pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Replace Scoring with Arrangement: A Contextual Set-to-Arrangement Framework for Learning-to-Rank
Authors: Jiarui Jin, Xianyu Chen, Weinan Zhang, Mengyue Yang, Yang Wang, Yali Du, Yong Yu, Jun Wang
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank

Learning-to-rank is a core technique in the top-N recommendation task, where an ideal ranker would be a mapping from an item set to an arrangement (a.k.a. permutation). Most existing solutions fall in the paradigm of probabilistic ranking principle (PRP), i.e., first score each item in the candidate set and then perform a sort operation to generate the top ranking list. However, these approaches neglect the contextual dependence among candidate items during individual scoring, and the sort operation is non-differentiable. To bypass the above issues, we propose Set-To-Arrangement Ranking (STARank), a new framework directly generates the permutations of the candidate items without the need for individually scoring and sort operations; and is end-to-end differentiable. As a result, STARank can operate when only the ground-truth permutations are accessible without requiring access to the ground-truth relevance scores for items. For this purpose, STARank first reads the candidate items in the context of the user browsing history, whose representations are fed into a Plackett-Luce module to arrange the given items into a list. To effectively utilize the given ground-truth permutations for supervising STARank, we leverage the internal consistency property of Plackett-Luce models to derive a computationally efficient list-wise loss. Experimental comparisons against 9 the state-of-the-art methods on 2 learning-to-rank benchmark datasets and 3 top-N real-world recommendation datasets demonstrate the superiority of STARank in terms of conventional ranking metrics. Notice that these ranking metrics do not consider the effects of the contextual dependence among the items in the list, we design a new family of simulation-based ranking metrics, where existing metrics can be regarded as special cases. STARank can consistently achieve better performance in terms of PBM and UBM simulation-based metrics.
feather -- a Python SDK to share and deploy models
Authors: Nihir Vedd, Paul Riga
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

At its core, feather was a tool that allowed model developers to build shareable user interfaces for their models in under 20 lines of code. Using the Python SDK, developers specified visual components that users would interact with. (e.g. a FileUpload component to allow users to upload a file). Our service then provided 1) a URL that allowed others to access and use the model visually via a user interface; 2) an API endpoint to allow programmatic requests to a model. In this paper, we discuss feather's motivations and the value we intended to offer AI researchers and developers. For example, the SDK can support multi-step models and can be extended to run automatic evaluation against held out datasets. We additionally provide comprehensive technical and implementation details. N.B. feather is presently a dormant project. We have open sourced our code for research purposes: https://github.com/feather-ai/
Physics-Based Task Generation through Causal Sequence of Physical Interactions
Authors: Chathura Gamage, Vimukthini Pinto, Matthew Stephenson, Jochen Renz
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

Performing tasks in a physical environment is a crucial yet challenging problem for AI systems operating in the real world. Physics simulation-based tasks are often employed to facilitate research that addresses this challenge. In this paper, first, we present a systematic approach for defining a physical scenario using a causal sequence of physical interactions between objects. Then, we propose a methodology for generating tasks in a physics-simulating environment using these defined scenarios as inputs. Our approach enables a better understanding of the granular mechanics required for solving physics-based tasks, thereby facilitating accurate evaluation of AI systems' physical reasoning capabilities. We demonstrate our proposed task generation methodology using the physics-based puzzle game Angry Birds and evaluate the generated tasks using a range of metrics, including physical stability, solvability using intended physical interactions, and accidental solvability using unintended solutions. We believe that the tasks generated using our proposed methodology can facilitate a nuanced evaluation of physical reasoning agents, thus paving the way for the development of agents for more sophisticated real-world applications.
Multi-Agent Verification and Control with Probabilistic Model Checking
Authors: David Parker
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

Probabilistic model checking is a technique for formal automated reasoning about software or hardware systems that operate in the context of uncertainty or stochasticity. It builds upon ideas and techniques from a diverse range of fields, from logic, automata and graph theory, to optimisation, numerical methods and control. In recent years, probabilistic model checking has also been extended to integrate ideas from game theory, notably using models such as stochastic games and solution concepts such as equilibria, to formally verify the interaction of multiple rational agents with distinct objectives. This provides a means to reason flexibly about agents acting in either an adversarial or a collaborative fashion, and opens up opportunities to tackle new problems within, for example, artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous systems. In this paper, we summarise some of the advances in this area, and highlight applications for which they have already been used. We discuss how the strengths of probabilistic model checking apply, or have the potential to apply, to the multi-agent setting and outline some of the key challenges required to make further progress in this field.
A Symbolic Character-Aware Model for Solving Geometry Problems
Authors: Maizhen Ning, Qiu-Feng Wang, Kaizhu Huang, Xiaowei Huang
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Self-Supervised Learning

AI has made significant progress in solving math problems, but geometry problems remain challenging due to their reliance on both text and diagrams. In the text description, symbolic characters such as "$\triangle$ABC" often serve as a bridge to connect the corresponding diagram. However, by simply tokenizing symbolic characters into individual letters (e.g., 'A', 'B' and 'C'), existing works fail to study them explicitly and thus lose the semantic relationship with the diagram. In this paper, we develop a symbolic character-aware model to fully explore the role of these characters in both text and diagram understanding and optimize the model under a multi-modal reasoning framework. In the text encoder, we propose merging individual symbolic characters to form one semantic unit along with geometric information from the corresponding diagram. For the diagram encoder, we pre-train it under a multi-label classification framework with the symbolic characters as labels. In addition, we enhance the geometry diagram understanding ability via a self-supervised learning method under the masked image modeling auxiliary task. By integrating the proposed model into a general encoder-decoder pipeline for solving geometry problems, we demonstrate its superiority on two benchmark datasets, including GeoQA and Geometry3K, with extensive experiments. Specifically, on GeoQA, the question-solving accuracy is increased from 60.0\% to 64.1\%, achieving a new state-of-the-art accuracy; on Geometry3K, we reduce the question average solving steps from 6.9 down to 6.0 with marginally higher solving accuracy.
The changing rule of human bone density with aging based on a novel definition and mensuration of bone density with computed tomography
Authors: Linmi Tao, Ruiyang Liu, Yuanbiao Wang, Yuezhi Zhou, Li Huo, Guilan Hu, Xiangsong Zhang, Zuo-Xiang He
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Osteoporosis and fragility fractures have emerged as major public health concerns in an aging population. However, measuring age-related changes in bone density using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry has limited personalized risk assessment due to susceptibility to interference from various factors. In this study, we propose an innovative statistical model of bone pixel distribution in fine-segmented computed tomography (CT) images, along with a novel approach to measuring bone density based on CT values of bone pixels. Our findings indicate that bone density exhibits a linear decline with age during adulthood between the ages of 39 and 80, with the rate of decline being approximately 1.6 times faster in women than in men. This contradicts the widely accepted notion that bone density starts declining in women at menopause and in men at around 50 years of age. The linearity of age-related changes provides further insights into the dynamics of the aging human body. Consequently, our findings suggest that the definition of osteoporosis by the World Health Organization should be revised to the standard deviation of age-based bone density. Furthermore, these results open up new avenues for research in bone health care and clinical investigation of osteoporosis.
Artificial Intelligence for Molecular Communication
Authors: Max Bartunik, Jens Kirchner, Oliver Keszocze
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

Molecular communication is a novel approach for data transmission between miniaturized devices, especially in contexts where electrical signals are to be avoided. The communication is based on sending molecules (or other particles) at nano scale through channel instead sending electrons over a wire. Molecular communication devices have a large potential in medical applications as they offer an alternative to antenna-based transmission systems that may not be applicable due to size, temperature, or radiation constraints. The communication is achieved by transforming a digital signal into concentrations of molecules. These molecules are then detected at the other end of the communication channel and transformed back into a digital signal. Accurately modeling the transmission channel is often not possible which may be due to a lack of data or time-varying parameters of the channel (e. g., the movements of a person wearing a medical device). This makes demodulation of the signal very difficult. Many approaches for demodulation have been discussed with one particular approach having tremendous success: artificial neural networks. These networks imitate the decision process in the human brain and are capable of reliably classifying noisy input data. Training such a network relies on a large set of training data. As molecular communication as a technology is still in its early development phase, this data is not always readily available. We discuss neural network-based demodulation approaches relying on synthetic data based on theoretical channel models as well as works using actual measurements produced by a prototype test bed. In this work, we give a general overview over the field molecular communication, discuss the challenges in the demodulations process of transmitted signals, and present approaches to these challenges that are based on artificial neural networks.
A generative model for surrogates of spatial-temporal wildfire nowcasting
Authors: Sibo Cheng, Yike Guo, Rossella Arcucci
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Temporal Sequences

Recent increase in wildfires worldwide has led to the need for real-time fire nowcasting. Physics-driven models, such as cellular automata and computational fluid dynamics can provide high-fidelity fire spread simulations but they are computationally expensive and time-consuming. Much effort has been put into developing machine learning models for fire prediction. However, these models are often region-specific and require a substantial quantity of simulation data for training purpose. This results in a significant amount of computational effort for different ecoregions. In this work, a generative model is proposed using a three-dimensional Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders to generate spatial-temporal sequences of unseen wildfire burned areas in a given ecoregion. The model is tested in the ecoregion of a recent massive wildfire event in California, known as the Chimney fire. Numerical results show that the model succeed in generating coherent and structured fire scenarios, taking into account the impact from geophysical variables, such as vegetation and slope. Generated data are also used to train a surrogate model for predicting wildfire dissemination, which has been tested on both simulation data and the real Chimney fire event.
MiAMix: Enhancing Image Classification through a Multi-stage Augmented Mixed Sample Data Augmentation Method
Authors: Wen Liang, Youzhi Liang, Jianguo Jia
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Data Augmentation, Image Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification

Despite substantial progress in the field of deep learning, overfitting persists as a critical challenge, and data augmentation has emerged as a particularly promising approach due to its capacity to enhance model generalization in various computer vision tasks. While various strategies have been proposed, Mixed Sample Data Augmentation (MSDA) has shown great potential for enhancing model performance and generalization. We introduce a novel mixup method called MiAMix, which stands for Multi-stage Augmented Mixup. MiAMix integrates image augmentation into the mixup framework, utilizes multiple diversified mixing methods concurrently, and improves the mixing method by randomly selecting mixing mask augmentation methods. Recent methods utilize saliency information and the MiAMix is designed for computational efficiency as well, reducing additional overhead and offering easy integration into existing training pipelines. We comprehensively evaluate MiaMix using four image benchmarks and pitting it against current state-of-the-art mixed sample data augmentation techniques to demonstrate that MIAMix improves performance without heavy computational overhead.
Crowdsourcing Fraud Detection over Heterogeneous Temporal MMMA Graph
Authors: Zequan Xu, Qihang Sun, Shaofeng Hu, Jieming Shi, Hui Li
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Fraud Detection, Graph Anomaly Detection, MULTI-VIEW LEARNING

The rise of the click farm business using Multi-purpose Messaging Mobile Apps (MMMAs) tempts cybercriminals to perpetrate crowdsourcing frauds that cause financial losses to click farm workers. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive multi-view learning method named CMT for crowdsourcing fraud detection over the heterogeneous temporal graph (HTG) of MMMA. CMT captures both heterogeneity and dynamics of HTG and generates high-quality representations for crowdsourcing fraud detection in a self-supervised manner. We deploy CMT to detect crowdsourcing frauds on an industry-size HTG of a representative MMMA WeChat and it significantly outperforms other methods. CMT also shows promising results for fraud detection on a large-scale public financial HTG, indicating that it can be applied in other graph anomaly detection tasks. We provide our implementation at https://github.com/KDEGroup/CMT.
Solving Logistic-Oriented Bin Packing Problems Through a Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach
Authors: Sebastián V. Romero, Eneko Osaba, Esther Villar-Rodriguez, Antón Asla
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00

The Bin Packing Problem is a classic problem with wide industrial applicability. In fact, the efficient packing of items into bins is one of the toughest challenges in many logistic corporations and is a critical issue for reducing storage costs or improving vehicle space allocation. In this work, we resort to our previously published quantum-classical framework known as Q4RealBPP, and elaborate on the solving of real-world oriented instances of the Bin Packing Problem. With this purpose, this paper gravitates on the following characteristics: i) the existence of heterogeneous bins, ii) the extension of the framework to solve not only three-dimensional, but also one- and two-dimensional instances of the problem, iii) requirements for item-bin associations, and iv) delivery priorities. All these features have been tested in this paper, as well as the ability of Q4RealBPP to solve real-world oriented instances.
Semi-supervised Contrastive Regression for Estimation of Eye Gaze
Authors: Somsukla Maiti, Akshansh Gupta
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Gaze Estimation, regression

With the escalated demand of human-machine interfaces for intelligent systems, development of gaze controlled system have become a necessity. Gaze, being the non-intrusive form of human interaction, is one of the best suited approach. Appearance based deep learning models are the most widely used for gaze estimation. But the performance of these models is entirely influenced by the size of labeled gaze dataset and in effect affects generalization in performance. This paper aims to develop a semi-supervised contrastive learning framework for estimation of gaze direction. With a small labeled gaze dataset, the framework is able to find a generalized solution even for unseen face images. In this paper, we have proposed a new contrastive loss paradigm that maximizes the similarity agreement between similar images and at the same time reduces the redundancy in embedding representations. Our contrastive regression framework shows good performance in comparison to several state of the art contrastive learning techniques used for gaze estimation.
Surrogate Empowered Sim2Real Transfer of Deep Reinforcement Learning for ORC Superheat Control
Authors: Runze Lin, Yangyang Luo, Xialai Wu, Junghui Chen, Biao Huang, Lei Xie, Hongye Su
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Transfer Learning

The Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is widely used in industrial waste heat recovery due to its simple structure and easy maintenance. However, in the context of smart manufacturing in the process industry, traditional model-based optimization control methods are unable to adapt to the varying operating conditions of the ORC system or sudden changes in operating modes. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has significant advantages in situations with uncertainty as it directly achieves control objectives by interacting with the environment without requiring an explicit model of the controlled plant. Nevertheless, direct application of DRL to physical ORC systems presents unacceptable safety risks, and its generalization performance under model-plant mismatch is insufficient to support ORC control requirements. Therefore, this paper proposes a Sim2Real transfer learning-based DRL control method for ORC superheat control, which aims to provide a new simple, feasible, and user-friendly solution for energy system optimization control. Experimental results show that the proposed method greatly improves the training speed of DRL in ORC control problems and solves the generalization performance issue of the agent under multiple operating conditions through Sim2Real transfer.
NeRFs: The Search for the Best 3D Representation
Authors: Ravi Ramamoorthi
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, NeRF

Neural Radiance Fields or NeRFs have become the representation of choice for problems in view synthesis or image-based rendering, as well as in many other applications across computer graphics and vision, and beyond. At their core, NeRFs describe a new representation of 3D scenes or 3D geometry. Instead of meshes, disparity maps, multiplane images or even voxel grids, they represent the scene as a continuous volume, with volumetric parameters like view-dependent radiance and volume density obtained by querying a neural network. The NeRF representation has now been widely used, with thousands of papers extending or building on it every year, multiple authors and websites providing overviews and surveys, and numerous industrial applications and startup companies. In this article, we briefly review the NeRF representation, and describe the three decades-long quest to find the best 3D representation for view synthesis and related problems, culminating in the NeRF papers. We then describe new developments in terms of NeRF representations and make some observations and insights regarding the future of 3D representations.
Nonlinear Controller Design for a Quadrotor with Inverted Pendulum
Authors: Xichen Shi, Yashwanth Kumar Nakka
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00

The quadrotor is a $6$ degrees-of-freedom (DoF) system with underactuation. Adding a spherical pendulum on top of a quadrotor further complicates the task of achieving any output tracking while stabilizing the rest. In this report, we present different types of controllers for the nonlinear dynamical system of quadrotor and pendulum combination, utilizing feedback-linearization and control Lyapunov function with quadratic programming (CLF-QP) approaches. We demonstrated trajectory tracking for quadrotor-only case as well as quadrotor-pendulum-combined case.
Assessing the impact of emergency department short stay units using length-of-stay prediction and discrete event simulation
Authors: Mucahit Cevik, Can Kavaklioglu, Fahad Razak, Amol Verma, Ayse Basar
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, feature selection, Length-of-Stay prediction

Accurately predicting hospital length-of-stay at the time a patient is admitted to hospital may help guide clinical decision making and resource allocation. In this study we aim to build a decision support system that predicts hospital length-of-stay for patients admitted to general internal medicine from the emergency department. We conduct an exploratory data analysis and employ feature selection methods to identify the attributes that result in the best predictive performance. We also develop a discrete-event simulation model to assess the performances of the prediction models in a practical setting. Our results show that the recommendation performances of the proposed approaches are generally acceptable and do not benefit from the feature selection. Further, the results indicate that hospital length-of-stay could be predicted with reasonable accuracy (e.g., AUC value for classifying short and long stay patients is 0.69) using patient admission demographics, laboratory test results, diagnostic imaging, vital signs and clinical documentation.
Towards Improving Harmonic Sensitivity and Prediction Stability for Singing Melody Extraction
Authors: Keren Shao, Ke Chen, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Shlomo Dubnov
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Melody Extraction, Sensitivity

In deep learning research, many melody extraction models rely on redesigning neural network architectures to improve performance. In this paper, we propose an input feature modification and a training objective modification based on two assumptions. First, harmonics in the spectrograms of audio data decay rapidly along the frequency axis. To enhance the model's sensitivity on the trailing harmonics, we modify the Combined Frequency and Periodicity (CFP) representation using discrete z-transform. Second, the vocal and non-vocal segments with extremely short duration are uncommon. To ensure a more stable melody contour, we design a differentiable loss function that prevents the model from predicting such segments. We apply these modifications to several models, including MSNet, FTANet, and a newly introduced model, PianoNet, modified from a piano transcription network. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed modifications are empirically effective for singing melody extraction.