pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Forward and Backward Compatible Framework for Few-shot Class-incremental Pill Recognition
Authors: Jinghua Zhang, Li Liu, Kai Gao, Dewen Hu
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning, Graph Attention, Incremental Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Pill Classification, Triplet, Uncertainty Quantification

Automatic Pill Recognition (APR) systems are crucial for enhancing hospital efficiency, assisting visually impaired individuals, and preventing cross-infection. However, most existing deep learning-based pill recognition systems can only perform classification on classes with sufficient training data. In practice, the high cost of data annotation and the continuous increase in new pill classes necessitate the development of a few-shot class-incremental pill recognition system. This paper introduces the first few-shot class-incremental pill recognition framework, named Discriminative and Bidirectional Compatible Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (DBC-FSCIL). It encompasses forward-compatible and backward-compatible learning components. In forward-compatible learning, we propose an innovative virtual class synthesis strategy and a Center-Triplet (CT) loss to enhance discriminative feature learning. These virtual classes serve as placeholders in the feature space for future class updates, providing diverse semantic knowledge for model training. For backward-compatible learning, we develop a strategy to synthesize reliable pseudo-features of old classes using uncertainty quantification, facilitating Data Replay (DR) and Knowledge Distillation (KD). This approach allows for the flexible synthesis of features and effectively reduces additional storage requirements for samples and models. Additionally, we construct a new pill image dataset for FSCIL and assess various mainstream FSCIL methods, establishing new benchmarks. Our experimental results demonstrate that our framework surpasses existing State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhang-jinghua/DBC-FSCIL.
Spikingformer: Spike-driven Residual Learning for Transformer-based Spiking Neural Network
Authors: Chenlin Zhou, Liutao Yu, Zhaokun Zhou, Zhengyu Ma, Han Zhang, Huihui Zhou, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks, due to their event-driven spiking computation. However, state-of-the-art deep SNNs (including Spikformer and SEW ResNet) suffer from non-spike computations (integer-float multiplications) caused by the structure of their residual connection. These non-spike computations increase SNNs' power consumption and make them unsuitable for deployment on mainstream neuromorphic hardware, which only supports spike operations. In this paper, we propose a hardware-friendly spike-driven residual learning architecture for SNNs to avoid non-spike computations. Based on this residual design, we develop Spikingformer, a pure transformer-based spiking neural network. We evaluate Spikingformer on ImageNet, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, CIFAR10-DVS and DVS128 Gesture datasets, and demonstrate that Spikingformer outperforms the state-of-the-art in directly trained pure SNNs as a novel advanced backbone (75.85$\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, + 1.04$\%$ compared with Spikformer). Furthermore, our experiments verify that Spikingformer effectively avoids non-spike computations and significantly reduces energy consumption by 57.34$\%$ compared with Spikformer on ImageNet. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that a pure event-driven transformer-based SNN has been developed.
Geometric Relational Embeddings: A Survey
Authors: Bo Xiong, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Ming Jin, Yunjie He, Michael Cochez, Shirui Pan, Steffen Staab
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Multi-label Classification, Knowledge Graph Completion, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Relational Reasoning, Survey

Geometric relational embeddings map relational data as geometric objects that combine vector information suitable for machine learning and structured/relational information for structured/relational reasoning, typically in low dimensions. Their preservation of relational structures and their appealing properties and interpretability have led to their uptake for tasks such as knowledge graph completion, ontology and hierarchy reasoning, logical query answering, and hierarchical multi-label classification. We survey methods that underly geometric relational embeddings and categorize them based on (i) the embedding geometries that are used to represent the data; and (ii) the relational reasoning tasks that they aim to improve. We identify the desired properties (i.e., inductive biases) of each kind of embedding and discuss some potential future work.
MoniLog: An Automated Log-Based Anomaly Detection System for Cloud Computing Infrastructures
Authors: Arthur Vervaet
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Cloud Computing

Within today's large-scale systems, one anomaly can impact millions of users. Detecting such events in real-time is essential to maintain the quality of services. It allows the monitoring team to prevent or diminish the impact of a failure. Logs are a core part of software development and maintenance, by recording detailed information at runtime. Such log data are universally available in nearly all computer systems. They enable developers as well as system maintainers to monitor and dissect anomalous events. For Cloud computing companies and large online platforms in general, growth is linked to the scaling potential. Automatizing the anomaly detection process is a promising way to ensure the scalability of monitoring capacities regarding the increasing volume of logs generated by modern systems. In this paper, we will introduce MoniLog, a distributed approach to detect real-time anomalies within large-scale environments. It aims to detect sequential and quantitative anomalies within a multi-source log stream. MoniLog is designed to structure a log stream and perform the monitoring of anomalous sequences. Its output classifier learns from the administrator's actions to label and evaluate the criticality level of anomalies.
Is ChatGPT the Ultimate Programming Assistant -- How far is it?
Authors: Haoye Tian, Weiqi Lu, Tsz On Li, Xunzhu Tang, Shing-Chi Cheung, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Code Summarization, Program Repair, Prompt Engineering

Recently, the ChatGPT LLM has received great attention: it can be used as a bot for discussing source code, prompting it to suggest changes, provide descriptions or even generate code. Typical demonstrations generally focus on existing benchmarks, which may have been used in model training (i.e., data leakage). To assess the feasibility of using an LLM as a useful assistant bot for programmers, we must assess its realistic capabilities on unseen problems as well as its capabilities on various tasks. In this paper, we present an empirical study of ChatGPT's potential as a fully automated programming assistant, focusing on the tasks of code generation, program repair, and code summariziation. The study investigates ChatGPT's performance on common programming problems and compares it with state-of-the-art approaches on two benchmarks. Among several findings, our study shows that ChatGPT is effective in dealing with common programming problems. However, our experiments also reveal limitations in terms of its attention span: detailed descriptions will constrain the focus of ChatGPT and prevent it from leveraging its vast knowledge to solve the actual problem. Surprisingly, we have identified the ability of ChatGPT to reason the original intention of the code. We expect future work to build on this insight for dealing with the open question of the oracle problem. Our findings contribute interesting insights to the development of LLMs for programming assistance, notably by demonstrating the importance of prompt engineering, and providing a better understanding of ChatGPT's practical applications for software engineering.
Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving
Authors: Manuel Schwonberg, Joshua Niemeijer, Jan-Aike Termöhlen, Jörg P. Schäfer, Nico M. Schmidt, Hanno Gottschalk, Tim Fingscheidt
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation, Sensor Fusion, Survey, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven their capabilities in many areas in the past years, such as robotics, or automated driving, enabling technological breakthroughs. DNNs play a significant role in environment perception for the challenging application of automated driving and are employed for tasks such as detection, semantic segmentation, and sensor fusion. Despite this progress and tremendous research efforts, several issues still need to be addressed that limit the applicability of DNNs in automated driving. The bad generalization of DNNs to new, unseen domains is a major problem on the way to a safe, large-scale application, because manual annotation of new domains is costly, particularly for semantic segmentation. For this reason, methods are required to adapt DNNs to new domains without labeling effort. The task, which these methods aim to solve is termed unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). While several different domain shifts can challenge DNNs, the shift between synthetic and real data is of particular importance for automated driving, as it allows the use of simulation environments for DNN training. In this work, we present an overview of the current state of the art in this field of research. We categorize and explain the different approaches for UDA. The number of considered publications is larger than any other survey on this topic. The scope of this survey goes far beyond the description of the UDA state-of-the-art. Based on our large data and knowledge base, we present a quantitative comparison of the approaches and use the observations to point out the latest trends in this field. In the following, we conduct a critical analysis of the state-of-the-art and highlight promising future research directions. With this survey, we aim to facilitate UDA research further and encourage scientists to exploit novel research directions to generalize DNNs better.
Data-driven modelling of brain activity using neural networks, Diffusion Maps, and the Koopman operator
Authors: Ioannis K. Gallos, Daniel Lehmberg, Felix Dietrich, Constantinos Siettos
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

We propose a machine-learning approach to model long-term out-of-sample dynamics of brain activity from task-dependent fMRI data. Our approach is a three stage one. First, we exploit Diffusion maps (DMs) to discover a set of variables that parametrize the low-dimensional manifold on which the emergent high-dimensional fMRI time series evolve. Then, we construct reduced-order-models (ROMs) on the embedded manifold via two techniques: Feedforward Neural Networks (FNNs) and the Koopman operator. Finally, for predicting the out-of-sample long-term dynamics of brain activity in the ambient fMRI space, we solve the pre-image problem coupling DMs with Geometric Harmonics (GH) when using FNNs and the Koopman modes per se. For our illustrations, we have assessed the performance of the two proposed schemes using a benchmark fMRI dataset with recordings during a visuo-motor task. The results suggest that just a few (for the particular task, five) non-linear coordinates of the high-dimensional fMRI time series provide a good basis for modelling and out-of-sample prediction of the brain activity. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approaches outperform the one-step ahead predictions of the naive random walk model, which, in contrast to our scheme, relies on the knowledge of the signals in the previous time step. Importantly, we show that the proposed Koopman operator approach provides, for any practical purposes, equivalent results to the FNN-GH approach, thus bypassing the need to train a non-linear map and to use GH to extrapolate predictions in the ambient fMRI space; one can use instead the low-frequency truncation of the DMs function space of L^2-integrable functions, to predict the entire list of coordinate functions in the fMRI space and to solve the pre-image problem.
Development of a Trust-Aware User Simulator for Statistical Proactive Dialog Modeling in Human-AI Teams
Authors: Matthias Kraus, Ron Riekenbrauck, Wolfgang Minker
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Ended Question Answering

The concept of a Human-AI team has gained increasing attention in recent years. For effective collaboration between humans and AI teammates, proactivity is crucial for close coordination and effective communication. However, the design of adequate proactivity for AI-based systems to support humans is still an open question and a challenging topic. In this paper, we present the development of a corpus-based user simulator for training and testing proactive dialog policies. The simulator incorporates informed knowledge about proactive dialog and its effect on user trust and simulates user behavior and personal information, including socio-demographic features and personality traits. Two different simulation approaches were compared, and a task-step-based approach yielded better overall results due to enhanced modeling of sequential dependencies. This research presents a promising avenue for exploring and evaluating appropriate proactive strategies in a dialog game setting for improving Human-AI teams.
Data-driven Knowledge Fusion for Deep Multi-instance Learning
Authors: Yu-Xuan Zhang, Zhengchun Zhou, Xingxing He, Avik Ranjan Adhikary, Bapi Dutta
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Multi-instance learning (MIL) is a widely-applied technique in practical applications that involve complex data structures. MIL can be broadly categorized into two types: traditional methods and those based on deep learning. These approaches have yielded significant results, especially with regards to their problem-solving strategies and experimental validation, providing valuable insights for researchers in the MIL field. However, a considerable amount of knowledge is often trapped within the algorithm, leading to subsequent MIL algorithms that solely rely on the model's data fitting to predict unlabeled samples. This results in a significant loss of knowledge and impedes the development of more intelligent models. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven knowledge fusion for deep multi-instance learning (DKMIL) algorithm. DKMIL adopts a completely different idea from existing deep MIL methods by analyzing the decision-making of key samples in the data set (referred to as the data-driven) and using the knowledge fusion module designed to extract valuable information from these samples to assist the model's training. In other words, this module serves as a new interface between data and the model, providing strong scalability and enabling the use of prior knowledge from existing algorithms to enhance the learning ability of the model. Furthermore, to adapt the downstream modules of the model to more knowledge-enriched features extracted from the data-driven knowledge fusion module, we propose a two-level attention module that gradually learns shallow- and deep-level features of the samples to achieve more effective classification. We will prove the scalability of the knowledge fusion module while also verifying the efficacy of the proposed architecture by conducting experiments on 38 data sets across 6 categories.
Generation-driven Contrastive Self-training for Zero-shot Text Classification with Instruction-following LLM
Authors: Ruohong Zhang, Yau-Shian Wang, Yiming Yang
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modelling, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification, Zero-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Text Classification

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot language understanding has garnered significant attention. However, employing LLMs for large-scale inference or domain-specific fine-tuning requires immense computational resources due to their substantial model size. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel method, namely GenCo, which leverages the strong generative power of LLMs to assist in training a smaller and more adaptable language model. In our method, an LLM plays an important role in the self-training loop of a smaller model in two important ways. Firstly, the LLM is used to augment each input instance with a variety of possible continuations, enriching its semantic context for better understanding. Secondly, it helps crafting additional high-quality training pairs, by rewriting input texts conditioned on predicted labels. This ensures the generated texts are highly relevant to the predicted labels, alleviating the prediction error during pseudo-labeling, while reducing the dependency on large volumes of unlabeled text. In our experiments, GenCo outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods when only limited ($<5\%$ of original) in-domain text data is available. Notably, our approach surpasses the performance of Alpaca-7B with human prompts, highlighting the potential of leveraging LLM for self-training.
Incorporating Experts' Judgment into Machine Learning Models
Authors: Hogun Park, Aly Megahed, Peifeng Yin, Yuya Ong, Pravar Mahajan, Pei Guo
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Prediction

Machine learning (ML) models have been quite successful in predicting outcomes in many applications. However, in some cases, domain experts might have a judgment about the expected outcome that might conflict with the prediction of ML models. One main reason for this is that the training data might not be totally representative of the population. In this paper, we present a novel framework that aims at leveraging experts' judgment to mitigate the conflict. The underlying idea behind our framework is that we first determine, using a generative adversarial network, the degree of representation of an unlabeled data point in the training data. Then, based on such degree, we correct the \textcolor{black}{machine learning} model's prediction by incorporating the experts' judgment into it, where the higher that aforementioned degree of representation, the less the weight we put on the expert intuition that we add to our corrected output, and vice-versa. We perform multiple numerical experiments on synthetic data as well as two real-world case studies (one from the IT services industry and the other from the financial industry). All results show the effectiveness of our framework; it yields much higher closeness to the experts' judgment with minimal sacrifice in the prediction accuracy, when compared to multiple baseline methods. We also develop a new evaluation metric that combines prediction accuracy with the closeness to experts' judgment. Our framework yields statistically significant results when evaluated on that metric.
Towards a Praxis for Intercultural Ethics in Explainable AI
Authors: Chinasa T. Okolo
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Explainable AI (XAI) is often promoted with the idea of helping users understand how machine learning models function and produce predictions. Still, most of these benefits are reserved for those with specialized domain knowledge, such as machine learning developers. Recent research has argued that making AI explainable can be a viable way of making AI more useful in real-world contexts, especially within low-resource domains in the Global South. While AI has transcended borders, a limited amount of work focuses on democratizing the concept of explainable AI to the "majority world", leaving much room to explore and develop new approaches within this space that cater to the distinct needs of users within culturally and socially-diverse regions. This article introduces the concept of an intercultural ethics approach to AI explainability. It examines how cultural nuances impact the adoption and use of technology, the factors that impede how technical concepts such as AI are explained, and how integrating an intercultural ethics approach in the development of XAI can improve user understanding and facilitate efficient usage of these methods.
Human intuition as a defense against attribute inference
Authors: Marcin Waniek, Navya Suri, Abdullah Zameek, Bedoor AlShebli, Talal Rahwan
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Attribute inference - the process of analyzing publicly available data in order to uncover hidden information - has become a major threat to privacy, given the recent technological leap in machine learning. One way to tackle this threat is to strategically modify one's publicly available data in order to keep one's private information hidden from attribute inference. We evaluate people's ability to perform this task, and compare it against algorithms designed for this purpose. We focus on three attributes: the gender of the author of a piece of text, the country in which a set of photos was taken, and the link missing from a social network. For each of these attributes, we find that people's effectiveness is inferior to that of AI, especially when it comes to hiding the attribute in question. Moreover, when people are asked to modify the publicly available information in order to hide these attributes, they are less likely to make high-impact modifications compared to AI. This suggests that people are unable to recognize the aspects of the data that are critical to an inference algorithm. Taken together, our findings highlight the limitations of relying on human intuition to protect privacy in the age of AI, and emphasize the need for algorithmic support to protect private information from attribute inference.
Hierarchical Diffusion Autoencoders and Disentangled Image Manipulation
Authors: Zeyu Lu, Chengyue Wu, Xinyuan Chen, Yaohui Wang, Lei Bai, Yu Qiao, Xihui Liu
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Manipulation, Image Reconstruction

Diffusion models have attained impressive visual quality for image synthesis. However, how to interpret and manipulate the latent space of diffusion models has not been extensively explored. Prior work diffusion autoencoders encode the semantic representations into a semantic latent code, which fails to reflect the rich information of details and the intrinsic feature hierarchy. To mitigate those limitations, we propose Hierarchical Diffusion Autoencoders (HDAE) that exploit the fine-grained-to-abstract and lowlevel-to-high-level feature hierarchy for the latent space of diffusion models. The hierarchical latent space of HDAE inherently encodes different abstract levels of semantics and provides more comprehensive semantic representations. In addition, we propose a truncated-feature-based approach for disentangled image manipulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach with extensive experiments and applications on image reconstruction, style mixing, controllable interpolation, detail-preserving and disentangled image manipulation, and multi-modal semantic image synthesis.