pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Level Aggregation and Recursive Alignment Architecture for Efficient Parallel Inference Segmentation Network
Authors: Yanhua Zhang, Ke Zhang, Jingyu Wang, Yulin Wu, Wuwei Wang
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Real-Time Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Real-time semantic segmentation is a crucial research for real-world applications. However, many methods lay particular emphasis on reducing the computational complexity and model size, while largely sacrificing the accuracy. To tackle this problem, we propose a parallel inference network customized for semantic segmentation tasks to achieve a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. We employ a shallow backbone to ensure real-time speed, and propose three core components to compensate for the reduced model capacity to improve accuracy. Specifically, we first design a dual-pyramidal path architecture (Multi-level Feature Aggregation Module, MFAM) to aggregate multi-level features from the encoder to each scale, providing hierarchical clues for subsequent spatial alignment and corresponding in-network inference. Then, we build Recursive Alignment Module (RAM) by combining the flow-based alignment module with recursive upsampling architecture for accurate spatial alignment between multi-scale feature maps with half the computational complexity of the straightforward alignment method. Finally, we perform independent parallel inference on the aligned features to obtain multi-scale scores, and adaptively fuse them through an attention-based Adaptive Scores Fusion Module (ASFM) so that the final prediction can favor objects of multiple scales. Our framework shows a better balance between speed and accuracy than state-of-the-art real-time methods on Cityscapes and CamVid datasets. We also conducted systematic ablation studies to gain insight into our motivation and architectural design. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yanhua-Zhang/MFARANet.
SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking
Authors: Atharva Kulkarni, Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Hong Yu, Shruti Bhargava
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: All, dialog state tracking, Few-Shot Learning, In-Context Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

In-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising avenue of research in Dialog State Tracking (DST). However, the best-performing in-context learning methods involve retrieving and adding similar examples to the prompt, requiring access to labeled training data. Procuring such training data for a wide range of domains and applications is time-consuming, expensive, and, at times, infeasible. While zero-shot learning requires no training data, it significantly lags behind the few-shot setup. Thus, `\textit{Can we efficiently generate synthetic data for any dialogue schema to enable few-shot prompting?}' Addressing this question, we propose \method, a data generation framework tailored for DST, utilizing LLMs. Our approach only requires the dialogue schema and a few hand-crafted dialogue templates to synthesize natural, coherent, and free-flowing dialogues with DST annotations. Few-shot learning using data from {\method} results in $4-5%$ improvement in Joint Goal Accuracy over the zero-shot baseline on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4. Remarkably, our few-shot learning approach recovers nearly $98%$ of the performance compared to the few-shot setup using human-annotated training data. Our synthetic data and code can be accessed at https://github.com/apple/ml-synthdst
InceptionCapsule: Inception-Resnet and CapsuleNet with self-attention for medical image Classification
Authors: Elham Sadeghnezhad, Sajjad Salem
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification, Transfer Learning

Initial weighting is significant in deep neural networks because the random selection of weights produces different outputs and increases the probability of overfitting and underfitting. On the other hand, vector-based approaches to extract vector features need rich vectors for more accurate classification. The InceptionCapsule approach is presented to alleviate these two problems. This approach uses transfer learning and the Inception-ResNet model to avoid random selection of weights, which takes initial weights from ImageNet. It also uses the output of Inception middle layers to generate rich vectors. Extracted vectors are given to a capsule network for learning, which is equipped with an attention technique. Kvasir data and BUSI with the GT dataset were used to evaluate this approach. This model was able to achieve 97.62 accuracies in 5-class classification and also achieved 94.30 accuracies in 8-class classification on Kvasir. In the BUSI with GT dataset, the proposed approach achieved accuracy=98.88, Precision=95.34, and F1-score=93.74, which are acceptable results compared to other approaches in the literature.
Federated Learning with New Knowledge: Fundamentals, Advances, and Futures
Authors: Lixu Wang, Yang Zhao, Jiahua Dong, Ating Yin, Qinbin Li, Xiao Wang, Dusit Niyato, Qi Zhu
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving distributed learning approach that is rapidly developing in an era where privacy protection is increasingly valued. It is this rapid development trend, along with the continuous emergence of new demands for FL in the real world, that prompts us to focus on a very important problem: Federated Learning with New Knowledge. The primary challenge here is to effectively incorporate various new knowledge into existing FL systems and evolve these systems to reduce costs, extend their lifespan, and facilitate sustainable development. In this paper, we systematically define the main sources of new knowledge in FL, including new features, tasks, models, and algorithms. For each source, we thoroughly analyze and discuss how to incorporate new knowledge into existing FL systems and examine the impact of the form and timing of new knowledge arrival on the incorporation process. Furthermore, we comprehensively discuss the potential future directions for FL with new knowledge, considering a variety of factors such as scenario setups, efficiency, and security. There is also a continuously updating repository for this topic: https://github.com/conditionWang/FLNK.
MixedNUTS: Training-Free Accuracy-Robustness Balance via Nonlinearly Mixed Classifiers
Authors: Yatong Bai, Mo Zhou, Vishal M. Patel, Somayeh Sojoudi
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Robust classification

Adversarial robustness often comes at the cost of degraded accuracy, impeding real-life applications of robust classification models. Training-based solutions for better trade-offs are limited by incompatibilities with already-trained high-performance large models, necessitating the exploration of training-free ensemble approaches. Observing that robust models are more confident in correct predictions than in incorrect ones on clean and adversarial data alike, we speculate amplifying this "benign confidence property" can reconcile accuracy and robustness in an ensemble setting. To achieve so, we propose "MixedNUTS", a training-free method where the output logits of a robust classifier and a standard non-robust classifier are processed by nonlinear transformations with only three parameters, which are optimized through an efficient algorithm. MixedNUTS then converts the transformed logits into probabilities and mixes them as the overall output. On CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, experimental results with custom strong adaptive attacks demonstrate MixedNUTS's vastly improved accuracy and near-SOTA robustness -- it boosts CIFAR-100 clean accuracy by 7.86 points, sacrificing merely 0.87 points in robust accuracy.
Data Quality Matters: Suicide Intention Detection on Social Media Posts Using RoBERTa-CNN
Authors: Emily Lin, Jian Sun, Hsingyu Chen, Mohammad H. Mahoor
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Depression Detection, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

Suicide remains a pressing global health concern, necessitating innovative approaches for early detection and intervention. This paper focuses on identifying suicidal intentions in posts from the SuicideWatch subreddit by proposing a novel deep-learning approach that utilizes the state-of-the-art RoBERTa-CNN model. The robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) excels at capturing textual nuances and forming semantic relationships within the text. The remaining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) head enhances RoBERTa's capacity to discern critical patterns from extensive datasets. To evaluate RoBERTa-CNN, we conducted experiments on the Suicide and Depression Detection dataset, yielding promising results. For instance, RoBERTa-CNN achieves a mean accuracy of 98% with a standard deviation (STD) of 0.0009. Additionally, we found that data quality significantly impacts the training of a robust model. To improve data quality, we removed noise from the text data while preserving its contextual content through either manually cleaning or utilizing the OpenAI API.
XTSFormer: Cross-Temporal-Scale Transformer for Irregular-Time Event Prediction in Clinical Applications
Authors: Tingsong Xiao, Zelin Xu, Wenchong He, Zhengkun Xiao, Yupu Zhang, Zibo Liu, Shigang Chen, My T. Thai, Jiang Bian, Parisa Rashidi, Zhe Jiang
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Processes

Adverse clinical events related to unsafe care are among the top ten causes of death in the U.S. Accurate modeling and prediction of clinical events from electronic health records (EHRs) play a crucial role in patient safety enhancement. An example is modeling de facto care pathways that characterize common step-by-step plans for treatment or care. However, clinical event data pose several unique challenges, including the irregularity of time intervals between consecutive events, the existence of cycles, periodicity, multi-scale event interactions, and the high computational costs associated with long event sequences. Existing neural temporal point processes (TPPs) methods do not effectively capture the multi-scale nature of event interactions, which is common in many real-world clinical applications. To address these issues, we propose the cross-temporal-scale transformer (XTSFormer), specifically designed for irregularly timed event data. Our model consists of two vital components: a novel Feature-based Cycle-aware Time Positional Encoding (FCPE) that adeptly captures the cyclical nature of time, and a hierarchical multi-scale temporal attention mechanism, where different temporal scales are determined by a bottom-up clustering approach. Extensive experiments on several real-world EHR datasets show that our XTSFormer outperforms multiple baseline methods. The code is available at https://github.com/spatialdatasciencegroup/XTSFormer.
ExTTNet: A Deep Learning Algorithm for Extracting Table Texts from Invoice Images
Authors: Adem Akdoğan, Murat Kurt
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

In this work, product tables in invoices are obtained autonomously via a deep learning model, which is named as ExTTNet. Firstly, text is obtained from invoice images using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques. Tesseract OCR engine [37] is used for this process. Afterwards, the number of existing features is increased by using feature extraction methods to increase the accuracy. Labeling process is done according to whether each text obtained as a result of OCR is a table element or not. In this study, a multilayer artificial neural network model is used. The training has been carried out with an Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics card and taken $162$ minutes. As a result of the training, the F1 score is $0.92$.
Federated Learning with Differential Privacy
Authors: Adrien Banse, Jan Kreischer, Xavier Oliva i Jürgens
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL), as a type of distributed machine learning, is capable of significantly preserving client's private data from being shared among different parties. Nevertheless, private information can still be divulged by analyzing uploaded parameter weights from clients. In this report, we showcase our empirical benchmark of the effect of the number of clients and the addition of differential privacy (DP) mechanisms on the performance of the model on different types of data. Our results show that non-i.i.d and small datasets have the highest decrease in performance in a distributed and differentially private setting.
Machine Intelligence in Africa: a survey
Authors: Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Ali Traore, Sidy Danioko, Hamidou Tembine
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Ethics, Survey

In the last 5 years, the availability of large audio datasets in African countries has opened unlimited opportunities to build machine intelligence (MI) technologies that are closer to the people and speak, learn, understand, and do businesses in local languages, including for those who cannot read and write. Unfortunately, these audio datasets are not fully exploited by current MI tools, leaving several Africans out of MI business opportunities. Additionally, many state-of-the-art MI models are not culture-aware, and the ethics of their adoption indexes are questionable. The lack thereof is a major drawback in many applications in Africa. This paper summarizes recent developments in machine intelligence in Africa from a multi-layer multiscale and culture-aware ethics perspective, showcasing MI use cases in 54 African countries through 400 articles on MI research, industry, government actions, as well as uses in art, music, the informal economy, and small businesses in Africa. The survey also opens discussions on the reliability of MI rankings and indexes in the African continent as well as algorithmic definitions of unclear terms used in MI.
Diabetes detection using deep learning techniques with oversampling and feature augmentation
Authors: María Teresa García-Ordás, Carmen Benavides, José Alberto Benítez-Andrades, Héctor Alaiz-Moretón, Isaías García-Rodríguez
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Background and objective: Diabetes is a chronic pathology which is affecting more and more people over the years. It gives rise to a large number of deaths each year. Furthermore, many people living with the disease do not realize the seriousness of their health status early enough. Late diagnosis brings about numerous health problems and a large number of deaths each year so the development of methods for the early diagnosis of this pathology is essential. Methods: In this paper, a pipeline based on deep learning techniques is proposed to predict diabetic people. It includes data augmentation using a variational autoencoder (VAE), feature augmentation using an sparse autoencoder (SAE) and a convolutional neural network for classification. Pima Indians Diabetes Database, which takes into account information on the patients such as the number of pregnancies, glucose or insulin level, blood pressure or age, has been evaluated. Results: A 92.31% of accuracy was obtained when CNN classifier is trained jointly the SAE for featuring augmentation over a well balanced dataset. This means an increment of 3.17% of accuracy with respect the state-of-the-art. Conclusions: Using a full deep learning pipeline for data preprocessing and classification has demonstrate to be very promising in the diabetes detection field outperforming the state-of-the-art proposals.
Evolution Guided Generative Flow Networks
Authors: Zarif Ikram, Ling Pan, Dianbo Liu
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a family of probabilistic generative models that learn to sample compositional objects proportional to their rewards. One big challenge of GFlowNets is training them effectively when dealing with long time horizons and sparse rewards. To address this, we propose Evolution guided generative flow networks (EGFN), a simple but powerful augmentation to the GFlowNets training using Evolutionary algorithms (EA). Our method can work on top of any GFlowNets training objective, by training a set of agent parameters using EA, storing the resulting trajectories in the prioritized replay buffer, and training the GFlowNets agent using the stored trajectories. We present a thorough investigation over a wide range of toy and real-world benchmark tasks showing the effectiveness of our method in handling long trajectories and sparse rewards.
Sentiment analysis in non-fixed length audios using a Fully Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: María Teresa García-Ordás, Héctor Alaiz-Moretón, José Alberto Benítez-Andrades, Isaías García-Rodríguez, Oscar García-Olalla, Carmen Benavides
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

In this work, a sentiment analysis method that is capable of accepting audio of any length, without being fixed a priori, is proposed. Mel spectrogram and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are used as audio description methods and a Fully Convolutional Neural Network architecture is proposed as a classifier. The results have been validated using three well known datasets: EMODB, RAVDESS, and TESS. The results obtained were promising, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. Also, thanks to the fact that the proposed method admits audios of any size, it allows a sentiment analysis to be made in near real time, which is very interesting for a wide range of fields such as call centers, medical consultations, or financial brokers.
An Ontology-Based multi-domain model in Social Network Analysis: Experimental validation and case study
Authors: José Alberto Benítez-Andrades, Isaías García-Rodríguez, Carmen Benavides, Héctor Aláiz-Moretón, José Emilio Labra Gayo
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00

The use of social network theory and methods of analysis have been applied to different domains in recent years, including public health. The complete procedure for carrying out a social network analysis (SNA) is a time-consuming task that entails a series of steps in which the expert in social network analysis could make mistakes. This research presents a multi-domain knowledge model capable of automatically gathering data and carrying out different social network analyses in different domains, without errors and obtaining the same conclusions that an expert in SNA would obtain. The model is represented in an ontology called OntoSNAQA, which is made up of classes, properties and rules representing the domains of People, Questionnaires and Social Network Analysis. Besides the ontology itself, different rules are represented by SWRL and SPARQL queries. A Knowledge Based System was created using OntoSNAQA and applied to a real case study in order to show the advantages of the approach. Finally, the results of an SNA analysis obtained through the model were compared to those obtained from some of the most widely used SNA applications: UCINET, Pajek, Cytoscape and Gephi, to test and confirm the validity of the model.
Enhancing Cross-domain Link Prediction via Evolution Process Modeling
Authors: Xuanwen Huang, Wei Chow, Yize Zhu, Yang Wang, Ziwei Chai, Chunping Wang, Lei Chen, Yang Yang
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Link Prediction, Link Prediction, Prediction

This work proposes DyExpert, a dynamic graph model for cross-domain link prediction. It can explicitly model historical evolving processes to learn the evolution pattern of a specific downstream graph and subsequently make pattern-specific link predictions. DyExpert adopts a decode-only transformer and is capable of efficiently parallel training and inference by \textit{conditioned link generation} that integrates both evolution modeling and link prediction. DyExpert is trained by extensive dynamic graphs across diverse domains, comprising 6M dynamic edges. Extensive experiments on eight untrained graphs demonstrate that DyExpert achieves state-of-the-art performance in cross-domain link prediction. Compared to the advanced baseline under the same setting, DyExpert achieves an average of 11.40% improvement Average Precision across eight graphs. More impressive, it surpasses the fully supervised performance of 8 advanced baselines on 6 untrained graphs.
Vi(E)va LLM! A Conceptual Stack for Evaluating and Interpreting Generative AI-based Visualizations
Authors: Luca Podo, Muhammad Ishmal, Marco Angelini
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

The automatic generation of visualizations is an old task that, through the years, has shown more and more interest from the research and practitioner communities. Recently, large language models (LLM) have become an interesting option for supporting generative tasks related to visualization, demonstrating initial promising results. At the same time, several pitfalls, like the multiple ways of instructing an LLM to generate the desired result, the different perspectives leading the generation (code-based, image-based, grammar-based), and the presence of hallucinations even for the visualization generation task, make their usage less affordable than expected. Following similar initiatives for benchmarking LLMs, this paper copes with the problem of modeling the evaluation of a generated visualization through an LLM. We propose a theoretical evaluation stack, EvaLLM, that decomposes the evaluation effort in its atomic components, characterizes their nature, and provides an overview of how to implement and interpret them. We also designed and implemented an evaluation platform that provides a benchmarking resource for the visualization generation task. The platform supports automatic and manual scoring conducted by multiple assessors to support a fine-grained and semantic evaluation based on the EvaLLM stack. Two case studies on GPT3.5-turbo with Code Interpreter and Llama2-70-b models show the benefits of EvaLLM and illustrate interesting results on the current state-of-the-art LLM-generated visualizations.
Hierarchical Structure Enhances the Convergence and Generalizability of Linear Molecular Representation
Authors: Juan-Ni Wu, Tong Wang, Li-Juan Tang, Hai-Long Wu, Ru-Qin Yu
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: molecular representation

Language models demonstrate fundamental abilities in syntax, semantics, and reasoning, though their performance often depends significantly on the inputs they process. This study introduces TSIS (Simplified TSID) and its variants:TSISD (TSIS with Depth-First Search), TSISO (TSIS in Order), and TSISR (TSIS in Random), as integral components of the t-SMILES framework. These additions complete the framework's design, providing diverse approaches to molecular representation. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments employing deep generative models, including GPT, diffusion models, and reinforcement learning, the findings reveal that the hierarchical structure of t-SMILES is more straightforward to parse than initially anticipated. Furthermore, t-SMILES consistently outperforms other linear representations such as SMILES, SELFIES, and SAFE, demonstrating superior convergence speed and enhanced generalization capabilities.