pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Solving Witness-type Triangle Puzzles Faster with an Automatically Learned Human-Explainable Predicate
Authors: Justin Stevens, Vadim Bulitko, David Thue
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00

Automatically solving puzzle instances in the game The Witness can guide players toward solutions and help puzzle designers generate better puzzles. In the latter case such an Artificial Intelligence puzzle solver can inform a human puzzle designer and procedural puzzle generator to produce better instances. The puzzles, however, are combinatorially difficult and search-based solvers can require large amounts of time and memory. We accelerate such search by automatically learning a human-explainable predicate that predicts whether a partial path to a Witness-type puzzle is not completable to a solution path. We prove a key property of the learned predicate which allows us to use it for pruning successor states in search thereby accelerating search by an average of six times while maintaining completeness of the underlying search. Conversely given a fixed search time budget per puzzle our predicate-accelerated search can solve more puzzle instances of larger sizes than the baseline search.
Let's Give a Voice to Conversational Agents in Virtual Reality
Authors: Michele Yin, Gabriel Roccabruna, Abhinav Azad, Giuseppe Riccardi
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech-to-Text, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Unity

The dialogue experience with conversational agents can be greatly enhanced with multimodal and immersive interactions in virtual reality. In this work, we present an open-source architecture with the goal of simplifying the development of conversational agents operating in virtual environments. The architecture offers the possibility of plugging in conversational agents of different domains and adding custom or cloud-based Speech-To-Text and Text-To-Speech models to make the interaction voice-based. Using this architecture, we present two conversational prototypes operating in the digital health domain developed in Unity for both non-immersive displays and VR headsets.
Generation of Realistic Synthetic Raw Radar Data for Automated Driving Applications using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Eduardo C. Fidelis, Fabio Reway, Herick Y. S. Ribeiro, Pietro L. Campos, Werner Huber, Christian Icking, Lester A. Faria, Torsten Schön
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Edge Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

The main approaches for simulating FMCW radar are based on ray tracing, which is usually computationally intensive and do not account for background noise. This work proposes a faster method for FMCW radar simulation capable of generating synthetic raw radar data using generative adversarial networks (GAN). The code and pre-trained weights are open-source and available on GitHub. This method generates 16 simultaneous chirps, which allows the generated data to be used for the further development of algorithms for processing radar data (filtering and clustering). This can increase the potential for data augmentation, e.g., by generating data in non-existent or safety-critical scenarios that are not reproducible in real life. In this work, the GAN was trained with radar measurements of a motorcycle and used to generate synthetic raw radar data of a motorcycle traveling in a straight line. For generating this data, the distance of the motorcycle and Gaussian noise are used as input to the neural network. The synthetic generated radar chirps were evaluated using the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). Then, the Range-Azimuth (RA) map is calculated twice: first, based on synthetic data using this GAN and, second, based on real data. Based on these RA maps, an algorithm with adaptive threshold and edge detection is used for object detection. The results have shown that the data is realistic in terms of coherent radar reflections of the motorcycle and background noise based on the comparison of chirps, the RA maps and the object detection results. Thus, the proposed method in this work has shown to minimize the simulation-to-reality gap for the generation of radar data.
Harnessing the Web and Knowledge Graphs for Automated Impact Investing Scoring
Authors: Qingzhi Hu, Daniel Daza, Laurens Swinkels, Kristina Ūsaitė, Robbert-Jan 't Hoen, Paul Groth
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were introduced by the United Nations in order to encourage policies and activities that help guarantee human prosperity and sustainability. SDG frameworks produced in the finance industry are designed to provide scores that indicate how well a company aligns with each of the 17 SDGs. This scoring enables a consistent assessment of investments that have the potential of building an inclusive and sustainable economy. As a result of the high quality and reliability required by such frameworks, the process of creating and maintaining them is time-consuming and requires extensive domain expertise. In this work, we describe a data-driven system that seeks to automate the process of creating an SDG framework. First, we propose a novel method for collecting and filtering a dataset of texts from different web sources and a knowledge graph relevant to a set of companies. We then implement and deploy classifiers trained with this data for predicting scores of alignment with SDGs for a given company. Our results indicate that our best performing model can accurately predict SDG scores with a micro average F1 score of 0.89, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed solution. We further describe how the integration of the models for its use by humans can be facilitated by providing explanations in the form of data relevant to a predicted score. We find that our proposed solution enables access to a large amount of information that analysts would normally not be able to process, resulting in an accurate prediction of SDG scores at a fraction of the cost.
ChatGPT for GTFS: Benchmarking LLMs on GTFS Understanding and Retrieval
Authors: Saipraneeth Devunuri, Shirin Qiam, Lewis Lehe
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Information Retrieval, Multiple-choice, Program Synthesis, Retrieval

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) standard for publishing transit data is ubiquitous. GTFS being tabular data, with information spread across different files, necessitates specialized tools or packages to retrieve information. Concurrently, the use of Large Language Models(LLMs) for text and information retrieval is growing. The idea of this research is to see if the current widely adopted LLMs (ChatGPT) are able to understand GTFS and retrieve information from GTFS using natural language instructions without explicitly providing information. In this research, we benchmark OpenAI's GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 LLMs which are the backbone of ChatGPT. ChatGPT demonstrates a reasonable understanding of GTFS by answering 59.7% (GPT-3.5-Turbo) and 73.3% (GPT-4) of our multiple-choice questions (MCQ) correctly. Furthermore, we evaluated the LLMs on information extraction tasks using a filtered GTFS feed containing four routes. We found that program synthesis techniques outperformed zero-shot approaches, achieving up to 93% (90%) accuracy for simple queries and 61% (41%) for complex ones using GPT-4 (GPT-3.5-Turbo).
Vehicles Control: Collision Avoidance using Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Badr Ben Elallid, Amine Abouaomar, Nabil Benamar, Abdellatif Kobbane
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In the face of growing urban populations and the escalating number of vehicles on the roads, managing transportation efficiently and ensuring safety have become critical challenges. To tackle these issues, the development of intelligent control systems for vehicles is paramount. This paper presents a comprehensive study on vehicle control for collision avoidance, leveraging the power of Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning (FDRL) techniques. Our main goal is to minimize travel delays and enhance the average speed of vehicles while prioritizing safety and preserving data privacy. To accomplish this, we conducted a comparative analysis between the local model, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), and the global model, Federated Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (FDDPG), to determine their effectiveness in optimizing vehicle control for collision avoidance. The results obtained indicate that the FDDPG algorithm outperforms DDPG in terms of effectively controlling vehicles and preventing collisions. Significantly, the FDDPG-based algorithm demonstrates substantial reductions in travel delays and notable improvements in average speed compared to the DDPG algorithm.
Interoperable synthetic health data with SyntHIR to enable the development of CDSS tools
Authors: Pavitra Chauhan, Mohsen Gamal Saad Askar, Bjørn Fjukstad, Lars Ailo Bongo, Edvard Pedersen
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00

There is a great opportunity to use high-quality patient journals and health registers to develop machine learning-based Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS). To implement a CDSS tool in a clinical workflow, there is a need to integrate, validate and test this tool on the Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems used to store and manage patient data. However, it is often not possible to get the necessary access to an EHR system due to legal compliance. We propose an architecture for generating and using synthetic EHR data for CDSS tool development. The architecture is implemented in a system called SyntHIR. The SyntHIR system uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards for data interoperability, the Gretel framework for generating synthetic data, the Microsoft Azure FHIR server as the FHIR-based EHR system and SMART on FHIR framework for tool transportability. We demonstrate the usefulness of SyntHIR by developing a machine learning-based CDSS tool using data from the Norwegian Patient Register (NPR) and Norwegian Patient Prescriptions (NorPD). We demonstrate the development of the tool on the SyntHIR system and then lift it to the Open DIPS environment. In conclusion, SyntHIR provides a generic architecture for CDSS tool development using synthetic FHIR data and a testing environment before implementing it in a clinical setting. However, there is scope for improvement in terms of the quality of the synthetic data generated. The code is open source and available at https://github.com/potter-coder89/SyntHIR.git.
Unravelling Responsibility for AI
Authors: Zoe Porter, Philippa Ryan, Phillip Morgan, Joanna Al-Qaddoumi, Bernard Twomey, Paul Noordhof, John McDermid, Ibrahim Habli
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy, valid

It is widely acknowledged that we need to establish where responsibility lies for the outputs and impacts of AI-enabled systems. This is important to achieve justice and compensation for victims of AI harms, and to inform policy and engineering practice. But without a clear, thorough understanding of what `responsibility' means, deliberations about where responsibility lies will be, at best, unfocused and incomplete and, at worst, misguided. Furthermore, AI-enabled systems exist within a wider ecosystem of actors, decisions, and governance structures, giving rise to complex networks of responsibility relations. To address these issues, this paper presents a conceptual framework of responsibility, accompanied with a graphical notation and general methodology, for visualising these responsibility networks and for tracing different responsibility attributions for AI. Taking the three-part formulation 'Actor A is responsible for Occurrence O,' the framework unravels the concept of responsibility to clarify that there are different possibilities of who is responsible for AI, senses in which they are responsible, and aspects of events they are responsible for. The notation allows these permutations to be represented graphically. The methodology enables users to apply the framework to specific scenarios. The aim is to offer a foundation to support stakeholders from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to discuss and address complex responsibility questions in hypothesised and real-world cases involving AI. The work is illustrated by application to a fictitious scenario of a fatal collision between a crewless, AI-enabled maritime vessel in autonomous mode and a traditional, crewed vessel at sea.
On stable wrapper-based parameter selection method for efficient ANN-based data-driven modeling of turbulent flows
Authors: Hyeongeun Yun, Yongcheol Choi, Youngjae Kim, Seongwon Kang
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00

To model complex turbulent flow and heat transfer phenomena, this study aims to analyze and develop a reduced modeling approach based on artificial neural network (ANN) and wrapper methods. This approach has an advantage over other methods such as the correlation-based filter method in terms of removing redundant or irrelevant parameters even under non-linearity among them. As a downside, the overfitting and randomness of ANN training may produce inconsistent subsets over selection trials especially in a higher physical dimension. This study analyzes a few existing ANN-based wrapper methods and develops a revised one based on the gradient-based subset selection indices to minimize the loss in the total derivative or the directional consistency at each elimination step. To examine parameter reduction performance and consistency-over-trials, we apply these methods to a manufactured subset selection problem, modeling of the bubble size in a turbulent bubbly flow, and modeling of the spatially varying turbulent Prandtl number in a duct flow. It is found that the gradient-based subset selection to minimize the total derivative loss results in improved consistency-over-trials compared to the other ANN-based wrapper methods, while removing unnecessary parameters successfully. For the reduced turbulent Prandtl number model, the gradient-based subset selection improves the prediction in the validation case over the other methods. Also, the reduced parameter subsets show a slight increase in the training speed compared to the others.
Analysis and Optimization of Wireless Federated Learning with Data Heterogeneity
Authors: Xuefeng Han, Jun Li, Wen Chen, Zhen Mei, Kang Wei, Ming Ding, H. Vincent Poor
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Scheduling

With the rapid proliferation of smart mobile devices, federated learning (FL) has been widely considered for application in wireless networks for distributed model training. However, data heterogeneity, e.g., non-independently identically distributions and different sizes of training data among clients, poses major challenges to wireless FL. Limited communication resources complicate the implementation of fair scheduling which is required for training on heterogeneous data, and further deteriorate the overall performance. To address this issue, this paper focuses on performance analysis and optimization for wireless FL, considering data heterogeneity, combined with wireless resource allocation. Specifically, we first develop a closed-form expression for an upper bound on the FL loss function, with a particular emphasis on data heterogeneity described by a dataset size vector and a data divergence vector. Then we formulate the loss function minimization problem, under constraints on long-term energy consumption and latency, and jointly optimize client scheduling, resource allocation, and the number of local training epochs (CRE). Next, via the Lyapunov drift technique, we transform the CRE optimization problem into a series of tractable problems. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other benchmarks in terms of the learning accuracy and energy consumption.
Designing a Deep Learning-Driven Resource-Efficient Diagnostic System for Metastatic Breast Cancer: Reducing Long Delays of Clinical Diagnosis and Improving Patient Survival in Developing Countries
Authors: William Gao, Dayong Wang, Yi Huang
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Diagnostic

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer mortality. Breast cancer patients in developing countries, especially sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and South America, suffer from the highest mortality rate in the world. One crucial factor contributing to the global disparity in mortality rate is long delay of diagnosis due to a severe shortage of trained pathologists, which consequently has led to a large proportion of late-stage presentation at diagnosis. The delay between the initial development of symptoms and the receipt of a diagnosis could stretch upwards 15 months. To tackle this critical healthcare disparity, this research has developed a deep learning-based diagnosis system for metastatic breast cancer that can achieve high diagnostic accuracy as well as computational efficiency. Based on our evaluation, the MobileNetV2-based diagnostic model outperformed the more complex VGG16, ResNet50 and ResNet101 models in diagnostic accuracy, model generalization, and model training efficiency. The visual comparisons between the model prediction and ground truth have demonstrated that the MobileNetV2 diagnostic models can identify very small cancerous nodes embedded in a large area of normal cells which is challenging for manual image analysis. Equally Important, the light weighted MobleNetV2 models were computationally efficient and ready for mobile devices or devices of low computational power. These advances empower the development of a resource-efficient and high performing AI-based metastatic breast cancer diagnostic system that can adapt to under-resourced healthcare facilities in developing countries. This research provides an innovative technological solution to address the long delays in metastatic breast cancer diagnosis and the consequent disparity in patient survival outcome in developing countries.
SMARLA: A Safety Monitoring Approach for Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents
Authors: Amirhossein Zolfagharian, Manel Abdellatif, Lionel C. Briand, Ramesh S
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has made significant advancements in various fields, such as autonomous driving, healthcare, and robotics, by enabling agents to learn optimal policies through interactions with their environments. However, the application of DRL in safety-critical domains presents challenges, particularly concerning the safety of the learned policies. DRL agents, which are focused on maximizing rewards, may select unsafe actions, leading to safety violations. Runtime safety monitoring is thus essential to ensure the safe operation of these agents, especially in unpredictable and dynamic environments. This paper introduces SMARLA, a black-box safety monitoring approach specifically designed for DRL agents. SMARLA utilizes machine learning to predict safety violations by observing the agent's behavior during execution. The approach is based on Q-values, which reflect the expected reward for taking actions in specific states. SMARLA employs state abstraction to reduce the complexity of the state space, enhancing the predictive capabilities of the monitoring model. Such abstraction enables the early detection of unsafe states, allowing for the implementation of corrective and preventive measures before incidents occur. We quantitatively and qualitatively validated SMARLA on three well-known case studies widely used in DRL research. Empirical results reveal that SMARLA is accurate at predicting safety violations, with a low false positive rate, and can predict violations at an early stage, approximately halfway through the execution of the agent, before violations occur. We also discuss different decision criteria, based on confidence intervals of the predicted violation probabilities, to trigger safety mechanisms aiming at a trade-off between early detection and low false positive rates.
Guided Distillation for Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation
Authors: Tariq Berrada, Camille Couprie, Karteek Alahari, Jakob Verbeek
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation

Although instance segmentation methods have improved considerably, the dominant paradigm is to rely on fully-annotated training images, which are tedious to obtain. To alleviate this reliance, and boost results, semi-supervised approaches leverage unlabeled data as an additional training signal that limits overfitting to the labeled samples. In this context, we present novel design choices to significantly improve teacher-student distillation models. In particular, we (i) improve the distillation approach by introducing a novel "guided burn-in" stage, and (ii) evaluate different instance segmentation architectures, as well as backbone networks and pre-training strategies. Contrary to previous work which uses only supervised data for the burn-in period of the student model, we also use guidance of the teacher model to exploit unlabeled data in the burn-in period. Our improved distillation approach leads to substantial improvements over previous state-of-the-art results. For example, on the Cityscapes dataset we improve mask-AP from 23.7 to 33.9 when using labels for 10\% of images, and on the COCO dataset we improve mask-AP from 18.3 to 34.1 when using labels for only 1\% of the training data.
Is GPT-4 a reliable rater? Evaluating Consistency in GPT-4 Text Ratings
Authors: Veronika Hackl, Alexandra Elena Müller, Michael Granitzer, Maximilian Sailer
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This study investigates the consistency of feedback ratings generated by OpenAI's GPT-4, a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence language model, across multiple iterations, time spans and stylistic variations. The model rated responses to tasks within the Higher Education (HE) subject domain of macroeconomics in terms of their content and style. Statistical analysis was conducted in order to learn more about the interrater reliability, consistency of the ratings across iterations and the correlation between ratings in terms of content and style. The results revealed a high interrater reliability with ICC scores ranging between 0.94 and 0.99 for different timespans, suggesting that GPT-4 is capable of generating consistent ratings across repetitions with a clear prompt. Style and content ratings show a high correlation of 0.87. When applying a non-adequate style the average content ratings remained constant, while style ratings decreased, which indicates that the large language model (LLM) effectively distinguishes between these two criteria during evaluation. The prompt used in this study is furthermore presented and explained. Further research is necessary to assess the robustness and reliability of AI models in various use cases.