Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Diving into the Depths of Spotting Text in Multi-Domain Noisy Scenes

When used in a real-world noisy environment, the capacity to generalize to multiple domains is essential for any autonomous scene text spotting system. However, existing state-of-the-art methods employ pretraining and fine-tuning strategies on natural scene datasets, which do not exploit the feature interaction across other complex domains. In this work, we explore and investigate the problem of domain-agnostic scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly generalize to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. In this regard, we present the community a text spotting validation benchmark called Under-Water Text (UWT) for noisy underwater scenes to establish an important case study. Moreover, we also design an efficient super-resolution based end-to-end transformer baseline called DA-TextSpotter which achieves comparable or superior performance over existing text spotting architectures for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text spotting benchmarks in terms of both accuracy and model efficiency. The dataset, code and pre-trained models will be released upon acceptance.
Colloquial Persian POS (CPPOS) Corpus: A Novel Corpus for Colloquial Persian Part of Speech Tagging

Introduction: Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging, the process of classifying words into their respective parts of speech (e.g., verb or noun), is essential in various natural language processing applications. POS tagging is a crucial preprocessing task for applications like machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, etc. However, existing corpora for POS tagging in Persian mainly consist of formal texts, such as daily news and newspapers. As a result, smart POS tools, machine learning models, and deep learning models trained on these corpora may not perform optimally for processing colloquial text in social network analysis. Method: This paper introduces a novel corpus, "Colloquial Persian POS" (CPPOS), specifically designed to support colloquial Persian text. The corpus includes formal and informal text collected from various domains such as political, social, and commercial on Telegram, Twitter, and Instagram more than 520K labeled tokens. After collecting posts from these social platforms for one year, special preprocessing steps were conducted, including normalization, sentence tokenizing, and word tokenizing for social text. The tokens and sentences were then manually annotated and verified by a team of linguistic experts. This study also defines a POS tagging guideline for annotating the data and conducting the annotation process. Results: To evaluate the quality of CPPOS, various deep learning models, such as the RNN family, were trained using the constructed corpus. A comparison with another well-known Persian POS corpus named "Bijankhan" and the Persian Hazm POS tool trained on Bijankhan revealed that our model trained on CPPOS outperforms them. With the new corpus and the BiLSTM deep neural model, we achieved a 14% improvement over the previous dataset.
YFlows: Systematic Dataflow Exploration and Code Generation for Efficient Neural Network Inference using SIMD Architectures on CPUs

We address the challenges associated with deploying neural networks on CPUs, with a particular focus on minimizing inference time while maintaining accuracy. Our novel approach is to use the dataflow (i.e., computation order) of a neural network to explore data reuse opportunities using heuristic-guided analysis and a code generation framework, which enables exploration of various Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) implementations to achieve optimized neural network execution. Our results demonstrate that the dataflow that keeps outputs in SIMD registers while also maximizing both input and weight reuse consistently yields the best performance for a wide variety of inference workloads, achieving up to 3x speedup for 8-bit neural networks, and up to 4.8x speedup for binary neural networks, respectively, over the optimized implementations of neural networks today.
Faithful Explanations of Black-box NLP Models Using LLM-generated Counterfactuals

Causal explanations of the predictions of NLP systems are essential to ensure safety and establish trust. Yet, existing methods often fall short of explaining model predictions effectively or efficiently and are often model-specific. In this paper, we address model-agnostic explanations, proposing two approaches for counterfactual (CF) approximation. The first approach is CF generation, where a large language model (LLM) is prompted to change a specific text concept while keeping confounding concepts unchanged. While this approach is demonstrated to be very effective, applying LLM at inference-time is costly. We hence present a second approach based on matching, and propose a method that is guided by an LLM at training-time and learns a dedicated embedding space. This space is faithful to a given causal graph and effectively serves to identify matches that approximate CFs. After showing theoretically that approximating CFs is required in order to construct faithful explanations, we benchmark our approaches and explain several models, including LLMs with billions of parameters. Our empirical results demonstrate the excellent performance of CF generation models as model-agnostic explainers. Moreover, our matching approach, which requires far less test-time resources, also provides effective explanations, surpassing many baselines. We also find that Top-K techniques universally improve every tested method. Finally, we showcase the potential of LLMs in constructing new benchmarks for model explanation and subsequently validate our conclusions. Our work illuminates new pathways for efficient and accurate approaches to interpreting NLP systems.
Learning How to Propagate Messages in Graph Neural Networks

This paper studies the problem of learning message propagation strategies for graph neural networks (GNNs). One of the challenges for graph neural networks is that of defining the propagation strategy. For instance, the choices of propagation steps are often specialized to a single graph and are not personalized to different nodes. To compensate for this, in this paper, we present learning to propagate, a general learning framework that not only learns the GNN parameters for prediction but more importantly, can explicitly learn the interpretable and personalized propagate strategies for different nodes and various types of graphs. We introduce the optimal propagation steps as latent variables to help find the maximum-likelihood estimation of the GNN parameters in a variational Expectation-Maximization (VEM) framework. Extensive experiments on various types of graph benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed framework can significantly achieve better performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods, and can effectively learn personalized and interpretable propagate strategies of messages in GNNs.
Evaluating Speech Synthesis by Training Recognizers on Synthetic Speech

Modern speech synthesis systems have improved significantly, with synthetic speech being indistinguishable from real speech. However, efficient and holistic evaluation of synthetic speech still remains a significant challenge. Human evaluation using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is ideal, but inefficient due to high costs. Therefore, researchers have developed auxiliary automatic metrics like Word Error Rate (WER) to measure intelligibility. Prior works focus on evaluating synthetic speech based on pre-trained speech recognition models, however, this can be limiting since this approach primarily measures speech intelligibility. In this paper, we propose an evaluation technique involving the training of an ASR model on synthetic speech and assessing its performance on real speech. Our main assumption is that by training the ASR model on the synthetic speech, the WER on real speech reflects the similarity between distributions, a broader assessment of synthetic speech quality beyond intelligibility. Our proposed metric demonstrates a strong correlation with both MOS naturalness and MOS intelligibility when compared to SpeechLMScore and MOSNet on three recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems: MQTTS, StyleTTS, and YourTTS.
HOH: Markerless Multimodal Human-Object-Human Handover Dataset with Large Object Count

We present the HOH (Human-Object-Human) Handover Dataset, a large object count dataset with 136 objects, to accelerate data-driven research on handover studies, human-robot handover implementation, and artificial intelligence (AI) on handover parameter estimation from 2D and 3D data of person interactions. HOH contains multi-view RGB and depth data, skeletons, fused point clouds, grasp type and handedness labels, object, giver hand, and receiver hand 2D and 3D segmentations, giver and receiver comfort ratings, and paired object metadata and aligned 3D models for 2,720 handover interactions spanning 136 objects and 20 giver-receiver pairs-40 with role-reversal-organized from 40 participants. We also show experimental results of neural networks trained using HOH to perform grasp, orientation, and trajectory prediction. As the only fully markerless handover capture dataset, HOH represents natural human-human handover interactions, overcoming challenges with markered datasets that require specific suiting for body tracking, and lack high-resolution hand tracking. To date, HOH is the largest handover dataset in number of objects, participants, pairs with role reversal accounted for, and total interactions captured.
RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing, which enhances user interactions by enabling models to imitate various characters. However, the closed-source nature of state-of-the-art LLMs and their general-purpose training limit role-playing optimization. In this paper, we introduce RoleLLM, a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in LLMs. RoleLLM comprises four stages: (1) Role Profile Construction for 100 roles; (2) Context-Based Instruction Generation (Context-Instruct) for role-specific knowledge extraction; (3) Role Prompting using GPT (RoleGPT) for speaking style imitation; and (4) Role-Conditioned Instruction Tuning (RoCIT) for fine-tuning open-source models along with role customization. By Context-Instruct and RoleGPT, we create RoleBench, the first systematic and fine-grained character-level benchmark dataset for role-playing with 168,093 samples. Moreover, RoCIT on RoleBench yields RoleLLaMA (English) and RoleGLM (Chinese), significantly enhancing role-playing abilities and even achieving comparable results with RoleGPT (using GPT-4).
Anywhere &amp; Everywhere: A Mobile, Immersive, and Ubiquitous Vision for Data Analytics

Data is collected everywhere in our increasingly instrumented world and people are increasingly wanting to access this data from anywhere in it. This kind of anywhere & everywhere data present new challenges and opportunities for data-driven sensemaking and decision-making that will require leveraging novel mobile, immersive, and ubiquitous technologies undergirded by recent advances in human cognition. In this paper, we examine these emerging forms of analytics that are transforming how data analysis will be conducted in the future: in an ecosystem of connected devices, interactive visualizations, and collaborating users with vast amounts of data and analytical mechanisms available at their fingertips.
SMOOT: Saliency Guided Mask Optimized Online Training

Deep Neural Networks are powerful tools for understanding complex patterns and making decisions. However, their black-box nature impedes a complete understanding of their inner workings. Saliency-Guided Training (SGT) methods try to highlight the prominent features in the model's training based on the output to alleviate this problem. These methods use back-propagation and modified gradients to guide the model toward the most relevant features while keeping the impact on the prediction accuracy negligible. SGT makes the model's final result more interpretable by masking input partially. In this way, considering the model's output, we can infer how each segment of the input affects the output. In the particular case of image as the input, masking is applied to the input pixels. However, the masking strategy and number of pixels which we mask, are considered as a hyperparameter. Appropriate setting of masking strategy can directly affect the model's training. In this paper, we focus on this issue and present our contribution. We propose a novel method to determine the optimal number of masked images based on input, accuracy, and model loss during the training. The strategy prevents information loss which leads to better accuracy values. Also, by integrating the model's performance in the strategy formula, we show that our model represents the salient features more meaningful. Our experimental results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both model accuracy and the prominence of saliency, thereby affirming the effectiveness of our proposed solution.
Learning Type Inference for Enhanced Dataflow Analysis

Statically analyzing dynamically-typed code is a challenging endeavor, as even seemingly trivial tasks such as determining the targets of procedure calls are non-trivial without knowing the types of objects at compile time. Addressing this challenge, gradual typing is increasingly added to dynamically-typed languages, a prominent example being TypeScript that introduces static typing to JavaScript. Gradual typing improves the developer's ability to verify program behavior, contributing to robust, secure and debuggable programs. In practice, however, users only sparsely annotate types directly. At the same time, conventional type inference faces performance-related challenges as program size grows. Statistical techniques based on machine learning offer faster inference, but although recent approaches demonstrate overall improved accuracy, they still perform significantly worse on user-defined types than on the most common built-in types. Limiting their real-world usefulness even more, they rarely integrate with user-facing applications. We propose CodeTIDAL5, a Transformer-based model trained to reliably predict type annotations. For effective result retrieval and re-integration, we extract usage slices from a program's code property graph. Comparing our approach against recent neural type inference systems, our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 7.85% on the ManyTypes4TypeScript benchmark, achieving 71.27% accuracy overall. Furthermore, we present JoernTI, an integration of our approach into Joern, an open source static analysis tool, and demonstrate that the analysis benefits from the additional type information. As our model allows for fast inference times even on commodity CPUs, making our system available through Joern leads to high accessibility and facilitates security research.
Testing the Limits of Unified Sequence to Sequence LLM Pretraining on Diverse Table Data Tasks

Tables stored in databases and tables which are present in web pages and articles account for a large part of semi-structured data that is available on the internet. It then becomes pertinent to develop a modeling approach with large language models (LLMs) that can be used to solve diverse table tasks such as semantic parsing, question answering as well as classification problems. Traditionally, there existed separate models specialized for each task individually. It raises the question of how far can we go to build a unified model that works well on some table tasks without significant degradation on others. To that end, we attempt at creating a shared modeling approach in the pretraining stage with encoder-decoder style LLMs that can cater to diverse tasks. We evaluate our approach that continually pretrains and finetunes different model families of T5 with data from tables and surrounding context, on these downstream tasks at different model scales. Through multiple ablation studies, we observe that our pretraining with self-supervised objectives can significantly boost the performance of the models on these tasks. As an example of one improvement, we observe that the instruction finetuned public models which come specialized on text question answering (QA) and have been trained on table data still have room for improvement when it comes to table specific QA. Our work is the first attempt at studying the advantages of a unified approach to table specific pretraining when scaled from 770M to 11B sequence to sequence models while also comparing the instruction finetuned variants of the models.
Web Image Formats: Assessment of Their Real-World-Usage and Performance across Popular Web Browsers

In 2023, images on the web make up 41% of transmitted data, significantly impacting the performance of web apps. Fortunately, image formats like WEBP and AVIF could offer advanced compression and faster page loading, but may face performance disparities across browsers. Therefore, we conducted performance evaluations on five major browsers - Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, and Firefox - while comparing four image formats. The results indicate that the newer formats exhibited notable performance enhancements across all browsers, leading to shorter loading times. Compared to the compressed JPEG format, WEBP and AVIF improved the Page Load Time by 21% and 15%, respectively. However, web scraping revealed that JPEG and PNG still dominate web image choices, with WEBP at 4% as the most used new format. Through the web scraping and web performance evaluation, this research serves to (1) explore image format preferences in web applications and analyze distribution and characteristics across frequently-visited sites in 2023 and (2) assess the performance impact of distinct web image formats on application load times across popular web browsers.
A Comprehensive Review of Generative AI in Healthcare

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has catalyzed revolutionary changes across various sectors, notably in healthcare. Among the significant developments in this field are the applications of generative AI models, specifically transformers and diffusion models. These models have played a crucial role in analyzing diverse forms of data, including medical imaging (encompassing image reconstruction, image-to-image translation, image generation, and image classification), protein structure prediction, clinical documentation, diagnostic assistance, radiology interpretation, clinical decision support, medical coding, and billing, as well as drug design and molecular representation. Such applications have enhanced clinical diagnosis, data reconstruction, and drug synthesis. This review paper aims to offer a thorough overview of the generative AI applications in healthcare, focusing on transformers and diffusion models. Additionally, we propose potential directions for future research to tackle the existing limitations and meet the evolving demands of the healthcare sector. Intended to serve as a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners interested in the healthcare applications of generative AI, this review provides valuable insights into the current state of the art, challenges faced, and prospective future directions.
Can Pre-trained Networks Detect Familiar Out-of-Distribution Data?

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for safety-sensitive machine learning applications and has been extensively studied, yielding a plethora of methods developed in the literature. However, most studies for OOD detection did not use pre-trained models and trained a backbone from scratch. In recent years, transferring knowledge from large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by lightweight tuning has become mainstream for training in-distribution (ID) classifiers. To bridge the gap between the practice of OOD detection and current classifiers, the unique and crucial problem is that the samples whose information networks know often come as OOD input. We consider that such data may significantly affect the performance of large pre-trained networks because the discriminability of these OOD data depends on the pre-training algorithm. Here, we define such OOD data as PT-OOD (Pre-Trained OOD) data. In this paper, we aim to reveal the effect of PT-OOD on the OOD detection performance of pre-trained networks from the perspective of pre-training algorithms. To achieve this, we explore the PT-OOD detection performance of supervised and self-supervised pre-training algorithms with linear-probing tuning, the most common efficient tuning method. Through our experiments and analysis, we find that the low linear separability of PT-OOD in the feature space heavily degrades the PT-OOD detection performance, and self-supervised models are more vulnerable to PT-OOD than supervised pre-trained models, even with state-of-the-art detection methods. To solve this vulnerability, we further propose a unique solution to large-scale pre-trained models: Leveraging powerful instance-by-instance discriminative representations of pre-trained models and detecting OOD in the feature space independent of the ID decision boundaries. The code will be available via https://github.com/AtsuMiyai/PT-OOD.
Action Recognition Utilizing YGAR Dataset

The scarcity of high quality actions video data is a bottleneck in the research and application of action recognition. Although significant effort has been made in this area, there still exist gaps in the range of available data types a more flexible and comprehensive data set could help bridge. In this paper, we present a new 3D actions data simulation engine and generate 3 sets of sample data to demonstrate its current functionalities. With the new data generation process, we demonstrate its applications to image classifications, action recognitions and potential to evolve into a system that would allow the exploration of much more complex action recognition tasks. In order to show off these capabilities, we also train and test a list of commonly used models for image recognition to demonstrate the potential applications and capabilities of the data sets and their generation process.
Enable Language Models to Implicitly Learn Self-Improvement From Data

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-ended text generation tasks. However, the inherent open-ended nature of these tasks implies that there is always room for improvement in the quality of model responses. To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed to enhance the performance of LLMs. There has been a growing focus on enabling LLMs to self-improve their response quality, thereby reducing the reliance on extensive human annotation efforts for collecting diverse and high-quality training data. Recently, prompting-based methods have been widely explored among self-improvement methods owing to their effectiveness, efficiency, and convenience. However, those methods usually require explicitly and thoroughly written rubrics as inputs to LLMs. It is expensive and challenging to manually derive and provide all necessary rubrics with a real-world complex goal for improvement (e.g., being more helpful and less harmful). To this end, we propose an ImPlicit Self-ImprovemenT (PIT) framework that implicitly learns the improvement goal from human preference data. PIT only requires preference data that are used to train reward models without extra human efforts. Specifically, we reformulate the training objective of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) -- instead of maximizing response quality for a given input, we maximize the quality gap of the response conditioned on a reference response. In this way, PIT is implicitly trained with the improvement goal of better aligning with human preferences. Experiments on two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset show that our method significantly outperforms prompting-based methods.