pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Realism Metric for Generated LiDAR Point Clouds
Authors: Larissa T. Triess, Christoph B. Rist, David Peter, J. Marius Zöllner
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

A considerable amount of research is concerned with the generation of realistic sensor data. LiDAR point clouds are generated by complex simulations or learned generative models. The generated data is usually exploited to enable or improve downstream perception algorithms. Two major questions arise from these procedures: First, how to evaluate the realism of the generated data? Second, does more realistic data also lead to better perception performance? This paper addresses both questions and presents a novel metric to quantify the realism of LiDAR point clouds. Relevant features are learned from real-world and synthetic point clouds by training on a proxy classification task. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate the application of our metric to determine the realism of generated LiDAR data and compare the realism estimation of our metric to the performance of a segmentation model. We confirm that our metric provides an indication for the downstream segmentation performance.
Cell-Free Latent Go-Explore
Authors: Quentin Gallouédec, Emmanuel Dellandréa
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Montezuma's Revenge, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we introduce Latent Go-Explore (LGE), a simple and general approach based on the Go-Explore paradigm for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). Go-Explore was initially introduced with a strong domain knowledge constraint for partitioning the state space into cells. However, in most real-world scenarios, drawing domain knowledge from raw observations is complex and tedious. If the cell partitioning is not informative enough, Go-Explore can completely fail to explore the environment. We argue that the Go-Explore approach can be generalized to any environment without domain knowledge and without cells by exploiting a learned latent representation. Thus, we show that LGE can be flexibly combined with any strategy for learning a latent representation. Our results indicate that LGE, although simpler than Go-Explore, is more robust and outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of pure exploration on multiple hard-exploration environments including Montezuma's Revenge. The LGE implementation is available as open-source at https://github.com/qgallouedec/lge.
LANIT: Language-Driven Image-to-Image Translation for Unlabeled Data
Authors: JiHye Park, Sunwoo Kim, Soohyun Kim, Seokju Cho, Jaejun Yoo, Youngjung Uh, Seungryong Kim
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Prompt Learning, Translation, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

Existing techniques for image-to-image translation commonly have suffered from two critical problems: heavy reliance on per-sample domain annotation and/or inability of handling multiple attributes per image. Recent truly-unsupervised methods adopt clustering approaches to easily provide per-sample one-hot domain labels. However, they cannot account for the real-world setting: one sample may have multiple attributes. In addition, the semantics of the clusters are not easily coupled to the human understanding. To overcome these, we present a LANguage-driven Image-to-image Translation model, dubbed LANIT. We leverage easy-to-obtain candidate attributes given in texts for a dataset: the similarity between images and attributes indicates per-sample domain labels. This formulation naturally enables multi-hot label so that users can specify the target domain with a set of attributes in language. To account for the case that the initial prompts are inaccurate, we also present prompt learning. We further present domain regularization loss that enforces translated images be mapped to the corresponding domain. Experiments on several standard benchmarks demonstrate that LANIT achieves comparable or superior performance to existing models.
GRILLBot: An Assistant for Real-World Tasks with Neural Semantic Parsing and Graph-Based Representations
Authors: Carlos Gemmell, Iain Mackie, Paul Owoicho, Federico Rossetto, Sophie Fischer, Jeffrey Dalton
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing

GRILLBot is the winning system in the 2022 Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, moving towards the next generation of multimodal task assistants. It is a voice assistant to guide users through complex real-world tasks in the domains of cooking and home improvement. These are long-running and complex tasks that require flexible adjustment and adaptation. The demo highlights the core aspects, including a novel Neural Decision Parser for contextualized semantic parsing, a new "TaskGraph" state representation that supports conditional execution, knowledge-grounded chit-chat, and automatic enrichment of tasks with images and videos.
Formalising the Robustness of Counterfactual Explanations for Neural Networks
Authors: Junqi Jiang, Francesco Leofante, Antonio Rago, Francesca Toni
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

The use of counterfactual explanations (CFXs) is an increasingly popular explanation strategy for machine learning models. However, recent studies have shown that these explanations may not be robust to changes in the underlying model (e.g., following retraining), which raises questions about their reliability in real-world applications. Existing attempts towards solving this problem are heuristic, and the robustness to model changes of the resulting CFXs is evaluated with only a small number of retrained models, failing to provide exhaustive guarantees. To remedy this, we propose {\Delta}-robustness, the first notion to formally and deterministically assess the robustness (to model changes) of CFXs for neural networks. We introduce an abstraction framework based on interval neural networks to verify the {\Delta}-robustness of CFXs against a possibly infinite set of changes to the model parameters, i.e., weights and biases. We then demonstrate the utility of this approach in two distinct ways. First, we analyse the {\Delta}-robustness of a number of CFX generation methods from the literature and show that they unanimously host significant deficiencies in this regard. Second, we demonstrate how embedding {\Delta}-robustness within existing methods can provide CFXs which are provably robust.
Batch-Size Independent Regret Bounds for Combinatorial Semi-Bandits with Probabilistically Triggered Arms or Independent Arms
Authors: Xutong Liu, Jinhang Zuo, Siwei Wang, Carlee Joe-Wong, John C. S. Lui, Wei Chen
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00

In this paper, we study the combinatorial semi-bandits (CMAB) and focus on reducing the dependency of the batch-size $K$ in the regret bound, where $K$ is the total number of arms that can be pulled or triggered in each round. First, for the setting of CMAB with probabilistically triggered arms (CMAB-T), we discover a novel (directional) triggering probability and variance modulated (TPVM) condition that can replace the previously-used smoothness condition for various applications, such as cascading bandits, online network exploration and online influence maximization. Under this new condition, we propose a BCUCB-T algorithm with variance-aware confidence intervals and conduct regret analysis which reduces the $O(K)$ factor to $O(\log K)$ or $O(\log^2 K)$ in the regret bound, significantly improving the regret bounds for the above applications. Second, for the setting of non-triggering CMAB with independent arms, we propose a SESCB algorithm which leverages on the non-triggering version of the TPVM condition and completely removes the dependency on $K$ in the leading regret. As a valuable by-product, the regret analysis used in this paper can improve several existing results by a factor of $O(\log K)$. Finally, experimental evaluations show our superior performance compared with benchmark algorithms in different applications.
Learning Automata-Based Complex Event Patterns in Answer Set Programming
Authors: Nikos Katzouris, Georgios Paliouras
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00

Complex Event Recognition and Forecasting (CER/F) techniques attempt to detect, or even forecast ahead of time, event occurrences in streaming input using predefined event patterns. Such patterns are not always known in advance, or they frequently change over time, making machine learning techniques, capable of extracting such patterns from data, highly desirable in CER/F. Since many CER/F systems use symbolic automata to represent such patterns, we propose a family of such automata where the transition-enabling conditions are defined by Answer Set Programming (ASP) rules, and which, thanks to the strong connections of ASP to symbolic learning, are directly learnable from data. We present such a learning approach in ASP and an incremental version thereof that trades optimality for efficiency and is capable to scale to large datasets. We evaluate our approach on two CER datasets and compare it to state-of-the-art automata learning techniques, demonstrating empirically a superior performance, both in terms of predictive accuracy and scalability.
Negative Human Rights as a Basis for Long-term AI Safety and Regulation
Authors: Ondrej Bajgar, Jan Horenovsky
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00

If autonomous AI systems are to be reliably safe in novel situations, they will need to incorporate general principles guiding them to recognize and avoid harmful behaviours. Such principles may need to be supported by a binding system of regulation, which would need the underlying principles to be widely accepted. They should also be specific enough for technical implementation. Drawing inspiration from law, this article explains how negative human rights could fulfil the role of such principles and serve as a foundation both for an international regulatory system and for building technical safety constraints for future AI systems.
Enhancing Early Lung Cancer Detection on Chest Radiographs with AI-assistance: A Multi-Reader Study
Authors: Gaetan Dissez, Nicole Tay, Tom Dyer, Matthew Tam, Richard Dittrich, David Doyne, James Hoare, Jackson J. Pat, Stephanie Patterson, Amanda Stockham, Qaiser Malik, Tom Naunton Morgan, Paul Williams, Liliana Garcia-Mondragon, Jordan Smith, George Pearse, Simon Rasalingham
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Specificity

Objectives: The present study evaluated the impact of a commercially available explainable AI algorithm in augmenting the ability of clinicians to identify lung cancer on chest X-rays (CXR). Design: This retrospective study evaluated the performance of 11 clinicians for detecting lung cancer from chest radiographs, with and without assistance from a commercially available AI algorithm (red dot, Behold.ai) that predicts suspected lung cancer from CXRs. Clinician performance was evaluated against clinically confirmed diagnoses. Setting: The study analysed anonymised patient data from an NHS hospital; the dataset consisted of 400 chest radiographs from adult patients (18 years and above) who had a CXR performed in 2020, with corresponding clinical text reports. Participants: A panel of readers consisting of 11 clinicians (consultant radiologists, radiologist trainees and reporting radiographers) participated in this study. Main outcome measures: Overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and precision for detecting lung cancer on CXRs by clinicians, with and without AI input. Agreement rates between clinicians and performance standard deviation were also evaluated, with and without AI input. Results: The use of the AI algorithm by clinicians led to an improved overall performance for lung tumour detection, achieving an overall increase of 17.4% of lung cancers being identified on CXRs which would have otherwise been missed, an overall increase in detection of smaller tumours, a 24% and 13% increased detection of stage 1 and stage 2 lung cancers respectively, and standardisation of clinician performance. Conclusions: This study showed great promise in the clinical utility of AI algorithms in improving early lung cancer diagnosis and promoting health equity through overall improvement in reader performances, without impacting downstream imaging resources.
Cluster-based Sampling in Hindsight Experience Replay for Robotic Tasks (Student Abstract)
Authors: TaeYoung Kim, Dongsoo Har
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, OpenAI Gym

In multi-goal reinforcement learning with a sparse binary reward, training agents is particularly challenging, due to a lack of successful experiences. To solve this problem, hindsight experience replay (HER) generates successful experiences even from unsuccessful ones. However, generating successful experiences from uniformly sampled ones is not an efficient process. In this paper, the impact of exploiting the property of achieved goals in generating successful experiences is investigated and a novel cluster-based sampling strategy is proposed. The proposed sampling strategy groups episodes with different achieved goals by using a cluster model and samples experiences in the manner of HER to create the training batch. The proposed method is validated by experiments with three robotic control tasks of the OpenAI Gym. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is substantially sample efficient and achieves better performance than baseline approaches.
Open Challenges in Musical Metacreation
Authors: Filippo Carnovalini
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00

Musical Metacreation tries to obtain creative behaviors from computers algorithms composing music. In this paper I briefly analyze how this field evolved from algorithmic composition to be focused on the search for creativity, and I point out some issues in pursuing this goal. Finally, I argue that hybridization of algorithms can be a useful direction for research.
Modelling and Detection of Driver's Fatigue using Ontology
Authors: Alexandre Lambert, Manolo Dulva Hina, Celine Barth, Assia Soukane, Amar Ramdane-Cherif
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00

Road accidents have become the eight leading cause of death all over the world. Lots of these accidents are due to a driver's inattention or lack of focus, due to fatigue. Various factors cause driver's fatigue. This paper considers all the measureable data that manifest driver's fatigue, namely those manifested in the vehicle measureable data while driving as well as the driver's physical and physiological data. Each of the three main factors are further subdivided into smaller details. For example, the vehicle's data is composed of the values obtained from the steering wheel's angle, yaw angle, the position on the lane, and the speed and acceleration of the vehicle while moving. Ontological knowledge and rules for driver fatigue detection are to be integrated into an intelligent system so that on the first sign of dangerous level of fatigue is detected, a warning notification is sent to the driver. This work is intended to contribute to safe road driving.
NeurIPS'22 Cross-Domain MetaDL competition: Design and baseline results
Authors: Dustin Carrión-Ojeda, Hong Chen, Adrian El Baz, Sergio Escalera, Chaoyu Guan, Isabelle Guyon, Ihsan Ullah, Xin Wang, Wenwu Zhu
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning, Humanitarian, image-classification, Image Classification, Meta-Learning

We present the design and baseline results for a new challenge in the ChaLearn meta-learning series, accepted at NeurIPS'22, focusing on "cross-domain" meta-learning. Meta-learning aims to leverage experience gained from previous tasks to solve new tasks efficiently (i.e., with better performance, little training data, and/or modest computational resources). While previous challenges in the series focused on within-domain few-shot learning problems, with the aim of learning efficiently N-way k-shot tasks (i.e., N class classification problems with k training examples), this competition challenges the participants to solve "any-way" and "any-shot" problems drawn from various domains (healthcare, ecology, biology, manufacturing, and others), chosen for their humanitarian and societal impact. To that end, we created Meta-Album, a meta-dataset of 40 image classification datasets from 10 domains, from which we carve out tasks with any number of "ways" (within the range 2-20) and any number of "shots" (within the range 1-20). The competition is with code submission, fully blind-tested on the CodaLab challenge platform. The code of the winners will be open-sourced, enabling the deployment of automated machine learning solutions for few-shot image classification across several domains.
Unifying Evaluation of Machine Learning Safety Monitors
Authors: Joris Guerin, Raul Sena Ferreira, Kevin Delmas, Jérémie Guiochet
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

With the increasing use of Machine Learning (ML) in critical autonomous systems, runtime monitors have been developed to detect prediction errors and keep the system in a safe state during operations. Monitors have been proposed for different applications involving diverse perception tasks and ML models, and specific evaluation procedures and metrics are used for different contexts. This paper introduces three unified safety-oriented metrics, representing the safety benefits of the monitor (Safety Gain), the remaining safety gaps after using it (Residual Hazard), and its negative impact on the system's performance (Availability Cost). To compute these metrics, one requires to define two return functions, representing how a given ML prediction will impact expected future rewards and hazards. Three use-cases (classification, drone landing, and autonomous driving) are used to demonstrate how metrics from the literature can be expressed in terms of the proposed metrics. Experimental results on these examples show how different evaluation choices impact the perceived performance of a monitor. As our formalism requires us to formulate explicit safety assumptions, it allows us to ensure that the evaluation conducted matches the high-level system requirements.
An Empirical Study and Analysis of Learning Generalizable Manipulation Skill in the SAPIEN Simulator
Authors: Kun Liu, Huiyuan Fu, Zheng Zhang, Huanpu Yin
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00

This paper provides a brief overview of our submission to the no interaction track of SAPIEN ManiSkill Challenge 2021. Our approach follows an end-to-end pipeline which mainly consists of two steps: we first extract the point cloud features of multiple objects; then we adopt these features to predict the action score of the robot simulators through a deep and wide transformer-based network. More specially, %to give guidance for future work, to open up avenues for exploitation of learning manipulation skill, we present an empirical study that includes a bag of tricks and abortive attempts. Finally, our method achieves a promising ranking on the leaderboard. All code of our solution is available at https://github.com/liu666666/bigfish\_codes.
Generating Intermediate Steps for NLI with Next-Step Supervision
Authors: Deepanway Ghosal, Somak Aditya, Monojit Choudhury
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Natural Language Inference

The Natural Language Inference (NLI) task often requires reasoning over multiple steps to reach the conclusion. While the necessity of generating such intermediate steps (instead of a summary explanation) has gained popular support, it is unclear how to generate such steps without complete end-to-end supervision and how such generated steps can be further utilized. In this work, we train a sequence-to-sequence model to generate only the next step given an NLI premise and hypothesis pair (and previous steps); then enhance it with external knowledge and symbolic search to generate intermediate steps with only next-step supervision. We show the correctness of such generated steps through automated and human verification. Furthermore, we show that such generated steps can help improve end-to-end NLI task performance using simple data augmentation strategies, across multiple public NLI datasets.
Temporal Flow Mask Attention for Open-Set Long-Tailed Recognition of Wild Animals in Camera-Trap Images
Authors: JeongSoo Kim, Sangmin Woo, Byeongjun Park, Changick Kim
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Camera traps, unmanned observation devices, and deep learning-based image recognition systems have greatly reduced human effort in collecting and analyzing wildlife images. However, data collected via above apparatus exhibits 1) long-tailed and 2) open-ended distribution problems. To tackle the open-set long-tailed recognition problem, we propose the Temporal Flow Mask Attention Network that comprises three key building blocks: 1) an optical flow module, 2) an attention residual module, and 3) a meta-embedding classifier. We extract temporal features of sequential frames using the optical flow module and learn informative representation using attention residual blocks. Moreover, we show that applying the meta-embedding technique boosts the performance of the method in open-set long-tailed recognition. We apply this method on a Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dataset. We conduct extensive experiments, and quantitative and qualitative analyses to prove that our method effectively tackles the open-set long-tailed recognition problem while being robust to unknown classes.
Continuous QA Learning with Structured Prompts
Authors: Yinhe Zheng
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Lifelong learning, Question Answering

QA models with lifelong learning (LL) abilities are important for practical QA applications, and architecture-based LL methods are reported to be an effective implementation for these models. However, it is non-trivial to extend previous approaches to QA tasks since they either require access to task identities in the testing phase or do not explicitly model samples from unseen tasks. In this paper, we propose Diana: a dynamic architecture-based lifelong QA model that tries to learn a sequence of QA tasks with a prompt enhanced language model. Four types of hierarchically organized prompts are used in Diana to capture QA knowledge from different granularities. Specifically, we dedicate task-level prompts to capture task-specific knowledge to retain high LL performances and maintain instance-level prompts to learn knowledge shared across different input samples to improve the model's generalization performance. Moreover, we dedicate separate prompts to explicitly model unseen tasks and introduce a set of prompt key vectors to facilitate knowledge sharing between tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Diana outperforms state-of-the-art lifelong QA models, especially in handling unseen tasks.