Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Evaluating UAV Path Planning Algorithms for Realistic Maritime Search  and Rescue Missions

Authors:
raw_author_name: Messmer, Martin
raw_author_name: Zell, Andreas

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as very important tools in search and rescue (SAR) missions at sea, enabling swift and efficient deployment for locating individuals or vessels in distress. The successful execution of these critical missions heavily relies on effective path planning algorithms that navigate UAVs through complex maritime environments while considering dynamic factors such as water currents and wind flow. Furthermore, they need to account for the uncertainty in search target locations. However, existing path planning methods often fail to address the inherent uncertainty associated with the precise location of search targets and the uncertainty of oceanic forces. In this paper, we develop a framework to develop and investigate trajectory planning algorithms for maritime SAR scenarios employing UAVs. We adopt it to compare multiple planning strategies, some of them used in practical applications by the United States Coast Guard. Furthermore, we propose a novel planner that aims at bridging the gap between computation heavy, precise algorithms and lightweight strategies applicable to real-world scenarios.
Code-Switched Language Identification is Harder Than You Think

Authors:
raw_author_name: Burchell, Laurie
raw_author_name: Birch, Alexandra
raw_author_name: Heafield, Kenneth

Abstract: Code switching (CS) is a very common phenomenon in written and spoken communication but one that is handled poorly by many natural language processing applications. Looking to the application of building CS corpora, we explore CS language identification (LID) for corpus building. We make the task more realistic by scaling it to more languages and considering models with simpler architectures for faster inference. We also reformulate the task as a sentence-level multi-label tagging problem to make it more tractable. Having defined the task, we investigate three reasonable models for this task and define metrics which better reflect desired performance. We present empirical evidence that no current approach is adequate and finally provide recommendations for future work in this area.
Di-NeRF: Distributed NeRF for Collaborative Learning with Unknown  Relative Poses

Authors:
raw_author_name: Zareinia, Kourosh
raw_author_name: Saeedi, Sajad

Abstract: Collaborative mapping of unknown environments can be done faster and more robustly than a single robot. However, a collaborative approach requires a distributed paradigm to be scalable and deal with communication issues. This work presents a fully distributed algorithm enabling a group of robots to collectively optimize the parameters of a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). The algorithm involves the communication of each robot's trained NeRF parameters over a mesh network, where each robot trains its NeRF and has access to its own visual data only. Additionally, the relative poses of all robots are jointly optimized alongside the model parameters, enabling mapping with unknown relative camera poses. We show that multi-robot systems can benefit from differentiable and robust 3D reconstruction optimized from multiple NeRFs. Experiments on real-world and synthetic data demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. See the website of the project for videos of the experiments and supplementary material(https://sites.google.com/view/di-nerf/home).
Connecting the Dots: Is Mode-Connectedness the Key to Feasible  Sample-Based Inference in Bayesian Neural Networks?

Authors:
raw_author_name: Papamarkou, Theodore
raw_author_name: Bothmann, Ludwig
raw_author_name: Bischl, Bernd
raw_author_name: Rügamer, David

Abstract: A major challenge in sample-based inference (SBI) for Bayesian neural networks is the size and structure of the networks' parameter space. Our work shows that successful SBI is possible by embracing the characteristic relationship between weight and function space, uncovering a systematic link between overparameterization and the difficulty of the sampling problem. Through extensive experiments, we establish practical guidelines for sampling and convergence diagnosis. As a result, we present a Bayesian deep ensemble approach as an effective solution with competitive performance and uncertainty quantification.
Multilingual Gradient Word-Order Typology from Universal Dependencies

Authors:
raw_author_name: Baylor, Emi
raw_author_name: Ploeger, Esther
raw_author_name: Bjerva, Johannes

Abstract: While information from the field of linguistic typology has the potential to improve performance on NLP tasks, reliable typological data is a prerequisite. Existing typological databases, including WALS and Grambank, suffer from inconsistencies primarily caused by their categorical format. Furthermore, typological categorisations by definition differ significantly from the continuous nature of phenomena, as found in natural language corpora. In this paper, we introduce a new seed dataset made up of continuous-valued data, rather than categorical data, that can better reflect the variability of language. While this initial dataset focuses on word-order typology, we also present the methodology used to create the dataset, which can be easily adapted to generate data for a broader set of features and languages.
Distractor Generation for Multiple-Choice Questions: A Survey of  Methods, Datasets, and Evaluation

Authors:
raw_author_name: Alhazmi, Elaf
raw_author_name: Sheng, Quan Z.
raw_author_name: Zhang, Wei Emma
raw_author_name: Zaib, Munazza
raw_author_name: Alhazmi, Ahoud

Abstract: Distractors are important in learning evaluation. This paper surveys distractor generation tasks using English multiple-choice question datasets for textual and multimodal contexts. In particular, this paper presents a thorough literature review of the recent studies on distractor generation tasks, discusses multiple choice components and their characteristics, analyzes the related datasets, and summarizes the evaluation metrics of distractor generation. Our investigation reveals that more than half of datasets are human-generated from educational sources in specific domains such as Science and English, which are largely text-based, with a lack of open domain and multimodal datasets.
A Hybrid Strategy for Chat Transcript Summarization

Authors:
raw_author_name: Biswas, Pratik K.

Abstract: Text summarization is the process of condensing a piece of text to fewer sentences, while still preserving its content. Chat transcript, in this context, is a textual copy of a digital or online conversation between a customer (caller) and agent(s). This paper presents an indigenously (locally) developed hybrid method that first combines extractive and abstractive summarization techniques in compressing ill-punctuated or un-punctuated chat transcripts to produce more readable punctuated summaries and then optimizes the overall quality of summarization through reinforcement learning. Extensive testing, evaluations, comparisons, and validation have demonstrated the efficacy of this approach for large-scale deployment of chat transcript summarization, in the absence of manually generated reference (annotated) summaries.
Mapping the Multiverse of Latent Representations

Authors:
raw_author_name: Coupette, Corinna
raw_author_name: Rieck, Bastian

Abstract: Echoing recent calls to counter reliability and robustness concerns in machine learning via multiverse analysis, we present PRESTO, a principled framework for mapping the multiverse of machine-learning models that rely on latent representations. Although such models enjoy widespread adoption, the variability in their embeddings remains poorly understood, resulting in unnecessary complexity and untrustworthy representations. Our framework uses persistent homology to characterize the latent spaces arising from different combinations of diverse machine-learning methods, (hyper)parameter configurations, and datasets, allowing us to measure their pairwise (dis)similarity and statistically reason about their distributions. As we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically, our pipeline preserves desirable properties of collections of latent representations, and it can be leveraged to perform sensitivity analysis, detect anomalous embeddings, or efficiently and effectively navigate hyperparameter search spaces.
The closed-branch decoder for quantum LDPC codes

Authors:
raw_author_name: iOlius, Antonio deMarti
raw_author_name: Martinez, Josu Etxezarreta

Abstract: Quantum error correction is the building block for constructing fault-tolerant quantum processors that can operate reliably even if its constituting elements are corrupted by decoherence. In this context, real-time decoding is a necessity for implementing arbitrary quantum computations on the logical level. In this work, we present a new decoder for Quantum Low Density Parity Check (QLDPC) codes, named the closed-branch decoder, with a worst-case complexity loosely upper bounded by $\mathcal{O}(n\text{max}_{\text{gr}}\text{max}_{\text{br}})$, where $\text{max}_{\text{gr}}$ and $\text{max}_{\text{br}}$ are tunable parameters that pose the accuracy versus speed trade-off of decoding algorithms. For the best precision, the $\text{max}_{\text{gr}}\text{max}_{\text{br}}$ product is exponentially increasing, but we numerically prove that considering small values that are polynomials of the code distance are enough for good error correction performance. The decoder is described to great extent and compared with the Belief Propagation Ordered Statistics Decoder (BPOSD) operating over data qubit, phenomenological and circuit-level noise models for the class of Bivariate Bicycle (BB) codes. The results showcase a promising performance of the decoder, obtaining similar results with much lower complexity than BPOSD when considering the smallest distance codes, but experiencing some logical error probability degradation for the bigger ones. Ultimately, the performance and complexity of the decoder depends on the product $\text{max}_{\text{gr}}\text{max}_{\text{br}}$, which can be considered taking into account benefiting one of the two aspects at the expense of the other.
Continuously Distributing Entanglement in Quantum Networks with Regular  Topologies

Authors:
raw_author_name: Iñesta, Álvaro G.
raw_author_name: Wehner, Stephanie

Abstract: Small interconnected quantum processors can collaborate to tackle quantum computational problems that typically demand more capable devices. These linked processors, referred to as quantum nodes, can use shared entangled states to execute nonlocal operations. As a consequence, understanding how to distribute entangled states among nodes is essential for developing hardware and software. We analyze a protocol where entanglement is continuously distributed among nodes that are physically arranged in a regular pattern: a chain, a honeycomb lattice, a square grid, and a triangular lattice. These regular patterns allow for the modular expansion of networks for large-scale distributed quantum computing. Within the entanglement distribution protocol, nodes can fix the probability of attempting entanglement swaps to trade off multiple entangled states shared with neighboring nodes for fewer entangled states shared with non-neighboring nodes. We evaluate the protocol's performance using the virtual neighborhood size -- a metric indicating the number of other nodes with which a given node shares entangled states. Employing numerical methods, we find that nodes must perform more swaps to maximize the virtual neighborhood size when coherence times are short. In a chain network, the virtual neighborhood size's dependence on swap attempt probability differs for each node based on its distance from the end of the chain. Conversely, all nodes in the square grid exhibit a qualitatively similar dependence of the virtual neighborhood size on the swap probability.
Big data applications on small quantum computers

Authors:
raw_author_name: Kolotouros, Ioannis
raw_author_name: Wallden, Petros

Abstract: Current quantum hardware prohibits any direct use of large classical datasets. Coresets allow for a succinct description of these large datasets and their solution in a computational task is competitive with the solution on the original dataset. The method of combining coresets with small quantum computers to solve a given task that requires a large number of data points was first introduced by Harrow [arXiv:2004.00026]. In this paper, we apply the coreset method in three different well-studied classical machine learning problems, namely Divisive Clustering, 3-means Clustering, and Gaussian Mixture Model Clustering. We provide a Hamiltonian formulation of the aforementioned problems for which the number of qubits scales linearly with the size of the coreset. Then, we evaluate how the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) performs on these problems and demonstrate the practical efficiency of coresets when used along with a small quantum computer. We perform noiseless simulations on instances of sizes up to 25 qubits on CUDA Quantum and show that our approach provides comparable performance to classical solvers.
Low-Resource Cross-Domain Singing Voice Synthesis via Reduced  Self-Supervised Speech Representations

Authors:
raw_author_name: Kakoulidis, Panos
raw_author_name: Ellinas, Nikolaos
raw_author_name: Vamvoukakis, Georgios
raw_author_name: Christidou, Myrsini
raw_author_name: Vioni, Alexandra
raw_author_name: Maniati, Georgia
raw_author_name: Jho, Gunu
raw_author_name: Hwang, Inchul
raw_author_name: Tsiakoulis, Pirros
raw_author_name: Chalamandaris, Aimilios

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a singing voice synthesis model, Karaoker-SSL, that is trained only on text and speech data as a typical multi-speaker acoustic model. It is a low-resource pipeline that does not utilize any singing data end-to-end, since its vocoder is also trained on speech data. Karaoker-SSL is conditioned by self-supervised speech representations in an unsupervised manner. We preprocess these representations by selecting only a subset of their task-correlated dimensions. The conditioning module is indirectly guided to capture style information during training by multi-tasking. This is achieved with a Conformer-based module, which predicts the pitch from the acoustic model's output. Thus, Karaoker-SSL allows singing voice synthesis without reliance on hand-crafted and domain-specific features. There are also no requirements for text alignments or lyrics timestamps. To refine the voice quality, we employ a U-Net discriminator that is conditioned on the target speaker and follows a Diffusion GAN training scheme.
Adaptive Optimization for Prediction with Missing Data

Authors:
raw_author_name: Bertsimas, Dimitris
raw_author_name: Delarue, Arthur
raw_author_name: Pauphilet, Jean

Abstract: When training predictive models on data with missing entries, the most widely used and versatile approach is a pipeline technique where we first impute missing entries and then compute predictions. In this paper, we view prediction with missing data as a two-stage adaptive optimization problem and propose a new class of models, adaptive linear regression models, where the regression coefficients adapt to the set of observed features. We show that some adaptive linear regression models are equivalent to learning an imputation rule and a downstream linear regression model simultaneously instead of sequentially. We leverage this joint-impute-then-regress interpretation to generalize our framework to non-linear models. In settings where data is strongly not missing at random, our methods achieve a 2-10% improvement in out-of-sample accuracy.
Quantum advantage in zero-error function computation with side  information

Authors:
raw_author_name: Meng, Ruoyu
raw_author_name: Ramamoorthy, Aditya

Abstract: We consider the problem of zero-error function computation with side information. Alice has a source $X$ and Bob has correlated source $Y$ and they can communicate via either classical or a quantum channel. Bob wants to calculate $f(X,Y)$ with zero error. We aim to characterize the minimum amount of information that Alice needs to send to Bob for this to happen with zero-error. In the classical setting, this quantity depends on the asymptotic growth of $\chi(G^{(m)})$, the chromatic number of an appropriately defined $m$-instance "confusion graph". In this work we present structural characterizations of $G^{(m)}$ and demonstrate two function computation scenarios that have the same single-instance confusion graph. However, in one case there a strict advantage in using quantum transmission as against classical transmission, whereas there is no such advantage in the other case.
Boximator: Generating Rich and Controllable Motions for Video Synthesis

Authors:
raw_author_name: Zhang, Yuchen
raw_author_name: Zou, Jiaxin
raw_author_name: Wei, Guoqiang
raw_author_name: Yuan, Liping
raw_author_name: Li, Hang

Abstract: Generating rich and controllable motion is a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. We propose Boximator, a new approach for fine-grained motion control. Boximator introduces two constraint types: hard box and soft box. Users select objects in the conditional frame using hard boxes and then use either type of boxes to roughly or rigorously define the object's position, shape, or motion path in future frames. Boximator functions as a plug-in for existing video diffusion models. Its training process preserves the base model's knowledge by freezing the original weights and training only the control module. To address training challenges, we introduce a novel self-tracking technique that greatly simplifies the learning of box-object correlations. Empirically, Boximator achieves state-of-the-art video quality (FVD) scores, improving on two base models, and further enhanced after incorporating box constraints. Its robust motion controllability is validated by drastic increases in the bounding box alignment metric. Human evaluation also shows that users favor Boximator generation results over the base model.
Efficient and Interaction-Aware Trajectory Planning for Autonomous  Vehicles with Particle Swarm Optimization

Authors:
raw_author_name: Song, Lin
raw_author_name: Isele, David
raw_author_name: Hovakimyan, Naira

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel numerical approach to achieving smooth lane-change trajectories in autonomous driving scenarios. Our trajectory generation approach leverages particle swarm optimization (PSO) techniques, incorporating Neural Network (NN) predictions for trajectory refinement. The generation of smooth and dynamically feasible trajectories for the lane change maneuver is facilitated by combining polynomial curve fitting with particle propagation, which can account for vehicle dynamics. The proposed planning algorithm is capable of determining feasible trajectories with real-time computation capability. We conduct comparative analyses with two baseline methods for lane changing, involving analytic solutions and heuristic techniques in numerical simulations. The simulation results validate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Spiking Music: Audio Compression with Event Based Auto-encoders

Authors:
raw_author_name: Bellec, Guillaume

Abstract: Neurons in the brain communicate information via punctual events called spikes. The timing of spikes is thought to carry rich information, but it is not clear how to leverage this in digital systems. We demonstrate that event-based encoding is efficient for audio compression. To build this event-based representation we use a deep binary auto-encoder, and under high sparsity pressure, the model enters a regime where the binary event matrix is stored more efficiently with sparse matrix storage algorithms. We test this on the large MAESTRO dataset of piano recordings against vector quantized auto-encoders. Not only does our "Spiking Music compression" algorithm achieve a competitive compression/reconstruction trade-off, but selectivity and synchrony between encoded events and piano key strikes emerge without supervision in the sparse regime.
Free Quantum Codes from Twisted Unitary $t$-groups

Authors:
raw_author_name: Teixeira, Ian

Abstract: We introduce twisted unitary $t$-groups, a generalization of unitary $t$-groups under a twisting by an irreducible representation. We then apply representation theoretic methods to the Knill-Laflamme error correction conditions to show that twisted unitary $t$-groups automatically correspond to quantum codes with distance $d=t+1$. By construction these codes have many transversal gates, which are naturally fault tolerant.
Stochastic Two Points Method for Deep Model Zeroth-order Optimization

Authors:
raw_author_name: Zhou, Jiayu

Abstract: Large foundation models, such as large language models, have performed exceptionally well in various application scenarios. Building or fully fine-tuning such large models is usually prohibitive due to either hardware budget or lack of access to backpropagation. The zeroth-order methods offer a promising direction for tackling this challenge, where only forward passes are needed to update the model. This paper introduces an efficient Stochastic Two-Point (S2P) approach within the gradient-free regime. We present the theoretical convergence properties of S2P under the general and relaxed smoothness assumptions. The theoretical properties also shed light on a faster and more stable S2P variant, Accelerated S2P (AS2P), through exploiting our new convergence properties that better represent the dynamics of deep models in training. Our comprehensive empirical results show that AS2P is highly effective in optimizing objectives for large deep models, including language models, and outperforms standard methods across various model types and scales, with 2 $\times$ speed-up in training over most conducted tasks.
Position Paper: Generalized grammar rules and structure-based  generalization beyond classical equivariance for lexical tasks and  transduction

Authors:
raw_author_name: Trivedi, Shubhendu

Abstract: Compositional generalization is one of the main properties which differentiates lexical learning in humans from state-of-art neural networks. We propose a general framework for building models that can generalize compositionally using the concept of Generalized Grammar Rules (GGRs), a class of symmetry-based compositional constraints for transduction tasks, which we view as a transduction analogue of equivariance constraints in physics-inspired tasks. Besides formalizing generalized notions of symmetry for language transduction, our framework is general enough to contain many existing works as special cases. We present ideas on how GGRs might be implemented, and in the process draw connections to reinforcement learning and other areas of research.
Hyperparameter tuning via trajectory predictions: Stochastic prox-linear  methods in matrix sensing

Authors:
raw_author_name: Pananjady, Ashwin

Abstract: Motivated by the desire to understand stochastic algorithms for nonconvex optimization that are robust to their hyperparameter choices, we analyze a mini-batched prox-linear iterative algorithm for the problem of recovering an unknown rank-1 matrix from rank-1 Gaussian measurements corrupted by noise. We derive a deterministic recursion that predicts the error of this method and show, using a non-asymptotic framework, that this prediction is accurate for any batch-size and a large range of step-sizes. In particular, our analysis reveals that this method, though stochastic, converges linearly from a local initialization with a fixed step-size to a statistical error floor. Our analysis also exposes how the batch-size, step-size, and noise level affect the (linear) convergence rate and the eventual statistical estimation error, and we demonstrate how to use our deterministic predictions to perform hyperparameter tuning (e.g. step-size and batch-size selection) without ever running the method. On a technical level, our analysis is enabled in part by showing that the fluctuations of the empirical iterates around our deterministic predictions scale with the error of the previous iterate.