pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SynCDR : Training Cross Domain Retrieval Models with Synthetic Data
Authors: Samarth Mishra, Carlos D. Castillo, Hongcheng Wang, Kate Saenko, Venkatesh Saligrama
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Translation

In cross-domain retrieval, a model is required to identify images from the same semantic category across two visual domains. For instance, given a sketch of an object, a model needs to retrieve a real image of it from an online store's catalog. A standard approach for such a problem is learning a feature space of images where Euclidean distances reflect similarity. Even without human annotations, which may be expensive to acquire, prior methods function reasonably well using unlabeled images for training. Our problem constraint takes this further to scenarios where the two domains do not necessarily share any common categories in training data. This can occur when the two domains in question come from different versions of some biometric sensor recording identities of different people. We posit a simple solution, which is to generate synthetic data to fill in these missing category examples across domains. This, we do via category preserving translation of images from one visual domain to another. We compare approaches specifically trained for this translation for a pair of domains, as well as those that can use large-scale pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models via prompts, and find that the latter can generate better replacement synthetic data, leading to more accurate cross-domain retrieval models. Our best SynCDR model can outperform prior art by up to 15\%. Code for our work is available at https://github.com/samarth4149/SynCDR .
A Two-stream Hybrid CNN-Transformer Network for Skeleton-based Human Interaction Recognition
Authors: Ruoqi Yin, Jianqin Yin
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Interaction Recognition, Specificity

Human Interaction Recognition is the process of identifying interactive actions between multiple participants in a specific situation. The aim is to recognise the action interactions between multiple entities and their meaning. Many single Convolutional Neural Network has issues, such as the inability to capture global instance interaction features or difficulty in training, leading to ambiguity in action semantics. In addition, the computational complexity of the Transformer cannot be ignored, and its ability to capture local information and motion features in the image is poor. In this work, we propose a Two-stream Hybrid CNN-Transformer Network (THCT-Net), which exploits the local specificity of CNN and models global dependencies through the Transformer. CNN and Transformer simultaneously model the entity, time and space relationships between interactive entities respectively. Specifically, Transformer-based stream integrates 3D convolutions with multi-head self-attention to learn inter-token correlations; We propose a new multi-branch CNN framework for CNN-based streams that automatically learns joint spatio-temporal features from skeleton sequences. The convolutional layer independently learns the local features of each joint neighborhood and aggregates the features of all joints. And the raw skeleton coordinates as well as their temporal difference are integrated with a dual-branch paradigm to fuse the motion features of the skeleton. Besides, a residual structure is added to speed up training convergence. Finally, the recognition results of the two branches are fused using parallel splicing. Experimental results on diverse and challenging datasets, demonstrate that the proposed method can better comprehend and infer the meaning and context of various actions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Social-LLM: Modeling User Behavior at Scale using Language Models and Social Network Data
Authors: Julie Jiang, Emilio Ferrara
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00

The proliferation of social network data has unlocked unprecedented opportunities for extensive, data-driven exploration of human behavior. The structural intricacies of social networks offer insights into various computational social science issues, particularly concerning social influence and information diffusion. However, modeling large-scale social network data comes with computational challenges. Though large language models make it easier than ever to model textual content, any advanced network representation methods struggle with scalability and efficient deployment to out-of-sample users. In response, we introduce a novel approach tailored for modeling social network data in user detection tasks. This innovative method integrates localized social network interactions with the capabilities of large language models. Operating under the premise of social network homophily, which posits that socially connected users share similarities, our approach is designed to address these challenges. We conduct a thorough evaluation of our method across seven real-world social network datasets, spanning a diverse range of topics and detection tasks, showcasing its applicability to advance research in computational social science.
Generative Model-Driven Synthetic Training Image Generation: An Approach to Cognition in Rail Defect Detection
Authors: Rahatara Ferdousi, Chunsheng Yang, M. Anwar Hossain, Fedwa Laamarti, M. Shamim Hossain, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Defect Detection, Image Generation, Image Reconstruction

Recent advancements in cognitive computing, with the integration of deep learning techniques, have facilitated the development of intelligent cognitive systems (ICS). This is particularly beneficial in the context of rail defect detection, where the ICS would emulate human-like analysis of image data for defect patterns. Despite the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in visual defect classification, the scarcity of large datasets for rail defect detection remains a challenge due to infrequent accident events that would result in defective parts and images. Contemporary researchers have addressed this data scarcity challenge by exploring rule-based and generative data augmentation models. Among these, Variational Autoencoder (VAE) models can generate realistic data without extensive baseline datasets for noise modeling. This study proposes a VAE-based synthetic image generation technique for rail defects, incorporating weight decay regularization and image reconstruction loss to prevent overfitting. The proposed method is applied to create a synthetic dataset for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) with just 50 real samples across five classes. Remarkably, 500 synthetic samples are generated with a minimal reconstruction loss of 0.021. A Visual Transformer (ViT) model underwent fine-tuning using this synthetic CPR dataset, achieving high accuracy rates (98%-99%) in classifying the five defect classes. This research offers a promising solution to the data scarcity challenge in rail defect detection, showcasing the potential for robust ICS development in this domain.
SAFE-SIM: Safety-Critical Closed-Loop Traffic Simulation with Diffusion-Controllable Adversaries
Authors: Wei-Jer Chang, Francesco Pittaluga, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan, Manmohan Chandraker
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Denoising

Evaluating the performance of autonomous vehicle planning algorithms necessitates simulating long-tail safety-critical traffic scenarios. However, traditional methods for generating such scenarios often fall short in terms of controllability and realism; they also neglect the dynamics of agent interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce SAFE-SIM, a novel diffusion-based controllable closed-loop safety-critical simulation framework. Our approach yields two distinct advantages: 1) generating realistic long-tail safety-critical scenarios that closely reflect real-world conditions, and 2) providing controllable adversarial behavior for more comprehensive and interactive evaluations. We develop a novel approach to simulate safety-critical scenarios through an adversarial term in the denoising process of diffusion models, which allows an adversarial agent to challenge a planner with plausible maneuvers while all agents in the scene exhibit reactive and realistic behaviors. Furthermore, we propose novel guidance objectives and a partial diffusion process that enables users to control key aspects of the scenarios, such as the collision type and aggressiveness of the adversarial agent, while maintaining the realism of the behavior. We validate our framework empirically using the nuScenes and nuPlan datasets across multiple planners, demonstrating improvements in both realism and controllability. These findings affirm that diffusion models provide a robust and versatile foundation for safety-critical, interactive traffic simulation, extending their utility across the broader autonomous driving landscape. Project website: https://safe-sim.github.io/.
Horizontal Federated Computer Vision
Authors: Paul K. Mandal, Cole Leo, Connor Hurley
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

In the modern world, the amount of visual data recorded has been rapidly increasing. In many cases, data is stored in geographically distinct locations and thus requires a large amount of time and space to consolidate. Sometimes, there are also regulations for privacy protection which prevent data consolidation. In this work, we present federated implementations for object detection and recognition using a federated Faster R-CNN (FRCNN) and image segmentation using a federated Fully Convolutional Network (FCN). Our FRCNN was trained on 5000 examples of the COCO2017 dataset while our FCN was trained on the entire train set of the CamVid dataset. The proposed federated models address the challenges posed by the increasing volume and decentralized nature of visual data, offering efficient solutions in compliance with privacy regulations.
DREAM: Debugging and Repairing AutoML Pipelines
Authors: XiaoYu Zhang, Juan Zhai, Shiqing Ma, Chao Shen
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML

Deep Learning models have become an integrated component of modern software systems. In response to the challenge of model design, researchers proposed Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems, which automatically search for model architecture and hyperparameters for a given task. Like other software systems, existing AutoML systems suffer from bugs. We identify two common and severe bugs in AutoML, performance bug (i.e., searching for the desired model takes an unreasonably long time) and ineffective search bug (i.e., AutoML systems are not able to find an accurate enough model). After analyzing the workflow of AutoML, we observe that existing AutoML systems overlook potential opportunities in search space, search method, and search feedback, which results in performance and ineffective search bugs. Based on our analysis, we design and implement DREAM, an automatic debugging and repairing system for AutoML systems. It monitors the process of AutoML to collect detailed feedback and automatically repairs bugs by expanding search space and leveraging a feedback-driven search strategy. Our evaluation results show that DREAM can effectively and efficiently repair AutoML bugs.
HQ-VAE: Hierarchical Discrete Representation Learning with Variational Bayes
Authors: Yuhta Takida, Yukara Ikemiya, Takashi Shibuya, Kazuki Shimada, Woosung Choi, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Naoki Murata, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Kengo Uchida, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Yuki Mitsufuji
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Representation Learning

Vector quantization (VQ) is a technique to deterministically learn features with discrete codebook representations. It is commonly performed with a variational autoencoding model, VQ-VAE, which can be further extended to hierarchical structures for making high-fidelity reconstructions. However, such hierarchical extensions of VQ-VAE often suffer from the codebook/layer collapse issue, where the codebook is not efficiently used to express the data, and hence degrades reconstruction accuracy. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel unified framework to stochastically learn hierarchical discrete representation on the basis of the variational Bayes framework, called hierarchically quantized variational autoencoder (HQ-VAE). HQ-VAE naturally generalizes the hierarchical variants of VQ-VAE, such as VQ-VAE-2 and residual-quantized VAE (RQ-VAE), and provides them with a Bayesian training scheme. Our comprehensive experiments on image datasets show that HQ-VAE enhances codebook usage and improves reconstruction performance. We also validated HQ-VAE in terms of its applicability to a different modality with an audio dataset.
Two-Step Offline Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning with Constrained Actions
Authors: Yinglun Xu, Tarun Suresh, Rohan Gumaste, David Zhu, Ruirui Li, Zhengyang Wang, Haoming Jiang, Xianfeng Tang, Qingyu Yin, Monica Xiao Cheng, Qi Zeng, Chao Zhang, Gagandeep Singh
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) in the offline setting has succeeded greatly in industrial applications such as chatbots. A two-step learning framework where one applies a reinforcement learning step after a reward modeling step has been widely adopted for the problem. However, such a method faces challenges from the risk of reward hacking and the complexity of reinforcement learning. To overcome the challenge, our insight is that both challenges come from the state-actions not supported in the dataset. Such state-actions are unreliable and increase the complexity of the reinforcement learning problem at the second step. Based on the insight, we develop a novel two-step learning method called PRC: preference-based reinforcement learning with constrained actions. The high-level idea is to limit the reinforcement learning agent to optimize over a constrained action space that excludes the out-of-distribution state-actions. We empirically verify that our method has high learning efficiency on various datasets in robotic control environments.
Bidirectional Temporal Plan Graph: Enabling Switchable Passing Orders for More Efficient Multi-Agent Path Finding Plan Execution
Authors: Yifan Su, Rishi Veerapaneni, Jiaoyang Li
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Agent Path Finding

The Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem involves planning collision-free paths for multiple agents in a shared environment. The majority of MAPF solvers rely on the assumption that an agent can arrive at a specific location at a specific timestep. However, real-world execution uncertainties can cause agents to deviate from this assumption, leading to collisions and deadlocks. Prior research solves this problem by having agents follow a Temporal Plan Graph (TPG), enforcing a consistent passing order at every location as defined in the MAPF plan. However, we show that TPGs are overly strict because, in some circumstances, satisfying the passing order requires agents to wait unnecessarily, leading to longer execution time. To overcome this issue, we introduce a new graphical representation called a Bidirectional Temporal Plan Graph (BTPG), which allows switching passing orders during execution to avoid unnecessary waiting time. We design two anytime algorithms for constructing a BTPG: BTPG-na\"ive and BTPG-optimized. Experimental results show that following BTPGs consistently outperforms following TPGs, reducing unnecessary waits by 8-20%.
Principal-Agent Reward Shaping in MDPs
Authors: Omer Ben-Porat, Yishay Mansour, Michal Moshkovitz, Boaz Taitler
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00

Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios such as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this paper, we further explore this line of research by investigating how reward shaping under budget constraints can improve the principal's utility. We study a two-player Stackelberg game where the principal and the agent have different reward functions, and the agent chooses an MDP policy for both players. The principal offers an additional reward to the agent, and the agent picks their policy selfishly to maximize their reward, which is the sum of the original and the offered reward. Our results establish the NP-hardness of the problem and offer polynomial approximation algorithms for two classes of instances: Stochastic trees and deterministic decision processes with a finite horizon.
Red Teaming for Large Language Models At Scale: Tackling Hallucinations on Mathematics Tasks
Authors: Aleksander Buszydlik, Karol Dobiczek, Michał Teodor Okoń, Konrad Skublicki, Philip Lippmann, Jie Yang
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

We consider the problem of red teaming LLMs on elementary calculations and algebraic tasks to evaluate how various prompting techniques affect the quality of outputs. We present a framework to procedurally generate numerical questions and puzzles, and compare the results with and without the application of several red teaming techniques. Our findings suggest that even though structured reasoning and providing worked-out examples slow down the deterioration of the quality of answers, the gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4 models are not well suited for elementary calculations and reasoning tasks, also when being red teamed.
Deep Learning for Code Intelligence: Survey, Benchmark and Toolkit
Authors: Yao Wan, Yang He, Zhangqian Bi, JianGuo Zhang, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Guandong Xu, Hai Jin, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Representation Learning, Survey

Code intelligence leverages machine learning techniques to extract knowledge from extensive code corpora, with the aim of developing intelligent tools to improve the quality and productivity of computer programming. Currently, there is already a thriving research community focusing on code intelligence, with efforts ranging from software engineering, machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, and programming languages. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on deep learning for code intelligence, from the aspects of code representation learning, deep learning techniques, and application tasks. We also benchmark several state-of-the-art neural models for code intelligence, and provide an open-source toolkit tailored for the rapid prototyping of deep-learning-based code intelligence models. In particular, we inspect the existing code intelligence models under the basis of code representation learning, and provide a comprehensive overview to enhance comprehension of the present state of code intelligence. Furthermore, we publicly release the source code and data resources to provide the community with a ready-to-use benchmark, which can facilitate the evaluation and comparison of existing and future code intelligence models (https://xcodemind.github.io). At last, we also point out several challenging and promising directions for future research.
BusReF: Infrared-Visible images registration and fusion focus on reconstructible area using one set of features
Authors: Zeyang Zhang, Hui Li, Tianyang Xu, XiaoJun Wu, Josef Kittler
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

In a scenario where multi-modal cameras are operating together, the problem of working with non-aligned images cannot be avoided. Yet, existing image fusion algorithms rely heavily on strictly registered input image pairs to produce more precise fusion results, as a way to improve the performance of downstream high-level vision tasks. In order to relax this assumption, one can attempt to register images first. However, the existing methods for registering multiple modalities have limitations, such as complex structures and reliance on significant semantic information. This paper aims to address the problem of image registration and fusion in a single framework, called BusRef. We focus on Infrared-Visible image registration and fusion task (IVRF). In this framework, the input unaligned image pairs will pass through three stages: Coarse registration, Fine registration and Fusion. It will be shown that the unified approach enables more robust IVRF. We also propose a novel training and evaluation strategy, involving the use of masks to reduce the influence of non-reconstructible regions on the loss functions, which greatly improves the accuracy and robustness of the fusion task. Last but not least, a gradient-aware fusion network is designed to preserve the complementary information. The advanced performance of this algorithm is demonstrated by
Promoting Segment Anything Model towards Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation
Authors: Xianjie Liu, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dichotomous Image Segmentation, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a significant breakthrough into foundation models for computer vision, providing a large-scale image segmentation model. However, despite SAM's zero-shot performance, its segmentation masks lack fine-grained details, particularly in accurately delineating object boundaries. We have high expectations regarding whether SAM, as a foundation model, can be improved towards highly accurate object segmentation, which is known as dichotomous image segmentation (DIS). To address this issue, we propose DIS-SAM, which advances SAM towards DIS with extremely accurate details. DIS-SAM is a framework specifically tailored for highly accurate segmentation, maintaining SAM's promptable design. DIS-SAM employs a two-stage approach, integrating SAM with a modified IS-Net dedicated to DIS. Despite its simplicity, DIS-SAM demonstrates significantly enhanced segmentation accuracy compared to SAM and HQ-SAM.
How to Evaluate Coreference in Literary Texts?
Authors: Ana-Isabel Duron-Tejedor, Pascal Amsili, Thierry Poibeau
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00

In this short paper, we examine the main metrics used to evaluate textual coreference and we detail some of their limitations. We show that a unique score cannot represent the full complexity of the problem at stake, and is thus uninformative, or even misleading. We propose a new way of evaluating coreference, taking into account the context (in our case, the analysis of fictions, esp. novels). More specifically, we propose to distinguish long coreference chains (corresponding to main characters), from short ones (corresponding to secondary characters), and singletons (isolated elements). This way, we hope to get more interpretable and thus more informative results through evaluation.
Automating Leukemia Diagnosis with Autoencoders: A Comparative Study
Authors: Minoo Sayyadpour, Nasibe Moghaddamniya, Touraj Banirostam
Date: 2023-12-30 00:00:00

Leukemia is one of the most common and death-threatening types of cancer that threaten human life. Medical data from some of the patient's critical parameters contain valuable information hidden among these data. On this subject, deep learning can be used to extract this information. In this paper, AutoEncoders have been used to develop valuable features to help the precision of leukemia diagnosis. It has been attempted to get the best activation function and optimizer to use in AutoEncoder and designed the best architecture for this neural network. The proposed architecture is compared with this area's classical machine learning models. Our proposed method performs better than other machine learning in precision and f1-score metrics by more than 11%.