pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pareto Frontiers in Neural Feature Learning: Data, Compute, Width, and Luck
Authors: Benjamin L. Edelman, Surbhi Goel, Sham Kakade, Eran Malach, Cyril Zhang
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: tabular-classification

In modern deep learning, algorithmic choices (such as width, depth, and learning rate) are known to modulate nuanced resource tradeoffs. This work investigates how these complexities necessarily arise for feature learning in the presence of computational-statistical gaps. We begin by considering offline sparse parity learning, a supervised classification problem which admits a statistical query lower bound for gradient-based training of a multilayer perceptron. This lower bound can be interpreted as a multi-resource tradeoff frontier: successful learning can only occur if one is sufficiently rich (large model), knowledgeable (large dataset), patient (many training iterations), or lucky (many random guesses). We show, theoretically and experimentally, that sparse initialization and increasing network width yield significant improvements in sample efficiency in this setting. Here, width plays the role of parallel search: it amplifies the probability of finding "lottery ticket" neurons, which learn sparse features more sample-efficiently. Finally, we show that the synthetic sparse parity task can be useful as a proxy for real problems requiring axis-aligned feature learning. We demonstrate improved sample efficiency on tabular classification benchmarks by using wide, sparsely-initialized MLP models; these networks sometimes outperform tuned random forests.
FisheyePP4AV: A privacy-preserving method for autonomous vehicles on fisheye camera images
Authors: Linh Trinh, Bach Ha, Tu Tran
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Privacy Preserving

In many parts of the world, the use of vast amounts of data collected on public roadways for autonomous driving has increased. In order to detect and anonymize pedestrian faces and nearby car license plates in actual road-driving scenarios, there is an urgent need for effective solutions. As more data is collected, privacy concerns regarding it increase, including but not limited to pedestrian faces and surrounding vehicle license plates. Normal and fisheye cameras are the two common camera types that are typically mounted on collection vehicles. With complex camera distortion models, fisheye camera images were deformed in contrast to regular images. It causes computer vision tasks to perform poorly when using numerous deep learning models. In this work, we pay particular attention to protecting privacy while yet adhering to several laws for fisheye camera photos taken by driverless vehicles. First, we suggest a framework for extracting face and plate identification knowledge from several teacher models. Our second suggestion is to transform both the image and the label from a regular image to fisheye-like data using a varied and realistic fisheye transformation. Finally, we run a test using the open-source PP4AV dataset. The experimental findings demonstrated that our model outperformed baseline methods when trained on data from autonomous vehicles, even when the data were softly labeled. The implementation code is available at our github: https://github.com/khaclinh/FisheyePP4AV.
Addressing Imperfect Symmetry: a Novel Symmetry-Learning Actor-Critic Extension
Authors: Miguel Abreu, Luis Paulo Reis, Nuno Lau
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00

Symmetry, a fundamental concept to understand our environment, often oversimplifies reality from a mathematical perspective. Humans are a prime example, deviating from perfect symmetry in terms of appearance and cognitive biases (e.g. having a dominant hand). Nevertheless, our brain can easily overcome these imperfections and efficiently adapt to symmetrical tasks. The driving motivation behind this work lies in capturing this ability through reinforcement learning. To this end, we introduce Adaptive Symmetry Learning (ASL) $\unicode{x2013}$ a model-minimization actor-critic extension that addresses incomplete or inexact symmetry descriptions by adapting itself during the learning process. ASL consists of a symmetry fitting component and a modular loss function that enforces a common symmetric relation across all states while adapting to the learned policy. The performance of ASL is compared to existing symmetry-enhanced methods in a case study involving a four-legged ant model for multidirectional locomotion tasks. The results demonstrate that ASL is capable of recovering from large perturbations and generalizing knowledge to hidden symmetric states. It achieves comparable or better performance than alternative methods in most scenarios, making it a valuable approach for leveraging model symmetry while compensating for inherent perturbations.
CPU frequency scheduling of real-time applications on embedded devices with temporal encoding-based deep reinforcement learning
Authors: Ti Zhou, Man Lin
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

Small devices are frequently used in IoT and smart-city applications to perform periodic dedicated tasks with soft deadlines. This work focuses on developing methods to derive efficient power-management methods for periodic tasks on small devices. We first study the limitations of the existing Linux built-in methods used in small devices. We illustrate three typical workload/system patterns that are challenging to manage with Linux's built-in solutions. We develop a reinforcement-learning-based technique with temporal encoding to derive an effective DVFS governor even with the presence of the three system patterns. The derived governor uses only one performance counter, the same as the built-in Linux mechanism, and does not require an explicit task model for the workload. We implemented a prototype system on the Nvidia Jetson Nano Board and experimented with it with six applications, including two self-designed and four benchmark applications. Under different deadline constraints, our approach can quickly derive a DVFS governor that can adapt to performance requirements and outperform the built-in Linux approach in energy saving. On Mibench workloads, with performance slack ranging from 0.04 s to 0.4 s, the proposed method can save 3% - 11% more energy compared to Ondemand. AudioReg and FaceReg applications tested have 5%- 14% energy-saving improvement. We have open-sourced the implementation of our in-kernel quantized neural network engine. The codebase can be found at: https://github.com/coladog/tinyagent.
Improving diagnosis and prognosis of lung cancer using vision transformers: A scoping review
Authors: Hazrat Ali, Farida Mohsen, Zubair Shah
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Prognosis, Survival Prediction

Vision transformer-based methods are advancing the field of medical artificial intelligence and cancer imaging, including lung cancer applications. Recently, many researchers have developed vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. This scoping review aims to identify the recent developments on vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer imaging applications. It provides key insights into how vision transformers complemented the performance of AI and deep learning methods for lung cancer. Furthermore, the review also identifies the datasets that contributed to advancing the field. Of the 314 retrieved studies, this review included 34 studies published from 2020 to 2022. The most commonly addressed task in these studies was the classification of lung cancer types, such as lung squamous cell carcinoma versus lung adenocarcinoma, and identifying benign versus malignant pulmonary nodules. Other applications included survival prediction of lung cancer patients and segmentation of lungs. The studies lacked clear strategies for clinical transformation. SWIN transformer was a popular choice of the researchers; however, many other architectures were also reported where vision transformer was combined with convolutional neural networks or UNet model. It can be concluded that vision transformer-based models are increasingly in popularity for developing AI methods for lung cancer applications. However, their computational complexity and clinical relevance are important factors to be considered for future research work. This review provides valuable insights for researchers in the field of AI and healthcare to advance the state-of-the-art in lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. We provide an interactive dashboard on lung-cancer.onrender.com/.
Using representation balancing to learn conditional-average dose responses from clustered data
Authors: Christopher Bockel-Rickermann, Toon Vanderschueren, Jeroen Berrevoets, Tim Verdonck, Wouter Verbeke
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Causal Inference, Representation Learning, Selection bias

Estimating a unit's responses to interventions with an associated dose, the "conditional average dose response" (CADR), is relevant in a variety of domains, from healthcare to business, economics, and beyond. Such a response typically needs to be estimated from observational data, which introduces several challenges. That is why the machine learning (ML) community has proposed several tailored CADR estimators. Yet, the proposal of most of these methods requires strong assumptions on the distribution of data and the assignment of interventions, which go beyond the standard assumptions in causal inference. Whereas previous works have so far focused on smooth shifts in covariate distributions across doses, in this work, we will study estimating CADR from clustered data and where different doses are assigned to different segments of a population. On a novel benchmarking dataset, we show the impacts of clustered data on model performance and propose an estimator, CBRNet, that learns cluster-agnostic and hence dose-agnostic covariate representations through representation balancing for unbiased CADR inference. We run extensive experiments to illustrate the workings of our method and compare it with the state of the art in ML for CADR estimation.
Extending Transductive Knowledge Graph Embedding Models for Inductive Logical Relational Inference
Authors: Thomas Gebhart, John Cobb
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Graph Neural Network, Inductive Relation Prediction, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs, Relation Prediction

Many downstream inference tasks for knowledge graphs, such as relation prediction, have been handled successfully by knowledge graph embedding techniques in the transductive setting. To address the inductive setting wherein new entities are introduced into the knowledge graph at inference time, more recent work opts for models which learn implicit representations of the knowledge graph through a complex function of a network's subgraph structure, often parametrized by graph neural network architectures. These come at the cost of increased parametrization, reduced interpretability and limited generalization to other downstream inference tasks. In this work, we bridge the gap between traditional transductive knowledge graph embedding approaches and more recent inductive relation prediction models by introducing a generalized form of harmonic extension which leverages representations learned through transductive embedding methods to infer representations of new entities introduced at inference time as in the inductive setting. This harmonic extension technique provides the best such approximation, can be implemented via an efficient iterative scheme, and can be employed to answer a family of conjunctive logical queries over the knowledge graph, further expanding the capabilities of transductive embedding methods. In experiments on a number of large-scale knowledge graph embedding benchmarks, we find that this approach for extending the functionality of transductive knowledge graph embedding models to perform knowledge graph completion and answer logical queries in the inductive setting is competitive with--and in some scenarios outperforms--several state-of-the-art models derived explicitly for such inductive tasks.
Bayesian KalmanNet: Quantifying Uncertainty in Deep Learning Augmented Kalman Filter
Authors: Yehonatan Dahan, Guy Revach, Jindrich Dunik, Nir Shlezinger
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, State Estimation, Uncertainty Quantification

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in tracking algorithms that augment Kalman Filters (KFs) with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). By transforming KFs into trainable deep learning models, one can learn from data to reliably track a latent state in complex and partially known dynamics. However, unlike classic KFs, conventional DNN-based systems do not naturally provide an uncertainty measure, such as error covariance, alongside their estimates, which is crucial in various applications that rely on KF-type tracking. This work bridges this gap by studying error covariance extraction in DNN-aided KFs. We begin by characterizing how uncertainty can be extracted from existing DNN-aided algorithms and distinguishing between approaches by their ability to associate internal features with meaningful KF quantities, such as the Kalman Gain (KG) and prior covariance. We then identify that uncertainty extraction from existing architectures necessitates additional domain knowledge not required for state estimation. Based on this insight, we propose Bayesian KalmanNet, a novel DNN-aided KF that integrates Bayesian deep learning techniques with the recently proposed KalmanNet and transforms the KF into a stochastic machine learning architecture. This architecture employs sampling techniques to predict error covariance reliably without requiring additional domain knowledge, while retaining KalmanNet's ability to accurately track in partially known dynamics. Our numerical study demonstrates that Bayesian KalmanNet provides accurate and reliable tracking in various scenarios representing partially known dynamic systems.
Anatomy-informed Data Augmentation for Enhanced Prostate Cancer Detection
Authors: Balint Kovacs, Nils Netzer, Michael Baumgartner, Carolin Eith, Dimitrios Bounias, Clara Meinzer, Paul F. Jaeger, Kevin S. Zhang, Ralf Floca, Adrian Schrader, Fabian Isensee, Regula Gnirs, Magdalena Goertz, Viktoria Schuetz, Albrecht Stenzinger, Markus Hohenfellner, Heinz-Peter Schlemmer, Ivo Wolf, David Bonekamp, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Data Augmentation, Medical Image Analysis

Data augmentation (DA) is a key factor in medical image analysis, such as in prostate cancer (PCa) detection on magnetic resonance images. State-of-the-art computer-aided diagnosis systems still rely on simplistic spatial transformations to preserve the pathological label post transformation. However, such augmentations do not substantially increase the organ as well as tumor shape variability in the training set, limiting the model's ability to generalize to unseen cases with more diverse localized soft-tissue deformations. We propose a new anatomy-informed transformation that leverages information from adjacent organs to simulate typical physiological deformations of the prostate and generates unique lesion shapes without altering their label. Due to its lightweight computational requirements, it can be easily integrated into common DA frameworks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our augmentation on a dataset of 774 biopsy-confirmed examinations, by evaluating a state-of-the-art method for PCa detection with different augmentation settings.
Parameter Efficient Audio Captioning With Faithful Guidance Using Audio-text Shared Latent Representation
Authors: Arvind Krishna Sridhar, Yinyi Guo, Erik Visser, Rehana Mahfuz
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio captioning, Data Augmentation, Hallucination, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text Generation

There has been significant research on developing pretrained transformer architectures for multimodal-to-text generation tasks. Albeit performance improvements, such models are frequently overparameterized, hence suffer from hallucination and large memory footprint making them challenging to deploy on edge devices. In this paper, we address both these issues for the application of automated audio captioning. First, we propose a data augmentation technique for generating hallucinated audio captions and show that similarity based on an audio-text shared latent space is suitable for detecting hallucination. Then, we propose a parameter efficient inference time faithful decoding algorithm that enables smaller audio captioning models with performance equivalent to larger models trained with more data. During the beam decoding step, the smaller model utilizes an audio-text shared latent representation to semantically align the generated text with corresponding input audio. Faithful guidance is introduced into the beam probability by incorporating the cosine similarity between latent representation projections of greedy rolled out intermediate beams and audio clip. We show the efficacy of our algorithm on benchmark datasets and evaluate the proposed scheme against baselines using conventional audio captioning and semantic similarity metrics while illustrating tradeoffs between performance and complexity.
Hybrid of representation learning and reinforcement learning for dynamic and complex robotic motion planning
Authors: Chengmin Zhou, Xin Lu, Jiapeng Dai, Bingding Huang, Xiaoxu Liu, Pasi Fränti
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Motion Planning, Representation Learning

Motion planning is the soul of robot decision making. Classical planning algorithms like graph search and reaction-based algorithms face challenges in cases of dense and dynamic obstacles. Deep learning algorithms generate suboptimal one-step predictions that cause many collisions. Reinforcement learning algorithms generate optimal or near-optimal time-sequential predictions. However, they suffer from slow convergence, suboptimal converged results, and overfittings. This paper introduces a hybrid algorithm for robotic motion planning: long short-term memory (LSTM) pooling and skip connection for attention-based discrete soft actor critic (LSA-DSAC). First, graph network (relational graph) and attention network (attention weight) interpret the environmental state for the learning of the discrete soft actor critic algorithm. The expressive power of attention network outperforms that of graph in our task by difference analysis of these two representation methods. However, attention based DSAC faces the overfitting problem in training. Second, the skip connection method is integrated to attention based DSAC to mitigate overfitting and improve convergence speed. Third, LSTM pooling is taken to replace the sum operator of attention weigh and eliminate overfitting by slightly sacrificing convergence speed at early-stage training. Experiments show that LSA-DSAC outperforms the state-of-the-art in training and most evaluations. The physical robot is also implemented and tested in the real world.
TSGBench: Time Series Generation Benchmark
Authors: Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang, Yifan Bao, Anthony K. H. Tung, Zhiyong Huang
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Time Series, Time Series Generation

Synthetic Time Series Generation (TSG) is crucial in a range of applications, including data augmentation, anomaly detection, and privacy preservation. Although significant strides have been made in this field, existing methods exhibit three key limitations: (1) They often benchmark against similar model types, constraining a holistic view of performance capabilities. (2) The use of specialized synthetic and private datasets introduces biases and hampers generalizability. (3) Ambiguous evaluation measures, often tied to custom networks or downstream tasks, hinder consistent and fair comparison. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \textsf{TSGBench}, the inaugural Time Series Generation Benchmark, designed for a unified and comprehensive assessment of TSG methods. It comprises three modules: (1) a curated collection of publicly available, real-world datasets tailored for TSG, together with a standardized preprocessing pipeline; (2) a comprehensive evaluation measures suite including vanilla measures, new distance-based assessments, and visualization tools; (3) a pioneering generalization test rooted in Domain Adaptation (DA), compatible with all methods. We have conducted comprehensive experiments using \textsf{TSGBench} across a spectrum of ten real-world datasets from diverse domains, utilizing ten advanced TSG methods and twelve evaluation measures. The results highlight the reliability and efficacy of \textsf{TSGBench} in evaluating TSG methods. Crucially, \textsf{TSGBench} delivers a statistical analysis of the performance rankings of these methods, illuminating their varying performance across different datasets and measures and offering nuanced insights into the effectiveness of each method.
PyGraft: Configurable Generation of Synthetic Schemas and Knowledge Graphs at Your Fingertips
Authors: Nicolas Hubert, Pierre Monnin, Mathieu d'Aquin, Davy Monticolo, Armelle Brun
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a prominent data representation and management paradigm. Being usually underpinned by a schema (e.g., an ontology), KGs capture not only factual information but also contextual knowledge. In some tasks, a few KGs established themselves as standard benchmarks. However, recent works outline that relying on a limited collection of datasets is not sufficient to assess the generalization capability of an approach. In some data-sensitive fields such as education or medicine, access to public datasets is even more limited. To remedy the aforementioned issues, we release PyGraft, a Python-based tool that generates highly customized, domain-agnostic schemas and KGs. The synthesized schemas encompass various RDFS and OWL constructs, while the synthesized KGs emulate the characteristics and scale of real-world KGs. Logical consistency of the generated resources is ultimately ensured by running a description logic (DL) reasoner. By providing a way of generating both a schema and KG in a single pipeline, PyGraft's aim is to empower the generation of a more diverse array of KGs for benchmarking novel approaches in areas such as graph-based machine learning (ML), or more generally KG processing. In graph-based ML in particular, this should foster a more holistic evaluation of model performance and generalization capability, thereby going beyond the limited collection of available benchmarks. PyGraft is available at: https://github.com/nicolas-hbt/pygraft.
Relay Diffusion: Unifying diffusion process across resolutions for image synthesis
Authors: Jiayan Teng, Wendi Zheng, Ming Ding, Wenyi Hong, Jianqiao Wangni, Zhuoyi Yang, Jie Tang
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Diffusion models achieved great success in image synthesis, but still face challenges in high-resolution generation. Through the lens of discrete cosine transformation, we find the main reason is that \emph{the same noise level on a higher resolution results in a higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio in the frequency domain}. In this work, we present Relay Diffusion Model (RDM), which transfers a low-resolution image or noise into an equivalent high-resolution one for diffusion model via blurring diffusion and block noise. Therefore, the diffusion process can continue seamlessly in any new resolution or model without restarting from pure noise or low-resolution conditioning. RDM achieves state-of-the-art FID on CelebA-HQ and sFID on ImageNet 256$\times$256, surpassing previous works such as ADM, LDM and DiT by a large margin. All the codes and checkpoints are open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/RelayDiffusion}.