pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RL + Model-based Control: Using On-demand Optimal Control to Learn Versatile Legged Locomotion
Authors: Dongho Kang, Jin Cheng, Miguel Zamora, Fatemeh Zargarbashi, Stelian Coros
Date: 2023-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper presents a control framework that combines model-based optimal control and reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve versatile and robust legged locomotion. Our approach enhances the RL training process by incorporating on-demand reference motions generated through finite-horizon optimal control, covering a broad range of velocities and gaits. These reference motions serve as targets for the RL policy to imitate, leading to the development of robust control policies that can be learned with reliability. Furthermore, by utilizing realistic simulation data that captures whole-body dynamics, RL effectively overcomes the inherent limitations in reference motions imposed by modeling simplifications. We validate the robustness and controllability of the RL training process within our framework through a series of experiments. In these experiments, our method showcases its capability to generalize reference motions and effectively handle more complex locomotion tasks that may pose challenges for the simplified model, thanks to RL's flexibility. Additionally, our framework effortlessly supports the training of control policies for robots with diverse dimensions, eliminating the necessity for robot-specific adjustments in the reward function and hyperparameters.
Large Language Models, scientific knowledge and factuality: A framework to streamline human expert evaluation
Authors: Magdalena Wysocka, Oskar Wysocki, Maxime Delmas, Vincent Mutel, Andre Freitas
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

The paper introduces a framework for the evaluation of the encoding of factual scientific knowledge, designed to streamline the manual evaluation process typically conducted by domain experts. Inferring over and extracting information from Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on a large corpus of scientific literature can potentially define a step change in biomedical discovery, reducing the barriers for accessing and integrating existing medical evidence. This work explores the potential of LLMs for dialoguing with biomedical background knowledge, using the context of antibiotic discovery. The framework involves of three evaluation steps, each assessing different aspects sequentially: fluency, prompt alignment, semantic coherence, factual knowledge, and specificity of the generated responses. By splitting these tasks between non-experts and experts, the framework reduces the effort required from the latter. The work provides a systematic assessment on the ability of eleven state-of-the-art models LLMs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Llama 2, in two prompting-based tasks: chemical compound definition generation and chemical compound-fungus relation determination. Although recent models have improved in fluency, factual accuracy is still low and models are biased towards over-represented entities. The ability of LLMs to serve as biomedical knowledge bases is questioned, and the need for additional systematic evaluation frameworks is highlighted. While LLMs are currently not fit for purpose to be used as biomedical factual knowledge bases in a zero-shot setting, there is a promising emerging property in the direction of factuality as the models become domain specialised, scale-up in size and level of human feedback.
The Computational Complexity of Single-Player Imperfect-Recall Games
Authors: Emanuel Tewolde, Caspar Oesterheld, Vincent Conitzer, Paul W. Goldberg
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00

We study single-player extensive-form games with imperfect recall, such as the Sleeping Beauty problem or the Absentminded Driver game. For such games, two natural equilibrium concepts have been proposed as alternative solution concepts to ex-ante optimality. One equilibrium concept uses generalized double halving (GDH) as a belief system and evidential decision theory (EDT), and another one uses generalized thirding (GT) as a belief system and causal decision theory (CDT). Our findings relate those three solution concepts of a game to solution concepts of a polynomial maximization problem: global optima, optimal points with respect to subsets of variables and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points. Based on these correspondences, we are able to settle various complexity-theoretic questions on the computation of such strategies. For ex-ante optimality and (EDT,GDH)-equilibria, we obtain NP-hardness and inapproximability, and for (CDT,GT)-equilibria we obtain CLS-completeness results.
ConvGenVisMo: Evaluation of Conversational Generative Vision Models
Authors: Narjes Nikzad Khasmakhi, Meysam Asgari-Chenaghlu, Nabiha Asghar, Philipp Schaer, Dietlind Zühlke
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00

Conversational generative vision models (CGVMs) like Visual ChatGPT (Wu et al., 2023) have recently emerged from the synthesis of computer vision and natural language processing techniques. These models enable more natural and interactive communication between humans and machines, because they can understand verbal inputs from users and generate responses in natural language along with visual outputs. To make informed decisions about the usage and deployment of these models, it is important to analyze their performance through a suitable evaluation framework on realistic datasets. In this paper, we present ConvGenVisMo, a framework for the novel task of evaluating CGVMs. ConvGenVisMo introduces a new benchmark evaluation dataset for this task, and also provides a suite of existing and new automated evaluation metrics to evaluate the outputs. All ConvGenVisMo assets, including the dataset and the evaluation code, will be made available publicly on GitHub.
Visual Affordance Prediction for Guiding Robot Exploration
Authors: Homanga Bharadhwaj, Abhinav Gupta, Shubham Tulsiani
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Motivated by the intuitive understanding humans have about the space of possible interactions, and the ease with which they can generalize this understanding to previously unseen scenes, we develop an approach for learning visual affordances for guiding robot exploration. Given an input image of a scene, we infer a distribution over plausible future states that can be achieved via interactions with it. We use a Transformer-based model to learn a conditional distribution in the latent embedding space of a VQ-VAE and show that these models can be trained using large-scale and diverse passive data, and that the learned models exhibit compositional generalization to diverse objects beyond the training distribution. We show how the trained affordance model can be used for guiding exploration by acting as a goal-sampling distribution, during visual goal-conditioned policy learning in robotic manipulation.
Towards Confidential Computing: A Secure Cloud Architecture for Big Data Analytics and AI
Authors: Naweiluo Zhou, Florent Dufour, Vinzent Bode, Peter Zinterhof, Nicolay J Hammer, Dieter Kranzlmüller
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Scheduling

Cloud computing provisions computer resources at a cost-effective way based on demand. Therefore it has become a viable solution for big data analytics and artificial intelligence which have been widely adopted in various domain science. Data security in certain fields such as biomedical research remains a major concern when moving their workflows to cloud, because cloud environments are generally outsourced which are more exposed to risks. We present a secure cloud architecture and describes how it enables workflow packaging and scheduling while keeping its data, logic and computation secure in transit, in use and at rest.
Bayesian inference and neural estimation of acoustic wave propagation
Authors: Yongchao Huang, Yuhang He, Hong Ge
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Room Impulse Response (RIR)

In this work, we introduce a novel framework which combines physics and machine learning methods to analyse acoustic signals. Three methods are developed for this task: a Bayesian inference approach for inferring the spectral acoustics characteristics, a neural-physical model which equips a neural network with forward and backward physical losses, and the non-linear least squares approach which serves as benchmark. The inferred propagation coefficient leads to the room impulse response (RIR) quantity which can be used for relocalisation with uncertainty. The simplicity and efficiency of this framework is empirically validated on simulated data.
Bridging the Language Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMs
Authors: Somnath Kumar, Vaibhav Balloli, Mercy Ranjit, Kabir Ahuja, Sunayana Sitaram, Kalika Bali, Tanuja Ganu, Akshay Nambi
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains but still struggle with non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper addresses the critical challenge of improving multilingual performance without extensive fine-tuning. We introduce a novel dynamic learning approach that optimizes prompt strategy, embedding model, and LLM per query at runtime. By adapting configurations dynamically, our method achieves significant improvements over static, best and random baselines. It operates efficiently in both offline and online settings, generalizing seamlessly across new languages and datasets. Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with state-of-the-art multilingual embeddings, we achieve superior task performance across diverse linguistic contexts. Through systematic investigation and evaluation across 18 diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets we show our approach results in 10-15% improvements in multilingual performance over pre-trained models and 4x gains compared to fine-tuned, language-specific models.
Predictability and Fairness in Load Aggregation with Deadband
Authors: F. V. Difonzo, M. Roubalik, J. Marecek
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Virtual power plants and load aggregation are becoming increasingly common. There, one regulates the aggregate power output of an ensemble of distributed energy resources (DERs). Marecek et al. [Automatica, Volume 147, January 2023, 110743, arXiv:2110.03001] recently suggested that long-term averages of prices or incentives offered should exist and be independent of the initial states of the operators of the DER, the aggregator, and the power grid. This can be seen as predictability, which underlies fairness. Unfortunately, the existence of such averages cannot be guaranteed with many traditional regulators, including the proportional-integral (PI) regulator with or without deadband. Here, we consider the effects of losses in the alternating current model and the deadband in the controller. This yields a non-linear dynamical system (due to the non-linear losses) exhibiting discontinuities (due to the deadband). We show that Filippov invariant measures enable reasoning about predictability and fairness while considering non-linearity of the alternating-current model and deadband.
FuseCap: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enriched Fused Image Captions
Authors: Noam Rotstein, David Bensaid, Shaked Brody, Roy Ganz, Ron Kimmel
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image Captioning, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Retrieval, Text Retrieval

The advent of vision-language pre-training techniques enhanced substantial progress in the development of models for image captioning. However, these models frequently produce generic captions and may omit semantically important image details. This limitation can be traced back to the image-text datasets; while their captions typically offer a general description of image content, they frequently omit salient details. Considering the magnitude of these datasets, manual reannotation is impractical, emphasizing the need for an automated approach. To address this challenge, we leverage existing captions and explore augmenting them with visual details using "frozen" vision experts including an object detector, an attribute recognizer, and an Optical Character Recognizer (OCR). Our proposed method, FuseCap, fuses the outputs of such vision experts with the original captions using a large language model (LLM), yielding comprehensive image descriptions. We automatically curate a training set of 12M image-enriched caption pairs. These pairs undergo extensive evaluation through both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Subsequently, this data is utilized to train a captioning generation BLIP-based model. This model outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches, producing more precise and detailed descriptions, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed data-centric approach. We release this large-scale dataset of enriched image-caption pairs for the community.
Spot keywords from very noisy and mixed speech
Authors: Ying Shi, Dong Wang, Lantian Li, Jiqing Han, Shi Yin
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Keyword Spotting

Most existing keyword spotting research focuses on conditions with slight or moderate noise. In this paper, we try to tackle a more challenging task: detecting keywords buried under strong interfering speech (10 times higher than the keyword in amplitude), and even worse, mixed with other keywords. We propose a novel Mix Training (MT) strategy that encourages the model to discover low-energy keywords from noisy and mixed speech. Experiments were conducted with a vanilla CNN and two EfficientNet (B0/B2) architectures. The results evaluated with the Google Speech Command dataset demonstrated that the proposed mix training approach is highly effective and outperforms standard data augmentation and mixup training.
Towards Autonomous and Safe Last-mile Deliveries with AI-augmented Self-driving Delivery Robots
Authors: Eyad Shaklab, Areg Karapetyan, Arjun Sharma, Murad Mebrahtu, Mustofa Basri, Mohamed Nagy, Majid Khonji, Jorge Dias
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00

In addition to its crucial impact on customer satisfaction, last-mile delivery (LMD) is notorious for being the most time-consuming and costly stage of the shipping process. Pressing environmental concerns combined with the recent surge of e-commerce sales have sparked renewed interest in automation and electrification of last-mile logistics. To address the hurdles faced by existing robotic couriers, this paper introduces a customer-centric and safety-conscious LMD system for small urban communities based on AI-assisted autonomous delivery robots. The presented framework enables end-to-end automation and optimization of the logistic process while catering for real-world imposed operational uncertainties, clients' preferred time schedules, and safety of pedestrians. To this end, the integrated optimization component is modeled as a robust variant of the Cumulative Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, where routes are constructed under uncertain travel times with an objective to minimize the total latency of deliveries (i.e., the overall waiting time of customers, which can negatively affect their satisfaction). We demonstrate the proposed LMD system's utility through real-world trials in a university campus with a single robotic courier. Implementation aspects as well as the findings and practical insights gained from the deployment are discussed in detail. Lastly, we round up the contributions with numerical simulations to investigate the scalability of the developed mathematical formulation with respect to the number of robotic vehicles and customers.
Amplification trojan network: Attack deep neural networks by amplifying their inherent weakness
Authors: Zhanhao Hu, Jun Zhu, Bo Zhang, Xiaolin Hu
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00

Recent works found that deep neural networks (DNNs) can be fooled by adversarial examples, which are crafted by adding adversarial noise on clean inputs. The accuracy of DNNs on adversarial examples will decrease as the magnitude of the adversarial noise increase. In this study, we show that DNNs can be also fooled when the noise is very small under certain circumstances. This new type of attack is called Amplification Trojan Attack (ATAttack). Specifically, we use a trojan network to transform the inputs before sending them to the target DNN. This trojan network serves as an amplifier to amplify the inherent weakness of the target DNN. The target DNN, which is infected by the trojan network, performs normally on clean data while being more vulnerable to adversarial examples. Since it only transforms the inputs, the trojan network can hide in DNN-based pipelines, e.g. by infecting the pre-processing procedure of the inputs before sending them to the DNNs. This new type of threat should be considered in developing safe DNNs.
One Network, Many Masks: Towards More Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning
Authors: Guangtao Zeng, Peiyuan Zhang, Wei Lu
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models for multiple tasks tends to be expensive in terms of storage. To mitigate this, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods have been proposed to address this issue, but they still require a significant number of parameters and storage when being applied to broader ranges of tasks. To achieve even greater storage reduction, we propose PROPETL, a novel method that enables efficient sharing of a single PETL module which we call prototype network (e.g., adapter, LoRA, and prefix-tuning) across layers and tasks. We then learn binary masks to select different sub-networks from the shared prototype network and apply them as PETL modules into different layers. We find that the binary masks can determine crucial information from the network, which is often ignored in previous studies. Our work can also be seen as a type of pruning method, where we find that overparameterization also exists in the seemingly small PETL modules. We evaluate PROPETL on various downstream tasks and show that it can outperform other PETL methods with approximately 10% of the parameter storage required by the latter.
Evaluating GPT-3 Generated Explanations for Hateful Content Moderation
Authors: Han Wang, Ming Shan Hee, Md Rabiul Awal, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness, Persuasiveness, Survey

Recent research has focused on using large language models (LLMs) to generate explanations for hate speech through fine-tuning or prompting. Despite the growing interest in this area, these generated explanations' effectiveness and potential limitations remain poorly understood. A key concern is that these explanations, generated by LLMs, may lead to erroneous judgments about the nature of flagged content by both users and content moderators. For instance, an LLM-generated explanation might inaccurately convince a content moderator that a benign piece of content is hateful. In light of this, we propose an analytical framework for examining hate speech explanations and conducted an extensive survey on evaluating such explanations. Specifically, we prompted GPT-3 to generate explanations for both hateful and non-hateful content, and a survey was conducted with 2,400 unique respondents to evaluate the generated explanations. Our findings reveal that (1) human evaluators rated the GPT-generated explanations as high quality in terms of linguistic fluency, informativeness, persuasiveness, and logical soundness, (2) the persuasive nature of these explanations, however, varied depending on the prompting strategy employed, and (3) this persuasiveness may result in incorrect judgments about the hatefulness of the content. Our study underscores the need for caution in applying LLM-generated explanations for content moderation. Code and results are available at https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/GPT3-HateEval.
Decoding the Underlying Meaning of Multimodal Hateful Memes
Authors: Ming Shan Hee, Wen-Haw Chong, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Hateful Meme Classification, Meme Classification

Recent studies have proposed models that yielded promising performance for the hateful meme classification task. Nevertheless, these proposed models do not generate interpretable explanations that uncover the underlying meaning and support the classification output. A major reason for the lack of explainable hateful meme methods is the absence of a hateful meme dataset that contains ground truth explanations for benchmarking or training. Intuitively, having such explanations can educate and assist content moderators in interpreting and removing flagged hateful memes. This paper address this research gap by introducing Hateful meme with Reasons Dataset (HatReD), which is a new multimodal hateful meme dataset annotated with the underlying hateful contextual reasons. We also define a new conditional generation task that aims to automatically generate underlying reasons to explain hateful memes and establish the baseline performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained language models on this task. We further demonstrate the usefulness of HatReD by analyzing the challenges of the new conditional generation task in explaining memes in seen and unseen domains. The dataset and benchmark models are made available here: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/HatRed
Choose your Data Wisely: A Framework for Semantic Counterfactuals
Authors: Edmund Dervakos, Konstantinos Thomas, Giorgos Filandrianos, Giorgos Stamou
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Knowledge Graphs

Counterfactual explanations have been argued to be one of the most intuitive forms of explanation. They are typically defined as a minimal set of edits on a given data sample that, when applied, changes the output of a model on that sample. However, a minimal set of edits is not always clear and understandable to an end-user, as it could, for instance, constitute an adversarial example (which is indistinguishable from the original data sample to an end-user). Instead, there are recent ideas that the notion of minimality in the context of counterfactuals should refer to the semantics of the data sample, and not to the feature space. In this work, we build on these ideas, and propose a framework that provides counterfactual explanations in terms of knowledge graphs. We provide an algorithm for computing such explanations (given some assumptions about the underlying knowledge), and quantitatively evaluate the framework with a user study.
Robust Natural Language Understanding with Residual Attention Debiasing
Authors: Fei Wang, James Y. Huang, Tianyi Yan, Wenxuan Zhou, Muhao Chen
Date: 2023-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding

Natural language understanding (NLU) models often suffer from unintended dataset biases. Among bias mitigation methods, ensemble-based debiasing methods, especially product-of-experts (PoE), have stood out for their impressive empirical success. However, previous ensemble-based debiasing methods typically apply debiasing on top-level logits without directly addressing biased attention patterns. Attention serves as the main media of feature interaction and aggregation in PLMs and plays a crucial role in providing robust prediction. In this paper, we propose REsidual Attention Debiasing (READ), an end-to-end debiasing method that mitigates unintended biases from attention. Experiments on three NLU tasks show that READ significantly improves the performance of BERT-based models on OOD data with shortcuts removed, including +12.9% accuracy on HANS, +11.0% accuracy on FEVER-Symmetric, and +2.7% F1 on PAWS. Detailed analyses demonstrate the crucial role of unbiased attention in robust NLU models and that READ effectively mitigates biases in attention. Code is available at https://github.com/luka-group/READ.