This research presents FDASynthesis, a novel algorithm designed to generate synthetic GPS trajectory data while preserving privacy. After pre-processing the input GPS data, human mobility traces are modeled as multidimensional curves using Functional Data Analysis (FDA). Then, the synthesis process identifies the K-nearest trajectories and averages their Square-Root Velocity Functions (SRVFs) to generate synthetic data. This results in synthetic trajectories that maintain the utility of the original data while ensuring privacy. Although applied for human mobility research, FDASynthesis is highly adaptable to different types of functional data, offering a scalable solution in various application domains.
Solving tabular math word problems (TMWPs) has become a critical role in evaluating the mathematical reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), where large-scale TMWP samples are commonly required for LLM fine-tuning. Since the collection of high-quality TMWP datasets is costly and time-consuming, recent research has concentrated on automatic TMWP generation. However, current generated samples usually suffer from issues of either correctness or diversity. In this paper, we propose a Template-driven LLM-paraphrased (TeLL) framework for generating high-quality TMWP samples with diverse backgrounds and accurate tables, questions, answers, and solutions. To this end, we first extract templates from existing real samples to generate initial problems, ensuring correctness. Then, we adopt an LLM to extend templates and paraphrase problems, obtaining diverse TMWP samples. Furthermore, we find the reasoning annotation is important for solving TMWPs. Therefore, we propose to enrich each solution with illustrative reasoning steps. Through the proposed framework, we construct a high-quality dataset TabMWP-TeLL by adhering to the question types in the TabMWP dataset, and we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of LLMs to demonstrate the effectiveness of TabMWP-TeLL in improving TMWP solving performance. The code and data of this paper are available at: //github.com/Jason8Kang/TELL.
A recently proposed scheme utilizing local noise addition and matrix masking enables data collection while protecting individual privacy from all parties, including the central data manager. Statistical analysis of such privacy-preserved data is particularly challenging for nonlinear models like logistic regression. By leveraging a relationship between logistic regression and linear regression estimators, we propose the first valid statistical analysis method for logistic regression under this setting. Theoretical analysis of the proposed estimators confirmed its validity under an asymptotic framework with increasing noise magnitude to account for strict privacy requirements. Simulations and real data analyses demonstrate the superiority of the proposed estimators over naive logistic regression methods on privacy-preserved data sets.
We consider the variable selection problem for two-sample tests, aiming to select the most informative variables to determine whether two collections of samples follow the same distribution. To address this, we propose a novel framework based on the kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). Our approach seeks a subset of variables with a pre-specified size that maximizes the variance-regularized kernel MMD statistic. We focus on three commonly used types of kernels: linear, quadratic, and Gaussian. From a computational perspective, we derive mixed-integer programming formulations and propose exact and approximation algorithms with performance guarantees to solve these formulations. From a statistical viewpoint, we derive the rate of testing power of our framework under appropriate conditions. These results show that the sample size requirements for the three kernels depend crucially on the number of selected variables, rather than the data dimension. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method, compared to other variable selection frameworks, particularly in high-dimensional settings.
This study explores the application of the rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) technique, vital for interference mitigation in modern communication systems. It investigates the use of precoding methods in RSMA, especially in complex multiple-antenna interference channels, employing deep reinforcement learning. The aim is to optimize precoders and power allocation for common and private data streams involving multiple decision-makers. A multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) framework is employed to address this complexity, where decentralized agents collectively learn to optimize actions in a continuous policy space. We also explore the challenges posed by imperfect channel side information at the transmitter. Additionally, decoding order estimation is addressed to determine the optimal decoding sequence for common and private data sequences. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RSMA method based on MADDPG, achieving the upper bound in single-antenna scenarios and closely approaching theoretical limits in multi-antenna scenarios. Comparative analysis shows superiority over other techniques such as MADDPG without rate-splitting, maximal ratio transmission (MRT), zero-forcing (ZF), and leakage-based precoding methods. These findings highlight the potential of deep reinforcement learning-driven RSMA in reducing interference and enhancing system performance in communication systems.
This work focuses on developing efficient post-hoc explanations for quantum AI algorithms. In classical contexts, the cooperative game theory concept of the Shapley value adapts naturally to post-hoc explanations, where it can be used to identify which factors are important in an AI's decision-making process. An interesting question is how to translate Shapley values to the quantum setting and whether quantum effects could be used to accelerate their calculation. We propose quantum algorithms that can extract Shapley values within some confidence interval. Our method is capable of quadratically outperforming classical Monte Carlo approaches to approximating Shapley values up to polylogarithmic factors in various circumstances. We demonstrate the validity of our approach empirically with specific voting games and provide rigorous proofs of performance for general cooperative games.
Adversarial attacks pose significant challenges in 3D object recognition, especially in scenarios involving multi-view analysis where objects can be observed from varying angles. This paper introduces View-Invariant Adversarial Perturbations (VIAP), a novel method for crafting robust adversarial examples that remain effective across multiple viewpoints. Unlike traditional methods, VIAP enables targeted attacks capable of manipulating recognition systems to classify objects as specific, pre-determined labels, all while using a single universal perturbation. Leveraging a dataset of 1,210 images across 121 diverse rendered 3D objects, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VIAP in both targeted and untargeted settings. Our untargeted perturbations successfully generate a singular adversarial noise robust to 3D transformations, while targeted attacks achieve exceptional results, with top-1 accuracies exceeding 95% across various epsilon values. These findings highlight VIAPs potential for real-world applications, such as testing the robustness of 3D recognition systems. The proposed method sets a new benchmark for view-invariant adversarial robustness, advancing the field of adversarial machine learning for 3D object recognition.
This paper studies sample average approximation (SAA) in solving convex or strongly convex stochastic programming (SP) problems. Under some common regularity conditions, we show -- perhaps for the first time -- that SAA's sample complexity can be completely free from any quantification of metric entropy (such as the logarithm of the covering number), leading to a significantly more efficient rate with dimensionality $d$ than most existing results. From the newly established complexity bounds, an important revelation is that SAA and the canonical stochastic mirror descent (SMD) method, two mainstream solution approaches to SP, entail almost identical rates of sample efficiency, lifting a theoretical discrepancy of SAA from SMD by the order of $O(d)$. Furthermore, this paper explores non-Lipschitzian scenarios where SAA maintains provable efficacy but the corresponding results for SMD remain mostly unexplored, indicating the potential of SAA's better applicability in some irregular settings.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Cold-start problems are long-standing challenges for practical recommendations. Most existing recommendation algorithms rely on extensive observed data and are brittle to recommendation scenarios with few interactions. This paper addresses such problems using few-shot learning and meta learning. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. To accomplish this, we combine the scenario-specific learning with a model-agnostic sequential meta-learning and unify them into an integrated end-to-end framework, namely Scenario-specific Sequential Meta learner (or s^2 meta). By doing so, our meta-learner produces a generic initial model through aggregating contextual information from a variety of prediction tasks while effectively adapting to specific tasks by leveraging learning-to-learn knowledge. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve significant gains over the state-of-the-arts for cold-start problems in online recommendation. Deployment is at the Guess You Like session, the front page of the Mobile Taobao.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.