pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Forecasting Auxiliary Energy Consumption for Electric Heavy-Duty Vehicles
Authors: Yuantao Fan, Zhenkan Wang, Sepideh Pashami, Slawomir Nowaczyk, Henrik Ydreskog
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Accurate energy consumption prediction is crucial for optimizing the operation of electric commercial heavy-duty vehicles, e.g., route planning for charging. Moreover, understanding why certain predictions are cast is paramount for such a predictive model to gain user trust and be deployed in practice. Since commercial vehicles operate differently as transportation tasks, ambient, and drivers vary, a heterogeneous population is expected when building an AI system for forecasting energy consumption. The dependencies between the input features and the target values are expected to also differ across sub-populations. One well-known example of such a statistical phenomenon is the Simpson paradox. In this paper, we illustrate that such a setting poses a challenge for existing XAI methods that produce global feature statistics, e.g. LIME or SHAP, causing them to yield misleading results. We demonstrate a potential solution by training multiple regression models on subsets of data. It not only leads to superior regression performance but also more relevant and consistent LIME explanations. Given that the employed groupings correspond to relevant sub-populations, the associations between the input features and the target values are consistent within each cluster but different across clusters. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that such splitting of a complex problem into simpler ones yields better regression performance and interpretability.
Unified Batch Normalization: Identifying and Alleviating the Feature Condensation in Batch Normalization and a Unified Framework
Authors: Shaobo Wang, Xiangdong Zhang, Dongrui Liu, Junchi Yan
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Batch Normalization (BN) has become an essential technique in contemporary neural network design, enhancing training stability. Specifically, BN employs centering and scaling operations to standardize features along the batch dimension and uses an affine transformation to recover features. Although standard BN has shown its capability to improve deep neural network training and convergence, it still exhibits inherent limitations in certain cases. Current enhancements to BN typically address only isolated aspects of its mechanism. In this work, we critically examine BN from a feature perspective, identifying feature condensation during BN as a detrimental factor to test performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a two-stage unified framework called Unified Batch Normalization (UBN). In the first stage, we employ a straightforward feature condensation threshold to mitigate condensation effects, thereby preventing improper updates of statistical norms. In the second stage, we unify various normalization variants to boost each component of BN. Our experimental results reveal that UBN significantly enhances performance across different visual backbones and different vision tasks, and notably expedites network training convergence, particularly in early training stages. Notably, our method improved about 3% in accuracy on ImageNet classification and 4% in mean average precision on both Object Detection and Instance Segmentation on COCO dataset, showing the effectiveness of our approach in real-world scenarios.
SPIN: Sparsifying and Integrating Internal Neurons in Large Language Models for Text Classification
Authors: Difan Jiao, Yilun Liu, Zhenwei Tang, Daniel Matter, Jürgen Pfeffer, Ashton Anderson
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Specificity, text-classification, Text Classification

Among the many tasks that Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized is text classification. Current text classification paradigms, however, rely solely on the output of the final layer in the LLM, with the rich information contained in internal neurons largely untapped. In this study, we present SPIN: a model-agnostic framework that sparsifies and integrates internal neurons of intermediate layers of LLMs for text classification. Specifically, SPIN sparsifies internal neurons by linear probing-based salient neuron selection layer by layer, avoiding noise from unrelated neurons and ensuring efficiency. The cross-layer salient neurons are then integrated to serve as multi-layered features for the classification head. Extensive experimental results show our proposed SPIN significantly improves text classification accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability.
Soil Organic Carbon Estimation from Climate-related Features with Graph Neural Network
Authors: Weiying Zhao, Natalia Efremova
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Management

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a pivotal role in the global carbon cycle, impacting climate dynamics and necessitating accurate estimation for sustainable land and agricultural management. While traditional methods of SOC estimation face resolution and accuracy challenges, recent technological solutions harness remote sensing, machine learning, and high-resolution satellite mapping. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), especially when integrated with positional encoders, can capture complex relationships between soil and climate. Using the LUCAS database, this study compared four GNN operators in the positional encoder framework. Results revealed that the PESAGE and PETransformer models outperformed others in SOC estimation, indicating their potential in capturing the complex relationship between SOC and climate features. Our findings confirm the feasibility of applications of GNN architectures in SOC prediction, establishing a framework for future explorations of this topic with more advanced GNN models.
Efficient Pre-training for Localized Instruction Generation of Videos
Authors: Anil Batra, Davide Moltisanti, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Marcus Rohrbach, Frank Keller
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00

Procedural videos, exemplified by recipe demonstrations, are instrumental in conveying step-by-step instructions. However, understanding such videos is challenging as it involves the precise localization of steps and the generation of textual instructions. Manually annotating steps and writing instructions is costly, which limits the size of current datasets and hinders effective learning. Leveraging large but noisy video-transcript datasets for pre-training can boost performance but demands significant computational resources. Furthermore, transcripts contain irrelevant content and differ in style from human-written instructions. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel technique, Sieve-&-Swap, to automatically generate high-quality training data for the recipe domain: (i) Sieve: filters irrelevant transcripts and (ii) Swap: acquires high-quality text by replacing transcripts with human-written instruction from a text-only recipe dataset. The resulting dataset is three orders of magnitude smaller than current web-scale datasets but enables efficient training of large-scale models. Alongside Sieve-&-Swap, we propose Procedure Transformer (ProcX), a model for end-to-end step localization and instruction generation for procedural videos. When pre-trained on our curated dataset, this model achieves state-of-the-art performance on YouCook2 and Tasty while using a fraction of the training data. We have released code and dataset.
Program Machine Policy: Addressing Long-Horizon Tasks by Integrating Program Synthesis and State Machines
Authors: Yu-an Lin, Chen-Tao Lee, Guan-Ting Liu, Pu-Jen Cheng, Shao-Hua Sun
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Program Synthesis

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) excels in various domains but lacks generalizability and interpretability. On the other hand, programmatic RL methods (Trivedi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023) reformulate RL tasks as synthesizing interpretable programs that can be executed in the environments. Despite encouraging results, these methods are limited to short-horizon tasks. On the other hand, representing RL policies using state machines (Inala et al., 2020) can inductively generalize to long-horizon tasks; however, it struggles to scale up to acquire diverse and complex behaviors. This work proposes the Program Machine Policy (POMP), which bridges the advantages of programmatic RL and state machine policies, allowing for the representation of complex behaviors and the address of long-term tasks. Specifically, we introduce a method that can retrieve a set of effective, diverse, and compatible programs. Then, we use these programs as modes of a state machine and learn a transition function to transition among mode programs, allowing for capturing repetitive behaviors. Our proposed framework outperforms programmatic RL and deep RL baselines on various tasks and demonstrates the ability to inductively generalize to even longer horizons without any fine-tuning. Ablation studies justify the effectiveness of our proposed search algorithm for retrieving a set of programs as modes.
CheapNET: Improving Light-weight speech enhancement network by projected loss function
Authors: Kaijun Tan, Benzhe Dai, Jiakui Li, Wenyu Mao
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Noise suppression and echo cancellation are critical in speech enhancement and essential for smart devices and real-time communication. Deployed in voice processing front-ends and edge devices, these algorithms must ensure efficient real-time inference with low computational demands. Traditional edge-based noise suppression often uses MSE-based amplitude spectrum mask training, but this approach has limitations. We introduce a novel projection loss function, diverging from MSE, to enhance noise suppression. This method uses projection techniques to isolate key audio components from noise, significantly improving model performance. For echo cancellation, the function enables direct predictions on LAEC pre-processed outputs, substantially enhancing performance. Our noise suppression model achieves near state-of-the-art results with only 3.1M parameters and 0.4GFlops/s computational load. Moreover, our echo cancellation model outperforms replicated industry-leading models, introducing a new perspective in speech enhancement.
Replay across Experiments: A Natural Extension of Off-Policy RL
Authors: Dhruva Tirumala, Thomas Lampe, Jose Enrique Chen, Tuomas Haarnoja, Sandy Huang, Guy Lever, Ben Moran, Tim Hertweck, Leonard Hasenclever, Martin Riedmiller, Nicolas Heess, Markus Wulfmeier
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Replaying data is a principal mechanism underlying the stability and data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). We present an effective yet simple framework to extend the use of replays across multiple experiments, minimally adapting the RL workflow for sizeable improvements in controller performance and research iteration times. At its core, Replay Across Experiments (RaE) involves reusing experience from previous experiments to improve exploration and bootstrap learning while reducing required changes to a minimum in comparison to prior work. We empirically show benefits across a number of RL algorithms and challenging control domains spanning both locomotion and manipulation, including hard exploration tasks from egocentric vision. Through comprehensive ablations, we demonstrate robustness to the quality and amount of data available and various hyperparameter choices. Finally, we discuss how our approach can be applied more broadly across research life cycles and can increase resilience by reloading data across random seeds or hyperparameter variations.
Auto-CsiNet: Scenario-customized Automatic Neural Network Architecture Generation for Massive MIMO CSI Feedback
Authors: Xiangyi Li, Jiajia Guo, Chao-Kai Wen, Shi Jin
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Neural Architecture Search

Deep learning has revolutionized the design of the channel state information (CSI) feedback module in wireless communications. However, designing the optimal neural network (NN) architecture for CSI feedback can be a laborious and time-consuming process. Manual design can be prohibitively expensive for customizing NNs to different scenarios. This paper proposes using neural architecture search (NAS) to automate the generation of scenario-customized CSI feedback NN architectures, thereby maximizing the potential of deep learning in exclusive environments. By employing automated machine learning and gradient-descent-based NAS, an efficient and cost-effective architecture design process is achieved. The proposed approach leverages implicit scene knowledge, integrating it into the scenario customization process in a data-driven manner, and fully exploits the potential of deep learning for each specific scenario. To address the issue of excessive search, early stopping and elastic selection mechanisms are employed, enhancing the efficiency of the proposed scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that the automatically generated architecture, known as Auto-CsiNet, outperforms manually-designed models in both reconstruction performance (achieving approximately a 14% improvement) and complexity (reducing it by approximately 50%). Furthermore, the paper analyzes the impact of the scenario on the NN architecture and its capacity.
A new fuzzy multi-attribute group decision-making method based on TOPSIS and optimization models
Authors: Qixiao Hu, Shiquan Zhang, Chaolang Hu, Yuetong Liu
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decision Making

In this paper, a new method based on TOPSIS and optimization models is proposed for multi-attribute group decision-making in the environment of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets.Firstly, by minimizing the sum of differences between individual evaluations and the overallconsistent evaluations of all experts, a new optimization model is established for determining expert weights. Secondly, based on TOPSIS method, the improved closeness index for evaluating each alternative is obtained. Finally, the attribute weight is determined by establishing an optimization model with the goal of maximizing the closeness of each alternative, and it is brought into the closeness index so that the alternatives can be ranked. Combining all these together, the complete fuzzy multi-attribute group decision-making algorithm is formulated, which can give full play to the advantages of subjective and objective weighting methods. In the end, the feasibility and effectiveness of the provided method are verified by a real case study.
WorldSense: A Synthetic Benchmark for Grounded Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Youssef Benchekroun, Megi Dervishi, Mark Ibrahim, Jean-Baptiste Gaya, Xavier Martinet, Grégoire Mialon, Thomas Scialom, Emmanuel Dupoux, Dieuwke Hupkes, Pascal Vincent
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

We propose WorldSense, a benchmark designed to assess the extent to which LLMs are consistently able to sustain tacit world models, by testing how they draw simple inferences from descriptions of simple arrangements of entities. Worldsense is a synthetic benchmark with three problem types, each with their own trivial control, which explicitly avoids bias by decorrelating the abstract structure of problems from the vocabulary and expressions, and by decorrelating all problem subparts with the correct response. We run our benchmark on three state-of-the-art chat-LLMs (GPT3.5, GPT4 and Llama2-chat) and show that these models make errors even with as few as three objects. Furthermore, they have quite heavy response biases, preferring certain responses irrespective of the question. Errors persist even with chain-of-thought prompting and in-context learning. Lastly, we show that while finetuning on similar problems does result in substantial improvements -- within- and out-of-distribution -- the finetuned models do not generalise beyond a constraint problem space.
Reinforcement Learning for Wildfire Mitigation in Simulated Disaster Environments
Authors: Alexander Tapley, Marissa Dotter, Michael Doyle, Aidan Fennelly, Dhanuj Gandikota, Savanna Smith, Michael Threet, Tim Welsh
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Climate change has resulted in a year over year increase in adverse weather and weather conditions which contribute to increasingly severe fire seasons. Without effective mitigation, these fires pose a threat to life, property, ecology, cultural heritage, and critical infrastructure. To better prepare for and react to the increasing threat of wildfires, more accurate fire modelers and mitigation responses are necessary. In this paper, we introduce SimFire, a versatile wildland fire projection simulator designed to generate realistic wildfire scenarios, and SimHarness, a modular agent-based machine learning wrapper capable of automatically generating land management strategies within SimFire to reduce the overall damage to the area. Together, this publicly available system allows researchers and practitioners the ability to emulate and assess the effectiveness of firefighter interventions and formulate strategic plans that prioritize value preservation and resource allocation optimization. The repositories are available for download at https://github.com/mitrefireline.
Diagnosis driven Anomaly Detection for CPS
Authors: Henrik S. Steude, Lukas Moddemann, Alexander Diedrich, Jonas Ehrhardt, Oliver Niggemann
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

In Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) research, anomaly detection (detecting abnormal behavior) and diagnosis (identifying the underlying root cause) are often treated as distinct, isolated tasks. However, diagnosis algorithms require symptoms, i.e. temporally and spatially isolated anomalies, as input. Thus, anomaly detection and diagnosis must be developed together to provide a holistic solution for diagnosis in CPS. We therefore propose a method for utilizing deep learning-based anomaly detection to generate inputs for Consistency-Based Diagnosis (CBD). We evaluate our approach on a simulated and a real-world CPS dataset, where our model demonstrates strong performance relative to other state-of-the-art models.
A Fully Data-Driven Approach for Realistic Traffic Signal Control Using Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jianxiong Li, Shichao Lin, Tianyu Shi, Chujie Tian, Yu Mei, Jian Song, Xianyuan Zhan, Ruimin Li
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traffic Signal Control

The optimization of traffic signal control (TSC) is critical for an efficient transportation system. In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have emerged as a popular approach for TSC and show promising results for highly adaptive control. However, existing RL-based methods suffer from notably poor real-world applicability and hardly have any successful deployments. The reasons for such failures are mostly due to the reliance on over-idealized traffic simulators for policy optimization, as well as using unrealistic fine-grained state observations and reward signals that are not directly obtainable from real-world sensors. In this paper, we propose a fully Data-Driven and simulator-free framework for realistic Traffic Signal Control (D2TSC). Specifically, we combine well-established traffic flow theory with machine learning to construct a reward inference model to infer the reward signals from coarse-grained traffic data. With the inferred rewards, we further propose a sample-efficient offline RL method to enable direct signal control policy learning from historical offline datasets of real-world intersections. To evaluate our approach, we collect historical traffic data from a real-world intersection, and develop a highly customized simulation environment that strictly follows real data characteristics. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our approach achieves superior performance over conventional and offline RL baselines, and also enjoys much better real-world applicability.
Towards Adaptive RF Fingerprint-based Authentication of IIoT devices
Authors: Emmanuel Lomba, Ricardo Severino, Ana Fernández Vilas
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00

As IoT technologies mature, they are increasingly finding their way into more sensitive domains, such as Medical and Industrial IoT, in which safety and cyber-security are of great importance. While the number of deployed IoT devices continues to increase exponentially, they still present severe cyber-security vulnerabilities. Effective authentication is paramount to support trustworthy IIoT communications, however, current solutions focus on upper-layer identity verification or key-based cryptography which are often inadequate to the heterogeneous IIoT environment. In this work, we present a first step towards achieving powerful and flexible IIoT device authentication, by leveraging AI adaptive Radio Frequency Fingerprinting technique selection and tuning, at the PHY layer for highly accurate device authentication over challenging RF environments.
End-to-End Breast Cancer Radiotherapy Planning via LMMs with Consistency Embedding
Authors: Kwanyoung Kim, Yujin Oh, Sangjoon Park, Hwa Kyung Byun, Joongyo Lee, Jin Sung Kim, Yong Bae Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Segmentation

Recent advances in AI foundation models have significant potential for lightening the clinical workload by mimicking the comprehensive and multi-faceted approaches used by medical professionals. In the field of radiation oncology, the integration of multiple modalities holds great importance, so the opportunity of foundational model is abundant. Inspired by this, here we present RO-LMM, a multi-purpose, comprehensive large multimodal model (LMM) tailored for the field of radiation oncology. This model effectively manages a series of tasks within the clinical workflow, including clinical context summarization, radiation treatment plan suggestion, and plan-guided target volume segmentation by leveraging the capabilities of LMM. In particular, to perform consecutive clinical tasks without error accumulation, we present a novel Consistency Embedding Fine-Tuning (CEFTune) technique, which boosts LMM's robustness to noisy inputs while preserving the consistency of handling clean inputs. We further extend this concept to LMM-driven segmentation framework, leading to a novel Consistency Embedding Segmentation~(CESEG) techniques. Experimental results including multi-centre validation confirm that our RO-LMM with CEFTune and CESEG results in promising performance for multiple clinical tasks with generalization capabilities.
Utilizing Explainability Techniques for Reinforcement Learning Model Assurance
Authors: Alexander Tapley, Kyle Gatesman, Luis Robaina, Brett Bissey, Joseph Weissman
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, model, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) can provide transparency into the decision-making process of a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model and increase user trust and adoption in real-world use cases. By utilizing XRL techniques, researchers can identify potential vulnerabilities within a trained DRL model prior to deployment, therefore limiting the potential for mission failure or mistakes by the system. This paper introduces the ARLIN (Assured RL Model Interrogation) Toolkit, an open-source Python library that identifies potential vulnerabilities and critical points within trained DRL models through detailed, human-interpretable explainability outputs. To illustrate ARLIN's effectiveness, we provide explainability visualizations and vulnerability analysis for a publicly available DRL model. The open-source code repository is available for download at https://github.com/mitre/arlin.