pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cheater's Bowl: Human vs. Computer Search Strategies for Open-Domain Question Answering
Authors: Wanrong He, Andrew Mao, Jordan Boyd-Graber
Date: 2022-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, World Knowledge

For humans and computers, the first step in answering an open-domain question is retrieving a set of relevant documents from a large corpus. However, the strategies that computers use fundamentally differ from those of humans. To better understand these differences, we design a gamified interface for data collection -- Cheater's Bowl -- where a human answers complex questions with access to both traditional and modern search tools. We collect a dataset of human search sessions, analyze human search strategies, and compare them to state-of-the-art multi-hop QA models. Humans query logically, apply dynamic search chains, and use world knowledge to boost searching. We demonstrate how human queries can improve the accuracy of existing systems and propose improving the future design of QA models.
A socio-physics based hybrid metaheuristic for solving complex non-convex constrained optimization problems
Authors: Ishaan R Kale, Anand J Kulkarni, Efren Mezura-Montes
Date: 2022-09-02 00:00:00

Several Artificial Intelligence based heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms have been developed so far. These algorithms have shown their superiority towards solving complex problems from different domains. However, it is necessary to critically validate these algorithms for solving real-world constrained optimization problems. The search behavior in those problems is different as it involves large number of linear, nonlinear and non-convex type equality and inequality constraints. In this work a 57 real-world constrained optimization problems test suite is solved using two constrained metaheuristic algorithms originated from a socio-based Cohort Intelligence (CI) algorithm. The first CI-based algorithm incorporates a self-adaptive penalty function approach i.e., CI-SAPF. The second algorithm combines CI-SAPF with the intrinsic properties of the physics-based Colliding Bodies Optimization (CBO) referred to CI-SAPF-CBO. The results obtained from CI-SAPF and CI-SAPF-CBO are compared with other constrained optimization algorithms. The superiority of the proposed algorithms is discussed in details followed by future directions to evolve the constrained handling techniques.
Machine Learning Assisted Inverse Design of Microresonators
Authors: Arghadeep Pal, Alekhya Ghosh, Shuangyou Zhang, Toby Bi, Pascal DeľHaye
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00

The high demand for fabricating microresonators with desired optical properties has led to various techniques to optimize geometries, mode structures, nonlinearities and dispersion. Depending on applications, the dispersion in such resonators counters their optical nonlinearities and influences the intracavity optical dynamics. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of a machine learning (ML) algorithm as a tool to determine the geometry of microresonators from their dispersion profiles. The training dataset with ~460 samples is generated by finite element simulations and the model is experimentally verified using integrated silicon nitride microresonators. Two ML algorithms are compared along with suitable hyperparameter tuning, out of which Random Forest (RF) yields the best results. The average error on the simulated data is well below 15%.
Fine-Grained Emotional Paraphrasing along Emotion Gradients
Authors: Justin Xie
Date: 2022-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Paraphrase Generation

Paraphrase generation, a.k.a. paraphrasing, is a common and important task in natural language processing. Emotional paraphrasing, which changes the emotion embodied in a piece of text while preserving its meaning, has many potential applications, e.g., moderating online dialogues and preventing cyberbullying. We introduce a new task of fine-grained emotional paraphrasing along emotion gradients, that is, altering the emotional intensities of the paraphrases in fine grain following smooth variations in affective dimensions while preserving the meanings of the originals. We propose a framework for addressing this task by fine-tuning text-to-text Transformers through multi-task training. We enhance several widely used paraphrasing corpus by annotating the input and target texts with their fine-grained emotion labels. With these labels, fine-tuning text-to-text Transformers on these corpus entails multi-task training. Evaluations of the fine-tuned Transformers on separate test sets show that including fine-grained emotion labels in the paraphrase task significantly improve the chance of obtaining high-quality paraphrases of the desired emotions, i.e., more than doubling the number of exact matches of desired emotions while achieving consistently better scores in paraphrase metrics such as BLEU, ROGUE, and METEOR.
Edge Impulse: An MLOps Platform for Tiny Machine Learning
Authors: Shawn Hymel, Colby Banbury, Daniel Situnayake, Alex Elium, Carl Ward, Mat Kelcey, Mathijs Baaijens, Mateusz Majchrzycki, Jenny Plunkett, David Tischler, Alessandro Grande, Louis Moreau, Dmitry Maslov, Artie Beavis, Jan Jongboom, Vijay Janapa Reddi
Date: 2022-11-02 00:00:00

Edge Impulse is a cloud-based machine learning operations (MLOps) platform for developing embedded and edge ML (TinyML) systems that can be deployed to a wide range of hardware targets. Current TinyML workflows are plagued by fragmented software stacks and heterogeneous deployment hardware, making ML model optimizations difficult and unportable. We present Edge Impulse, a practical MLOps platform for developing TinyML systems at scale. Edge Impulse addresses these challenges and streamlines the TinyML design cycle by supporting various software and hardware optimizations to create an extensible and portable software stack for a multitude of embedded systems. As of Oct. 2022, Edge Impulse hosts 118,185 projects from 50,953 developers.
A Stochastic Lomax Diffusion Process: Statistical Inference and Application
Authors: Ahmed Nafidi, Ilyasse Makroz, Ramón Gutiérrez Sánchez
Date: 2021-01-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Mathematics 2021 1
Tasks: parameter estimation

In this paper, we discuss a new stochastic diffusion process in which the trend function is proportional to the Lomax density function. This distribution arises naturally in the studies of the frequency of extremely rare events. We first consider the probabilistic characteristics of the proposed model, including its analytic expression as the unique solution to a stochastic differential equation, the transition probability density function together with the conditional and unconditional trend functions. Then, we present a method to address the problem of parameter estimation using maximum likelihood with discrete sampling. This estimation requires the solution of a non-linear equation, which is achieved via the simulated annealing method. Finally, we apply the proposed model to a real-world example concerning adolescent fertility rate in Morocco.
Implementation of CNN based COVID-19 classification model from CT images
Authors: Atakan Kaya, Kubilay Atas, Indrit Myderrizi
Date: 2021-03-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: Conference 2021 3
Tasks: Data Augmentation

The number of COVID-19 patients around the globe is increasing day by day. Statistics show that even after almost 10 months from outbreak, number of the total patients has not reached to its peak value yet. Easy spreading of the virus among people causes high number of patients at the same time. Accelerating the reduction in spread is of vital importance. In order to achieve this reduction, early diagnosis of the disease and the number of tests and scans to be performed frequently becomes important. In this paper, a comprehensive model examination is made to overcome COVID-19 diagnosing problem. Using CT images, data augmentation technique is applied first in the pre-processing section and then pre-trained deep CNN networks perform the classification. The model is tested using various networks and high accuracy results of 96.5% and 97.9% are obtained for VGG-16 and EfficientNetB3 networks, respectively.
Graph Matching with Bi-level Noisy Correspondence
Authors: Yijie Lin, Mouxing Yang, Jun Yu, Peng Hu, Changqing Zhang, Xi Peng
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Learning, Graph Matching

In this paper, we study a novel and widely existing problem in graph matching (GM), namely, Bi-level Noisy Correspondence (BNC), which refers to node-level noisy correspondence (NNC) and edge-level noisy correspondence (ENC). In brief, on the one hand, due to the poor recognizability and viewpoint differences between images, it is inevitable to inaccurately annotate some keypoints with offset and confusion, leading to the mismatch between two associated nodes, i.e., NNC. On the other hand, the noisy node-to-node correspondence will further contaminate the edge-to-edge correspondence, thus leading to ENC. For the BNC challenge, we propose a novel method termed Contrastive Matching with Momentum Distillation. Specifically, the proposed method is with a robust quadratic contrastive loss which enjoys the following merits: i) better exploring the node-to-node and edge-to-edge correlations through a GM customized quadratic contrastive learning paradigm; ii) adaptively penalizing the noisy assignments based on the confidence estimated by the momentum teacher. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the robustness of our model compared with 12 competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/2023-ICCV-COMMON.
GreenEyes: An Air Quality Evaluating Model based on WaveNet
Authors: Kan Huang, Kai Zhang, Ming Liu
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00

Accompanying rapid industrialization, humans are suffering from serious air pollution problems. The demand for air quality prediction is becoming more and more important to the government's policy-making and people's daily life. In this paper, We propose GreenEyes -- a deep neural network model, which consists of a WaveNet-based backbone block for learning representations of sequences and an LSTM with a Temporal Attention module for capturing the hidden interactions between features of multi-channel inputs. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we carry out several experiments including an ablation study on our collected and preprocessed air quality data near HKUST. The experimental results show our model can effectively predict the air quality level of the next timestamp given any segment of the air quality data from the data set. We have also released our standalone dataset at https://github.com/AI-Huang/IAQI_Dataset The model and code for this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-Huang/AirEvaluation
VideoDex: Learning Dexterity from Internet Videos
Authors: Kenneth Shaw, Shikhar Bahl, Deepak Pathak
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00

To build general robotic agents that can operate in many environments, it is often imperative for the robot to collect experience in the real world. However, this is often not feasible due to safety, time, and hardware restrictions. We thus propose leveraging the next best thing as real-world experience: internet videos of humans using their hands. Visual priors, such as visual features, are often learned from videos, but we believe that more information from videos can be utilized as a stronger prior. We build a learning algorithm, VideoDex, that leverages visual, action, and physical priors from human video datasets to guide robot behavior. These actions and physical priors in the neural network dictate the typical human behavior for a particular robot task. We test our approach on a robot arm and dexterous hand-based system and show strong results on various manipulation tasks, outperforming various state-of-the-art methods. Videos at https://video-dex.github.io
SINE: SINgle Image Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhixing Zhang, Ligong Han, Arnab Ghosh, Dimitris Metaxas, Jian Ren
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image Generation

Recent works on diffusion models have demonstrated a strong capability for conditioning image generation, e.g., text-guided image synthesis. Such success inspires many efforts trying to use large-scale pre-trained diffusion models for tackling a challenging problem--real image editing. Works conducted in this area learn a unique textual token corresponding to several images containing the same object. However, under many circumstances, only one image is available, such as the painting of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. Using existing works on fine-tuning the pre-trained diffusion models with a single image causes severe overfitting issues. The information leakage from the pre-trained diffusion models makes editing can not keep the same content as the given image while creating new features depicted by the language guidance. This work aims to address the problem of single-image editing. We propose a novel model-based guidance built upon the classifier-free guidance so that the knowledge from the model trained on a single image can be distilled into the pre-trained diffusion model, enabling content creation even with one given image. Additionally, we propose a patch-based fine-tuning that can effectively help the model generate images of arbitrary resolution. We provide extensive experiments to validate the design choices of our approach and show promising editing capabilities, including changing style, content addition, and object manipulation. The code is available for research purposes at https://github.com/zhang-zx/SINE.git .
A New Linear Scaling Rule for Private Adaptive Hyperparameter Optimization
Authors: Ashwinee Panda, Xinyu Tang, Saeed Mahloujifar, Vikash Sehwag, Prateek Mittal
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization, Image Classification

An open problem in differentially private deep learning is hyperparameter optimization (HPO). DP-SGD introduces new hyperparameters and complicates existing ones, forcing researchers to painstakingly tune hyperparameters with hundreds of trials, which in turn makes it impossible to account for the privacy cost of HPO without destroying the utility. We propose an adaptive HPO method that uses cheap trials (in terms of privacy cost and runtime) to estimate optimal hyperparameters and scales them up. We obtain state-of-the-art performance on 22 benchmark tasks, across computer vision and natural language processing, across pretraining and finetuning, across architectures and a wide range of $\varepsilon \in [0.01,8.0]$, all while accounting for the privacy cost of HPO.
General-Purpose In-Context Learning by Meta-Learning Transformers
Authors: Louis Kirsch, James Harrison, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Luke Metz
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Inductive Bias, Meta-Learning

Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock greater capabilities with less manual effort. One particularly ambitious goal of meta-learning is to train general-purpose in-context learning algorithms from scratch, using only black-box models with minimal inductive bias. Such a model takes in training data, and produces test-set predictions across a wide range of problems, without any explicit definition of an inference model, training loss, or optimization algorithm. In this paper we show that Transformers and other black-box models can be meta-trained to act as general-purpose in-context learners. We characterize transitions between algorithms that generalize, algorithms that memorize, and algorithms that fail to meta-train at all, induced by changes in model size, number of tasks, and meta-optimization. We further show that the capabilities of meta-trained algorithms are bottlenecked by the accessible state size (memory) determining the next prediction, unlike standard models which are thought to be bottlenecked by parameter count. Finally, we propose practical interventions such as biasing the training distribution that improve the meta-training and meta-generalization of general-purpose in-context learning algorithms.
Mining Explainable Predictive Features for Water Quality Management
Authors: Conor Muldoon, Levent Görgü, John J. O'Sullivan, Wim G. Meijer, Gregory M. P. O'Hare
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

With water quality management processes, identifying and interpreting relationships between features, such as location and weather variable tuples, and water quality variables, such as levels of bacteria, is key to gaining insights and identifying areas where interventions should be made. There is a need for a search process to identify the locations and types of phenomena that are influencing water quality and a need to explain how the quality is being affected and which factors are most relevant. This paper addresses both of these issues. A process is developed for collecting data for features that represent a variety of variables over a spatial region and which are used for training models and inference. An analysis of the performance of the features is undertaken using the models and Shapley values. Shapley values originated in cooperative game theory and can be used to aid in the interpretation of machine learning results. Evaluations are performed using several machine learning algorithms and water quality data from the Dublin Grand Canal basin.
OFASys: A Multi-Modal Multi-Task Learning System for Building Generalist Models
Authors: Jinze Bai, Rui Men, Hao Yang, Xuancheng Ren, Kai Dang, Yichang Zhang, Xiaohuan Zhou, Peng Wang, Sinan Tan, An Yang, Zeyu Cui, Yu Han, Shuai Bai, Wenbin Ge, Jianxin Ma, Junyang Lin, Jingren Zhou, Chang Zhou
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Generalist models, which are capable of performing diverse multi-modal tasks in a task-agnostic way within a single model, have been explored recently. Being, hopefully, an alternative to approaching general-purpose AI, existing generalist models are still at an early stage, where modality and task coverage is limited. To empower multi-modal task-scaling and speed up this line of research, we release a generalist model learning system, OFASys, built on top of a declarative task interface named multi-modal instruction. At the core of OFASys is the idea of decoupling multi-modal task representations from the underlying model implementations. In OFASys, a task involving multiple modalities can be defined declaratively even with just a single line of code. The system automatically generates task plans from such instructions for training and inference. It also facilitates multi-task training for diverse multi-modal workloads. As a starting point, we provide presets of 7 different modalities and 23 highly-diverse example tasks in OFASys, with which we also develop a first-in-kind, single model, OFA+, that can handle text, image, speech, video, and motion data. The single OFA+ model achieves 95% performance in average with only 16% parameters of 15 task-finetuned models, showcasing the performance reliability of multi-modal task-scaling provided by OFASys. Available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/OFASys
A Rubric for Human-like Agents and NeuroAI
Authors: Ida Momennejad
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00

Researchers across cognitive, neuro-, and computer sciences increasingly reference human-like artificial intelligence and neuroAI. However, the scope and use of the terms are often inconsistent. Contributed research ranges widely from mimicking behaviour, to testing machine learning methods as neurally plausible hypotheses at the cellular or functional levels, or solving engineering problems. However, it cannot be assumed nor expected that progress on one of these three goals will automatically translate to progress in others. Here a simple rubric is proposed to clarify the scope of individual contributions, grounded in their commitments to human-like behaviour, neural plausibility, or benchmark/engineering goals. This is clarified using examples of weak and strong neuroAI and human-like agents, and discussing the generative, corroborate, and corrective ways in which the three dimensions interact with one another. The author maintains that future progress in artificial intelligence will need strong interactions across the disciplines, with iterative feedback loops and meticulous validity tests, leading to both known and yet-unknown advances that may span decades to come.
BEVBert: Multimodal Map Pre-training for Language-guided Navigation
Authors: Dong An, Yuankai Qi, Yangguang Li, Yan Huang, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan, Jing Shao
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Vision and Language Navigation, Visual Navigation

Large-scale pre-training has shown promising results on the vision-and-language navigation (VLN) task. However, most existing pre-training methods employ discrete panoramas to learn visual-textual associations. This requires the model to implicitly correlate incomplete, duplicate observations within the panoramas, which may impair an agent's spatial understanding. Thus, we propose a new map-based pre-training paradigm that is spatial-aware for use in VLN. Concretely, we build a local metric map to explicitly aggregate incomplete observations and remove duplicates, while modeling navigation dependency in a global topological map. This hybrid design can balance the demand of VLN for both short-term reasoning and long-term planning. Then, based on the hybrid map, we devise a pre-training framework to learn a multimodal map representation, which enhances spatial-aware cross-modal reasoning thereby facilitating the language-guided navigation goal. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the map-based pre-training route for VLN, and the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on four VLN benchmarks.
Alleviating neighbor bias: augmenting graph self-supervise learning with structural equivalent positive samples
Authors: Jiawei Zhu, Mei Hong, Ronghua Du, Haifeng Li
Date: 2022-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Node Classification, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

In recent years, using a self-supervised learning framework to learn the general characteristics of graphs has been considered a promising paradigm for graph representation learning. The core of self-supervised learning strategies for graph neural networks lies in constructing suitable positive sample selection strategies. However, existing GNNs typically aggregate information from neighboring nodes to update node representations, leading to an over-reliance on neighboring positive samples, i.e., homophilous samples; while ignoring long-range positive samples, i.e., positive samples that are far apart on the graph but structurally equivalent samples, a problem we call "neighbor bias." This neighbor bias can reduce the generalization performance of GNNs. In this paper, we argue that the generalization properties of GNNs should be determined by combining homogeneous samples and structurally equivalent samples, which we call the "GC combination hypothesis." Therefore, we propose a topological signal-driven self-supervised method. It uses a topological information-guided structural equivalence sampling strategy. First, we extract multiscale topological features using persistent homology. Then we compute the structural equivalence of node pairs based on their topological features. In particular, we design a topological loss function to pull in non-neighboring node pairs with high structural equivalence in the representation space to alleviate neighbor bias. Finally, we use the joint training mechanism to adjust the effect of structural equivalence on the model to fit datasets with different characteristics. We conducted experiments on the node classification task across seven graph datasets. The results show that the model performance can be effectively improved using a strategy of topological signal enhancement.