pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
E^2-LLM: Efficient and Extreme Length Extension of Large Language Models
Authors: Jiaheng Liu, Zhiqi Bai, Yuanxing Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yu Zhang, Ge Zhang, Jiakai Wang, Haoran Que, Yukang Chen, Wenbo Su, Tiezheng Ge, Jie Fu, Wenhu Chen, Bo Zheng
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, GPU, Position

Typically, training LLMs with long context sizes is computationally expensive, requiring extensive training hours and GPU resources. Existing long-context extension methods usually need additional training procedures to support corresponding long-context windows, where the long-context training data (e.g., 32k) is needed, and high GPU training costs are assumed. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an Efficient and Extreme length extension method for Large Language Models, called E 2 -LLM, with only one training procedure and dramatically reduced computation cost, which also removes the need to collect long-context data. Concretely, first, the training data of our E 2 -LLM only requires a short length (e.g., 4k), which reduces the tuning cost greatly. Second, the training procedure on the short training context window is performed only once time, and we can support different evaluation context windows at inference. Third, in E 2 - LLM, based on RoPE position embeddings, we introduce two different augmentation methods on the scale and position index parameters for different samples in training. It aims to make the model more robust to the different relative differences when directly interpolating the arbitrary context length at inference. Comprehensive experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our E 2 -LLM on challenging long-context tasks.
ORGANA: A Robotic Assistant for Automated Chemistry Experimentation and Characterization
Authors: Kourosh Darvish, Marta Skreta, Yuchi Zhao, Naruki Yoshikawa, Sagnik Som, Miroslav Bogdanovic, Yang Cao, Han Hao, Haoping Xu, Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Animesh Garg, Florian Shkurti
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Scheduling

Chemistry experiments can be resource- and labor-intensive, often requiring manual tasks like polishing electrodes in electrochemistry. Traditional lab automation infrastructure faces challenges adapting to new experiments. To address this, we introduce ORGANA, an assistive robotic system that automates diverse chemistry experiments using decision-making and perception tools. It makes decisions with chemists in the loop to control robots and lab devices. ORGANA interacts with chemists using Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive experiment goals, handle disambiguation, and provide experiment logs. ORGANA plans and executes complex tasks with visual feedback, while supporting scheduling and parallel task execution. We demonstrate ORGANA's capabilities in solubility, pH measurement, recrystallization, and electrochemistry experiments. In electrochemistry, it executes a 19-step plan in parallel to characterize quinone derivatives for flow batteries. Our user study shows ORGANA reduces frustration and physical demand by over 50%, with users saving an average of 80.3% of their time when using it.
Parameter-Efficient Detoxification with Contrastive Decoding
Authors: Tong Niu, Caiming Xiong, Semih Yavuz, Yingbo Zhou
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, GPU, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

The field of natural language generation has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, including the development of controllable text generation techniques. However, controlling the attributes of the generated text remains a challenge, especially when aiming to avoid undesirable behavior such as toxicity. In this work, we introduce Detoxification Generator (DETOXIGEN), an inference-time algorithm that steers the generation away from unwanted styles. DETOXIGEN is an ensemble of a pre-trained language model (generator) and a detoxifier. The detoxifier is trained intentionally on the toxic data representative of the undesirable attribute, encouraging it to generate text in that style exclusively. During the actual generation, we use the trained detoxifier to produce undesirable tokens for the generator to contrast against at each decoding step. This approach directly informs the generator to avoid generating tokens that the detoxifier considers highly likely. We evaluate DETOXIGEN on the commonly used REALTOXICITYPROMPTS benchmark (Gehman et al., 2020) with various language models as generators. We find that it significantly outperforms previous approaches in detoxification metrics while not compromising on the generation quality. Moreover, the detoxifier is obtained by soft prompt-tuning using the same backbone language model as the generator. Hence, DETOXIGEN requires only a tiny amount of extra weights from the virtual tokens of the detoxifier to be loaded into GPU memory while decoding, making it a promising lightweight, practical, and parameter-efficient detoxification strategy.
3D Object Detection and High-Resolution Traffic Parameters Extraction Using Low-Resolution LiDAR Data
Authors: Linlin Zhang, Xiang Yu, Armstrong Aboah, Yaw Adu-Gyamfi
Date: 2024-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Point Cloud Completion, Zero-Shot Learning

Traffic volume data collection is a crucial aspect of transportation engineering and urban planning, as it provides vital insights into traffic patterns, congestion, and infrastructure efficiency. Traditional manual methods of traffic data collection are both time-consuming and costly. However, the emergence of modern technologies, particularly Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), has revolutionized the process by enabling efficient and accurate data collection. Despite the benefits of using LiDAR for traffic data collection, previous studies have identified two major limitations that have impeded its widespread adoption. These are the need for multiple LiDAR systems to obtain complete point cloud information of objects of interest, as well as the labor-intensive process of annotating 3D bounding boxes for object detection tasks. In response to these challenges, the current study proposes an innovative framework that alleviates the need for multiple LiDAR systems and simplifies the laborious 3D annotation process. To achieve this goal, the study employed a single LiDAR system, that aims at reducing the data acquisition cost and addressed its accompanying limitation of missing point cloud information by developing a Point Cloud Completion (PCC) framework to fill in missing point cloud information using point density. Furthermore, we also used zero-shot learning techniques to detect vehicles and pedestrians, as well as proposed a unique framework for extracting low to high features from the object of interest, such as height, acceleration, and speed. Using the 2D bounding box detection and extracted height information, this study is able to generate 3D bounding boxes automatically without human intervention.
Modeling Latent Selection with Structural Causal Models
Authors: Leihao Chen, Onno Zoeter, Joris M. Mooij
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Selection bias

Selection bias is ubiquitous in real-world data, and can lead to misleading results if not dealt with properly. We introduce a conditioning operation on Structural Causal Models (SCMs) to model latent selection from a causal perspective. We show that the conditioning operation transforms an SCM with the presence of an explicit latent selection mechanism into an SCM without such selection mechanism, which partially encodes the causal semantics of the selected subpopulation according to the original SCM. Furthermore, we show that this conditioning operation preserves the simplicity, acyclicity, and linearity of SCMs, and commutes with marginalization. Thanks to these properties, combined with marginalization and intervention, the conditioning operation offers a valuable tool for conducting causal reasoning tasks within causal models where latent details have been abstracted away. We demonstrate by example how classical results of causal inference can be generalized to include selection bias and how the conditioning operation helps with modeling of real-world problems.
Open RAN LSTM Traffic Prediction and Slice Management using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Fatemeh Lotfi, Fatemeh Afghah
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, Traffic Prediction

With emerging applications such as autonomous driving, smart cities, and smart factories, network slicing has become an essential component of 5G and beyond networks as a means of catering to a service-aware network. However, managing different network slices while maintaining quality of services (QoS) is a challenge in a dynamic environment. To address this issue, this paper leverages the heterogeneous experiences of distributed units (DUs) in ORAN systems and introduces a novel approach to ORAN slicing xApp using distributed deep reinforcement learning (DDRL). Additionally, to enhance the decision-making performance of the RL agent, a prediction rApp based on long short-term memory (LSTM) is incorporated to provide additional information from the dynamic environment to the xApp. Simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in network performance, particularly in reducing QoS violations. This emphasizes the importance of using the prediction rApp and distributed actors' information jointly as part of a dynamic xApp.
DocFinQA: A Long-Context Financial Reasoning Dataset
Authors: Varshini Reddy, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Viet Dac Lai, Michael Krumdick, Charles Lovering, Chris Tanner
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Specificity

For large language models (LLMs) to be effective in the financial domain -- where each decision can have a significant impact -- it is necessary to investigate realistic tasks and data. Financial professionals often interact with documents that are hundreds of pages long, but most financial research datasets only deal with short excerpts from these documents. To address this, we introduce a long-document financial QA task. We augment 7,437 questions from the existing FinQA dataset with the full-document context, extending the average context length from under 700 words in FinQA to 123k words in DocFinQA. We conduct extensive experiments over retrieval-based QA pipelines and long-context language models. DocFinQA proves a significant challenge for even state-of-the-art systems. We also provide a case-study on the longest documents in DocFinQA and find that models particularly struggle on these documents. Addressing these challenges may have a wide reaching impact across applications where specificity and long-range contexts are critical, like gene sequences and legal document contract analysis.
Scaling While Privacy Preserving: A Comprehensive Synthetic Tabular Data Generation and Evaluation in Learning Analytics
Authors: Qinyi Liu, Mohammad Khalil, Ronas Shakya, Jelena Jovanovic
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Synthetic Data Generation, Tabular Data Generation

Privacy poses a significant obstacle to the progress of learning analytics (LA), presenting challenges like inadequate anonymization and data misuse that current solutions struggle to address. Synthetic data emerges as a potential remedy, offering robust privacy protection. However, prior LA research on synthetic data lacks thorough evaluation, essential for assessing the delicate balance between privacy and data utility. Synthetic data must not only enhance privacy but also remain practical for data analytics. Moreover, diverse LA scenarios come with varying privacy and utility needs, making the selection of an appropriate synthetic data approach a pressing challenge. To address these gaps, we propose a comprehensive evaluation of synthetic data, which encompasses three dimensions of synthetic data quality, namely resemblance, utility, and privacy. We apply this evaluation to three distinct LA datasets, using three different synthetic data generation methods. Our results show that synthetic data can maintain similar utility (i.e., predictive performance) as real data, while preserving privacy. Furthermore, considering different privacy and data utility requirements in different LA scenarios, we make customized recommendations for synthetic data generation. This paper not only presents a comprehensive evaluation of synthetic data but also illustrates its potential in mitigating privacy concerns within the field of LA, thus contributing to a wider application of synthetic data in LA and promoting a better practice for open science.
Multicriteria decision support employing adaptive prediction in a tensor-based feature representation
Authors: Betania Silva Carneiro Campello, Leonardo Tomazeli Duarte, João Marcos Travassos Romano
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Prediction, Time Series

Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a widely used tool to support decisions in which a set of alternatives should be ranked or classified based on multiple criteria. Recent studies in MCDA have shown the relevance of considering not only current evaluations of each criterion but also past data. Past-data-based approaches carry new challenges, especially in time-varying environments. This study deals with this challenge via essential tools of signal processing, such as tensorial representations and adaptive prediction. More specifically, we structure the criteria' past data as a tensor and, by applying adaptive prediction, we compose signals with these prediction values of the criteria. Besides, we transform the prediction in the time domain into a most favorable decision making domain, called the feature domain. We present a novel extension of the MCDA method PROMETHEE II, aimed at addressing the tensor in the feature domain to obtain a ranking of alternatives. Numerical experiments were performed using real-world time series, and our approach is compared with other existing strategies. The results highlight the relevance and efficiency of our proposal, especially for nonstationary time series.
Health-LLM: Large Language Models for Health Prediction via Wearable Sensor Data
Authors: Yubin Kim, Xuhai Xu, Daniel McDuff, Cynthia Breazeal, Hae Won Park
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of many natural language tasks, yet they are far from perfect. In health applications, grounding and interpreting domain-specific and non-linguistic data is crucial. This paper investigates the capacity of LLMs to make inferences about health based on contextual information (e.g. user demographics, health knowledge) and physiological data (e.g. resting heart rate, sleep minutes). We present a comprehensive evaluation of 12 state-of-the-art LLMs with prompting and fine-tuning techniques on four public health datasets (PMData, LifeSnaps, GLOBEM and AW_FB). Our experiments cover 10 consumer health prediction tasks in mental health, activity, metabolic, and sleep assessment. Our fine-tuned model, HealthAlpaca exhibits comparable performance to much larger models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Gemini-Pro), achieving the best performance in 8 out of 10 tasks. Ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of context enhancement strategies. Notably, we observe that our context enhancement can yield up to 23.8% improvement in performance. While constructing contextually rich prompts (combining user context, health knowledge and temporal information) exhibits synergistic improvement, the inclusion of health knowledge context in prompts significantly enhances overall performance.
Structsum Generation for Faster Text Comprehension
Authors: Parag Jain, Andreea Marzoca, Francesco Piccinno
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

We consider the task of generating structured representations of text using large language models (LLMs). We focus on tables and mind maps as representative modalities. Tables are more organized way of representing data, while mind maps provide a visually dynamic and flexible approach, particularly suitable for sparse content. Despite the effectiveness of LLMs on different tasks, we show that current models struggle with generating structured outputs. In response, we present effective prompting strategies for both of these tasks. We introduce a taxonomy of problems around factuality, global and local structure, common to both modalities and propose a set of critiques to tackle these issues resulting in an absolute improvement in accuracy of +37pp (79%) for mind maps and +15pp (78%) for tables. To evaluate semantic coverage of generated structured representations we propose Auto-QA, and we verify the adequacy of Auto-QA using SQuAD dataset. We further evaluate the usefulness of structured representations via a text comprehension user study. The results show a significant reduction in comprehension time compared to text when using table (42.9%) and mind map (31.9%), without loss in accuracy.
Enhancing Emotional Generation Capability of Large Language Models via Emotional Chain-of-Thought
Authors: Zaijing Li, Gongwei Chen, Rui Shao, Yuquan Xie, Dongmei Jiang, Liqiang Nie
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotional Intelligence, Emotion Recognition, Sentiment Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various emotion recognition tasks, thereby piquing the research community's curiosity for exploring their potential in emotional intelligence. However, several issues in the field of emotional generation tasks remain unresolved, including human preference alignment and emotional generation assessment. In this paper, we propose the Emotional Chain-of-Thought (ECoT), a plug-and-play prompting method that enhances the performance of LLMs on various emotional generation tasks by aligning with human emotional intelligence guidelines. To assess the reliability of ECoT, we propose an automated model-based evaluation method called Emotional Generation Score (EGS). EGS incorporates Goleman's Emotional Intelligence Theory as a consensus of human experts, providing a new perspective on the evaluation of emotional generation tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ECoT and EGS. Further, we discuss the promise of LLMs in the field of emotional intelligence and present key insights into the LLMs with the ECoT in emotional generation tasks.
A hierarchical control framework for autonomous decision-making systems: Integrating HMDP and MPC
Authors: Xue-Fang Wang, Jingjing Jiang, Wen-Hua Chen
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Model Predictive Control

This paper proposes a comprehensive hierarchical control framework for autonomous decision-making arising in robotics and autonomous systems. In a typical hierarchical control architecture, high-level decision making is often characterised by discrete state and decision/control sets. However, a rational decision is usually affected by not only the discrete states of the autonomous system, but also the underlying continuous dynamics even the evolution of its operational environment. This paper proposes a holistic and comprehensive design process and framework for this type of challenging problems, from new modelling and design problem formulation to control design and stability analysis. It addresses the intricate interplay between traditional continuous systems dynamics utilized at the low levels for control design and discrete Markov decision processes (MDP) for facilitating high-level decision making. We model the decision making system in complex environments as a hybrid system consisting of a controlled MDP and autonomous (i.e. uncontrolled) continuous dynamics. Consequently, the new formulation is called as hybrid Markov decision process (HMDP). The design problem is formulated with a focus on ensuring both safety and optimality while taking into account the influence of both the discrete and continuous state variables of different levels. With the help of the model predictive control (MPC) concept, a decision maker design scheme is proposed for the proposed hybrid decision making model. By carefully designing key ingredients involved in this scheme, it is shown that the recursive feasibility and stability of the proposed autonomous decision making scheme are guaranteed. The proposed framework is applied to develop an autonomous lane changing system for intelligent vehicles.
A Survey on the Applications of Frontier AI, Foundation Models, and Large Language Models to Intelligent Transportation Systems
Authors: Mohamed R. Shoaib, Heba M. Emara, Jun Zhao
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Management, Text Generation

This survey paper explores the transformative influence of frontier AI, foundation models, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in the realm of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), emphasizing their integral role in advancing transportation intelligence, optimizing traffic management, and contributing to the realization of smart cities. Frontier AI refers to the forefront of AI technology, encompassing the latest advancements, innovations, and experimental techniques in the field, especially AI foundation models and LLMs. Foundation models, like GPT-4, are large, general-purpose AI models that provide a base for a wide range of applications. They are characterized by their versatility and scalability. LLMs are obtained from finetuning foundation models with a specific focus on processing and generating natural language. They excel in tasks like language understanding, text generation, translation, and summarization. By leveraging vast textual data, including traffic reports and social media interactions, LLMs extract critical insights, fostering the evolution of ITS. The survey navigates the dynamic synergy between LLMs and ITS, delving into applications in traffic management, integration into autonomous vehicles, and their role in shaping smart cities. It provides insights into ongoing research, innovations, and emerging trends, aiming to inspire collaboration at the intersection of language, intelligence, and mobility for safer, more efficient, and sustainable transportation systems. The paper further surveys interactions between LLMs and various aspects of ITS, exploring roles in traffic management, facilitating autonomous vehicles, and contributing to smart city development, while addressing challenges brought by frontier AI and foundation models. This paper offers valuable inspiration for future research and innovation in the transformative domain of intelligent transportation.
RecSys Challenge 2023: From data preparation to prediction, a simple, efficient, robust and scalable solution
Authors: Maxime Manderlier, Fabian Lecron
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Missing Values

The RecSys Challenge 2023, presented by ShareChat, consists to predict if an user will install an application on his smartphone after having seen advertising impressions in ShareChat & Moj apps. This paper presents the solution of 'Team UMONS' to this challenge, giving accurate results (our best score is 6.622686) with a relatively small model that can be easily implemented in different production configurations. Our solution scales well when increasing the dataset size and can be used with datasets containing missing values.