bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
RealDex: Towards Human-like Grasping for Robotic Dexterous Hand
Authors: Liu Yumeng , Yang Yaxun , Wang Youzhuo , Wu Xiaofei , Wang Jiamin , Yao Yichen , Schwertfeger Sören , Yang Sibei , Wang Wenping , Yu Jingyi , He Xuming , Ma Yuexin
Published: July 2024

In this paper, we introduce RealDex, a pioneering dataset capturing authentic dexterous hand grasping motions infused with human behavioral patterns, enriched by multi-view and multimodal visual data. Utilizing a teleoperation system, we seamlessly synchronize human-robot hand poses in real time. This collection of human-like motions is crucial for training dexterous hands to mimic human movements more naturally and precisely. RealDex holds immense promise in advancing humanoid robot for automated perception, cognition, and manipulation in real-world scenarios. Moreover, we introduce a cutting-edge dexterous grasping motion generation framework, which aligns with human experience and enhances real-world applicability through effectively utilizing Multimodal Large Language Models. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of our method on RealDex and other open datasets. The dataset and associated code are available at https://4dvlab.github.io/RealDex_page/.
Feedback-Based Adaptive Crossover-Rate in Evolutionary Computation
Authors: Guan Xiaoyuan , Yang Tianyi , Zhao Chunliang , Zhou Yuren
Published: July 2024

We propose a novel approach to improve multi-objective evolutionary algorithms by modifying crossover operations. Our approach uses a modifiable cross distribution and virtual point to rebalance the probability distribution of all crossover options. This design reduces runtime for typical pseudo-Boolean functions. Experiments and analysis show our approach effectively optimizes bi-objective problems COCZ and LOTZ in Θ(n) time during crossover, outperforming conventional crossover multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (C-MOEA) which require O(n log n) steps. For the tri-objective problem Hierarchical-COCZ, our approach guarantees an expected runtime of Θ(n2 log n), while C-MOEA needs at least Ω(n2 log n) and at most O(n2 log2 n) steps.
MARCO: A Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Framework for Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: I. Garmendia Andoni , Cappart Quentin , Ceberio Josu , Mendiburu Alexander
Published: July 2024

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) is an emerging domain where deep learning techniques are employed to address combinatorial optimization problems as a standalone solver. Despite their potential, existing NCO methods often suffer from inefficient search space exploration, frequently leading to local optima entrapment or redundant exploration of previously visited states. This paper introduces a versatile framework, referred to as Memory-Augmented Reinforcement for Combinatorial Optimization (MARCO), that can be used to enhance both constructive and improvement methods in NCO through an innovative memory module. MARCO stores data collected throughout the optimization trajectory and retrieves contextually relevant information at each state. This way, the search is guided by two competing criteria: making the best decision in terms of the quality of the solution and avoiding revisiting already explored solutions. This approach promotes a more efficient use of the available optimization budget. Moreover, thanks to the parallel nature of NCO models, several search threads can run simultaneously, all sharing the same memory module, enabling an efficient collaborative exploration. Empirical evaluations, carried out on the maximum cut, maximum independent set and travelling salesman problems, reveal that the memory module effectively increases the exploration, enabling the model to discover diverse, higher-quality solutions. MARCO achieves good performance in a low computational cost, establishing a promising new direction in the field of NCO.
Cross-Problem Learning for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems
Authors: Lin Zhuoyi , Wu Yaoxin , Zhou Bangjian , Cao Zhiguang , Song Wen , Zhang Yingqian , Jayavelu Senthilnath
Published: July 2024

Existing neural heuristics often train a deep architecture from scratch for each specific vehicle routing problem (VRP), ignoring the transferable knowledge across different VRP variants. This paper proposes the cross-problem learning to assist heuristics training for different downstream VRP variants. Particularly, we modularize neural architectures for complex VRPs into 1) the backbone Transformer for tackling the travelling salesman problem (TSP), and 2) the additional lightweight modules for processing problem-specific features in complex VRPs. Accordingly, we propose to pre-train the backbone Transformer for TSP, and then apply it in the process of fine-tuning the Transformer models for each target VRP variant. On the one hand, we fully fine-tune the trained backbone Transformer and problem-specific modules simultaneously. On the other hand, we only fine-tune small adapter networks along with the modules, keeping the backbone Transformer still. Extensive experiments on typical VRPs substantiate that 1) the full fine-tuning achieves significantly better performance than the one trained from scratch, and 2) the adapter-based fine-tuning also delivers comparable performance while being notably parameter-efficient. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate the favorable effect of our method in terms of cross-distribution application and versatility.
Denoising Diffusion-Augmented Hybrid Video Anomaly Detection via Reconstructing Noised Frames
Authors: Cheng Kai , Pan Yaning , Liu Yang , Zeng Xinhua , Feng Rui
Published: July 2024

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) is crucial for enhancing security and surveillance systems through automatic identification of irregular events, thereby enabling timely responses and augmenting overall situational awareness. Although existing methods have achieved decent detection performances on benchmarks, their predicted objects still remain ambiguous in terms of the semantic aspect. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Denoising diffusion-augmented Hybrid Video Anomaly Detection (DHVAD) framework. The proposed Denoising diffusion-based Reconstruction Unit (DRU) enhances the understanding of semantically accurate normality as a crucial component in DHVAD. Meanwhile, we propose a detection strategy that integrates the advantages of a prediction-based Frame Prediction Unit (FPU) with DRU by exploring the spatial-temporal consistency seamlessly. The competitive performance of DHVAD compared with state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets proves the effectiveness of our framework. The extended experimental analysis demonstrates that our framework can gain a better understanding of the normality in terms of semantic accuracy for VAD and efficiently leverage the strengths of both components.
Quality-Diversity Algorithms Can Provably Be Helpful for Optimization
Authors: Qian Chao , Xue Ke , Wang Ren-Jian
Published: July 2024

Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are a new type of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), aiming to find a set of high-performing, yet diverse solutions. They have found many successful applications in reinforcement learning and robotics, helping improve the robustness in complex environments. Furthermore, they often empirically find a better overall solution than traditional search algorithms which explicitly search for a single highest-performing solution. However, their theoretical analysis is far behind, leaving many fundamental questions unexplored. In this paper, we try to shed some light on the optimization ability of QD algorithms via rigorous runtime analysis. By comparing the popular QD algorithm MAP-Elites with (\mu+1)-EA (a typical EA focusing on finding better objective values only), we prove that on two NP-hard problem classes with wide applications, i.e., monotone approximately submodular maximization with a size constraint, and set cover, MAP-Elites can achieve the (asymptotically) optimal polynomial-time approximation ratio, while (\mu+1)-EA requires exponential expected time on some instances. This provides theoretical justification for that QD algorithms can be helpful for optimization, and discloses that the simultaneous search for high-performing solutions with diverse behaviors can provide stepping stones to good overall solutions and help avoid local optima.
Maintaining Diversity Provably Helps in Evolutionary Multimodal Optimization
Authors: Ren Shengjie , Qiu Zhijia , Bian Chao , Li Miqing , Qian Chao
Published: July 2024

In the real world, there exist a class of optimization problems that multiple (local) optimal solutions in the solution space correspond to a single point in the objective space. In this paper, we theoretically show that for such multimodal problems, a simple method that considers the diversity of solutions in the solution space can benefit the search in evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Specifically, we prove that the proposed method, working with crossover, can help enhance the exploration, leading to polynomial or even exponential acceleration on the expected running time. This result is derived by rigorous running time analysis in both single-objective and multi-objective scenarios, including (mu+1)-GA solving the widely studied single-objective problem, Jump, and NSGA-II and SMS-EMOA (two well-established multi-objective EAs) solving the widely studied bi-objective problem, OneJumpZeroJump. Experiments are also conducted to validate the theoretical results. We hope that our results may encourage the exploration of diversity maintenance in the solution space for multi-objective optimization, where existing EAs usually only consider the diversity in the objective space and can easily be trapped in local optima.
A New Paradigm for Counterfactual Reasoning in Fairness and Recourse
Authors: Bynum Lucius E.J. , Loftus Joshua R. , Stoyanovich Julia
Published: July 2024

Counterfactuals underpin numerous techniques for auditing and understanding artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The traditional paradigm for counterfactual reasoning in this literature is the interventional counterfactual, where hypothetical interventions are imagined and simulated. For this reason, the starting point for causal reasoning about legal protections and demographic data in AI is an imagined intervention on a legally-protected characteristic, such as ethnicity, race, gender, disability, age, etc. We ask, for example, what would have happened had your race been different? An inherent limitation of this paradigm is that some demographic interventions — like interventions on race — may not be well-defined or translate into the formalisms of interventional counterfactuals. In this work, we explore a new paradigm based instead on the backtracking counterfactual, where rather than imagine hypothetical interventions on legally-protected characteristics, we imagine alternate initial conditions while holding these characteristics fixed. We ask instead, what would explain a counterfactual outcome for you as you actually are or could be? This alternate framework allows us to address many of the same social concerns, but to do so while asking fundamentally different questions that do not rely on demographic interventions.
Transfer Learning Using Inaccurate Physics Rule for Streamflow Prediction
Authors: Bao Tianshu , Johnson Taylor Thomas , Jia Xiaowei
Published: July 2024

Accurate streamflow prediction is critical for ensuring water supply and detecting floods, while also providing essential hydrological inputs for other scientific models in fields such as climate and agriculture.

Recently, deep learning models have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art regionalization performance by building a global hydrologic model. These models predict streamflow given catchment physical characteristics and weather forcing data.

However, these models are only focused on gauged basins and cannot adapt to ungaugaed basins, i.e., basins without training data.

Prediction in Ungauged Basins (PUB) is considered one of the most important challenges in hydrology, as most basins in the United States and around the world have no observations.

In this work, we propose a meta-transfer learning approach by enhancing imperfect physics equations that facilitate model adaptation.

Intuitively, physical equations can often be used to regularize deep learning models to achieve robust regionalization performance under gauged scenarios, but they can be inaccurate due to the simplified representation of physics.

We correct such uncertainty in physical equation by residual approximation and let these corrected equations guide the model training process. We evaluated the proposed method for predicting daily streamflow on the catchment attributes and meteorology for large-sample studies (CAMELS) dataset.

The experiment results on hydrological data over 19 years demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in ungauged scenarios.
ReBandit: Random Effects Based Online RL Algorithm for Reducing Cannabis Use
Authors: Ghosh Susobhan , Guo Yongyi , Hung Pei-Yao , Coughlin Lara , Bonar Erin , Nahum-Shani Inbal , Walton Maureen , Murphy Susan
Published: July 2024

The escalating prevalence of cannabis use, and associated cannabis-use disorder (CUD), poses a significant public health challenge globally. With a notably wide treatment gap, especially among emerging adults (EAs; ages 18-25), addressing cannabis use and CUD remains a pivotal objective within the 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In this work, we develop an online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm called reBandit which will be utilized in a mobile health study to deliver personalized mobile health interventions aimed at reducing cannabis use among EAs. reBandit utilizes random effects and informative Bayesian priors to learn quickly and efficiently in noisy mobile health environments. Moreover, reBandit employs Empirical Bayes and optimization techniques to autonomously update its hyper-parameters online. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, we construct a simulation testbed using data from a prior study, and compare against commonly used algorithms in mobile health studies. We show that reBandit performs equally well or better than all the baseline algorithms, and the performance gap widens as population heterogeneity increases in the simulation environment, proving its adeptness to adapt to diverse population of study participants.
A Survival Guide for Iranian Women Prescribed by Iranian Women: Participatory AI to Investigate Intimate Partner Physical Violence in Iran
Authors: Khorramrouz Adel , Fayyazi Mahbeigom , KhudaBukhsh Ashiqur R.
Published: July 2024

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a global problem affecting more than 2 billion women worldwide. Our paper makes two key contributions. First, via a substantial corpus of 53,220 comments to 1,563 Intimate Partner Physical Violence (IPPV) posts gleaned from more than 10 million comments posted on 523,232 posts on a popular parental health website in Iran, we present the first-ever computational analysis of user comments on accounts of IPPV in Iran. We harness large language models and participatory AI and tackle extreme class imbalance and other linguistic challenges that arise from tackling low-resource languages to shed light on the gender struggles of a country with documented stark gender inequality. With active input from a woman with a history of advocacy for social rights and grounded in Iranian culture, we characterize comments on IPPV into three broad categories: empathy, confront, and conform, and analyze their distribution. Second, we release an important dataset of 3,400 comments on IPPV posts.
Predicting Housing Transaction with Common Covariance GNNs
Authors: Li Jinjin , Liu Bin , Liu Chengyan , Zhang Hongli
Published: July 2024

Urban migration is a significant aspect of a city's economy. The exploration of the underlying determinants of housing purchases among current residents contributes to the study of future trends in urban migration, enabling governments to formulate appropriate policies to guide future economic growth. This article employs a factor model to analyze data on residents' rentals, first-time home purchases, and subsequent housing upgrades. We decompose the factors influencing housing purchases into common drivers and specific drivers. Our hypothesis is that common drivers reflect universal social patterns, while personalized drivers represent stochastic elements. We construct a correlation matrix capturing the inter-resident relationships based on the common drivers of housing purchases. We then propose a graph neural network based on the correlation matrix to model housing predictions as a node classification problem. Our model addresses two critical questions. Firstly, we aim to identify which part of rental residents will engage in first-time home purchases in the future. Secondly, we seek to determine which group of residents, having completed rental and first-time home purchases, will opt for a second home purchase. The results of our testing on real-world datasets demonstrate that based solely on rental and home purchase records, we can achieve a sensitivity for housing predictions exceeding 80%.
Domain Adaptation with Joint Loss for Consistent Regression and Ordinal Classification in the Proxy Means Test for Poverty Targeting
Authors: Mariyah Siti , Wobcke Wayne
Published: July 2024

Previous domain adaptation methods are designed to work for a single task, either classification or regression. In this paper, the task of the learner is to produce both an estimation and an ordinal classification of instances that are consistent in that the classification of instances into quantiles is derived from the estimated values. We propose an extension of the boosting for transfer method (TrAdaBoost), Joint Quantile Loss Boosting Domain Adaptation (TrAdaBoost.JQL) for regression transfer learning, that aims to jointly minimize regression and ordinal classification errors. Motivated by the real-world problem of poverty targeting using the Proxy Means Test, we empirically show that TrAdaBoost.JQL can consistently reduce RMSE and inclusion and exclusion errors for estimating per capita household expenditure, across a wide variety of districts in Indonesia, compared to other reweighting-based and invariant feature representation-based domain adaptation methods. We design TrAdaBoost.JQL to be flexible as to the chosen eligibility (poor) threshold used in poverty targeting practice and as to whether estimation or ordinal classification accuracy is prioritized.
Bridging Generative and Discriminative Models for Unified Visual Perception with Diffusion Priors
Authors: Dong Shiyin , Zhu Mingrui , Cheng Kun , Wang Nannan , Gao Xinbo
Published: July 2024

The remarkable prowess of diffusion models in image generation has spurred efforts to extend their application beyond generative tasks. However, a persistent challenge exists in lacking a unified approach to apply diffusion models to visual perception tasks with diverse semantic granularity requirements. Our purpose is to establish a unified visual perception framework, capitalizing on the potential synergies between generative and discriminative models. In this paper, we propose Vermouth, a simple yet effective framework comprising a pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD) model containing rich generative priors, a unified head (U-head) capable of integrating hierarchical representations, and an Adapted-Expert providing discriminative priors. Comprehensive investigations unveil potential characteristics of Vermouth, such as varying granularity of perception concealed in latent variables at distinct time steps and various U-net stages. We emphasize that there is no necessity for incorporating a heavyweight or intricate decoder to transform diffusion models into potent representation learners. Extensive comparative evaluations against tailored discriminative models showcase the efficacy of our approach on zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), few-shot classification, and open-vocabulary (OV) semantic segmentation tasks. The promising results demonstrate the potential of diffusion models as formidable learners, establishing their significance in furnishing informative and robust visual representations.
Self-Supervised Vision for Climate Downscaling
Authors: Singh Karandeep , Jeong Chaeyoon , Shidqi Naufal , Park Sungwon , Nellikkattil Arjun , Zeller Elke , Cha Meeyoung
Published: July 2024

Climate change is one of the most critical challenges that our planet is facing today. Rising global temperatures are already affecting Earth's weather and climate patterns with an increased frequency of unpredictable and extreme events. Future projections for climate change research are based on computer models like Earth System Models (ESMs). Climate simulations typically run on a coarser grid due to the high computational resources required, and then undergo a lighter downscaling process to obtain data on a finer grid. This work presents a self-supervised deep learning model that does not require high resolution ground truth data for downscaling. This is realized by leveraging salient distribution patterns and the hidden dependencies between weather variables for an individual data point at runtime. We propose three climate-specific components that well represent the patterns of underlying weather variables and learn intricate inter-variable dependencies. Extensive evaluation with 2x, 3x, and 4x scaling factors demonstrates that our model obtains 8% to 47% performance gain over existing baselines while greatly reducing the overall runtime. The improved performance and no dependence on high resolution ground truth data make our method a valuable tool for future climate research.
Intertwining CP and NLP: The Generation of Unreasonably Constrained Sentences
Authors: Bonlarron Alexandre , Régin Jean-Charles
Published: July 2024

Constrained text generation remains a challenging task, particularly when dealing with hard constraints. Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches prioritize generating meaningful and coherent output. Also, the current state-of-the-art methods often lack the expressiveness and constraint satisfaction capabilities to handle such tasks effectively. This paper presents the Constraints First Framework to remedy this issue.

This framework considers a constrained text generation problem as a discrete combinatorial optimization problem. It is solved by a constraint programming method that combines linguistic properties (e.g., n-grams or language level) with other more classical constraints (e.g., the number of characters, syllables, or words). Eventually, a curation phase allows for selecting the best-generated sentences according to perplexity using a large language model.

The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by tackling a new more tediously constrained text generation problem: the iconic RADNER sentences problem. This problem aims to generate sentences respecting a set of quite strict rules defined by their use in vision and clinical research. Thanks to our CP-based approach, many new strongly constrained sentences have been successfully generated in an automatic manner. This highlights the potential of our approach to handle unreasonably constrained text generation scenarios.
Large Language Models for Human-AI Co-Creation of Robotic Dance Performances
Authors: De Filippo Allegra , Milano Michela
Published: July 2024

This paper focuses on the potential of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), in the still unexplored domain of robotic dance creation. In particular, we assess whether a LLM (GPT-3.5 turbo) can create robotic dance choreographies, and we investigate if the feedback provided by human creators can improve the quality of the output. To this end, we design three prompt engineering techniques for robotic dance creation. In the prompts, we gradually introduce human knowledge through examples and feedback in natural language in order to explore the dynamics of human-AI co-creation. The experimental analysis shows that the capabilities of the LLM can be improved through human collaboration, by producing choreographies with a major artistic impact on the evaluation audience. The findings offer valuable insights into the interplay between human creativity and AI generative models, paving the way for enhanced collaborative frameworks in creative domains.
Diffutoon: High-Resolution Editable Toon Shading via Diffusion Models
Authors: Duan Zhongjie , Wang Chengyu , Chen Cen , Qian Weining , Huang Jun
Published: July 2024

Toon shading is a type of non-photorealistic rendering task in animation. Its primary purpose is to render objects with a flat and stylized appearance. As diffusion models have ascended to the forefront of image synthesis, this paper delves into an innovative form of toon shading based on diffusion models, aiming to directly render photorealistic videos into anime styles. In video stylization, existing methods encounter persistent challenges, notably in maintaining consistency and achieving high visual quality. In this paper, we model the toon shading problem as four subproblems, i.e., stylization, consistency enhancement, structure guidance, and colorization. To address the challenges in video stylization, we propose an effective toon shading approach called Diffutoon. Diffutoon is capable of rendering remarkably detailed, high-resolution, and extended-duration videos in anime style. It can also edit the video content according to input prompts via an additional branch. The efficacy of Diffutoon is evaluated through quantitive metrics and human evaluation. Notably, Diffutoon surpasses both open-source and closed-source baseline approaches in our experiments. Our work is accompanied by the release of both the source code and example videos on Github.
From Pixels to Metal: AI-Empowered Numismatic Art
Authors: Machado Penousal , Martins Tiago , Correia João , Espírito Santo Luís , Lourenço Nuno , Cunha João , Rebelo Sérgio , Martins Pedro , Bicker João
Published: July 2024

This paper describes our response to a unique challenge presented by the Portuguese National Press-Mint: to use Artificial Intelligence to design a commemorative coin that celebrates the "digital world". We explain the process of this coin's co-creation, from conceptualisation to production, highlighting the design process, the underlying rationale, key obstacles encountered, and the technical innovations and developments made to meet the challenge. These include the development of an evolutionary art system guided by Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) and Machine Learning-based aesthetic models, a system for prompt evolution, and a representation for encoding genotypes in mintable format. This collaboration produced a limited edition 10 euro silver proof coin, with a total of 4000 units minted by the National Press-Mint. The coin was met with enthusiasm, selling out within two months. This work contributes to Computational Creativity, particularly co-creativity, co-design, and digital art, and represents a significant step in using Artificial Intelligence for Numismatics.
Retrieval Guided Music Captioning via Multimodal Prefixes
Authors: Srivatsan Nikita , Chen Ke , Dubnov Shlomo , Berg-Kirkpatrick Taylor
Published: July 2024

In this paper we put forward a new approach to music captioning, the task of automatically generating natural language descriptions for songs. These descriptions are useful both for categorization and analysis, and also from an accessibility standpoint as they form an important component of closed captions for video content. Our method supplements an audio encoding with a retriever, allowing the decoder to condition on multimodal signal both from the audio of the song itself as well as a candidate caption identified by a nearest neighbor system. This lets us retain the advantages of a retrieval based approach while also allowing for the flexibility of a generative one. We evaluate this system on a dataset of 200k music-caption pairs scraped from Audiostock, a royalty-free music platform, and on MusicCaps, a dataset of 5.5k pairs. We demonstrate significant improvements over prior systems across both automatic metrics and human evaluation.
DP-Font: Chinese Calligraphy Font Generation Using Diffusion Model and Physical Information Neural Network
Authors: Zhang Liguo , Zhu Yalong , Benarab Achref , Ma Yusen , Dong Yuxin , Sun Jianguo
Published: July 2024

As a typical visual art form, Chinese calligraphy has a long history and aesthetic value. However, current methods for generating Chinese fonts still struggle with complex character shapes and lack personalized writing styles. To address these issues, we propose a font generation method for Chinese Calligraphy based on diffusion model incorporating physical information neural network (PINN), which is named DP-Font. Firstly, the multi-attribute guidance is combined to guide the generation process of the diffusion model and introduce the critical constraint of stroke order in Chinese characters, aiming to significantly improve the quality of the generated results. We then incorporate physical constraints into the neural network loss function, utilizing physical equations to provide in-depth guidance and constraints on the learning process. By learning the movement rule of the nib and the diffusion pattern of the ink, DP-Font can generate personalized calligraphy styles. The generated fonts are very close to the calligraphers' works. Compared with existing deep learning-based techniques, DP-Font has made significant progress in enhancing the physical plausibility of the model, generating more realistic and high-quality results.
Are They the Same Picture? Adapting Concept Bottleneck Models for Human-AI Collaboration in Image Retrieval
Authors: Balloli Vaibhav , Beery Sara , Bondi-Kelly Elizabeth
Published: July 2024

Image retrieval plays a pivotal role in applications from wildlife conservation to healthcare, for finding individual animals or relevant images to aid diagnosis. Although deep learning techniques for image retrieval have advanced significantly, their imperfect real-world performance often necessitates including human expertise. Human-in-the-loop approaches typically rely on humans completing the task independently and then combining their opinions with an AI model in various ways, as these models offer very little interpretability or correctability. To allow humans to intervene in the AI model instead, thereby saving human time and effort, we adapt the Concept Bottleneck Model (CBM) and propose CHAIR. CHAIR (a) enables humans to correct intermediate concepts, which helps \textit{improve} embeddings generated, and (b) allows for flexible levels of intervention that accommodate varying levels of human expertise for better retrieval. To show the efficacy of \methodname, we demonstrate that our method performs better than similar models on image retrieval metrics without any external intervention. Furthermore, we also showcase how human intervention helps further improve retrieval performance, thereby achieving human-AI complementarity.
A Goal-Directed Dialogue System for Assistance in Safety-Critical Application
Authors: Jamakatel Prakash , De Venezia Rebecca , Muise Christian , Kiam Jane Jean
Published: July 2024

In safety-critical applications where a human is in the loop, providing timely contextual assistance can reduce the severity of emergencies. While the context can typically be inferred passively, engaging the human in an active conversation with the assistance system makes this context richer and more sound. For this, we explore a FOND-planning-powered goal-directed dialogue system with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities. We use an Ultralight (UL) aviation domain as an example application for test and validation by inferring the current context in situations requiring emergency landings using the goal-directed dialogue system. The inferred context is then used for real-time modelling of the problem instance, necessary for generating strategic plans to guide the human out of the emergency situations. To overcome data scarcity, we augment the data collected from human pilots using generative text models to train the NLU capabilities of the dialogue agent. We benchmark against generative chatbots and demonstrate that our goal-directed dialogue system significantly outperforms them in context inference.
Emergence of Social Norms in Generative Agent Societies: Principles and Architecture
Authors: Ren Siyue , Cui Zhiyao , Song Ruiqi , Wang Zhen , Hu Shuyue
Published: July 2024

Social norms play a crucial role in guiding agents towards understanding and adhering to standards of behavior, thus reducing social conflicts within multi-agent systems (MASs). However, current LLM-based (or generative) MASs lack the capability to be normative. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, named CRSEC, to empower the emergence of social norms within generative MASs. Our architecture consists of four modules: Creation & Representation, Spreading, Evaluation, and Compliance. This addresses several important aspects of the emergent processes all in one: (i) where social norms come from, (ii) how they are formally represented, (iii) how they spread through agents' communications and observations, (iv) how they are examined with a sanity check and synthesized in the long term, and (v) how they are incorporated into agents' planning and actions. Our experiments deployed in the Smallville sandbox game environment demonstrate the capability of our architecture to establish social norms and reduce social conflicts within generative MASs. The positive outcomes of our human evaluation, conducted with 30 evaluators, further affirm the effectiveness of our approach. Our project can be accessed via the following link: https://github.com/sxswz213/CRSEC.
Reassessing Evaluation Functions in Algorithmic Recourse: An Empirical Study from a Human-Centered Perspective
Authors: Tominaga Tomu , Yamashita Naomi , Kurashima Takeshi
Published: July 2024

In this study, we critically examine the foundational premise of algorithmic recourse - a process of generating counterfactual action plans (i.e., recourses) assisting individuals to reverse adverse decisions made by AI systems. The assumption underlying algorithmic recourse is that individuals accept and act on recourses that minimize the gap between their current and desired states. This assumption, however, remains empirically unverified. To address this issue, we conducted a user study with 362 participants and assessed whether minimizing the distance function, a metric of the gap between the current and desired states, indeed prompts them to accept and act upon suggested recourses. Our findings reveal a nuanced landscape: participants' acceptance of recourses did not correlate with the recourse distance. Moreover, participants' willingness to act upon recourses peaked at the minimal recourse distance but was otherwise constant. These findings cast doubt on the prevailing assumption of algorithmic recourse research and signal the need to rethink the evaluation functions to pave the way for human-centered recourse generation.
Enhancing Cross-modal Completion and Alignment for Unsupervised Incomplete Text-to-Image Person Retrieval
Authors: Gong Tiantian , Wang Junsheng , Zhang Liyan
Published: July 2024

Traditional text-image person retrieval methods heavily rely on fully matched and identity-annotated multimodal data, representing an ideal yet limited scenario. The issues of handling incomplete multimodal data and the complexities of labeling multimodal data are common challenges encountered in real-world applications. In response to these challenges encountered, we consider a more robust and pragmatic setting termed unsupervised incomplete text-image person retrieval, where person images and text descriptions are not fully matched and lack the supervision of identity labels. To tackle these two problems, we propose the Enhancing Cross-modal Completion and Alignment (ECCA) method. Specifically, we propose a feature-level cross-modal completion strategy for incomplete data. This approach leverages the available cross-modal high semantic similarity features to construct relational graphs for missing modal data, which can generate more reliable completion features.

Additionally, to address the cross-modal matching ambiguity, we propose weighted inter-instance granularity alignment as well as enhanced prototype-wise granularity alignment modules that can map semantically similar image-text pairs more compact in the common embedding space. Extensive experiments on public datasets, fully demonstrate the consistent superiority of our method over SOTA text-image person retrieval methods.
Faster and Lighter LLMs: A Survey on Current Challenges and Way Forward
Authors: Chavan Arnav , Magazine Raghav , Kushwaha Shubham , Debbah Merouane , Gupta Deepak
Published: July 2024

Despite the impressive performance of LLMs, their widespread adoption faces challenges due to substantial computational and memory requirements during inference. Recent advancements in model compression and system-level optimization methods aim to enhance LLM inference. This survey offers an overview of these methods, emphasizing recent developments. Through experiments on LLaMA(/2)-7B, we evaluate various compression techniques, providing practical insights for efficient LLM deployment in a unified setting. The empirical analysis on LLaMA(/2)-7B highlights the effectiveness of these methods. Drawing from survey insights, we identify current limitations and discuss potential future directions to improve LLM inference efficiency. We release the codebase to reproduce the results presented in this paper at https://github.com/nyunAI/Faster-LLM-Survey
A Survey on Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Chen Shu , Xu Zitao , Pan Weike , Yang Qiang , Ming Zhong
Published: July 2024

Cross-domain sequential recommendation (CDSR) shifts the modeling of user preferences from flat to stereoscopic by integrating and learning interaction information from multiple domains at different granularities (ranging from inter-sequence to intra-sequence and from single-domain to cross-domain). In this survey, we initially define the CDSR problem using a four-dimensional tensor and then analyze its multi-type input representations under multidirectional dimensionality reductions. Following that, we provide a systematic overview from both macro and micro views. From a macro view, we abstract the multi-level fusion structures of various models across domains and discuss their bridges for fusion. From a micro view, focusing on the existing models, we specifically discuss the basic technologies and then explain the auxiliary learning technologies. Finally, we exhibit the available public datasets and the representative experimental results as well as provide some insights into future directions for research in CDSR.
A Survey of Robotic Language Grounding: Tradeoffs between Symbols and Embeddings
Authors: Cohen Vanya , Liu Jason Xinyu , Mooney Raymond , Tellex Stefanie , Watkins David
Published: July 2024

With large language models, robots can understand language more flexibly and more capable than ever before. This survey reviews and situates recent literature into a spectrum with two poles: 1) mapping between language and some manually defined formal representation of meaning, and 2) mapping between language and high-dimensional vector spaces that translate directly to low-level robot policy. Using a formal representation allows the meaning of the language to be precisely represented, limits the size of the learning problem, and leads to a framework for interpretability and formal safety guarantees. Methods that embed language and perceptual data into high-dimensional spaces avoid this manually specified symbolic structure and thus have the potential to be more general when fed enough data but require more data and computing to train. We discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of each approach and finish by providing directions for future work that achieves the best of both worlds.
TSESNet: Temporal-Spatial Enhanced Breast Tumor Segmentation in DCE-MRI Using Feature Perception and Separability
Authors: He Jiezhou , Zhao Xue , Luo Zhiming , Su Songzhi , Li Shaozi , Zhang Guojun
Published: July 2024

Accurate segmentation of breast tumors in dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance images (DCE-MRI) is critical for early diagnosis of breast cancer. However, this task remains challenging due to the wide range of tumor sizes, shapes, and appearances. Additionally, the complexity is further compounded by the high dimensionality and ill-posed artifacts present in DCE-MRI data. Furthermore, accurately modeling features in DCE-MRI sequences presents a challenge that hinders the effective representation of essential tumor characteristics. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel Temporal-Spatial Enhanced Network (TSESNet) for breast tumor segmentation in DCE-MRI. TSESNet leverages the spatial and temporal dependencies of DCE-MRI to provide a comprehensive representation of tumor features. To address sequence modeling challenges, we propose a Temporal-Spatial Contrastive Loss (TSCLoss) that maximizes the distance between different classes and minimizes the distance within the same class, thereby improving the separation between tumors and the background. Moreover, we design a novel Temporal Series Feature Fusion (TSFF) module that effectively integrates temporal MRI features from multiple time points, enhancing the model's ability to handle temporal sequences and improving overall performance. Finally, we introduce a simple and effective Tumor-Aware (TA) module that enriches feature representation to accommodate tumors of various sizes. We conducted comprehensive experiments to validate the proposed method and demonstrate its superior performance compared to recent state-of-the-art segmentation methods on two breast cancer DCE-MRI datasets.
A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Reduction: Sparsification, Coarsening, and Condensation
Authors: Hashemi Mohammad , Gong Shengbo , Ni Juntong , Fan Wenqi , Prakash B. Aditya , Jin Wei
Published: July 2024

Many real-world datasets can be naturally represented as graphs, spanning a wide range of domains. However, the increasing complexity and size of graph datasets present significant challenges for analysis and computation. In response, graph reduction techniques have gained prominence for simplifying large graphs while preserving essential properties. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of graph reduction methods, including graph sparsification, graph coarsening, and graph condensation. Specifically, we establish a unified definition for these methods and introduce a hierarchical taxonomy to categorize the challenges they address. Our survey then systematically reviews the technical details of these methods and emphasizes their practical applications across diverse scenarios. Furthermore, we outline critical research directions to ensure the continued effectiveness of graph reduction techniques.
Learning Structural Causal Models through Deep Generative Models: Methods, Guarantees, and Challenges
Authors: Poinsot Audrey , Leite Alessandro , Chesneau Nicolas , Sebag Michele , Schoenauer Marc
Published: July 2024

This paper provides a comprehensive review of deep structural causal models (DSCMs), particularly focusing on their ability to answer counterfactual queries using observational data within known causal structures. It delves into the characteristics of DSCMs by analyzing the hypotheses, guarantees, and applications inherent to the underlying deep learning components and structural causal models, fostering a finer understanding of their capabilities and limitations in addressing different counterfactual queries. Furthermore, it highlights the challenges and open questions in the field of deep structural causal modeling. It sets the stages for researchers to identify future work directions and for practitioners to get an overview in order to find out the most appropriate methods for their needs.
Building Expressive and Tractable Probabilistic Generative Models: A Review
Authors: Sidheekh Sahil , Natarajan Sriraam
Published: July 2024

We present a comprehensive survey of the advancements and techniques in the field of tractable probabilistic generative modeling, primarily focusing on Probabilistic Circuits (PCs). We provide a unified perspective on the inherent trade-offs between expressivity and tractability, highlighting the design principles and algorithmic extensions that have enabled building expressive and efficient PCs, and provide a taxonomy of the field. We also discuss recent efforts to build deep and hybrid PCs by fusing notions from deep neural models, and outline the challenges and open questions that can guide future research in this evolving field.
Intelligent Agents for Auction-based Federated Learning: A Survey
Authors: Tang Xiaoli , Yu Han , Li Xiaoxiao , Kraus Sarit
Published: July 2024

Auction-based federated learning (AFL) is an important emerging category of FL incentive mechanism design, due to its ability to fairly and efficiently motivate high-quality data owners to join data consumers' (i.e., servers') FL training tasks. To enhance the efficiency in AFL decision support for stakeholders (i.e., data consumers, data owners, and the auctioneer), intelligent agent-based techniques have emerged. However, due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of this field and the lack of a comprehensive survey providing an accessible perspective, it is a challenge for researchers to enter and contribute to this field. This paper bridges this important gap by providing a first-of-its-kind survey on the Intelligent Agents for AFL (IA-AFL) literature. We propose a unique multi-tiered taxonomy that organises existing IA-AFL works according to 1) the stakeholders served, 2) the auction mechanism adopted, and 3) the goals of the agents, to provide readers with a multi-perspective view into this field. In addition, we analyse the limitations of existing approaches, summarise the commonly adopted performance evaluation metrics, and discuss promising future directions leading towards effective and efficient stakeholder-oriented decision support in IA-AFL ecosystems.
A Survey on Extractive Knowledge Graph Summarization: Applications, Approaches, Evaluation, and Future Directions
Authors: Wang Xiaxia , Cheng Gong
Published: July 2024

With the continuous growth of large Knowledge Graphs (KGs), extractive KG summarization becomes a trending task. Aiming at distilling a compact subgraph with condensed information, it facilitates various downstream KG-based tasks. In this survey paper, we are among the first to provide a systematic overview of its applications and define a taxonomy for existing methods from its interdisciplinary studies. Future directions are also laid out based on our extensive and comparative review.
Beyond the Limits: A Survey of Techniques to Extend the Context Length in Large Language Models
Authors: Wang Xindi , Salmani Mahsa , Omidi Parsa , Ren Xiangyu , Rezagholizadeh Mehdi , Eshaghi Armaghan
Published: July 2024

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities including understanding context, engaging in logical reasoning, and generating responses. However, this is achieved at the expense of stringent computational and memory requirements, hindering their ability to effectively support long input sequences. This survey provides an inclusive review of the recent techniques and methods devised to extend the sequence length in LLMs, thereby enhancing their capacity for long-context understanding. In particular, we review and categorize a wide range of techniques including architectural modifications, such as modified positional encoding and altered attention mechanisms, which are designed to enhance the processing of longer sequences while avoiding a proportional increase in computational cost. The diverse methodologies investigated in this study can be leveraged across different phases of LLMs, i.e., training, fine-tuning and inference. This enables LLMs to efficiently process extended sequences. The limitations of the current methodologies is discussed in the last section along with the suggestions for future research directions, underscoring the importance of sequence length in the continued advancement of LLMs.