pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Speech Aware Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC11)
Authors: Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, Mingqiu Wang, Abhinav Rastogi, Jeffrey Zhao, Ye Jia, Wei Han, Yuan Cao, Aramys Miranda
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), dialog state tracking, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Most research on task oriented dialog modeling is based on written text input. However, users interact with practical dialog systems often using speech as input. Typically, systems convert speech into text using an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, introducing errors. Furthermore, these systems do not address the differences in written and spoken language. The research on this topic is stymied by the lack of a public corpus. Motivated by these considerations, our goal in hosting the speech-aware dialog state tracking challenge was to create a public corpus or task which can be used to investigate the performance gap between the written and spoken forms of input, develop models that could alleviate this gap, and establish whether Text-to-Speech-based (TTS) systems is a reasonable surrogate to the more-labor intensive human data collection. We created three spoken versions of the popular written-domain MultiWoz task -- (a) TTS-Verbatim: written user inputs were converted into speech waveforms using a TTS system, (b) Human-Verbatim: humans spoke the user inputs verbatim, and (c) Human-paraphrased: humans paraphrased the user inputs. Additionally, we provided different forms of ASR output to encourage wider participation from teams that may not have access to state-of-the-art ASR systems. These included ASR transcripts, word time stamps, and latent representations of the audio (audio encoder outputs). In this paper, we describe the corpus, report results from participating teams, provide preliminary analyses of their results, and summarize the current state-of-the-art in this domain.
Rarely a problem? Language models exhibit inverse scaling in their predictions following few-type quantifiers
Authors: James A. Michaelov, Benjamin K. Bergen
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

How well do language models deal with quantification? In this study, we focus on 'few'-type quantifiers, as in 'few children like toys', which might pose a particular challenge for language models because the sentence components with out the quantifier are likely to co-occur, and 'few'-type quantifiers are rare. We present 960 English sentence stimuli from two human neurolinguistic experiments to 22 autoregressive transformer models of differing sizes. Not only do all the models perform poorly on 'few'-type quantifiers, but overall the larger the model, the worse its performance. This inverse scaling is consistent with previous work suggesting that larger models increasingly reflect online rather than offline human processing, and we argue that the decreasing performance of larger models may challenge uses of language models as the basis for natural language systems.
Plansformer: Generating Symbolic Plans using Transformers
Authors: Vishal Pallagani, Bharath Muppasani, Keerthiram Murugesan, Francesca Rossi, Lior Horesh, Biplav Srivastava, Francesco Fabiano, Andrea Loreggia
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Text Generation, Transfer Learning, valid

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been the subject of active research, significantly advancing the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). From BERT to BLOOM, LLMs have surpassed state-of-the-art results in various natural language tasks such as question answering, summarization, and text generation. Many ongoing efforts focus on understanding LLMs' capabilities, including their knowledge of the world, syntax, and semantics. However, extending the textual prowess of LLMs to symbolic reasoning has been slow and predominantly focused on tackling problems related to the mathematical field. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs for automated planning - a branch of AI concerned with the realization of action sequences (plans) to achieve a goal, typically executed by intelligent agents, autonomous robots, and unmanned vehicles. We introduce Plansformer; an LLM fine-tuned on planning problems and capable of generating plans with favorable behavior in terms of correctness and length with reduced knowledge-engineering efforts. We also demonstrate the adaptability of Plansformer in solving different planning domains with varying complexities, owing to the transfer learning abilities of LLMs. For one configuration of Plansformer, we achieve ~97% valid plans, out of which ~95% are optimal for Towers of Hanoi - a puzzle-solving domain.
Natural Language Processing in Customer Service: A Systematic Review
Authors: Malak Mashaabi, Areej Alotaibi, Hala Qudaih, Raghad Alnashwan, Hend Al-Khalifa
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Question Answering

Artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly being used in customer service to interact with users and answer their questions. The goal of this systematic review is to examine existing research on the use of NLP technology in customer service, including the research domain, applications, datasets used, and evaluation methods. The review also looks at the future direction of the field and any significant limitations. The review covers the time period from 2015 to 2022 and includes papers from five major scientific databases. Chatbots and question-answering systems were found to be used in 10 main fields, with the most common use in general, social networking, and e-commerce areas. Twitter was the second most commonly used dataset, with most research also using their own original datasets. Accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 were the most common evaluation methods. Future work aims to improve the performance and understanding of user behavior and emotions, and address limitations such as the volume, diversity, and quality of datasets. This review includes research on different spoken languages and models and techniques.
Hard Sample Aware Network for Contrastive Deep Graph Clustering
Authors: Yue Liu, Xihong Yang, Sihang Zhou, Xinwang Liu, Zhen Wang, Ke Liang, Wenxuan Tu, Liang Li, Jingcan Duan, Cancan Chen
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Clustering, Graph Clustering

Contrastive deep graph clustering, which aims to divide nodes into disjoint groups via contrastive mechanisms, is a challenging research spot. Among the recent works, hard sample mining-based algorithms have achieved great attention for their promising performance. However, we find that the existing hard sample mining methods have two problems as follows. 1) In the hardness measurement, the important structural information is overlooked for similarity calculation, degrading the representativeness of the selected hard negative samples. 2) Previous works merely focus on the hard negative sample pairs while neglecting the hard positive sample pairs. Nevertheless, samples within the same cluster but with low similarity should also be carefully learned. To solve the problems, we propose a novel contrastive deep graph clustering method dubbed Hard Sample Aware Network (HSAN) by introducing a comprehensive similarity measure criterion and a general dynamic sample weighing strategy. Concretely, in our algorithm, the similarities between samples are calculated by considering both the attribute embeddings and the structure embeddings, better revealing sample relationships and assisting hardness measurement. Moreover, under the guidance of the carefully collected high-confidence clustering information, our proposed weight modulating function will first recognize the positive and negative samples and then dynamically up-weight the hard sample pairs while down-weighting the easy ones. In this way, our method can mine not only the hard negative samples but also the hard positive sample, thus improving the discriminative capability of the samples further. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed method.
CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yuqi Lin, Minghao Chen, Wenxiao Wang, Boxi Wu, Ke Li, Binbin Lin, Haifeng Liu, Xiaofei He
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels is a challenging task. Mainstream approaches follow a multi-stage framework and suffer from high training costs. In this paper, we explore the potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models (CLIP) to localize different categories with only image-level labels and without further training. To efficiently generate high-quality segmentation masks from CLIP, we propose a novel WSSS framework called CLIP-ES. Our framework improves all three stages of WSSS with special designs for CLIP: 1) We introduce the softmax function into GradCAM and exploit the zero-shot ability of CLIP to suppress the confusion caused by non-target classes and backgrounds. Meanwhile, to take full advantage of CLIP, we re-explore text inputs under the WSSS setting and customize two text-driven strategies: sharpness-based prompt selection and synonym fusion. 2) To simplify the stage of CAM refinement, we propose a real-time class-aware attention-based affinity (CAA) module based on the inherent multi-head self-attention (MHSA) in CLIP-ViTs. 3) When training the final segmentation model with the masks generated by CLIP, we introduced a confidence-guided loss (CGL) focus on confident regions. Our CLIP-ES achieves SOTA performance on Pascal VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 while only taking 10% time of previous methods for the pseudo mask generation. Code is available at https://github.com/linyq2117/CLIP-ES.
EffMulti: Efficiently Modeling Complex Multimodal Interactions for Emotion Analysis
Authors: Feng Qiu, Chengyang Xie, Yu Ding, Wanzeng Kong
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

Humans are skilled in reading the interlocutor's emotion from multimodal signals, including spoken words, simultaneous speech, and facial expressions. It is still a challenge to effectively decode emotions from the complex interactions of multimodal signals. In this paper, we design three kinds of multimodal latent representations to refine the emotion analysis process and capture complex multimodal interactions from different views, including a intact three-modal integrating representation, a modality-shared representation, and three modality-individual representations. Then, a modality-semantic hierarchical fusion is proposed to reasonably incorporate these representations into a comprehensive interaction representation. The experimental results demonstrate that our EffMulti outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The compelling performance benefits from its well-designed framework with ease of implementation, lower computing complexity, and less trainable parameters.
A Hierarchical Framework for Collaborative Artificial Intelligence
Authors: James L. Crowley, Joëlle L Coutaz, Jasmin Grosinger, Javier Vázquez-Salceda, Cecilio Angulo, Alberto Sanfeliu, Luca Iocchi, Anthony G. Cohn
Date: 2022-12-14 00:00:00

We propose a hierarchical framework for collaborative intelligent systems. This framework organizes research challenges based on the nature of the collaborative activity and the information that must be shared, with each level building on capabilities provided by lower levels. We review research paradigms at each level, with a description of classical engineering-based approaches and modern alternatives based on machine learning, illustrated with a running example using a hypothetical personal service robot. We discuss cross-cutting issues that occur at all levels, focusing on the problem of communicating and sharing comprehension, the role of explanation and the social nature of collaboration. We conclude with a summary of research challenges and a discussion of the potential for economic and societal impact provided by technologies that enhance human abilities and empower people and society through collaboration with Intelligent Systems.
IMAGINE: An Integrated Model of Artificial Intelligence-Mediated Communication Effects
Authors: Frederic Guerrero-Sole
Date: 2022-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming all fields of knowledge and production. From surgery, autonomous driving, to image and video creation, AI seems to make possible hitherto unimaginable processes of automation and efficient creation. Media and communication are not an exception, and we are currently witnessing the dawn of powerful AI tools capable of creating artistic images from simple keywords, or to capture emotions from facial expression. These examples may be only the beginning of what can be in the future the engines for automatic AI real time creation of media content linked to the emotional and behavioural responses of individuals. Although it may seem we are still far from there, it is already the moment to adapt our theories about media to the hypothetical scenario in which content production can be done without human intervention, and governed by the controlled any reactions of the individual to the exposure to media content. Following that, I propose the definition of the Integrated Model of Artificial Intelligence-Mediated Communication Effects (IMAGINE), and its consequences on the way we understand media evolution (Scolari, 2012) and we think about media effects (Potter, 2010). The conceptual framework proposed is aimed to help scholars theorizing and doing research in a scenario of continuous real-time connection between AI measurement of people's responses to media, and the AI creation of content, with the objective of optimizing and maximizing the processes of influence. Parasocial interaction and real-time beautification are used as examples to model the functioning of the IMAGINE process.
Smart Journey in Istanbul: A Mobile Application in Smart Cities for Traffic Estimation by Harnessing Time Series
Authors: Senem Tanberk, Mustafa Can
Date: 2022-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Traffic Prediction

In recent decades, mobile applications (apps) have gained enormous popularity. Smart services for smart cities increasingly gain attention. The main goal of the proposed research is to present a new AI-powered mobile application on Istanbul's traffic congestion forecast by using traffic density data. It addresses the research question by using time series approaches (LSTM, Transformer, and XGBoost) based on past data over the traffic load dataset combined with meteorological conditions. Analysis of simulation results on predicted models will be discussed according to performance indicators such as MAPE, MAE, and RMSE. And then, it was observed that the Transformer model made the most accurate traffic prediction. The developed traffic forecasting prototype is expected to be a starting point on future products for a mobile application suitable for citizens' daily use.
Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers
Authors: William Peebles, Saining Xie
Date: 2022-12-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Image Generation

We explore a new class of diffusion models based on the transformer architecture. We train latent diffusion models of images, replacing the commonly-used U-Net backbone with a transformer that operates on latent patches. We analyze the scalability of our Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) through the lens of forward pass complexity as measured by Gflops. We find that DiTs with higher Gflops -- through increased transformer depth/width or increased number of input tokens -- consistently have lower FID. In addition to possessing good scalability properties, our largest DiT-XL/2 models outperform all prior diffusion models on the class-conditional ImageNet 512x512 and 256x256 benchmarks, achieving a state-of-the-art FID of 2.27 on the latter.
Randomized Quantization: A Generic Augmentation for Data Agnostic Self-supervised Learning
Authors: Huimin Wu, Chenyang Lei, Xiao Sun, Peng-Shuai Wang, Qifeng Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Stephen Lin, Zhirong Wu
Date: 2022-12-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Quantization, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised representation learning follows a paradigm of withholding some part of the data and tasking the network to predict it from the remaining part. Among many techniques, data augmentation lies at the core for creating the information gap. Towards this end, masking has emerged as a generic and powerful tool where content is withheld along the sequential dimension, e.g., spatial in images, temporal in audio, and syntactic in language. In this paper, we explore the orthogonal channel dimension for generic data augmentation by exploiting precision redundancy. The data for each channel is quantized through a non-uniform quantizer, with the quantized value sampled randomly within randomly sampled quantization bins. From another perspective, quantization is analogous to channel-wise masking, as it removes the information within each bin, but preserves the information across bins. Our approach significantly surpasses existing generic data augmentation methods, while showing on par performance against modality-specific augmentations. We comprehensively evaluate our approach on vision, audio, 3D point clouds, as well as the DABS benchmark which is comprised of various data modalities. The code is available at https: //github.com/microsoft/random_quantize.
Correspondence Distillation from NeRF-based GAN
Authors: Yushi Lan, Chen Change Loy, Bo Dai
Date: 2022-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

The neural radiance field (NeRF) has shown promising results in preserving the fine details of objects and scenes. However, unlike mesh-based representations, it remains an open problem to build dense correspondences across different NeRFs of the same category, which is essential in many downstream tasks. The main difficulties of this problem lie in the implicit nature of NeRF and the lack of ground-truth correspondence annotations. In this paper, we show it is possible to bypass these challenges by leveraging the rich semantics and structural priors encapsulated in a pre-trained NeRF-based GAN. Specifically, we exploit such priors from three aspects, namely 1) a dual deformation field that takes latent codes as global structural indicators, 2) a learning objective that regards generator features as geometric-aware local descriptors, and 3) a source of infinite object-specific NeRF samples. Our experiments demonstrate that such priors lead to 3D dense correspondence that is accurate, smooth, and robust. We also show that established dense correspondence across NeRFs can effectively enable many NeRF-based downstream applications such as texture transfer.
Annual field-scale maps of tall and short crops at the global scale using GEDI and Sentinel-2
Authors: Stefania Di Tommaso, Sherrie Wang, Vivek Vajipey, Noel Gorelick, Rob Strey, David B. Lobell
Date: 2022-12-19 00:00:00

Crop type maps are critical for tracking agricultural land use and estimating crop production. Remote sensing has proven an efficient and reliable tool for creating these maps in regions with abundant ground labels for model training, yet these labels remain difficult to obtain in many regions and years. NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) spaceborne lidar instrument, originally designed for forest monitoring, has shown promise for distinguishing tall and short crops. In the current study, we leverage GEDI to develop wall-to-wall maps of short vs tall crops on a global scale at 10 m resolution for 2019-2021. Specifically, we show that (1) GEDI returns can reliably be classified into tall and short crops after removing shots with extreme view angles or topographic slope, (2) the frequency of tall crops over time can be used to identify months when tall crops are at their peak height, and (3) GEDI shots in these months can then be used to train random forest models that use Sentinel-2 time series to accurately predict short vs. tall crops. Independent reference data from around the world are then used to evaluate these GEDI-S2 maps. We find that GEDI-S2 performed nearly as well as models trained on thousands of local reference training points, with accuracies of at least 87% and often above 90% throughout the Americas, Europe, and East Asia. Systematic underestimation of tall crop area was observed in regions where crops frequently exhibit low biomass, namely Africa and South Asia, and further work is needed in these systems. Although the GEDI-S2 approach only differentiates tall from short crops, in many landscapes this distinction goes a long way toward mapping the main individual crop types. The combination of GEDI and Sentinel-2 thus presents a very promising path towards global crop mapping with minimal reliance on ground data.
Wukong-Reader: Multi-modal Pre-training for Fine-grained Visual Document Understanding
Authors: Haoli Bai, Zhiguang Liu, Xiaojun Meng, Wentao Li, Shuang Liu, Nian Xie, Rongfu Zheng, Liangwei Wang, Lu Hou, Jiansheng Wei, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
Date: 2022-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, document understanding, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Unsupervised Pre-training

Unsupervised pre-training on millions of digital-born or scanned documents has shown promising advances in visual document understanding~(VDU). While various vision-language pre-training objectives are studied in existing solutions, the document textline, as an intrinsic granularity in VDU, has seldom been explored so far. A document textline usually contains words that are spatially and semantically correlated, which can be easily obtained from OCR engines. In this paper, we propose Wukong-Reader, trained with new pre-training objectives to leverage the structural knowledge nested in document textlines. We introduce textline-region contrastive learning to achieve fine-grained alignment between the visual regions and texts of document textlines. Furthermore, masked region modeling and textline-grid matching are also designed to enhance the visual and layout representations of textlines. Experiments show that our Wukong-Reader has superior performance on various VDU tasks such as information extraction. The fine-grained alignment over textlines also empowers Wukong-Reader with promising localization ability.