pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AudioFormer: Audio Transformer learns audio feature representations from discrete acoustic codes
Authors: Zhaohui Li, Haitao Wang, Xinghua Jiang
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding

We propose a method named AudioFormer,which learns audio feature representations through the acquisition of discrete acoustic codes and subsequently fine-tunes them for audio classification tasks. Initially,we introduce a novel perspective by considering the audio classification task as a form of natural language understanding (NLU). Leveraging an existing neural audio codec model,we generate discrete acoustic codes and utilize them to train a masked language model (MLM),thereby obtaining audio feature representations. Furthermore,we pioneer the integration of a Multi-Positive sample Contrastive (MPC) learning approach. This method enables the learning of joint representations among multiple discrete acoustic codes within the same audio input. In our experiments,we treat discrete acoustic codes as textual data and train a masked language model using a cloze-like methodology,ultimately deriving high-quality audio representations. Notably,the MPC learning technique effectively captures collaborative representations among distinct positive samples. Our research outcomes demonstrate that AudioFormer attains significantly improved performance compared to prevailing monomodal audio classification models across multiple datasets,and even outperforms audio-visual multimodal classification models on select datasets. Specifically,our approach achieves remarkable results on datasets including AudioSet (2M,20K),and FSD50K,with performance scores of 53.9,45.1,and 65.6,respectively. We have openly shared both the code and models: https://github.com/LZH-0225/AudioFormer.git.
Improved YOLOv8 Detection Algorithm in Security Inspection Image
Authors: Liyao Lu
Date: 2023-08-12 00:00:00

Security inspection is the first line of defense to ensure the safety of people's lives and property, and intelligent security inspection is an inevitable trend in the future development of the security inspection industry. Aiming at the problems of overlapping detection objects, false detection of contraband, and missed detection in the process of X-ray image detection, an improved X-ray contraband detection algorithm CSS-YOLO based on YOLOv8s is proposed.
DS-Depth: Dynamic and Static Depth Estimation via a Fusion Cost Volume
Authors: Xingyu Miao, Yang Bai, Haoran Duan, Yawen Huang, Fan Wan, Xinxing Xu, Yang Long, Yefeng Zheng
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation, Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods typically rely on the reprojection error to capture geometric relationships between successive frames in static environments. However, this assumption does not hold in dynamic objects in scenarios, leading to errors during the view synthesis stage, such as feature mismatch and occlusion, which can significantly reduce the accuracy of the generated depth maps. To address this problem, we propose a novel dynamic cost volume that exploits residual optical flow to describe moving objects, improving incorrectly occluded regions in static cost volumes used in previous work. Nevertheless, the dynamic cost volume inevitably generates extra occlusions and noise, thus we alleviate this by designing a fusion module that makes static and dynamic cost volumes compensate for each other. In other words, occlusion from the static volume is refined by the dynamic volume, and incorrect information from the dynamic volume is eliminated by the static volume. Furthermore, we propose a pyramid distillation loss to reduce photometric error inaccuracy at low resolutions and an adaptive photometric error loss to alleviate the flow direction of the large gradient in the occlusion regions. We conducted extensive experiments on the KITTI and Cityscapes datasets, and the results demonstrate that our model outperforms previously published baselines for self-supervised monocular depth estimation.
Color-NeuS: Reconstructing Neural Implicit Surfaces with Color
Authors: Licheng Zhong, Lixin Yang, Kailin Li, Haoyu Zhen, Mei Han, Cewu Lu
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00

The reconstruction of object surfaces from multi-view images or monocular video is a fundamental issue in computer vision. However, much of the recent research concentrates on reconstructing geometry through implicit or explicit methods. In this paper, we shift our focus towards reconstructing mesh in conjunction with color. We remove the view-dependent color from neural volume rendering while retaining volume rendering performance through a relighting network. Mesh is extracted from the signed distance function (SDF) network for the surface, and color for each surface vertex is drawn from the global color network. To evaluate our approach, we conceived a in hand object scanning task featuring numerous occlusions and dramatic shifts in lighting conditions. We've gathered several videos for this task, and the results surpass those of any existing methods capable of reconstructing mesh alongside color. Additionally, our method's performance was assessed using public datasets, including DTU, BlendedMVS, and OmniObject3D. The results indicated that our method performs well across all these datasets. Project page: https://colmar-zlicheng.github.io/color_neus.
LLM Self Defense: By Self Examination, LLMs Know They Are Being Tricked
Authors: Mansi Phute, Alec Helbling, Matthew Hull, Shengyun Peng, Sebastian Szyller, Cory Cornelius, Duen Horng Chau
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering, Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are popular for high-quality text generation but can produce harmful content, even when aligned with human values through reinforcement learning. Adversarial prompts can bypass their safety measures. We propose LLM Self Defense, a simple approach to defend against these attacks by having an LLM screen the induced responses. Our method does not require any fine-tuning, input preprocessing, or iterative output generation. Instead, we incorporate the generated content into a pre-defined prompt and employ another instance of an LLM to analyze the text and predict whether it is harmful. We test LLM Self Defense on GPT 3.5 and Llama 2, two of the current most prominent LLMs against various types of attacks, such as forcefully inducing affirmative responses to prompts and prompt engineering attacks. Notably, LLM Self Defense succeeds in reducing the attack success rate to virtually 0 using both GPT 3.5 and Llama 2. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/poloclub/llm-self-defense
Extend Wave Function Collapse to Large-Scale Content Generation
Authors: Yuhe Nie, Shaoming Zheng, Zhan Zhuang, Xuan Song
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design

Wave Function Collapse (WFC) is a widely used tile-based algorithm in procedural content generation, including textures, objects, and scenes. However, the current WFC algorithm and related research lack the ability to generate commercialized large-scale or infinite content due to constraint conflict and time complexity costs. This paper proposes a Nested WFC (N-WFC) algorithm framework to reduce time complexity. To avoid conflict and backtracking problems, we offer a complete and sub-complete tileset preparation strategy, which requires only a small number of tiles to generate aperiodic and deterministic infinite content. We also introduce the weight-brush system that combines N-WFC and sub-complete tileset, proving its suitability for game design. Our contribution addresses WFC's challenge in massive content generation and provides a theoretical basis for implementing concrete games.
Neural Authorship Attribution: Stylometric Analysis on Large Language Models
Authors: Tharindu Kumarage, Huan Liu
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Misinformation

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, PaLM, and Llama have significantly propelled the generation of AI-crafted text. With rising concerns about their potential misuse, there is a pressing need for AI-generated-text forensics. Neural authorship attribution is a forensic effort, seeking to trace AI-generated text back to its originating LLM. The LLM landscape can be divided into two primary categories: proprietary and open-source. In this work, we delve into these emerging categories of LLMs, focusing on the nuances of neural authorship attribution. To enrich our understanding, we carry out an empirical analysis of LLM writing signatures, highlighting the contrasts between proprietary and open-source models, and scrutinizing variations within each group. By integrating stylometric features across lexical, syntactic, and structural aspects of language, we explore their potential to yield interpretable results and augment pre-trained language model-based classifiers utilized in neural authorship attribution. Our findings, based on a range of state-of-the-art LLMs, provide empirical insights into neural authorship attribution, paving the way for future investigations aimed at mitigating the threats posed by AI-generated misinformation.
Why Not? Explaining Missing Entailments with Evee (Technical Report)
Authors: Christian Alrabbaa, Stefan Borgwardt, Tom Friese, Patrick Koopmann, Mikhail Kotlov
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00

Understanding logical entailments derived by a description logic reasoner is not always straight-forward for ontology users. For this reason, various methods for explaining entailments using justifications and proofs have been developed and implemented as plug-ins for the ontology editor Prot\'eg\'e. However, when the user expects a missing consequence to hold, it is equally important to explain why it does not follow from the ontology. In this paper, we describe a new version of $\rm E{\scriptsize VEE}$, a Prot\'eg\'e plugin that now also provides explanations for missing consequences, via existing and new techniques based on abduction and counterexamples.
Cross-Attribute Matrix Factorization Model with Shared User Embedding
Authors: Wen Liang, Zeng Fan, Youzhi Liang, Jianguo Jia
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Over the past few years, deep learning has firmly established its prowess across various domains, including computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Motivated by its outstanding success, researchers have been directing their efforts towards applying deep learning techniques to recommender systems. Neural collaborative filtering (NCF) and Neural Matrix Factorization (NeuMF) refreshes the traditional inner product in matrix factorization with a neural architecture capable of learning complex and data-driven functions. While these models effectively capture user-item interactions, they overlook the specific attributes of both users and items. This can lead to robustness issues, especially for items and users that belong to the "long tail". Such challenges are commonly recognized in recommender systems as a part of the cold-start problem. A direct and intuitive approach to address this issue is by leveraging the features and attributes of the items and users themselves. In this paper, we introduce a refined NeuMF model that considers not only the interaction between users and items, but also acrossing associated attributes. Moreover, our proposed architecture features a shared user embedding, seamlessly integrating with user embeddings to imporve the robustness and effectively address the cold-start problem. Rigorous experiments on both the Movielens and Pinterest datasets demonstrate the superiority of our Cross-Attribute Matrix Factorization model, particularly in scenarios characterized by higher dataset sparsity.
Autonomous Point Cloud Segmentation for Power Lines Inspection in Smart Grid
Authors: Alexander Kyuroson, Anton Koval, George Nikolakopoulos
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Point Cloud Segmentation

LiDAR is currently one of the most utilized sensors to effectively monitor the status of power lines and facilitate the inspection of remote power distribution networks and related infrastructures. To ensure the safe operation of the smart grid, various remote data acquisition strategies, such as Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS), Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS), and Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TSL) have been leveraged to allow continuous monitoring of regional power networks, which are typically surrounded by dense vegetation. In this article, an unsupervised Machine Learning (ML) framework is proposed, to detect, extract and analyze the characteristics of power lines of both high and low voltage, as well as the surrounding vegetation in a Power Line Corridor (PLC) solely from LiDAR data. Initially, the proposed approach eliminates the ground points from higher elevation points based on statistical analysis that applies density criteria and histogram thresholding. After denoising and transforming of the remaining candidate points by applying Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Kd-tree, power line segmentation is achieved by utilizing a two-stage DBSCAN clustering to identify each power line individually. Finally, all high elevation points in the PLC are identified based on their distance to the newly segmented power lines. Conducted experiments illustrate that the proposed framework is an agnostic method that can efficiently detect the power lines and perform PLC-based hazard analysis.
Data-Efficient Energy-Aware Participant Selection for UAV-Enabled Federated Learning
Authors: Youssra Cheriguene, Wael Jaafar, Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache, Halim Yanikomeroglu, Fatima Zohra Bousbaa, Nasreddine Lagraa
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, SSIM

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled edge federated learning (FL) has sparked a rise in research interest as a result of the massive and heterogeneous data collected by UAVs, as well as the privacy concerns related to UAV data transmissions to edge servers. However, due to the redundancy of UAV collected data, e.g., imaging data, and non-rigorous FL participant selection, the convergence time of the FL learning process and bias of the FL model may increase. Consequently, we investigate in this paper the problem of selecting UAV participants for edge FL, aiming to improve the FL model's accuracy, under UAV constraints of energy consumption, communication quality, and local datasets' heterogeneity. We propose a novel UAV participant selection scheme, called data-efficient energy-aware participant selection strategy (DEEPS), which consists of selecting the best FL participant in each sub-region based on the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) average score of its local dataset and its power consumption profile. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed selection scheme is superior to the benchmark random selection method, in terms of model accuracy, training time, and UAV energy consumption.
Can we Agree? On the Rashōmon Effect and the Reliability of Post-Hoc Explainable AI
Authors: Clement Poiret, Antoine Grigis, Justin Thomas, Marion Noulhiane
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00

The Rash\=omon effect poses challenges for deriving reliable knowledge from machine learning models. This study examined the influence of sample size on explanations from models in a Rash\=omon set using SHAP. Experiments on 5 public datasets showed that explanations gradually converged as the sample size increased. Explanations from <128 samples exhibited high variability, limiting reliable knowledge extraction. However, agreement between models improved with more data, allowing for consensus. Bagging ensembles often had higher agreement. The results provide guidance on sufficient data to trust explanations. Variability at low samples suggests that conclusions may be unreliable without validation. Further work is needed with more model types, data domains, and explanation methods. Testing convergence in neural networks and with model-specific explanation methods would be impactful. The approaches explored here point towards principled techniques for eliciting knowledge from ambiguous models.
Context-Aware Planning and Environment-Aware Memory for Instruction Following Embodied Agents
Authors: Byeonghwi Kim, Jinyeon Kim, Yuyeong Kim, Cheolhong Min, Jonghyun Choi
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Instruction Following, Visual Navigation

Accomplishing household tasks requires to plan step-by-step actions considering the consequences of previous actions. However, the state-of-the-art embodied agents often make mistakes in navigating the environment and interacting with proper objects due to imperfect learning by imitating experts or algorithmic planners without such knowledge. To improve both visual navigation and object interaction, we propose to consider the consequence of taken actions by CAPEAM (Context-Aware Planning and Environment-Aware Memory) that incorporates semantic context (e.g., appropriate objects to interact with) in a sequence of actions, and the changed spatial arrangement and states of interacted objects (e.g., location that the object has been moved to) in inferring the subsequent actions. We empirically show that the agent with the proposed CAPEAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in various metrics using a challenging interactive instruction following benchmark in both seen and unseen environments by large margins (up to +10.70% in unseen env.).
MM-GEF: Multi-modal representation meet collaborative filtering
Authors: Hao Wu, Alejandro Ariza-Casabona, Bartłomiej Twardowski, Tri Kurniawan Wijaya
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Multi-modal Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

In modern e-commerce, item content features in various modalities offer accurate yet comprehensive information to recommender systems. The majority of previous work either focuses on learning effective item representation during modelling user-item interactions, or exploring item-item relationships by analysing multi-modal features. Those methods, however, fail to incorporate the collaborative item-user-item relationships into the multi-modal feature-based item structure. In this work, we propose a graph-based item structure enhancement method MM-GEF: Multi-Modal recommendation with Graph Early-Fusion, which effectively combines the latent item structure underlying multi-modal contents with the collaborative signals. Instead of processing the content feature in different modalities separately, we show that the early-fusion of multi-modal features provides significant improvement. MM-GEF learns refined item representations by injecting structural information obtained from both multi-modal and collaborative signals. Through extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets, we demonstrate systematical improvements of our method over state-of-the-art multi-modal recommendation methods.
Algorithms for the Training of Neural Support Vector Machines
Authors: Lars Simon, Manuel Radons
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00

Neural support vector machines (NSVMs) allow for the incorporation of domain knowledge in the design of the model architecture. In this article we introduce a set of training algorithms for NSVMs that leverage the Pegasos algorithm and provide a proof of concept by solving a set of standard machine learning tasks.
Neural Categorical Priors for Physics-Based Character Control
Authors: Qingxu Zhu, He Zhang, Mengting Lan, Lei Han
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent advances in learning reusable motion priors have demonstrated their effectiveness in generating naturalistic behaviors. In this paper, we propose a new learning framework in this paradigm for controlling physics-based characters with significantly improved motion quality and diversity over existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method uses reinforcement learning (RL) to initially track and imitate life-like movements from unstructured motion clips using the discrete information bottleneck, as adopted in the Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE). This structure compresses the most relevant information from the motion clips into a compact yet informative latent space, i.e., a discrete space over vector quantized codes. By sampling codes in the space from a trained categorical prior distribution, high-quality life-like behaviors can be generated, similar to the usage of VQ-VAE in computer vision. Although this prior distribution can be trained with the supervision of the encoder's output, it follows the original motion clip distribution in the dataset and could lead to imbalanced behaviors in our setting. To address the issue, we further propose a technique named prior shifting to adjust the prior distribution using curiosity-driven RL. The outcome distribution is demonstrated to offer sufficient behavioral diversity and significantly facilitates upper-level policy learning for downstream tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments using humanoid characters on two challenging downstream tasks, sword-shield striking and two-player boxing game. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of controlling the character to perform considerably high-quality movements in terms of behavioral strategies, diversity, and realism. Videos, codes, and data are available at https://tencent-roboticsx.github.io/NCP/.
Explaining Black-Box Models through Counterfactuals
Authors: Patrick Altmeyer, Arie van Deursen, Cynthia C. S. Liem
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Explainable artificial intelligence

We present CounterfactualExplanations.jl: a package for generating Counterfactual Explanations (CE) and Algorithmic Recourse (AR) for black-box models in Julia. CE explain how inputs into a model need to change to yield specific model predictions. Explanations that involve realistic and actionable changes can be used to provide AR: a set of proposed actions for individuals to change an undesirable outcome for the better. In this article, we discuss the usefulness of CE for Explainable Artificial Intelligence and demonstrate the functionality of our package. The package is straightforward to use and designed with a focus on customization and extensibility. We envision it to one day be the go-to place for explaining arbitrary predictive models in Julia through a diverse suite of counterfactual generators.
Task Offloading for Smart Glasses in Healthcare: Enhancing Detection of Elevated Body Temperature
Authors: Abdenacer Naouri, Nabil Abdelkader Nouri, Attia Qammar, Feifei Shi, Huansheng Ning, Sahraoui Dhelim
Date: 2023-08-14 00:00:00

Wearable devices like smart glasses have gained popularity across various applications. However, their limited computational capabilities pose challenges for tasks that require extensive processing, such as image and video processing, leading to drained device batteries. To address this, offloading such tasks to nearby powerful remote devices, such as mobile devices or remote servers, has emerged as a promising solution. This paper focuses on analyzing task-offloading scenarios for a healthcare monitoring application performed on smart wearable glasses, aiming to identify the optimal conditions for offloading. The study evaluates performance metrics including task completion time, computing capabilities, and energy consumption under realistic conditions. A specific use case is explored within an indoor area like an airport, where security agents wearing smart glasses to detect elevated body temperature in individuals, potentially indicating COVID-19. The findings highlight the potential benefits of task offloading for wearable devices in healthcare settings, demonstrating its practicality and relevance.