pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Spatiotemporal Deep Neural Network for Fine-Grained Multi-Horizon Wind Prediction
Authors: Fanling Huang, Yangdong Deng
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

The prediction of wind in terms of both wind speed and direction, which has a crucial impact on many real-world applications like aviation and wind power generation, is extremely challenging due to the high stochasticity and complicated correlation in the weather data. Existing methods typically focus on a sub-set of influential factors and thus lack a systematic treatment of the problem. In addition, fine-grained forecasting is essential for efficient industry operations, but has been less attended in the literature. In this work, we propose a novel data-driven model, Multi-Horizon SpatioTemporal Network (MHSTN), generally for accurate and efficient fine-grained wind prediction. MHSTN integrates multiple deep neural networks targeting different factors in a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) backbone to effectively extract features from various data sources and produce multi-horizon predictions for all sites within a given region. MHSTN is composed of four major modules. First, a temporal module fuses coarse-grained forecasts derived by Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and historical on-site observation data at stations so as to leverage both global and local atmospheric information. Second, a spatial module exploits spatial correlation by modeling the joint representation of all stations. Third, an ensemble module weighs the above two modules for final predictions. Furthermore, a covariate selection module automatically choose influential meteorological variables as initial input. MHSTN is already integrated into the scheduling platform of one of the busiest international airports of China. The evaluation results demonstrate that our model outperforms competitors by a significant margin.
TCGAN: Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network for Time Series Classification and Clustering
Authors: Fanling Huang, Yangdong Deng
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Generative Adversarial Network, Time Series, Time Series Classification

Recent works have demonstrated the superiority of supervised Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in learning hierarchical representations from time series data for successful classification. These methods require sufficiently large labeled data for stable learning, however acquiring high-quality labeled time series data can be costly and potentially infeasible. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved great success in enhancing unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. Nonetheless, to our best knowledge, it remains unclear how effectively GANs can serve as a general-purpose solution to learn representations for time series recognition, i.e., classification and clustering. The above considerations inspire us to introduce a Time-series Convolutional GAN (TCGAN). TCGAN learns by playing an adversarial game between two one-dimensional CNNs (i.e., a generator and a discriminator) in the absence of label information. Parts of the trained TCGAN are then reused to construct a representation encoder to empower linear recognition methods. We conducted comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that TCGAN is faster and more accurate than existing time-series GANs. The learned representations enable simple classification and clustering methods to achieve superior and stable performance. Furthermore, TCGAN retains high efficacy in scenarios with few-labeled and imbalanced-labeled data. Our work provides a promising path to effectively utilize abundant unlabeled time series data.
Transitions in echo index and dependence on input repetitions
Authors: Peter Ashwin, Andrea Ceni
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00

The echo index counts the number of simultaneously stable asymptotic responses of a nonautonomous (i.e. input-driven) dynamical system. It generalizes the well-known echo state property for recurrent neural networks - this corresponds to the echo index being equal to one. In this paper, we investigate how the echo index depends on parameters that govern typical responses to a finite-state ergodic external input that forces the dynamics. We consider the echo index for a nonautonomous system that switches between a finite set of maps, where we assume that each map possesses a finite set of hyperbolic equilibrium attractors. We find the minimum and maximum repetitions of each map are crucial for the resulting echo index. Casting our theoretical findings in the RNN computing framework, we obtain that for small amplitude forcing the echo index corresponds to the number of attractors for the input-free system, while for large amplitude forcing, the echo index reduces to one. The intermediate regime is the most interesting; in this region the echo index depends not just on the amplitude of forcing but also on more subtle properties of the input.
Toward Reproducing Network Research Results Using Large Language Models
Authors: Qiao Xiang, Yuling Lin, Mingjun Fang, Bang Huang, Siyong Huang, Ridi Wen, Franck Le, Linghe Kong, Jiwu Shu
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

Reproducing research results in the networking community is important for both academia and industry. The current best practice typically resorts to three approaches: (1) looking for publicly available prototypes; (2) contacting the authors to get a private prototype; and (3) manually implementing a prototype following the description of the publication. However, most published network research does not have public prototypes and private prototypes are hard to get. As such, most reproducing efforts are spent on manual implementation based on the publications, which is both time and labor consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we boldly propose reproducing network research results using the emerging large language models (LLMs). In particular, we first prove its feasibility with a small-scale experiment, in which four students with essential networking knowledge each reproduces a different networking system published in prominent conferences and journals by prompt engineering ChatGPT. We report the experiment's observations and lessons and discuss future open research questions of this proposal. This work raises no ethical issue.
Jade: A Differentiable Physics Engine for Articulated Rigid Bodies with Intersection-Free Frictional Contact
Authors: Gang Yang, Siyuan Luo, Lin Shao
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

We present Jade, a differentiable physics engine for articulated rigid bodies. Jade models contacts as the Linear Complementarity Problem (LCP). Compared to existing differentiable simulations, Jade offers features including intersection-free collision simulation and stable LCP solutions for multiple frictional contacts. We use continuous collision detection to detect the time of impact and adopt the backtracking strategy to prevent intersection between bodies with complex geometry shapes. We derive the gradient calculation to ensure the whole simulation process is differentiable under the backtracking mechanism. We modify the popular Dantzig algorithm to get valid solutions under multiple frictional contacts. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our differentiable physics simulation over a variety of contact-rich tasks.
Advantage Actor-Critic with Reasoner: Explaining the Agent's Behavior from an Exploratory Perspective
Authors: Muzhe Guo, Feixu Yu, Tian Lan, Fang Jin
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful tool for solving complex decision-making problems, but its lack of transparency and interpretability has been a major challenge in domains where decisions have significant real-world consequences. In this paper, we propose a novel Advantage Actor-Critic with Reasoner (A2CR), which can be easily applied to Actor-Critic-based RL models and make them interpretable. A2CR consists of three interconnected networks: the Policy Network, the Value Network, and the Reasoner Network. By predefining and classifying the underlying purpose of the actor's actions, A2CR automatically generates a more comprehensive and interpretable paradigm for understanding the agent's decision-making process. It offers a range of functionalities such as purpose-based saliency, early failure detection, and model supervision, thereby promoting responsible and trustworthy RL. Evaluations conducted in action-rich Super Mario Bros environments yield intriguing findings: Reasoner-predicted label proportions decrease for ``Breakout" and increase for ``Hovering" as the exploration level of the RL algorithm intensifies. Additionally, purpose-based saliencies are more focused and comprehensible.
Analysis of Disinformation and Fake News Detection Using Fine-Tuned Large Language Model
Authors: Bohdan M. Pavlyshenko
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Fake News Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The paper considers the possibility of fine-tuning Llama 2 large language model (LLM) for the disinformation analysis and fake news detection. For fine-tuning, the PEFT/LoRA based approach was used. In the study, the model was fine-tuned for the following tasks: analysing a text on revealing disinformation and propaganda narratives, fact checking, fake news detection, manipulation analytics, extracting named entities with their sentiments. The obtained results show that the fine-tuned Llama 2 model can perform a deep analysis of texts and reveal complex styles and narratives. Extracted sentiments for named entities can be considered as predictive features in supervised machine learning models.
Advancements in Upper Body Exoskeleton: Implementing Active Gravity Compensation with a Feedforward Controller
Authors: Muhammad Ayaz Hussain, Ioannis Iossifidis
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, Position

In this study, we present a feedforward control system designed for active gravity compensation on an upper body exoskeleton. The system utilizes only positional data from internal motor sensors to calculate torque, employing analytical control equations based on Newton-Euler Inverse Dynamics. Compared to feedback control systems, the feedforward approach offers several advantages. It eliminates the need for external torque sensors, resulting in reduced hardware complexity and weight. Moreover, the feedforward control exhibits a more proactive response, leading to enhanced performance. The exoskeleton used in the experiments is lightweight and comprises 4 Degrees of Freedom, closely mimicking human upper body kinematics and three-dimensional range of motion. We conducted tests on both hardware and simulations of the exoskeleton, demonstrating stable performance. The system maintained its position over an extended period, exhibiting minimal friction and avoiding undesired slewing.
Code-Style In-Context Learning for Knowledge-Based Question Answering
Authors: Zhijie Nie, Richong Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Xudong Liu
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, In-Context Learning, Question Answering, Semantic Parsing

Current methods for Knowledge-Based Question Answering (KBQA) usually rely on complex training techniques and model frameworks, leading to many limitations in practical applications. Recently, the emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) provides a simple and training-free semantic parsing paradigm for KBQA: Given a small number of questions and their labeled logical forms as demo examples, LLMs can understand the task intent and generate the logic form for a new question. However, current powerful LLMs have little exposure to logic forms during pre-training, resulting in a high format error rate. To solve this problem, we propose a code-style in-context learning method for KBQA, which converts the generation process of unfamiliar logical form into the more familiar code generation process for LLMs. Experimental results on three mainstream datasets show that our method dramatically mitigated the formatting error problem in generating logic forms while realizing a new SOTA on WebQSP, GrailQA, and GraphQ under the few-shot setting. The code and supplementary files are released at https://github.com/Arthurizijar/KB-Coder .
Flexible and Robust Counterfactual Explanations with Minimal Satisfiable Perturbations
Authors: Yongjie Wang, Hangwei Qian, Yongjie Liu, Wei Guo, Chunyan Miao
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Fairness

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) exemplify how to minimally modify a feature vector to achieve a different prediction for an instance. CFEs can enhance informational fairness and trustworthiness, and provide suggestions for users who receive adverse predictions. However, recent research has shown that multiple CFEs can be offered for the same instance or instances with slight differences. Multiple CFEs provide flexible choices and cover diverse desiderata for user selection. However, individual fairness and model reliability will be damaged if unstable CFEs with different costs are returned. Existing methods fail to exploit flexibility and address the concerns of non-robustness simultaneously. To address these issues, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective solution named Counterfactual Explanations with Minimal Satisfiable Perturbations (CEMSP). Specifically, CEMSP constrains changing values of abnormal features with the help of their semantically meaningful normal ranges. For efficiency, we model the problem as a Boolean satisfiability problem to modify as few features as possible. Additionally, CEMSP is a general framework and can easily accommodate more practical requirements, e.g., casualty and actionability. Compared to existing methods, we conduct comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate that our method provides more robust explanations while preserving flexibility.
FIAT: Fusing learning paradigms with Instruction-Accelerated Tuning
Authors: Xinyi Wang, John Wieting, Jonathan H. Clark
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Learning paradigms for large language models (LLMs) currently tend to fall within either in-context learning (ICL) or full fine-tuning. Each of these comes with their own trade-offs based on available data, model size, compute cost, ease-of-use, and final quality with neither solution performing well across-the-board. In this article, we first describe ICL and fine-tuning paradigms in a way that highlights their natural connections. Based on these connections, we propose a new learning paradigm called FIAT that fuses the best of these paradigms together, enabling prompt-engineered instructions and chain-of-thought reasoning with the very largest models while also using similar methods to perform parameter updates on a modestly-sized LLM with parameter-efficient tuning. We evaluate FIAT's effectiveness on a variety of multilingual tasks and observe that FIAT performs better than both ICL and fine-tuning at scales ranging from 100-10,000 training examples. We hope that FIAT provides a practical way of harnessing the full potential of LLMs without needing to make a hard choice between learning paradigms.
Video and Synthetic MRI Pre-training of 3D Vision Architectures for Neuroimage Analysis
Authors: Nikhil J. Dhinagar, Amit Singh, Saket Ozarkar, Ketaki Buwa, Sophia I. Thomopoulos, Conor Owens-Walton, Emily Laltoo, Yao-Liang Chen, Philip Cook, Corey McMillan, Chih-Chien Tsai, J-J Wang, Yih-Ru Wu, Paul M. Thompson
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Transfer learning represents a recent paradigm shift in the way we build artificial intelligence (AI) systems. In contrast to training task-specific models, transfer learning involves pre-training deep learning models on a large corpus of data and minimally fine-tuning them for adaptation to specific tasks. Even so, for 3D medical imaging tasks, we do not know if it is best to pre-train models on natural images, medical images, or even synthetically generated MRI scans or video data. To evaluate these alternatives, here we benchmarked vision transformers (ViTs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), initialized with varied upstream pre-training approaches. These methods were then adapted to three unique downstream neuroimaging tasks with a range of difficulty: Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) classification, "brain age" prediction. Experimental tests led to the following key observations: 1. Pre-training improved performance across all tasks including a boost of 7.4% for AD classification and 4.6% for PD classification for the ViT and 19.1% for PD classification and reduction in brain age prediction error by 1.26 years for CNNs, 2. Pre-training on large-scale video or synthetic MRI data boosted performance of ViTs, 3. CNNs were robust in limited-data settings, and in-domain pretraining enhanced their performances, 4. Pre-training improved generalization to out-of-distribution datasets and sites. Overall, we benchmarked different vision architectures, revealing the value of pre-training them with emerging datasets for model initialization. The resulting pre-trained models can be adapted to a range of downstream neuroimaging tasks, even when training data for the target task is limited.
Efficient Finetuning Large Language Models For Vietnamese Chatbot
Authors: Vu-Thuan Doan, Quoc-Truong Truong, Duc-Vu Nguyen, Vinh-Tiep Nguyen, Thuy-Ngan Nguyen Luu
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Instruction Following

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, PaLM, and LLaMa, have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks. Recent advancements in instruction tuning bring LLMs with ability in following user's instructions and producing human-like responses. However, the high costs associated with training and implementing LLMs pose challenges to academic research. Furthermore, the availability of pretrained LLMs and instruction-tune datasets for Vietnamese language is limited. To tackle these concerns, we leverage large-scale instruction-following datasets from open-source projects, namely Alpaca, GPT4All, and Chat-Doctor, which cover general domain and specific medical domain. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first instructional dataset for Vietnamese. Subsequently, we utilize parameter-efficient tuning through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on two open LLMs: Bloomz (Multilingual) and GPTJ-6B (Vietnamese), resulting four models: Bloomz-Chat, Bloomz-Doctor, GPTJ-Chat, GPTJ-Doctor.Finally, we assess the effectiveness of our methodology on a per-sample basis, taking into consideration the helpfulness, relevance, accuracy, level of detail in their responses. This evaluation process entails the utilization of GPT-4 as an automated scoring mechanism. Despite utilizing a low-cost setup, our method demonstrates about 20-30\% improvement over the original models in our evaluation tasks.
Few-Shot Learning of Force-Based Motions From Demonstration Through Pre-training of Haptic Representation
Authors: Marina Y. Aoyama, João Moura, Namiko Saito, Sethu Vijayakumar
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Few-Shot Learning, Friction, Motion Generation

In many contact-rich tasks, force sensing plays an essential role in adapting the motion to the physical properties of the manipulated object. To enable robots to capture the underlying distribution of object properties necessary for generalising learnt manipulation tasks to unseen objects, existing Learning from Demonstration (LfD) approaches require a large number of costly human demonstrations. Our proposed semi-supervised LfD approach decouples the learnt model into an haptic representation encoder and a motion generation decoder. This enables us to pre-train the first using large amount of unsupervised data, easily accessible, while using few-shot LfD to train the second, leveraging the benefits of learning skills from humans. We validate the approach on the wiping task using sponges with different stiffness and surface friction. Our results demonstrate that pre-training significantly improves the ability of the LfD model to recognise physical properties and generate desired wiping motions for unseen sponges, outperforming the LfD method without pre-training. We validate the motion generated by our semi-supervised LfD model on the physical robot hardware using the KUKA iiwa robot arm. We also validate that the haptic representation encoder, pre-trained in simulation, captures the properties of real objects, explaining its contribution to improving the generalisation of the downstream task.
Leveraging World Model Disentanglement in Value-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zhizun Wang, David Meger
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Management, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Starcraft, Starcraft II

In this paper, we propose a novel model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning approach named Value Decomposition Framework with Disentangled World Model to address the challenge of achieving a common goal of multiple agents interacting in the same environment with reduced sample complexity. Due to scalability and non-stationarity problems posed by multi-agent systems, model-free methods rely on a considerable number of samples for training. In contrast, we use a modularized world model, composed of action-conditioned, action-free, and static branches, to unravel the environment dynamics and produce imagined outcomes based on past experience, without sampling directly from the real environment. We employ variational auto-encoders and variational graph auto-encoders to learn the latent representations for the world model, which is merged with a value-based framework to predict the joint action-value function and optimize the overall training objective. We present experimental results in Easy, Hard, and Super-Hard StarCraft II micro-management challenges to demonstrate that our method achieves high sample efficiency and exhibits superior performance in defeating the enemy armies compared to other baselines.