pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Domain Adaptation for Arabic Machine Translation: The Case of Financial Texts
Authors: Emad A. Alghamdi, Jezia Zakraoui, Fares A. Abanmy
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Benchmarking, Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, NMT, Transfer Learning, Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) has shown impressive performance when trained on large-scale corpora. However, generic NMT systems have demonstrated poor performance on out-of-domain translation. To mitigate this issue, several domain adaptation methods have recently been proposed which often lead to better translation quality than genetic NMT systems. While there has been some continuous progress in NMT for English and other European languages, domain adaption in Arabic has received little attention in the literature. The current study, therefore, aims to explore the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptation for Arabic MT (AMT), in yet unexplored domain, financial news articles. To this end, we developed carefully a parallel corpus for Arabic-English (AR- EN) translation in the financial domain for benchmarking different domain adaptation methods. We then fine-tuned several pre-trained NMT and Large Language models including ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo on our dataset. The results showed that the fine-tuning is successful using just a few well-aligned in-domain AR-EN segments. The quality of ChatGPT translation was superior than other models based on automatic and human evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on fine-tuning ChatGPT towards financial domain transfer learning. To contribute to research in domain translation, we made our datasets and fine-tuned models available at https://huggingface.co/asas-ai/.
Diffusion Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Qidong Liu, Fan Yan, Xiangyu Zhao, Zhaocheng Du, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Feng Tian
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SRS) has become the technical foundation in many applications recently, which aims to recommend the next item based on the user's historical interactions. However, sequential recommendation often faces the problem of data sparsity, which widely exists in recommender systems. Besides, most users only interact with a few items, but existing SRS models often underperform these users. Such a problem, named the long-tail user problem, is still to be resolved. Data augmentation is a distinct way to alleviate these two problems, but they often need fabricated training strategies or are hindered by poor-quality generated interactions. To address these problems, we propose a Diffusion Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation (DiffuASR) for a higher quality generation. The augmented dataset by DiffuASR can be used to train the sequential recommendation models directly, free from complex training procedures. To make the best of the generation ability of the diffusion model, we first propose a diffusion-based pseudo sequence generation framework to fill the gap between image and sequence generation. Then, a sequential U-Net is designed to adapt the diffusion noise prediction model U-Net to the discrete sequence generation task. At last, we develop two guide strategies to assimilate the preference between generated and origin sequences. To validate the proposed DiffuASR, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with three sequential recommendation models. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of DiffuASR. As far as we know, DiffuASR is one pioneer that introduce the diffusion model to the recommendation.
AxOCS: Scaling FPGA-based Approximate Operators using Configuration Supersampling
Authors: Siva Satyendra Sahoo, Salim Ullah, Soumyo Bhattacharjee, Akash Kumar
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00

The rising usage of AI and ML-based processing across application domains has exacerbated the need for low-cost ML implementation, specifically for resource-constrained embedded systems. To this end, approximate computing, an approach that explores the power, performance, area (PPA), and behavioral accuracy (BEHAV) trade-offs, has emerged as a possible solution for implementing embedded machine learning. Due to the predominance of MAC operations in ML, designing platform-specific approximate arithmetic operators forms one of the major research problems in approximate computing. Recently there has been a rising usage of AI/ML-based design space exploration techniques for implementing approximate operators. However, most of these approaches are limited to using ML-based surrogate functions for predicting the PPA and BEHAV impact of a set of related design decisions. While this approach leverages the regression capabilities of ML methods, it does not exploit the more advanced approaches in ML. To this end, we propose AxOCS, a methodology for designing approximate arithmetic operators through ML-based supersampling. Specifically, we present a method to leverage the correlation of PPA and BEHAV metrics across operators of varying bit-widths for generating larger bit-width operators. The proposed approach involves traversing the relatively smaller design space of smaller bit-width operators and employing its associated Design-PPA-BEHAV relationship to generate initial solutions for metaheuristics-based optimization for larger operators. The experimental evaluation of AxOCS for FPGA-optimized approximate operators shows that the proposed approach significantly improves the quality-resulting hypervolume for multi-objective optimization-of 8x8 signed approximate multipliers.
Synthetic Boost: Leveraging Synthetic Data for Enhanced Vision-Language Segmentation in Echocardiography
Authors: Rabin Adhikari, Manish Dhakal, Safal Thapaliya, Kanchan Poudel, Prasiddha Bhandari, Bishesh Khanal
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Vision-Language Segmentation

Accurate segmentation is essential for echocardiography-based assessment of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, the variability among sonographers and the inherent challenges of ultrasound images hinder precise segmentation. By leveraging the joint representation of image and text modalities, Vision-Language Segmentation Models (VLSMs) can incorporate rich contextual information, potentially aiding in accurate and explainable segmentation. However, the lack of readily available data in echocardiography hampers the training of VLSMs. In this study, we explore using synthetic datasets from Semantic Diffusion Models (SDMs) to enhance VLSMs for echocardiography segmentation. We evaluate results for two popular VLSMs (CLIPSeg and CRIS) using seven different kinds of language prompts derived from several attributes, automatically extracted from echocardiography images, segmentation masks, and their metadata. Our results show improved metrics and faster convergence when pretraining VLSMs on SDM-generated synthetic images before finetuning on real images. The code, configs, and prompts are available at https://github.com/naamiinepal/synthetic-boost.
OmniDrones: An Efficient and Flexible Platform for Reinforcement Learning in Drone Control
Authors: Botian Xu, Feng Gao, Chao Yu, Ruize Zhang, Yi Wu, Yu Wang
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, reinforcement-learning

In this work, we introduce OmniDrones, an efficient and flexible platform tailored for reinforcement learning in drone control, built on Nvidia's Omniverse Isaac Sim. It employs a bottom-up design approach that allows users to easily design and experiment with various application scenarios on top of GPU-parallelized simulations. It also offers a range of benchmark tasks, presenting challenges ranging from single-drone hovering to over-actuated system tracking. In summary, we propose an open-sourced drone simulation platform, equipped with an extensive suite of tools for drone learning. It includes 4 drone models, 5 sensor modalities, 4 control modes, over 10 benchmark tasks, and a selection of widely used RL baselines. To showcase the capabilities of OmniDrones and to support future research, we also provide preliminary results on these benchmark tasks. We hope this platform will encourage further studies on applying RL to practical drone systems.
A Spectral Theory of Neural Prediction and Alignment
Authors: Abdulkadir Canatar, Jenelle Feather, Albert Wakhloo, SueYeon Chung
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Prediction, regression

The representations of neural networks are often compared to those of biological systems by performing regression between the neural network responses and those measured from biological systems. Many different state-of-the-art deep neural networks yield similar neural predictions, but it remains unclear how to differentiate among models that perform equally well at predicting neural responses. To gain insight into this, we use a recent theoretical framework that relates the generalization error from regression to the spectral properties of the model and the target. We apply this theory to the case of regression between model activations and neural responses and decompose the neural prediction error in terms of the model eigenspectra, alignment of model eigenvectors and neural responses, and the training set size. Using this decomposition, we introduce geometrical measures to interpret the neural prediction error. We test a large number of deep neural networks that predict visual cortical activity and show that there are multiple types of geometries that result in low neural prediction error as measured via regression. The work demonstrates that carefully decomposing representational metrics can provide interpretability of how models are capturing neural activity and points the way towards improved models of neural activity.
Masking Improves Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for ConvNets, and Saliency Tells You Where
Authors: Zhi-Yi Chin, Chieh-Ming Jiang, Ching-Chun Huang, Pin-Yu Chen, Wei-Chen Chiu
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

While image data starts to enjoy the simple-but-effective self-supervised learning scheme built upon masking and self-reconstruction objective thanks to the introduction of tokenization procedure and vision transformer backbone, convolutional neural networks as another important and widely-adopted architecture for image data, though having contrastive-learning techniques to drive the self-supervised learning, still face the difficulty of leveraging such straightforward and general masking operation to benefit their learning process significantly. In this work, we aim to alleviate the burden of including masking operation into the contrastive-learning framework for convolutional neural networks as an extra augmentation method. In addition to the additive but unwanted edges (between masked and unmasked regions) as well as other adverse effects caused by the masking operations for ConvNets, which have been discussed by prior works, we particularly identify the potential problem where for one view in a contrastive sample-pair the randomly-sampled masking regions could be overly concentrated on important/salient objects thus resulting in misleading contrastiveness to the other view. To this end, we propose to explicitly take the saliency constraint into consideration in which the masked regions are more evenly distributed among the foreground and background for realizing the masking-based augmentation. Moreover, we introduce hard negative samples by masking larger regions of salient patches in an input image. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets, contrastive learning mechanisms, and downstream tasks well verify the efficacy as well as the superior performance of our proposed method with respect to several state-of-the-art baselines.
Towards an MLOps Architecture for XAI in Industrial Applications
Authors: Leonhard Faubel, Thomas Woudsma, Leila Methnani, Amir Ghorbani Ghezeljhemeidan, Fabian Buelow, Klaus Schmid, Willem D. van Driel, Benjamin Kloepper, Andreas Theodorou, Mohsen Nosratinia, Magnus Bång
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Machine learning (ML) has become a popular tool in the industrial sector as it helps to improve operations, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. However, deploying and managing ML models in production environments can be complex. This is where Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) comes in. MLOps aims to streamline this deployment and management process. One of the remaining MLOps challenges is the need for explanations. These explanations are essential for understanding how ML models reason, which is key to trust and acceptance. Better identification of errors and improved model accuracy are only two resulting advantages. An often neglected fact is that deployed models are bypassed in practice when accuracy and especially explainability do not meet user expectations. We developed a novel MLOps software architecture to address the challenge of integrating explanations and feedback capabilities into the ML development and deployment processes. In the project EXPLAIN, our architecture is implemented in a series of industrial use cases. The proposed MLOps software architecture has several advantages. It provides an efficient way to manage ML models in production environments. Further, it allows for integrating explanations into the development and deployment processes.
OpenAi's GPT4 as coding assistant
Authors: Lefteris Moussiades, George Zografos
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering

Lately, Large Language Models have been widely used in code generation. GPT4 is considered the most potent Large Language Model from Openai. In this paper, we examine GPT3.5 and GPT4 as coding assistants. More specifically, we have constructed appropriate tests to check whether the two systems can a) answer typical questions that can arise during the code development, b) produce reliable code, and c) contribute to code debugging. The test results are impressive. The performance of GPT4 is outstanding and signals an increase in the productivity of programmers and the reorganization of software development procedures based on these new tools.
Defeasible Reasoning with Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Dave Raggett
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Human knowledge is subject to uncertainties, imprecision, incompleteness and inconsistencies. Moreover, the meaning of many everyday terms is dependent on the context. That poses a huge challenge for the Semantic Web. This paper introduces work on an intuitive notation and model for defeasible reasoning with imperfect knowledge, and relates it to previous work on argumentation theory. PKN is to N3 as defeasible reasoning is to deductive logic. Further work is needed on an intuitive syntax for describing reasoning strategies and tactics in declarative terms, drawing upon the AIF ontology for inspiration. The paper closes with observations on symbolic approaches in the era of large language models.
In-context Interference in Chat-based Large Language Models
Authors: Eric Nuertey Coleman, Julio Hurtado, Vincenzo Lomonaco
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have had a huge impact on society due to their impressive capabilities and vast knowledge of the world. Various applications and tools have been created that allow users to interact with these models in a black-box scenario. However, one limitation of this scenario is that users cannot modify the internal knowledge of the model, and the only way to add or modify internal knowledge is by explicitly mentioning it to the model during the current interaction. This learning process is called in-context training, and it refers to training that is confined to the user's current session or context. In-context learning has significant applications, but also has limitations that are seldom studied. In this paper, we present a study that shows how the model can suffer from interference between information that continually flows in the context, causing it to forget previously learned knowledge, which can reduce the model's performance. Along with showing the problem, we propose an evaluation benchmark based on the bAbI dataset.
H2O+: An Improved Framework for Hybrid Offline-and-Online RL with Dynamics Gaps
Authors: Haoyi Niu, Tianying Ji, Bingqi Liu, Haocheng Zhao, Xiangyu Zhu, Jianying Zheng, Pengfei Huang, Guyue Zhou, Jianming Hu, Xianyuan Zhan
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Solving real-world complex tasks using reinforcement learning (RL) without high-fidelity simulation environments or large amounts of offline data can be quite challenging. Online RL agents trained in imperfect simulation environments can suffer from severe sim-to-real issues. Offline RL approaches although bypass the need for simulators, often pose demanding requirements on the size and quality of the offline datasets. The recently emerged hybrid offline-and-online RL provides an attractive framework that enables joint use of limited offline data and imperfect simulator for transferable policy learning. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm, called H2O+, which offers great flexibility to bridge various choices of offline and online learning methods, while also accounting for dynamics gaps between the real and simulation environment. Through extensive simulation and real-world robotics experiments, we demonstrate superior performance and flexibility over advanced cross-domain online and offline RL algorithms.
The Mathematical Game
Authors: Marc Pierre, Quentin Cohen-Solal, Tristan Cazenave
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Theorem Proving

Monte Carlo Tree Search can be used for automated theorem proving. Holophrasm is a neural theorem prover using MCTS combined with neural networks for the policy and the evaluation. In this paper we propose to improve the performance of the Holophrasm theorem prover using other game tree search algorithms.
PointSSC: A Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Point Cloud Benchmark for Semantic Scene Completion
Authors: Yuxiang Yan, Boda Liu, Jianfei Ai, Qinbu Li, Ru Wan, Jian Pu
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Completion, Segmentation

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) aims to jointly generate space occupancies and semantic labels for complex 3D scenes. Most existing SSC models focus on volumetric representations, which are memory-inefficient for large outdoor spaces. Point clouds provide a lightweight alternative but existing benchmarks lack outdoor point cloud scenes with semantic labels. To address this, we introduce PointSSC, the first cooperative vehicle-infrastructure point cloud benchmark for semantic scene completion. These scenes exhibit long-range perception and minimal occlusion. We develop an automated annotation pipeline leveraging Semantic Segment Anything to efficiently assign semantics. To benchmark progress, we propose a LiDAR-based model with a Spatial-Aware Transformer for global and local feature extraction and a Completion and Segmentation Cooperative Module for joint completion and segmentation. PointSSC provides a challenging testbed to drive advances in semantic point cloud completion for real-world navigation. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/yyxssm/PointSSC.
Multi-Label Noise Transition Matrix Estimation with Label Correlations: Theory and Algorithm
Authors: Shikun Li, Xiaobo Xia, Hansong Zhang, Shiming Ge, Tongliang Liu
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Label Learning

Noisy multi-label learning has garnered increasing attention due to the challenges posed by collecting large-scale accurate labels, making noisy labels a more practical alternative. Motivated by noisy multi-class learning, the introduction of transition matrices can help model multi-label noise and enable the development of statistically consistent algorithms for noisy multi-label learning. However, estimating multi-label noise transition matrices remains a challenging task, as most existing estimators in noisy multi-class learning rely on anchor points and accurate fitting of noisy class posteriors, which is hard to satisfy in noisy multi-label learning. In this paper, we address this problem by first investigating the identifiability of class-dependent transition matrices in noisy multi-label learning. Building upon the identifiability results, we propose a novel estimator that leverages label correlations without the need for anchor points or precise fitting of noisy class posteriors. Specifically, we first estimate the occurrence probability of two noisy labels to capture noisy label correlations. Subsequently, we employ sample selection techniques to extract information implying clean label correlations, which are then used to estimate the occurrence probability of one noisy label when a certain clean label appears. By exploiting the mismatches in label correlations implied by these occurrence probabilities, we demonstrate that the transition matrix becomes identifiable and can be acquired by solving a bilinear decomposition problem. Theoretically, we establish an estimation error bound for our multi-label transition matrix estimator and derive a generalization error bound for our statistically consistent algorithm. Empirically, we validate the effectiveness of our estimator in estimating multi-label noise transition matrices, leading to excellent classification performance.
Enhancing Graph Representation of the Environment through Local and Cloud Computation
Authors: Francesco Argenziano, Vincenzo Suriani, Daniele Nardi
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00

Enriching the robot representation of the operational environment is a challenging task that aims at bridging the gap between low-level sensor readings and high-level semantic understanding. Having a rich representation often requires computationally demanding architectures and pure point cloud based detection systems that struggle when dealing with everyday objects that have to be handled by the robot. To overcome these issues, we propose a graph-based representation that addresses this gap by providing a semantic representation of robot environments from multiple sources. In fact, to acquire information from the environment, the framework combines classical computer vision tools with modern computer vision cloud services, ensuring computational feasibility on onboard hardware. By incorporating an ontology hierarchy with over 800 object classes, the framework achieves cross-domain adaptability, eliminating the need for environment-specific tools. The proposed approach allows us to handle also small objects and integrate them into the semantic representation of the environment. The approach is implemented in the Robot Operating System (ROS) using the RViz visualizer for environment representation. This work is a first step towards the development of a general-purpose framework, to facilitate intuitive interaction and navigation across different domains.