pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Devil is in the Details: A Deep Dive into the Rabbit Hole of Data Filtering
Authors: Haichao Yu, Yu Tian, Sateesh Kumar, Linjie Yang, Heng Wang
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00

The quality of pre-training data plays a critical role in the performance of foundation models. Popular foundation models often design their own recipe for data filtering, which makes it hard to analyze and compare different data filtering approaches. DataComp is a new benchmark dedicated to evaluating different methods for data filtering. This paper describes our learning and solution when participating in the DataComp challenge. Our filtering strategy includes three stages: single-modality filtering, cross-modality filtering, and data distribution alignment. We integrate existing methods and propose new solutions, such as computing CLIP score on horizontally flipped images to mitigate the interference of scene text, using vision and language models to retrieve training samples for target downstream tasks, rebalancing the data distribution to improve the efficiency of allocating the computational budget, etc. We slice and dice our design choices, provide in-depth analysis, and discuss open questions. Our approach outperforms the best method from the DataComp paper by over 4% on the average performance of 38 tasks and by over 2% on ImageNet.
AutoEncoding Tree for City Generation and Applications
Authors: Wenyu Han, Congcong Wen, Lazarus Chok, Yan Liang Tan, Sheung Lung Chan, Hang Zhao, Chen Feng
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

City modeling and generation have attracted an increased interest in various applications, including gaming, urban planning, and autonomous driving. Unlike previous works focused on the generation of single objects or indoor scenes, the huge volumes of spatial data in cities pose a challenge to the generative models. Furthermore, few publicly available 3D real-world city datasets also hinder the development of methods for city generation. In this paper, we first collect over 3,000,000 geo-referenced objects for the city of New York, Zurich, Tokyo, Berlin, Boston and several other large cities. Based on this dataset, we propose AETree, a tree-structured auto-encoder neural network, for city generation. Specifically, we first propose a novel Spatial-Geometric Distance (SGD) metric to measure the similarity between building layouts and then construct a binary tree over the raw geometric data of building based on the SGD metric. Next, we present a tree-structured network whose encoder learns to extract and merge spatial information from bottom-up iteratively. The resulting global representation is reversely decoded for reconstruction or generation. To address the issue of long-dependency as the level of the tree increases, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Cell is employed as a basic network element of the proposed AETree. Moreover, we introduce a novel metric, Overlapping Area Ratio (OAR), to quantitatively evaluate the generation results. Experiments on the collected dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on 2D and 3D city generation. Furthermore, the latent features learned by AETree can serve downstream urban planning applications.
Context-Aware Entity Grounding with Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs
Authors: Haonan Chang, Kowndinya Boyalakuntla, Shiyang Lu, Siwei Cai, Eric Jing, Shreesh Keskar, Shijie Geng, Adeeb Abbas, Lifeng Zhou, Kostas Bekris, Abdeslam Boularias
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Navigate, Object, Object Localization, Robot Navigation

We present an Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graph (OVSG), a formal framework for grounding a variety of entities, such as object instances, agents, and regions, with free-form text-based queries. Unlike conventional semantic-based object localization approaches, our system facilitates context-aware entity localization, allowing for queries such as ``pick up a cup on a kitchen table" or ``navigate to a sofa on which someone is sitting". In contrast to existing research on 3D scene graphs, OVSG supports free-form text input and open-vocabulary querying. Through a series of comparative experiments using the ScanNet dataset and a self-collected dataset, we demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly surpasses the performance of previous semantic-based localization techniques. Moreover, we highlight the practical application of OVSG in real-world robot navigation and manipulation experiments.
Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Video Question Answering with Multi-Modal Prompts
Authors: Deniz Engin, Yannis Avrithis
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-shot Video Question Answering, Prompt Learning, Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Zero-Shot Video Question Answer

Recent vision-language models are driven by large-scale pretrained models. However, adapting pretrained models on limited data presents challenges such as overfitting, catastrophic forgetting, and the cross-modal gap between vision and language. We introduce a parameter-efficient method to address these challenges, combining multimodal prompt learning and a transformer-based mapping network, while keeping the pretrained models frozen. Our experiments on several video question answering benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of performance and parameter efficiency on both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our code is available at https://engindeniz.github.io/vitis.
Aperture Diffraction for Compact Snapshot Spectral Imaging
Authors: Tao Lv, Hao Ye, Quan Yuan, Zhan Shi, Yibo Wang, Shuming Wang, Xun Cao
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

We demonstrate a compact, cost-effective snapshot spectral imaging system named Aperture Diffraction Imaging Spectrometer (ADIS), which consists only of an imaging lens with an ultra-thin orthogonal aperture mask and a mosaic filter sensor, requiring no additional physical footprint compared to common RGB cameras. Then we introduce a new optical design that each point in the object space is multiplexed to discrete encoding locations on the mosaic filter sensor by diffraction-based spatial-spectral projection engineering generated from the orthogonal mask. The orthogonal projection is uniformly accepted to obtain a weakly calibration-dependent data form to enhance modulation robustness. Meanwhile, the Cascade Shift-Shuffle Spectral Transformer (CSST) with strong perception of the diffraction degeneration is designed to solve a sparsity-constrained inverse problem, realizing the volume reconstruction from 2D measurements with Large amount of aliasing. Our system is evaluated by elaborating the imaging optical theory and reconstruction algorithm with demonstrating the experimental imaging under a single exposure. Ultimately, we achieve the sub-super-pixel spatial resolution and high spectral resolution imaging. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Krito-ex/CSST.
High Perceptual Quality Wireless Image Delivery with Denoising Diffusion Models
Authors: Selim F. Yilmaz, Xueyan Niu, Bo Bai, Wei Han, Lei Deng, Deniz Gunduz
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

We consider the image transmission problem over a noisy wireless channel via deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) along with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) at the receiver. Specifically, we are interested in the perception-distortion trade-off in the practical finite block length regime, in which separate source and channel coding can be highly suboptimal. We introduce a novel scheme, where the conventional DeepJSCC encoder targets transmitting a lower resolution version of the image, which later can be refined thanks to the generative model available at the receiver. In particular, we utilize the range-null space decomposition of the target image; DeepJSCC transmits the range-space of the image, while DDPM progressively refines its null space contents. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate significant improvements in distortion and perceptual quality of reconstructed images compared to standard DeepJSCC and the state-of-the-art generative learning-based method.
Highly Efficient SNNs for High-speed Object Detection
Authors: Nemin Qiu, Zhiguo Li, Yuan Li, Chuang Zhu
Date: 2023-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization

The high biological properties and low energy consumption of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have brought much attention in recent years. However, the converted SNNs generally need large time steps to achieve satisfactory performance, which will result in high inference latency and computational resources increase. In this work, we propose a highly efficient and fast SNN for object detection. First, we build an initial compact ANN by using quantization training method of convolution layer fold batch normalization layer and neural network modification. Second, we theoretically analyze how to obtain the low complexity SNN correctly. Then, we propose a scale-aware pseudoquantization scheme to guarantee the correctness of the compact ANN to SNN. Third, we propose a continuous inference scheme by using a Feed-Forward Integrate-and-Fire (FewdIF) neuron to realize high-speed object detection. Experimental results show that our efficient SNN can achieve 118X speedup on GPU with only 1.5MB parameters for object detection tasks. We further verify our SNN on FPGA platform and the proposed model can achieve 800+FPS object detection with extremely low latency.
Cross-City Matters: A Multimodal Remote Sensing Benchmark Dataset for Cross-City Semantic Segmentation using High-Resolution Domain Adaptation Networks
Authors: Danfeng Hong, Bing Zhang, Hao Li, YuXuan Li, Jing Yao, Chenyu Li, Martin Werner, Jocelyn Chanussot, Alexander Zipf, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Date: 2023-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches nowadays have gained remarkable success in single-modality-dominated remote sensing (RS) applications, especially with an emphasis on individual urban environments (e.g., single cities or regions). Yet these AI models tend to meet the performance bottleneck in the case studies across cities or regions, due to the lack of diverse RS information and cutting-edge solutions with high generalization ability. To this end, we build a new set of multimodal remote sensing benchmark datasets (including hyperspectral, multispectral, SAR) for the study purpose of the cross-city semantic segmentation task (called C2Seg dataset), which consists of two cross-city scenes, i.e., Berlin-Augsburg (in Germany) and Beijing-Wuhan (in China). Beyond the single city, we propose a high-resolution domain adaptation network, HighDAN for short, to promote the AI model's generalization ability from the multi-city environments. HighDAN is capable of retaining the spatially topological structure of the studied urban scene well in a parallel high-to-low resolution fusion fashion but also closing the gap derived from enormous differences of RS image representations between different cities by means of adversarial learning. In addition, the Dice loss is considered in HighDAN to alleviate the class imbalance issue caused by factors across cities. Extensive experiments conducted on the C2Seg dataset show the superiority of our HighDAN in terms of segmentation performance and generalization ability, compared to state-of-the-art competitors. The C2Seg dataset and the semantic segmentation toolbox (involving the proposed HighDAN) will be available publicly at https://github.com/danfenghong.
GasMono: Geometry-Aided Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Scenes
Authors: Chaoqiang Zhao, Matteo Poggi, Fabio Tosi, Lei Zhou, Qiyu Sun, Yang Tang, Stefano Mattoccia
Date: 2023-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

This paper tackles the challenges of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in indoor scenes caused by large rotation between frames and low texture. We ease the learning process by obtaining coarse camera poses from monocular sequences through multi-view geometry to deal with the former. However, we found that limited by the scale ambiguity across different scenes in the training dataset, a na\"ive introduction of geometric coarse poses cannot play a positive role in performance improvement, which is counter-intuitive. To address this problem, we propose to refine those poses during training through rotation and translation/scale optimization. To soften the effect of the low texture, we combine the global reasoning of vision transformers with an overfitting-aware, iterative self-distillation mechanism, providing more accurate depth guidance coming from the network itself. Experiments on NYUv2, ScanNet, 7scenes, and KITTI datasets support the effectiveness of each component in our framework, which sets a new state-of-the-art for indoor self-supervised monocular depth estimation, as well as outstanding generalization ability. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zxcqlf/GasMono
HyperPPO: A scalable method for finding small policies for robotic control
Authors: Shashank Hegde, Zhehui Huang, Gaurav S. Sukhatme
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

Models with fewer parameters are necessary for the neural control of memory-limited, performant robots. Finding these smaller neural network architectures can be time-consuming. We propose HyperPPO, an on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm that utilizes graph hypernetworks to estimate the weights of multiple neural architectures simultaneously. Our method estimates weights for networks that are much smaller than those in common-use networks yet encode highly performant policies. We obtain multiple trained policies at the same time while maintaining sample efficiency and provide the user the choice of picking a network architecture that satisfies their computational constraints. We show that our method scales well - more training resources produce faster convergence to higher-performing architectures. We demonstrate that the neural policies estimated by HyperPPO are capable of decentralized control of a Crazyflie2.1 quadrotor. Website: https://sites.google.com/usc.edu/hyperppo
Reusability report: Prostate cancer stratification with diverse biologically-informed neural architectures
Authors: Christian Pedersen, Tiberiu Tesileanu, Tinghui Wu, Siavash Golkar, Miles Cranmer, Zijun Zhang, Shirley Ho
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

In Elmarakeby et al., "Biologically informed deep neural network for prostate cancer discovery", a feedforward neural network with biologically informed, sparse connections (P-NET) was presented to model the state of prostate cancer. We verified the reproducibility of the study conducted by Elmarakeby et al., using both their original codebase, and our own re-implementation using more up-to-date libraries. We quantified the contribution of network sparsification by Reactome biological pathways, and confirmed its importance to P-NET's superior performance. Furthermore, we explored alternative neural architectures and approaches to incorporating biological information into the networks. We experimented with three types of graph neural networks on the same training data, and investigated the clinical prediction agreement between different models. Our analyses demonstrated that deep neural networks with distinct architectures make incorrect predictions for individual patient that are persistent across different initializations of a specific neural architecture. This suggests that different neural architectures are sensitive to different aspects of the data, an important yet under-explored challenge for clinical prediction tasks.
Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning -- Certify the Confidence Interval
Authors: Jiarui Yao, Simon Shaolei Du
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Currently, reinforcement learning (RL), especially deep RL, has received more and more attention in the research area. However, the security of RL has been an obvious problem due to the attack manners becoming mature. In order to defend against such adversarial attacks, several practical approaches are developed, such as adversarial training, data filtering, etc. However, these methods are mostly based on empirical algorithms and experiments, without rigorous theoretical analysis of the robustness of the algorithms. In this paper, we develop an algorithm to certify the robustness of a given policy offline with random smoothing, which could be proven and conducted as efficiently as ones without random smoothing. Experiments on different environments confirm the correctness of our algorithm.
On Learning with LAD
Authors: C. A. Jothishwaran, Biplav Srivastava, Jitin Singla, Sugata Gangopadhyay
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

The logical analysis of data, LAD, is a technique that yields two-class classifiers based on Boolean functions having disjunctive normal form (DNF) representation. Although LAD algorithms employ optimization techniques, the resulting binary classifiers or binary rules do not lead to overfitting. We propose a theoretical justification for the absence of overfitting by estimating the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension (VC dimension) for LAD models where hypothesis sets consist of DNFs with a small number of cubic monomials. We illustrate and confirm our observations empirically.
Exploiting Edge Features in Graphs with Fused Network Gromov-Wasserstein Distance
Authors: Junjie Yang, Matthieu Labeau, Florence d'Alché-Buc
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

Pairwise comparison of graphs is key to many applications in Machine learning ranging from clustering, kernel-based classification/regression and more recently supervised graph prediction. Distances between graphs usually rely on informative representations of these structured objects such as bag of substructures or other graph embeddings. A recently popular solution consists in representing graphs as metric measure spaces, allowing to successfully leverage Optimal Transport, which provides meaningful distances allowing to compare them: the Gromov-Wasserstein distances. However, this family of distances overlooks edge attributes, which are essential for many structured objects. In this work, we introduce an extension of Gromov-Wasserstein distance for comparing graphs whose both nodes and edges have features. We propose novel algorithms for distance and barycenter computation. We empirically show the effectiveness of the novel distance in learning tasks where graphs occur in either input space or output space, such as classification and graph prediction.
Deep Learning Based Uplink Multi-User SIMO Beamforming Design
Authors: Cemil Vahapoglu, Timothy J. O'Shea, Tamoghna Roy, Sennur Ulukus
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Management

The advancement of fifth generation (5G) wireless communication networks has created a greater demand for wireless resource management solutions that offer high data rates, extensive coverage, minimal latency and energy-efficient performance. Nonetheless, traditional approaches have shortcomings when it comes to computational complexity and their ability to adapt to dynamic conditions, creating a gap between theoretical analysis and the practical execution of algorithmic solutions for managing wireless resources. Deep learning-based techniques offer promising solutions for bridging this gap with their substantial representation capabilities. We propose a novel unsupervised deep learning framework, which is called NNBF, for the design of uplink receive multi-user single input multiple output (MU-SIMO) beamforming. The primary objective is to enhance the throughput by focusing on maximizing the sum-rate while also offering computationally efficient solution, in contrast to established conventional methods. We conduct experiments for several antenna configurations. Our experimental results demonstrate that NNBF exhibits superior performance compared to our baseline methods, namely, zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer. Additionally, NNBF is scalable to the number of single-antenna user equipments (UEs) while baseline methods have significant computational burden due to matrix pseudo-inverse operation.
Cross-Prediction-Powered Inference
Authors: Tijana Zrnic, Emmanuel J. Candès
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Missing Labels, Prediction

While reliable data-driven decision-making hinges on high-quality labeled data, the acquisition of quality labels often involves laborious human annotations or slow and expensive scientific measurements. Machine learning is becoming an appealing alternative as sophisticated predictive techniques are being used to quickly and cheaply produce large amounts of predicted labels; e.g., predicted protein structures are used to supplement experimentally derived structures, predictions of socioeconomic indicators from satellite imagery are used to supplement accurate survey data, and so on. Since predictions are imperfect and potentially biased, this practice brings into question the validity of downstream inferences. We introduce cross-prediction: a method for valid inference powered by machine learning. With a small labeled dataset and a large unlabeled dataset, cross-prediction imputes the missing labels via machine learning and applies a form of debiasing to remedy the prediction inaccuracies. The resulting inferences achieve the desired error probability and are more powerful than those that only leverage the labeled data. Closely related is the recent proposal of prediction-powered inference, which assumes that a good pre-trained model is already available. We show that cross-prediction is consistently more powerful than an adaptation of prediction-powered inference in which a fraction of the labeled data is split off and used to train the model. Finally, we observe that cross-prediction gives more stable conclusions than its competitors; its confidence intervals typically have significantly lower variability.
Collaborative Distributed Machine Learning
Authors: David Jin, Niclas Kannengießer, Sascha Rank, Ali Sunyaev
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Various collaborative distributed machine learning (CDML) systems, including federated learning systems and swarm learning systems, with diferent key traits were developed to leverage resources for the development and use of machine learning(ML) models in a conidentiality-preserving way. To meet use case requirements, suitable CDML systems need to be selected. However, comparison between CDML systems to assess their suitability for use cases is often diicult. To support comparison of CDML systems and introduce scientiic and practical audiences to the principal functioning and key traits of CDML systems, this work presents a CDML system conceptualization and CDML archetypes.
Overcoming the Barrier of Orbital-Free Density Functional Theory for Molecular Systems Using Deep Learning
Authors: He Zhang, Siyuan Liu, Jiacheng You, Chang Liu, Shuxin Zheng, Ziheng Lu, Tong Wang, Nanning Zheng, Bin Shao
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00

Orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) is a quantum chemistry formulation that has a lower cost scaling than the prevailing Kohn-Sham DFT, which is increasingly desired for contemporary molecular research. However, its accuracy is limited by the kinetic energy density functional, which is notoriously hard to approximate for non-periodic molecular systems. Here we propose M-OFDFT, an OFDFT approach capable of solving molecular systems using a deep learning functional model. We build the essential non-locality into the model, which is made affordable by the concise density representation as expansion coefficients under an atomic basis. With techniques to address unconventional learning challenges therein, M-OFDFT achieves a comparable accuracy with Kohn-Sham DFT on a wide range of molecules untouched by OFDFT before. More attractively, M-OFDFT extrapolates well to molecules much larger than those seen in training, which unleashes the appealing scaling of OFDFT for studying large molecules including proteins, representing an advancement of the accuracy-efficiency trade-off frontier in quantum chemistry.