pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DeliverAI: Reinforcement Learning Based Distributed Path-Sharing Network for Food Deliveries
Authors: Ashman Mehra, Snehanshu Saha, Vaskar Raychoudhury, Archana Mathur
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Delivery of items from the producer to the consumer has experienced significant growth over the past decade and has been greatly fueled by the recent pandemic. Amazon Fresh, Shopify, UberEats, InstaCart, and DoorDash are rapidly growing and are sharing the same business model of consumer items or food delivery. Existing food delivery methods are sub-optimal because each delivery is individually optimized to go directly from the producer to the consumer via the shortest time path. We observe a significant scope for reducing the costs associated with completing deliveries under the current model. We model our food delivery problem as a multi-objective optimization, where consumer satisfaction and delivery costs, both, need to be optimized. Taking inspiration from the success of ride-sharing in the taxi industry, we propose DeliverAI - a reinforcement learning-based path-sharing algorithm. Unlike previous attempts for path-sharing, DeliverAI can provide real-time, time-efficient decision-making using a Reinforcement learning-enabled agent system. Our novel agent interaction scheme leverages path-sharing among deliveries to reduce the total distance traveled while keeping the delivery completion time under check. We generate and test our methodology vigorously on a simulation setup using real data from the city of Chicago. Our results show that DeliverAI can reduce the delivery fleet size by 12\%, the distance traveled by 13%, and achieve 50% higher fleet utilization compared to the baselines.
SMORE: Score Models for Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Harshit Sikchi, Rohan Chitnis, Ahmed Touati, Alborz Geramifard, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Robot Manipulation

Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) is tasked with learning to achieve multiple goals in an environment purely from offline datasets using sparse reward functions. Offline GCRL is pivotal for developing generalist agents capable of leveraging pre-existing datasets to learn diverse and reusable skills without hand-engineering reward functions. However, contemporary approaches to GCRL based on supervised learning and contrastive learning are often suboptimal in the offline setting. An alternative perspective on GCRL optimizes for occupancy matching, but necessitates learning a discriminator, which subsequently serves as a pseudo-reward for downstream RL. Inaccuracies in the learned discriminator can cascade, negatively influencing the resulting policy. We present a novel approach to GCRL under a new lens of mixture-distribution matching, leading to our discriminator-free method: SMORe. The key insight is combining the occupancy matching perspective of GCRL with a convex dual formulation to derive a learning objective that can better leverage suboptimal offline data. SMORe learns scores or unnormalized densities representing the importance of taking an action at a state for reaching a particular goal. SMORe is principled and our extensive experiments on the fully offline GCRL benchmark composed of robot manipulation and locomotion tasks, including high-dimensional observations, show that SMORe can outperform state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin.
Obtaining Explainable Classification Models using Distributionally Robust Optimization
Authors: Sanjeeb Dash, Soumyadip Ghosh, Joao Goncalves, Mark S. Squillante
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification

Model explainability is crucial for human users to be able to interpret how a proposed classifier assigns labels to data based on its feature values. We study generalized linear models constructed using sets of feature value rules, which can capture nonlinear dependencies and interactions. An inherent trade-off exists between rule set sparsity and its prediction accuracy. It is computationally expensive to find the right choice of sparsity -- e.g., via cross-validation -- with existing methods. We propose a new formulation to learn an ensemble of rule sets that simultaneously addresses these competing factors. Good generalization is ensured while keeping computational costs low by utilizing distributionally robust optimization. The formulation utilizes column generation to efficiently search the space of rule sets and constructs a sparse ensemble of rule sets, in contrast with techniques like random forests or boosting and their variants. We present theoretical results that motivate and justify the use of our distributionally robust formulation. Extensive numerical experiments establish that our method improves over competing methods -- on a large set of publicly available binary classification problem instances -- with respect to one or more of the following metrics: generalization quality, computational cost, and explainability.
RT-Trajectory: Robotic Task Generalization via Hindsight Trajectory Sketches
Authors: Jiayuan Gu, Sean Kirmani, Paul Wohlhart, Yao Lu, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Kanishka Rao, Wenhao Yu, Chuyuan Fu, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Zhuo Xu, Priya Sundaresan, Peng Xu, Hao Su, Karol Hausman, Chelsea Finn, Quan Vuong, Ted Xiao
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

Generalization remains one of the most important desiderata for robust robot learning systems. While recently proposed approaches show promise in generalization to novel objects, semantic concepts, or visual distribution shifts, generalization to new tasks remains challenging. For example, a language-conditioned policy trained on pick-and-place tasks will not be able to generalize to a folding task, even if the arm trajectory of folding is similar to pick-and-place. Our key insight is that this kind of generalization becomes feasible if we represent the task through rough trajectory sketches. We propose a policy conditioning method using such rough trajectory sketches, which we call RT-Trajectory, that is practical, easy to specify, and allows the policy to effectively perform new tasks that would otherwise be challenging to perform. We find that trajectory sketches strike a balance between being detailed enough to express low-level motion-centric guidance while being coarse enough to allow the learned policy to interpret the trajectory sketch in the context of situational visual observations. In addition, we show how trajectory sketches can provide a useful interface to communicate with robotic policies: they can be specified through simple human inputs like drawings or videos, or through automated methods such as modern image-generating or waypoint-generating methods. We evaluate RT-Trajectory at scale on a variety of real-world robotic tasks, and find that RT-Trajectory is able to perform a wider range of tasks compared to language-conditioned and goal-conditioned policies, when provided the same training data.
The language of prompting: What linguistic properties make a prompt successful?
Authors: Alina Leidinger, Robert van Rooij, Ekaterina Shutova
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

The latest generation of LLMs can be prompted to achieve impressive zero-shot or few-shot performance in many NLP tasks. However, since performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, considerable effort has been devoted to crowd-sourcing prompts or designing methods for prompt optimisation. Yet, we still lack a systematic understanding of how linguistic properties of prompts correlate with task performance. In this work, we investigate how LLMs of different sizes, pre-trained and instruction-tuned, perform on prompts that are semantically equivalent, but vary in linguistic structure. We investigate both grammatical properties such as mood, tense, aspect and modality, as well as lexico-semantic variation through the use of synonyms. Our findings contradict the common assumption that LLMs achieve optimal performance on lower perplexity prompts that reflect language use in pretraining or instruction-tuning data. Prompts transfer poorly between datasets or models, and performance cannot generally be explained by perplexity, word frequency, ambiguity or prompt length. Based on our results, we put forward a proposal for a more robust and comprehensive evaluation standard for prompting research.
Don't Make Your LLM an Evaluation Benchmark Cheater
Authors: Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Zhipeng Chen, Wentong Chen, Wayne Xin Zhao, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Ji-Rong Wen, Jiawei Han
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

Large language models~(LLMs) have greatly advanced the frontiers of artificial intelligence, attaining remarkable improvement in model capacity. To assess the model performance, a typical approach is to construct evaluation benchmarks for measuring the ability level of LLMs in different aspects. Despite that a number of high-quality benchmarks have been released, the concerns about the appropriate use of these benchmarks and the fair comparison of different models are increasingly growing. Considering these concerns, in this paper, we discuss the potential risk and impact of inappropriately using evaluation benchmarks and misleadingly interpreting the evaluation results. Specially, we focus on a special issue that would lead to inappropriate evaluation, \ie \emph{benchmark leakage}, referring that the data related to evaluation sets is occasionally used for model training. This phenomenon now becomes more common since pre-training data is often prepared ahead of model test. We conduct extensive experiments to study the effect of benchmark leverage, and find that it can dramatically boost the evaluation results, which would finally lead to an unreliable assessment of model performance. To improve the use of existing evaluation benchmarks, we finally present several guidelines for both LLM developers and benchmark maintainers. We hope this work can draw attention to appropriate training and evaluation of LLMs.
Assessing Fidelity in XAI post-hoc techniques: A Comparative Study with Ground Truth Explanations Datasets
Authors: M. Miró-Nicolau, A. Jaume-i-Capó, G. Moyà-Alcover
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

The evaluation of the fidelity of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods to their underlying models is a challenging task, primarily due to the absence of a ground truth for explanations. However, assessing fidelity is a necessary step for ensuring a correct XAI methodology. In this study, we conduct a fair and objective comparison of the current state-of-the-art XAI methods by introducing three novel image datasets with reliable ground truth for explanations. The primary objective of this comparison is to identify methods with low fidelity and eliminate them from further research, thereby promoting the development of more trustworthy and effective XAI techniques. Our results demonstrate that XAI methods based on the backpropagation of output information to input yield higher accuracy and reliability compared to methods relying on sensitivity analysis or Class Activation Maps (CAM). However, the backpropagation method tends to generate more noisy saliency maps. These findings have significant implications for the advancement of XAI methods, enabling the elimination of erroneous explanations and fostering the development of more robust and reliable XAI.
Architecture of Smart Certificates for Web3 Applications Against Cyberthreats in Financial Industry
Authors: Stefan Kambiz Behfar, Jon Crowcroft
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This study addresses the security challenges associated with the current internet transformations, specifically focusing on emerging technologies such as blockchain and decentralized storage. It also investigates the role of Web3 applications in shaping the future of the internet. The primary objective is to propose a novel design for 'smart certificates,' which are digital certificates that can be programmatically enforced. Utilizing such certificates, an enterprise can better protect itself from cyberattacks and ensure the security of its data and systems. Web3 recent security solutions by companies and projects like Certik, Forta, Slither, and Securify are the equivalent of code scanning tool that were originally developed for Web1 and Web2 applications, and definitely not like certificates to help enterprises feel safe against cyberthreats. We aim to improve the resilience of enterprises' digital infrastructure by building on top of Web3 application and put methodologies in place for vulnerability analysis and attack correlation, focusing on architecture of different layers, Wallet/Client, Application and Smart Contract, where specific components are provided to identify and predict threats and risks. Furthermore, Certificate Transparency is used for enhancing the security, trustworthiness and decentralized management of the certificates, and detecting misuses, compromises, and malfeasances.
A Quantitative Autonomy Quantification Framework for Fully Autonomous Robotic Systems
Authors: Nasser Gyagenda, Hubert Roth
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

Although autonomous functioning facilitates deployment of robotic systems in domains that admit limited human oversight on our planet and beyond, finding correspondence between task requirements and autonomous capability is still an open challenge. Consequently, a number of methods for quantifying autonomy have been proposed over the last three decades, but to our knowledge all these have no discernment of sub-mode features of variation of autonomy and some are based on metrics that violet the Goodhart's law. This paper focuses on the full autonomous mode and proposes a quantitative autonomy assessment framework based on task requirements. The framework starts by establishing robot task characteristics from which three autonomy metrics, namely requisite capability set, reliability and responsiveness are derived. These characteristics were founded on the realization that robots ultimately replace human skilled workers, from which a relationship between human job and robot task characteristics was established. Additionally, mathematical functions mapping metrics to autonomy as a two-part measure, namely of level and degree of autonomy are also presented. The distinction between level and degree of autonomy stemmed from the acknowledgment that autonomy is not just a question of existence, but also one of performance of requisite capability. The framework has been demonstrated on two case studies, namely autonomous vehicle at an on-road dynamic driving task and the DARPA subterranean challenge rules analysis. The framework provides not only a tool for quantifying autonomy, but also a regulatory interface and common language for autonomous systems developers and users. Its greatest feature is the ability to monitor system integrity when implemented online.
Supermind Ideator: Exploring generative AI to support creative problem-solving
Authors: Steven R. Rick, Gianni Giacomelli, Haoran Wen, Robert J. Laubacher, Nancy Taubenslag, Jennifer L. Heyman, Max Sina Knicker, Younes Jeddi, Hendrik Maier, Stephen Dwyer, Pranav Ragupathy, Thomas W. Malone
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Previous efforts to support creative problem-solving have included (a) techniques (such as brainstorming and design thinking) to stimulate creative ideas, and (b) software tools to record and share these ideas. Now, generative AI technologies can suggest new ideas that might never have occurred to the users, and users can then select from these ideas or use them to stimulate even more ideas. Here, we describe such a system, Supermind Ideator. The system uses a large language model (GPT 3.5) and adds prompting, fine tuning, and a user interface specifically designed to help people use creative problem-solving techniques. Some of these techniques can be applied to any problem; others are specifically intended to help generate innovative ideas about how to design groups of people and/or computers ("superminds"). We also describe our early experiences with using this system and suggest ways it could be extended to support additional techniques for other specific problem-solving domains.
GateLoop: Fully Data-Controlled Linear Recurrence for Sequence Modeling
Authors: Tobias Katsch
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Linear Recurrence has proven to be a powerful tool for modeling long sequences efficiently. In this work, we show that existing models fail to take full advantage of its potential. Motivated by this finding, we develop GateLoop, a foundational sequence model that generalizes linear recurrent models such as S4, S5, LRU and RetNet, by employing data-controlled state transitions. Utilizing this theoretical advance, GateLoop empirically outperforms existing models for auto-regressive language modeling. Our method comes with a low-cost $O(l)$ recurrent mode and an efficient $O(l \log_{2} l)$ parallel mode making use of highly optimized associative scan implementations. Furthermore, we derive an $O(l^2)$ surrogate attention mode, revealing remarkable implications for Transformer and recently proposed architectures. Specifically, we prove that our approach can be interpreted as providing data-controlled relative-positional information to Attention. While many existing models solely rely on data-controlled cumulative sums for context aggregation, our findings suggest that incorporating data-controlled complex cumulative products may be a crucial step towards more powerful sequence models.
Large Language Models Illuminate a Progressive Pathway to Artificial Healthcare Assistant: A Review
Authors: Mingze Yuan, Peng Bao, Jiajia Yuan, Yunhao Shen, ZiFan Chen, Yi Xie, Jie Zhao, Yang Chen, Li Zhang, Lin Shen, Bin Dong
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in mimicking human-level language comprehension and reasoning. This has sparked significant interest in applying LLMs to enhance various aspects of healthcare, ranging from medical education to clinical decision support. However, medicine involves multifaceted data modalities and nuanced reasoning skills, presenting challenges for integrating LLMs. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the applications and implications of LLMs in medicine. It begins by examining the fundamental applications of general-purpose and specialized LLMs, demonstrating their utilities in knowledge retrieval, research support, clinical workflow automation, and diagnostic assistance. Recognizing the inherent multimodality of medicine, the review then focuses on multimodal LLMs, investigating their ability to process diverse data types like medical imaging and EHRs to augment diagnostic accuracy. To address LLMs' limitations regarding personalization and complex clinical reasoning, the paper explores the emerging development of LLM-powered autonomous agents for healthcare. Furthermore, it summarizes the evaluation methodologies for assessing LLMs' reliability and safety in medical contexts. Overall, this review offers an extensive analysis on the transformative potential of LLMs in modern medicine. It also highlights the pivotal need for continuous optimizations and ethical oversight before these models can be effectively integrated into clinical practice. Visit https://github.com/mingze-yuan/Awesome-LLM-Healthcare for an accompanying GitHub repository containing latest papers.
Enhancing Functional Data Analysis with Sequential Neural Networks: Advantages and Comparative Study
Authors: J. Zhao, J. Li, M. Chen, S. Jadhav
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

Functional Data Analysis (FDA) is a statistical domain developed to handle functional data characterized by high dimensionality and complex data structures. Sequential Neural Networks (SNNs) are specialized neural networks capable of processing sequence data, a fundamental aspect of functional data. Despite their great flexibility in modeling functional data, SNNs have been inadequately employed in the FDA community. One notable advantage of SNNs is the ease of implementation, making them accessible to a broad audience beyond academia. Conversely, FDA-based methodologies present challenges, particularly for practitioners outside the field, due to their intricate complexity. In light of this, we propose utilizing SNNs in FDA applications and demonstrate their effectiveness through comparative analyses against popular FDA regression models based on numerical experiments and real-world data analysis. SNN architectures allow us to surpass the limitations of traditional FDA methods, offering scalability, flexibility, and improved analytical performance. Our findings highlight the potential of SNN-based methodologies as powerful tools for data applications involving functional data.
Multi-EuP: The Multilingual European Parliament Dataset for Analysis of Bias in Information Retrieval
Authors: Jinrui Yang, Timothy Baldwin, Trevor Cohn
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Fairness, Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Reranking

We present Multi-EuP, a new multilingual benchmark dataset, comprising 22K multi-lingual documents collected from the European Parliament, spanning 24 languages. This dataset is designed to investigate fairness in a multilingual information retrieval (IR) context to analyze both language and demographic bias in a ranking context. It boasts an authentic multilingual corpus, featuring topics translated into all 24 languages, as well as cross-lingual relevance judgments. Furthermore, it offers rich demographic information associated with its documents, facilitating the study of demographic bias. We report the effectiveness of Multi-EuP for benchmarking both monolingual and multilingual IR. We also conduct a preliminary experiment on language bias caused by the choice of tokenization strategy.
Towards Concept-Aware Large Language Models
Authors: Chen Shani, Jilles Vreeken, Dafna Shahaf
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

Concepts play a pivotal role in various human cognitive functions, including learning, reasoning and communication. However, there is very little work on endowing machines with the ability to form and reason with concepts. In particular, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) work at the level of tokens, not concepts. In this work, we analyze how well contemporary LLMs capture human concepts and their structure. We then discuss ways to develop concept-aware LLMs, taking place at different stages of the pipeline. We sketch a method for pretraining LLMs using concepts, and also explore the simpler approach that uses the output of existing LLMs. Despite its simplicity, our proof-of-concept is shown to better match human intuition, as well as improve the robustness of predictions. These preliminary results underscore the promise of concept-aware LLMs.