In this work, we proposed a novel inferential procedure assisted by machine learning based adjustment for randomized control trials. The method was developed under the Rosenbaum's framework of exact tests in randomized experiments with covariate adjustments. Through extensive simulation experiments, we showed the proposed method can robustly control the type I error and can boost the inference efficiency for a randomized controlled trial (RCT). This advantage was further demonstrated in a real world example. The simplicity and robustness of the proposed method makes it a competitive candidate as a routine inference procedure for RCTs, especially when the number of baseline covariates is large, and when nonlinear association or interaction among covariates is expected. Its application may remarkably reduce the required sample size and cost of RCTs, such as phase III clinical trials.
As research in large language models (LLMs) continues to accelerate, LLM-based evaluation has emerged as a scalable and cost-effective alternative to human evaluations for comparing the ever increasing list of models. This paper investigates the efficacy of these ``LLM evaluators'', particularly in using them to assess instruction following, a metric that gauges how closely generated text adheres to the given instruction. We introduce a challenging meta-evaluation benchmark, LLMBar, designed to test the ability of an LLM evaluator in discerning instruction-following outputs. The authors manually curated 419 pairs of outputs, one adhering to instructions while the other diverging, yet may possess deceptive qualities that mislead an LLM evaluator, e.g., a more engaging tone. Contrary to existing meta-evaluation, we discover that different evaluators (i.e., combinations of LLMs and prompts) exhibit distinct performance on LLMBar and even the highest-scoring ones have substantial room for improvement. We also present a novel suite of prompting strategies that further close the gap between LLM and human evaluators. With LLMBar, we hope to offer more insight into LLM evaluators and foster future research in developing better instruction-following models.
In this work, we unveil the advantages of synergizing cooperative rate splitting (CRS) with user relaying and simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR RIS). Specifically, we propose a novel STAR RIS-assisted CRS transmission framework, featuring six unique transmission modes that leverage various combination of the relaying protocols (including full duplex-FD and half duplex-HD) and the STAR RIS configuration protocols (including energy splitting-ES, mode switching-MS, and time splitting-TS). With the objective of maximizing the minimum user rate, we then propose a unified successive convex approximation (SCA)-based alternative optimization (AO) algorithm to jointly optimize the transmit active beamforming, common rate allocation, STAR RIS passive beamforming, as well as time allocation (for HD or TS protocols) subject to the transmit power constraint at the base station (BS) and the law of energy conservation at the STAR RIS. To alleviate the computational burden, we further propose a low-complexity algorithm that incorporates a closed-form passive beamforming design. Numerical results show that our proposed framework significantly enhances user fairness compared with conventional CRS schemes without STAR RIS or other STAR RIS empowered multiple access schemes. Moreover, the proposed low-complexity algorithm dramatically reduces the computational complexity while achieving very close performance to the AO method.
In this work, we instantiate a regularized form of the gradient clipping algorithm and prove that it can converge to the global minima of deep neural network loss functions provided that the net is of sufficient width. We present empirical evidence that our theoretically founded regularized gradient clipping algorithm is also competitive with the state-of-the-art deep-learning heuristics. Hence the algorithm presented here constitutes a new approach to rigorous deep learning. The modification we do to standard gradient clipping is designed to leverage the PL* condition, a variant of the Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality which was recently proven to be true for various neural networks for any depth within a neighborhood of the initialisation.
Copyright infringement may occur when a generative model produces samples substantially similar to some copyrighted data that it had access to during the training phase. The notion of access usually refers to including copyrighted samples directly in the training dataset, which one may inspect to identify an infringement. We argue that such visual auditing largely overlooks a concealed copyright infringement, where one constructs a disguise that looks drastically different from the copyrighted sample yet still induces the effect of training Latent Diffusion Models on it. Such disguises only require indirect access to the copyrighted material and cannot be visually distinguished, thus easily circumventing the current auditing tools. In this paper, we provide a better understanding of such disguised copyright infringement by uncovering the disguises generation algorithm, the revelation of the disguises, and importantly, how to detect them to augment the existing toolbox. Additionally, we introduce a broader notion of acknowledgment for comprehending such indirect access.
In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study on the robustness of domain generation algorithm (DGA) classifiers. We implement 32 white-box attacks, 19 of which are very effective and induce a false-negative rate (FNR) of $\approx$ 100\% on unhardened classifiers. To defend the classifiers, we evaluate different hardening approaches and propose a novel training scheme that leverages adversarial latent space vectors and discretized adversarial domains to significantly improve robustness. In our study, we highlight a pitfall to avoid when hardening classifiers and uncover training biases that can be easily exploited by attackers to bypass detection, but which can be mitigated by adversarial training (AT). In our study, we do not observe any trade-off between robustness and performance, on the contrary, hardening improves a classifier's detection performance for known and unknown DGAs. We implement all attacks and defenses discussed in this paper as a standalone library, which we make publicly available to facilitate hardening of DGA classifiers: //gitlab.com/rwth-itsec/robust-dga-detection
In this paper, we investigate the problem of resource allocation for fluid antenna relay (FAR) system with antenna location optimization. In the considered model, each user transmits information to a base station (BS) with help of FAR. The antenna location of the FAR is flexible and can be adapted to dynamic location distribution of the users. We formulate a sum rate maximization problem through jointly optimizing the antenna location and bandwidth allocation with meeting the minimum rate requirements, total bandwidth budget, and feasible antenna region constraints. To solve this problem, we obtain the optimal bandwidth in closed form. Based on the optimal bandwidth, the original problem is reduced to the antenna location optimization problem and an alternating algorithm is proposed. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the sum rate can be increased by up to 125% compared to the conventional schemes.
In this study, we propose a multi branched network approach to predict the dynamics of a physics attractor characterized by intricate and chaotic behavior. We introduce a unique neural network architecture comprised of Radial Basis Function (RBF) layers combined with an attention mechanism designed to effectively capture nonlinear inter-dependencies inherent in the attractor's temporal evolution. Our results demonstrate successful prediction of the attractor's trajectory across 100 predictions made using a real-world dataset of 36,700 time-series observations encompassing approximately 28 minutes of activity. To further illustrate the performance of our proposed technique, we provide comprehensive visualizations depicting the attractor's original and predicted behaviors alongside quantitative measures comparing observed versus estimated outcomes. Overall, this work showcases the potential of advanced machine learning algorithms in elucidating hidden structures in complex physical systems while offering practical applications in various domains requiring accurate short-term forecasting capabilities.
In statistics and machine learning, logistic regression is a widely-used supervised learning technique primarily employed for binary classification tasks. When the number of observations greatly exceeds the number of predictor variables, we present a simple, randomized sampling-based algorithm for logistic regression problem that guarantees high-quality approximations to both the estimated probabilities and the overall discrepancy of the model. Our analysis builds upon two simple structural conditions that boil down to randomized matrix multiplication, a fundamental and well-understood primitive of randomized numerical linear algebra. We analyze the properties of estimated probabilities of logistic regression when leverage scores are used to sample observations, and prove that accurate approximations can be achieved with a sample whose size is much smaller than the total number of observations. To further validate our theoretical findings, we conduct comprehensive empirical evaluations. Overall, our work sheds light on the potential of using randomized sampling approaches to efficiently approximate the estimated probabilities in logistic regression, offering a practical and computationally efficient solution for large-scale datasets.
Data augmentations are known to improve robustness in speech-processing tasks. In this study, we summarize and compare different data augmentation strategies using S3PRL toolkit. We explore how HuBERT and wav2vec perform using different augmentation techniques (SpecAugment, Gaussian Noise, Speed Perturbation) for Phoneme Recognition (PR) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. We evaluate model performance in terms of phoneme error rate (PER) and word error rate (WER). From the experiments, we observed that SpecAugment slightly improves the performance of HuBERT and wav2vec on the original dataset. Also, we show that models trained using the Gaussian Noise and Speed Perturbation dataset are more robust when tested with augmented test sets.
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.