Industry
An NLP Benchmark Dataset for Assessing Corporate Climate Policy Engagement
As societal awareness of climate change grows, corporate climate policy engagements are attracting attention.We propose a dataset to estimate corporate climate policy engagement from various PDF-formatted documents.Our dataset comes from LobbyMap (a platform operated by global think tank InfluenceMap) that provides engagement categories and stances on the documents.To convert the LobbyMap data into the structured dataset, we developed a pipeline using text extraction and OCR.Our contributions are: (i) Building an NLP dataset including 10K documents on corporate climate policy engagement.
Our king, priest and feudal lord – how AI is taking us back to the dark ages Joseph de Weck
Since the Enlightenment, we've been making our own decisions. T his summer, I found myself battling through traffic in the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat told me to turn right toward a spot known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to go straight. Tired, and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze's advice.
Extraction and Recovery of Spatio-Temporal Structure in Latent Dynamics Alignment with Diffusion Models
In the field of behavior-related brain computation, it is necessary to align raw neural signals against the drastic domain shift among them. A foundational framework within neuroscience research posits that trial-based neural population activities rely on low-dimensional latent dynamics, thus focusing on the latter greatly facilitates the alignment procedure. Despite this field's progress, existing methods ignore the intrinsic spatio-temporal structure during the alignment phase. Hence, their solutions usually lead to poor quality in latent dynamics structures and overall performance. To tackle this problem, we propose an alignment method ERDiff, which leverages the expressivity of the diffusion model to preserve the spatio-temporal structure of latent dynamics. Specifically, the latent dynamics structures of the source domain are first extracted by a diffusion model. Then, under the guidance of this diffusion model, such structures are well-recovered through a maximum likelihood alignment procedure in the target domain. We first demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on a synthetic dataset. Then, when applied to neural recordings from the non-human primate motor cortex, under both cross-day and inter-subject settings, our method consistently manifests its capability of preserving the spatio-temporal structure of latent dynamics and outperforms existing approaches in alignment goodness-of-fit and neural decoding performance.
VTaC: A Benchmark Dataset of Ventricular Tachycardia Alarms from ICU Monitors
False arrhythmia alarms in intensive care units (ICUs) are a continuing problem despite considerable effort from industrial and academic algorithm developers. Of all life-threatening arrhythmias, ventricular tachycardia (VT) stands out as the most challenging arrhythmia to detect reliably. We introduce a new annotated VT alarm database, VTaC (Ventricular Tachycardia annotated alarms from ICUs) consisting of over 5,000 waveform recordings with VT alarms triggered by bedside monitors in the ICU. Each VT alarm waveform in the dataset has been labeled by at least two independent human expert annotators. The dataset encompasses data collected from ICUs in two major US hospitals and includes data from three leading bedside monitor manufacturers, providing a diverse and representative collection of alarm waveform data. Each waveform recording comprises at least two electrocardiogram (ECG) leads and one or more pulsatile waveforms, such as photoplethysmogram (PPG or PLETH) and arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveforms. We demonstrate the utility of this new benchmark dataset for the task of false arrhythmia alarm reduction, and present performance of multiple machine learning approaches, including conventional supervised machine learning, deep learning, semi-supervised learning, and generative approaches for the task of VT false alarm reduction.
Zero-shot Knowledge Transfer via Adversarial Belief Matching
Performing knowledge transfer from a large teacher network to a smaller student is a popular task in modern deep learning applications. However, due to growing dataset sizes and stricter privacy regulations, it is increasingly common not to have access to the data that was used to train the teacher. We propose a novel method which trains a student to match the predictions of its teacher without using any data or metadata. We achieve this by training an adversarial generator to search for images on which the student poorly matches the teacher, and then using them to train the student. Our resulting student closely approximates its teacher for simple datasets like SVHN, and on CIFAR10 we improve on the state-of-the-art for few-shot distillation (with $100$ images per class), despite using no data. Finally, we also propose a metric to quantify the degree of belief matching between teacher and student in the vicinity of decision boundaries, and observe a significantly higher match between our zero-shot student and the teacher, than between a student distilled with real data and the teacher.
Specific and Shared Causal Relation Modeling and Mechanism-Based Clustering
State-of-the-art approaches to causal discovery usually assume a fixed underlying causal model. However, it is often the case that causal models vary across domains or subjects, due to possibly omitted factors that affect the quantitative causal effects. As a typical example, causal connectivity in the brain network has been reported to vary across individuals, with significant differences across groups of people, such as autistics and typical controls. In this paper, we develop a unified framework for causal discovery and mechanism-based group identification. In particular, we propose a specific and shared causal model (SSCM), which takes into account the variabilities of causal relations across individuals/groups and leverages their commonalities to achieve statistically reliable estimation. The learned SSCM gives the specific causal knowledge for each individual as well as the general trend over the population. In addition, the estimated model directly provides the group information of each individual. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.
Efficient online learning with kernels for adversarial large scale problems
We are interested in a framework of online learning with kernels for low-dimensional, but large-scale and potentially adversarial datasets. We study the computational and theoretical performance of online variations of kernel Ridge regression. Despite its simplicity, the algorithm we study is the first to achieve the optimal regret for a wide range of kernels with a per-round complexity of order $n^\alpha$ with $\alpha < 2$. The algorithm we consider is based on approximating the kernel with the linear span of basis functions. Our contributions are twofold: 1) For the Gaussian kernel, we propose to build the basis beforehand (independently of the data) through Taylor expansion. For $d$-dimensional inputs, we provide a (close to) optimal regret of order $O((\log n)^{d+1})$ with per-round time complexity and space complexity $O((\log n)^{2d})$. This makes the algorithm a suitable choice as soon as $n \gg e^d$ which is likely to happen in a scenario with small dimensional and large-scale dataset; 2) For general kernels with low effective dimension, the basis functions are updated sequentially, adapting to the data, by sampling Nyström points. In this case, our algorithm improves the computational trade-off known for online kernel regression.
Injecting Multimodal Information into Rigid Protein Docking via Bi-level Optimization
The structure of protein-protein complexes is critical for understanding binding dynamics, biological mechanisms, and intervention strategies. Rigid protein docking, a fundamental problem in this field, aims to predict the 3D structure of complexes from their unbound states without conformational changes. In this scenario, we have access to two types of valuable information: sequence-modal information, such as coevolutionary data obtained from multiple sequence alignments, and structure-modal information, including the 3D conformations of rigid structures. However, existing docking methods typically utilize single-modal information, resulting in suboptimal predictions. In this paper, we propose xTrimoBiDock (or BiDock for short), a novel rigid docking model that effectively integrates sequence-and structure-modal information through bi-level optimization. Specifically, a cross-modal transformer combines multimodal information to predict an inter-protein distance map. To achieve rigid docking, the roto-translation transformation is optimized to align the docked pose with the predicted distance map. In order to tackle this bi-level optimization problem, we unroll the gradient descent of the inner loop and further derive a better initialization for roto-translation transformation based on spectral estimation. Compared to baselines, BiDock achieves a promising result of a maximum 234% relative improvement in challenging antibody-antigen docking problem.
Episodic Memory in Lifelong Language Learning
We introduce a lifelong language learning setup where a model needs to learn from a stream of text examples without any dataset identifier. We propose an episodic memory model that performs sparse experience replay and local adaptation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in this setup. Experiments on text classification and question answering demonstrate the complementary benefits of sparse experience replay and local adaptation to allow the model to continuously learn from new datasets. We also show that the space complexity of the episodic memory module can be reduced significantly (~50-90%) by randomly choosing which examples to store in memory with a minimal decrease in performance. We consider an episodic memory component as a crucial building block of general linguistic intelligence and see our model as a first step in that direction.
Propagating Uncertainty in Reinforcement Learning via Wasserstein Barycenters
How does the uncertainty of the value function propagate when performing temporal difference learning? In this paper, we address this question by proposing a Bayesian framework in which we employ approximate posterior distributions to model the uncertainty of the value function and Wasserstein barycenters to propagate it across state-action pairs. Leveraging on these tools, we present an algorithm, Wasserstein Q-Learning (WQL), starting in the tabular case and then, we show how it can be extended to deal with continuous domains. Furthermore, we prove that, under mild assumptions, a slight variation of WQL enjoys desirable theoretical properties in the tabular setting. Finally, we present an experimental campaign to show the effectiveness of WQL on finite problems, compared to several RL algorithms, some of which are specifically designed for exploration, along with some preliminary results on Atari games.