique, we tested six LLMs across three sociodemographic groups and four decision-making scenarios. Our results show that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant sociodemographic disparities in nearly all simulations, with more advanced models exhibiting greater implicit biases despite reducing explicit biases. Furthermore, when comparing our findings to real-world disparities reported in empirical studies, we find that the biases we uncovered are directionally aligned but markedly amplified. This directional alignment highlights the utility of our technique in uncovering systematic biases in LLMs rather than random variations; moreover, the presence and amplification of implicit biases emphasizes the need for novel strategies to address these biases.
2501.17422
SIGN: A Statistically-Informed Gaze Network for Gaze Time Prediction
cs.CV stat.AP
We propose a first version of SIGN, a Statistically-Informed Gaze Network, to predict aggregate gaze times on images. We develop a foundational statistical model for which we derive a deep learning implementation involving CNNs and Visual Transformers, which enables the prediction of overall gaze times. The model enables us to derive from the aggregate gaze times the underlying gaze pattern as a probability map over all regions in the image, where each region's probability represents the likelihood of being gazed at across all possible scan-paths. We test SIGN's performance on AdGaze3500, a dataset of images of ads with aggregate gaze times, and on COCO-Search18, a dataset with individual-level fixation patterns collected during search. We demonstrate that SIGN (1) improves gaze duration prediction significantly over state-of-the-art deep learning benchmarks on both datasets, and (2) can deliver plausible gaze patterns that correspond to empirical fixation patterns in COCO-Search18. These results suggest that the first version of SIGN holds promise for gaze-time predictions and deserves further development.
2501.17424
Certificated Actor-Critic: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Control Barrier Functions for Safe Navigation
cs.RO cs.LG
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a prominent approach to designing safe navigation systems of robots. Despite their popularity, current CBF-based methods exhibit some limitations: optimization-based safe control techniques tend to be either myopic or computationally intensive, and they rely on simplified system models; conversely, the learning-based methods suffer from the lack of quantitative indication in terms of navigation performance and safety. In this paper, we present a new model-free reinforcement learning algorithm called Certificated Actor-Critic (CAC), which introduces a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework and well-defined reward functions derived from CBFs. We carry out theoretical analysis and proof of our algorithm, and propose several improvements in algorithm implementation. Our analysis is validated by two simulation experiments, showing the effectiveness of our proposed CAC algorithm.
2501.17428
WCDT: Systematic WCET Optimization for Decision Tree Implementations
cs.LG cs.PF
Machine-learning models are increasingly deployed on resource-constrained embedded systems with strict timing constraints. In such scenarios, the worst-case execution time (WCET) of the models is required to ensure safe operation. Specifically, decision trees are a prominent class of machine-learning models and the main building blocks of tree-based ensemble models (e.g., random forests), which are commonly employed in resource-constrained embedded systems. In this paper, we develop a systematic approach for WCET optimization of decision tree implementations. To this end, we introduce a linear surrogate model that estimates the execution time of individual paths through a decision tree based on the path's length and the number of taken branches. We provide an optimization algorithm that constructively builds a WCET-optimal implementation of a given decision tree with respect to this surrogate model. We experimentally evaluate both the surrogate model and the WCET-optimization algorithm. The evaluation shows that the optimization algorithm improves analytically determined WCET by up to $17\%$ compared to an unoptimized implementation.
2501.17429
Algorithmic Segmentation and Behavioral Profiling for Ransomware Detection Using Temporal-Correlation Graphs
cs.CR cs.AI
The rapid evolution of cyber threats has outpaced traditional detection methodologies, necessitating innovative approaches capable of addressing the adaptive and complex behaviors of modern adversaries. A novel framework was introduced, leveraging Temporal-Correlation Graphs to model the intricate relationships and temporal patterns inherent in malicious operations. The approach dynamically captured behavioral anomalies, offering a robust mechanism for distinguishing between benign and malicious activities in real-time scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrated the framework's effectiveness across diverse ransomware families, with consistently high precision, recall, and overall detection accuracy. Comparative evaluations highlighted its better performance over traditional signature-based and heuristic methods, particularly in handling polymorphic and previously unseen ransomware variants. The architecture was designed with scalability and modularity in mind, ensuring compatibility with enterprise-scale environments while maintaining resource efficiency. Analysis of encryption speeds, anomaly patterns, and temporal correlations provided deeper insights into the operational strategies of ransomware, validating the framework's adaptability to evolving threats. The research contributes to advancing cybersecurity technologies by integrating dynamic graph analytics and machine learning for future innovations in threat detection. Results from this study underline the potential for transforming the way organizations detect and mitigate complex cyberattacks.
2501.17431
Human-Aligned Skill Discovery: Balancing Behaviour Exploration and Alignment
cs.LG cs.RO
Unsupervised skill discovery in Reinforcement Learning aims to mimic humans' ability to autonomously discover diverse behaviors. However, existing methods are often unconstrained, making it difficult to find useful skills, especially in complex environments, where discovered skills are frequently unsafe or impractical. We address this issue by proposing Human-aligned Skill Discovery (HaSD), a framework that incorporates human feedback to discover safer, more aligned skills. HaSD simultaneously optimises skill diversity and alignment with human values. This approach ensures that alignment is maintained throughout the skill discovery process, eliminating the inefficiencies associated with exploring unaligned skills. We demonstrate its effectiveness in both 2D navigation and SafetyGymnasium environments, showing that HaSD discovers diverse, human-aligned skills that are safe and useful for downstream tasks. Finally, we extend HaSD by learning a range of configurable skills with varying degrees of diversity alignment trade-offs that could be useful in practical scenarios.
2501.17433
Virus: Harmful Fine-tuning Attack for Large Language Models Bypassing Guardrail Moderation
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks -- models lose their safety alignment ability after fine-tuning on a few harmful samples. For risk mitigation, a guardrail is typically used to filter out harmful samples before fine-tuning. By designing a new red-teaming method, we in this paper show that purely relying on the moderation guardrail for data filtration is not reliable. Our proposed attack method, dubbed Virus, easily bypasses the guardrail moderation by slightly modifying the harmful data. Experimental results show that the harmful data optimized by Virus is not detectable by the guardrail with up to 100\% leakage ratio, and can simultaneously achieve superior attack performance. Finally, the key message we want to convey through this paper is that: \textbf{it is reckless to consider guardrail moderation as a clutch at straws towards harmful fine-tuning attack}, as it cannot solve the inherent safety issue of the pre-trained LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Virus
2501.17437
Bayesian BIM-Guided Construction Robot Navigation with NLP Safety Prompts in Dynamic Environments
cs.RO
Construction robotics increasingly relies on natural language processing for task execution, creating a need for robust methods to interpret commands in complex, dynamic environments. While existing research primarily focuses on what tasks robots should perform, less attention has been paid to how these tasks should be executed safely and efficiently. This paper presents a novel probabilistic framework that uses sentiment analysis from natural language commands to dynamically adjust robot navigation policies in construction environments. The framework leverages Building Information Modeling (BIM) data and natural language prompts to create adaptive navigation strategies that account for varying levels of environmental risk and uncertainty. We introduce an object-aware path planning approach that combines exponential potential fields with a grid-based representation of the environment, where the potential fields are dynamically adjusted based on the semantic analysis of user prompts. The framework employs Bayesian inference to consolidate multiple information sources: the static data from BIM, the semantic content of natural language commands, and the implied safety constraints from user prompts. We demonstrate our approach through experiments comparing three scenarios: baseline shortest-path planning, safety-oriented navigation, and risk-aware routing. Results show that our method successfully adapts path planning based on natural language sentiment, achieving a 50\% improvement in minimum distance to obstacles when safety is prioritized, while maintaining reasonable path lengths. Scenarios with contrasting prompts, such as "dangerous" and "safe", demonstrate the framework's ability to modify paths. This approach provides a flexible foundation for integrating human knowledge and safety considerations into construction robot navigation.
2501.17441
Towards Making Flowchart Images Machine Interpretable
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL cs.DL cs.SE
Computer programming textbooks and software documentations often contain flowcharts to illustrate the flow of an algorithm or procedure. Modern OCR engines often tag these flowcharts as graphics and ignore them in further processing. In this paper, we work towards making flowchart images machine-interpretable by converting them to executable Python codes. To this end, inspired by the recent success in natural language to code generation literature, we present a novel transformer-based framework, namely FloCo-T5. Our model is well-suited for this task,as it can effectively learn semantics, structure, and patterns of programming languages, which it leverages to generate syntactically correct code. We also used a task-specific pre-training objective to pre-train FloCo-T5 using a large number of logic-preserving augmented code samples. Further, to perform a rigorous study of this problem, we introduce theFloCo dataset that contains 11,884 flowchart images and their corresponding Python codes. Our experiments show promising results, and FloCo-T5 clearly outperforms related competitive baselines on code generation metrics. We make our dataset and implementation publicly available.
2501.17443
Gradual Domain Adaptation for Graph Learning
cs.LG
Existing literature lacks a graph domain adaptation technique for handling large distribution shifts, primarily due to the difficulty in simulating an evolving path from source to target graph. To make a breakthrough, we present a graph gradual domain adaptation (GGDA) framework with the construction of a compact domain sequence that minimizes information loss in adaptations. Our approach starts with an efficient generation of knowledge-preserving intermediate graphs over the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) metric. With the bridging data pool, GGDA domains are then constructed via a novel vertex-based domain progression, which comprises "close" vertex selections and adaptive domain advancement to enhance inter-domain information transferability. Theoretically, our framework concretizes the intractable inter-domain distance $W_p(\mu_t,\mu_{t+1})$ via implementable upper and lower bounds, enabling flexible adjustments of this metric for optimizing domain formation. Extensive experiments under various transfer scenarios validate the superior performance of our GGDA framework.
2501.17449
Cross-Language Approach for Quranic QA
cs.CL cs.IR
Question answering systems face critical limitations in languages with limited resources and scarce data, making the development of robust models especially challenging. The Quranic QA system holds significant importance as it facilitates a deeper understanding of the Quran, a Holy text for over a billion people worldwide. However, these systems face unique challenges, including the linguistic disparity between questions written in Modern Standard Arabic and answers found in Quranic verses written in Classical Arabic, and the small size of existing datasets, which further restricts model performance. To address these challenges, we adopt a cross-language approach by (1) Dataset Augmentation: expanding and enriching the dataset through machine translation to convert Arabic questions into English, paraphrasing questions to create linguistic diversity, and retrieving answers from an English translation of the Quran to align with multilingual training requirements; and (2) Language Model Fine-Tuning: utilizing pre-trained models such as BERT-Medium, RoBERTa-Base, DeBERTa-v3-Base, ELECTRA-Large, Flan-T5, Bloom, and Falcon to address the specific requirements of Quranic QA. Experimental results demonstrate that this cross-language approach significantly improves model performance, with RoBERTa-Base achieving the highest MAP@10 (0.34) and MRR (0.52), while DeBERTa-v3-Base excels in Recall@10 (0.50) and Precision@10 (0.24). These findings underscore the effectiveness of cross-language strategies in overcoming linguistic barriers and advancing Quranic QA systems
2501.17450
NF-MKV Net: A Constraint-Preserving Neural Network Approach to Solving Mean-Field Games Equilibrium
cs.LG
Neural network-based methods for solving Mean-Field Games (MFGs) equilibria have garnered significant attention for their effectiveness in high-dimensional problems. However, many algorithms struggle with ensuring that the evolution of the density distribution adheres to the required mathematical constraints. This paper investigates a neural network approach to solving MFGs equilibria through a stochastic process perspective. It integrates process-regularized Normalizing Flow (NF) frameworks with state-policy-connected time-series neural networks to address McKean-Vlasov-type Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equation (MKV FBSDE) fixed-point problems, equivalent to MFGs equilibria.
2501.17456
A review on the novelty measurements of academic papers
cs.DL cs.CL
Novelty evaluation is vital for the promotion and management of innovation. With the advancement of information techniques and the open data movement, some progress has been made in novelty measurements. Tracking and reviewing novelty measures provides a data-driven way to assess contributions, progress, and emerging directions in the science field. As academic papers serve as the primary medium for the dissemination, validation, and discussion of scientific knowledge, this review aims to offer a systematic analysis of novelty measurements for scientific papers. We began by comparing the differences between scientific novelty and four similar concepts, including originality, scientific innovation, creativity, and scientific breakthrough. Next, we reviewed the types of scientific novelty. Then, we classified existing novelty measures according to data types and reviewed the measures for each type. Subsequently, we surveyed the approaches employed in validating novelty measures and examined the current tools and datasets associated with these measures. Finally, we proposed several open issues for future studies.
2501.17459
Large Language Models for Single-Step and Multi-Step Flight Trajectory Prediction
cs.AI cs.CL
Flight trajectory prediction is a critical time series task in aviation. While deep learning methods have shown significant promise, the application of large language models (LLMs) to this domain remains underexplored. This study pioneers the use of LLMs for flight trajectory prediction by reframing it as a language modeling problem. Specifically, We extract features representing the aircraft's position and status from ADS-B flight data to construct a prompt-based dataset, where trajectory waypoints are converted into language tokens. The dataset is then employed to fine-tune LLMs, enabling them to learn complex spatiotemporal patterns for accurate predictions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LLMs achieve notable performance improvements in both single-step and multi-step predictions compared to traditional methods, with LLaMA-3.1 model achieving the highest overall accuracy. However, the high inference latency of LLMs poses a challenge for real-time applications, underscoring the need for further research in this promising direction.
2501.17468
Solving Inverse Problems using Diffusion with Fast Iterative Renoising
cs.CV
Imaging inverse problems can be solved in an unsupervised manner using pre-trained diffusion models. In most cases, that involves approximating the gradient of the measurement-conditional score function in the reverse process. Since the approximations produced by existing methods are quite poor, especially early in the reverse process, we propose a new approach that re-estimates and renoises the image several times per diffusion step. Renoising adds carefully shaped colored noise that ensures the pre-trained diffusion model sees white-Gaussian error, in accordance with how it was trained. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our "DDfire" method at 20, 100, and 1000 neural function evaluations on linear inverse problems and phase retrieval.
2501.17473
Remote State Estimation over a Wearing Channel: Information Freshness vs. Channel Aging
cs.IT cs.SY eess.SY math.IT
We study the remote estimation of a linear Gaussian system over a nonstationary channel that wears out over time and with every use. The sensor can either transmit a fresh measurement in the current time slot, restore the channel quality at the cost of downtime, or remain silent. More frequent transmissions yield accurate estimates but incur significant wear on the channel. Renewing the channel too often improves channel conditions but results in poor estimation quality. What is the optimal timing to transmit measurements and restore the channel? We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and show the monotonicity properties of an optimal policy. A structured policy iteration algorithm is proposed to find the optimal policy.
2501.17476
Hybrid Channel- and Coding-Based Challenge-Response Physical-Layer Authentication
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
This letter proposes a new physical layer authentication mechanism operating at the physical layer of a communication system where the receiver has partial control of the channel conditions (e.g., using an intelligent reflecting surface). We aim to exploit both instantaneous channel state information (CSI) and a secret shared key for authentication. This is achieved by both transmitting an identifying key by wiretap coding (to conceal the key from the attacker) and checking that the instantaneous CSI corresponds to the channel configuration randomly selected by the receiver. We investigate the trade-off between the pilot signals used for CSI estimation and the coding rate (or key length) to improve the overall security of the authentication procedure.
2501.17479
DFPE: A Diverse Fingerprint Ensemble for Enhancing LLM Performance
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various natural language processing tasks but often struggle to excel uniformly in diverse or complex domains. We propose a novel ensemble method - Diverse Fingerprint Ensemble (DFPE), which leverages the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs to achieve more robust performance. Our approach involves: (1) clustering models based on response "fingerprints" patterns, (2) applying a quantile-based filtering mechanism to remove underperforming models at a per-subject level, and (3) assigning adaptive weights to remaining models based on their subject-wise validation accuracy. In experiments on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, DFPE outperforms the best single model by 3% overall accuracy and 5% in discipline-level accuracy. This method increases the robustness and generalization of LLMs and underscores how model selection, diversity preservation, and performance-driven weighting can effectively address challenging, multi-faceted language understanding tasks.
2501.17484
Capacity Expansion Planning under Uncertainty subject to Expected Energy Not Served Constraints
eess.SY cs.SY
We present a method for solving a large-scale stochastic capacity expansion problem which explicitly considers reliability constraints, in particular constraints on expected energy not served. Our method tackles this problem by a Lagrange relaxation of the expected energy not served constraints. We solve the relaxed formulation in an iterative manner, using a subgradient-based method. Each iteration requires the solution of a stochastic capacity expansion problem, for which we implement a subgradient decomposition scheme in a high-performance computing infrastructure. We apply the proposed methodology on the Economic Viability Assessment model that is used by ENTSO-E in the annual European Resource Adequacy Assessment, extended to include explicit reliability constraints. The approach is able to solve this model achieving a 1.3% optimality gap. We compare our approach against accounting for reliability through penalizing load shedding at VOLL, and find that the former results in 1.6% savings in total cost. We are also able to quantify the cost savings from allowing some load curtailment in the capacity planning process, which ranges from 1.6 to 6% in the cases analyzed.
2501.17486
DINT Transformer
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
DIFF Transformer addresses the issue of irrelevant context interference by introducing a differential attention mechanism that enhances the robustness of local attention. However, it has two critical limitations: the lack of global context modeling, which is essential for identifying globally significant tokens, and numerical instability due to the absence of strict row normalization in the attention matrix. To overcome these challenges, we propose DINT Transformer, which extends DIFF Transformer by incorporating a differential-integral mechanism. By computing global importance scores and integrating them into the attention matrix, DINT Transformer improves its ability to capture global dependencies. Moreover, the unified parameter design enforces row-normalized attention matrices, improving numerical stability. Experimental results demonstrate that DINT Transformer excels in accuracy and robustness across various practical applications, such as long-context language modeling and key information retrieval. These results position DINT Transformer as a highly effective and promising architecture.
2501.17489
Neural Spelling: A Spell-Based BCI System for Language Neural Decoding
cs.HC cs.AI
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) present a promising avenue by translating neural activity directly into text, eliminating the need for physical actions. However, existing non-invasive BCI systems have not successfully covered the entire alphabet, limiting their practicality. In this paper, we propose a novel non-invasive EEG-based BCI system with Curriculum-based Neural Spelling Framework, which recognizes all 26 alphabet letters by decoding neural signals associated with handwriting first, and then apply a Generative AI (GenAI) to enhance spell-based neural language decoding tasks. Our approach combines the ease of handwriting with the accessibility of EEG technology, utilizing advanced neural decoding algorithms and pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to translate EEG patterns into text with high accuracy. This system show how GenAI can improve the performance of typical spelling-based neural language decoding task, and addresses the limitations of previous methods, offering a scalable and user-friendly solution for individuals with communication impairments, thereby enhancing inclusive communication options.
2501.17493
Certifying Pareto-Optimality in Multi-Objective Maximum Satisfiability
cs.AI
Due to the wide employment of automated reasoning in the analysis and construction of correct systems, the results reported by automated reasoning engines must be trustworthy. For Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers - and more recently SAT-based maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) solvers - trustworthiness is obtained by integrating proof logging into solvers, making solvers capable of emitting machine-verifiable proofs to certify correctness of the reasoning steps performed. In this work, we enable for the first time proof logging based on the VeriPB proof format for multi-objective MaxSAT (MO-MaxSAT) optimization techniques. Although VeriPB does not offer direct support for multi-objective problems, we detail how preorders in VeriPB can be used to provide certificates for MO-MaxSAT algorithms computing a representative solution for each element in the non-dominated set of the search space under Pareto-optimality, without extending the VeriPB format or the proof checker. By implementing VeriPB proof logging into a state-of-the-art multi-objective MaxSAT solver, we show empirically that proof logging can be made scalable for MO-MaxSAT with reasonable overhead.
2501.17496
SemML: Enhancing Automata-Theoretic LTL Synthesis with Machine Learning
cs.AI cs.SY eess.SY
Synthesizing a reactive system from specifications given in linear temporal logic (LTL) is a classical problem, finding its applications in safety-critical systems design. We present our tool SemML, which won this year's LTL realizability tracks of SYNTCOMP, after years of domination by Strix. While both tools are based on the automata-theoretic approach, ours relies heavily on (i) Semantic labelling, additional information of logical nature, coming from recent LTL-to-automata translations and decorating the resulting parity game, and (ii) Machine Learning approaches turning this information into a guidance oracle for on-the-fly exploration of the parity game (whence the name SemML). Our tool fills the missing gaps of previous suggestions to use such an oracle and provides an efficeint implementation with additional algorithmic improvements. We evaluate SemML both on the entire set of SYNTCOMP as well as a synthetic data set, compare it to Strix, and analyze the advantages and limitations. As SemML solves more instances on SYNTCOMP and does so significantly faster on larger instances, this demonstrates for the first time that machine-learning-aided approaches can out-perform state-of-the-art tools in real LTL synthesis.
2501.17499
A Sampling Complexity-aware Framework for Discrete-time Fractional-Order Dynamical System Identification
eess.SY cs.SY
A variety of complex biological, natural and man-made systems exhibit non-Markovian dynamics that can be modeled through fractional order differential equations, yet, we lack sample comlexity aware system identification strategies. Towards this end, we propose an affine discrete-time fractional order dynamical system (FoDS) identification algorithm and provide a detailed sample complexity analysis. The algorithm effectively addresses the challenges of FoDS identification in the presence of noisy data. The proposed algorithm consists of two key steps. Firstly, it avoids solving higher-order polynomial equations, which would otherwise result in multiple potential solutions for the fractional orders. Secondly, the identification problem is reformulated as a least squares estimation, allowing us to infer the system parameters. We derive the expectation and probabilistic bounds for the FoDS parameter estimation error, assuming prior knowledge of the functions \( f \) and \( g \) in the FoDS model. The error decays at a rate of \( N = O\left( \frac{d}{\epsilon} \right) \), where \( N \) is the number of samples, \( d \) is the dimension of the state variable, and \( \epsilon \) represents the desired estimation accuracy. Simulation results demonstrate that our theoretical bounds are tight, validating the accuracy and robustness of this algorithm.
2501.17507
Reflections on "Can AI Understand Our Universe?"
cs.AI astro-ph.HE astro-ph.IM
This article briefly discusses the philosophical and technical aspects of AI. It focuses on two concepts of understanding: intuition and causality, and highlights three AI technologies: Transformers, chain-of-thought reasoning, and multimodal processing. We anticipate that in principle AI could form understanding, with these technologies representing promising advancements.
2501.17510
LLM Assistance for Pediatric Depression
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Traditional depression screening methods, such as the PHQ-9, are particularly challenging for children in pediatric primary care due to practical limitations. AI has the potential to help, but the scarcity of annotated datasets in mental health, combined with the computational costs of training, highlights the need for efficient, zero-shot approaches. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of state-of-the-art LLMs for depressive symptom extraction in pediatric settings (ages 6-24). This approach aims to complement traditional screening and minimize diagnostic errors. Our findings show that all LLMs are 60% more efficient than word match, with Flan leading in precision (average F1: 0.65, precision: 0.78), excelling in the extraction of more rare symptoms like "sleep problems" (F1: 0.92) and "self-loathing" (F1: 0.8). Phi strikes a balance between precision (0.44) and recall (0.60), performing well in categories like "Feeling depressed" (0.69) and "Weight change" (0.78). Llama 3, with the highest recall (0.90), overgeneralizes symptoms, making it less suitable for this type of analysis. Challenges include the complexity of clinical notes and overgeneralization from PHQ-9 scores. The main challenges faced by LLMs include navigating the complex structure of clinical notes with content from different times in the patient trajectory, as well as misinterpreting elevated PHQ-9 scores. We finally demonstrate the utility of symptom annotations provided by Flan as features in an ML algorithm, which differentiates depression cases from controls with high precision of 0.78, showing a major performance boost compared to a baseline that does not use these features.
2501.17512
A Survey on Cluster-based Federated Learning
stat.ML cs.LG
As the industrial and commercial use of Federated Learning (FL) has expanded, so has the need for optimized algorithms. In settings were FL clients' data is non-independently and identically distributed (non-IID) and with highly heterogeneous distributions, the baseline FL approach seems to fall short. To tackle this issue, recent studies, have looked into personalized FL (PFL) which relaxes the implicit single-model constraint and allows for multiple hypotheses to be learned from the data or local models. Among the personalized FL approaches, cluster-based solutions (CFL) are particularly interesting whenever it is clear -through domain knowledge -that the clients can be separated into groups. In this paper, we study recent works on CFL, proposing: i) a classification of CFL solutions for personalization; ii) a structured review of literature iii) a review of alternative use cases for CFL. CCS Concepts: $\bullet$ General and reference $\rightarrow$ Surveys and overviews; $\bullet$ Computing methodologies $\rightarrow$ Machine learning; $\bullet$ Information systems $\rightarrow$ Clustering; $\bullet$ Security and privacy $\rightarrow$ Privacy-preserving protocols.
2501.17513
Sequential Learning of the Pareto Front for Multi-objective Bandits
stat.ML cs.LG
We study the problem of sequential learning of the Pareto front in multi-objective multi-armed bandits. An agent is faced with K possible arms to pull. At each turn she picks one, and receives a vector-valued reward. When she thinks she has enough information to identify the Pareto front of the different arm means, she stops the game and gives an answer. We are interested in designing algorithms such that the answer given is correct with probability at least 1-$\delta$. Our main contribution is an efficient implementation of an algorithm achieving the optimal sample complexity when the risk $\delta$ is small. With K arms in d dimensions p of which are in the Pareto set, the algorithm runs in time O(Kp^d) per round.
2501.17518
RegD: Hierarchical Embeddings via Distances over Geometric Regions
cs.LG cs.AI
Hierarchical data are common in many domains like life sciences and e-commerce, and their embeddings often play a critical role. Although hyperbolic embeddings offer a grounded approach to representing hierarchical structures in low-dimensional spaces, their utility is hindered by optimization difficulties in hyperbolic space and dependence on handcrafted structural constraints. We propose RegD, a novel Euclidean framework that addresses these limitations by representing hierarchical data as geometric regions with two new metrics: (1) depth distance, which preserves the representational power of hyperbolic spaces for hierarchical data, and (2) boundary distance, which explicitly encodes set-inclusion relationships between regions in a general way. Our empirical evaluation on diverse real-world datasets shows consistent performance gains over state-of-the-art methods and demonstrates RegD's potential for broader applications beyond hierarchy alone tasks.
2501.17529
Accelerated DC loadflow solver for topology optimization
eess.SY cs.SY
We present a massively parallel solver that accelerates DC loadflow computations for power grid topology optimization tasks. Our approach leverages low-rank updates of the Power Transfer Distribution Factors (PTDFs) to represent substation splits, line outages, and reconfigurations without ever refactorizing the system. Furthermore, we implement the core routines on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), thereby exploiting their high-throughput architecture for linear algebra. A two-level decomposition separates changes in branch topology from changes in nodal injections, enabling additional speed-ups by an in-the-loop brute force search over injection variations at minimal additional cost. We demonstrate billion-loadflow-per-second performance on power grids of varying sizes in workload settings which are typical for gradient-free topology optimization such as Reinforcement Learning or Quality Diversity methods. While adopting the DC approximation sacrifices some accuracy and prohibits the computation of voltage magnitudes, we show that this sacrifice unlocks new scales of computational feasibility, offering a powerful tool for large-scale grid planning and operational topology optimization.
2501.17534
3DSES: an indoor Lidar point cloud segmentation dataset with real and pseudo-labels from a 3D model
cs.CV
Semantic segmentation of indoor point clouds has found various applications in the creation of digital twins for robotics, navigation and building information modeling (BIM). However, most existing datasets of labeled indoor point clouds have been acquired by photogrammetry. In contrast, Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) can acquire dense sub-centimeter point clouds and has become the standard for surveyors. We present 3DSES (3D Segmentation of ESGT point clouds), a new dataset of indoor dense TLS colorized point clouds covering 427 m 2 of an engineering school. 3DSES has a unique double annotation format: semantic labels annotated at the point level alongside a full 3D CAD model of the building. We introduce a model-to-cloud algorithm for automated labeling of indoor point clouds using an existing 3D CAD model. 3DSES has 3 variants of various semantic and geometrical complexities. We show that our model-to-cloud alignment can produce pseudo-labels on our point clouds with a \> 95% accuracy, allowing us to train deep models with significant time savings compared to manual labeling. First baselines on 3DSES show the difficulties encountered by existing models when segmenting objects relevant to BIM, such as light and safety utilities. We show that segmentation accuracy can be improved by leveraging pseudo-labels and Lidar intensity, an information rarely considered in current datasets. Code and data will be open sourced.
2501.17544
Pole-Zero Identification: Unveiling the Critical Dynamics of Microwave Circuits Beyond Stability Analysis
eess.SY cs.SY
Pole-zero identification refers to the obtaining of the poles and zeros of a linear (or linearized) system described by its frequency response. This is usually done using optimization techniques (such as least squares, maximum likelihood estimation, or vector fitting) that fit a given frequency response of the linear system to a transfer function defined as the ratio of two polynomials. This kind of linear system identification in the frequency domain has numerous applications in a wide variety of engineering fields (such as mechanical systems, power systems and Electromagnetic Compatibility). In the microwave domain, rational approximation is increasingly used to obtain black-box models of complex passive structures for model order reduction and efficient transient simulation. In this paper we will focus on a different application of pole-zero identification. We will review the different ways in which pole-zero identification can be applied to nonlinear circuit design (for power amplifier stability analysis and beyond). We will give a comprehensive view on recent approaches through illustrative application examples. Other uses of rational approximation techniques are beyond the scope of this paper.
2501.17546
Is Conversational XAI All You Need? Human-AI Decision Making With a Conversational XAI Assistant
cs.HC cs.AI
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods are being proposed to help interpret and understand how AI systems reach specific predictions. Inspired by prior work on conversational user interfaces, we argue that augmenting existing XAI methods with conversational user interfaces can increase user engagement and boost user understanding of the AI system. In this paper, we explored the impact of a conversational XAI interface on users' understanding of the AI system, their trust, and reliance on the AI system. In comparison to an XAI dashboard, we found that the conversational XAI interface can bring about a better understanding of the AI system among users and higher user trust. However, users of both the XAI dashboard and conversational XAI interfaces showed clear overreliance on the AI system. Enhanced conversations powered by large language model (LLM) agents amplified over-reliance. Based on our findings, we reason that the potential cause of such overreliance is the illusion of explanatory depth that is concomitant with both XAI interfaces. Our findings have important implications for designing effective conversational XAI interfaces to facilitate appropriate reliance and improve human-AI collaboration. Code can be found at https://github.com/delftcrowd/IUI2025_ConvXAI
2501.17547
Towards Training-Free Open-World Classification with 3D Generative Models
cs.CV
3D open-world classification is a challenging yet essential task in dynamic and unstructured real-world scenarios, requiring both open-category and open-pose recognition. To address these challenges, recent wisdom often takes sophisticated 2D pre-trained models to provide enriched and stable representations. However, these methods largely rely on how 3D objects can be projected into 2D space, which is unfortunately not well solved, and thus significantly limits their performance. Unlike these present efforts, in this paper we make a pioneering exploration of 3D generative models for 3D open-world classification. Drawing on abundant prior knowledge from 3D generative models, we additionally craft a rotation-invariant feature extractor. This innovative synergy endows our pipeline with the advantages of being training-free, open-category, and pose-invariant, thus well suited to 3D open-world classification. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the potential of generative models in 3D open-world classification, achieving state-of-the-art performance on ModelNet10 and McGill with 32.0% and 8.7% overall accuracy improvement, respectively.
2501.17549
Query-Aware Learnable Graph Pooling Tokens as Prompt for Large Language Models
cs.CL
Graph-structured data plays a vital role in numerous domains, such as social networks, citation networks, commonsense reasoning graphs and knowledge graphs. While graph neural networks have been employed for graph processing, recent advancements have explored integrating large language models for graph-based tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Learnable Graph Pooling Token (LGPT), which addresses the limitations of the scalability issues in node-level projection and information loss in graph-level projection. LGPT enables flexible and efficient graph representation by introducing learnable parameters that act as tokens in large language models, balancing fine-grained and global graph information. Additionally, we investigate an Early Query Fusion technique, which fuses query context before constructing the graph representation, leading to more effective graph embeddings. Our method achieves a 4.13\% performance improvement on the GraphQA benchmark without training the large language model, demonstrating significant gains in handling complex textual-attributed graph data.
2501.17550
Action Recognition Using Temporal Shift Module and Ensemble Learning
cs.CV
This paper presents the first-rank solution for the Multi-Modal Action Recognition Challenge, part of the Multi-Modal Visual Pattern Recognition Workshop at the \acl{ICPR} 2024. The competition aimed to recognize human actions using a diverse dataset of 20 action classes, collected from multi-modal sources. The proposed approach is built upon the \acl{TSM}, a technique aimed at efficiently capturing temporal dynamics in video data, incorporating multiple data input types. Our strategy included transfer learning to leverage pre-trained models, followed by meticulous fine-tuning on the challenge's specific dataset to optimize performance for the 20 action classes. We carefully selected a backbone network to balance computational efficiency and recognition accuracy and further refined the model using an ensemble technique that integrates outputs from different modalities. This ensemble approach proved crucial in boosting the overall performance. Our solution achieved a perfect top-1 accuracy on the test set, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach in recognizing human actions across 20 classes. Our code is available online https://github.com/ffyyytt/TSM-MMVPR.
2501.17552
Efficient Calculation of Stabilization Parameters in RF Power Amplifiers
eess.SY cs.SY
This paper proposes an efficient method for the calculation of the stabilization parameters in RF power amplifiers operating in periodic large-signal regimes. Stabilization is achieved by applying the principles of linear control theory for Periodic Linear Time-Varying (PLTV) systems. A numerical method is proposed to obtain the Harmonic Transfer Function that represents the system linearized around the large-signal steady state. Then, a feedback analysis is performed to calculate the closed-loop poles of the PLTV system. The proposed approach is demonstrated with two examples. Firstly, a three-stage amplifier that exhibits a low-frequency oscillation for increasing values of input power is correctly stabilized. Next, the stabilization of an unstable design that exhibits an odd-mode parametric oscillation is presented. The results of the proposed technique are compared to those obtained with the conventional parametric stability simulation. These examples serve to illustrate the capability and efficiency of the proposed approach.
2501.17553
Closing the Gap Between Synthetic and Ground Truth Time Series Distributions via Neural Mapping
cs.LG stat.ML
In this paper, we introduce Neural Mapper for Vector Quantized Time Series Generator (NM-VQTSG), a novel method aimed at addressing fidelity challenges in vector quantized (VQ) time series generation. VQ-based methods, such as TimeVQVAE, have demonstrated success in generating time series but are hindered by two critical bottlenecks: information loss during compression into discrete latent spaces and deviations in the learned prior distribution from the ground truth distribution. These challenges result in synthetic time series with compromised fidelity and distributional accuracy. To overcome these limitations, NM-VQTSG leverages a U-Net-based neural mapping model to bridge the distributional gap between synthetic and ground truth time series. To be more specific, the model refines synthetic data by addressing artifacts introduced during generation, effectively aligning the distributions of synthetic and real data. Importantly, NM-VQTSG can be used for synthetic time series generated by any VQ-based generative method. We evaluate NM-VQTSG across diverse datasets from the UCR Time Series Classification archive, demonstrating its capability to consistently enhance fidelity in both unconditional and conditional generation tasks. The improvements are evidenced by significant improvements in FID, IS, and conditional FID, additionally backed up by visual inspection in a data space and a latent space. Our findings establish NM-VQTSG as a new method to improve the quality of synthetic time series. Our implementation is available on \url{https://github.com/ML4ITS/TimeVQVAE}.
2501.17554
Information Theory for Expectation Measures
cs.IT math.IT math.PR
Shannon based his information theory on the notion of probability measures as it we developed by Kolmogorov. In this paper we study some fundamental problems in information theory based on expectation measures. In the theory of expectation measures it is natural to study data sets where no randomness is present and it is also natural to study information theory for point processes as well as sampling where the sample size is not fixed. Expectation measures in combination with Kraft's Inequality can be used to clarify in which cases probability measures can be used to quantify randomness.
2501.17555
An Exceptional Dataset For Rare Pancreatic Tumor Segmentation
cs.CV cs.AI
Pancreatic NEuroendocrine Tumors (pNETs) are very rare endocrine neoplasms that account for less than 5% of all pancreatic malignancies, with an incidence of only 1-1.5 cases per 100,000. Early detection of pNETs is critical for improving patient survival, but the rarity of pNETs makes segmenting them from CT a very challenging problem. So far, there has not been a dataset specifically for pNETs available to researchers. To address this issue, we propose a pNETs dataset, a well-annotated Contrast-Enhanced Computed Tomography (CECT) dataset focused exclusively on Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors, containing data from 469 patients. This is the first dataset solely dedicated to pNETs, distinguishing it from previous collections. Additionally, we provide the baseline detection networks with a new slice-wise weight loss function designed for the UNet-based model, improving the overall pNET segmentation performance. We hope that our dataset can enhance the understanding and diagnosis of pNET Tumors within the medical community, facilitate the development of more accurate diagnostic tools, and ultimately improve patient outcomes and advance the field of oncology.
2501.17557
Heuristic-Informed Mixture of Experts for Link Prediction in Multilayer Networks
cs.LG cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Link prediction algorithms for multilayer networks are in principle required to effectively account for the entire layered structure while capturing the unique contexts offered by each layer. However, many existing approaches excel at predicting specific links in certain layers but struggle with others, as they fail to effectively leverage the diverse information encoded across different network layers. In this paper, we present MoE-ML-LP, the first Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework specifically designed for multilayer link prediction. Building on top of multilayer heuristics for link prediction, MoE-ML-LP synthesizes the decisions taken by diverse experts, resulting in significantly enhanced predictive capabilities. Our extensive experimental evaluation on real-world and synthetic networks demonstrates that MoE-ML-LP consistently outperforms several baselines and competing methods, achieving remarkable improvements of +60% in Mean Reciprocal Rank, +82% in Hits@1, +55% in Hits@5, and +41% in Hits@10. Furthermore, MoE-ML-LP features a modular architecture that enables the seamless integration of newly developed experts without necessitating the re-training of the entire framework, fostering efficiency and scalability to new experts, paving the way for future advancements in link prediction.
2501.17559
Solving Urban Network Security Games: Learning Platform, Benchmark, and Challenge for AI Research
cs.AI cs.GT
After the great achievement of solving two-player zero-sum games, more and more AI researchers focus on solving multiplayer games. To facilitate the development of designing efficient learning algorithms for solving multiplayer games, we propose a multiplayer game platform for solving Urban Network Security Games (\textbf{UNSG}) that model real-world scenarios. That is, preventing criminal activity is a highly significant responsibility assigned to police officers in cities, and police officers have to allocate their limited security resources to interdict the escaping criminal when a crime takes place in a city. This interaction between multiple police officers and the escaping criminal can be modeled as a UNSG. The variants of UNSGs can model different real-world settings, e.g., whether real-time information is available or not, and whether police officers can communicate or not. The main challenges of solving this game include the large size of the game and the co-existence of cooperation and competition. While previous efforts have been made to tackle UNSGs, they have been hampered by performance and scalability issues. Therefore, we propose an open-source UNSG platform (\textbf{GraphChase}) for designing efficient learning algorithms for solving UNSGs. Specifically, GraphChase offers a unified and flexible game environment for modeling various variants of UNSGs, supporting the development, testing, and benchmarking of algorithms. We believe that GraphChase not only facilitates the development of efficient algorithms for solving real-world problems but also paves the way for significant advancements in algorithmic development for solving general multiplayer games.
2501.17561
Coalitional model predictive control of an irrigation canal
eess.SY cs.MA cs.SY math.OC
We present a hierarchical control scheme for large-scale systems whose components can exchange information through a data network. The main goal of the supervisory layer is to find the best compromise between control performance and communicational costs by actively modifying the network topology. The actions taken at the supervisory layer alter the control agents' knowledge of the complete system, and the set of agents with which they can communicate. Each group of linked subsystems, or coalition, is independently controlled based on a decentralized model predictive control (MPC) scheme, managed at the bottom layer. Hard constraints on the inputs are imposed, while soft constraints on the states are considered to avoid feasibility issues. The performance of the proposed control scheme is validated on a model of the Dez irrigation canal, implemented on the accurate simulator for water systems SOBEK. Finally, the results are compared with those obtained using a centralized MPC controller.
2501.17567
Exploring the Potential of Wireless-enabled Multi-Chip AI Accelerators
cs.AR cs.AI
The insatiable appetite of Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads for computing power is pushing the industry to develop faster and more efficient accelerators. The rigidity of custom hardware, however, conflicts with the need for scalable and versatile architectures capable of catering to the needs of the evolving and heterogeneous pool of Machine Learning (ML) models in the literature. In this context, multi-chiplet architectures assembling multiple (perhaps heterogeneous) accelerators are an appealing option that is unfortunately hindered by the still rigid and inefficient chip-to-chip interconnects. In this paper, we explore the potential of wireless technology as a complement to existing wired interconnects in this multi-chiplet approach. Using an evaluation framework from the state-of-the-art, we show that wireless interconnects can lead to speedups of 10% on average and 20% maximum. We also highlight the importance of load balancing between the wired and wireless interconnects, which will be further explored in future work.
2501.17568
Histogram approaches for imbalanced data streams regression
cs.LG
Handling imbalanced data streams in regression tasks presents a significant challenge, as rare instances can appear anywhere in the target distribution rather than being confined to its extreme values. In this paper, we introduce novel data-level sampling strategies, \texttt{HistUS} and \texttt{HistOS}, that utilize histogram-based approaches to dynamically balance data streams. Unlike previous methods based on Chebyshev\textquotesingle s inequality, our proposed techniques identify and handle rare cases across the entire distribution effectively. We demonstrate that \texttt{HistUS} and \texttt{HistOS} outperform traditional methods through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, leading to more accurate and robust regression models in streaming environments.
2501.17569
A linguistically-motivated evaluation methodology for unraveling model's abilities in reading comprehension tasks
cs.CL
We introduce an evaluation methodology for reading comprehension tasks based on the intuition that certain examples, by the virtue of their linguistic complexity, consistently yield lower scores regardless of model size or architecture. We capitalize on semantic frame annotation for characterizing this complexity, and study seven complexity factors that may account for model's difficulty. We first deploy this methodology on a carefully annotated French reading comprehension benchmark showing that two of those complexity factors are indeed good predictors of models' failure, while others are less so. We further deploy our methodology on a well studied English benchmark by using Chat-GPT as a proxy for semantic annotation. Our study reveals that fine-grained linguisticallymotivated automatic evaluation of a reading comprehension task is not only possible, but helps understand models' abilities to handle specific linguistic characteristics of input examples. It also shows that current state-of-the-art models fail with some for those characteristics which suggests that adequately handling them requires more than merely increasing model size.
2501.17570
Trustworthy image-to-image translation: evaluating uncertainty calibration in unpaired training scenarios
eess.IV cs.CV physics.med-ph
Mammographic screening is an effective method for detecting breast cancer, facilitating early diagnosis. However, the current need to manually inspect images places a heavy burden on healthcare systems, spurring a desire for automated diagnostic protocols. Techniques based on deep neural networks have been shown effective in some studies, but their tendency to overfit leaves considerable risk for poor generalisation and misdiagnosis, preventing their widespread adoption in clinical settings. Data augmentation schemes based on unpaired neural style transfer models have been proposed that improve generalisability by diversifying the representations of training image features in the absence of paired training data (images of the same tissue in either image style). But these models are similarly prone to various pathologies, and evaluating their performance is challenging without ground truths/large datasets (as is often the case in medical imaging). Here, we consider two frameworks/architectures: a GAN-based cycleGAN, and the more recently developed diffusion-based SynDiff. We evaluate their performance when trained on image patches parsed from three open access mammography datasets and one non-medical image dataset. We consider the use of uncertainty quantification to assess model trustworthiness, and propose a scheme to evaluate calibration quality in unpaired training scenarios. This ultimately helps facilitate the trustworthy use of image-to-image translation models in domains where ground truths are not typically available.
2501.17578
Music2Latent2: Audio Compression with Summary Embeddings and Autoregressive Decoding
cs.SD cs.AI cs.LG eess.AS
Efficiently compressing high-dimensional audio signals into a compact and informative latent space is crucial for various tasks, including generative modeling and music information retrieval (MIR). Existing audio autoencoders, however, often struggle to achieve high compression ratios while preserving audio fidelity and facilitating efficient downstream applications. We introduce Music2Latent2, a novel audio autoencoder that addresses these limitations by leveraging consistency models and a novel approach to representation learning based on unordered latent embeddings, which we call summary embeddings. Unlike conventional methods that encode local audio features into ordered sequences, Music2Latent2 compresses audio signals into sets of summary embeddings, where each embedding can capture distinct global features of the input sample. This enables to achieve higher reconstruction quality at the same compression ratio. To handle arbitrary audio lengths, Music2Latent2 employs an autoregressive consistency model trained on two consecutive audio chunks with causal masking, ensuring coherent reconstruction across segment boundaries. Additionally, we propose a novel two-step decoding procedure that leverages the denoising capabilities of consistency models to further refine the generated audio at no additional cost. Our experiments demonstrate that Music2Latent2 outperforms existing continuous audio autoencoders regarding audio quality and performance on downstream tasks. Music2Latent2 paves the way for new possibilities in audio compression.
2501.17581
CSEval: Towards Automated, Multi-Dimensional, and Reference-Free Counterspeech Evaluation using Auto-Calibrated LLMs
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY cs.SI
Counterspeech has emerged as a popular and effective strategy for combating online hate speech, sparking growing research interest in automating its generation using language models. However, the field still lacks standardised evaluation protocols and reliable automated evaluation metrics that align with human judgement. Current automatic evaluation methods, primarily based on similarity metrics, do not effectively capture the complex and independent attributes of counterspeech quality, such as contextual relevance, aggressiveness, or argumentative coherence. This has led to an increased dependency on labor-intensive human evaluations to assess automated counter-speech generation methods. To address these challenges, we introduce CSEval, a novel dataset and framework for evaluating counterspeech quality across four dimensions: contextual-relevance, aggressiveness, argument-coherence, and suitableness. Furthermore, we propose Auto-Calibrated COT for Counterspeech Evaluation (Auto-CSEval), a prompt-based method with auto-calibrated chain-of-thoughts (CoT) for scoring counterspeech using large language models. Our experiments show that Auto-CSEval outperforms traditional metrics like ROUGE, METEOR, and BertScore in correlating with human judgement, indicating a significant improvement in automated counterspeech evaluation.
2501.17582
Coalitional Control: Cooperative game theory and control
eess.SY cs.GT cs.SY math.OC
The evolution of information and communication technologies has yielded the means of sharing measurements and other information in an efficient and flexible way, which has enabled the size and complexity of control applications to increase. At the same time, the improvements in the computational and communicational capabilities of control devices have fostered the development of noncentralized control architectures, already motivated by the inherent structural constraints of large-scale systems. Computer-based control approaches such as model predictive control (MPC) are visible beneficiaries of these advances and have registered a significant growth regarding both theoretical and applied fields. Coalitional control focuses on the local interests that motivate the controllers to assemble, an aspect so far rarely contemplated in the distributed control literature. This article presents the main concepts and challenges in coalitional control, and the links with cooperative network game theory.
2501.17584
GLLM: Self-Corrective G-Code Generation using Large Language Models with User Feedback
cs.SE cs.CL cs.LG
This paper introduces GLLM, an innovative tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate G-code from natural language instructions for Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining. GLLM addresses the challenges of manual G-code writing by bridging the gap between human-readable task descriptions and machine-executable code. The system incorporates a fine-tuned StarCoder-3B model, enhanced with domain-specific training data and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanism. GLLM employs advanced prompting strategies and a novel self-corrective code generation approach to ensure both syntactic and semantic correctness of the generated G-code. The architecture includes robust validation mechanisms, including syntax checks, G-code-specific verifications, and functional correctness evaluations using Hausdorff distance. By combining these techniques, GLLM aims to democratize CNC programming, making it more accessible to users without extensive programming experience while maintaining high accuracy and reliability in G-code generation.
2501.17586
Boosting Weak Positives for Text Based Person Search
cs.CV cs.LG
Large vision-language models have revolutionized cross-modal object retrieval, but text-based person search (TBPS) remains a challenging task due to limited data and fine-grained nature of the task. Existing methods primarily focus on aligning image-text pairs into a common representation space, often disregarding the fact that real world positive image-text pairs share a varied degree of similarity in between them. This leads models to prioritize easy pairs, and in some recent approaches, challenging samples are discarded as noise during training. In this work, we introduce a boosting technique that dynamically identifies and emphasizes these challenging samples during training. Our approach is motivated from classical boosting technique and dynamically updates the weights of the weak positives, wherein, the rank-1 match does not share the identity of the query. The weight allows these misranked pairs to contribute more towards the loss and the network has to pay more attention towards such samples. Our method achieves improved performance across four pedestrian datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed module.
2501.17589
Extracting Inter-Protein Interactions Via Multitasking Graph Structure Learning
q-bio.QM cs.ET cs.LG
Identifying protein-protein interactions (PPI) is crucial for gaining in-depth insights into numerous biological processes within cells and holds significant guiding value in areas such as drug development and disease treatment. Currently, most PPI prediction methods focus primarily on the study of protein sequences, neglecting the critical role of the internal structure of proteins. This paper proposes a novel PPI prediction method named MgslaPPI, which utilizes graph attention to mine protein structural information and enhances the expressive power of the protein encoder through multitask learning strategy. Specifically, we decompose the end-to-end PPI prediction process into two stages: amino acid residue reconstruction (A2RR) and protein interaction prediction (PIP). In the A2RR stage, we employ a graph attention-based residue reconstruction method to explore the internal relationships and features of proteins. In the PIP stage, in addition to the basic interaction prediction task, we introduce two auxiliary tasks, i.e., protein feature reconstruction (PFR) and masked interaction prediction (MIP). The PFR task aims to reconstruct the representation of proteins in the PIP stage, while the MIP task uses partially masked protein features for PPI prediction, with both working in concert to prompt MgslaPPI to capture more useful information. Experimental results demonstrate that MgslaPPI significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods under various data partitioning schemes.
2501.17594
Watch Your STEPP: Semantic Traversability Estimation using Pose Projected Features
cs.RO cs.CV
Understanding the traversability of terrain is essential for autonomous robot navigation, particularly in unstructured environments such as natural landscapes. Although traditional methods, such as occupancy mapping, provide a basic framework, they often fail to account for the complex mobility capabilities of some platforms such as legged robots. In this work, we propose a method for estimating terrain traversability by learning from demonstrations of human walking. Our approach leverages dense, pixel-wise feature embeddings generated using the DINOv2 vision Transformer model, which are processed through an encoder-decoder MLP architecture to analyze terrain segments. The averaged feature vectors, extracted from the masked regions of interest, are used to train the model in a reconstruction-based framework. By minimizing reconstruction loss, the network distinguishes between familiar terrain with a low reconstruction error and unfamiliar or hazardous terrain with a higher reconstruction error. This approach facilitates the detection of anomalies, allowing a legged robot to navigate more effectively through challenging terrain. We run real-world experiments on the ANYmal legged robot both indoor and outdoor to prove our proposed method. The code is open-source, while video demonstrations can be found on our website: https://rpl-cs-ucl.github.io/STEPP
2501.17595
Technical report on label-informed logit redistribution for better domain generalization in low-shot classification with foundation models
cs.CV
Confidence calibration is an emerging challenge in real-world decision systems based on foundations models when used for downstream vision classification tasks. Due to various reasons exposed, logit scores on the CLIP head remain large irrespective of whether the image-language pairs reconcile. It is difficult to address in data space, given the few-shot regime. We propose a penalty incorporated into loss objective that penalizes incorrect classifications whenever one is made during finetuning, by moving an amount of log-likelihood to the true class commensurate to the relative amplitudes of the two likelihoods. We refer to it as \textit{confidence misalignment penalty (CMP)}. Extensive experiments on $12$ vision datasets and $5$ domain generalization datasets supports the calibration performance of our method against stat-of-the-art. CMP outperforms the benchmarked prompt learning methods, demonstrating average improvement in Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by average $6.01$\%, $4.01$ \% at minimum and $9.72$\% at maximum.
2501.17597
Economic Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of Prosumer District Heating Networks: The Extended Version
eess.SY cs.SY
In this paper, we propose an economic nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for district heating networks (DHNs). The proposed method features prosumers, multiple producers, and storage systems, which are essential components of 4th generation DHNs. These networks are characterized by their ability to optimize their operations, aiming to reduce supply temperatures, accommodate distributed heat sources, and leverage the flexibility provided by thermal inertia and storage, all crucial for achieving a fossil-fuel-free energy supply. Developing a smart energy management system to accomplish these goals requires detailed models of highly complex nonlinear systems and computational algorithms able to handle large-scale optimization problems. To address this, we introduce a graph-based optimization-oriented model that efficiently integrates distributed producers, prosumers, storage buffers, and bidirectional pipe flows, such that it can be implemented in a real-time MPC setting. Furthermore, we conduct several numerical experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms in closed-loop. Our findings demonstrate that the MPC methods achieved up to 9% cost improvement over traditional rule-based controllers while better maintaining system constraints.
2501.17598
Semantic Consistency Regularization with Large Language Models for Semi-supervised Sentiment Analysis
cs.CL cs.LG
Accurate sentiment analysis of texts is crucial for a variety of applications, such as understanding customer feedback, monitoring market trends, and detecting public sentiment. However, manually annotating large sentiment corpora for supervised learning is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Therefore, it is essential and effective to develop a semi-supervised method for the sentiment analysis task. Although some methods have been proposed for semi-supervised text classification, they rely on the intrinsic information within the unlabeled data and the learning capability of the NLP model, which lack generalization ability to the sentiment analysis scenario and may prone to overfit. Inspired by the ability of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) in following instructions and generating coherent text, we propose a Semantic Consistency Regularization with Large Language Models (SCR) framework for semi-supervised sentiment analysis. We introduce two prompting strategies to semantically enhance unlabeled text using LLMs. The first is Entity-based Enhancement (SCR-EE), which involves extracting entities and numerical information, and querying the LLM to reconstruct the textual information. The second is Concept-based Enhancement (SCR-CE), which directly queries the LLM with the original sentence for semantic reconstruction. Subsequently, the LLM-augmented data is utilized for a consistency loss with confidence thresholding, which preserves high-quality agreement samples to provide additional supervision signals during training. Furthermore, to fully utilize the uncertain unlabeled data samples, we propose a class re-assembling strategy inspired by the class space shrinking theorem. Experiments show our method achieves remarkable performance over prior semi-supervised methods.
2501.17599
RegionGCN: Spatial-Heterogeneity-Aware Graph Convolutional Networks
cs.LG
Modeling spatial heterogeneity in the data generation process is essential for understanding and predicting geographical phenomena. Despite their prevalence in geospatial tasks, neural network models usually assume spatial stationarity, which could limit their performance in the presence of spatial process heterogeneity. By allowing model parameters to vary over space, several approaches have been proposed to incorporate spatial heterogeneity into neural networks. However, current geographically weighting approaches are ineffective on graph neural networks, yielding no significant improvement in prediction accuracy. We assume the crux lies in the over-fitting risk brought by a large number of local parameters. Accordingly, we propose to model spatial process heterogeneity at the regional level rather than at the individual level, which largely reduces the number of spatially varying parameters. We further develop a heuristic optimization procedure to learn the region partition adaptively in the process of model training. Our proposed spatial-heterogeneity-aware graph convolutional network, named RegionGCN, is applied to the spatial prediction of county-level vote share in the 2016 US presidential election based on socioeconomic attributes. Results show that RegionGCN achieves significant improvement over the basic and geographically weighted GCNs. We also offer an exploratory analysis tool for the spatial variation of non-linear relationships through ensemble learning of regional partitions from RegionGCN. Our work contributes to the practice of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in tackling spatial heterogeneity.
2501.17604
nabqr: Python package for improving probabilistic forecasts
cs.LG stat.AP stat.CO
We introduce the open-source Python package NABQR: Neural Adaptive Basis for (time-adaptive) Quantile Regression that provides reliable probabilistic forecasts. NABQR corrects ensembles (scenarios) with LSTM networks and then applies time-adaptive quantile regression to the corrected ensembles to obtain improved and more reliable forecasts. With the suggested package, accuracy improvements of up to 40% in mean absolute terms can be achieved in day-ahead forecasting of onshore and offshore wind power production in Denmark.
2501.17612
VoicePrompter: Robust Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Voice Prompt and Conditional Flow Matching
cs.SD cs.AI eess.AS eess.SP
Despite remarkable advancements in recent voice conversion (VC) systems, enhancing speaker similarity in zero-shot scenarios remains challenging. This challenge arises from the difficulty of generalizing and adapting speaker characteristics in speech within zero-shot environments, which is further complicated by mismatch between the training and inference processes. To address these challenges, we propose VoicePrompter, a robust zero-shot VC model that leverages in-context learning with voice prompts. VoicePrompter is composed of (1) a factorization method that disentangles speech components and (2) a DiT-based conditional flow matching (CFM) decoder that conditions on these factorized features and voice prompts. Additionally, (3) latent mixup is used to enhance in-context learning by combining various speaker features. This approach improves speaker similarity and naturalness in zero-shot VC by applying mixup to latent representations. Experimental results demonstrate that VoicePrompter outperforms existing zero-shot VC systems in terms of speaker similarity, speech intelligibility, and audio quality. Our demo is available at \url{https://hayeong0.github.io/VoicePrompter-demo/}.
2501.17614
Coalitional control: a bottom-up approach
eess.SY cs.GT cs.SY math.OC
The recent major developments in information technologies have opened interesting possibilities for the effective management of multi-agent systems. In many cases, the important role of central control nodes can now be undertaken by several controllers in a distributed topology that suits better the structure of the system. This opens as well the possibility to promote cooperation between control agents in competitive environments, establishing links between controllers in order to adapt the exchange of critical information to the degree of subsystems' interactions. In this paper a bottom-up approach to coalitional control is presented, where the structure of each agent's model predictive controller is adapted to the time-variant coupling conditions, promoting the formation of coalitions - clusters of control agents where communication is essential to ensure the cooperation - whenever it can bring benefit to the overall system performance.
2501.17615
Cross-lingual Embedding Clustering for Hierarchical Softmax in Low-Resource Multilingual Speech Recognition
cs.CL cs.SD eess.AS
We present a novel approach centered on the decoding stage of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) that enhances multilingual performance, especially for low-resource languages. It utilizes a cross-lingual embedding clustering method to construct a hierarchical Softmax (H-Softmax) decoder, which enables similar tokens across different languages to share similar decoder representations. It addresses the limitations of the previous Huffman-based H-Softmax method, which relied on shallow features in token similarity assessments. Through experiments on a downsampled dataset of 15 languages, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving low-resource multilingual ASR accuracy.
2501.17617
Structured Context Recomposition for Large Language Models Using Probabilistic Layer Realignment
cs.CL
Extended sequence generation often leads to degradation in contextual consistency due to the inability of conventional self-attention mechanisms to effectively retain long-range dependencies. Existing approaches, including memory compression and retrieval-augmented conditioning, introduce computational trade-offs that either increase inference latency or impose additional storage overhead. Structured Context Recomposition (SCR) introduces a probabilistic layer realignment strategy that dynamically adjusts learned representations within transformer layers, ensuring that semantically relevant embeddings persist throughout extended transformations. The proposed method enhances coherence retention through a recursive weighting function that redistributes representational emphasis based on inferred contextual relevance rather than relying on fixed token-level attention scores. Empirical results indicate that probabilistic realignment mitigates abrupt topic shifts and logical inconsistencies, particularly in scenarios where sequences exceed standard attention window constraints. Sequence-level entropy analysis further reveals that SCR moderates representational variability without introducing excessive output regularization, allowing models to sustain generative diversity while preserving contextual alignment. Attention head deviation measurements confirm that hierarchical reweighting contributes to smoother token dependency transitions across transformer layers, reinforcing the stability of multi-turn interactions and document-level reasoning. Computational resource assessments show that while SCR incurs a moderate increase in processing time, memory overhead remains within feasible limits, making it suitable for practical deployment in autoregressive generative applications.
2501.17621
Physics-Informed Neural Networks in Power System Dynamics: Improving Simulation Accuracy
eess.SY cs.SY
The importance and cost of time-domain simulations when studying power systems have exponentially increased in the last decades. With the growing share of renewable energy sources, the slow and predictable responses from large turbines are replaced by the fast and unpredictable dynamics from power electronics. The current existing simulation tools require new solutions designed for faster dynamics. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have recently emerged in power systems to accelerate such simulations. By incorporating knowledge during the up-front training, PINNs provide more accurate results over larger time steps than traditional numerical methods. This paper introduces PINNs as an alternative approximation method that seamlessly integrates with the current simulation framework. We replace a synchronous machine for a trained PINN in the IEEE 9-, 14-, and 30-bus systems and simulate several network disturbances. Including PINNs systematically boosts the simulations' accuracy, providing more accurate results for both the PINN-modeled component and the whole multi-machine system states.
2501.17628
Dual Invariance Self-training for Reliable Semi-supervised Surgical Phase Recognition
eess.IV cs.CV
Accurate surgical phase recognition is crucial for advancing computer-assisted interventions, yet the scarcity of labeled data hinders training reliable deep learning models. Semi-supervised learning (SSL), particularly with pseudo-labeling, shows promise over fully supervised methods but often lacks reliable pseudo-label assessment mechanisms. To address this gap, we propose a novel SSL framework, Dual Invariance Self-Training (DIST), that incorporates both Temporal and Transformation Invariance to enhance surgical phase recognition. Our two-step self-training process dynamically selects reliable pseudo-labels, ensuring robust pseudo-supervision. Our approach mitigates the risk of noisy pseudo-labels, steering decision boundaries toward true data distribution and improving generalization to unseen data. Evaluations on Cataract and Cholec80 datasets show our method outperforms state-of-the-art SSL approaches, consistently surpassing both supervised and SSL baselines across various network architectures.
2501.17629
The Imitation Game According To Turing
cs.HC cs.AI cs.CY
The current cycle of hype and anxiety concerning the benefits and risks to human society of Artificial Intelligence is fuelled, not only by the increasing use of generative AI and other AI tools by the general public, but also by claims made on behalf of such technology by popularizers and scientists. In particular, recent studies have claimed that Large Language Models (LLMs) can pass the Turing Test-a goal for AI since the 1950s-and therefore can "think". Large-scale impacts on society have been predicted as a result. Upon detailed examination, however, none of these studies has faithfully applied Turing's original instructions. Consequently, we conducted a rigorous Turing Test with GPT-4-Turbo that adhered closely to Turing's instructions for a three-player imitation game. We followed established scientific standards where Turing's instructions were ambiguous or missing. For example, we performed a Computer-Imitates-Human Game (CIHG) without constraining the time duration and conducted a Man-Imitates-Woman Game (MIWG) as a benchmark. All but one participant correctly identified the LLM, showing that one of today's most advanced LLMs is unable to pass a rigorous Turing Test. We conclude that recent extravagant claims for such models are unsupported, and do not warrant either optimism or concern about the social impact of thinking machines.
2501.17630
Uncertainty Quantification and Decomposition for LLM-based Recommendation
cs.IR cs.CL
Despite the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) for recommendation, we demonstrate that LLMs often exhibit uncertainty in their recommendations. To ensure the trustworthy use of LLMs in generating recommendations, we emphasize the importance of assessing the reliability of recommendations generated by LLMs. We start by introducing a novel framework for estimating the predictive uncertainty to quantitatively measure the reliability of LLM-based recommendations. We further propose to decompose the predictive uncertainty into recommendation uncertainty and prompt uncertainty, enabling in-depth analyses of the primary source of uncertainty. Through extensive experiments, we (1) demonstrate predictive uncertainty effectively indicates the reliability of LLM-based recommendations, (2) investigate the origins of uncertainty with decomposed uncertainty measures, and (3) propose uncertainty-aware prompting for a lower predictive uncertainty and enhanced recommendation. Our source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/WonbinKweon/UNC_LLM_REC_WWW2025
2501.17634
Federated Learning With Individualized Privacy Through Client Sampling
cs.LG cs.CR cs.CV
With growing concerns about user data collection, individualized privacy has emerged as a promising solution to balance protection and utility by accounting for diverse user privacy preferences. Instead of enforcing a uniform level of anonymization for all users, this approach allows individuals to choose privacy settings that align with their comfort levels. Building on this idea, we propose an adapted method for enabling Individualized Differential Privacy (IDP) in Federated Learning (FL) by handling clients according to their personal privacy preferences. By extending the SAMPLE algorithm from centralized settings to FL, we calculate client-specific sampling rates based on their heterogeneous privacy budgets and integrate them into a modified IDP-FedAvg algorithm. We test this method under realistic privacy distributions and multiple datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves clear improvements over uniform DP baselines, reducing the trade-off between privacy and utility. Compared to the alternative SCALE method in related work, which assigns differing noise scales to clients, our method performs notably better. However, challenges remain for complex tasks with non-i.i.d. data, primarily stemming from the constraints of the decentralized setting.