pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Depth Map Denoising Network and Lightweight Fusion Network for Enhanced 3D Face Recognition
Authors: Ruizhuo Xu, Ke Wang, Chao Deng, Mei Wang, Xi Chen, Wenhui Huang, Junlan Feng, Weihong Deng
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Face Recognition

With the increasing availability of consumer depth sensors, 3D face recognition (FR) has attracted more and more attention. However, the data acquired by these sensors are often coarse and noisy, making them impractical to use directly. In this paper, we introduce an innovative Depth map denoising network (DMDNet) based on the Denoising Implicit Image Function (DIIF) to reduce noise and enhance the quality of facial depth images for low-quality 3D FR. After generating clean depth faces using DMDNet, we further design a powerful recognition network called Lightweight Depth and Normal Fusion network (LDNFNet), which incorporates a multi-branch fusion block to learn unique and complementary features between different modalities such as depth and normal images. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four distinct low-quality databases demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed methods. Furthermore, when combining DMDNet and LDNFNet, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the Lock3DFace database.
Text2Avatar: Text to 3D Human Avatar Generation with Codebook-Driven Body Controllable Attribute
Authors: Chaoqun Gong, Yuqin Dai, Ronghui Li, Achun Bao, Jun Li, Jian Yang, Yachao Zhang, Xiu Li
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Disentanglement, Text to 3D, text-to-3d-human

Generating 3D human models directly from text helps reduce the cost and time of character modeling. However, achieving multi-attribute controllable and realistic 3D human avatar generation is still challenging due to feature coupling and the scarcity of realistic 3D human avatar datasets. To address these issues, we propose Text2Avatar, which can generate realistic-style 3D avatars based on the coupled text prompts. Text2Avatar leverages a discrete codebook as an intermediate feature to establish a connection between text and avatars, enabling the disentanglement of features. Furthermore, to alleviate the scarcity of realistic style 3D human avatar data, we utilize a pre-trained unconditional 3D human avatar generation model to obtain a large amount of 3D avatar pseudo data, which allows Text2Avatar to achieve realistic style generation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can generate realistic 3D avatars from coupled textual data, which is challenging for other existing methods in this field.
Large Language Models aren't all that you need
Authors: Kiran Voderhobli Holla, Chaithanya Kumar, Aryan Singh
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, NER, Task 2, Triplet

This paper describes the architecture and systems built towards solving the SemEval 2023 Task 2: MultiCoNER II (Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition) [1]. We evaluate two approaches (a) a traditional Conditional Random Fields model and (b) a Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuned with a customized head and compare the two approaches. The novel ideas explored are: 1) Decaying auxiliary loss (with residual) - where we train the model on an auxiliary task of Coarse-Grained NER and include this task as a part of the loss function 2) Triplet token blending - where we explore ways of blending the embeddings of neighboring tokens in the final NER layer prior to prediction 3) Task-optimal heads - where we explore a variety of custom heads and learning rates for the final layer of the LLM. We also explore multiple LLMs including GPT-3 and experiment with a variety of dropout and other hyperparameter settings before arriving at our final model which achieves micro & macro f1 of 0.85/0.84 (on dev) and 0.67/0.61 on the test data . We show that while pre-trained LLMs, by themselves, bring about a large improvement in scores as compared to traditional models, we also demonstrate that tangible improvements to the Macro-F1 score can be made by augmenting the LLM with additional feature/loss/model engineering techniques described above.
Large language model for Bible sentiment analysis: Sermon on the Mount
Authors: Mahek Vora, Tom Blau, Vansh Kachhwal, Ashu M. G. Solo, Rohitash Chandra
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Sentiment Analysis

The revolution of natural language processing via large language models has motivated its use in multidisciplinary areas that include social sciences and humanities and more specifically, comparative religion. Sentiment analysis provides a mechanism to study the emotions expressed in text. Recently, sentiment analysis has been used to study and compare translations of the Bhagavad Gita, which is a fundamental and sacred Hindu text. In this study, we use sentiment analysis for studying selected chapters of the Bible. These chapters are known as the Sermon on the Mount. We utilize a pre-trained language model for sentiment analysis by reviewing five translations of the Sermon on the Mount, which include the King James version, the New International Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the Lamsa Version, and the Basic English Version. We provide a chapter-by-chapter and verse-by-verse comparison using sentiment and semantic analysis and review the major sentiments expressed. Our results highlight the varying sentiments across the chapters and verses. We found that the vocabulary of the respective translations is significantly different. We detected different levels of humour, optimism, and empathy in the respective chapters that were used by Jesus to deliver his message.
Communication-Efficient Federated Learning for LEO Satellite Networks Integrated with HAPs Using Hybrid NOMA-OFDM
Authors: Mohamed Elmahallawy, Tie Luo, Khaled Ramadan
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Space AI has become increasingly important and sometimes even necessary for government, businesses, and society. An active research topic under this mission is integrating federated learning (FL) with satellite communications (SatCom) so that numerous low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites can collaboratively train a machine learning model. However, the special communication environment of SatCom leads to a very slow FL training process up to days and weeks. This paper proposes NomaFedHAP, a novel FL-SatCom approach tailored to LEO satellites, that (1) utilizes high-altitude platforms (HAPs) as distributed parameter servers (PS) to enhance satellite visibility, and (2) introduces non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) into LEO to enable fast and bandwidth-efficient model transmissions. In addition, NomaFedHAP includes (3) a new communication topology that exploits HAPs to bridge satellites among different orbits to mitigate the Doppler shift, and (4) a new FL model aggregation scheme that optimally balances models between different orbits and shells. Moreover, we (5) derive a closed-form expression of the outage probability for satellites in near and far shells, as well as for the entire system. Our extensive simulations have validated the mathematical analysis and demonstrated the superior performance of NomaFedHAP in achieving fast and efficient FL model convergence with high accuracy as compared to the state-of-the-art.
Data Assimilation in Chaotic Systems Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mohamad Abed El Rahman Hammoud, Naila Raboudi, Edriss S. Titi, Omar Knio, Ibrahim Hoteit
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Trajectory Planning

Data assimilation (DA) plays a pivotal role in diverse applications, ranging from climate predictions and weather forecasts to trajectory planning for autonomous vehicles. A prime example is the widely used ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), which relies on linear updates to minimize variance among the ensemble of forecast states. Recent advancements have seen the emergence of deep learning approaches in this domain, primarily within a supervised learning framework. However, the adaptability of such models to untrained scenarios remains a challenge. In this study, we introduce a novel DA strategy that utilizes reinforcement learning (RL) to apply state corrections using full or partial observations of the state variables. Our investigation focuses on demonstrating this approach to the chaotic Lorenz '63 system, where the agent's objective is to minimize the root-mean-squared error between the observations and corresponding forecast states. Consequently, the agent develops a correction strategy, enhancing model forecasts based on available system state observations. Our strategy employs a stochastic action policy, enabling a Monte Carlo-based DA framework that relies on randomly sampling the policy to generate an ensemble of assimilated realizations. Results demonstrate that the developed RL algorithm performs favorably when compared to the EnKF. Additionally, we illustrate the agent's capability to assimilate non-Gaussian data, addressing a significant limitation of the EnKF.
1st Place Solution for 5th LSVOS Challenge: Referring Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Zhuoyan Luo, Yicheng Xiao, Yong liu, Yitong Wang, Yansong Tang, Xiu Li, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Referring Video Object Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

The recent transformer-based models have dominated the Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) task due to the superior performance. Most prior works adopt unified DETR framework to generate segmentation masks in query-to-instance manner. In this work, we integrate strengths of that leading RVOS models to build up an effective paradigm. We first obtain binary mask sequences from the RVOS models. To improve the consistency and quality of masks, we propose Two-Stage Multi-Model Fusion strategy. Each stage rationally ensembles RVOS models based on framework design as well as training strategy, and leverages different video object segmentation (VOS) models to enhance mask coherence by object propagation mechanism. Our method achieves 75.7% J&F on Ref-Youtube-VOS validation set and 70% J&F on test set, which ranks 1st place on 5th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge (ICCV 2023) track 3. Code is available at https://github.com/RobertLuo1/iccv2023_RVOS_Challenge.
Edge AI as a Service with Coordinated Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Alireza Maleki, Hamed Shah-Mansouri, Babak H. Khalaj
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00

As artificial intelligence (AI) applications continue to expand in next-generation networks, there is a growing need for deep neural network (DNN) models. Although DNN models deployed at the edge are promising for providing AI as a service with low latency, their cooperation is yet to be explored. In this paper, we consider that DNN service providers share their computing resources as well as their models' parameters and allow other DNNs to offload their computations without mirroring. We propose a novel algorithm called coordinated DNNs on edge (\textbf{CoDE}) that facilitates coordination among DNN services by establishing new inference paths. CoDE aims to find the optimal path, which is the path with the highest possible reward, by creating multi-task DNNs from individual models. The reward reflects the inference throughput and model accuracy. With CoDE, DNN models can make new paths for inference by using their own or other models' parameters. We then evaluate the performance of CoDE through numerical experiments. The results demonstrate a $40\%$ increase in the inference throughput while degrading the average accuracy by only $2.3\%$. Experiments show that CoDE enhances the inference throughput and, achieves higher precision compared to a state-of-the-art existing method.
A Compact Representation for Bayesian Neural Networks By Removing Permutation Symmetry
Authors: Tim Z. Xiao, Weiyang Liu, Robert Bamler
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Variational Inference

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are a principled approach to modeling predictive uncertainties in deep learning, which are important in safety-critical applications. Since exact Bayesian inference over the weights in a BNN is intractable, various approximate inference methods exist, among which sampling methods such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) are often considered the gold standard. While HMC provides high-quality samples, it lacks interpretable summary statistics because its sample mean and variance is meaningless in neural networks due to permutation symmetry. In this paper, we first show that the role of permutations can be meaningfully quantified by a number of transpositions metric. We then show that the recently proposed rebasin method allows us to summarize HMC samples into a compact representation that provides a meaningful explicit uncertainty estimate for each weight in a neural network, thus unifying sampling methods with variational inference. We show that this compact representation allows us to compare trained BNNs directly in weight space across sampling methods and variational inference, and to efficiently prune neural networks trained without explicit Bayesian frameworks by exploiting uncertainty estimates from HMC.
A Survey of Personality, Persona, and Profile in Conversational Agents and Chatbots
Authors: Richard Sutcliffe
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00

We present a review of personality in neural conversational agents (CAs), also called chatbots. First, we define Personality, Persona, and Profile. We explain all personality schemes which have been used in CAs, and list models under the scheme(s) which they use. Second we describe 21 datasets which have been developed in recent CA personality research. Third, we define the methods used to embody personality in a CA, and review recent models using them. Fourth, we survey some relevant reviews on CAs, personality, and related topics. Finally, we draw conclusions and identify some research challenges for this important emerging field.
Reviving the Context: Camera Trap Species Classification as Link Prediction on Multimodal Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Vardaan Pahuja, Weidi Luo, Yu Gu, Cheng-Hao Tu, Hong-You Chen, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Charles Stewart, Song Gao, Wei-Lun Chao, Yu Su
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Camera traps are important tools in animal ecology for biodiversity monitoring and conservation. However, their practical application is limited by issues such as poor generalization to new and unseen locations. Images are typically associated with diverse forms of context, which may exist in different modalities. In this work, we exploit the structured context linked to camera trap images to boost out-of-distribution generalization for species classification tasks in camera traps. For instance, a picture of a wild animal could be linked to details about the time and place it was captured, as well as structured biological knowledge about the animal species. While often overlooked by existing studies, incorporating such context offers several potential benefits for better image understanding, such as addressing data scarcity and enhancing generalization. However, effectively incorporating such heterogeneous context into the visual domain is a challenging problem. To address this, we propose a novel framework that transforms species classification as link prediction in a multimodal knowledge graph (KG). This framework enables the seamless integration of diverse multimodal contexts for visual recognition. We apply this framework for out-of-distribution species classification on the iWildCam2020-WILDS and Snapshot Mountain Zebra datasets and achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, our framework enhances sample efficiency for recognizing under-represented species.
LaFFi: Leveraging Hybrid Natural Language Feedback for Fine-tuning Language Models
Authors: Qianxi Li, Yingyue Cao, Jikun Kang, Tianpei Yang, Xi Chen, Jun Jin, Matthew E. Taylor
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) adapts a trained model to specific downstream tasks, significantly improving task-specific performance. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a common approach, where an LLM is trained to produce desired answers. However, LLMs trained with SFT sometimes make simple mistakes and result in hallucinations on reasoning tasks such as question-answering. Without external feedback, it is difficult for SFT to learn a good mapping between the question and the desired answer, especially with a small dataset. This paper introduces an alternative to SFT called Natural Language Feedback for Finetuning LLMs (LaFFi). LaFFi has LLMs directly predict the feedback they will receive from an annotator. We find that requiring such reflection can significantly improve the accuracy in in-domain question-answering tasks, providing a promising direction for the application of natural language feedback in the realm of SFT LLMs. Additional ablation studies show that the portion of human-annotated data in the annotated datasets affects the fine-tuning performance.
Fairness in Serving Large Language Models
Authors: Ying Sheng, Shiyi Cao, Dacheng Li, Banghua Zhu, Zhuohan Li, Danyang Zhuo, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Scheduling

High-demand LLM inference services (e.g., ChatGPT and BARD) support a wide range of requests from short chat conversations to long document reading. To ensure that all client requests are processed fairly, most major LLM inference services have request rate limits, to ensure that no client can dominate the request queue. However, this rudimentary notion of fairness also results in under-utilization of the resources and poor client experience when there is spare capacity. While there is a rich literature on fair scheduling, serving LLMs presents new challenges due to their unpredictable request lengths and their unique batching characteristics on parallel accelerators. This paper introduces the definition of LLM serving fairness based on a cost function that accounts for the number of input and output tokens processed. To achieve fairness in serving, we propose a novel scheduling algorithm, the Virtual Token Counter (VTC), a fair scheduler based on the continuous batching mechanism. We prove a 2x tight upper bound on the service difference between two backlogged clients, adhering to the requirement of work-conserving. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of VTC in ensuring fairness, especially in contrast to other baseline methods, which exhibit shortcomings under various conditions. The reproducible code is available at https://github.com/Ying1123/VTC-artifact
Brain Tumor Segmentation Based on Deep Learning, Attention Mechanisms, and Energy-Based Uncertainty Prediction
Authors: Zachary Schwehr, Sriman Achanta
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumors are one of the deadliest forms of cancer with a mortality rate of over 80%. A quick and accurate diagnosis is crucial to increase the chance of survival. However, in medical analysis, the manual annotation and segmentation of a brain tumor can be a complicated task. Multiple MRI modalities are typically analyzed as they provide unique information regarding the tumor regions. Although these MRI modalities are helpful for segmenting gliomas, they tend to increase overfitting and computation. This paper proposes a region of interest detection algorithm that is implemented during data preprocessing to locate salient features and remove extraneous MRI data. This decreases the input size, allowing for more aggressive data augmentations and deeper neural networks. Following the preprocessing of the MRI modalities, a fully convolutional autoencoder with soft attention segments the different brain MRIs. When these deep learning algorithms are implemented in practice, analysts and physicians cannot differentiate between accurate and inaccurate predictions. Subsequently, test time augmentations and an energy-based model were used for voxel-based uncertainty predictions. Experimentation was conducted on the BraTS benchmarks and achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performance. Additionally, qualitative results were used to assess the segmentation models and uncertainty predictions.
Exploring the Effectiveness of Instruction Tuning in Biomedical Language Processing
Authors: Omid Rohanian, Mohammadmahdi Nouriborji, David A. Clifton
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Natural Language Inference, NER, Relation Extraction

Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly those similar to ChatGPT, have significantly influenced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While these models excel in general language tasks, their performance in domain-specific downstream tasks such as biomedical and clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Medical Natural Language Inference (NLI) is still evolving. In this context, our study investigates the potential of instruction tuning for biomedical language processing, applying this technique to two general LLMs of substantial scale. We present a comprehensive, instruction-based model trained on a dataset that consists of approximately $200,000$ instruction-focused samples. This dataset represents a carefully curated compilation of existing data, meticulously adapted and reformatted to align with the specific requirements of our instruction-based tasks. This initiative represents an important step in utilising such models to achieve results on par with specialised encoder-only models like BioBERT and BioClinicalBERT for various classical biomedical NLP tasks. Our work includes an analysis of the dataset's composition and its impact on model performance, providing insights into the intricacies of instruction tuning. By sharing our codes, models, and the distinctively assembled instruction-based dataset, we seek to encourage ongoing research and development in this area.
KernelGPT: Enhanced Kernel Fuzzing via Large Language Models
Authors: Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Lingming Zhang
Date: 2023-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Bugs in operating system kernels can affect billions of devices and users all over the world. As a result, a large body of research has been focused on kernel fuzzing, i.e., automatically generating syscall (system call) sequences to detect potential kernel bugs or vulnerabilities. Kernel fuzzing aims to generate valid syscall sequences guided by syscall specifications that define both the syntax and semantics of syscalls. While there has been existing work trying to automate syscall specification generation, this remains largely manual work, and a large number of important syscalls are still uncovered. In this paper, we propose KernelGPT, the first approach to automatically synthesizing syscall specifications via Large Language Models (LLMs) for enhanced kernel fuzzing. Our key insight is that LLMs have seen massive kernel code, documentation, and use cases during pre-training, and thus can automatically distill the necessary information for making valid syscalls. More specifically, KernelGPT leverages an iterative approach to automatically infer the specifications, and further debug and repair them based on the validation feedback. Our results demonstrate that KernelGPT can generate more new and valid specifications and achieve higher coverage than state-of-the-art techniques. So far, by using newly generated specifications, KernelGPT has already detected 24 new unique bugs in Linux kernel, with 12 fixed and 11 assigned with CVE numbers. Moreover, a number of specifications generated by KernelGPT have already been merged into the kernel fuzzer Syzkaller, following the request from its development team.