pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring Iterative Enhancement for Improving Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Question Explanations with Large Language Models
Authors: Qiming Bao, Juho Leinonen, Alex Yuxuan Peng, Wanjun Zhong, Gaël Gendron, Timothy Pistotti, Alice Huang, Paul Denny, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Explanation Generation, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multiple-choice

Large language models exhibit superior capabilities in processing and understanding language, yet their applications in educational contexts remain underexplored. Learnersourcing enhances learning by engaging students in creating their own educational content. When learnersourcing multiple-choice questions, creating explanations for the solution of a question is a crucial step; it helps other students understand the solution and promotes a deeper understanding of related concepts. However, it is often difficult for students to craft effective solution explanations, due to limited subject understanding. To help scaffold the task of automated explanation generation, we present and evaluate a framework called "ILearner-LLM", that iteratively enhances the generated explanations for the given questions with large language models. Comprising an explanation generation model and an explanation evaluation model, the framework generates high-quality student-aligned explanations by iteratively feeding the quality rating score from the evaluation model back into the instruction prompt of the explanation generation model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our ILearner-LLM on LLaMA2-13B and GPT-4 to generate higher quality explanations that are closer to those written by students on five PeerWise datasets. Our findings represent a promising path to enrich the learnersourcing experience for students and to enhance the capabilities of large language models for educational applications.
Rethinking Imitation-based Planner for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jie Cheng, Yingbing Chen, Xiaodong Mei, Bowen Yang, Bo Li, Ming Liu
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation

In recent years, imitation-based driving planners have reported considerable success. However, due to the absence of a standardized benchmark, the effectiveness of various designs remains unclear. The newly released nuPlan addresses this issue by offering a large-scale real-world dataset and a standardized closed-loop benchmark for equitable comparisons. Utilizing this platform, we conduct a comprehensive study on two fundamental yet underexplored aspects of imitation-based planners: the essential features for ego planning and the effective data augmentation techniques to reduce compounding errors. Furthermore, we highlight an imitation gap that has been overlooked by current learning systems. Finally, integrating our findings, we propose a strong baseline model-PlanTF. Our results demonstrate that a well-designed, purely imitation-based planner can achieve highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods involving hand-crafted rules and exhibit superior generalization capabilities in long-tail cases. Our models and benchmarks are publicly available. Project website https://jchengai.github.io/planTF.
Multi-Object Graph Affordance Network: Goal-Oriented Planning through Learned Compound Object Affordances
Authors: Tuba Girgin, Emre Ugur
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Learning object affordances is an effective tool in the field of robot learning. While the data-driven models investigate affordances of single or paired objects, there is a gap in the exploration of affordances of compound objects composed of an arbitrary number of objects. We propose the Multi-Object Graph Affordance Network which models complex compound object affordances by learning the outcomes of robot actions that facilitate interactions between an object and a compound. Given the depth images of the objects, the object features are extracted via convolution operations and encoded in the nodes of graph neural networks. Graph convolution operations are used to encode the state of the compounds, which are used as input to decoders to predict the outcome of the object-compound interactions. After learning the compound object affordances, given different tasks, the learned outcome predictors are used to plan sequences of stack actions that involve stacking objects on top of each other, inserting smaller objects into larger containers and passing through ring-like objects through poles. We showed that our system successfully modeled the affordances of compound objects that include concave and convex objects, in both simulated and real-world environments. We benchmarked our system with a baseline model to highlight its advantages.
Functional requirements to mitigate the Risk of Harm to Patients from Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Authors: Juan M. García-Gómez, Vicent Blanes-Selva, José Carlos de Bartolomé Cenzano, Jaime Cebolla-Cornejo, Ascensión Doñate-Martínez
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The Directorate General for Parliamentary Research Services of the European Parliament has prepared a report to the Members of the European Parliament where they enumerate seven main risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine and healthcare: patient harm due to AI errors, misuse of medical AI tools, bias in AI and the perpetuation of existing inequities, lack of transparency, privacy and security issues, gaps in accountability, and obstacles in implementation. In this study, we propose fourteen functional requirements that AI systems may implement to reduce the risks associated with their medical purpose: AI passport, User management, Regulation check, Academic use only disclaimer, data quality assessment, Clinicians double check, Continuous performance evaluation, Audit trail, Continuous usability test, Review of retrospective/simulated cases, Bias check, eXplainable AI, Encryption and use of field-tested libraries, and Semantic interoperability. Our intention here is to provide specific high-level specifications of technical solutions to ensure continuous good performance and use of AI systems to benefit patients in compliance with the future EU regulatory framework.
Learning from Teaching Assistants to Program with Subgoals: Exploring the Potential for AI Teaching Assistants
Authors: Changyoon Lee, Junho Myung, Jieun Han, Jiho Jin, Alice Oh
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00

With recent advances in generative AI, conversational models like ChatGPT have become feasible candidates for TAs. We investigate the practicality of using generative AI as TAs in introductory programming education by examining novice learners' interaction with TAs in a subgoal learning environment. To compare the learners' interaction and perception of the AI and human TAs, we conducted a between-subject study with 20 novice programming learners. Learners solve programming tasks by producing subgoals and subsolutions with the guidance of a TA. Our study shows that learners can solve tasks faster with comparable scores with AI TAs. Learners' perception of the AI TA is on par with that of human TAs in terms of speed and comprehensiveness of the replies and helpfulness, difficulty, and satisfaction of the conversation. Finally, we suggest guidelines to better design and utilize generative AI as TAs in programming education from the result of our chat log analysis.
Unsupervised Learning via Network-Aware Embeddings
Authors: Anne Sophie Riis Damstrup, Sofie Tosti Madsen, Michele Coscia
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Marketing

Data clustering, the task of grouping observations according to their similarity, is a key component of unsupervised learning -- with real world applications in diverse fields such as biology, medicine, and social science. Often in these fields the data comes with complex interdependencies between the dimensions of analysis, for instance the various characteristics and opinions people can have live on a complex social network. Current clustering methods are ill-suited to tackle this complexity: deep learning can approximate these dependencies, but not take their explicit map as the input of the analysis. In this paper, we aim at fixing this blind spot in the unsupervised learning literature. We can create network-aware embeddings by estimating the network distance between numeric node attributes via the generalized Euclidean distance. Differently from all methods in the literature that we know of, we do not cluster the nodes of the network, but rather its node attributes. In our experiments we show that having these network embeddings is always beneficial for the learning task; that our method scales to large networks; and that we can actually provide actionable insights in applications in a variety of fields such as marketing, economics, and political science. Our method is fully open source and data and code are available to reproduce all results in the paper.
Exploiting Causality Signals in Medical Images: A Pilot Study with Empirical Results
Authors: Gianluca Carloni, Sara Colantonio
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

We present a novel technique to discover and exploit weak causal signals directly from images via neural networks for classification purposes. This way, we model how the presence of a feature in one part of the image affects the appearance of another feature in a different part of the image. Our method consists of a convolutional neural network backbone and a causality-factors extractor module, which computes weights to enhance each feature map according to its causal influence in the scene. We develop different architecture variants and empirically evaluate all the models on two public datasets of prostate MRI images and breast histopathology slides for cancer diagnosis. We study the effectiveness of our module both in fully-supervised and few-shot learning, we assess its addition to existing attention-based solutions, we conduct ablation studies, and investigate the explainability of our models via class activation maps. Our findings show that our lightweight block extracts meaningful information and improves the overall classification, together with producing more robust predictions that focus on relevant parts of the image. That is crucial in medical imaging, where accurate and reliable classifications are essential for effective diagnosis and treatment planning.
Adaptive questionnaires for facilitating patient data entry in clinical decision support systems: Methods and application to STOPP/START v2
Authors: Jean-Baptiste Lamy, Abdelmalek Mouazer, Karima Sedki, Sophie Dubois, Hector Falcoff
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00

Clinical decision support systems are software tools that help clinicians to make medical decisions. However, their acceptance by clinicians is usually rather low. A known problem is that they often require clinicians to manually enter lots of patient data, which is long and tedious. Existing solutions, such as the automatic data extraction from electronic health record, are not fully satisfying, because of low data quality and availability. In practice, many systems still include long questionnaire for data entry. In this paper, we propose an original solution to simplify patient data entry, using an adaptive questionnaire, i.e. a questionnaire that evolves during user interaction, showing or hiding questions dynamically. Considering a rule-based decision support systems, we designed methods for translating the system's clinical rules into display rules that determine the items to show in the questionnaire, and methods for determining the optimal order of priority among the items in the questionnaire. We applied this approach to a decision support system implementing STOPP/START v2, a guideline for managing polypharmacy. We show that it permits reducing by about two thirds the number of clinical conditions displayed in the questionnaire. Presented to clinicians during focus group sessions, the adaptive questionnaire was found "pretty easy to use". In the future, this approach could be applied to other guidelines, and adapted for data entry by patients.
Graph Contrastive Learning Meets Graph Meta Learning: A Unified Method for Few-shot Node Tasks
Authors: Hao liu, Jiarui Feng, Lecheng Kong, DaCheng Tao, Yixin Chen, Muhan Zhang
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: CoLA, Contrastive Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Meta-Learning, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become popular in Graph Representation Learning (GRL). One fundamental application is few-shot node classification. Most existing methods follow the meta learning paradigm, showing the ability of fast generalization to few-shot tasks. However, recent works indicate that graph contrastive learning combined with fine-tuning can significantly outperform meta learning methods. Despite the empirical success, there is limited understanding of the reasons behind it. In our study, we first identify two crucial advantages of contrastive learning compared to meta learning, including (1) the comprehensive utilization of graph nodes and (2) the power of graph augmentations. To integrate the strength of both contrastive learning and meta learning on the few-shot node classification tasks, we introduce a new paradigm: Contrastive Few-Shot Node Classification (COLA). Specifically, COLA employs graph augmentations to identify semantically similar nodes, which enables the construction of meta-tasks without the need for label information. Therefore, COLA can utilize all nodes to construct meta-tasks, further reducing the risk of overfitting. Through extensive experiments, we validate the essentiality of each component in our design and demonstrate that COLA achieves new state-of-the-art on all tasks.
Generative AI vs. AGI: The Cognitive Strengths and Weaknesses of Modern LLMs
Authors: Ben Goertzel
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

A moderately detailed consideration of interactive LLMs as cognitive systems is given, focusing on LLMs circa mid-2023 such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Llama, etc.. Cognitive strengths of these systems are reviewed, and then careful attention is paid to the substantial differences between the sort of cognitive system these LLMs are, and the sort of cognitive systems human beings are. It is found that many of the practical weaknesses of these AI systems can be tied specifically to lacks in the basic cognitive architectures according to which these systems are built. It is argued that incremental improvement of such LLMs is not a viable approach to working toward human-level AGI, in practical terms given realizable amounts of compute resources. This does not imply there is nothing to learn about human-level AGI from studying and experimenting with LLMs, nor that LLMs cannot form significant parts of human-level AGI architectures that also incorporate other ideas. Social and ethical matters regarding LLMs are very briefly touched from this perspective, which implies that while care should be taken regarding misinformation and other issues, and economic upheavals will need their own social remedies based on their unpredictable course as with any powerfully impactful technology, overall the sort of policy needed as regards modern LLMs is quite different than would be the case if a more credible approximation to human-level AGI were at hand.
Geometric structure of shallow neural networks and constructive ${\mathcal L}^2$ cost minimization
Authors: Thomas Chen, Patricia Muñoz Ewald
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00

In this paper, we approach the problem of cost (loss) minimization in underparametrized shallow neural networks through the explicit construction of upper bounds, without any use of gradient descent. A key focus is on elucidating the geometric structure of approximate and precise minimizers. We consider shallow neural networks with one hidden layer, a ReLU activation function, an ${\mathcal L}^2$ Schatten class (or Hilbert-Schmidt) cost function, input space ${\mathbb R}^M$, output space ${\mathbb R}^Q$ with $Q\leq M$, and training input sample size $N>QM$ that can be arbitrarily large. We prove an upper bound on the minimum of the cost function of order $O(\delta_P)$ where $\delta_P$ measures the signal to noise ratio of training inputs. In the special case $M=Q$, we explicitly determine an exact degenerate local minimum of the cost function, and show that the sharp value differs from the upper bound obtained for $Q\leq M$ by a relative error $O(\delta_P^2)$. The proof of the upper bound yields a constructively trained network; we show that it metrizes a particular $Q$-dimensional subspace in the input space ${\mathbb R}^M$. We comment on the characterization of the global minimum of the cost function in the given context.
Toward efficient resource utilization at edge nodes in federated learning
Authors: Sadi Alawadi, Addi Ait-Mlouk, Salman Toor, Andreas Hellander
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Federated Learning, Transfer Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables edge nodes to collaboratively contribute to constructing a global model without sharing their data. This is accomplished by devices computing local, private model updates that are then aggregated by a server. However, computational resource constraints and network communication can become a severe bottleneck for larger model sizes typical for deep learning applications. Edge nodes tend to have limited hardware resources (RAM, CPU), and the network bandwidth and reliability at the edge is a concern for scaling federated fleet applications. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a FL strategy inspired by transfer learning in order to reduce resource utilization on devices, as well as the load on the server and network in each global training round. For each local model update, we randomly select layers to train, freezing the remaining part of the model. In doing so, we can reduce both server load and communication costs per round by excluding all untrained layer weights from being transferred to the server. The goal of this study is to empirically explore the potential trade-off between resource utilization on devices and global model convergence under the proposed strategy. We implement the approach using the federated learning framework FEDn. A number of experiments were carried out over different datasets (CIFAR-10, CASA, and IMDB), performing different tasks using different deep-learning model architectures. Our results show that training the model partially can accelerate the training process, efficiently utilizes resources on-device, and reduce the data transmission by around 75% and 53% when we train 25%, and 50% of the model layers, respectively, without harming the resulting global model accuracy.
OccluTrack: Rethinking Awareness of Occlusion for Enhancing Multiple Pedestrian Tracking
Authors: Jianjun Gao, Yi Wang, Kim-Hui Yap, Kratika Garg, Boon Siew Han
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation

Multiple pedestrian tracking faces the challenge of tracking pedestrians in the presence of occlusion. Existing methods suffer from inaccurate motion estimation, appearance feature extraction, and association due to occlusion, leading to inadequate Identification F1-Score (IDF1), excessive ID switches (IDSw), and insufficient association accuracy and recall (AssA and AssR). We found that the main reason is abnormal detections caused by partial occlusion. In this paper, we suggest that the key insight is explicit motion estimation, reliable appearance features, and fair association in occlusion scenes. Specifically, we propose an adaptive occlusion-aware multiple pedestrian tracker, OccluTrack. We first introduce an abnormal motion suppression mechanism into the Kalman Filter to adaptively detect and suppress outlier motions caused by partial occlusion. Second, we propose a pose-guided re-ID module to extract discriminative part features for partially occluded pedestrians. Last, we design a new occlusion-aware association method towards fair IoU and appearance embedding distance measurement for occluded pedestrians. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate that our OccluTrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MOT-Challenge datasets. Particularly, the improvements on IDF1, IDSw, AssA, and AssR demonstrate the effectiveness of our OccluTrack on tracking and association performance.
Explaining Agent Behavior with Large Language Models
Authors: Xijia Zhang, Yue Guo, Simon Stepputtis, Katia Sycara, Joseph Campbell
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is often produced by uninterpretable models such as deep neural networks. We propose an approach to generate natural language explanations for an agent's behavior based only on observations of states and actions, agnostic to the underlying model representation. We show how a compact representation of the agent's behavior can be learned and used to produce plausible explanations with minimal hallucination while affording user interaction with a pre-trained large language model. Through user studies and empirical experiments, we show that our approach generates explanations as helpful as those generated by a human domain expert while enabling beneficial interactions such as clarification and counterfactual queries.
FedWOA: A Federated Learning Model that uses the Whale Optimization Algorithm for Renewable Energy Prediction
Authors: Viorica Chifu, Tudor Cioara, Cristian Anitiei, Cristina Pop, Ionut Anghel
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Prediction

Privacy is important when dealing with sensitive personal information in machine learning models, which require large data sets for training. In the energy field, access to household prosumer energy data is crucial for energy predictions to support energy grid management and large-scale adoption of renewables however citizens are often hesitant to grant access to cloud-based machine learning models. Federated learning has been proposed as a solution to privacy challenges however report issues in generating the global prediction model due to data heterogeneity, variations in generation patterns, and the high number of parameters leading to even lower prediction accuracy. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing FedWOA a novel federated learning model that employs the Whale Optimization Algorithm to aggregate global prediction models from the weights of local LTSM neural network models trained on prosumer energy data. The proposed solution identifies the optimal vector of weights in the search spaces of the local models to construct the global shared model and then is subsequently transmitted to the local nodes to improve the prediction quality at the prosumer site while for handling non-IID data K-Means was used for clustering prosumers with similar scale of energy data. The evaluation results on prosumers energy data have shown that FedWOA can effectively enhance the accuracy of energy prediction models accuracy by 25% for MSE and 16% for MAE compared to FedAVG while demonstrating good convergence and reduced loss.