pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cheating off your neighbors: Improving activity recognition through corroboration
Authors: Haoxiang Yu, Jingyi An, Evan King, Edison Thomaz, Christine Julien
Date: 2023-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition

Understanding the complexity of human activities solely through an individual's data can be challenging. However, in many situations, surrounding individuals are likely performing similar activities, while existing human activity recognition approaches focus almost exclusively on individual measurements and largely ignore the context of the activity. Consider two activities: attending a small group meeting and working at an office desk. From solely an individual's perspective, it can be difficult to differentiate between these activities as they may appear very similar, even though they are markedly different. Yet, by observing others nearby, it can be possible to distinguish between these activities. In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance the prediction accuracy of an individual's activities by incorporating insights from surrounding individuals. We have collected a real-world dataset from 20 participants with over 58 hours of data including activities such as attending lectures, having meetings, working in the office, and eating together. Compared to observing a single person in isolation, our proposed approach significantly improves accuracy. We regard this work as a first step in collaborative activity recognition, opening new possibilities for understanding human activity in group settings.
Detection of Late Blight Disease in Tomato Leaf Using Image Processing Techniques
Authors: Muhammad Shoaib Farooq, Tabir Arif, Shamyla Riaz
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

=One of the most frequently farmed crops is the tomato crop. Late blight is the most prevalent tomato disease in the world, and often causes a significant reduction in the production of tomato crops. The importance of tomatoes as an agricultural product necessitates early detection of late blight. It is produced by the fungus Phytophthora. The earliest signs of late blight on tomatoes are unevenly formed, water-soaked lesions on the leaves located on the plant canopy's younger leave White cottony growth may appear in humid environments evident on the undersides of the leaves that have been impacted. Lesions increase as the disease proceeds, turning the leaves brown to shrivel up and die. Using picture segmentation and the Multi-class SVM technique, late blight disorder is discovered in this work. Image segmentation is employed for separating damaged areas on leaves, and the Multi-class SVM method is used for reliable disease categorization. 30 reputable studies were chosen from a total of 2770 recognized papers. The primary goal of this study is to compile cutting-edge research that identifies current research trends, problems, and prospects for late blight detection. It also looks at current approaches for applying image processing to diagnose and detect late blight. A suggested taxonomy for late blight detection has also been provided. In the same way, a model for the development of the solutions to problems is also presented. Finally, the research gaps have been presented in terms of open issues for the provision of future directions in image processing for the researchers.
Augmentation-aware Self-supervised Learning with Conditioned Projector
Authors: Marcin Przewięźlikowski, Mateusz Pyla, Bartosz Zieliński, Bartłomiej Twardowski, Jacek Tabor, Marek Śmieja
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Sensitivity

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a powerful technique for learning from unlabeled data. By learning to remain invariant to applied data augmentations, methods such as SimCLR and MoCo can reach quality on par with supervised approaches. However, this invariance may be detrimental for solving downstream tasks that depend on traits affected by augmentations used during pretraining, such as color. In this paper, we propose to foster sensitivity to such characteristics in the representation space by modifying the projector network, a common component of self-supervised architectures. Specifically, we supplement the projector with information about augmentations applied to images. For the projector to take advantage of this auxiliary conditioning when solving the SSL task, the feature extractor learns to preserve the augmentation information in its representations. Our approach, coined Conditional Augmentation-aware Self-supervised Learning (CASSLE), is directly applicable to typical joint-embedding SSL methods regardless of their objective functions. Moreover, it does not require major changes in the network architecture or prior knowledge of downstream tasks. In addition to an analysis of sensitivity towards different data augmentations, we conduct a series of experiments, which show that CASSLE improves over various SSL methods, reaching state-of-the-art performance in multiple downstream tasks.
Machine Vision Using Cellphone Camera: A Comparison of deep networks for classifying three challenging denominations of Indian Coins
Authors: Keyur D. Joshi, Dhruv Shah, Varshil Shah, Nilay Gandhi, Sanket J. Shah, Sanket B. Shah
Date: 2023-05-12 00:00:00

Indian currency coins come in a variety of denominations. Off all the varieties Rs.1, RS.2, and Rs.5 have similar diameters. Majority of the coin styles in market circulation for denominations of Rs.1 and Rs.2 coins are nearly the same except for numerals on its reverse side. If a coin is resting on its obverse side, the correct denomination is not distinguishable by humans. Therefore, it was hypothesized that a digital image of a coin resting on its either size could be classified into its correct denomination by training a deep neural network model. The digital images were generated by using cheap cell phone cameras. To find the most suitable deep neural network architecture, four were selected based on the preliminary analysis carried out for comparison. The results confirm that two of the four deep neural network models can classify the correct denomination from either side of a coin with an accuracy of 97%.
Gemtelligence: Accelerating Gemstone classification with Deep Learning
Authors: Tommaso Bendinelli, Luca Biggio, Daniel Nyfeler, Abhigyan Ghosh, Peter Tollan, Moritz Alexander Kirschmann, Olga Fink
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Learning

The value of luxury goods, particularly investment-grade gemstones, is greatly influenced by their origin and authenticity, sometimes resulting in differences worth millions of dollars. Traditionally, human experts have determined the origin and detected treatments on gemstones through visual inspections and a range of analytical methods. However, the interpretation of the data can be subjective and time-consuming, resulting in inconsistencies. In this study, we propose Gemtelligence, a novel approach based on deep learning that enables accurate and consistent origin determination and treatment detection. Gemtelligence comprises convolutional and attention-based neural networks that process heterogeneous data types collected by multiple instruments. Notably, the algorithm demonstrated comparable predictive performance to expensive laser-ablation inductively-coupled-plasma mass-spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis and visual examination by human experts, despite using input data from relatively inexpensive analytical methods. Our innovative methodology represents a major breakthrough in the field of gemstone analysis by significantly improving the automation and robustness of the entire analytical process pipeline.
Improved flood mapping for efficient policy design by fusion of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Landsat-9 imagery to identify population and infrastructure exposed to floods
Authors: Usman Nazir, Muhammad Ahmad Waseem, Falak Sher Khan, Rabia Saeed, Syed Muhammad Hasan, Momin Uppal, Zubair Khalid
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

A reliable yet inexpensive tool for the estimation of flood water spread is conducive for efficient disaster management. The application of optical and SAR imagery in tandem provides a means of extended availability and enhanced reliability of flood mapping. We propose a methodology to merge these two types of imagery into a common data space and demonstrate its use in the identification of affected populations and infrastructure for the 2022 floods in Pakistan. The merging of optical and SAR data provides us with improved observations in cloud-prone regions; that is then used to gain additional insights into flood mapping applications. The use of open source datasets from WorldPop and OSM for population and roads respectively makes the exercise globally replicable. The integration of flood maps with spatial data on population and infrastructure facilitates informed policy design. We have shown that within the top five flood-affected districts in Sindh province, Pakistan, the affected population accounts for 31 %, while the length of affected roads measures 1410.25 km out of a total of 7537.96 km.
AaKOS: Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization
Authors: Guan Wang, Weihua Li, Edmund M-K. Lai, Quan Bai
Date: 2023-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Opinion Summarization, Text Generation, Text Summarization

The rapid growth of information on the Internet has led to an overwhelming amount of opinions and comments on various activities, products, and services. This makes it difficult and time-consuming for users to process all the available information when making decisions. Text summarization, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, has been widely explored to help users quickly retrieve relevant information by generating short and salient content from long or multiple documents. Recent advances in pre-trained language models, such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text generation. However, LLMs require massive amounts of data and resources and are challenging to implement as offline applications. Furthermore, existing text summarization approaches often lack the ``adaptive" nature required to capture diverse aspects in opinion summarization, which is particularly detrimental to users with specific requirements or preferences. In this paper, we propose an Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization model for product reviews, which effectively captures the adaptive nature required for opinion summarization. The model generates aspect-oriented summaries given a set of reviews for a particular product, efficiently providing users with useful information on specific aspects they are interested in, ensuring the generated summaries are more personalized and informative. Extensive experiments have been conducted using real-world datasets to evaluate the proposed model. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and is adaptive and efficient in generating summaries that focus on particular aspects, enabling users to make well-informed decisions and catering to their diverse interests and preferences.
Instruction Tuned Models are Quick Learners
Authors: Himanshu Gupta, Saurabh Arjun Sawant, Swaroop Mishra, Mutsumi Nakamura, Arindam Mitra, Santosh Mashetty, Chitta Baral
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Question Rewriting, Transfer Learning

Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream training data for finetuning. Often in real-world situations, there is a scarcity of data available for finetuning, falling somewhere between few shot inference and fully supervised finetuning. In this work, we demonstrate the sample efficiency of instruction tuned models over various tasks by estimating the minimal downstream training data required by them to perform transfer learning and match the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) supervised models. We conduct experiments on 119 tasks from Super Natural Instructions (SuperNI) in both the single task learning (STL) and multi task learning (MTL) settings. Our findings reveal that, in the STL setting, instruction tuned models equipped with 25% of the downstream train data surpass the SOTA performance on the downstream tasks. In the MTL setting, an instruction tuned model trained on only 6% of downstream training data achieve SOTA, while using 100% of the training data results in a 3.69% points improvement (ROUGE-L 74.68) over the previous SOTA. We conduct an analysis on T5 vs Tk-Instruct by developing several baselines to demonstrate that instruction tuning aids in increasing both sample efficiency and transfer learning. Additionally, we observe a consistent ~4% performance increase in both settings when pre-finetuning is performed with instructions. Finally, we conduct a categorical study and find that contrary to previous results, tasks in the question rewriting and title generation categories suffer from instruction tuning.
DetectLLM: Leveraging Log Rank Information for Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text
Authors: Jinyan Su, Terry Yue Zhuo, Di Wang, Preslav Nakov
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) and the huge amount of text they generated, it becomes more and more impractical to manually distinguish whether a text is machine-generated. Given the growing use of LLMs in social media and education, it prompts us to develop methods to detect machine-generated text, preventing malicious usage such as plagiarism, misinformation, and propaganda. Previous work has studied several zero-shot methods, which require no training data. These methods achieve good performance, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. In this paper, we introduce two novel zero-shot methods for detecting machine-generated text by leveraging the log rank information. One is called DetectLLM-LRR, which is fast and efficient, and the other is called DetectLLM-NPR, which is more accurate, but slower due to the need for perturbations. Our experiments on three datasets and seven language models show that our proposed methods improve over the state of the art by 3.9 and 1.75 AUROC points absolute. Moreover, DetectLLM-NPR needs fewer perturbations than previous work to achieve the same level of performance, which makes it more practical for real-world use. We also investigate the efficiency--performance trade-off based on users preference on these two measures and we provide intuition for using them in practice effectively. We release the data and the code of both methods in https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/DetectLLM
ChatGPT for Us: Preserving Data Privacy in ChatGPT via Dialogue Text Ambiguation to Expand Mental Health Care Delivery
Authors: Anaelia Ovalle, Mehrab Beikzadeh, Parshan Teimouri, Kai-Wei Chang, Majid Sarrafzadeh
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00

Large language models have been useful in expanding mental health care delivery. ChatGPT, in particular, has gained popularity for its ability to generate human-like dialogue. However, data-sensitive domains -- including but not limited to healthcare -- face challenges in using ChatGPT due to privacy and data-ownership concerns. To enable its utilization, we propose a text ambiguation framework that preserves user privacy. We ground this in the task of addressing stress prompted by user-provided texts to demonstrate the viability and helpfulness of privacy-preserved generations. Our results suggest that chatGPT recommendations are still able to be moderately helpful and relevant, even when the original user text is not provided.
Learning Phase Mask for Privacy-Preserving Passive Depth Estimation
Authors: Zaid Tasneem, Giovanni Milione, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Xiang Yu, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Manmohan Chandraker, Francesco Pittaluga
Date: 2022-11-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022 11
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Depth Estimation, Face Identification, Privacy Preserving

With over a billion sold each year, cameras are not only becoming ubiquitous and omnipresent, but are driving progress in a wide range of applications such as augmented/virtual reality, robotics, surveillance, security, autonomous navigation and many others. However, severe concerns regarding the privacy implications of camera-based solutions currently limit the range of environments where cameras can be deployed. The key question we address in this paper is: Can cameras be enhanced with a scalable solution to preserve users’ privacy without degrading their machine intelligence capabilities? Our solution is a novel end-to-end adversarial learning pipeline in which a phase mask placed at the aperture plane of a camera is jointly optimized with respect to privacy and utility objectives. We conduct an extensive design space analysis of sensor configurations with respect to phase mask design, focus settings and resolution to determine operating points with desirable privacy-utility tradeoffs that are also amenable to sensor fabrication and real-world constraints. We demonstrate the first working prototype that enables passive depth estimation while inhibiting face identification.
Optimization of binding affinities in chemical space with generative pretrained transformer and deep reinforcement learning
Authors: Xiaopeng Xu, Juexiao Zhou, Chen Zhu, Qing Zhan, Zhongxiao Li, Ruochi Zhang, Yu Wang, Xingyu Liao, Xin Gao
Date: 2023-04-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: F1000Research 2023 4
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Drug Discovery, Molecular Docking

Background: The key challenge in drug discovery is to discover novel compounds with desirable properties. Among the properties, binding affinity to a target is one of the prerequisites and usually evaluated by molecular docking or quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) models. Methods: In this study, we developed Simplified molecular input line entry system Generative Pretrained Transformer with Reinforcement Learning (SGPT-RL), which uses a transformer decoder as the policy network of the reinforcement learning agent to optimize the binding affinity to a target. SGPT-RL was evaluated on the Moses distribution learning benchmark and two goal-directed generation tasks, with Dopamine Receptor D2 (DRD2) and Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2) as the targets. Both QSAR model and molecular docking were implemented as the optimization goals in the tasks. The popular Reinvent method was used as the baseline for comparison. Results: The results on Moses benchmark showed that SGPT-RL learned good property distributions and generated molecules with high validity and novelty. On the two goal-directed generation tasks, both SGPT-RL and Reinvent were able to generate valid molecules with improved target scores. The SGPT-RL method achieved better results than Reinvent on the ACE2 task, where molecular docking was used as the optimization goal. Further analysis shows that SGPT-RL learned conserved scaffold patterns during exploration. Conclusions: The superior performance of SGPT-RL in the ACE2 task indicates that it can be applied to the virtual screening process where molecular docking is widely used as the criteria. Besides, the scaffold patterns learned by SGPT-RL during the exploration process can assist chemists to better design and discover novel lead candidates.
Centrality in Production Networks and International Technology Diffusion
Authors: Rinki Ito
Date: 2023-06-11 00:00:00

This study examines whether the structure of global value chains (GVCs) affects international spillovers of research and development (R&D). Although the presence of ``hub'' countries in GVCs has been confirmed by previous studies, the role of these hub countries in the diffusion of the technology has not been analyzed. Using a sample of 21 countries and 14 manufacturing industries during the period 1995-2007, I explore the role of hubs as the mediator of knowledge by classifying countries and industries based on a ``centrality'' measure. I find that R&D spillovers from exporters with High centrality are the largest, suggesting that hub countries play an important role in both gathering and diffusing knowledge. I also find that countries with Middle centrality are getting important in the diffusion of knowledge. Finally, positive spillover effects from own are observed only in the G5 countries.
UniPoll: A Unified Social Media Poll Generation Framework via Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Yixia Li, Rong Xiang, Yanlin Song, Jing Li
Date: 2023-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Poll Generation, Question Generation, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Synthetic Data Generation

Social media platforms are vital for expressing opinions and understanding public sentiment, yet many analytical tools overlook passive users who mainly consume content without engaging actively. To address this, we introduce UniPoll, an advanced framework designed to automatically generate polls from social media posts using sophisticated natural language generation (NLG) techniques. Unlike traditional methods that struggle with social media's informal and context-sensitive nature, UniPoll leverages enriched contexts from user comments and employs multi-objective optimization to enhance poll relevance and engagement. To tackle the inherently noisy nature of social media data, UniPoll incorporates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and synthetic data generation, ensuring robust performance across real-world scenarios. The framework surpasses existing models, including T5, ChatGLM3, and GPT-3.5, in generating coherent and contextually appropriate question-answer pairs. Evaluated on the Chinese WeiboPolls dataset and the newly introduced English RedditPolls dataset, UniPoll demonstrates superior cross-lingual and cross-platform capabilities, making it a potent tool to boost user engagement and create a more inclusive environment for interaction.
FasterViT: Fast Vision Transformers with Hierarchical Attention
Authors: Ali Hatamizadeh, Greg Heinrich, Hongxu Yin, Andrew Tao, Jose M. Alvarez, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov
Date: 2023-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning

We design a new family of hybrid CNN-ViT neural networks, named FasterViT, with a focus on high image throughput for computer vision (CV) applications. FasterViT combines the benefits of fast local representation learning in CNNs and global modeling properties in ViT. Our newly introduced Hierarchical Attention (HAT) approach decomposes global self-attention with quadratic complexity into a multi-level attention with reduced computational costs. We benefit from efficient window-based self-attention. Each window has access to dedicated carrier tokens that participate in local and global representation learning. At a high level, global self-attentions enable the efficient cross-window communication at lower costs. FasterViT achieves a SOTA Pareto-front in terms of accuracy and image throughput. We have extensively validated its effectiveness on various CV tasks including classification, object detection and segmentation. We also show that HAT can be used as a plug-and-play module for existing networks and enhance them. We further demonstrate significantly faster and more accurate performance than competitive counterparts for images with high resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FasterViT.