pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Task and Weight Prioritization Curriculum Learning for Multimodal Imagery
Authors: Huseyin Fuat Alsan, Taner Arsan
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Multimodal Deep Learning, Question Answering, Semantic Segmentation, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

This paper explores post-disaster analytics using multimodal deep learning models trained with curriculum learning method. Studying post-disaster analytics is important as it plays a crucial role in mitigating the impact of disasters by providing timely and accurate insights into the extent of damage and the allocation of resources. We propose a curriculum learning strategy to enhance the performance of multimodal deep learning models. Curriculum learning emulates the progressive learning sequence in human education by training deep learning models on increasingly complex data. Our primary objective is to develop a curriculum-trained multimodal deep learning model, with a particular focus on visual question answering (VQA) capable of jointly processing image and text data, in conjunction with semantic segmentation for disaster analytics using the FloodNet\footnote{https://github.com/BinaLab/FloodNet-Challenge-EARTHVISION2021} dataset. To achieve this, U-Net model is used for semantic segmentation and image encoding. A custom built text classifier is used for visual question answering. Existing curriculum learning methods rely on manually defined difficulty functions. We introduce a novel curriculum learning approach termed Dynamic Task and Weight Prioritization (DATWEP), which leverages a gradient-based method to automatically decide task difficulty during curriculum learning training, thereby eliminating the need for explicit difficulty computation. The integration of DATWEP into our multimodal model shows improvement on VQA performance. Source code is available at https://github.com/fualsan/DATWEP.
Web3 Meets AI Marketplace: Exploring Opportunities, Analyzing Challenges, and Suggesting Solutions
Authors: Peihao Li
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00

Web3 and AI have been among the most discussed fields over the recent years, with substantial hype surrounding each field's potential to transform the world as we know it. However, as the hype settles, it's evident that neither AI nor Web3 can address all challenges independently. Consequently, the intersection of AI and Web3 is gaining increased attention, emerging as a new field with the potential to address the limitations of each. In this article, we will focus on the integration of web3 and the AI marketplace, where AI services and products can be provided in a decentralized manner (DeAI). A comprehensive review is provided by summarizing the opportunities and challenges on this topic. Additionally, we offer analyses and solutions to address these challenges. We've developed a framework that lets users pay with any kind of cryptocurrency to get AI services. Additionally, they can also enjoy AI services for free on our platform by simply locking up their assets temporarily in the protocol. This unique approach is a first in the industry. Before this, offering free AI services in the web3 community wasn't possible. Our solution opens up exciting opportunities for the AI marketplace in the web3 space to grow and be widely adopted.
Roles of Scaling and Instruction Tuning in Language Perception: Model vs. Human Attention
Authors: Changjiang Gao, ShuJian Huang, Jixing Li, Jiajun Chen
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00

Recent large language models (LLMs) have revealed strong abilities to understand natural language. Since most of them share the same basic structure, i.e. the transformer block, possible contributors to their success in the training process are scaling and instruction tuning. However, how these factors affect the models' language perception is unclear. This work compares the self-attention of several existing LLMs (LLaMA, Alpaca and Vicuna) in different sizes (7B, 13B, 30B, 65B), together with eye saccade, an aspect of human reading attention, to assess the effect of scaling and instruction tuning on language perception. Results show that scaling enhances the human resemblance and improves the effective attention by reducing the trivial pattern reliance, while instruction tuning does not. However, instruction tuning significantly enhances the models' sensitivity to instructions. We also find that current LLMs are consistently closer to non-native than native speakers in attention, suggesting a sub-optimal language perception of all models. Our code and data used in the analysis is available on GitHub.
Bespoke Solvers for Generative Flow Models
Authors: Neta Shaul, Juan Perez, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Ali Thabet, Albert Pumarola, Yaron Lipman
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Diffusion or flow-based models are powerful generative paradigms that are notoriously hard to sample as samples are defined as solutions to high-dimensional Ordinary or Stochastic Differential Equations (ODEs/SDEs) which require a large Number of Function Evaluations (NFE) to approximate well. Existing methods to alleviate the costly sampling process include model distillation and designing dedicated ODE solvers. However, distillation is costly to train and sometimes can deteriorate quality, while dedicated solvers still require relatively large NFE to produce high quality samples. In this paper we introduce "Bespoke solvers", a novel framework for constructing custom ODE solvers tailored to the ODE of a given pre-trained flow model. Our approach optimizes an order consistent and parameter-efficient solver (e.g., with 80 learnable parameters), is trained for roughly 1% of the GPU time required for training the pre-trained model, and significantly improves approximation and generation quality compared to dedicated solvers. For example, a Bespoke solver for a CIFAR10 model produces samples with Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 2.73 with 10 NFE, and gets to 1% of the Ground Truth (GT) FID (2.59) for this model with only 20 NFE. On the more challenging ImageNet-64$\times$64, Bespoke samples at 2.2 FID with 10 NFE, and gets within 2% of GT FID (1.71) with 20 NFE.
Gauge-optimal approximate learning for small data classification problems
Authors: Edoardo Vecchi, Davide Bassetti, Fabio Graziato, Lukas Pospisil, Illia Horenko
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Dimensionality Reduction

Small data learning problems are characterized by a significant discrepancy between the limited amount of response variable observations and the large feature space dimension. In this setting, the common learning tools struggle to identify the features important for the classification task from those that bear no relevant information, and cannot derive an appropriate learning rule which allows to discriminate between different classes. As a potential solution to this problem, here we exploit the idea of reducing and rotating the feature space in a lower-dimensional gauge and propose the Gauge-Optimal Approximate Learning (GOAL) algorithm, which provides an analytically tractable joint solution to the dimension reduction, feature segmentation and classification problems for small data learning problems. We prove that the optimal solution of the GOAL algorithm consists in piecewise-linear functions in the Euclidean space, and that it can be approximated through a monotonically convergent algorithm which presents -- under the assumption of a discrete segmentation of the feature space -- a closed-form solution for each optimization substep and an overall linear iteration cost scaling. The GOAL algorithm has been compared to other state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) tools on both synthetic data and challenging real-world applications from climate science and bioinformatics (i.e., prediction of the El Nino Southern Oscillation and inference of epigenetically-induced gene-activity networks from limited experimental data). The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the reported best competitors for these problems both in learning performance and computational cost.
A multi-modal table tennis robot system
Authors: Andreas Ziegler, Thomas Gossard, Karl Vetter, Jonas Tebbe, Andreas Zell
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00

In recent years, robotic table tennis has become a popular research challenge for perception and robot control. Here, we present an improved table tennis robot system with high accuracy vision detection and fast robot reaction. Based on previous work, our system contains a KUKA robot arm with 6 DOF, with four frame-based cameras and two additional event-based cameras. We developed a novel calibration approach to calibrate this multimodal perception system. For table tennis, spin estimation is crucial. Therefore, we introduced a novel, and more accurate spin estimation approach. Finally, we show how combining the output of an event-based camera and a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) can be used for accurate ball detection.
TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language Understanding
Authors: Shuhuai Ren, Sishuo Chen, Shicheng Li, Xu sun, Lu Hou
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Language Modelling, Retrieval, Video Question Answering, Video Retrieval, Video-Text Retrieval

Large-scale video-language pre-training has made remarkable strides in advancing video-language understanding tasks. However, the heavy computational burden of video encoding remains a formidable efficiency bottleneck, particularly for long-form videos. These videos contain massive visual tokens due to their inherent 3D properties and spatiotemporal redundancy, making it challenging to capture complex temporal and spatial relationships. To tackle this issue, we propose an efficient method called TEmporal-Spatial Token Aggregation (TESTA). TESTA condenses video semantics by adaptively aggregating similar frames, as well as similar patches within each frame. TESTA can reduce the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerate video encoding. Building upon TESTA, we introduce a pre-trained video-language model equipped with a divided space-time token aggregation module in each video encoder block. We evaluate our model on five datasets for paragraph-to-video retrieval and long-form VideoQA tasks. Experimental results show that TESTA improves computing efficiency by 1.7 times, and achieves significant performance gains from its scalability in processing longer input frames, e.g., +13.7 R@1 on QuerYD and +6.5 R@1 on Condensed Movie.
A Unique Training Strategy to Enhance Language Models Capabilities for Health Mention Detection from Social Media Content
Authors: Pervaiz Iqbal Khan, Muhammad Nabeel Asim, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Language Modelling

An ever-increasing amount of social media content requires advanced AI-based computer programs capable of extracting useful information. Specifically, the extraction of health-related content from social media is useful for the development of diverse types of applications including disease spread, mortality rate prediction, and finding the impact of diverse types of drugs on diverse types of diseases. Language models are competent in extracting the syntactic and semantics of text. However, they face a hard time extracting similar patterns from social media texts. The primary reason for this shortfall lies in the non-standardized writing style commonly employed by social media users. Following the need for an optimal language model competent in extracting useful patterns from social media text, the key goal of this paper is to train language models in such a way that they learn to derive generalized patterns. The key goal is achieved through the incorporation of random weighted perturbation and contrastive learning strategies. On top of a unique training strategy, a meta predictor is proposed that reaps the benefits of 5 different language models for discriminating posts of social media text into non-health and health-related classes. Comprehensive experimentation across 3 public benchmark datasets reveals that the proposed training strategy improves the performance of the language models up to 3.87%, in terms of F1-score, as compared to their performance with traditional training. Furthermore, the proposed meta predictor outperforms existing health mention classification predictors across all 3 benchmark datasets.
MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion
Authors: Pengyue Jia, Yiding Liu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xiaopeng Li, Changying Hao, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval

Query expansion, pivotal in search engines, enhances the representation of user information needs with additional terms. While existing methods expand queries using retrieved or generated contextual documents, each approach has notable limitations. Retrieval-based methods often fail to accurately capture search intent, particularly with brief or ambiguous queries. Generation-based methods, utilizing large language models (LLMs), generally lack corpus-specific knowledge and entail high fine-tuning costs. To address these gaps, we propose a novel zero-shot query expansion framework utilizing LLMs for mutual verification. Specifically, we first design a query-query-document generation method, leveraging LLMs' zero-shot reasoning ability to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents. Then, a mutual verification process synergizes generated and retrieved documents for optimal expansion. Our proposed method is fully zero-shot, and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods. Our code is available online at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/MILL to ease reproduction.
TeacherLM: Teaching to Fish Rather Than Giving the Fish, Language Modeling Likewise
Authors: Nan He, Hanyu Lai, Chenyang Zhao, Zirui Cheng, Junting Pan, Ruoyu Qin, Ruofan Lu, Rui Lu, Yunchen Zhang, Gangming Zhao, Zhaohui Hou, Zhiyuan Huang, Shaoqing Lu, Ding Liang, Mingjie Zhan
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, MMLU

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning and data augmentation capabilities in various NLP tasks. However, what about small models? In this work, we propose TeacherLM-7.1B, capable of annotating relevant fundamentals, chain of thought, and common mistakes for most NLP samples, which makes annotation more than just an answer, thus allowing other models to learn "why" instead of just "what". The TeacherLM-7.1B model achieved a zero-shot score of 52.3 on MMLU, surpassing most models with over 100B parameters. Even more remarkable is its data augmentation ability. Based on TeacherLM-7.1B, we augmented 58 NLP datasets and taught various student models with different parameters from OPT and BLOOM series in a multi-task setting. The experimental results indicate that the data augmentation provided by TeacherLM has brought significant benefits. We will release the TeacherLM series of models and augmented datasets as open-source.
Uncovering Prototypical Knowledge for Weakly Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper studies the problem of weakly open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (WOVSS), which learns to segment objects of arbitrary classes using mere image-text pairs. Existing works turn to enhance the vanilla vision transformer by introducing explicit grouping recognition, i.e., employing several group tokens/centroids to cluster the image tokens and perform the group-text alignment. Nevertheless, these methods suffer from a granularity inconsistency regarding the usage of group tokens, which are aligned in the all-to-one v.s. one-to-one manners during the training and inference phases, respectively. We argue that this discrepancy arises from the lack of elaborate supervision for each group token. To bridge this granularity gap, this paper explores explicit supervision for the group tokens from the prototypical knowledge. To this end, this paper proposes the non-learnable prototypical regularization (NPR) where non-learnable prototypes are estimated from source features to serve as supervision and enable contrastive matching of the group tokens. This regularization encourages the group tokens to segment objects with less redundancy and capture more comprehensive semantic regions, leading to increased compactness and richness. Based on NPR, we propose the prototypical guidance segmentation network (PGSeg) that incorporates multi-modal regularization by leveraging prototypical sources from both images and texts at different levels, progressively enhancing the segmentation capability with diverse prototypical patterns. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ferenas/PGSeg.
Bipartite Graph Pre-training for Unsupervised Extractive Summarization with Graph Convolutional Auto-Encoders
Authors: Qianren Mao, Shaobo Zhao, Jiarui Li, Xiaolei Gu, Shizhu He, Bo Li, JianXin Li
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Extractive Summarization, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Unsupervised Extractive Summarization

Pre-trained sentence representations are crucial for identifying significant sentences in unsupervised document extractive summarization. However, the traditional two-step paradigm of pre-training and sentence-ranking, creates a gap due to differing optimization objectives. To address this issue, we argue that utilizing pre-trained embeddings derived from a process specifically designed to optimize cohensive and distinctive sentence representations helps rank significant sentences. To do so, we propose a novel graph pre-training auto-encoder to obtain sentence embeddings by explicitly modelling intra-sentential distinctive features and inter-sentential cohesive features through sentence-word bipartite graphs. These pre-trained sentence representations are then utilized in a graph-based ranking algorithm for unsupervised summarization. Our method produces predominant performance for unsupervised summarization frameworks by providing summary-worthy sentence representations. It surpasses heavy BERT- or RoBERTa-based sentence representations in downstream tasks.
Path Analysis for Effective Fault Localization in Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Soroush Hashemifar, Saeed Parsa, Akram Kalaee
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, Fault localization

Deep learning has revolutionized numerous fields, yet the reliability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) remains a concern due to their complexity and data dependency. Traditional software fault localization methods, such as Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SBFL), have been adapted for DNNs but often fall short in effectiveness. These methods typically overlook the propagation of faults through neural pathways, resulting in less precise fault detection. Research indicates that examining neural pathways, rather than individual neurons, is crucial because issues in one neuron can affect its entire pathway. By investigating these interconnected pathways, we can better identify and address problems arising from the collective activity of neurons. To address this limitation, we introduce the NP-SBFL method, which leverages Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to identify essential faulty neural pathways. Our method explores multiple fault sources to accurately pinpoint faulty neurons by analyzing their interconnections. Additionally, our multi-stage gradient ascent (MGA) technique, an extension of gradient ascent (GA), enables sequential neuron activation to enhance fault detection. We evaluated NP-SBFL-MGA on the well-established MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, comparing it to other methods like DeepFault and NP-SBFL-GA, as well as three neuron measures: Tarantula, Ochiai, and Barinel. Our evaluation utilized all training and test samples (60,000 for MNIST and 50,000 for CIFAR-10) and revealed that NP-SBFL-MGA significantly outperformed the baselines in identifying suspicious pathways and generating adversarial inputs. Notably, Tarantula with NP-SBFL-MGA achieved a remarkable 96.75% fault detection rate compared to DeepFault's 89.90%. NP-SBFL-MGA highlights a strong correlation between critical path coverage and the number of failed tests in DNN fault localization.
DCQA: Document-Level Chart Question Answering towards Complex Reasoning and Common-Sense Understanding
Authors: Anran Wu, Luwei Xiao, Xingjiao Wu, Shuwen Yang, Junjie Xu, Zisong Zhuang, Nian Xie, Cheng Jin, Liang He
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Chart Question Answering, Common Sense Reasoning, Document Layout Analysis, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Question-Answer-Generation, Question Answering

Visually-situated languages such as charts and plots are omnipresent in real-world documents. These graphical depictions are human-readable and are often analyzed in visually-rich documents to address a variety of questions that necessitate complex reasoning and common-sense responses. Despite the growing number of datasets that aim to answer questions over charts, most only address this task in isolation, without considering the broader context of document-level question answering. Moreover, such datasets lack adequate common-sense reasoning information in their questions. In this work, we introduce a novel task named document-level chart question answering (DCQA). The goal of this task is to conduct document-level question answering, extracting charts or plots in the document via document layout analysis (DLA) first and subsequently performing chart question answering (CQA). The newly developed benchmark dataset comprises 50,010 synthetic documents integrating charts in a wide range of styles (6 styles in contrast to 3 for PlotQA and ChartQA) and includes 699,051 questions that demand a high degree of reasoning ability and common-sense understanding. Besides, we present the development of a potent question-answer generation engine that employs table data, a rich color set, and basic question templates to produce a vast array of reasoning question-answer pairs automatically. Based on DCQA, we devise an OCR-free transformer for document-level chart-oriented understanding, capable of DLA and answering complex reasoning and common-sense questions over charts in an OCR-free manner. Our DCQA dataset is expected to foster research on understanding visualizations in documents, especially for scenarios that require complex reasoning for charts in the visually-rich document. We implement and evaluate a set of baselines, and our proposed method achieves comparable results.
EtiCor: Corpus for Analyzing LLMs for Etiquettes
Authors: Ashutosh Dwivedi, Pradhyumna Lavania, Ashutosh Modi
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

Etiquettes are an essential ingredient of day-to-day interactions among people. Moreover, etiquettes are region-specific, and etiquettes in one region might contradict those in other regions. In this paper, we propose EtiCor, an Etiquettes Corpus, having texts about social norms from five different regions across the globe. The corpus provides a test bed for evaluating LLMs for knowledge and understanding of region-specific etiquettes. Additionally, we propose the task of Etiquette Sensitivity. We experiment with state-of-the-art LLMs (Delphi, Falcon40B, and GPT-3.5). Initial results indicate that LLMs, mostly fail to understand etiquettes from regions from non-Western world.