pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards a Unified Framework for Adaptable Problematic Content Detection via Continual Learning
Authors: Ali Omrani, Alireza S. Ziabari, Preni Golazizian, Jeffery Sorensen, Morteza Dehghani
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Diversity

Detecting problematic content, such as hate speech, is a multifaceted and ever-changing task, influenced by social dynamics, user populations, diversity of sources, and evolving language. There has been significant efforts, both in academia and in industry, to develop annotated resources that capture various aspects of problematic content. Due to researchers' diverse objectives, the annotations are inconsistent and hence, reports of progress on detection of problematic content are fragmented. This pattern is expected to persist unless we consolidate resources considering the dynamic nature of the problem. We propose integrating the available resources, and leveraging their dynamic nature to break this pattern. In this paper, we introduce a continual learning benchmark and framework for problematic content detection comprising over 84 related tasks encompassing 15 annotation schemas from 8 sources. Our benchmark creates a novel measure of progress: prioritizing the adaptability of classifiers to evolving tasks over excelling in specific tasks. To ensure the continuous relevance of our framework, we designed it so that new tasks can easily be integrated into the benchmark. Our baseline results demonstrate the potential of continual learning in capturing the evolving content and adapting to novel manifestations of problematic content.
DeBERTinha: A Multistep Approach to Adapt DebertaV3 XSmall for Brazilian Portuguese Natural Language Processing Task
Authors: Israel Campiotti, Matheus Rodrigues, Yuri Albuquerque, Rafael Azevedo, Alyson Andrade
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents an approach for adapting the DebertaV3 XSmall model pre-trained in English for Brazilian Portuguese natural language processing (NLP) tasks. A key aspect of the methodology involves a multistep training process to ensure the model is effectively tuned for the Portuguese language. Initial datasets from Carolina and BrWac are preprocessed to address issues like emojis, HTML tags, and encodings. A Portuguese-specific vocabulary of 50,000 tokens is created using SentencePiece. Rather than training from scratch, the weights of the pre-trained English model are used to initialize most of the network, with random embeddings, recognizing the expensive cost of training from scratch. The model is fine-tuned using the replaced token detection task in the same format of DebertaV3 training. The adapted model, called DeBERTinha, demonstrates effectiveness on downstream tasks like named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and determining sentence relatedness, outperforming BERTimbau-Large in two tasks despite having only 40M parameters.
Curriculum-Driven Edubot: A Framework for Developing Language Learning Chatbots Through Synthesizing Conversational Data
Authors: Yu Li, Shang Qu, Jili Shen, Shangchao Min, Zhou Yu
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Chatbots have become popular in educational settings, revolutionizing how students interact with material and how teachers teach. We present Curriculum-Driven EduBot, a framework for developing a chatbot that combines the interactive features of chatbots with the systematic material of English textbooks to assist students in enhancing their conversational skills. We begin by extracting pertinent topics from textbooks and using large language models to generate dialogues related to these topics. We then fine-tune an open-source model using our generated conversational data to create our curriculum-driven chatbot. User studies demonstrate that EduBot outperforms ChatGPT in leading curriculum-based dialogues and adapting its dialogue to match the user's English proficiency level. By combining traditional textbook methodologies with conversational AI, our approach offers learners an interactive tool that aligns with their curriculum and provides user-tailored conversation practice. This facilitates meaningful student-bot dialogues and enriches the overall learning experience within the curriculum's pedagogical framework.
The Blessings of Multiple Treatments and Outcomes in Treatment Effect Estimation
Authors: Yong Wu, Mingzhou Liu, Jing Yan, Yanwei Fu, Shouyan Wang, Yizhou Wang, Xinwei Sun
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Causal Identification

Assessing causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding is a challenging problem. Existing studies leveraged proxy variables or multiple treatments to adjust for the confounding bias. In particular, the latter approach attributes the impact on a single outcome to multiple treatments, allowing estimating latent variables for confounding control. Nevertheless, these methods primarily focus on a single outcome, whereas in many real-world scenarios, there is greater interest in studying the effects on multiple outcomes. Besides, these outcomes are often coupled with multiple treatments. Examples include the intensive care unit (ICU), where health providers evaluate the effectiveness of therapies on multiple health indicators. To accommodate these scenarios, we consider a new setting dubbed as multiple treatments and multiple outcomes. We then show that parallel studies of multiple outcomes involved in this setting can assist each other in causal identification, in the sense that we can exploit other treatments and outcomes as proxies for each treatment effect under study. We proceed with a causal discovery method that can effectively identify such proxies for causal estimation. The utility of our method is demonstrated in synthetic data and sepsis disease.
Statistical physics, Bayesian inference and neural information processing
Authors: Erin Grant, Sandra Nestler, Berfin Şimşek, Sara Solla
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Dimensionality Reduction

Lecture notes from the course given by Professor Sara A. Solla at the Les Houches summer school on "Statistical physics of Machine Learning". The notes discuss neural information processing through the lens of Statistical Physics. Contents include Bayesian inference and its connection to a Gibbs description of learning and generalization, Generalized Linear Models as a controlled alternative to backpropagation through time, and linear and non-linear techniques for dimensionality reduction.
A Mean Field Approach to Empirical Bayes Estimation in High-dimensional Linear Regression
Authors: Sumit Mukherjee, Bodhisattva Sen, Subhabrata Sen
Date: 2023-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, regression

We study empirical Bayes estimation in high-dimensional linear regression. To facilitate computationally efficient estimation of the underlying prior, we adopt a variational empirical Bayes approach, introduced originally in Carbonetto and Stephens (2012) and Kim et al. (2022). We establish asymptotic consistency of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) and its (computable) naive mean field variational surrogate under mild assumptions on the design and the prior. Assuming, in addition, that the naive mean field approximation has a dominant optimizer, we develop a computationally efficient approximation to the oracle posterior distribution, and establish its accuracy under the 1-Wasserstein metric. This enables computationally feasible Bayesian inference; e.g., construction of posterior credible intervals with an average coverage guarantee, Bayes optimal estimation for the regression coefficients, estimation of the proportion of non-nulls, etc. Our analysis covers both deterministic and random designs, and accommodates correlations among the features. To the best of our knowledge, this provides the first rigorous nonparametric empirical Bayes method in a high-dimensional regression setting without sparsity.
SAppKG: Mobile App Recommendation Using Knowledge Graph and Side Information-A Secure Framework
Authors: Daksh Dave, Aditya Sharma, Shafii Muhammad Abdulhamid, Adeel Ahmed, Adnan Akhunzada, Rashid Amin
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Recommendation Systems

Due to the rapid development of technology and the widespread usage of smartphones, the number of mobile applications is exponentially growing. Finding a suitable collection of apps that aligns with users needs and preferences can be challenging. However, mobile app recommender systems have emerged as a helpful tool in simplifying this process. But there is a drawback to employing app recommender systems. These systems need access to user data, which is a serious security violation. While users seek accurate opinions, they do not want to compromise their privacy in the process. We address this issue by developing SAppKG, an end-to-end user privacy-preserving knowledge graph architecture for mobile app recommendation based on knowledge graph models such as SAppKG-S and SAppKG-D, that utilized the interaction data and side information of app attributes. We tested the proposed model on real-world data from the Google Play app store, using precision, recall, mean absolute precision, and mean reciprocal rank. We found that the proposed model improved results on all four metrics. We also compared the proposed model to baseline models and found that it outperformed them on all four metrics.
Unsupervised Large Language Model Alignment for Information Retrieval via Contrastive Feedback
Authors: Qian Dong, Yiding Liu, Qingyao Ai, Zhijing Wu, Haitao Li, Yiqun Liu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Shaoping Ma
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval, Specificity

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various research domains, including the field of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the responses generated by off-the-shelf LLMs tend to be generic, i.e., cannot capture the distinctiveness of each document with similar content. This limits the performance of LLMs in IR because finding and distinguishing relevant documents from substantial similar documents is a typical problem in many IR tasks. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised alignment method, namely Reinforcement Learning from Contrastive Feedback (RLCF), empowering LLMs to generate both high-quality and context-specific responses. Our approach constructs unsupervised contrastive feedback signals based on similar document groups, and adopts a reward function, named group-wise reciprocal rank, to optimize LLMs within a standard Proximal Policy Optimization. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of RLCF on LLMs built with different languages and parameter sizes on multiple downstream IR applications. RLCF significantly outperforms existing alignment methods, and RLCF-optimized LLMs demonstrate considerable improvement in generating responses with distinctiveness.
Beyond Co-occurrence: Multi-modal Session-based Recommendation
Authors: Xiaokun Zhang, Bo Xu, Fenglong Ma, Chenliang Li, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin
Date: 2023-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Descriptive, Representation Learning, Session-Based Recommendations

Session-based recommendation is devoted to characterizing preferences of anonymous users based on short sessions. Existing methods mostly focus on mining limited item co-occurrence patterns exposed by item ID within sessions, while ignoring what attracts users to engage with certain items is rich multi-modal information displayed on pages. Generally, the multi-modal information can be classified into two categories: descriptive information (e.g., item images and description text) and numerical information (e.g., price). In this paper, we aim to improve session-based recommendation by modeling the above multi-modal information holistically. There are mainly three issues to reveal user intent from multi-modal information: (1) How to extract relevant semantics from heterogeneous descriptive information with different noise? (2) How to fuse these heterogeneous descriptive information to comprehensively infer user interests? (3) How to handle probabilistic influence of numerical information on user behaviors? To solve above issues, we propose a novel multi-modal session-based recommendation (MMSBR) that models both descriptive and numerical information under a unified framework. Specifically, a pseudo-modality contrastive learning is devised to enhance the representation learning of descriptive information. Afterwards, a hierarchical pivot transformer is presented to fuse heterogeneous descriptive information. Moreover, we represent numerical information with Gaussian distribution and design a Wasserstein self-attention to handle the probabilistic influence mode. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MMSBR. Further analysis also proves that our MMSBR can alleviate the cold-start problem in SBR effectively.
Mechanical Artifacts in Optical Projection Tomography: Classification and Automatic Calibration
Authors: Yan Liu, Jonathan Dong, Thanh-an Pham, Francois Marelli, Michael Unser
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00

Optical projection tomography (OPT) is a powerful tool for biomedical studies. It achieves 3D visualization of mesoscopic biological samples with high spatial resolution using conventional tomographic-reconstruction algorithms. However, various artifacts degrade the quality of the reconstructed images due to experimental imperfections in the OPT instruments. While many efforts have been made to characterize and correct for these artifacts, they focus on one specific type of artifacts. This work has two contributions. First, we systematically document a catalog of mechanical artifacts based on a 3D description of the imaging system that uses a set of angular and translational parameters. Then, we introduce a calibration algorithm that recovers the unknown system parameters fed into the final 3D iterative reconstruction algorithm for a distortion-free volumetric image. Simulations with beads data and experimental results on a fluorescent textile fiber confirm that our algorithm successfully removes miscalibration artifacts in the reconstruction.
Framework and Model Analysis on Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset: BaDLAD
Authors: Kazi Reyazul Hasan, Mubasshira Musarrat, Sadif Ahmed, Shahriar Raj
Date: 2023-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Layout Analysis

This study focuses on understanding Bengali Document Layouts using advanced computer programs: Detectron2, YOLOv8, and SAM. We looked at lots of different Bengali documents in our study. Detectron2 is great at finding and separating different parts of documents, like text boxes and paragraphs. YOLOv8 is good at figuring out different tables and pictures. We also tried SAM, which helps us understand tricky layouts. We tested these programs to see how well they work. By comparing their accuracy and speed, we learned which one is good for different types of documents. Our research helps make sense of complex layouts in Bengali documents and can be useful for other languages too.
MVMR: A New Framework for Evaluating Faithfulness of Video Moment Retrieval against Multiple Distractors
Authors: Nakyeong Yang, Minsung Kim, Seunghyun Yoon, Joongbo Shin, Kyomin Jung
Date: 2023-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Misinformation, Moment Retrieval, Retrieval, text similarity, Video Corpus Moment Retrieval

With the explosion of multimedia content, video moment retrieval (VMR), which aims to detect a video moment that matches a given text query from a video, has been studied intensively as a critical problem. However, the existing VMR framework evaluates video moment retrieval performance, assuming that a video is given, which may not reveal whether the models exhibit overconfidence in the falsely given video. In this paper, we propose the MVMR (Massive Videos Moment Retrieval for Faithfulness Evaluation) task that aims to retrieve video moments within a massive video set, including multiple distractors, to evaluate the faithfulness of VMR models. For this task, we suggest an automated massive video pool construction framework to categorize negative (distractors) and positive (false-negative) video sets using textual and visual semantic distance verification methods. We extend existing VMR datasets using these methods and newly construct three practical MVMR datasets. To solve the task, we further propose a strong informative sample-weighted learning method, CroCs, which employs two contrastive learning mechanisms: (1) weakly-supervised potential negative learning and (2) cross-directional hard-negative learning. Experimental results on the MVMR datasets reveal that existing VMR models are easily distracted by the misinformation (distractors), whereas our model shows significantly robust performance, demonstrating that CroCs is essential to distinguishing positive moments against distractors. Our code and datasets are publicly available: https://github.com/yny0506/Massive-Videos-Moment-Retrieval.
Multimodal Analysis Of Google Bard And GPT-Vision: Experiments In Visual Reasoning
Authors: David Noever, Samantha Elizabeth Miller Noever
Date: 2023-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Optical Character Recognition, Visual Reasoning

Addressing the gap in understanding visual comprehension in Large Language Models (LLMs), we designed a challenge-response study, subjecting Google Bard and GPT-Vision to 64 visual tasks, spanning categories like "Visual Situational Reasoning" and "Next Scene Prediction." Previous models, such as GPT4, leaned heavily on optical character recognition tools like Tesseract, whereas Bard and GPT-Vision, akin to Google Lens and Visual API, employ deep learning techniques for visual text recognition. However, our findings spotlight both vision-language model's limitations: while proficient in solving visual CAPTCHAs that stump ChatGPT alone, it falters in recreating visual elements like ASCII art or analyzing Tic Tac Toe grids, suggesting an over-reliance on educated visual guesses. The prediction problem based on visual inputs appears particularly challenging with no common-sense guesses for next-scene forecasting based on current "next-token" multimodal models. This study provides experimental insights into the current capacities and areas for improvement in multimodal LLMs.
Automatic Cadastral Boundary Detection of Very High Resolution Images Using Mask R-CNN
Authors: Neda Rahimpour Anaraki, Alireza Azadbakht, Maryam Tahmasbi, Hadi Farahani, Saeed Reza Kheradpisheh, Alireza Javaheri
Date: 2023-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recently, there has been a high demand for accelerating and improving the detection of automatic cadastral mapping. As this problem is in its starting point, there are many methods of computer vision and deep learning that have not been considered yet. In this paper, we focus on deep learning and provide three geometric post-processing methods that improve the quality of the work. Our framework includes two parts, each of which consists of a few phases. Our solution to this problem uses instance segmentation. In the first part, we use Mask R-CNN with the backbone of pre-trained ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset. In the second phase, we apply three geometric post-processing methods to the output of the first part to get better overall output. Here, we also use computational geometry to introduce a new method for simplifying lines which we call it pocket-based simplification algorithm. For evaluating the quality of our solution, we use popular formulas in this field which are recall, precision and F-score. The highest recall we gain is 95 percent which also maintains high Precision of 72 percent. This resulted in an F-score of 82 percent. Implementing instance segmentation using Mask R-CNN with some geometric post-processes to its output gives us promising results for this field. Also, results show that pocket-based simplification algorithms work better for simplifying lines than Douglas-Puecker algorithm.
General Lipschitz: Certified Robustness Against Resolvable Semantic Transformations via Transformation-Dependent Randomized Smoothing
Authors: Dmitrii Korzh, Mikhail Pautov, Olga Tsymboi, Ivan Oseledets
Date: 2023-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Randomized smoothing is the state-of-the-art approach to construct image classifiers that are provably robust against additive adversarial perturbations of bounded magnitude. However, it is more complicated to construct reasonable certificates against semantic transformation (e.g., image blurring, translation, gamma correction) and their compositions. In this work, we propose \emph{General Lipschitz (GL),} a new framework to certify neural networks against composable resolvable semantic perturbations. Within the framework, we analyze transformation-dependent Lipschitz-continuity of smoothed classifiers w.r.t. transformation parameters and derive corresponding robustness certificates. Our method performs comparably to state-of-the-art approaches on the ImageNet dataset.
MV-DeepSDF: Implicit Modeling with Multi-Sweep Point Clouds for 3D Vehicle Reconstruction in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yibo Liu, Kelly Zhu, Guile Wu, Yuan Ren, Bingbing Liu, Yang Liu, Jinjun Shan
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving

Reconstructing 3D vehicles from noisy and sparse partial point clouds is of great significance to autonomous driving. Most existing 3D reconstruction methods cannot be directly applied to this problem because they are elaborately designed to deal with dense inputs with trivial noise. In this work, we propose a novel framework, dubbed MV-DeepSDF, which estimates the optimal Signed Distance Function (SDF) shape representation from multi-sweep point clouds to reconstruct vehicles in the wild. Although there have been some SDF-based implicit modeling methods, they only focus on single-view-based reconstruction, resulting in low fidelity. In contrast, we first analyze multi-sweep consistency and complementarity in the latent feature space and propose to transform the implicit space shape estimation problem into an element-to-set feature extraction problem. Then, we devise a new architecture to extract individual element-level representations and aggregate them to generate a set-level predicted latent code. This set-level latent code is an expression of the optimal 3D shape in the implicit space, and can be subsequently decoded to a continuous SDF of the vehicle. In this way, our approach learns consistent and complementary information among multi-sweeps for 3D vehicle reconstruction. We conduct thorough experiments on two real-world autonomous driving datasets (Waymo and KITTI) to demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art alternative methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Prediction and Interpretation of Vehicle Trajectories in the Graph Spectral Domain
Authors: Marion Neumeier, Sebastian Dorn, Michael Botsch, Wolfgang Utschick
Date: 2023-08-16 00:00:00

This work provides a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of the graph spectral representation of traffic scenarios. Based on a spatio-temporal vehicle interaction graph, an observed traffic scenario can be transformed into the graph spectral domain by means of the multidimensional Graph Fourier Transformation. Since these spectral scenario representations have shown to successfully incorporate the complex and interactive nature of traffic scenarios, the beneficial feature representation is employed for the purpose of predicting vehicle trajectories. This work introduces GFTNNv2, a deep learning network predicting vehicle trajectories in the graph spectral domain. Evaluation of the GFTNNv2 on the publicly available datasets highD and NGSIM shows a performance gain of up to 25% in comparison to state-of-the-art prediction approaches.