pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dexterity from Touch: Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Tactile Representations with Robotic Play
Authors: Irmak Guzey, Ben Evans, Soumith Chintala, Lerrel Pinto
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Teaching dexterity to multi-fingered robots has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. Most prominent work in this area focuses on learning controllers or policies that either operate on visual observations or state estimates derived from vision. However, such methods perform poorly on fine-grained manipulation tasks that require reasoning about contact forces or about objects occluded by the hand itself. In this work, we present T-Dex, a new approach for tactile-based dexterity, that operates in two phases. In the first phase, we collect 2.5 hours of play data, which is used to train self-supervised tactile encoders. This is necessary to bring high-dimensional tactile readings to a lower-dimensional embedding. In the second phase, given a handful of demonstrations for a dexterous task, we learn non-parametric policies that combine the tactile observations with visual ones. Across five challenging dexterous tasks, we show that our tactile-based dexterity models outperform purely vision and torque-based models by an average of 1.7X. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis on factors critical to T-Dex including the importance of play data, architectures, and representation learning.
Roots and Requirements for Collaborative AIs
Authors: Mark Stefik
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC

The vision of AI collaborators is a staple of mythology and science fiction, where artificial agents with special talents assist human partners and teams. In this dream, sophisticated AIs understand nuances of collaboration and human communication. The AI as collaborator dream is different from computer tools that augment human intelligence (IA) or intermediate human collaboration. Those tools have their roots in the 1960s and helped to drive an information technology revolution. They can be useful but they are not intelligent and do not collaborate as effectively as skilled people. With the increase of hybrid and remote work since the COVID pandemic, the benefits and requirements for better coordination, collaboration, and communication are becoming hot topics in the workplace. Employers and workers face choices and trade-offs as they negotiate the options for working from home versus working at the office. Many factors such as the high costs of homes near employers are impeding a mass return to the office. Government advisory groups and leaders in AI have advocated for years that AIs should be transparent and effective collaborators. Nonetheless, robust AIs that collaborate like talented people remain out of reach. Are AI teammates part of a solution? How artificially intelligent (AI) could and should they be? This position paper reviews the arc of technology and public calls for human-machine teaming. It draws on earlier research in psychology and the social sciences about what human-like collaboration requires. This paper sets a context for a second science-driven paper that advocates a radical shift in technology and methodology for creating resilient, intelligent, and human-compatible AIs (Stefik & Price, 2023). The aspirational goal is that such AIs would learn, share what they learn, and collaborate to achieve high capabilities.
The Representational Status of Deep Learning Models
Authors: Eamon Duede
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

This paper aims to clarify the representational status of Deep Learning Models (DLMs). While commonly referred to as 'representations', what this entails is ambiguous due to a conflation of functional and relational conceptions of representation. This paper argues that while DLMs represent their targets in a relational sense, in general, we have no good reason to believe that DLMs encode locally semantically decomposable representations of their targets. That is, the representational capacity these models have is largely global, rather than decomposable into stable, local subrepresentations. This result has immediate implications for explainable AI (XAI) and directs attention toward exploring the global relational nature of deep learning representations and their relationship both to models more generally to understand their potential role in future scientific inquiry.
cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models with Conversational Tables
Authors: Anirudh S Sundar, Larry Heck
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Informativeness, Response Generation, Retrieval, Table Retrieval

Optimizing accuracy and performance while eliminating hallucinations of open-domain conversational large language models (LLMs) is an open research challenge. A particularly promising direction is to augment and ground LLMs with information from structured sources. This paper introduces Conversational Tables (cTBLS), a three-step architecture to retrieve and generate dialogue responses grounded on retrieved tabular information. cTBLS uses Transformer encoder embeddings for Dense Table Retrieval and obtains up to 125% relative improvement over the retriever in the previous state-of-the-art system on the HyrbiDialogue dataset. cTBLS then uses a shared process between encoder and decoder models to perform a coarse+fine tabular knowledge (e.g., cell) ranking combined with a GPT-3.5 LLM response generator to yield a 2x relative improvement in ROUGE scores. Finally, human evaluators prefer cTBLs +80% of the time (coherency, fluency) and judge informativeness to be 4x better than the previous state-of-the-art.
Logical Reasoning over Natural Language as Knowledge Representation: A Survey
Authors: Zonglin Yang, Xinya Du, Rui Mao, Jinjie Ni, Erik Cambria
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Survey

Logical reasoning is central to human cognition and intelligence. It includes deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning. Past research of logical reasoning within AI uses formal language as knowledge representation and symbolic reasoners. However, reasoning with formal language has proved challenging (e.g., brittleness and knowledge-acquisition bottleneck). This paper provides a comprehensive overview on a new paradigm of logical reasoning, which uses natural language as knowledge representation and pretrained language models as reasoners, including philosophical definition and categorization of logical reasoning, advantages of the new paradigm, benchmarks and methods, challenges of the new paradigm, possible future directions, and relation to related NLP fields. This new paradigm is promising since it not only alleviates many challenges of formal representation but also has advantages over end-to-end neural methods. This survey focus on transformer-based LLMs explicitly working on deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning over English representation.
Artificial muses: Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Have Risen to Human-Level Creativity
Authors: Jennifer Haase, Paul H. P. Hanel
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00

A widespread view is that Artificial Intelligence cannot be creative. We tested this assumption by comparing human-generated ideas with those generated by six Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) chatbots: alpa.ai, Copy.ai, ChatGPT (versions 3 and 4), Studio.ai, and YouChat. Humans and a specifically trained AI independently assessed the quality and quantity of ideas. We found no qualitative difference between AI and human-generated creativity, although there are differences in how ideas are generated. Interestingly, 9.4 percent of humans were more creative than the most creative GAI, GPT-4. Our findings suggest that GAIs are valuable assistants in the creative process. Continued research and development of GAI in creative tasks is crucial to fully understand this technology's potential benefits and drawbacks in shaping the future of creativity. Finally, we discuss the question of whether GAIs are capable of being truly creative.
Studying How to Efficiently and Effectively Guide Models with Explanations
Authors: Sukrut Rao, Moritz Böhle, Amin Parchami-Araghi, Bernt Schiele
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

Despite being highly performant, deep neural networks might base their decisions on features that spuriously correlate with the provided labels, thus hurting generalization. To mitigate this, 'model guidance' has recently gained popularity, i.e. the idea of regularizing the models' explanations to ensure that they are "right for the right reasons". While various techniques to achieve such model guidance have been proposed, experimental validation of these approaches has thus far been limited to relatively simple and / or synthetic datasets. To better understand the effectiveness of the various design choices that have been explored in the context of model guidance, in this work we conduct an in-depth evaluation across various loss functions, attribution methods, models, and 'guidance depths' on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. As annotation costs for model guidance can limit its applicability, we also place a particular focus on efficiency. Specifically, we guide the models via bounding box annotations, which are much cheaper to obtain than the commonly used segmentation masks, and evaluate the robustness of model guidance under limited (e.g. with only 1% of annotated images) or overly coarse annotations. Further, we propose using the EPG score as an additional evaluation metric and loss function ('Energy loss'). We show that optimizing for the Energy loss leads to models that exhibit a distinct focus on object-specific features, despite only using bounding box annotations that also include background regions. Lastly, we show that such model guidance can improve generalization under distribution shifts. Code available at: https://github.com/sukrutrao/Model-Guidance.
Do intermediate feature coalitions aid explainability of black-box models?
Authors: Minal Suresh Patil, Kary Främling
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00

This work introduces the notion of intermediate concepts based on levels structure to aid explainability for black-box models. The levels structure is a hierarchical structure in which each level corresponds to features of a dataset (i.e., a player-set partition). The level of coarseness increases from the trivial set, which only comprises singletons, to the set, which only contains the grand coalition. In addition, it is possible to establish meronomies, i.e., part-whole relationships, via a domain expert that can be utilised to generate explanations at an abstract level. We illustrate the usability of this approach in a real-world car model example and the Titanic dataset, where intermediate concepts aid in explainability at different levels of abstraction.
Large-Scale Traffic Signal Control Using Constrained Network Partition and Adaptive Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hankang Gu, Shangbo Wang, Xiaoguang Ma, Dongyao Jia, Guoqiang Mao, Eng Gee Lim, Cheuk Pong Ryan Wong
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Traffic Signal Control

Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) based traffic signal control becomes a popular research topic in recent years. To alleviate the scalability issue of completely centralized RL techniques and the non-stationarity issue of completely decentralized RL techniques on large-scale traffic networks, some literature utilizes a regional control approach where the whole network is firstly partitioned into multiple disjoint regions, followed by applying the centralized RL approach to each region. However, the existing partitioning rules either have no constraints on the topology of regions or require the same topology for all regions. Meanwhile, no existing regional control approach explores the performance of optimal joint action in an exponentially growing regional action space when intersections are controlled by 4-phase traffic signals (EW, EWL, NS, NSL). In this paper, we propose a novel RL training framework named RegionLight to tackle the above limitations. Specifically, the topology of regions is firstly constrained to a star network which comprises one center and an arbitrary number of leaves. Next, the network partitioning problem is modeled as an optimization problem to minimize the number of regions. Then, an Adaptive Branching Dueling Q-Network (ABDQ) model is proposed to decompose the regional control task into several joint signal control sub-tasks corresponding to particular intersections. Subsequently, these sub-tasks maximize the regional benefits cooperatively. Finally, the global control strategy for the whole network is obtained by concatenating the optimal joint actions of all regions. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over all baselines under both real and synthetic datasets in all evaluation metrics.
Penalty-Based Imitation Learning With Cross Semantics Generation Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Hongkuan Zhou, Aifen Sui, Letian Shi, Yinxian Li
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Imitation Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Sensor Fusion

In recent times, there has been a growing focus on end-to-end autonomous driving technologies. This technology involves the replacement of the entire driving pipeline with a single neural network, which has a simpler structure and faster inference time. However, while this approach reduces the number of components in the driving pipeline, it also presents challenges related to interpretability and safety. For instance, the trained policy may not always comply with traffic rules, and it is difficult to determine the reason for such misbehavior due to the lack of intermediate outputs. Additionally, the successful implementation of autonomous driving technology heavily depends on the reliable and expedient processing of sensory data to accurately perceive the surrounding environment. In this paper, we provide penalty-based imitation learning approach combined with cross semantics generation sensor fusion technologies (P-CSG) to efficiently integrate multiple modalities of information and enable the autonomous agent to effectively adhere to traffic regulations. Our model undergoes evaluation within the Town 05 Long benchmark, where we observe a remarkable increase in the driving score by more than 12% when compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, InterFuser. Notably, our model achieves this performance enhancement while achieving a 7-fold increase in inference speed and reducing the model size by approximately 30%. For more detailed information, including code-based resources, they can be found at https://hk-zh.github.io/p-csg/
Better Understanding Differences in Attribution Methods via Systematic Evaluations
Authors: Sukrut Rao, Moritz Böhle, Bernt Schiele
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Deep neural networks are very successful on many vision tasks, but hard to interpret due to their black box nature. To overcome this, various post-hoc attribution methods have been proposed to identify image regions most influential to the models' decisions. Evaluating such methods is challenging since no ground truth attributions exist. We thus propose three novel evaluation schemes to more reliably measure the faithfulness of those methods, to make comparisons between them more fair, and to make visual inspection more systematic. To address faithfulness, we propose a novel evaluation setting (DiFull) in which we carefully control which parts of the input can influence the output in order to distinguish possible from impossible attributions. To address fairness, we note that different methods are applied at different layers, which skews any comparison, and so evaluate all methods on the same layers (ML-Att) and discuss how this impacts their performance on quantitative metrics. For more systematic visualizations, we propose a scheme (AggAtt) to qualitatively evaluate the methods on complete datasets. We use these evaluation schemes to study strengths and shortcomings of some widely used attribution methods over a wide range of models. Finally, we propose a post-processing smoothing step that significantly improves the performance of some attribution methods, and discuss its applicability.
Continual Learning in the Presence of Spurious Correlation
Authors: DongGyu Lee, Sangwon Jung, Taesup Moon
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Transfer Learning

Most continual learning (CL) algorithms have focused on tackling the stability-plasticity dilemma, that is, the challenge of preventing the forgetting of previous tasks while learning new ones. However, they have overlooked the impact of the knowledge transfer when the dataset in a certain task is biased - namely, when some unintended spurious correlations of the tasks are learned from the biased dataset. In that case, how would they affect learning future tasks or the knowledge already learned from the past tasks? In this work, we carefully design systematic experiments using one synthetic and two real-world datasets to answer the question from our empirical findings. Specifically, we first show through two-task CL experiments that standard CL methods, which are unaware of dataset bias, can transfer biases from one task to another, both forward and backward, and this transfer is exacerbated depending on whether the CL methods focus on the stability or the plasticity. We then present that the bias transfer also exists and even accumulate in longer sequences of tasks. Finally, we propose a simple, yet strong plug-in method for debiasing-aware continual learning, dubbed as Group-class Balanced Greedy Sampling (BGS). As a result, we show that our BGS can always reduce the bias of a CL model, with a slight loss of CL performance at most.
Online Transformers with Spiking Neurons for Fast Prosthetic Hand Control
Authors: Nathan Leroux, Jan Finkbeiner, Emre Neftci
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Position regression

Transformers are state-of-the-art networks for most sequence processing tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism often used in Transformers requires large time windows for each computation step and thus makes them less suitable for online signal processing compared to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). In this paper, instead of the self-attention mechanism, we use a sliding window attention mechanism. We show that this mechanism is more efficient for continuous signals with finite-range dependencies between input and target, and that we can use it to process sequences element-by-element, this making it compatible with online processing. We test our model on a finger position regression dataset (NinaproDB8) with Surface Electromyographic (sEMG) signals measured on the forearm skin to estimate muscle activities. Our approach sets the new state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy on this dataset while requiring only very short time windows of 3.5 ms at each inference step. Moreover, we increase the sparsity of the network using Leaky-Integrate and Fire (LIF) units, a bio-inspired neuron model that activates sparsely in time solely when crossing a threshold. We thus reduce the number of synaptic operations up to a factor of $\times5.3$ without loss of accuracy. Our results hold great promises for accurate and fast online processing of sEMG signals for smooth prosthetic hand control and is a step towards Transformers and Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) co-integration for energy efficient temporal signal processing.
Modeling Relational Patterns for Logical Query Answering over Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Yunjie He, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Bo Xiong, Yuqicheng Zhu, Evgeny Kharlamov, Steffen Staab
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Knowledge Graphs

Answering first-order logical (FOL) queries over knowledge graphs (KG) remains a challenging task mainly due to KG incompleteness. Query embedding approaches this problem by computing the low-dimensional vector representations of entities, relations, and logical queries. KGs exhibit relational patterns such as symmetry and composition and modeling the patterns can further enhance the performance of query embedding models. However, the role of such patterns in answering FOL queries by query embedding models has not been yet studied in the literature. In this paper, we fill in this research gap and empower FOL queries reasoning with pattern inference by introducing an inductive bias that allows for learning relation patterns. To this end, we develop a novel query embedding method, RoConE, that defines query regions as geometric cones and algebraic query operators by rotations in complex space. RoConE combines the advantages of Cone as a well-specified geometric representation for query embedding, and also the rotation operator as a powerful algebraic operation for pattern inference. Our experimental results on several benchmark datasets confirm the advantage of relational patterns for enhancing logical query answering task.
LoRCoN-LO: Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network-based LiDAR Odometry
Authors: Donghwi Jung, Jae-Kyung Cho, Younghwa Jung, Soohyun Shin, Seong-Woo Kim
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00

We propose a deep learning-based LiDAR odometry estimation method called LoRCoN-LO that utilizes the long-term recurrent convolutional network (LRCN) structure. The LRCN layer is a structure that can process spatial and temporal information at once by using both CNN and LSTM layers. This feature is suitable for predicting continuous robot movements as it uses point clouds that contain spatial information. Therefore, we built a LoRCoN-LO model using the LRCN layer, and predicted the pose of the robot through this model. For performance verification, we conducted experiments exploiting a public dataset (KITTI). The results of the experiment show that LoRCoN-LO displays accurate odometry prediction in the dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/donghwijung/LoRCoN-LO.
Dens-PU: PU Learning with Density-Based Positive Labeled Augmentation
Authors: Vasileios Sevetlidis, George Pavlidis, Spyridon Mouroutsos, Antonios Gasteratos
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Binary Classification

This study proposes a novel approach for solving the PU learning problem based on an anomaly-detection strategy. Latent encodings extracted from positive-labeled data are linearly combined to acquire new samples. These new samples are used as embeddings to increase the density of positive-labeled data and, thus, define a boundary that approximates the positive class. The further a sample is from the boundary the more it is considered as a negative sample. Once a set of negative samples is obtained, the PU learning problem reduces to binary classification. The approach, named Dens-PU due to its reliance on the density of positive-labeled data, was evaluated using benchmark image datasets, and state-of-the-art results were attained.
ADCNet: Learning from Raw Radar Data via Distillation
Authors: Bo Yang, Ishan Khatri, Michael Happold, Chulong Chen
Date: 2023-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Pseudo Label

As autonomous vehicles and advanced driving assistance systems have entered wider deployment, there is an increased interest in building robust perception systems using radars. Radar-based systems are lower cost and more robust to adverse weather conditions than their LiDAR-based counterparts; however the point clouds produced are typically noisy and sparse by comparison. In order to combat these challenges, recent research has focused on consuming the raw radar data, instead of the final radar point cloud. We build on this line of work and demonstrate that by bringing elements of the signal processing pipeline into our network and then pre-training on the signal processing task, we are able to achieve state of the art detection performance on the RADIal dataset. Our method uses expensive offline signal processing algorithms to pseudo-label data and trains a network to distill this information into a fast convolutional backbone, which can then be finetuned for perception tasks. Extensive experiment results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.