pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Photometric Redshifts with Copula Entropy
Authors: Jian Ma
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

In this paper we propose to apply copula entropy (CE) to photometric redshifts. CE is used to measure the correlations between photometric measurements and redshifts and then the measurements associated with high CEs are selected for predicting redshifts. We verified the proposed method on the SDSS quasar data. Experimental results show that the accuracy of photometric redshifts is improved with the selected measurements compared to the results with all the measurements used in the experiments, especially for the samples with high redshifts. The measurements selected with CE include luminosity magnitude, the brightness in ultraviolet band with standard deviation, and the brightness of the other four bands. Since CE is a rigorously defined mathematical concept, the models such derived is interpretable.
Prompt-Driven Building Footprint Extraction in Aerial Images with Offset-Building Model
Authors: Kai Li, Yupeng Deng, Yunlong Kong, Diyou Liu, Jingbo Chen, Yu Meng, Junxian Ma
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Region Proposal, Semantic Segmentation

More accurate extraction of invisible building footprints from very-high-resolution (VHR) aerial images relies on roof segmentation and roof-to-footprint offset extraction. Existing state-of-the-art methods based on instance segmentation suffer from poor generalization when extended to large-scale data production and fail to achieve low-cost human interactive annotation. The latest prompt paradigms inspire us to design a promptable framework for roof and offset extraction, which transforms end-to-end algorithms into promptable methods. Within this framework, we propose a novel Offset-Building Model (OBM). To rigorously evaluate the algorithm's capabilities, we introduce a prompt-based evaluation method, where our model reduces offset errors by 16.6% and improves roof Intersection over Union (IoU) by 10.8% compared to other models. Leveraging the common patterns in predicting offsets, we propose Distance-NMS (DNMS) algorithms, enabling the model to further reduce offset vector loss by 6.5%. To further validate the generalization of models, we tested them using a new dataset with over 7,000 manually annotated instance samples. Our algorithms and dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OBM-B3EC.
RDBench: ML Benchmark for Relational Databases
Authors: Zizhao Zhang, Yi Yang, Lutong Zou, He Wen, Tao Feng, Jiaxuan You
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Benefiting from high-quality datasets and standardized evaluation metrics, machine learning (ML) has achieved sustained progress and widespread applications. However, while applying machine learning to relational databases (RDBs), the absence of a well-established benchmark remains a significant obstacle to the development of ML. To address this issue, we introduce ML Benchmark For Relational Databases (RDBench), a standardized benchmark that aims to promote reproducible ML research on RDBs that include multiple tables. RDBench offers diverse RDB datasets of varying scales, domains, and relational structures, organized into 4 levels. Notably, to simplify the adoption of RDBench for diverse ML domains, for any given database, RDBench exposes three types of interfaces including tabular data, homogeneous graphs, and heterogeneous graphs, sharing the same underlying task definition. For the first time, RDBench enables meaningful comparisons between ML methods from diverse domains, ranging from XGBoost to Graph Neural Networks, under RDB prediction tasks. We design multiple classification and regression tasks for each RDB dataset and report averaged results over the same dataset, further enhancing the robustness of the experimental findings. RDBench is implemented with DBGym, a user-friendly platform for ML research and application on databases, enabling benchmarking new ML methods with RDBench at ease.
LLM-FP4: 4-Bit Floating-Point Quantized Transformers
Authors: Shih-Yang Liu, Zechun Liu, Xijie Huang, Pingcheng Dong, Kwang-Ting Cheng
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Quantization

We propose LLM-FP4 for quantizing both weights and activations in large language models (LLMs) down to 4-bit floating-point values, in a post-training manner. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) solutions are primarily integer-based and struggle with bit widths below 8 bits. Compared to integer quantization, floating-point (FP) quantization is more flexible and can better handle long-tail or bell-shaped distributions, and it has emerged as a default choice in many hardware platforms. One characteristic of FP quantization is that its performance largely depends on the choice of exponent bits and clipping range. In this regard, we construct a strong FP-PTQ baseline by searching for the optimal quantization parameters. Furthermore, we observe a high inter-channel variance and low intra-channel variance pattern in activation distributions, which adds activation quantization difficulty. We recognize this pattern to be consistent across a spectrum of transformer models designed for diverse tasks, such as LLMs, BERT, and Vision Transformer models. To tackle this, we propose per-channel activation quantization and show that these additional scaling factors can be reparameterized as exponential biases of weights, incurring a negligible cost. Our method, for the first time, can quantize both weights and activations in the LLaMA-13B to only 4-bit and achieves an average score of 63.1 on the common sense zero-shot reasoning tasks, which is only 5.8 lower than the full-precision model, significantly outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by 12.7 points. Code is available at: https://github.com/nbasyl/LLM-FP4.
Proposal-Contrastive Pretraining for Object Detection from Fewer Data
Authors: Quentin Bouniot, Romaric Audigier, Angélique Loesch, Amaury Habrard
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

The use of pretrained deep neural networks represents an attractive way to achieve strong results with few data available. When specialized in dense problems such as object detection, learning local rather than global information in images has proven to be more efficient. However, for unsupervised pretraining, the popular contrastive learning requires a large batch size and, therefore, a lot of resources. To address this problem, we are interested in transformer-based object detectors that have recently gained traction in the community with good performance and with the particularity of generating many diverse object proposals. In this work, we present Proposal Selection Contrast (ProSeCo), a novel unsupervised overall pretraining approach that leverages this property. ProSeCo uses the large number of object proposals generated by the detector for contrastive learning, which allows the use of a smaller batch size, combined with object-level features to learn local information in the images. To improve the effectiveness of the contrastive loss, we introduce the object location information in the selection of positive examples to take into account multiple overlapping object proposals. When reusing pretrained backbone, we advocate for consistency in learning local information between the backbone and the detection head. We show that our method outperforms state of the art in unsupervised pretraining for object detection on standard and novel benchmarks in learning with fewer data.
TD-MPC2: Scalable, Robust World Models for Continuous Control
Authors: Nicklas Hansen, Hao Su, Xiaolong Wang
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Decoder, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

TD-MPC is a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that performs local trajectory optimization in the latent space of a learned implicit (decoder-free) world model. In this work, we present TD-MPC2: a series of improvements upon the TD-MPC algorithm. We demonstrate that TD-MPC2 improves significantly over baselines across 104 online RL tasks spanning 4 diverse task domains, achieving consistently strong results with a single set of hyperparameters. We further show that agent capabilities increase with model and data size, and successfully train a single 317M parameter agent to perform 80 tasks across multiple task domains, embodiments, and action spaces. We conclude with an account of lessons, opportunities, and risks associated with large TD-MPC2 agents. Explore videos, models, data, code, and more at https://tdmpc2.com
Prompt Me Up: Unleashing the Power of Alignments for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction
Authors: Xuming Hu, Junzhe Chen, Aiwei Liu, Shiao Meng, Lijie Wen, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction

How can we better extract entities and relations from text? Using multimodal extraction with images and text obtains more signals for entities and relations, and aligns them through graphs or hierarchical fusion, aiding in extraction. Despite attempts at various fusions, previous works have overlooked many unlabeled image-caption pairs, such as NewsCLIPing. This paper proposes innovative pre-training objectives for entity-object and relation-image alignment, extracting objects from images and aligning them with entity and relation prompts for soft pseudo-labels. These labels are used as self-supervised signals for pre-training, enhancing the ability to extract entities and relations. Experiments on three datasets show an average 3.41% F1 improvement over prior SOTA. Additionally, our method is orthogonal to previous multimodal fusions, and using it on prior SOTA fusions further improves 5.47% F1.
Can GPT models Follow Human Summarization Guidelines? Evaluating ChatGPT and GPT-4 for Dialogue Summarization
Authors: Yongxin Zhou, Fabien Ringeval, François Portet
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

This study explores the capabilities of prompt-driven Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 in adhering to human guidelines for dialogue summarization. Experiments employed DialogSum (English social conversations) and DECODA (French call center interactions), testing various prompts: including prompts from existing literature and those from human summarization guidelines, as well as a two-step prompt approach. Our findings indicate that GPT models often produce lengthy summaries and deviate from human summarization guidelines. However, using human guidelines as an intermediate step shows promise, outperforming direct word-length constraint prompts in some cases. The results reveal that GPT models exhibit unique stylistic tendencies in their summaries. While BERTScores did not dramatically decrease for GPT outputs suggesting semantic similarity to human references and specialised pre-trained models, ROUGE scores reveal grammatical and lexical disparities between GPT-generated and human-written summaries. These findings shed light on the capabilities and limitations of GPT models in following human instructions for dialogue summarization.
Improving a Named Entity Recognizer Trained on Noisy Data with a Few Clean Instances
Authors: Zhendong Chu, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I Morariu, Jiuxiang Gu, Ani Nenkova
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: NER

To achieve state-of-the-art performance, one still needs to train NER models on large-scale, high-quality annotated data, an asset that is both costly and time-intensive to accumulate. In contrast, real-world applications often resort to massive low-quality labeled data through non-expert annotators via crowdsourcing and external knowledge bases via distant supervision as a cost-effective alternative. However, these annotation methods result in noisy labels, which in turn lead to a notable decline in performance. Hence, we propose to denoise the noisy NER data with guidance from a small set of clean instances. Along with the main NER model we train a discriminator model and use its outputs to recalibrate the sample weights. The discriminator is capable of detecting both span and category errors with different discriminative prompts. Results on public crowdsourcing and distant supervision datasets show that the proposed method can consistently improve performance with a small guidance set.
The Data Provenance Initiative: A Large Scale Audit of Dataset Licensing & Attribution in AI
Authors: Shayne Longpre, Robert Mahari, Anthony Chen, Naana Obeng-Marnu, Damien Sileo, William Brannon, Niklas Muennighoff, Nathan Khazam, Jad Kabbara, Kartik Perisetla, Xinyi Wu, Enrico Shippole, Kurt Bollacker, Tongshuang Wu, Luis Villa, Sandy Pentland, Sara Hooker
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we convene a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data. This points to a deepening divide in the types of data that are made available under different license conditions, and heightened implications for jurisdictional legal interpretations of copyright and fair use. We also observe frequent miscategorization of licenses on widely used dataset hosting sites, with license omission of 70%+ and error rates of 50%+. This points to a crisis in misattribution and informed use of the most popular datasets driving many recent breakthroughs. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire audit, with an interactive UI, the Data Provenance Explorer, which allows practitioners to trace and filter on data provenance for the most popular open source finetuning data collections: www.dataprovenance.org.
DEFT: Data Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Language Models via Unsupervised Core-Set Selection
Authors: Devleena Das, Vivek Khetan
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

Recent advances have led to the availability of many pre-trained language models (PLMs); however, a question that remains is how much data is truly needed to fine-tune PLMs for downstream tasks? In this work, we introduce DEFT-UCS, a data-efficient fine-tuning framework that leverages unsupervised core-set selection to identify a smaller, representative dataset that reduces the amount of data needed to fine-tune PLMs for downstream tasks. We examine the efficacy of DEFT-UCS in the context of text-editing LMs, and compare to the state-of-the art text-editing model, CoEDIT. Our results demonstrate that DEFT-UCS models are just as accurate as CoEDIT, across eight different datasets consisting of six different editing tasks, while finetuned on 70% less data.
AI Agent as Urban Planner: Steering Stakeholder Dynamics in Urban Planning via Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Kejiang Qian, Lingjun Mao, Xin Liang, Yimin Ding, Jin Gao, Xinran Wei, Ziyi Guo, Jiajie Li
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Decision Making, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In urban planning, land use readjustment plays a pivotal role in aligning land use configurations with the current demands for sustainable urban development. However, present-day urban planning practices face two main issues. Firstly, land use decisions are predominantly dependent on human experts. Besides, while resident engagement in urban planning can promote urban sustainability and livability, it is challenging to reconcile the diverse interests of stakeholders. To address these challenges, we introduce a Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework for real-world land use readjustment. This framework serves participatory urban planning, allowing diverse intelligent agents as stakeholder representatives to vote for preferred land use types. Within this framework, we propose a novel consensus mechanism in reward design to optimize land utilization through collective decision making. To abstract the structure of the complex urban system, the geographic information of cities is transformed into a spatial graph structure and then processed by graph neural networks. Comprehensive experiments on both traditional top-down planning and participatory planning methods from real-world communities indicate that our computational framework enhances global benefits and accommodates diverse interests, leading to improved satisfaction across different demographic groups. By integrating Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, our framework ensures that participatory urban planning decisions are more dynamic and adaptive to evolving community needs and provides a robust platform for automating complex real-world urban planning processes.
SuperHF: Supervised Iterative Learning from Human Feedback
Authors: Gabriel Mukobi, Peter Chatain, Su Fong, Robert Windesheim, Gitta Kutyniok, Kush Bhatia, Silas Alberti
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Safety Alignment

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they often present challenges in terms of safety, alignment with human values, and stability during training. Here, we focus on two prevalent methods used to align these models, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). SFT is simple and robust, powering a host of open-source models, while RLHF is a more sophisticated method used in top-tier models like ChatGPT but also suffers from instability and susceptibility to reward hacking. We propose a novel approach, Supervised Iterative Learning from Human Feedback (SuperHF), which seeks to leverage the strengths of both methods. Our hypothesis is two-fold: that the reward model used in RLHF is critical for efficient data use and model generalization and that the use of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in RLHF may not be necessary and could contribute to instability issues. SuperHF replaces PPO with a simple supervised loss and a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence prior. It creates its own training data by repeatedly sampling a batch of model outputs and filtering them through the reward model in an online learning regime. We then break down the reward optimization problem into three components: robustly optimizing the training rewards themselves, preventing reward hacking-exploitation of the reward model that degrades model performance-as measured by a novel METEOR similarity metric, and maintaining good performance on downstream evaluations. Our experimental results show SuperHF exceeds PPO-based RLHF on the training objective, easily and favorably trades off high reward with low reward hacking, improves downstream calibration, and performs the same on our GPT-4 based qualitative evaluation scheme all the while being significantly simpler to implement, highlighting SuperHF's potential as a competitive language model alignment technique.
HI-TOM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Higher-Order Theory of Mind Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Yinghui He, Yufan Wu, Yilin Jia, Rada Mihalcea, Yulong Chen, Naihao Deng
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to reason about one's own and others' mental states. ToM plays a critical role in the development of intelligence, language understanding, and cognitive processes. While previous work has primarily focused on first and second-order ToM, we explore higher-order ToM, which involves recursive reasoning on others' beliefs. We introduce HI-TOM, a Higher Order Theory of Mind benchmark. Our experimental evaluation using various Large Language Models (LLMs) indicates a decline in performance on higher-order ToM tasks, demonstrating the limitations of current LLMs. We conduct a thorough analysis of different failure cases of LLMs, and share our thoughts on the implications of our findings on the future of NLP.
PROMINET: Prototype-based Multi-View Network for Interpretable Email Response Prediction
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Prashanth Vijayaraghavan, Ehsan Degan
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing, Sentence

Email is a widely used tool for business communication, and email marketing has emerged as a cost-effective strategy for enterprises. While previous studies have examined factors affecting email marketing performance, limited research has focused on understanding email response behavior by considering email content and metadata. This study proposes a Prototype-based Multi-view Network (PROMINET) that incorporates semantic and structural information from email data. By utilizing prototype learning, the PROMINET model generates latent exemplars, enabling interpretable email response prediction. The model maps learned semantic and structural exemplars to observed samples in the training data at different levels of granularity, such as document, sentence, or phrase. The approach is evaluated on two real-world email datasets: the Enron corpus and an in-house Email Marketing corpus. Experimental results demonstrate that the PROMINET model outperforms baseline models, achieving a ~3% improvement in F1 score on both datasets. Additionally, the model provides interpretability through prototypes at different granularity levels while maintaining comparable performance to non-interpretable models. The learned prototypes also show potential for generating suggestions to enhance email text editing and improve the likelihood of effective email responses. This research contributes to enhancing sender-receiver communication and customer engagement in email interactions.
Translating Universal Scene Descriptions into Knowledge Graphs for Robotic Environment
Authors: Giang Hoang Nguyen, Daniel Bessler, Simon Stelter, Mihai Pomarlan, Michael Beetz
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Robots performing human-scale manipulation tasks require an extensive amount of knowledge about their surroundings in order to perform their actions competently and human-like. In this work, we investigate the use of virtual reality technology as an implementation for robot environment modeling, and present a technique for translating scene graphs into knowledge bases. To this end, we take advantage of the Universal Scene Description (USD) format which is an emerging standard for the authoring, visualization and simulation of complex environments. We investigate the conversion of USD-based environment models into Knowledge Graph (KG) representations that facilitate semantic querying and integration with additional knowledge sources.
Mapping the Empirical Evidence of the GDPR (In-)Effectiveness: A Systematic Review
Authors: Wenlong Li, Zihao Li, Wenkai Li, Yueming Zhang, Aolan Li
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

In the realm of data protection, a striking disconnect prevails between traditional domains of doctrinal, legal, theoretical, and policy-based inquiries and a burgeoning body of empirical evidence. Much of the scholarly and regulatory discourse remains entrenched in abstract legal principles or normative frameworks, leaving the empirical landscape uncharted or minimally engaged. Since the birth of EU data protection law, a modest body of empirical evidence has been generated but remains widely scattered and unexamined. Such evidence offers vital insights into the perception, impact, clarity, and effects of data protection measures but languishes on the periphery, inadequately integrated into the broader conversation. To make a meaningful connection, we conduct a comprehensive review and synthesis of empirical research spanning nearly three decades (1995- March 2022), advocating for a more robust integration of empirical evidence into the evaluation and review of the GDPR, while laying a methodological foundation for future empirical research.