pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Open-Vocabulary Diffusion to Camouflaged Instance Segmentation
Authors: Tuan-Anh Vu, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Qing Guo, Binh-Son Hua, Nhat Minh Chung, Ivor W. Tsang, Sai-Kit Yeung
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Text-to-image diffusion techniques have shown exceptional capability of producing high-quality images from text descriptions. This indicates that there exists a strong correlation between the visual and textual domains. In addition, text-image discriminative models such as CLIP excel in image labelling from text prompts, thanks to the rich and diverse information available from open concepts. In this paper, we leverage these technical advances to solve a challenging problem in computer vision: camouflaged instance segmentation. Specifically, we propose a method built upon a state-of-the-art diffusion model, empowered by open-vocabulary to learn multi-scale textual-visual features for camouflaged object representations. Such cross-domain representations are desirable in segmenting camouflaged objects where visual cues are subtle to distinguish the objects from the background, especially in segmenting novel objects which are not seen in training. We also develop technically supportive components to effectively fuse cross-domain features and engage relevant features towards respective foreground objects. We validate our method and compare it with existing ones on several benchmark datasets of camouflaged instance segmentation and generic open-vocabulary instance segmentation. Experimental results confirm the advances of our method over existing ones. We will publish our code and pre-trained models to support future research.
Truth Forest: Toward Multi-Scale Truthfulness in Large Language Models through Intervention without Tuning
Authors: Zhongzhi Chen, Xingwu Sun, Xianfeng Jiao, Fengzong Lian, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Cheng-Zhong Xu
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: TruthfulQA

Despite the great success of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, they suffer from generating hallucinations. We introduce Truth Forest, a method that enhances truthfulness in LLMs by uncovering hidden truth representations using multi-dimensional orthogonal probes. Specifically, it creates multiple orthogonal bases for modeling truth by incorporating orthogonal constraints into the probes. Moreover, we introduce Random Peek, a systematic technique considering an extended range of positions within the sequence, reducing the gap between discerning and generating truth features in LLMs. By employing this approach, we improved the truthfulness of Llama-2-7B from 40.8\% to 74.5\% on TruthfulQA. Likewise, significant improvements are observed in fine-tuned models. We conducted a thorough analysis of truth features using probes. Our visualization results show that orthogonal probes capture complementary truth-related features, forming well-defined clusters that reveal the inherent structure of the dataset.
Culturally-Attuned Moral Machines: Implicit Learning of Human Value Systems by AI through Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Nigini Oliveira, Jasmine Li, Koosha Khalvati, Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, Katharina Reinecke, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Rajesh P. N. Rao
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Decision Making

Constructing a universal moral code for artificial intelligence (AI) is difficult or even impossible, given that different human cultures have different definitions of morality and different societal norms. We therefore argue that the value system of an AI should be culturally attuned: just as a child raised in a particular culture learns the specific values and norms of that culture, we propose that an AI agent operating in a particular human community should acquire that community's moral, ethical, and cultural codes. How AI systems might acquire such codes from human observation and interaction has remained an open question. Here, we propose using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as a method for AI agents to acquire a culturally-attuned value system implicitly. We test our approach using an experimental paradigm in which AI agents use IRL to learn different reward functions, which govern the agents' moral values, by observing the behavior of different cultural groups in an online virtual world requiring real-time decision making. We show that an AI agent learning from the average behavior of a particular cultural group can acquire altruistic characteristics reflective of that group's behavior, and this learned value system can generalize to new scenarios requiring altruistic judgments. Our results provide, to our knowledge, the first demonstration that AI agents could potentially be endowed with the ability to continually learn their values and norms from observing and interacting with humans, thereby becoming attuned to the culture they are operating in.
EHR Interaction Between Patients and AI: NoteAid EHR Interaction
Authors: Xiaocheng Zhang, Zonghai Yao, Hong Yu
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their outstanding performance in semantic and contextual comprehension, the potential of LLMs in specialized domains warrants exploration. This paper introduces the NoteAid EHR Interaction Pipeline, an innovative approach developed using generative LLMs to assist in patient education, a task stemming from the need to aid patients in understanding Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Building upon the NoteAid work, we designed two novel tasks from the patient's perspective: providing explanations for EHR content that patients may not understand and answering questions posed by patients after reading their EHRs. We extracted datasets containing 10,000 instances from MIMIC Discharge Summaries and 876 instances from the MADE medical notes collection, respectively, executing the two tasks through the NoteAid EHR Interaction Pipeline with these data. Performance data of LLMs on these tasks were collected and constructed as the corresponding NoteAid EHR Interaction Dataset. Through a comprehensive evaluation of the entire dataset using LLM assessment and a rigorous manual evaluation of 64 instances, we showcase the potential of LLMs in patient education. Besides, the results provide valuable data support for future exploration and applications in this domain while also supplying high-quality synthetic datasets for in-house system training.
FerKD: Surgical Label Adaptation for Efficient Distillation
Authors: Zhiqiang Shen
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

We present FerKD, a novel efficient knowledge distillation framework that incorporates partial soft-hard label adaptation coupled with a region-calibration mechanism. Our approach stems from the observation and intuition that standard data augmentations, such as RandomResizedCrop, tend to transform inputs into diverse conditions: easy positives, hard positives, or hard negatives. In traditional distillation frameworks, these transformed samples are utilized equally through their predictive probabilities derived from pretrained teacher models. However, merely relying on prediction values from a pretrained teacher, a common practice in prior studies, neglects the reliability of these soft label predictions. To address this, we propose a new scheme that calibrates the less-confident regions to be the context using softened hard groundtruth labels. Our approach involves the processes of hard regions mining + calibration. We demonstrate empirically that this method can dramatically improve the convergence speed and final accuracy. Additionally, we find that a consistent mixing strategy can stabilize the distributions of soft supervision, taking advantage of the soft labels. As a result, we introduce a stabilized SelfMix augmentation that weakens the variation of the mixed images and corresponding soft labels through mixing similar regions within the same image. FerKD is an intuitive and well-designed learning system that eliminates several heuristics and hyperparameters in former FKD solution. More importantly, it achieves remarkable improvement on ImageNet-1K and downstream tasks. For instance, FerKD achieves 81.2% on ImageNet-1K with ResNet-50, outperforming FKD and FunMatch by remarkable margins. Leveraging better pre-trained weights and larger architectures, our finetuned ViT-G14 even achieves 89.9%. Our code is available at https://github.com/szq0214/FKD/tree/main/FerKD.
FedLED: Label-Free Equipment Fault Diagnosis with Vertical Federated Transfer Learning
Authors: Jie Shen, Shusen Yang, Cong Zhao, Xuebin Ren, Peng Zhao, Yuqian Yang, Qing Han, Shuaijun Wu
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Diagnosis, Transfer Learning

Intelligent equipment fault diagnosis based on Federated Transfer Learning (FTL) attracts considerable attention from both academia and industry. It allows real-world industrial agents with limited samples to construct a fault diagnosis model without jeopardizing their raw data privacy. Existing approaches, however, can neither address the intense sample heterogeneity caused by different working conditions of practical agents, nor the extreme fault label scarcity, even zero, of newly deployed equipment. To address these issues, we present FedLED, the first unsupervised vertical FTL equipment fault diagnosis method, where knowledge of the unlabeled target domain is further exploited for effective unsupervised model transfer. Results of extensive experiments using data of real equipment monitoring demonstrate that FedLED obviously outperforms SOTA approaches in terms of both diagnosis accuracy (up to 4.13 times) and generality. We expect our work to inspire further study on label-free equipment fault diagnosis systematically enhanced by target domain knowledge.
ClST: A Convolutional Transformer Framework for Automatic Modulation Recognition by Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Dongbin Hou, Lixin Li, Wensheng Lin, Junli Liang, Zhu Han
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Modulation Recognition, Knowledge Distillation

With the rapid development of deep learning (DL) in recent years, automatic modulation recognition (AMR) with DL has achieved high accuracy. However, insufficient training signal data in complicated channel environments and large-scale DL models are critical factors that make DL methods difficult to deploy in practice. Aiming to these problems, we propose a novel neural network named convolution-linked signal transformer (ClST) and a novel knowledge distillation method named signal knowledge distillation (SKD). The ClST is accomplished through three primary modifications: a hierarchy of transformer containing convolution, a novel attention mechanism named parallel spatial-channel attention (PSCA) mechanism and a novel convolutional transformer block named convolution-transformer projection (CTP) to leverage a convolutional projection. The SKD is a knowledge distillation method to effectively reduce the parameters and complexity of neural networks. We train two lightweight neural networks using the SKD algorithm, KD-CNN and KD-MobileNet, to meet the demand that neural networks can be used on miniaturized devices. The simulation results demonstrate that the ClST outperforms advanced neural networks on all datasets. Moreover, both KD-CNN and KD-MobileNet obtain higher recognition accuracy with less network complexity, which is very beneficial for the deployment of AMR on miniaturized communication devices.
State Machine of Thoughts: Leveraging Past Reasoning Trajectories for Enhancing Problem Solving
Authors: Jia Liu, Jie Shuai, Xiyao Li
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Current Large Language Model-based agents reason within an exploration-evaluation framework, navigating problem-solving processes in a tree-like manner. However, these methods often neglect successful reasoning trajectories once a problem is resolved, leading to inefficient use of these trajectories for future analogous problems. To address this inefficiency, we adopt a state machine to record experience derived from previous reasoning trajectories. Within the state machine, states represent decomposed sub-problems, while state transitions reflect the dependencies among sub-problems. The state machine records both successful and failed trajectories. Utilizing the experience from the state machine, our proposed State Machine of Thoughts (SMoT) selects the most optimal sub-solutions and avoids incorrect ones. Our experiments show that SMoT can significantly improve problem-solving abilities in two exploration-intensive problems: the 24-point game and a taxi navigation reinforcement learning game.
Break Out of a Pigeonhole: A Unified Framework for Examining Miscalibration, Bias, and Stereotype in Recommender Systems
Authors: Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Ru Lin
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Movie Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Despite the benefits of personalizing items and information tailored to users' needs, it has been found that recommender systems tend to introduce biases that favor popular items or certain categories of items, and dominant user groups. In this study, we aim to characterize the systematic errors of a recommendation system and how they manifest in various accountability issues, such as stereotypes, biases, and miscalibration. We propose a unified framework that distinguishes the sources of prediction errors into a set of key measures that quantify the various types of system-induced effects, both at the individual and collective levels. Based on our measuring framework, we examine the most widely adopted algorithms in the context of movie recommendation. Our research reveals three important findings: (1) Differences between algorithms: recommendations generated by simpler algorithms tend to be more stereotypical but less biased than those generated by more complex algorithms. (2) Disparate impact on groups and individuals: system-induced biases and stereotypes have a disproportionate effect on atypical users and minority groups (e.g., women and older users). (3) Mitigation opportunity: using structural equation modeling, we identify the interactions between user characteristics (typicality and diversity), system-induced effects, and miscalibration. We further investigate the possibility of mitigating system-induced effects by oversampling underrepresented groups and individuals, which was found to be effective in reducing stereotypes and improving recommendation quality. Our research is the first systematic examination of not only system-induced effects and miscalibration but also the stereotyping issue in recommender systems.
Commonsense for Zero-Shot Natural Language Video Localization
Authors: Meghana Holla, Ismini Lourentzou
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00

Zero-shot Natural Language-Video Localization (NLVL) methods have exhibited promising results in training NLVL models exclusively with raw video data by dynamically generating video segments and pseudo-query annotations. However, existing pseudo-queries often lack grounding in the source video, resulting in unstructured and disjointed content. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of commonsense reasoning in zero-shot NLVL. Specifically, we present CORONET, a zero-shot NLVL framework that leverages commonsense to bridge the gap between videos and generated pseudo-queries via a commonsense enhancement module. CORONET employs Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) to encode commonsense information extracted from a knowledge graph, conditioned on the video, and cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the encoded video and pseudo-query representations prior to localization. Through empirical evaluations on two benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that CORONET surpasses both zero-shot and weakly supervised baselines, achieving improvements up to 32.13% across various recall thresholds and up to 6.33% in mIoU. These results underscore the significance of leveraging commonsense reasoning for zero-shot NLVL.
ALF: Adaptive Label Finetuning for Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Qishen Chen, Jianzhi Liu, Xinyu Lyu, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen, Jingkuan Song
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Relation, Scene Graph Generation, Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) endeavors to predict the relationships between subjects and objects in a given image. Nevertheless, the long-tail distribution of relations often leads to biased prediction on coarse labels, presenting a substantial hurdle in SGG. To address this issue, researchers focus on unbiased SGG and introduce data transfer methods to transfer coarse-grained predicates into fine-grained ones across the entire dataset. However, these methods encounter two primary challenges: 1) They overlook the inherent context constraints imposed by subject-object pairs, leading to erroneous relations transfer. 2) Additional retraining process are required after the data transfer, which incurs substantial computational costs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the first plug-and-play one-stage data transfer pipeline in SGG, termed Adaptive Label Finetuning (ALF), which eliminates the need for extra retraining sessions and meanwhile significantly enhance models' relation recognition capability across various SGG benchmark approaches. Specifically, ALF consists of two components: Adaptive Label Construction (ALC) and Adaptive Iterative Learning (AIL). By imposing Predicate-Context Constraints within relation space, ALC adaptively re-ranks and selects candidate relations in reference to model's predictive logits utilizing the Restriction-Based Judgment techniques, achieving robust relation transfer. Supervised with labels transferred by ALC, AIL iteratively finetunes the SGG models in an auto-regressive manner, which mitigates the substantial computational costs arising from the retraining process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ALF achieves a 16% improvement in mR@100 compared to the typical SGG method Motif, with only a 6% increase in calculation costs compared to the state-of-the-art method IETrans.
Hotspot Prediction of Severe Traffic Accidents in the Federal District of Brazil
Authors: Vinicius Lima, Vetria Byrd
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00

Traffic accidents are one of the biggest challenges in a society where commuting is so important. What triggers an accident can be dependent on several subjective parameters and varies within each region, city, or country. In the same way, it is important to understand those parameters in order to provide a knowledge basis to support decisions regarding future cases prevention. The literature presents several works where machine learning algorithms are used for prediction of accidents or severity of accidents, in which city-level datasets were used as evaluation studies. This work attempts to add to the diversity of research, by focusing mainly on concentration of accidents and how machine learning can be used to predict hotspots. This approach demonstrated to be a useful technique for authorities to understand nuances of accident concentration behavior. For the first time, data from the Federal District of Brazil collected from forensic traffic accident analysts were used and combined with data from local weather conditions to predict hotspots of collisions. Out of the five algorithms we considered, two had good performance: Multi-layer Perceptron and Random Forest, with the latter being the best one at 98% accuracy. As a result, we identify that weather parameters are not as important as the accident location, demonstrating that local intervention is important to reduce the number of accidents.
Beyond PID Controllers: PPO with Neuralized PID Policy for Proton Beam Intensity Control in Mu2e
Authors: Chenwei Xu, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Aakaash Narayanan, Mattson Thieme, Vladimir Nagaslaev, Mark Austin, Jeremy Arnold, Jose Berlioz, Pierrick Hanlet, Aisha Ibrahim, Dennis Nicklaus, Jovan Mitrevski, Jason Michael St. John, Gauri Pradhan, Andrea Saewert, Kiyomi Seiya, Brian Schupbach, Randy Thurman-Keup, Nhan Tran, Rui Shi, Seda Ogrenci, Alexis Maya-Isabelle Shuping, Kyle Hazelwood, Han Liu
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We introduce a novel Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm aimed at addressing the challenge of maintaining a uniform proton beam intensity delivery in the Muon to Electron Conversion Experiment (Mu2e) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). Our primary objective is to regulate the spill process to ensure a consistent intensity profile, with the ultimate goal of creating an automated controller capable of providing real-time feedback and calibration of the Spill Regulation System (SRS) parameters on a millisecond timescale. We treat the Mu2e accelerator system as a Markov Decision Process suitable for Reinforcement Learning (RL), utilizing PPO to reduce bias and enhance training stability. A key innovation in our approach is the integration of a neuralized Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller into the policy function, resulting in a significant improvement in the Spill Duty Factor (SDF) by 13.6%, surpassing the performance of the current PID controller baseline by an additional 1.6%. This paper presents the preliminary offline results based on a differentiable simulator of the Mu2e accelerator. It paves the groundwork for real-time implementations and applications, representing a crucial step towards automated proton beam intensity control for the Mu2e experiment.
Towards Auto-Modeling of Formal Verification for NextG Protocols: A Multimodal cross- and self-attention Large Language Model Approach
Authors: Jingda Yang, Ying Wang
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This paper introduces Auto-modeling of Formal Verification with Real-world Prompting for 5G and NextG protocols (AVRE), a novel system designed for the formal verification of Next Generation (NextG) communication protocols, addressing the increasing complexity and scalability challenges in network protocol design and verification. Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), AVRE transforms protocol descriptions into dependency graphs and formal models, efficiently resolving ambiguities and capturing design intent. The system integrates a transformer model with LLMs to autonomously establish quantifiable dependency relationships through cross- and self-attention mechanisms. Enhanced by iterative feedback from the HyFuzz experimental platform, AVRE significantly advances the accuracy and relevance of formal verification in complex communication protocols, offering a groundbreaking approach to validating sophisticated communication systems. We compare CAL's performance with state-of-the-art LLM-based models and traditional time sequence models, demonstrating its superiority in accuracy and robustness, achieving an accuracy of 95.94\% and an AUC of 0.98. This NLP-based approach enables, for the first time, the creation of exploits directly from design documents, making remarkable progress in scalable system verification and validation.