pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pre-Trained Large Language Models for Industrial Control
Authors: Lei Song, Chuheng Zhang, Li Zhao, Jiang Bian
Date: 2023-08-06 00:00:00

For industrial control, developing high-performance controllers with few samples and low technical debt is appealing. Foundation models, possessing rich prior knowledge obtained from pre-training with Internet-scale corpus, have the potential to be a good controller with proper prompts. In this paper, we take HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) building control as an example to examine the ability of GPT-4 (one of the first-tier foundation models) as the controller. To control HVAC, we wrap the task as a language game by providing text including a short description for the task, several selected demonstrations, and the current observation to GPT-4 on each step and execute the actions responded by GPT-4. We conduct series of experiments to answer the following questions: 1)~How well can GPT-4 control HVAC? 2)~How well can GPT-4 generalize to different scenarios for HVAC control? 3) How different parts of the text context affect the performance? In general, we found GPT-4 achieves the performance comparable to RL methods with few samples and low technical debt, indicating the potential of directly applying foundation models to industrial control tasks.
Show Me the World in My Language: Establishing the First Baseline for Scene-Text to Scene-Text Translation
Authors: Shreyas Vaidya, Arvind Kumar Sharma, Prajwal Gatti, Anand Mishra
Date: 2023-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Scene Text Editing, Scene Text Recognition, Translation, Transliteration

In this work, we study the task of ``visually'' translating scene text from a source language (e.g., Hindi) to a target language (e.g., English). Visual translation involves not just the recognition and translation of scene text but also the generation of the translated image that preserves visual features of the source scene text, such as font, size, and background. There are several challenges associated with this task, such as translation with limited context, deciding between translation and transliteration, accommodating varying text lengths within fixed spatial boundaries, and preserving the font and background styles of the source scene text in the target language. To address this problem, we make the following contributions: (i) We study visual translation as a standalone problem for the first time in the literature. (ii) We present a cascaded framework for visual translation that combines state-of-the-art modules for scene text recognition, machine translation, and scene text synthesis as a baseline for the task. (iii) We propose a set of task-specific design enhancements to design a variant of the baseline to obtain performance improvements. (iv) Currently, the existing related literature lacks any comprehensive performance evaluation for this novel task. To fill this gap, we introduce several automatic and user-assisted evaluation metrics designed explicitly for evaluating visual translation. Further, we evaluate presented baselines for translating scene text between Hindi and English. Our experiments demonstrate that although we can effectively perform visual translation over a large collection of scene text images, the presented baseline only partially addresses challenges posed by visual translation tasks. We firmly believe that this new task and the limitations of existing models, as reported in this paper, should encourage further research in visual translation.
SAPIEN: Affective Virtual Agents Powered by Large Language Models
Authors: Masum Hasan, Cengiz Ozel, Sammy Potter, Ehsan Hoque
Date: 2023-08-06 00:00:00

In this demo paper, we introduce SAPIEN, a platform for high-fidelity virtual agents driven by large language models that can hold open domain conversations with users in 13 different languages, and display emotions through facial expressions and voice. The platform allows users to customize their virtual agent's personality, background, and conversation premise, thus providing a rich, immersive interaction experience. Furthermore, after the virtual meeting, the user can choose to get the conversation analyzed and receive actionable feedback on their communication skills. This paper illustrates an overview of the platform and discusses the various application domains of this technology, ranging from entertainment to mental health, communication training, language learning, education, healthcare, and beyond. Additionally, we consider the ethical implications of such realistic virtual agent representations and the potential challenges in ensuring responsible use.
Cal-SFDA: Source-Free Domain-adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Differentiable Expected Calibration Error
Authors: Zixin Wang, Yadan Luo, Zhi Chen, Sen Wang, Zi Huang
Date: 2023-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Model Selection, Pseudo Label, Semantic Segmentation, Source-Free Domain Adaptation

The prevalence of domain adaptive semantic segmentation has prompted concerns regarding source domain data leakage, where private information from the source domain could inadvertently be exposed in the target domain. To circumvent the requirement for source data, source-free domain adaptation has emerged as a viable solution that leverages self-training methods to pseudo-label high-confidence regions and adapt the model to the target data. However, the confidence scores obtained are often highly biased due to over-confidence and class-imbalance issues, which render both model selection and optimization problematic. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration-guided source-free domain adaptive semantic segmentation (Cal-SFDA) framework. The core idea is to estimate the expected calibration error (ECE) from the segmentation predictions, serving as a strong indicator of the model's generalization capability to the unlabeled target domain. The estimated ECE scores, in turn, assist the model training and fair selection in both source training and target adaptation stages. During model pre-training on the source domain, we ensure the differentiability of the ECE objective by leveraging the LogSumExp trick and using ECE scores to select the best source checkpoints for adaptation. To enable ECE estimation on the target domain without requiring labels, we train a value net for ECE estimation and apply statistic warm-up on its BatchNorm layers for stability. The estimated ECE scores assist in determining the reliability of prediction and enable class-balanced pseudo-labeling by positively guiding the adaptation progress and inhibiting potential error accumulation. Extensive experiments on two widely-used synthetic-to-real transfer tasks show that the proposed approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art by up to 5.25% of mIoU with fair model selection criteria.
Spanish Pre-trained BERT Model and Evaluation Data
Authors: José Cañete, Gabriel Chaperon, Rodrigo Fuentes, Jou-Hui Ho, Hojin Kang, Jorge Pérez
Date: 2023-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

The Spanish language is one of the top 5 spoken languages in the world. Nevertheless, finding resources to train or evaluate Spanish language models is not an easy task. In this paper we help bridge this gap by presenting a BERT-based language model pre-trained exclusively on Spanish data. As a second contribution, we also compiled several tasks specifically for the Spanish language in a single repository much in the spirit of the GLUE benchmark. By fine-tuning our pre-trained Spanish model, we obtain better results compared to other BERT-based models pre-trained on multilingual corpora for most of the tasks, even achieving a new state-of-the-art on some of them. We have publicly released our model, the pre-training data, and the compilation of the Spanish benchmarks.
Science and engineering for what? A large-scale analysis of students' projects in science fairs
Authors: Adelmo Eloy, Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Fellip Silva Alves, Roseli de Deus Lopes
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

Science and Engineering fairs offer K-12 students opportunities to engage with authentic STEM practices. Particularly, students are given the chance to experience authentic and open inquiry processes, by defining which themes, questions and approaches will guide their scientific endeavors. In this study, we analyzed data from over 5,000 projects presented at a nationwide science fair in Brazil over the past 20 years using topic modeling to identify the main topics that have driven students' inquiry and design. Our analysis identified a broad range of topics being explored, with significant variations over time, region, and school setting. We argue those results and proposed methodology can not only support further research in the context of science fairs, but also inform instruction and design of contexts-specific resources to support students in open inquiry experiences in different settings.
Data Fusion for Multi-Task Learning of Building Extraction and Height Estimation
Authors: Saad Ahmed Jamal, Arioluwa Aribisala
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

In accordance with the urban reconstruction problem proposed by the DFC23 Track 2 Contest, this paper attempts a multitask-learning method of building extraction and height estimation using both optical and radar satellite imagery. Contrary to the initial goal of multitask learning which could potentially give a superior solution by reusing features and forming implicit constraints between multiple tasks, this paper reports the individual implementation of the building extraction and height estimation under constraints. The baseline results for the building extraction and the height estimation significantly increased after designed experiments.
A criterion for Artificial General Intelligence: hypothetic-deductive reasoning, tested on ChatGPT
Authors: Louis Vervoort, Vitaliy Mizyakov, Anastasia Ugleva
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Question Answering

We argue that a key reasoning skill that any advanced AI, say GPT-4, should master in order to qualify as 'thinking machine', or AGI, is hypothetic-deductive reasoning. Problem-solving or question-answering can quite generally be construed as involving two steps: hypothesizing that a certain set of hypotheses T applies to the problem or question at hand, and deducing the solution or answer from T - hence the term hypothetic-deductive reasoning. An elementary proxy of hypothetic-deductive reasoning is causal reasoning. We propose simple tests for both types of reasoning, and apply them to ChatGPT. Our study shows that, at present, the chatbot has a limited capacity for either type of reasoning, as soon as the problems considered are somewhat complex. However, we submit that if an AI would be capable of this type of reasoning in a sufficiently wide range of contexts, it would be an AGI.
dPASP: A Comprehensive Differentiable Probabilistic Answer Set Programming Environment For Neurosymbolic Learning and Reasoning
Authors: Renato Lui Geh, Jonas Gonçalves, Igor Cataneo Silveira, Denis Deratani Mauá, Fabio Gagliardi Cozman
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning

We present dPASP, a novel declarative probabilistic logic programming framework for differentiable neuro-symbolic reasoning. The framework allows for the specification of discrete probabilistic models with neural predicates, logic constraints and interval-valued probabilistic choices, thus supporting models that combine low-level perception (images, texts, etc), common-sense reasoning, and (vague) statistical knowledge. To support all such features, we discuss the several semantics for probabilistic logic programs that can express nondeterministic, contradictory, incomplete and/or statistical knowledge. We also discuss how gradient-based learning can be performed with neural predicates and probabilistic choices under selected semantics. We then describe an implemented package that supports inference and learning in the language, along with several example programs. The package requires minimal user knowledge of deep learning system's inner workings, while allowing end-to-end training of rather sophisticated models and loss functions.
Bias Behind the Wheel: Fairness Testing of Autonomous Driving Systems
Authors: Xinyue Li, Zhenpeng Chen, Jie M. Zhang, Federica Sarro, Ying Zhang, Xuanzhe Liu
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Fairness, Pedestrian Detection

This paper conducts fairness testing of automated pedestrian detection, a crucial but under-explored issue in autonomous driving systems. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art deep learning-based pedestrian detectors across demographic groups on large-scale real-world datasets. To enable thorough fairness testing, we provide extensive annotations for the datasets, resulting in 8,311 images with 16,070 gender labels, 20,115 age labels, and 3,513 skin tone labels. Our findings reveal significant fairness issues, particularly related to age. The proportion of undetected children is 20.14% higher compared to adults. Furthermore, we explore how various driving scenarios affect the fairness of pedestrian detectors. We find that pedestrian detectors demonstrate significant gender biases during night time, potentially exacerbating the prevalent societal issue of female safety concerns during nighttime out. Moreover, we observe that pedestrian detectors can demonstrate both enhanced fairness and superior performance under specific driving conditions, which challenges the fairness-performance trade-off theory widely acknowledged in the fairness literature. We publicly release the code, data, and results to support future research on fairness in autonomous driving.
ConvFormer: Revisiting Transformer for Sequential User Modeling
Authors: Hao Wang, Jianxun Lian, Mingqi Wu, Haoxuan Li, Jiajun Fan, Wanyue Xu, Chaozhuo Li, Xing Xie
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Sequential user modeling, a critical task in personalized recommender systems, focuses on predicting the next item a user would prefer, requiring a deep understanding of user behavior sequences. Despite the remarkable success of Transformer-based models across various domains, their full potential in comprehending user behavior remains untapped. In this paper, we re-examine Transformer-like architectures aiming to advance state-of-the-art performance. We start by revisiting the core building blocks of Transformer-based methods, analyzing the effectiveness of the item-to-item mechanism within the context of sequential user modeling. After conducting a thorough experimental analysis, we identify three essential criteria for devising efficient sequential user models, which we hope will serve as practical guidelines to inspire and shape future designs. Following this, we introduce ConvFormer, a simple but powerful modification to the Transformer architecture that meets these criteria, yielding state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we present an acceleration technique to minimize the complexity associated with processing extremely long sequences. Experiments on four public datasets showcase ConvFormer's superiority and confirm the validity of our proposed criteria.
Adversarial Erasing with Pruned Elements: Towards Better Graph Lottery Ticket
Authors: Yuwen Wang, Shunyu Liu, KaiXuan Chen, Tongtian Zhu, Ji Qiao, Mengjie Shi, Yuanyu Wan, Mingli Song
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

Graph Lottery Ticket (GLT), a combination of core subgraph and sparse subnetwork, has been proposed to mitigate the computational cost of deep Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large input graphs while preserving original performance. However, the winning GLTs in exisiting studies are obtained by applying iterative magnitude-based pruning (IMP) without re-evaluating and re-considering the pruned information, which disregards the dynamic changes in the significance of edges/weights during graph/model structure pruning, and thus limits the appeal of the winning tickets. In this paper, we formulate a conjecture, i.e., existing overlooked valuable information in the pruned graph connections and model parameters which can be re-grouped into GLT to enhance the final performance. Specifically, we propose an adversarial complementary erasing (ACE) framework to explore the valuable information from the pruned components, thereby developing a more powerful GLT, referred to as the ACE-GLT. The main idea is to mine valuable information from pruned edges/weights after each round of IMP, and employ the ACE technique to refine the GLT processing. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our ACE-GLT outperforms existing methods for searching GLT in diverse tasks. Our code will be made publicly available.
Anomaly Detection in Global Financial Markets with Graph Neural Networks and Nonextensive Entropy
Authors: Kleyton da Costa
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a challenging task, particularly in systems with many variables. Anomalies are outliers that statistically differ from the analyzed data and can arise from rare events, malfunctions, or system misuse. This study investigated the ability to detect anomalies in global financial markets through Graph Neural Networks (GNN) considering an uncertainty scenario measured by a nonextensive entropy. The main findings show that the complex structure of highly correlated assets decreases in a crisis, and the number of anomalies is statistically different for nonextensive entropy parameters considering before, during, and after crisis.
Edge of stability echo state networks
Authors: Andrea Ceni, Claudio Gallicchio
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

Echo State Networks (ESNs) are time-series processing models working under the Echo State Property (ESP) principle. The ESP is a notion of stability that imposes an asymptotic fading of the memory of the input. On the other hand, the resulting inherent architectural bias of ESNs may lead to an excessive loss of information, which in turn harms the performance in certain tasks with long short-term memory requirements. With the goal of bringing together the fading memory property and the ability to retain as much memory as possible, in this paper we introduce a new ESN architecture, called the Edge of Stability Echo State Network (ES$^2$N). The introduced ES$^2$N model is based on defining the reservoir layer as a convex combination of a nonlinear reservoir (as in the standard ESN), and a linear reservoir that implements an orthogonal transformation. We provide a thorough mathematical analysis of the introduced model, proving that the whole eigenspectrum of the Jacobian of the ES$^2$N map can be contained in an annular neighbourhood of a complex circle of controllable radius, and exploit this property to demonstrate that the ES$^2$N's forward dynamics evolves close to the edge-of-chaos regime by design. Remarkably, our experimental analysis shows that the newly introduced reservoir model is able to reach the theoretical maximum short-term memory capacity. At the same time, in comparison to standard ESN, ES$^2$N is shown to offer an excellent trade-off between memory and nonlinearity, as well as a significant improvement of performance in autoregressive nonlinear modeling.
Meta-learning in healthcare: A survey
Authors: Alireza Rafiei, Ronald Moore, Sina Jahromi, Farshid Hajati, Rishikesan Kamaleswaran
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning, Survey

As a subset of machine learning, meta-learning, or learning to learn, aims at improving the model's capabilities by employing prior knowledge and experience. A meta-learning paradigm can appropriately tackle the conventional challenges of traditional learning approaches, such as insufficient number of samples, domain shifts, and generalization. These unique characteristics position meta-learning as a suitable choice for developing influential solutions in various healthcare contexts, where the available data is often insufficient, and the data collection methodologies are different. This survey discusses meta-learning broad applications in the healthcare domain to provide insight into how and where it can address critical healthcare challenges. We first describe the theoretical foundations and pivotal methods of meta-learning. We then divide the employed meta-learning approaches in the healthcare domain into two main categories of multi/single-task learning and many/few-shot learning and survey the studies. Finally, we highlight the current challenges in meta-learning research, discuss the potential solutions, and provide future perspectives on meta-learning in healthcare.
Semi-supervised Learning for Segmentation of Bleeding Regions in Video Capsule Endoscopy
Authors: Hechen Li, Yanan Wu, Long Bai, An Wang, Tong Chen, Hongliang Ren
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Segmentation

In the realm of modern diagnostic technology, video capsule endoscopy (VCE) is a standout for its high efficacy and non-invasive nature in diagnosing various gastrointestinal (GI) conditions, including obscure bleeding. Importantly, for the successful diagnosis and treatment of these conditions, accurate recognition of bleeding regions in VCE images is crucial. While deep learning-based methods have emerged as powerful tools for the automated analysis of VCE images, they often demand large training datasets with comprehensive annotations. Acquiring these labeled datasets tends to be time-consuming, costly, and requires significant domain expertise. To mitigate this issue, we have embraced a semi-supervised learning (SSL) approach for the bleeding regions segmentation within VCE. By adopting the `Mean Teacher' method, we construct a student U-Net equipped with an scSE attention block, alongside a teacher model of the same architecture. These models' parameters are alternately updated throughout the training process. We use the Kvasir-Capsule dataset for our experiments, which encompasses various GI bleeding conditions. Notably, we develop the segmentation annotations for this dataset ourselves. The findings from our experiments endorse the efficacy of the SSL-based segmentation strategy, demonstrating its capacity to reduce reliance on large volumes of annotations for model training, without compromising on the accuracy of identification.