pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Implementing engrams from a machine learning perspective: matching for prediction
Authors: Jesus Marco de Lucas
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00

Despite evidence for the existence of engrams as memory support structures in our brains, there is no consensus framework in neuroscience as to what their physical implementation might be. Here we propose how we might design a computer system to implement engrams using neural networks, with the main aim of exploring new ideas using machine learning techniques, guided by challenges in neuroscience. Building on autoencoders, we propose latent neural spaces as indexes for storing and retrieving information in a compressed format. We consider this technique as a first step towards predictive learning: autoencoders are designed to compare reconstructed information with the original information received, providing a kind of predictive ability, which is an attractive evolutionary argument. We then consider how different states in latent neural spaces corresponding to different types of sensory input could be linked by synchronous activation, providing the basis for a sparse implementation of memory using concept neurons. Finally, we list some of the challenges and questions that link neuroscience and data science and that could have implications for both fields, and conclude that a more interdisciplinary approach is needed, as many scientists have already suggested.
Domain-adapted large language models for classifying nuclear medicine reports
Authors: Zachary Huemann, Changhee Lee, Junjie Hu, Steve Y. Cho, Tyler Bradshaw
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling

With the growing use of transformer-based language models in medicine, it is unclear how well these models generalize to nuclear medicine which has domain-specific vocabulary and unique reporting styles. In this study, we evaluated the value of domain adaptation in nuclear medicine by adapting language models for the purpose of 5-point Deauville score prediction based on clinical 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET/CT reports. We retrospectively retrieved 4542 text reports and 1664 images for FDG PET/CT lymphoma exams from 2008-2018 in our clinical imaging database. Deauville scores were removed from the reports and then the remaining text in the reports was used as the model input. Multiple general-purpose transformer language models were used to classify the reports into Deauville scores 1-5. We then adapted the models to the nuclear medicine domain using masked language modeling and assessed its impact on classification performance. The language models were compared against vision models, a multimodal vision language model, and a nuclear medicine physician with seven-fold Monte Carlo cross validation, reported are the mean and standard deviations. Domain adaption improved all language models. For example, BERT improved from 61.3% five-class accuracy to 65.7% following domain adaptation. The best performing model (domain-adapted RoBERTa) achieved a five-class accuracy of 77.4%, which was better than the physician's performance (66%), the best vision model's performance (48.1), and was similar to the multimodal model's performance (77.2). Domain adaptation improved the performance of large language models in interpreting nuclear medicine text reports.
Can ChatGPT Assess Human Personalities? A General Evaluation Framework
Authors: Haocong Rao, Cyril Leung, Chunyan Miao
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Fairness

Large Language Models (LLMs) especially ChatGPT have produced impressive results in various areas, but their potential human-like psychology is still largely unexplored. Existing works study the virtual personalities of LLMs but rarely explore the possibility of analyzing human personalities via LLMs. This paper presents a generic evaluation framework for LLMs to assess human personalities based on Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) tests. Specifically, we first devise unbiased prompts by randomly permuting options in MBTI questions and adopt the average testing result to encourage more impartial answer generation. Then, we propose to replace the subject in question statements to enable flexible queries and assessments on different subjects from LLMs. Finally, we re-formulate the question instructions in a manner of correctness evaluation to facilitate LLMs to generate clearer responses. The proposed framework enables LLMs to flexibly assess personalities of different groups of people. We further propose three evaluation metrics to measure the consistency, robustness, and fairness of assessment results from state-of-the-art LLMs including ChatGPT and GPT-4. Our experiments reveal ChatGPT's ability to assess human personalities, and the average results demonstrate that it can achieve more consistent and fairer assessments in spite of lower robustness against prompt biases compared with InstructGPT.
Frauds Bargain Attack: Generating Adversarial Text Samples via Word Manipulation Process
Authors: Mingze Ni, Zhensu Sun, Wei Liu
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Text, Sentence

Recent research has revealed that natural language processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to adversarial examples. However, the current techniques for generating such examples rely on deterministic heuristic rules, which fail to produce optimal adversarial examples. In response, this study proposes a new method called the Fraud's Bargain Attack (FBA), which uses a randomization mechanism to expand the search space and produce high-quality adversarial examples with a higher probability of success. FBA uses the Metropolis-Hasting sampler, a type of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler, to improve the selection of adversarial examples from all candidates generated by a customized stochastic process called the Word Manipulation Process (WMP). The WMP method modifies individual words in a contextually-aware manner through insertion, removal, or substitution. Through extensive experiments, this study demonstrates that FBA outperforms other methods in terms of attack success rate, imperceptibility and sentence quality.
Almanac: Retrieval-Augmented Language Models for Clinical Medicine
Authors: Cyril Zakka, Akash Chaurasia, Rohan Shad, Alex R. Dalal, Jennifer L. Kim, Michael Moor, Kevin Alexander, Euan Ashley, Jack Boyd, Kathleen Boyd, Karen Hirsch, Curt Langlotz, Joanna Nelson, William Hiesinger
Date: 2023-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Dialogue Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Retrieval

Large-language models have recently demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in a variety of natural language tasks such as summarization, dialogue generation, and question-answering. Despite many promising applications in clinical medicine, adoption of these models in real-world settings has been largely limited by their tendency to generate incorrect and sometimes even toxic statements. In this study, we develop Almanac, a large language model framework augmented with retrieval capabilities for medical guideline and treatment recommendations. Performance on a novel dataset of clinical scenarios (n = 130) evaluated by a panel of 5 board-certified and resident physicians demonstrates significant increases in factuality (mean of 18% at p-value < 0.05) across all specialties, with improvements in completeness and safety. Our results demonstrate the potential for large language models to be effective tools in the clinical decision-making process, while also emphasizing the importance of careful testing and deployment to mitigate their shortcomings.
FeatAug-DETR: Enriching One-to-Many Matching for DETRs with Feature Augmentation
Authors: Rongyao Fang, Peng Gao, Aojun Zhou, Yingjie Cai, Si Liu, Jifeng Dai, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection

One-to-one matching is a crucial design in DETR-like object detection frameworks. It enables the DETR to perform end-to-end detection. However, it also faces challenges of lacking positive sample supervision and slow convergence speed. Several recent works proposed the one-to-many matching mechanism to accelerate training and boost detection performance. We revisit these methods and model them in a unified format of augmenting the object queries. In this paper, we propose two methods that realize one-to-many matching from a different perspective of augmenting images or image features. The first method is One-to-many Matching via Data Augmentation (denoted as DataAug-DETR). It spatially transforms the images and includes multiple augmented versions of each image in the same training batch. Such a simple augmentation strategy already achieves one-to-many matching and surprisingly improves DETR's performance. The second method is One-to-many matching via Feature Augmentation (denoted as FeatAug-DETR). Unlike DataAug-DETR, it augments the image features instead of the original images and includes multiple augmented features in the same batch to realize one-to-many matching. FeatAug-DETR significantly accelerates DETR training and boosts detection performance while keeping the inference speed unchanged. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on DETR variants, including DAB-DETR, Deformable-DETR, and H-Deformable-DETR. Without extra training data, FeatAug-DETR shortens the training convergence periods of Deformable-DETR to 24 epochs and achieves 58.3 AP on COCO val2017 set with Swin-L as the backbone.
ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation Challenges
Authors: Dimitrios Kollias, Panagiotis Tzirakis, Alice Baird, Alan Cowen, Stefanos Zafeiriou
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Unit Detection, Arousal Estimation

The fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition is part of the respective ABAW Workshop which will be held in conjunction with IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2023. The 5th ABAW Competition is a continuation of the Competitions held at ECCV 2022, IEEE CVPR 2022, ICCV 2021, IEEE FG 2020 and CVPR 2017 Conferences, and is dedicated at automatically analyzing affect. For this year's Competition, we feature two corpora: i) an extended version of the Aff-Wild2 database and ii) the Hume-Reaction dataset. The former database is an audiovisual one of around 600 videos of around 3M frames and is annotated with respect to:a) two continuous affect dimensions -valence (how positive/negative a person is) and arousal (how active/passive a person is)-; b) basic expressions (e.g. happiness, sadness, neutral state); and c) atomic facial muscle actions (i.e., action units). The latter dataset is an audiovisual one in which reactions of individuals to emotional stimuli have been annotated with respect to seven emotional expression intensities. Thus the 5th ABAW Competition encompasses four Challenges: i) uni-task Valence-Arousal Estimation, ii) uni-task Expression Classification, iii) uni-task Action Unit Detection, and iv) Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation. In this paper, we present these Challenges, along with their corpora, we outline the evaluation metrics, we present the baseline systems and illustrate their obtained performance.
Image as Set of Points
Authors: Xu Ma, Yuqian Zhou, Huan Wang, Can Qin, Bin Sun, Chang Liu, Yun Fu
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

What is an image and how to extract latent features? Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) consider an image as organized pixels in a rectangular shape and extract features via convolutional operation in local region; Vision Transformers (ViTs) treat an image as a sequence of patches and extract features via attention mechanism in a global range. In this work, we introduce a straightforward and promising paradigm for visual representation, which is called Context Clusters. Context clusters (CoCs) view an image as a set of unorganized points and extract features via simplified clustering algorithm. In detail, each point includes the raw feature (e.g., color) and positional information (e.g., coordinates), and a simplified clustering algorithm is employed to group and extract deep features hierarchically. Our CoCs are convolution- and attention-free, and only rely on clustering algorithm for spatial interaction. Owing to the simple design, we show CoCs endow gratifying interpretability via the visualization of clustering process. Our CoCs aim at providing a new perspective on image and visual representation, which may enjoy broad applications in different domains and exhibit profound insights. Even though we are not targeting SOTA performance, COCs still achieve comparable or even better results than ConvNets or ViTs on several benchmarks. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ma-xu/Context-Cluster.
Delivering Arbitrary-Modal Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jiaming Zhang, Ruiping Liu, Hao Shi, Kailun Yang, Simon Reiß, Kunyu Peng, Haodong Fu, Kaiwei Wang, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Thermal Image Segmentation

Multimodal fusion can make semantic segmentation more robust. However, fusing an arbitrary number of modalities remains underexplored. To delve into this problem, we create the DeLiVER arbitrary-modal segmentation benchmark, covering Depth, LiDAR, multiple Views, Events, and RGB. Aside from this, we provide this dataset in four severe weather conditions as well as five sensor failure cases to exploit modal complementarity and resolve partial outages. To make this possible, we present the arbitrary cross-modal segmentation model CMNeXt. It encompasses a Self-Query Hub (SQ-Hub) designed to extract effective information from any modality for subsequent fusion with the RGB representation and adds only negligible amounts of parameters (~0.01M) per additional modality. On top, to efficiently and flexibly harvest discriminative cues from the auxiliary modalities, we introduce the simple Parallel Pooling Mixer (PPX). With extensive experiments on a total of six benchmarks, our CMNeXt achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DeLiVER, KITTI-360, MFNet, NYU Depth V2, UrbanLF, and MCubeS datasets, allowing to scale from 1 to 81 modalities. On the freshly collected DeLiVER, the quad-modal CMNeXt reaches up to 66.30% in mIoU with a +9.10% gain as compared to the mono-modal baseline. The DeLiVER dataset and our code are at: https://jamycheung.github.io/DELIVER.html.
Consistency Models
Authors: Yang song, Prafulla Dhariwal, Mark Chen, Ilya Sutskever
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization, Image Generation, Image Inpainting, Super-Resolution, Video Generation

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the fields of image, audio, and video generation, but they depend on an iterative sampling process that causes slow generation. To overcome this limitation, we propose consistency models, a new family of models that generate high quality samples by directly mapping noise to data. They support fast one-step generation by design, while still allowing multistep sampling to trade compute for sample quality. They also support zero-shot data editing, such as image inpainting, colorization, and super-resolution, without requiring explicit training on these tasks. Consistency models can be trained either by distilling pre-trained diffusion models, or as standalone generative models altogether. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that they outperform existing distillation techniques for diffusion models in one- and few-step sampling, achieving the new state-of-the-art FID of 3.55 on CIFAR-10 and 6.20 on ImageNet 64x64 for one-step generation. When trained in isolation, consistency models become a new family of generative models that can outperform existing one-step, non-adversarial generative models on standard benchmarks such as CIFAR-10, ImageNet 64x64 and LSUN 256x256.
Dataset Creation Pipeline for Camera-Based Heart Rate Estimation
Authors: Mohamed Moustafa, Amr Elrasad, Joseph Lemley, Peter Corcoran
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Heart rate estimation

Heart rate is one of the most vital health metrics which can be utilized to investigate and gain intuitions into various human physiological and psychological information. Estimating heart rate without the constraints of contact-based sensors thus presents itself as a very attractive field of research as it enables well-being monitoring in a wider variety of scenarios. Consequently, various techniques for camera-based heart rate estimation have been developed ranging from classical image processing to convoluted deep learning models and architectures. At the heart of such research efforts lies health and visual data acquisition, cleaning, transformation, and annotation. In this paper, we discuss how to prepare data for the task of developing or testing an algorithm or machine learning model for heart rate estimation from images of facial regions. The data prepared is to include camera frames as well as sensor readings from an electrocardiograph sensor. The proposed pipeline is divided into four main steps, namely removal of faulty data, frame and electrocardiograph timestamp de-jittering, signal denoising and filtering, and frame annotation creation. Our main contributions are a novel technique of eliminating jitter from health sensor and camera timestamps and a method to accurately time align both visual frame and electrocardiogram sensor data which is also applicable to other sensor types.
MoSFPAD: An end-to-end Ensemble of MobileNet and Support Vector Classifier for Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection
Authors: Anuj Rai, Somnath Dey, Pradeep Patidar, Prakhar Rai
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00

Automatic fingerprint recognition systems are the most extensively used systems for person authentication although they are vulnerable to Presentation attacks. Artificial artifacts created with the help of various materials are used to deceive these systems causing a threat to the security of fingerprint-based applications. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end model to detect fingerprint Presentation attacks. The proposed model incorporates MobileNet as a feature extractor and a Support Vector Classifier as a classifier to detect presentation attacks in cross-material and cross-sensor paradigms. The feature extractor's parameters are learned with the loss generated by the support vector classifier. The proposed model eliminates the need for intermediary data preparation procedures, unlike other static hybrid architectures. The performance of the proposed model has been validated on benchmark LivDet 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019 databases, and overall accuracy of 98.64%, 99.50%, 97.23%, 95.06%, and 95.20% is achieved on these databases, respectively. The performance of the proposed model is compared with state-of-the-art methods and the proposed method outperforms in cross-material and cross-sensor paradigms in terms of average classification error.
Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior
Authors: Yonatan Shafir, Guy Tevet, Roy Kapon, Amit H. Bermano
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Motion Synthesis

Recent work has demonstrated the significant potential of denoising diffusion models for generating human motion, including text-to-motion capabilities. However, these methods are restricted by the paucity of annotated motion data, a focus on single-person motions, and a lack of detailed control. In this paper, we introduce three forms of composition based on diffusion priors: sequential, parallel, and model composition. Using sequential composition, we tackle the challenge of long sequence generation. We introduce DoubleTake, an inference-time method with which we generate long animations consisting of sequences of prompted intervals and their transitions, using a prior trained only for short clips. Using parallel composition, we show promising steps toward two-person generation. Beginning with two fixed priors as well as a few two-person training examples, we learn a slim communication block, ComMDM, to coordinate interaction between the two resulting motions. Lastly, using model composition, we first train individual priors to complete motions that realize a prescribed motion for a given joint. We then introduce DiffusionBlending, an interpolation mechanism to effectively blend several such models to enable flexible and efficient fine-grained joint and trajectory-level control and editing. We evaluate the composition methods using an off-the-shelf motion diffusion model, and further compare the results to dedicated models trained for these specific tasks.
MLANet: Multi-Level Attention Network with Sub-instruction for Continuous Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Zongtao He, Liuyi Wang, Shu Li, Qingqing Yan, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen
Date: 2023-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Vision and Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to develop intelligent agents to navigate in unseen environments only through language and vision supervision. In the recently proposed continuous settings (continuous VLN), the agent must act in a free 3D space and faces tougher challenges like real-time execution, complex instruction understanding, and long action sequence prediction. For a better performance in continuous VLN, we design a multi-level instruction understanding procedure and propose a novel model, Multi-Level Attention Network (MLANet). The first step of MLANet is to generate sub-instructions efficiently. We design a Fast Sub-instruction Algorithm (FSA) to segment the raw instruction into sub-instructions and generate a new sub-instruction dataset named ``FSASub". FSA is annotation-free and faster than the current method by 70 times, thus fitting the real-time requirement in continuous VLN. To solve the complex instruction understanding problem, MLANet needs a global perception of the instruction and observations. We propose a Multi-Level Attention (MLA) module to fuse vision, low-level semantics, and high-level semantics, which produce features containing a dynamic and global comprehension of the task. MLA also mitigates the adverse effects of noise words, thus ensuring a robust understanding of the instruction. To correctly predict actions in long trajectories, MLANet needs to focus on what sub-instruction is being executed every step. We propose a Peak Attention Loss (PAL) to improve the flexible and adaptive selection of the current sub-instruction. PAL benefits the navigation agent by concentrating its attention on the local information, thus helping the agent predict the most appropriate actions. We train and test MLANet in the standard benchmark. Experiment results show MLANet outperforms baselines by a significant margin.