pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Photonic Accelerators for Image Segmentation in Autonomous Driving and Defect Detection
Authors: Lakshmi Nair, David Widemann, Brad Turcott, Nick Moore, Alexandra Wleklinski, Darius Bunandar, Ioannis Papavasileiou, Shihu Wang, Eric Logan
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Defect Detection, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Photonic computing promises faster and more energy-efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference than traditional digital hardware. Advances in photonic computing can have profound impacts on applications such as autonomous driving and defect detection that depend on fast, accurate and energy efficient execution of image segmentation models. In this paper, we investigate image segmentation on photonic accelerators to explore: a) the types of image segmentation DNN architectures that are best suited for photonic accelerators, and b) the throughput and energy efficiency of executing the different image segmentation models on photonic accelerators, along with the trade-offs involved therein. Specifically, we demonstrate that certain segmentation models exhibit negligible loss in accuracy (compared to digital float32 models) when executed on photonic accelerators, and explore the empirical reasoning for their robustness. We also discuss techniques for recovering accuracy in the case of models that do not perform well. Further, we compare throughput (inferences-per-second) and energy consumption estimates for different image segmentation workloads on photonic accelerators. We discuss the challenges and potential optimizations that can help improve the application of photonic accelerators to such computer vision tasks.
Intriguing properties of generative classifiers
Authors: Priyank Jaini, Kevin Clark, Robert Geirhos
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

What is the best paradigm to recognize objects -- discriminative inference (fast but potentially prone to shortcut learning) or using a generative model (slow but potentially more robust)? We build on recent advances in generative modeling that turn text-to-image models into classifiers. This allows us to study their behavior and to compare them against discriminative models and human psychophysical data. We report four intriguing emergent properties of generative classifiers: they show a record-breaking human-like shape bias (99% for Imagen), near human-level out-of-distribution accuracy, state-of-the-art alignment with human classification errors, and they understand certain perceptual illusions. Our results indicate that while the current dominant paradigm for modeling human object recognition is discriminative inference, zero-shot generative models approximate human object recognition data surprisingly well.
How many words does ChatGPT know? The answer is ChatWords
Authors: Gonzalo Martínez, Javier Conde, Pedro Reviriego, Elena Merino-Gómez, José Alberto Hernández, Fabrizio Lombardi
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

The introduction of ChatGPT has put Artificial Intelligence (AI) Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the spotlight. ChatGPT adoption has been exponential with millions of users experimenting with it in a myriad of tasks and application domains with impressive results. However, ChatGPT has limitations and suffers hallucinations, for example producing answers that look plausible but they are completely wrong. Evaluating the performance of ChatGPT and similar AI tools is a complex issue that is being explored from different perspectives. In this work, we contribute to those efforts with ChatWords, an automated test system, to evaluate ChatGPT knowledge of an arbitrary set of words. ChatWords is designed to be extensible, easy to use, and adaptable to evaluate also other NLP AI tools. ChatWords is publicly available and its main goal is to facilitate research on the lexical knowledge of AI tools. The benefits of ChatWords are illustrated with two case studies: evaluating the knowledge that ChatGPT has of the Spanish lexicon (taken from the official dictionary of the "Real Academia Espa\~nola") and of the words that appear in the Quixote, the well-known novel written by Miguel de Cervantes. The results show that ChatGPT is only able to recognize approximately 80% of the words in the dictionary and 90% of the words in the Quixote, in some cases with an incorrect meaning. The implications of the lexical knowledge of NLP AI tools and potential applications of ChatWords are also discussed providing directions for further work on the study of the lexical knowledge of AI tools.
Neural scaling laws for phenotypic drug discovery
Authors: Drew Linsley, John Griffin, Jason Parker Brown, Adam N Roose, Michael Frank, Peter Linsley, Steven Finkbeiner, Jeremy Linsley
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Recent breakthroughs by deep neural networks (DNNs) in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision have been driven by a scale-up of models and data rather than the discovery of novel computing paradigms. Here, we investigate if scale can have a similar impact for models designed to aid small molecule drug discovery. We address this question through a large-scale and systematic analysis of how DNN size, data diet, and learning routines interact to impact accuracy on our Phenotypic Chemistry Arena (Pheno-CA) benchmark: a diverse set of drug development tasks posed on image-based high content screening data. Surprisingly, we find that DNNs explicitly supervised to solve tasks in the Pheno-CA do not continuously improve as their data and model size is scaled-up. To address this issue, we introduce a novel precursor task, the Inverse Biological Process (IBP), which is designed to resemble the causal objective functions that have proven successful for NLP. We indeed find that DNNs first trained with IBP then probed for performance on the Pheno-CA significantly outperform task-supervised DNNs. More importantly, the performance of these IBP-trained DNNs monotonically improves with data and model scale. Our findings reveal that the DNN ingredients needed to accurately solve small molecule drug development tasks are already in our hands, and project how much more experimental data is needed to achieve any desired level of improvement. We release our Pheno-CA benchmark and code to encourage further study of neural scaling laws for small molecule drug discovery.
XVO: Generalized Visual Odometry via Cross-Modal Self-Training
Authors: Lei Lai, Zhongkai Shangguan, Jimuyang Zhang, Eshed Ohn-Bar
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Monocular Visual Odometry, Motion Estimation, Transfer Learning, Visual Odometry

We propose XVO, a semi-supervised learning method for training generalized monocular Visual Odometry (VO) models with robust off-the-self operation across diverse datasets and settings. In contrast to standard monocular VO approaches which often study a known calibration within a single dataset, XVO efficiently learns to recover relative pose with real-world scale from visual scene semantics, i.e., without relying on any known camera parameters. We optimize the motion estimation model via self-training from large amounts of unconstrained and heterogeneous dash camera videos available on YouTube. Our key contribution is twofold. First, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of semi-supervised training for learning a general-purpose direct VO regression network. Second, we demonstrate multi-modal supervision, including segmentation, flow, depth, and audio auxiliary prediction tasks, to facilitate generalized representations for the VO task. Specifically, we find audio prediction task to significantly enhance the semi-supervised learning process while alleviating noisy pseudo-labels, particularly in highly dynamic and out-of-domain video data. Our proposed teacher network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the commonly used KITTI benchmark despite no multi-frame optimization or knowledge of camera parameters. Combined with the proposed semi-supervised step, XVO demonstrates off-the-shelf knowledge transfer across diverse conditions on KITTI, nuScenes, and Argoverse without fine-tuning.
Persona-Coded Poly-Encoder: Persona-Guided Multi-Stream Conversational Sentence Scoring
Authors: Junfeng Liu, Christopher Symons, Ranga Raju Vatsavai
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation, Sentence

Recent advances in machine learning and deep learning have led to the widespread use of Conversational AI in many practical applications. However, it is still very challenging to leverage auxiliary information that can provide conversational context or personalized tuning to improve the quality of conversations. For example, there has only been limited research on using an individuals persona information to improve conversation quality, and even state-of-the-art conversational AI techniques are unable to effectively leverage signals from heterogeneous sources of auxiliary data, such as multi-modal interaction data, demographics, SDOH data, etc. In this paper, we present a novel Persona-Coded Poly-Encoder method that leverages persona information in a multi-stream encoding scheme to improve the quality of response generation for conversations. To show the efficacy of the proposed method, we evaluate our method on two different persona-based conversational datasets, and compared against two state-of-the-art methods. Our experimental results and analysis demonstrate that our method can improve conversation quality over the baseline method Poly-Encoder by 3.32% and 2.94% in terms of BLEU score and HR@1, respectively. More significantly, our method offers a path to better utilization of multi-modal data in conversational tasks. Lastly, our study outlines several challenges and future research directions for advancing personalized conversational AI technology.
Memory in Plain Sight: Surveying the Uncanny Resemblances of Associative Memories and Diffusion Models
Authors: Benjamin Hoover, Hendrik Strobelt, Dmitry Krotov, Judy Hoffman, Zsolt Kira, Duen Horng Chau
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Retrieval

The generative process of Diffusion Models (DMs) has recently set state-of-the-art on many AI generation benchmarks. Though the generative process is traditionally understood as an "iterative denoiser", there is no universally accepted language to describe it. We introduce a novel perspective to describe DMs using the mathematical language of memory retrieval from the field of energy-based Associative Memories (AMs), making efforts to keep our presentation approachable to newcomers to both of these fields. Unifying these two fields provides insight that DMs can be seen as a particular kind of AM where Lyapunov stability guarantees are bypassed by intelligently engineering the dynamics (i.e., the noise and step size schedules) of the denoising process. Finally, we present a growing body of evidence that records DMs exhibiting empirical behavior we would expect from AMs, and conclude by discussing research opportunities that are revealed by understanding DMs as a form of energy-based memory.
Discovering environments with XRM
Authors: Mohammad Pezeshki, Diane Bouchacourt, Mark Ibrahim, Nicolas Ballas, Pascal Vincent, David Lopez-Paz
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Environment annotations are essential for the success of many out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization methods. Unfortunately, these are costly to obtain and often limited by human annotators' biases. To achieve robust generalization, it is essential to develop algorithms for automatic environment discovery within datasets. Current proposals, which divide examples based on their training error, suffer from one fundamental problem. These methods introduce hyper-parameters and early-stopping criteria, which require a validation set with human-annotated environments, the very information subject to discovery. In this paper, we propose Cross-Risk-Minimization (XRM) to address this issue. XRM trains twin networks, each learning from one random half of the training data, while imitating confident held-out mistakes made by its sibling. XRM provides a recipe for hyper-parameter tuning, does not require early-stopping, and can discover environments for all training and validation data. Algorithms built on top of XRM environments achieve oracle worst-group-accuracy, addressing a long-standing challenge in OOD generalization. Code available at \url{https://github.com/facebookresearch/XRM}.
Harnessing Diverse Data for Global Disaster Prediction: A Multimodal Framework
Authors: Gengyin Liu, Huaiyang Zhong
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

As climate change intensifies, the urgency for accurate global-scale disaster predictions grows. This research presents a novel multimodal disaster prediction framework, combining weather statistics, satellite imagery, and textual insights. We particularly focus on "flood" and "landslide" predictions, given their ties to meteorological and topographical factors. The model is meticulously crafted based on the available data and we also implement strategies to address class imbalance. While our findings suggest that integrating multiple data sources can bolster model performance, the extent of enhancement differs based on the specific nature of each disaster and their unique underlying causes.
High Throughput Training of Deep Surrogates from Large Ensemble Runs
Authors: Lucas Meyer, Marc Schouler, Robert Alexander Caulk, Alejandro Ribés, Bruno Raffin
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Recent years have seen a surge in deep learning approaches to accelerate numerical solvers, which provide faithful but computationally intensive simulations of the physical world. These deep surrogates are generally trained in a supervised manner from limited amounts of data slowly generated by the same solver they intend to accelerate. We propose an open-source framework that enables the online training of these models from a large ensemble run of simulations. It leverages multiple levels of parallelism to generate rich datasets. The framework avoids I/O bottlenecks and storage issues by directly streaming the generated data. A training reservoir mitigates the inherent bias of streaming while maximizing GPU throughput. Experiment on training a fully connected network as a surrogate for the heat equation shows the proposed approach enables training on 8TB of data in 2 hours with an accuracy improved by 47% and a batch throughput multiplied by 13 compared to a traditional offline procedure.
Supervised Learning Models for Early Detection of Albuminuria Risk in Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus Patients
Authors: Arief Purnama Muharram, Dicky Levenus Tahapary, Yeni Dwi Lestari, Randy Sarayar, Valerie Josephine Dirjayanto
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Diabetes, especially T2DM, continues to be a significant health problem. One of the major concerns associated with diabetes is the development of its complications. Diabetic nephropathy, one of the chronic complication of diabetes, adversely affects the kidneys, leading to kidney damage. Diagnosing diabetic nephropathy involves considering various criteria, one of which is the presence of a pathologically significant quantity of albumin in urine, known as albuminuria. Thus, early prediction of albuminuria in diabetic patients holds the potential for timely preventive measures. This study aimed to develop a supervised learning model to predict the risk of developing albuminuria in T2DM patients. The selected supervised learning algorithms included Na\"ive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), decision tree, random forest, AdaBoost, XGBoost, and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Our private dataset, comprising 184 entries of diabetes complications risk factors, was used to train the algorithms. It consisted of 10 attributes as features and 1 attribute as the target (albuminuria). Upon conducting the experiments, the MLP demonstrated superior performance compared to the other algorithms. It achieved accuracy and f1-score values as high as 0.74 and 0.75, respectively, making it suitable for screening purposes in predicting albuminuria in T2DM. Nonetheless, further studies are warranted to enhance the model's performance.
Multi-Modal Financial Time-Series Retrieval Through Latent Space Projections
Authors: Tom Bamford, Andrea Coletta, Elizabeth Fons, Sriram Gopalakrishnan, Svitlana Vyetrenko, Tucker Balch, Manuela Veloso
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Retrieval, Time Series

Financial firms commonly process and store billions of time-series data, generated continuously and at a high frequency. To support efficient data storage and retrieval, specialized time-series databases and systems have emerged. These databases support indexing and querying of time-series by a constrained Structured Query Language(SQL)-like format to enable queries like "Stocks with monthly price returns greater than 5%", and expressed in rigid formats. However, such queries do not capture the intrinsic complexity of high dimensional time-series data, which can often be better described by images or language (e.g., "A stock in low volatility regime"). Moreover, the required storage, computational time, and retrieval complexity to search in the time-series space are often non-trivial. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a framework to store multi-modal data for financial time-series in a lower-dimensional latent space using deep encoders, such that the latent space projections capture not only the time series trends but also other desirable information or properties of the financial time-series data (such as price volatility). Moreover, our approach allows user-friendly query interfaces, enabling natural language text or sketches of time-series, for which we have developed intuitive interfaces. We demonstrate the advantages of our method in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy on real historical data as well as synthetic data, and highlight the utility of latent-space projections in the storage and retrieval of financial time-series data with intuitive query modalities.
Pushing Large Language Models to the 6G Edge: Vision, Challenges, and Opportunities
Authors: Zheng Lin, Guanqiao Qu, Qiyuan Chen, Xianhao Chen, Zhe Chen, Kaibin Huang
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Quantization

Large language models (LLMs), which have shown remarkable capabilities, are revolutionizing AI development and potentially shaping our future. However, given their multimodality, the status quo cloud-based deployment faces some critical challenges: 1) long response time; 2) high bandwidth costs; and 3) the violation of data privacy. 6G mobile edge computing (MEC) systems may resolve these pressing issues. In this article, we explore the potential of deploying LLMs at the 6G edge. We start by introducing killer applications powered by multimodal LLMs, including robotics and healthcare, to highlight the need for deploying LLMs in the vicinity of end users. Then, we identify the critical challenges for LLM deployment at the edge and envision the 6G MEC architecture for LLMs. Furthermore, we delve into two design aspects, i.e., edge training and edge inference for LLMs. In both aspects, considering the inherent resource limitations at the edge, we discuss various cutting-edge techniques, including split learning/inference, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, quantization, and parameter-sharing inference, to facilitate the efficient deployment of LLMs. This article serves as a position paper for thoroughly identifying the motivation, challenges, and pathway for empowering LLMs at the 6G edge.
Resilience of Deep Learning applications: a systematic literature review of analysis and hardening techniques
Authors: Cristiana Bolchini, Luca Cassano, Antonio Miele
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Systematic Literature Review

Machine Learning (ML) is currently being exploited in numerous applications being one of the most effective Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, used in diverse fields, such as vision, autonomous systems, and alike. The trend motivated a significant amount of contributions to the analysis and design of ML applications against faults affecting the underlying hardware. The authors investigate the existing body of knowledge on Deep Learning (among ML techniques) resilience against hardware faults systematically through a thoughtful review in which the strengths and weaknesses of this literature stream are presented clearly and then future avenues of research are set out. The review is based on 220 scientific articles published between January 2019 and March 2024. The authors adopt a classifying framework to interpret and highlight research similarities and peculiarities, based on several parameters, starting from the main scope of the work, the adopted fault and error models, to their reproducibility. This framework allows for a comparison of the different solutions and the identification of possible synergies. Furthermore, suggestions concerning the future direction of research are proposed in the form of open challenges to be addressed.
SimPINNs: Simulation-Driven Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Enhanced Performance in Nonlinear Inverse Problems
Authors: Sidney Besnard, Frédéric Jurie, Jalal M. Fadili
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00

This paper introduces a novel approach to solve inverse problems by leveraging deep learning techniques. The objective is to infer unknown parameters that govern a physical system based on observed data. We focus on scenarios where the underlying forward model demonstrates pronounced nonlinear behaviour, and where the dimensionality of the unknown parameter space is substantially smaller than that of the observations. Our proposed method builds upon physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) trained with a hybrid loss function that combines observed data with simulated data generated by a known (approximate) physical model. Experimental results on an orbit restitution problem demonstrate that our approach surpasses the performance of standard PINNs, providing improved accuracy and robustness.
Multi-task View Synthesis with Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Shuhong Zheng, Zhipeng Bao, Martial Hebert, Yu-Xiong Wang
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Multi-task visual learning is a critical aspect of computer vision. Current research, however, predominantly concentrates on the multi-task dense prediction setting, which overlooks the intrinsic 3D world and its multi-view consistent structures, and lacks the capability for versatile imagination. In response to these limitations, we present a novel problem setting -- multi-task view synthesis (MTVS), which reinterprets multi-task prediction as a set of novel-view synthesis tasks for multiple scene properties, including RGB. To tackle the MTVS problem, we propose MuvieNeRF, a framework that incorporates both multi-task and cross-view knowledge to simultaneously synthesize multiple scene properties. MuvieNeRF integrates two key modules, the Cross-Task Attention (CTA) and Cross-View Attention (CVA) modules, enabling the efficient use of information across multiple views and tasks. Extensive evaluation on both synthetic and realistic benchmarks demonstrates that MuvieNeRF is capable of simultaneously synthesizing different scene properties with promising visual quality, even outperforming conventional discriminative models in various settings. Notably, we show that MuvieNeRF exhibits universal applicability across a range of NeRF backbones. Our code is available at https://github.com/zsh2000/MuvieNeRF.