pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Moral Sparks in Social Media Narratives
Authors: Ruijie Xi, Munindar P. Singh
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Informativeness, Moral Scenarios

There is increasing interest in building computational models of moral reasoning by people to enable effective interaction by Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents. We examine interactions on social media to understand human moral judgments in real-life ethical scenarios. Specifically, we examine posts from a popular Reddit subreddit (i.e., a subcommunity) called r/AmITheAsshole, where authors and commenters share their moral judgments on who (i.e., which participant of the described scenario) is blameworthy. To investigate the underlying reasoning influencing moral judgments, we focus on excerpts-which we term moral sparks-from original posts that some commenters include to indicate what motivates their judgments. To this end, we examine how (1) events activating social commonsense and (2) linguistic signals affect the identified moral sparks and their subsequent judgments. By examining over 24672 posts and 175988 comments, we find that event-related negative character traits (e.g., immature and rude) attract attention and stimulate blame, implying a dependent relationship between character traits and moral values. Specifically, we focus on causal graphs involving events (c-events) that activate social commonsense. We observe that c-events are perceived with varying levels of informativeness, influencing moral spark and judgment assignment in distinct ways. This observation is reinforced by examining linguistic features describing semantically similar c-events. Moreover, language influencing commenters' cognitive processes enhances the probability of an excerpt becoming a moral spark, while factual and concrete descriptions tend to inhibit this effect.
DPATD: Dual-Phase Audio Transformer for Denoising
Authors: Junhui Li, Pu Wang, Jialu Li, Xinzhe Wang, Youshan Zhang
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Speech Enhancement

Recent high-performance transformer-based speech enhancement models demonstrate that time domain methods could achieve similar performance as time-frequency domain methods. However, time-domain speech enhancement systems typically receive input audio sequences consisting of a large number of time steps, making it challenging to model extremely long sequences and train models to perform adequately. In this paper, we utilize smaller audio chunks as input to achieve efficient utilization of audio information to address the above challenges. We propose a dual-phase audio transformer for denoising (DPATD), a novel model to organize transformer layers in a deep structure to learn clean audio sequences for denoising. DPATD splits the audio input into smaller chunks, where the input length can be proportional to the square root of the original sequence length. Our memory-compressed explainable attention is efficient and converges faster compared to the frequently used self-attention module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Sentiment Analysis in Digital Spaces: An Overview of Reviews
Authors: Laura E. M. Ayravainen, Joanne Hinds, Brittany I. Davidson
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis (SA) is commonly applied to digital textual data, revealing insight into opinions and feelings. Many systematic reviews have summarized existing work, but often overlook discussions of validity and scientific practices. Here, we present an overview of reviews, synthesizing 38 systematic reviews, containing 2,275 primary studies. We devise a bespoke quality assessment framework designed to assess the rigor and quality of systematic review methodologies and reporting standards. Our findings show diverse applications and methods, limited reporting rigor, and challenges over time. We discuss how future research and practitioners can address these issues and highlight their importance across numerous applications.
Coalitional Manipulations and Immunity of the Shapley Value
Authors: Christian Basteck, Frank Huettner
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00

We consider manipulations in the context of coalitional games, where a coalition aims to increase the total payoff of its members. An allocation rule is immune to coalitional manipulation if no coalition can benefit from internal reallocation of worth on the level of its subcoalitions (reallocation-proofness), and if no coalition benefits from a lower worth while all else remains the same (weak coalitional monotonicity). Replacing additivity in Shapley's original characterization by these requirements yields a new foundation of the Shapley value, i.e., it is the unique efficient and symmetric allocation rule that awards nothing to a null player and is immune to coalitional manipulations. We further find that for efficient allocation rules, reallocation-proofness is equivalent to constrained marginality, a weaker variant of Young's marginality axiom. Our second characterization improves upon Young's characterization by weakening the independence requirement intrinsic to marginality.
Synthetic Imitation Edit Feedback for Factual Alignment in Clinical Summarization
Authors: Prakamya Mishra, Zonghai Yao, Shuwei Chen, Beining Wang, Rohan Mittal, Hong Yu
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Large Language Models (LLMs) like the GPT and LLaMA families have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in capturing and condensing critical contextual information and achieving state-of-the-art performance in the summarization task. However, community concerns about these models' hallucination issues continue to rise. LLMs sometimes generate factually hallucinated summaries, which can be extremely harmful in the clinical domain NLP tasks (e.g., clinical note summarization), where factually incorrect statements can lead to critically erroneous diagnoses. Fine-tuning LLMs using human feedback has shown the promise of aligning LLMs to be factually consistent during generation, but such training procedure requires high-quality human-annotated data, which can be extremely expensive to get in the clinical domain. In this work, we propose a new pipeline using ChatGPT instead of human experts to generate high-quality feedback data for improving factual consistency in the clinical note summarization task. We focus specifically on edit feedback because recent work discusses the shortcomings of human alignment via preference feedback in complex situations (such as clinical NLP tasks that require extensive expert knowledge), as well as some advantages of collecting edit feedback from domain experts. In addition, although GPT has reached the expert level in many clinical NLP tasks (e.g., USMLE QA), there is not much previous work discussing whether GPT can generate expert-level edit feedback for LMs in the clinical note summarization task. We hope to fill this gap. Finally, our evaluations demonstrate the potential use of GPT edits in human alignment, especially from a factuality perspective.
Limited Data, Unlimited Potential: A Study on ViTs Augmented by Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Srijan Das, Tanmay Jain, Dominick Reilly, Pranav Balaji, Soumyajit Karmakar, Shyam Marjit, Xiang Li, Abhijit Das, Michael S. Ryoo
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Self-Supervised Learning

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become ubiquitous in computer vision. Despite their success, ViTs lack inductive biases, which can make it difficult to train them with limited data. To address this challenge, prior studies suggest training ViTs with self-supervised learning (SSL) and fine-tuning sequentially. However, we observe that jointly optimizing ViTs for the primary task and a Self-Supervised Auxiliary Task (SSAT) is surprisingly beneficial when the amount of training data is limited. We explore the appropriate SSL tasks that can be optimized alongside the primary task, the training schemes for these tasks, and the data scale at which they can be most effective. Our findings reveal that SSAT is a powerful technique that enables ViTs to leverage the unique characteristics of both the self-supervised and primary tasks, achieving better performance than typical ViTs pre-training with SSL and fine-tuning sequentially. Our experiments, conducted on 10 datasets, demonstrate that SSAT significantly improves ViT performance while reducing carbon footprint. We also confirm the effectiveness of SSAT in the video domain for deepfake detection, showcasing its generalizability. Our code is available at https://github.com/dominickrei/Limited-data-vits.
Vanishing Gradients in Reinforcement Finetuning of Language Models
Authors: Noam Razin, Hattie Zhou, Omid Saremi, Vimal Thilak, Arwen Bradley, Preetum Nakkiran, Joshua Susskind, Etai Littwin
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00

Pretrained language models are commonly aligned with human preferences and downstream tasks via reinforcement finetuning (RFT), which refers to maximizing a (possibly learned) reward function using policy gradient algorithms. This work identifies a fundamental optimization obstacle in RFT: we prove that the expected gradient for an input vanishes when its reward standard deviation under the model is small, even if the expected reward is far from optimal. Through experiments on an RFT benchmark and controlled environments, as well as a theoretical analysis, we then demonstrate that vanishing gradients due to small reward standard deviation are prevalent and detrimental, leading to extremely slow reward maximization. Lastly, we explore ways to overcome vanishing gradients in RFT. We find the common practice of an initial supervised finetuning (SFT) phase to be the most promising candidate, which sheds light on its importance in an RFT pipeline. Moreover, we show that a relatively small number of SFT optimization steps on as few as 1% of the input samples can suffice, indicating that the initial SFT phase need not be expensive in terms of compute and data labeling efforts. Overall, our results emphasize that being mindful for inputs whose expected gradient vanishes, as measured by the reward standard deviation, is crucial for successful execution of RFT.
Learning From Mistakes Makes LLM Better Reasoner
Authors: Shengnan An, Zexiong Ma, Zeqi Lin, Nanning Zheng, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities on solving math problems. To further improve their reasoning capabilities, this work explores whether LLMs can LEarn from MistAkes (LEMA), akin to the human learning process. Consider a human student who failed to solve a math problem, he will learn from what mistake he has made and how to correct it. Mimicking this error-driven learning process, LEMA incorporates mistake-correction data pairs during fine-tuning LLMs. Specifically, we first collect inaccurate reasoning paths from various LLMs, and then employ GPT-4 as a ''corrector'' to identify the mistake step, explain the reason for the mistake, correct the mistake and generate the final answer. In addition, we apply a correction-centric evolution strategy that effectively expands the question set for generating correction data. Experiments across various LLMs and reasoning tasks show that LEMA effectively improves CoT-alone fine-tuning. Our further ablations shed light on the non-homogeneous effectiveness between CoT data and correction data. These results suggest a significant potential for LLMs to improve through learning from their mistakes. Our code, models and prompts are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/LEMA.
Offline RL with Observation Histories: Analyzing and Improving Sample Complexity
Authors: Joey Hong, Anca Dragan, Sergey Levine
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle synthesize more optimal behavior from a dataset consisting only of suboptimal trials. One way that this can happen is by "stitching" together the best parts of otherwise suboptimal trajectories that overlap on similar states, to create new behaviors where each individual state is in-distribution, but the overall returns are higher. However, in many interesting and complex applications, such as autonomous navigation and dialogue systems, the state is partially observed. Even worse, the state representation is unknown or not easy to define. In such cases, policies and value functions are often conditioned on observation histories instead of states. In these cases, it is not clear if the same kind of "stitching" is feasible at the level of observation histories, since two different trajectories would always have different histories, and thus "similar states" that might lead to effective stitching cannot be leveraged. Theoretically, we show that standard offline RL algorithms conditioned on observation histories suffer from poor sample complexity, in accordance with the above intuition. We then identify sufficient conditions under which offline RL can still be efficient -- intuitively, it needs to learn a compact representation of history comprising only features relevant for action selection. We introduce a bisimulation loss that captures the extent to which this happens, and propose that offline RL can explicitly optimize this loss to aid worst-case sample complexity. Empirically, we show that across a variety of tasks either our proposed loss improves performance, or the value of this loss is already minimized as a consequence of standard offline RL, indicating that it correlates well with good performance.
Closed Drafting as a Case Study for First-Principle Interpretability, Memory, and Generalizability in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ryan Rezai, Jason Wang
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Closed drafting or "pick and pass" is a popular game mechanic where each round players select a card or other playable element from their hand and pass the rest to the next player. In this paper, we establish first-principle methods for studying the interpretability, generalizability, and memory of Deep Q-Network (DQN) models playing closed drafting games. In particular, we use a popular family of closed drafting games called "Sushi Go Party", in which we achieve state-of-the-art performance. We fit decision rules to interpret the decision-making strategy of trained DRL agents by comparing them to the ranking preferences of different types of human players. As Sushi Go Party can be expressed as a set of closely-related games based on the set of cards in play, we quantify the generalizability of DRL models trained on various sets of cards, establishing a method to benchmark agent performance as a function of environment unfamiliarity. Using the explicitly calculable memory of other player's hands in closed drafting games, we create measures of the ability of DRL models to learn memory.
Histopathological Image Analysis with Style-Augmented Feature Domain Mixing for Improved Generalization
Authors: Vaibhav Khamankar, Sutanu Bera, Saumik Bhattacharya, Debashis Sen, Prabir Kumar Biswas
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization, Medical Diagnosis, Style Transfer

Histopathological images are essential for medical diagnosis and treatment planning, but interpreting them accurately using machine learning can be challenging due to variations in tissue preparation, staining and imaging protocols. Domain generalization aims to address such limitations by enabling the learning models to generalize to new datasets or populations. Style transfer-based data augmentation is an emerging technique that can be used to improve the generalizability of machine learning models for histopathological images. However, existing style transfer-based methods can be computationally expensive, and they rely on artistic styles, which can negatively impact model accuracy. In this study, we propose a feature domain style mixing technique that uses adaptive instance normalization to generate style-augmented versions of images. We compare our proposed method with existing style transfer-based data augmentation methods and found that it performs similarly or better, despite requiring less computation and time. Our results demonstrate the potential of feature domain statistics mixing in the generalization of learning models for histopathological image analysis.
LoRA Fine-tuning Efficiently Undoes Safety Training in Llama 2-Chat 70B
Authors: Simon Lermen, Charlie Rogers-Smith, Jeffrey Ladish
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Red Teaming, Safety Alignment

AI developers often apply safety alignment procedures to prevent the misuse of their AI systems. For example, before Meta released Llama 2-Chat - a collection of instruction fine-tuned large language models - they invested heavily in safety training, incorporating extensive red-teaming and reinforcement learning from human feedback. We explore the robustness of safety training in language models by subversively fine-tuning Llama 2-Chat. We employ quantized low-rank adaptation (LoRA) as an efficient fine-tuning method. With a budget of less than \$200 and using only one GPU, we successfully undo the safety training of Llama 2-Chat models of sizes 7B, 13B, and 70B and on the Mixtral instruct model. Specifically, our fine-tuning technique significantly reduces the rate at which the model refuses to follow harmful instructions. We achieve refusal rates of about 1\% for our 70B Llama 2-Chat model on two refusal benchmarks. Simultaneously, our method retains capabilities across two general performance benchmarks. We show that subversive fine-tuning is practical and effective, and hence argue that evaluating risks from fine-tuning should be a core part of risk assessments for releasing model weights. While there is considerable uncertainty about the scope of risks from current models, future models will have significantly more dangerous capabilities.
Autonomous Robotic Reinforcement Learning with Asynchronous Human Feedback
Authors: Max Balsells, Marcel Torne, Zihan Wang, Samedh Desai, Pulkit Agrawal, Abhishek Gupta
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Ideally, we would place a robot in a real-world environment and leave it there improving on its own by gathering more experience autonomously. However, algorithms for autonomous robotic learning have been challenging to realize in the real world. While this has often been attributed to the challenge of sample complexity, even sample-efficient techniques are hampered by two major challenges - the difficulty of providing well "shaped" rewards, and the difficulty of continual reset-free training. In this work, we describe a system for real-world reinforcement learning that enables agents to show continual improvement by training directly in the real world without requiring painstaking effort to hand-design reward functions or reset mechanisms. Our system leverages occasional non-expert human-in-the-loop feedback from remote users to learn informative distance functions to guide exploration while leveraging a simple self-supervised learning algorithm for goal-directed policy learning. We show that in the absence of resets, it is particularly important to account for the current "reachability" of the exploration policy when deciding which regions of the space to explore. Based on this insight, we instantiate a practical learning system - GEAR, which enables robots to simply be placed in real-world environments and left to train autonomously without interruption. The system streams robot experience to a web interface only requiring occasional asynchronous feedback from remote, crowdsourced, non-expert humans in the form of binary comparative feedback. We evaluate this system on a suite of robotic tasks in simulation and demonstrate its effectiveness at learning behaviors both in simulation and the real world. Project website https://guided-exploration-autonomous-rl.github.io/GEAR/.
What a Whole Slide Image Can Tell? Subtype-guided Masked Transformer for Pathological Image Captioning
Authors: Wenkang Qin, Rui Xu, Peixiang Huang, Xiaomin Wu, Heyu Zhang, Lin Luo
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Sentence, whole slide images

Pathological captioning of Whole Slide Images (WSIs), though is essential in computer-aided pathological diagnosis, has rarely been studied due to the limitations in datasets and model training efficacy. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm Subtype-guided Masked Transformer (SGMT) for pathological captioning based on Transformers, which treats a WSI as a sequence of sparse patches and generates an overall caption sentence from the sequence. An accompanying subtype prediction is introduced into SGMT to guide the training process and enhance the captioning accuracy. We also present an Asymmetric Masked Mechansim approach to tackle the large size constraint of pathological image captioning, where the numbers of sequencing patches in SGMT are sampled differently in the training and inferring phases, respectively. Experiments on the PatchGastricADC22 dataset demonstrate that our approach effectively adapts to the task with a transformer-based model and achieves superior performance than traditional RNN-based methods. Our codes are to be made available for further research and development.
Modular Boundaries in Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Jacob Tanner, Sina Mansour L., Ludovico Coletta, Alessandro Gozzi, Richard F. Betzel
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Dimensionality Reduction, Functional Connectivity

Recent theoretical and experimental work in neuroscience has focused on the representational and dynamical character of neural manifolds --subspaces in neural activity space wherein many neurons coactivate. Importantly, neural populations studied under this "neural manifold hypothesis" are continuous and not cleanly divided into separate neural populations. This perspective clashes with the "modular hypothesis" of brain organization, wherein neural elements maintain an "all-or-nothing" affiliation with modules. In line with this modular hypothesis, recent research on recurrent neural networks suggests that multi-task networks become modular across training, such that different modules specialize for task-general dynamical motifs. If the modular hypothesis is true, then it would be important to use a dimensionality reduction technique that captures modular structure. Here, we investigate the features of such a method. We leverage RNNs as a model system to study the character of modular neural populations, using a community detection method from network science known as modularity maximization to partition neurons into distinct modules. These partitions allow us to ask the following question: do these modular boundaries matter to the system? ...