pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ACT-GAN: Radio map construction based on generative adversarial networks with ACT blocks
Authors: Chen Qi, Yang Jingjing, Huang Ming, Zhou Qiang
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

The radio map, serving as a visual representation of electromagnetic spatial characteristics, plays a pivotal role in assessment of wireless communication networks and radio monitoring coverage. Addressing the issue of low accuracy existing in the current radio map construction, this paper presents a novel radio map construction method based on generative adversarial network (GAN) in which the Aggregated Contextual-Transformation (AOT) block, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and Transposed Convolution (T-Conv) block are applied to the generator, and we name it as ACT-GAN. It significantly improves the reconstruction accuracy and local texture of the radio maps. The performance of ACT-GAN across three different scenarios is demonstrated. Experiment results reveal that in the scenario without sparse discrete observations, the proposed method reduces the root mean square error (RMSE) by 14.6% in comparison to the state-of-the-art models. In the scenario with sparse discrete observations, the RMSE is diminished by 13.2%. Furthermore, the predictive results of the proposed model show a more lucid representation of electromagnetic spatial field distribution. To verify the universality of this model in radio map construction tasks, the scenario of unknown radio emission source is investigated. The results indicate that the proposed model is robust radio map construction and accurate in predicting the location of the emission source.
CEL: A Continual Learning Model for Disease Outbreak Prediction by Leveraging Domain Adaptation via Elastic Weight Consolidation
Authors: Saba Aslam, Abdur Rasool, Hongyan Wu, XiaoLi Li
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Domain Adaptation

Continual learning, the ability of a model to learn over time without forgetting previous knowledge and, therefore, be adaptive to new data, is paramount in dynamic fields such as disease outbreak prediction. Deep neural networks, i.e., LSTM, are prone to error due to catastrophic forgetting. This study introduces a novel CEL model for continual learning by leveraging domain adaptation via Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC). This model aims to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon in a domain incremental setting. The Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) is constructed with EWC to develop a regularization term that penalizes changes to important parameters, namely, the important previous knowledge. CEL's performance is evaluated on three distinct diseases, Influenza, Mpox, and Measles, with different metrics. The high R-squared values during evaluation and reevaluation outperform the other state-of-the-art models in several contexts, indicating that CEL adapts to incremental data well. CEL's robustness and reliability are underscored by its minimal 65% forgetting rate and 18% higher memory stability compared to existing benchmark studies. This study highlights CEL's versatility in disease outbreak prediction, addressing evolving data with temporal patterns. It offers a valuable model for proactive disease control with accurate, timely predictions.
Vlogger: Make Your Dream A Vlog
Authors: Shaobin Zhuang, Kunchang Li, Xinyuan Chen, Yaohui Wang, Ziwei Liu, Yu Qiao, Yali Wang
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Video Generation

In this work, we present Vlogger, a generic AI system for generating a minute-level video blog (i.e., vlog) of user descriptions. Different from short videos with a few seconds, vlog often contains a complex storyline with diversified scenes, which is challenging for most existing video generation approaches. To break through this bottleneck, our Vlogger smartly leverages Large Language Model (LLM) as Director and decomposes a long video generation task of vlog into four key stages, where we invoke various foundation models to play the critical roles of vlog professionals, including (1) Script, (2) Actor, (3) ShowMaker, and (4) Voicer. With such a design of mimicking human beings, our Vlogger can generate vlogs through explainable cooperation of top-down planning and bottom-up shooting. Moreover, we introduce a novel video diffusion model, ShowMaker, which serves as a videographer in our Vlogger for generating the video snippet of each shooting scene. By incorporating Script and Actor attentively as textual and visual prompts, it can effectively enhance spatial-temporal coherence in the snippet. Besides, we design a concise mixed training paradigm for ShowMaker, boosting its capacity for both T2V generation and prediction. Finally, the extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot T2V generation and prediction tasks. More importantly, Vlogger can generate over 5-minute vlogs from open-world descriptions, without loss of video coherence on script and actor. The code and model is all available at https://github.com/zhuangshaobin/Vlogger.
Through the Looking-Glass: Transparency Implications and Challenges in Enterprise AI Knowledge Systems
Authors: Karina Cortiñas-Lorenzo, Siân Lindley, Ida Larsen-Ledet, Bhaskar Mitra
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00

Knowledge can't be disentangled from people. As AI knowledge systems mine vast volumes of work-related data, the knowledge that's being extracted and surfaced is intrinsically linked to the people who create and use it. When predictive algorithms that learn from data are used to link knowledge and people, inaccuracies in knowledge extraction and surfacing can lead to disproportionate harms, influencing how individuals see each other and how they see themselves at work. In this paper, we present a reflective analysis of transparency requirements and impacts in this type of systems. We conduct a multidisciplinary literature review to understand the impacts of transparency in workplace settings, introducing the looking-glass metaphor to conceptualize AI knowledge systems as systems that reflect and distort, expanding our view on transparency requirements, implications and challenges. We formulate transparency as a key mediator in shaping different ways of seeing, including seeing into the system, which unveils its capabilities, limitations and behavior, and seeing through the system, which shapes workers' perceptions of their own contributions and others within the organization. Recognizing the sociotechnical nature of these systems, we identify three transparency dimensions necessary to realize the value of AI knowledge systems, namely system transparency, procedural transparency and transparency of outcomes. We discuss key challenges hindering the implementation of these forms of transparency, bringing to light the wider sociotechnical gap and highlighting directions for future Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research.
Neural Contractive Dynamical Systems
Authors: Hadi Beik-Mohammadi, Søren Hauberg, Georgios Arvanitidis, Nadia Figueroa, Gerhard Neumann, Leonel Rozo
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00

Stability guarantees are crucial when ensuring a fully autonomous robot does not take undesirable or potentially harmful actions. Unfortunately, global stability guarantees are hard to provide in dynamical systems learned from data, especially when the learned dynamics are governed by neural networks. We propose a novel methodology to learn neural contractive dynamical systems, where our neural architecture ensures contraction, and hence, global stability. To efficiently scale the method to high-dimensional dynamical systems, we develop a variant of the variational autoencoder that learns dynamics in a low-dimensional latent representation space while retaining contractive stability after decoding. We further extend our approach to learning contractive systems on the Lie group of rotations to account for full-pose end-effector dynamic motions. The result is the first highly flexible learning architecture that provides contractive stability guarantees with capability to perform obstacle avoidance. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach encodes the desired dynamics more accurately than the current state-of-the-art, which provides less strong stability guarantees.
Large Language Models Are Neurosymbolic Reasoners
Authors: Meng Fang, Shilong Deng, Yudi Zhang, Zijing Shi, Ling Chen, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Jun Wang
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Math, text-based games, valid

A wide range of real-world applications is characterized by their symbolic nature, necessitating a strong capability for symbolic reasoning. This paper investigates the potential application of Large Language Models (LLMs) as symbolic reasoners. We focus on text-based games, significant benchmarks for agents with natural language capabilities, particularly in symbolic tasks like math, map reading, sorting, and applying common sense in text-based worlds. To facilitate these agents, we propose an LLM agent designed to tackle symbolic challenges and achieve in-game objectives. We begin by initializing the LLM agent and informing it of its role. The agent then receives observations and a set of valid actions from the text-based games, along with a specific symbolic module. With these inputs, the LLM agent chooses an action and interacts with the game environments. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the capability of LLMs as automated agents for symbolic reasoning, and our LLM agent is effective in text-based games involving symbolic tasks, achieving an average performance of 88% across all tasks.
T-FOLEY: A Controllable Waveform-Domain Diffusion Model for Temporal-Event-Guided Foley Sound Synthesis
Authors: Yoonjin Chung, Junwon Lee, Juhan Nam
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Generation, Audio Synthesis

Foley sound, audio content inserted synchronously with videos, plays a critical role in the user experience of multimedia content. Recently, there has been active research in Foley sound synthesis, leveraging the advancements in deep generative models. However, such works mainly focus on replicating a single sound class or a textual sound description, neglecting temporal information, which is crucial in the practical applications of Foley sound. We present T-Foley, a Temporal-event-guided waveform generation model for Foley sound synthesis. T-Foley generates high-quality audio using two conditions: the sound class and temporal event feature. For temporal conditioning, we devise a temporal event feature and a novel conditioning technique named Block-FiLM. T-Foley achieves superior performance in both objective and subjective evaluation metrics and generates Foley sound well-synchronized with the temporal events. Additionally, we showcase T-Foley's practical applications, particularly in scenarios involving vocal mimicry for temporal event control. We show the demo on our companion website.
Deployable Reinforcement Learning with Variable Control Rate
Authors: Dong Wang, Giovanni Beltrame
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deploying controllers trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robots can be challenging: RL relies on agents' policies being modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), which assume an inherently discrete passage of time. The use of MDPs results in that nearly all RL-based control systems employ a fixed-rate control strategy with a period (or time step) typically chosen based on the developer's experience or specific characteristics of the application environment. Unfortunately, the system should be controlled at the highest, worst-case frequency to ensure stability, which can demand significant computational and energy resources and hinder the deployability of the controller on onboard hardware. Adhering to the principles of reactive programming, we surmise that applying control actions only when necessary enables the use of simpler hardware and helps reduce energy consumption. We challenge the fixed frequency assumption by proposing a variant of RL with variable control rate. In this approach, the policy decides the action the agent should take as well as the duration of the time step associated with that action. In our new setting, we expand Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) to compute the optimal policy with a variable control rate, introducing the Soft Elastic Actor-Critic (SEAC) algorithm. We show the efficacy of SEAC through a proof-of-concept simulation driving an agent with Newtonian kinematics. Our experiments show higher average returns, shorter task completion times, and reduced computational resources when compared to fixed rate policies.
3D Scene Geometry Estimation from 360$^\circ$ Imagery: A Survey
Authors: Thiago Lopes Trugillo da Silveira, Paulo Gamarra Lessa Pinto, Jeffri Erwin Murrugarra Llerena, Claudio Rosito Jung
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Stereo Matching, Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive survey on pioneer and state-of-the-art 3D scene geometry estimation methodologies based on single, two, or multiple images captured under the omnidirectional optics. We first revisit the basic concepts of the spherical camera model, and review the most common acquisition technologies and representation formats suitable for omnidirectional (also called 360$^\circ$, spherical or panoramic) images and videos. We then survey monocular layout and depth inference approaches, highlighting the recent advances in learning-based solutions suited for spherical data. The classical stereo matching is then revised on the spherical domain, where methodologies for detecting and describing sparse and dense features become crucial. The stereo matching concepts are then extrapolated for multiple view camera setups, categorizing them among light fields, multi-view stereo, and structure from motion (or visual simultaneous localization and mapping). We also compile and discuss commonly adopted datasets and figures of merit indicated for each purpose and list recent results for completeness. We conclude this paper by pointing out current and future trends.
DiffClone: Enhanced Behaviour Cloning in Robotics with Diffusion-Driven Policy Learning
Authors: Sabariswaran Mani, Sreyas Venkataraman, Abhranil Chandra, Adyan Rizvi, Yash Sirvi, Soumojit Bhattacharya, Aritra Hazra
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Robot Manipulation

Robot learning tasks are extremely compute-intensive and hardware-specific. Thus the avenues of tackling these challenges, using a diverse dataset of offline demonstrations that can be used to train robot manipulation agents, is very appealing. The Train-Offline-Test-Online (TOTO) Benchmark provides a well-curated open-source dataset for offline training comprised mostly of expert data and also benchmark scores of the common offline-RL and behaviour cloning agents. In this paper, we introduce DiffClone, an offline algorithm of enhanced behaviour cloning agent with diffusion-based policy learning, and measured the efficacy of our method on real online physical robots at test time. This is also our official submission to the Train-Offline-Test-Online (TOTO) Benchmark Challenge organized at NeurIPS 2023. We experimented with both pre-trained visual representation and agent policies. In our experiments, we find that MOCO finetuned ResNet50 performs the best in comparison to other finetuned representations. Goal state conditioning and mapping to transitions resulted in a minute increase in the success rate and mean-reward. As for the agent policy, we developed DiffClone, a behaviour cloning agent improved using conditional diffusion.
A Blockchain-based Model for Securing Data Pipeline in a Heterogeneous Information System
Authors: MN Ramahlosi, Y Madani, A Akanbi
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00

In our digital world, access to personal and public data has become an item of concern, with challenging security and privacy aspects. Modern information systems are heterogeneous in nature and have an inherent security vulnerability, which is susceptible to data interception and data modification due to unsecured communication data pipelines between connected endpoints. This re-search article presents a blockchain-based model for securing data pipelines in a heterogeneous information system using an integrated multi-hazard early warning system (MHEWS) as a case study. The proposed model utilizes the inherent security features of blockchain technology to address the security and privacy concerns that arise in data pipelines. The model is designed to ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity in a decentralized manner. The model is evaluated in a hybrid environment using a prototype implementation and simulation experiments with outcomes that demonstrate advantages over traditional approaches for a tamper-proof and immutable data pipeline for data authenticity and integrity using a confidential ledger.
DaFoEs: Mixing Datasets towards the generalization of vision-state deep-learning Force Estimation in Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery
Authors: Mikel De Iturrate Reyzabal, Mingcong Chen, Wei Huang, Sebastien Ourselin, Hongbin Liu
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Precisely determining the contact force during safe interaction in Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery (MIRS) is still an open research challenge. Inspired by post-operative qualitative analysis from surgical videos, the use of cross-modality data driven deep neural network models has been one of the newest approaches to predict sensorless force trends. However, these methods required for large and variable datasets which are not currently available. In this paper, we present a new vision-haptic dataset (DaFoEs) with variable soft environments for the training of deep neural models. In order to reduce the bias from a single dataset, we present a pipeline to generalize different vision and state data inputs for mixed dataset training, using a previously validated dataset with different setup. Finally, we present a variable encoder-decoder architecture to predict the forces done by the laparoscopic tool using single input or sequence of inputs. For input sequence, we use a recurrent decoder, named with the prefix R, and a new temporal sampling to represent the acceleration of the tool. During our training, we demonstrate that single dataset training tends to overfit to the training data domain, but has difficulties on translating the results across new domains. However, dataset mixing presents a good translation with a mean relative estimated force error of 5% and 12% for the recurrent and non-recurrent models respectively. Our method, also marginally increase the effectiveness of transformers for force estimation up to a maximum of ~15%, as the volume of available data is increase by 150%. In conclusion, we demonstrate that mixing experimental set ups for vision-state force estimation in MIRS is a possible approach towards the general solution of the problem.
A Characterization Theorem for Equivariant Networks with Point-wise Activations
Authors: Marco Pacini, Xiaowen Dong, Bruno Lepri, Gabriele Santin
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00

Equivariant neural networks have shown improved performance, expressiveness and sample complexity on symmetrical domains. But for some specific symmetries, representations, and choice of coordinates, the most common point-wise activations, such as ReLU, are not equivariant, hence they cannot be employed in the design of equivariant neural networks. The theorem we present in this paper describes all possible combinations of finite-dimensional representations, choice of coordinates and point-wise activations to obtain an exactly equivariant layer, generalizing and strengthening existing characterizations. Notable cases of practical relevance are discussed as corollaries. Indeed, we prove that rotation-equivariant networks can only be invariant, as it happens for any network which is equivariant with respect to connected compact groups. Then, we discuss implications of our findings when applied to important instances of exactly equivariant networks. First, we completely characterize permutation equivariant networks such as Invariant Graph Networks with point-wise nonlinearities and their geometric counterparts, highlighting a plethora of models whose expressive power and performance are still unknown. Second, we show that feature spaces of disentangled steerable convolutional neural networks are trivial representations.
Preparing Lessons for Progressive Training on Language Models
Authors: Yu Pan, Ye Yuan, Yichun Yin, Jiaxin Shi, Zenglin Xu, Ming Zhang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00

The rapid progress of Transformers in artificial intelligence has come at the cost of increased resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions due to growing model sizes. Prior work suggests using pretrained small models to improve training efficiency, but this approach may not be suitable for new model structures. On the other hand, training from scratch can be slow, and progressively stacking layers often fails to achieve significant acceleration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called Apollo, which prep\textbf{a}res lessons for ex\textbf{p}anding \textbf{o}perations by \textbf{l}earning high-\textbf{l}ayer functi\textbf{o}nality during training of low layers. Our approach involves low-value-prioritized sampling (LVPS) to train different depths and weight sharing to facilitate efficient expansion. We also introduce an interpolation method for stable model depth extension. Experiments demonstrate that Apollo achieves state-of-the-art acceleration ratios, even rivaling methods using pretrained models, making it a universal and efficient solution for training deep models while reducing time, financial, and environmental costs.
Should agentic conversational AI change how we think about ethics? Characterising an interactional ethics centred on respect
Authors: Lize Alberts, Geoff Keeling, Amanda McCroskery
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

With the growing popularity of conversational agents based on large language models (LLMs), we need to ensure their behaviour is ethical and appropriate. Work in this area largely centres around the 'HHH' criteria: making outputs more helpful and honest, and avoiding harmful (biased, toxic, or inaccurate) statements. Whilst this semantic focus is useful when viewing LLM agents as mere mediums or output-generating systems, it fails to account for pragmatic factors that can make the same speech act seem more or less tactless or inconsiderate in different social situations. With the push towards agentic AI, wherein systems become increasingly proactive in chasing goals and performing actions in the world, considering the pragmatics of interaction becomes essential. We propose an interactional approach to ethics that is centred on relational and situational factors. We explore what it means for a system, as a social actor, to treat an individual respectfully in a (series of) interaction(s). Our work anticipates a set of largely unexplored risks at the level of situated social interaction, and offers practical suggestions to help agentic LLM technologies treat people well.
GPT in Sheep's Clothing: The Risk of Customized GPTs
Authors: Sagiv Antebi, Noam Azulay, Edan Habler, Ben Ganon, Asaf Shabtai, Yuval Elovici
Date: 2024-01-17 00:00:00

In November 2023, OpenAI introduced a new service allowing users to create custom versions of ChatGPT (GPTs) by using specific instructions and knowledge to guide the model's behavior. We aim to raise awareness of the fact that GPTs can be used maliciously, posing privacy and security risks to their users.