pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scaling Integer Arithmetic in Probabilistic Programs
Authors: William X. Cao, Poorva Garg, Ryan Tjoa, Steven Holtzen, Todd Millstein, Guy Van Den Broeck
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Probabilistic Programming

Distributions on integers are ubiquitous in probabilistic modeling but remain challenging for many of today's probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). The core challenge comes from discrete structure: many of today's PPL inference strategies rely on enumeration, sampling, or differentiation in order to scale, which fail for high-dimensional complex discrete distributions involving integers. Our insight is that there is structure in arithmetic that these approaches are not using. We present a binary encoding strategy for discrete distributions that exploits the rich logical structure of integer operations like summation and comparison. We leverage this structured encoding with knowledge compilation to perform exact probabilistic inference, and show that this approach scales to much larger integer distributions with arithmetic.
Offline Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Q-Function Regularization
Authors: Laixi Shi, Robert Dadashi, Yuejie Chi, Pablo Samuel Castro, Matthieu Geist
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The core challenge of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is dealing with the (potentially catastrophic) extrapolation error induced by the distribution shift between the history dataset and the desired policy. A large portion of prior work tackles this challenge by implicitly/explicitly regularizing the learning policy towards the behavior policy, which is hard to estimate reliably in practice. In this work, we propose to regularize towards the Q-function of the behavior policy instead of the behavior policy itself, under the premise that the Q-function can be estimated more reliably and easily by a SARSA-style estimate and handles the extrapolation error more straightforwardly. We propose two algorithms taking advantage of the estimated Q-function through regularizations, and demonstrate they exhibit strong performance on the D4RL benchmarks.
Fitting Auditory Filterbanks with Multiresolution Neural Networks
Authors: Vincent Lostanlen, Daniel Haider, Han Han, Mathieu Lagrange, Peter Balazs, Martin Ehler
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Knowledge Distillation

Waveform-based deep learning faces a dilemma between nonparametric and parametric approaches. On one hand, convolutional neural networks (convnets) may approximate any linear time-invariant system; yet, in practice, their frequency responses become more irregular as their receptive fields grow. On the other hand, a parametric model such as LEAF is guaranteed to yield Gabor filters, hence an optimal time-frequency localization; yet, this strong inductive bias comes at the detriment of representational capacity. In this paper, we aim to overcome this dilemma by introducing a neural audio model, named multiresolution neural network (MuReNN). The key idea behind MuReNN is to train separate convolutional operators over the octave subbands of a discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Since the scale of DWT atoms grows exponentially between octaves, the receptive fields of the subsequent learnable convolutions in MuReNN are dilated accordingly. For a given real-world dataset, we fit the magnitude response of MuReNN to that of a well-established auditory filterbank: Gammatone for speech, CQT for music, and third-octave for urban sounds, respectively. This is a form of knowledge distillation (KD), in which the filterbank ''teacher'' is engineered by domain knowledge while the neural network ''student'' is optimized from data. We compare MuReNN to the state of the art in terms of goodness of fit after KD on a hold-out set and in terms of Heisenberg time-frequency localization. Compared to convnets and Gabor convolutions, we find that MuReNN reaches state-of-the-art performance on all three optimization problems.
ForestMonkey: Toolkit for Reasoning with AI-based Defect Detection and Classification Models
Authors: Jiajun Zhang, Georgina Cosma, Sarah Bugby, Jason Watkins
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning and explainable AI (XAI) tasks have gained popularity recently, enabling users to explain the predictions or decision processes of AI models. This paper introduces Forest Monkey (FM), a toolkit designed to reason the outputs of any AI-based defect detection and/or classification model with data explainability. Implemented as a Python package, FM takes input in the form of dataset folder paths (including original images, ground truth labels, and predicted labels) and provides a set of charts and a text file to illustrate the reasoning results and suggest possible improvements. The FM toolkit consists of processes such as feature extraction from predictions to reasoning targets, feature extraction from images to defect characteristics, and a decision tree-based AI-Reasoner. Additionally, this paper investigates the time performance of the FM toolkit when applied to four AI models with different datasets. Lastly, a tutorial is provided to guide users in performing reasoning tasks using the FM toolkit.
How to Scale Your EMA
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Preserving training dynamics across batch sizes is an important tool for practical machine learning as it enables the trade-off between batch size and wall-clock time. This trade-off is typically enabled by a scaling rule, for example, in stochastic gradient descent, one should scale the learning rate linearly with the batch size. Another important machine learning tool is the model EMA, a functional copy of a target model, whose parameters move towards those of its target model according to an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at a rate parameterized by a momentum hyperparameter. This model EMA can improve the robustness and generalization of supervised learning, stabilize pseudo-labeling, and provide a learning signal for Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). Prior works have not considered the optimization of the model EMA when performing scaling, leading to different training dynamics across batch sizes and lower model performance. In this work, we provide a scaling rule for optimization in the presence of a model EMA and demonstrate the rule's validity across a range of architectures, optimizers, and data modalities. We also show the rule's validity where the model EMA contributes to the optimization of the target model, enabling us to train EMA-based pseudo-labeling and SSL methods at small and large batch sizes. For SSL, we enable training of BYOL up to batch size 24,576 without sacrificing performance, a 6$\times$ wall-clock time reduction under idealized hardware settings.
Is GPT a Computational Model of Emotion? Detailed Analysis
Authors: Ala N. Tak, Jonathan Gratch
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

This paper investigates the emotional reasoning abilities of the GPT family of large language models via a component perspective. The paper first examines how the model reasons about autobiographical memories. Second, it systematically varies aspects of situations to impact emotion intensity and coping tendencies. Even without the use of prompt engineering, it is shown that GPT's predictions align significantly with human-provided appraisals and emotional labels. However, GPT faces difficulties predicting emotion intensity and coping responses. GPT-4 showed the highest performance in the initial study but fell short in the second, despite providing superior results after minor prompt engineering. This assessment brings up questions on how to effectively employ the strong points and address the weak areas of these models, particularly concerning response variability. These studies underscore the merits of evaluating models from a componential perspective.
An Empirical Study on Bugs Inside PyTorch: A Replication Study
Authors: Sharon Chee Yin Ho, Vahid Majdinasab, Mohayeminul Islam, Diego Elias Costa, Emad Shihab, Foutse khomh, Sarah Nadi, Muhammad Raza
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Software systems are increasingly relying on deep learning components, due to their remarkable capability of identifying complex data patterns and powering intelligent behaviour. A core enabler of this change in software development is the availability of easy-to-use deep learning libraries. Libraries like PyTorch and TensorFlow empower a large variety of intelligent systems, offering a multitude of algorithms and configuration options, applicable to numerous domains of systems. However, bugs in those popular deep learning libraries also may have dire consequences for the quality of systems they enable; thus, it is important to understand how bugs are identified and fixed in those libraries. Inspired by a study of Jia et al., which investigates the bug identification and fixing process at TensorFlow, we characterize bugs in the PyTorch library, a very popular deep learning framework. We investigate the causes and symptoms of bugs identified during PyTorch's development, and assess their locality within the project, and extract patterns of bug fixes. Our results highlight that PyTorch bugs are more like traditional software projects bugs, than related to deep learning characteristics. Finally, we also compare our results with the study on TensorFlow, highlighting similarities and differences across the bug identification and fixing process.
Combating the Curse of Multilinguality in Cross-Lingual WSD by Aligning Sparse Contextualized Word Representations
Authors: Gábor Berend
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Dictionary Learning, Word Sense Disambiguation

In this paper, we advocate for using large pre-trained monolingual language models in cross lingual zero-shot word sense disambiguation (WSD) coupled with a contextualized mapping mechanism. We also report rigorous experiments that illustrate the effectiveness of employing sparse contextualized word representations obtained via a dictionary learning procedure. Our experimental results demonstrate that the above modifications yield a significant improvement of nearly 6.5 points of increase in the average F-score (from 62.0 to 68.5) over a collection of 17 typologically diverse set of target languages. We release our source code for replicating our experiments at https://github.com/begab/sparsity_makes_sense.
E^2VPT: An Effective and Efficient Approach for Visual Prompt Tuning
Authors: Cheng Han, Qifan Wang, Yiming Cui, Zhiwen Cao, Wenguan Wang, Siyuan Qi, Dongfang Liu
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Visual Prompt Tuning

As the size of transformer-based models continues to grow, fine-tuning these large-scale pretrained vision models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Parameter-efficient learning has been developed to reduce the number of tunable parameters during fine-tuning. Although these methods show promising results, there is still a significant performance gap compared to full fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we propose an Effective and Efficient Visual Prompt Tuning (E^2VPT) approach for large-scale transformer-based model adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a set of learnable key-value prompts and visual prompts into self-attention and input layers, respectively, to improve the effectiveness of model fine-tuning. Moreover, we design a prompt pruning procedure to systematically prune low importance prompts while preserving model performance, which largely enhances the model's efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks, with considerably low parameter usage (e.g., 0.32% of model parameters on VTAB-1k). Our code is available at https://github.com/ChengHan111/E2VPT.
ClusterSeq: Enhancing Sequential Recommender Systems with Clustering based Meta-Learning
Authors: Mohammmadmahdi Maheri, Reza Abdollahzadeh, Bardia Mohammadi, Mina Rafiei, Jafar Habibi, Hamid R. Rabiee
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Meta-Learning, Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

In practical scenarios, the effectiveness of sequential recommendation systems is hindered by the user cold-start problem, which arises due to limited interactions for accurately determining user preferences. Previous studies have attempted to address this issue by combining meta-learning with user and item-side information. However, these approaches face inherent challenges in modeling user preference dynamics, particularly for "minor users" who exhibit distinct preferences compared to more common or "major users." To overcome these limitations, we present a novel approach called ClusterSeq, a Meta-Learning Clustering-Based Sequential Recommender System. ClusterSeq leverages dynamic information in the user sequence to enhance item prediction accuracy, even in the absence of side information. This model preserves the preferences of minor users without being overshadowed by major users, and it capitalizes on the collective knowledge of users within the same cluster. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of ClusterSeq. Empirical results consistently demonstrate that ClusterSeq outperforms several state-of-the-art meta-learning recommenders. Notably, compared to existing meta-learning methods, our proposed approach achieves a substantial improvement of 16-39% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR).
Sobolev Space Regularised Pre Density Models
Authors: Mark Kozdoba, Binyamin Perets, Shie Mannor
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Density Estimation, Inductive Bias

We propose a new approach to non-parametric density estimation that is based on regularizing a Sobolev norm of the density. This method is statistically consistent, and makes the inductive bias of the model clear and interpretable. While there is no closed analytic form for the associated kernel, we show that one can approximate it using sampling. The optimization problem needed to determine the density is non-convex, and standard gradient methods do not perform well. However, we show that with an appropriate initialization and using natural gradients, one can obtain well performing solutions. Finally, while the approach provides pre-densities (i.e. not necessarily integrating to 1), which prevents the use of log-likelihood for cross validation, we show that one can instead adapt Fisher divergence based score matching methods for this task. We evaluate the resulting method on the comprehensive recent anomaly detection benchmark suite, ADBench, and find that it ranks second best, among more than 15 algorithms.
Training-based Model Refinement and Representation Disagreement for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Authors: Seyed Mojtaba Marvasti-Zadeh, Nilanjan Ray, Nadir Erbilgin
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to improve the performance and generalization of existing object detectors by utilizing limited labeled data and extensive unlabeled data. Despite many advances, recent SSOD methods are still challenged by inadequate model refinement using the classical exponential moving average (EMA) strategy, the consensus of Teacher-Student models in the latter stages of training (i.e., losing their distinctiveness), and noisy/misleading pseudo-labels. This paper proposes a novel training-based model refinement (TMR) stage and a simple yet effective representation disagreement (RD) strategy to address the limitations of classical EMA and the consensus problem. The TMR stage of Teacher-Student models optimizes the lightweight scaling operation to refine the model's weights and prevent overfitting or forgetting learned patterns from unlabeled data. Meanwhile, the RD strategy helps keep these models diverged to encourage the student model to explore additional patterns in unlabeled data. Our approach can be integrated into established SSOD methods and is empirically validated using two baseline methods, with and without cascade regression, to generate more reliable pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over state-of-the-art SSOD methods. Specifically, the proposed approach outperforms the baseline Unbiased-Teacher-v2 (& Unbiased-Teacher-v1) method by an average mAP margin of 2.23, 2.1, and 3.36 (& 2.07, 1.9, and 3.27) on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and Pascal VOC datasets, respectively.
Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook
Authors: Muhammad Awais, Muzammal Naseer, Salman Khan, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Hisham Cholakkal, Mubarak Shah, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Vision systems to see and reason about the compositional nature of visual scenes are fundamental to understanding our world. The complex relations between objects and their locations, ambiguities, and variations in the real-world environment can be better described in human language, naturally governed by grammatical rules and other modalities such as audio and depth. The models learned to bridge the gap between such modalities coupled with large-scale training data facilitate contextual reasoning, generalization, and prompt capabilities at test time. These models are referred to as foundational models. The output of such models can be modified through human-provided prompts without retraining, e.g., segmenting a particular object by providing a bounding box, having interactive dialogues by asking questions about an image or video scene or manipulating the robot's behavior through language instructions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of such emerging foundational models, including typical architecture designs to combine different modalities (vision, text, audio, etc), training objectives (contrastive, generative), pre-training datasets, fine-tuning mechanisms, and the common prompting patterns; textual, visual, and heterogeneous. We discuss the open challenges and research directions for foundational models in computer vision, including difficulties in their evaluations and benchmarking, gaps in their real-world understanding, limitations of their contextual understanding, biases, vulnerability to adversarial attacks, and interpretability issues. We review recent developments in this field, covering a wide range of applications of foundation models systematically and comprehensively. A comprehensive list of foundational models studied in this work is available at \url{https://github.com/awaisrauf/Awesome-CV-Foundational-Models}.
Composite Diffusion | whole >= Σparts
Authors: Vikram Jamwal, Ramaneswaran S
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

For an artist or a graphic designer, the spatial layout of a scene is a critical design choice. However, existing text-to-image diffusion models provide limited support for incorporating spatial information. This paper introduces Composite Diffusion as a means for artists to generate high-quality images by composing from the sub-scenes. The artists can specify the arrangement of these sub-scenes through a flexible free-form segment layout. They can describe the content of each sub-scene primarily using natural text and additionally by utilizing reference images or control inputs such as line art, scribbles, human pose, canny edges, and more. We provide a comprehensive and modular method for Composite Diffusion that enables alternative ways of generating, composing, and harmonizing sub-scenes. Further, we wish to evaluate the composite image for effectiveness in both image quality and achieving the artist's intent. We argue that existing image quality metrics lack a holistic evaluation of image composites. To address this, we propose novel quality criteria especially relevant to composite generation. We believe that our approach provides an intuitive method of art creation. Through extensive user surveys, quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show how it achieves greater spatial, semantic, and creative control over image generation. In addition, our methods do not need to retrain or modify the architecture of the base diffusion models and can work in a plug-and-play manner with the fine-tuned models.
FedDRL: A Trustworthy Federated Learning Model Fusion Method Based on Staged Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Leiming Chen, Weishan Zhang, Cihao Dong, Sibo Qiao, Ziling Huang, Yuming Nie, Zhaoxiang Hou, Chee Wei Tan
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Traditional federated learning uses the number of samples to calculate the weights of each client model and uses this fixed weight value to fusion the global model. However, in practical scenarios, each client's device and data heterogeneity leads to differences in the quality of each client's model. Thus the contribution to the global model is not wholly determined by the sample size. In addition, if clients intentionally upload low-quality or malicious models, using these models for aggregation will lead to a severe decrease in global model accuracy. Traditional federated learning algorithms do not address these issues. To solve this probelm, we propose FedDRL, a model fusion approach using reinforcement learning based on a two staged approach. In the first stage, Our method could filter out malicious models and selects trusted client models to participate in the model fusion. In the second stage, the FedDRL algorithm adaptively adjusts the weights of the trusted client models and aggregates the optimal global model. We also define five model fusion scenarios and compare our method with two baseline algorithms in those scenarios. The experimental results show that our algorithm has higher reliability than other algorithms while maintaining accuracy.
Team Intro to AI team8 at CoachAI Badminton Challenge 2023: Advanced ShuttleNet for Shot Predictions
Authors: Shih-Hong Chen, Pin-Hsuan Chou, Yong-Fu Liu, Chien-An Han
Date: 2023-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

In this paper, our objective is to improve the performance of the existing framework ShuttleNet in predicting badminton shot types and locations by leveraging past strokes. We participated in the CoachAI Badminton Challenge at IJCAI 2023 and achieved significantly better results compared to the baseline. Ultimately, our team achieved the first position in the competition and we made our code available.
Neural Bradley-Terry Rating: Quantifying Properties from Comparisons
Authors: Satoru Fujii
Date: 2023-07-24 00:00:00

Many properties in the real world don't have metrics and can't be numerically observed, making them difficult to learn. To deal with this challenging problem, prior works have primarily focused on estimating those properties by using graded human scores as the target label in the training. Meanwhile, rating algorithms based on the Bradley-Terry model are extensively studied to evaluate the competitiveness of players based on their match history. In this paper, we introduce the Neural Bradley-Terry Rating (NBTR), a novel machine learning framework designed to quantify and evaluate properties of unknown items. Our method seamlessly integrates the Bradley-Terry model into the neural network structure. Moreover, we generalize this architecture further to asymmetric environments with unfairness, a condition more commonly encountered in real-world settings. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate that NBTR successfully learns to quantify and estimate desired properties.