pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Aquarium: A Comprehensive Framework for Exploring Predator-Prey Dynamics through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors: Michael Kölle, Yannick Erpelding, Fabian Ritz, Thomy Phan, Steffen Illium, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Recent advances in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning have prompted the modeling of intricate interactions between agents in simulated environments. In particular, the predator-prey dynamics have captured substantial interest and various simulations been tailored to unique requirements. To prevent further time-intensive developments, we introduce Aquarium, a comprehensive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning environment for predator-prey interaction, enabling the study of emergent behavior. Aquarium is open source and offers a seamless integration of the PettingZoo framework, allowing a quick start with proven algorithm implementations. It features physics-based agent movement on a two-dimensional, edge-wrapping plane. The agent-environment interaction (observations, actions, rewards) and the environment settings (agent speed, prey reproduction, predator starvation, and others) are fully customizable. Besides a resource-efficient visualization, Aquarium supports to record video files, providing a visual comprehension of agent behavior. To demonstrate the environment's capabilities, we conduct preliminary studies which use PPO to train multiple prey agents to evade a predator. In accordance to the literature, we find Individual Learning to result in worse performance than Parameter Sharing, which significantly improves coordination and sample-efficiency.
A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Directed Quantum Circuit Synthesis
Authors: Michael Kölle, Tom Schubert, Philipp Altmann, Maximilian Zorn, Jonas Stein, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

With recent advancements in quantum computing technology, optimizing quantum circuits and ensuring reliable quantum state preparation have become increasingly vital. Traditional methods often demand extensive expertise and manual calculations, posing challenges as quantum circuits grow in qubit- and gate-count. Therefore, harnessing machine learning techniques to handle the growing variety of gate-to-qubit combinations is a promising approach. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive reinforcement learning environment for quantum circuit synthesis, where circuits are constructed utilizing gates from the the Clifford+T gate set to prepare specific target states. Our experiments focus on exploring the relationship between the depth of synthesized quantum circuits and the circuit depths used for target initialization, as well as qubit count. We organize the environment configurations into multiple evaluation levels and include a range of well-known quantum states for benchmarking purposes. We also lay baselines for evaluating the environment using Proximal Policy Optimization. By applying the trained agents to benchmark tests, we demonstrated their ability to reliably design minimal quantum circuits for a selection of 2-qubit Bell states.
COIN: Chance-Constrained Imitation Learning for Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Resource Oversubscription Policy
Authors: Lu Wang, Mayukh Das, Fangkai Yang, Chao Duo, Bo Qiao, Hang Dong, Si Qin, Chetan Bansal, QIngwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Management

We address the challenge of learning safe and robust decision policies in presence of uncertainty in context of the real scientific problem of adaptive resource oversubscription to enhance resource efficiency while ensuring safety against resource congestion risk. Traditional supervised prediction or forecasting models are ineffective in learning adaptive policies whereas standard online optimization or reinforcement learning is difficult to deploy on real systems. Offline methods such as imitation learning (IL) are ideal since we can directly leverage historical resource usage telemetry. But, the underlying aleatoric uncertainty in such telemetry is a critical bottleneck. We solve this with our proposed novel chance-constrained imitation learning framework, which ensures implicit safety against uncertainty in a principled manner via a combination of stochastic (chance) constraints on resource congestion risk and ensemble value functions. This leads to substantial ($\approx 3-4\times$) improvement in resource efficiency and safety in many oversubscription scenarios, including resource management in cloud services.
Quantum Advantage Actor-Critic for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Michael Kölle, Mohamad Hgog, Fabian Ritz, Philipp Altmann, Maximilian Zorn, Jonas Stein, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Quantum computing offers efficient encapsulation of high-dimensional states. In this work, we propose a novel quantum reinforcement learning approach that combines the Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm with variational quantum circuits by substituting parts of the classical components. This approach addresses reinforcement learning's scalability concerns while maintaining high performance. We empirically test multiple quantum Advantage Actor-Critic configurations with the well known Cart Pole environment to evaluate our approach in control tasks with continuous state spaces. Our results indicate that the hybrid strategy of using either a quantum actor or quantum critic with classical post-processing yields a substantial performance increase compared to pure classical and pure quantum variants with similar parameter counts. They further reveal the limits of current quantum approaches due to the hardware constraints of noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers, suggesting further research to scale hybrid approaches for larger and more complex control tasks.
GEML: A Grammar-based Evolutionary Machine Learning Approach for Design-Pattern Detection
Authors: Rafael Barbudo, Aurora Ramírez, Francisco Servant, José Raúl Romero
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00

Design patterns (DPs) are recognised as a good practice in software development. However, the lack of appropriate documentation often hampers traceability, and their benefits are blurred among thousands of lines of code. Automatic methods for DP detection have become relevant but are usually based on the rigid analysis of either software metrics or specific properties of the source code. We propose GEML, a novel detection approach based on evolutionary machine learning using software properties of diverse nature. Firstly, GEML makes use of an evolutionary algorithm to extract those characteristics that better describe the DP, formulated in terms of human-readable rules, whose syntax is conformant with a context-free grammar. Secondly, a rule-based classifier is built to predict whether new code contains a hidden DP implementation. GEML has been validated over five DPs taken from a public repository recurrently adopted by machine learning studies. Then, we increase this number up to 15 diverse DPs, showing its effectiveness and robustness in terms of detection capability. An initial parameter study served to tune a parameter setup whose performance guarantees the general applicability of this approach without the need to adjust complex parameters to a specific pattern. Finally, a demonstration tool is also provided.
xCoT: Cross-lingual Instruction Tuning for Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Tao Sun, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Xiannian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, Tongliang Li, Qiyao Peng, Zhoujun Li
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a powerful technique to elicit reasoning in large language models and improve a variety of downstream tasks. CoT mainly demonstrates excellent performance in English, but its usage in low-resource languages is constrained due to poor language generalization. To bridge the gap among different languages, we propose a cross-lingual instruction fine-tuning framework (xCOT) to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. Specifically, the multilingual instruction training data (xCOT-INSTRUCT) is created to encourage the semantic alignment of multiple languages. We introduce cross-lingual in-context few-shot learning (xICL)) to accelerate multilingual agreement in instruction tuning, where some fragments of source languages in examples are randomly substituted by their counterpart translations of target languages. During multilingual instruction tuning, we adopt the randomly online CoT strategy to enhance the multilingual reasoning ability of the large language model by first translating the query to another language and then answering in English. To further facilitate the language transfer, we leverage the high-resource CoT to supervise the training of low-resource languages with cross-lingual distillation. Experimental results on previous benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of xCoT in reducing the gap among different languages, highlighting its potential to reduce the cross-lingual gap.
Code Security Vulnerability Repair Using Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models
Authors: Nafis Tanveer Islam, Mohammad Bahrami Karkevandi, Peyman Najafirad
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Code Repair, reinforcement-learning

With the recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), generating functionally correct code has become less complicated for a wide array of developers. While using LLMs has sped up the functional development process, it poses a heavy risk to code security. Code generation with proper security measures using LLM is a significantly more challenging task than functional code generation. Security measures may include adding a pair of lines of code with the original code, consisting of null pointer checking or prepared statements for SQL injection prevention. Currently, available code repair LLMs generate code repair by supervised fine-tuning, where the model looks at cross-entropy loss. However, the original and repaired codes are mostly similar in functionality and syntactically, except for a few (1-2) lines, which act as security measures. This imbalance between the lines needed for security measures and the functional code enforces the supervised fine-tuned model to prioritize generating functional code without adding proper security measures, which also benefits the model by resulting in minimal loss. Therefore, in this work, for security hardening and strengthening of generated code from LLMs, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method for program-specific repair with the combination of semantic and syntactic reward mechanisms that focus heavily on adding security and functional measures in the code, respectively.
Edge-Enabled Anomaly Detection and Information Completion for Social Network Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Fan Lu, Quan Qi, Huaibin Qin
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Edge-computing, Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs, Lightweight Deployment

In the rapidly advancing information era, various human behaviors are being precisely recorded in the form of data, including identity information, criminal records, and communication data. Law enforcement agencies can effectively maintain social security and precisely combat criminal activities by analyzing the aforementioned data. In comparison to traditional data analysis methods, deep learning models, relying on the robust computational power in cloud centers, exhibit higher accuracy in extracting data features and inferring data. However, within the architecture of cloud centers, the transmission of data from end devices introduces significant latency, hindering real-time inference of data. Furthermore, low-latency edge computing architectures face limitations in direct deployment due to relatively weak computing and storage capacities of nodes. To address these challenges, a lightweight distributed knowledge graph completion architecture is proposed. Firstly, we introduce a lightweight distributed knowledge graph completion architecture that utilizes knowledge graph embedding for data analysis. Subsequently, to filter out substandard data, a personnel data quality assessment method named PDQA is proposed. Lastly, we present a model pruning algorithm that significantly reduces the model size while maximizing performance, enabling lightweight deployment. In experiments, we compare the effects of 11 advanced models on completing the knowledge graph of public security personnel information. The results indicate that the RotatE model outperforms other models significantly in knowledge graph completion, with the pruned model size reduced by 70\%, and hits@10 reaching 86.97\%.}
Weak Labeling for Cropland Mapping in Africa
Authors: Gilles Quentin Hacheme, Akram Zaytar, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Caleb Robinson, Rahul Dodhia, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Stephen Wood
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Cropland mapping can play a vital role in addressing environmental, agricultural, and food security challenges. However, in the context of Africa, practical applications are often hindered by the limited availability of high-resolution cropland maps. Such maps typically require extensive human labeling, thereby creating a scalability bottleneck. To address this, we propose an approach that utilizes unsupervised object clustering to refine existing weak labels, such as those obtained from global cropland maps. The refined labels, in conjunction with sparse human annotations, serve as training data for a semantic segmentation network designed to identify cropland areas. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the benefits of the improved weak labels generated by our method. In a scenario where we train our model with only 33 human-annotated labels, the F_1 score for the cropland category increases from 0.53 to 0.84 when we add the mined negative labels.
Joint Extraction of Uyghur Medicine Knowledge with Edge Computing
Authors: Fan Lu, Quan Qi, Huaibin Qin
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Medical knowledge extraction methods based on edge computing deploy deep learning models on edge devices to achieve localized entity and relation extraction. This approach avoids transferring substantial sensitive data to cloud data centers, effectively safeguarding the privacy of healthcare services. However, existing relation extraction methods mainly employ a sequential pipeline approach, which classifies relations between determined entities after entity recognition. This mode faces challenges such as error propagation between tasks, insufficient consideration of dependencies between the two subtasks, and the neglect of interrelations between different relations within a sentence. To address these challenges, a joint extraction model with parameter sharing in edge computing is proposed, named CoEx-Bert. This model leverages shared parameterization between two models to jointly extract entities and relations. Specifically, CoEx-Bert employs two models, each separately sharing hidden layer parameters, and combines these two loss functions for joint backpropagation to optimize the model parameters. Additionally, it effectively resolves the issue of entity overlapping when extracting knowledge from unstructured Uyghur medical texts by considering contextual relations. Finally, this model is deployed on edge devices for real-time extraction and inference of Uyghur medical knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that CoEx-Bert outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracy, recall, and F1 scores of 90.65\%, 92.45\%, and 91.54\%, respectively, in the Uyghur traditional medical literature dataset. These improvements represent a 6.45\% increase in accuracy, a 9.45\% increase in recall, and a 7.95\% increase in F1 score compared to the baseline.
Progressive Feature Fusion Network for Enhancing Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Kaiqun Wu, Xiaoling Jiang, Rui Yu, Yonggang Luo, Tian Jiang, Xi Wu, Peng Wei
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Image Quality Assessment

Image compression has been applied in the fields of image storage and video broadcasting. However, it's formidably tough to distinguish the subtle quality differences between those distorted images generated by different algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new image quality assessment framework to decide which image is better in an image group. To capture the subtle differences, a fine-grained network is adopted to acquire multi-scale features. Subsequently, we design a cross subtract block for separating and gathering the information within positive and negative image pairs. Enabling image comparison in feature space. After that, a progressive feature fusion block is designed, which fuses multi-scale features in a novel progressive way. Hierarchical spatial 2D features can thus be processed gradually. Experimental results show that compared with the current mainstream image quality assessment methods, the proposed network can achieve more accurate image quality assessment and ranks second in the benchmark of CLIC in the image perceptual model track.
Singing the Body Electric: The Impact of Robot Embodiment on User Expectations
Authors: Nathaniel Dennler, Stefanos Nikolaidis, Maja Matarić
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00

Users develop mental models of robots to conceptualize what kind of interactions they can have with those robots. The conceptualizations are often formed before interactions with the robot and are based only on observing the robot's physical design. As a result, understanding conceptualizations formed from physical design is necessary to understand how users intend to interact with the robot. We propose to use multimodal features of robot embodiments to predict what kinds of expectations users will have about a given robot's social and physical capabilities. We show that using such features provides information about general mental models of the robots that generalize across socially interactive robots. We describe how these models can be incorporated into interaction design and physical design for researchers working with socially interactive robots.
CHAMP: A Competition-level Dataset for Fine-Grained Analyses of LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning Capabilities
Authors: Yujun Mao, Yoon Kim, Yilun Zhou
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown indications of mathematical reasoning ability on challenging competition-level problems, especially with self-generated verbalizations of intermediate reasoning steps (i.e., chain-of-thought prompting). However, current evaluations mainly focus on the end-to-end final answer correctness, and it is unclear whether LLMs can make use of helpful side information such as problem-specific hints. In this paper, we propose a challenging benchmark dataset for enabling such analyses. The Concept and Hint-Annotated Math Problems (CHAMP) consists of high school math competition problems, annotated with concepts, or general math facts, and hints, or problem-specific tricks. These annotations allow us to explore the effects of additional information, such as relevant hints, misleading concepts, or related problems. This benchmark is difficult, with the best model only scoring 58.1% in standard settings. With concepts and hints, performance sometimes improves, indicating that some models can make use of such side information. Furthermore, we annotate model-generated solutions for their correctness. Using this corpus, we find that models often arrive at the correct final answer through wrong reasoning steps. In addition, we test whether models are able to verify these solutions, and find that most models struggle.
Transformer for Object Re-Identification: A Survey
Authors: Mang Ye, Shuoyi Chen, Chenyue Li, Wei-Shi Zheng, David Crandall, Bo Du
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Survey

Object Re-identification (Re-ID) aims to identify specific objects across different times and scenes, which is a widely researched task in computer vision. For a prolonged period, this field has been predominantly driven by deep learning technology based on convolutional neural networks. In recent years, the emergence of Vision Transformers has spurred a growing number of studies delving deeper into Transformer-based Re-ID, continuously breaking performance records and witnessing significant progress in the Re-ID field. Offering a powerful, flexible, and unified solution, Transformers cater to a wide array of Re-ID tasks with unparalleled efficacy. This paper provides a comprehensive review and in-depth analysis of the Transformer-based Re-ID. In categorizing existing works into Image/Video-Based Re-ID, Re-ID with limited data/annotations, Cross-Modal Re-ID, and Special Re-ID Scenarios, we thoroughly elucidate the advantages demonstrated by the Transformer in addressing a multitude of challenges across these domains. Considering the trending unsupervised Re-ID, we propose a new Transformer baseline, UntransReID, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both single/cross modal tasks. For the under-explored animal Re-ID, we devise a standardized experimental benchmark and conduct extensive experiments to explore the applicability of Transformer for this task and facilitate future research. Finally, we discuss some important yet under-investigated open issues in the large foundation model era, we believe it will serve as a new handbook for researchers in this field. A periodically updated website will be available at https://github.com/mangye16/ReID-Survey.
Reinforcement Learning for Scalable Train Timetable Rescheduling with Graph Representation
Authors: Peng Yue, Yaochu Jin, Xuewu Dai, ZhenHua Feng, Dongliang Cui
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Train timetable rescheduling (TTR) aims to promptly restore the original operation of trains after unexpected disturbances or disruptions. Currently, this work is still done manually by train dispatchers, which is challenging to maintain performance under various problem instances. To mitigate this issue, this study proposes a reinforcement learning-based approach to TTR, which makes the following contributions compared to existing work. First, we design a simple directed graph to represent the TTR problem, enabling the automatic extraction of informative states through graph neural networks. Second, we reformulate the construction process of TTR's solution, not only decoupling the decision model from the problem size but also ensuring the generated scheme's feasibility. Third, we design a learning curriculum for our model to handle the scenarios with different levels of delay. Finally, a simple local search method is proposed to assist the learned decision model, which can significantly improve solution quality with little additional computation cost, further enhancing the practical value of our method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The learned decision model can achieve better performance for various problems with varying degrees of train delay and different scales when compared to handcrafted rules and state-of-the-art solvers.