pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BAGM: A Backdoor Attack for Manipulating Text-to-Image Generative Models
Authors: Jordan Vice, Naveed Akhtar, Richard Hartley, Ajmal Mian
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Image Generation, Language Modelling, Marketing, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

The rise in popularity of text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted widespread public interest. We demonstrate that this technology can be attacked to generate content that subtly manipulates its users. We propose a Backdoor Attack on text-to-image Generative Models (BAGM), which upon triggering, infuses the generated images with manipulative details that are naturally blended in the content. Our attack is the first to target three popular text-to-image generative models across three stages of the generative process by modifying the behaviour of the embedded tokenizer, the language model or the image generative model. Based on the penetration level, BAGM takes the form of a suite of attacks that are referred to as surface, shallow and deep attacks in this article. Given the existing gap within this domain, we also contribute a comprehensive set of quantitative metrics designed specifically for assessing the effectiveness of backdoor attacks on text-to-image models. The efficacy of BAGM is established by attacking state-of-the-art generative models, using a marketing scenario as the target domain. To that end, we contribute a dataset of branded product images. Our embedded backdoors increase the bias towards the target outputs by more than five times the usual, without compromising the model robustness or the generated content utility. By exposing generative AI's vulnerabilities, we encourage researchers to tackle these challenges and practitioners to exercise caution when using pre-trained models. Relevant code, input prompts and supplementary material can be found at https://github.com/JJ-Vice/BAGM, and the dataset is available at: https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/marketable-foods-mf-dataset. Keywords: Generative Artificial Intelligence, Generative Models, Text-to-Image generation, Backdoor Attacks, Trojan, Stable Diffusion.
Model-free Grasping with Multi-Suction Cup Grippers for Robotic Bin Picking
Authors: Philipp Schillinger, Miroslav Gabriel, Alexander Kuss, Hanna Ziesche, Ngo Anh Vien
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00

This paper presents a novel method for model-free prediction of grasp poses for suction grippers with multiple suction cups. Our approach is agnostic to the design of the gripper and does not require gripper-specific training data. In particular, we propose a two-step approach, where first, a neural network predicts pixel-wise grasp quality for an input image to indicate areas that are generally graspable. Second, an optimization step determines the optimal gripper selection and corresponding grasp poses based on configured gripper layouts and activation schemes. In addition, we introduce a method for automated labeling for supervised training of the grasp quality network. Experimental evaluations on a real-world industrial application with bin picking scenes of varying difficulty demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
To Classify is to Interpret: Building Taxonomies from Heterogeneous Data through Human-AI Collaboration
Authors: Sebastian Meier, Katrin Glinka
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00

Taxonomy building is a task that requires interpreting and classifying data within a given frame of reference, which comes to play in many areas of application that deal with knowledge and information organization. In this paper, we explore how taxonomy building can be supported with systems that integrate machine learning (ML). However, relying only on black-boxed ML-based systems to automate taxonomy building would sideline the users' expertise. We propose an approach that allows the user to iteratively take into account multiple model's outputs as part of their sensemaking process. We implemented our approach in two real-world use cases. The work is positioned in the context of HCI research that investigates the design of ML-based systems with an emphasis on enabling human-AI collaboration.
Tracking mulitple targets with multiple radars using Distributed Auctions
Authors: Pierre Larrenie, Cédric Buron, Frédéric Barbaresco
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00

Coordination of radars can be performed in various ways. To be more resilient radar networks can be coordinated in a decentralized way. In this paper, we introduce a highly resilient algorithm for radar coordination based on decentralized and collaborative bundle auctions. We first formalize our problem as a constrained optimization problem and apply a market-based algorithm to provide an approximate solution. Our approach allows to track simultaneously multiple targets, and to use up to two radars tracking the same target to improve accuracy. We show that our approach performs sensibly as well as a centralized approach relying on a MIP solver, and depending on the situations, may outperform it or be outperformed.
L3DMC: Lifelong Learning using Distillation via Mixed-Curvature Space
Authors: Kaushik Roy, Peyman Moghadam, Mehrtash Harandi
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Lifelong learning, Medical Image Classification, Novel Concepts

The performance of a lifelong learning (L3) model degrades when it is trained on a series of tasks, as the geometrical formation of the embedding space changes while learning novel concepts sequentially. The majority of existing L3 approaches operate on a fixed-curvature (e.g., zero-curvature Euclidean) space that is not necessarily suitable for modeling the complex geometric structure of data. Furthermore, the distillation strategies apply constraints directly on low-dimensional embeddings, discouraging the L3 model from learning new concepts by making the model highly stable. To address the problem, we propose a distillation strategy named L3DMC that operates on mixed-curvature spaces to preserve the already-learned knowledge by modeling and maintaining complex geometrical structures. We propose to embed the projected low dimensional embedding of fixed-curvature spaces (Euclidean and hyperbolic) to higher-dimensional Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) using a positive-definite kernel function to attain rich representation. Afterward, we optimize the L3 model by minimizing the discrepancies between the new sample representation and the subspace constructed using the old representation in RKHS. L3DMC is capable of adapting new knowledge better without forgetting old knowledge as it combines the representation power of multiple fixed-curvature spaces and is performed on higher-dimensional RKHS. Thorough experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed distillation strategy for medical image classification in L3 settings. Our code implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/L3DMC.
Every Mistake Counts in Assembly
Authors: Guodong Ding, Fadime Sener, Shugao Ma, Angela Yao
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00

One promising use case of AI assistants is to help with complex procedures like cooking, home repair, and assembly tasks. Can we teach the assistant to interject after the user makes a mistake? This paper targets the problem of identifying ordering mistakes in assembly procedures. We propose a system that can detect ordering mistakes by utilizing a learned knowledge base. Our framework constructs a knowledge base with spatial and temporal beliefs based on observed mistakes. Spatial beliefs depict the topological relationship of the assembling components, while temporal beliefs aggregate prerequisite actions as ordering constraints. With an episodic memory design, our algorithm can dynamically update and construct the belief sets as more actions are observed, all in an online fashion. We demonstrate experimentally that our inferred spatial and temporal beliefs are capable of identifying incorrect orderings in real-world action sequences. To construct the spatial beliefs, we collect a new set of coarse-level action annotations for Assembly101 based on the positioning of the toy parts. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of our belief inference algorithm in detecting ordering mistakes on the Assembly101 dataset.
Causal Inference for Banking Finance and Insurance A Survey
Authors: Satyam Kumar, Yelleti Vivek, Vadlamani Ravi, Indranil Bose
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Survey

Causal Inference plays an significant role in explaining the decisions taken by statistical models and artificial intelligence models. Of late, this field started attracting the attention of researchers and practitioners alike. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of 37 papers published during 1992-2023 and concerning the application of causal inference to banking, finance, and insurance. The papers are categorized according to the following families of domains: (i) Banking, (ii) Finance and its subdomains such as corporate finance, governance finance including financial risk and financial policy, financial economics, and Behavioral finance, and (iii) Insurance. Further, the paper covers the primary ingredients of causal inference namely, statistical methods such as Bayesian Causal Network, Granger Causality and jargon used thereof such as counterfactuals. The review also recommends some important directions for future research. In conclusion, we observed that the application of causal inference in the banking and insurance sectors is still in its infancy, and thus more research is possible to turn it into a viable method.
Subspace Distillation for Continual Learning
Authors: Kaushik Roy, Christian Simon, Peyman Moghadam, Mehrtash Harandi
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Novel Concepts

An ultimate objective in continual learning is to preserve knowledge learned in preceding tasks while learning new tasks. To mitigate forgetting prior knowledge, we propose a novel knowledge distillation technique that takes into the account the manifold structure of the latent/output space of a neural network in learning novel tasks. To achieve this, we propose to approximate the data manifold up-to its first order, hence benefiting from linear subspaces to model the structure and maintain the knowledge of a neural network while learning novel concepts. We demonstrate that the modeling with subspaces provides several intriguing properties, including robustness to noise and therefore effective for mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in continual learning. We also discuss and show how our proposed method can be adopted to address both classification and segmentation problems. Empirically, we observe that our proposed method outperforms various continual learning methods on several challenging datasets including Pascal VOC, and Tiny-Imagenet. Furthermore, we show how the proposed method can be seamlessly combined with existing learning approaches to improve their performances. The codes of this article will be available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/SDCL.
Bridging the Gap: Exploring the Capabilities of Bridge-Architectures for Complex Visual Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Kousik Rajesh, Mrigank Raman, Mohammed Asad Karim, Pranit Chawla
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Object, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Reasoning

In recent times there has been a surge of multi-modal architectures based on Large Language Models, which leverage the zero shot generation capabilities of LLMs and project image embeddings into the text space and then use the auto-regressive capacity to solve tasks such as VQA, captioning, and image retrieval. We name these architectures as "bridge-architectures" as they project from the image space to the text space. These models deviate from the traditional recipe of training transformer based multi-modal models, which involve using large-scale pre-training and complex multi-modal interactions through co or cross attention. However, the capabilities of bridge architectures have not been tested on complex visual reasoning tasks which require fine grained analysis about the image. In this project, we investigate the performance of these bridge-architectures on the NLVR2 dataset, and compare it to state-of-the-art transformer based architectures. We first extend the traditional bridge architectures for the NLVR2 dataset, by adding object level features to faciliate fine-grained object reasoning. Our analysis shows that adding object level features to bridge architectures does not help, and that pre-training on multi-modal data is key for good performance on complex reasoning tasks such as NLVR2. We also demonstrate some initial results on a recently bridge-architecture, LLaVA, in the zero shot setting and analyze its performance.
STL: A Signed and Truncated Logarithm Activation Function for Neural Networks
Authors: Yuanhao Gong
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00

Activation functions play an essential role in neural networks. They provide the non-linearity for the networks. Therefore, their properties are important for neural networks' accuracy and running performance. In this paper, we present a novel signed and truncated logarithm function as activation function. The proposed activation function has significantly better mathematical properties, such as being odd function, monotone, differentiable, having unbounded value range, and a continuous nonzero gradient. These properties make it an excellent choice as an activation function. We compare it with other well-known activation functions in several well-known neural networks. The results confirm that it is the state-of-the-art. The suggested activation function can be applied in a large range of neural networks where activation functions are necessary.
Relation-Oriented: Toward Causal Knowledge-Aligned AGI
Authors: Jia Li, Xiang Li
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Representation Learning

Observation-Oriented paradigm currently dominates relationship learning models, including AI-based ones, which inherently do not account for relationships with temporally nonlinear effects. Instead, this paradigm simplifies the "temporal dimension" to be a linear observational timeline, necessitating the prior identification of effects with specific timestamps. Such constraints lead to identifiability difficulties for dynamical effects, thereby overlooking the potentially crucial temporal nonlinearity of the modeled relationship. Moreover, the multi-dimensional nature of Temporal Feature Space is largely disregarded, introducing inherent biases that seriously compromise the robustness and generalizability of relationship models. This limitation is particularly pronounced in large AI-based causal applications. Examining these issues through the lens of a dimensionality framework, a fundamental misalignment is identified between our relation-indexing comprehension of knowledge and the current modeling paradigm. To address this, a new Relation-Oriented} paradigm is raised, aimed at facilitating the development of causal knowledge-aligned Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As its methodological counterpart, the proposed Relation-Indexed Representation Learning (RIRL) is validated through efficacy experiments.
When Large Language Models Meet Personalization: Perspectives of Challenges and Opportunities
Authors: Jin Chen, Zheng Liu, Xu Huang, Chenwang Wu, Qi Liu, Gangwei Jiang, Yuanhao Pu, Yuxuan Lei, Xiaolong Chen, Xingmei Wang, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning

The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.
Promptly: Using Prompt Problems to Teach Learners How to Effectively Utilize AI Code Generators
Authors: Paul Denny, Juho Leinonen, James Prather, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, Thezyrie Amarouche, Brett A. Becker, Brent N. Reeves
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00

With their remarkable ability to generate code, large language models (LLMs) are a transformative technology for computing education practice. They have created an urgent need for educators to rethink pedagogical approaches and teaching strategies for newly emerging skill sets. Traditional approaches to learning programming have focused on frequent and repeated practice at writing code. The ease with which code can now be generated has resulted in a shift in focus towards reading, understanding and evaluating LLM-generated code. In parallel with this shift, a new essential skill is emerging -- the ability to construct good prompts for code-generating models. This paper introduces a novel pedagogical concept known as a `Prompt Problem', designed to help students learn how to craft effective prompts for LLMs. A Prompt Problem challenges a student to create a natural language prompt that leads an LLM to produce the correct code for a specific problem. To support the delivery of Prompt Problems at scale, in this paper we also present a novel tool called Promptly which hosts a repository of Prompt Problems and automates the evaluation of prompt-generated code. We report empirical findings from a field study in which Promptly was deployed in a first-year Python programming course (n=54). We explore student interactions with the tool and their perceptions of the Prompt Problem concept. We found that Promptly was largely well-received by students for its ability to engage their computational thinking skills and expose them to new programming constructs. We also discuss avenues for future work, including variations on the design of Prompt Problems and the need to study their integration into the curriculum and teaching practice.
BearingPGA-Net: A Lightweight and Deployable Bearing Fault Diagnosis Network via Decoupled Knowledge Distillation and FPGA Acceleration
Authors: Jing-Xiao Liao, Sheng-Lai Wei, Chen-Long Xie, Tieyong Zeng, Jinwei Sun, Shiping Zhang, Xiaoge Zhang, Feng-Lei Fan
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Fault Diagnosis, Knowledge Distillation, Quantization

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in the field of bearing fault diagnosis. However, this success comes with larger models and more complex computations, which cannot be transferred into industrial fields requiring models to be of high speed, strong portability, and low power consumption. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and deployable model for bearing fault diagnosis, referred to as BearingPGA-Net, to address these challenges. Firstly, aided by a well-trained large model, we train BearingPGA-Net via decoupled knowledge distillation. Despite its small size, our model demonstrates excellent fault diagnosis performance compared to other lightweight state-of-the-art methods. Secondly, we design an FPGA acceleration scheme for BearingPGA-Net using Verilog. This scheme involves the customized quantization and designing programmable logic gates for each layer of BearingPGA-Net on the FPGA, with an emphasis on parallel computing and module reuse to enhance the computational speed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of deploying a CNN-based bearing fault diagnosis model on an FPGA. Experimental results reveal that our deployment scheme achieves over 200 times faster diagnosis speed compared to CPU, while achieving a lower-than-0.4\% performance drop in terms of F1, Recall, and Precision score on our independently-collected bearing dataset. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/asdvfghg/BearingPGA-Net}.
Distributionally Robust Safety Filter for Learning-Based Control in Active Distribution Systems
Authors: Hoang Tien Nguyen, Dae-Hyun Choi
Date: 2023-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Operational constraint violations may occur when deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents interact with real-world active distribution systems to learn their optimal policies during training. This letter presents a universal distributionally robust safety filter (DRSF) using which any DRL agent can reduce the constraint violations of distribution systems significantly during training while maintaining near-optimal solutions. The DRSF is formulated as a distributionally robust optimization problem with chance constraints of operational limits. This problem aims to compute near-optimal actions that are minimally modified from the optimal actions of DRL-based Volt/VAr control by leveraging the distribution system model, thereby providing constraint satisfaction guarantee with a probability level under the model uncertainty. The performance of the proposed DRSF is verified using the IEEE 33-bus and 123-bus systems.
Rating-based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Devin White, Mingkang Wu, Ellen Novoseller, Vernon J. Lawhern, Nicholas Waytowich, Yongcan Cao
Date: 2023-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

This paper develops a novel rating-based reinforcement learning approach that uses human ratings to obtain human guidance in reinforcement learning. Different from the existing preference-based and ranking-based reinforcement learning paradigms, based on human relative preferences over sample pairs, the proposed rating-based reinforcement learning approach is based on human evaluation of individual trajectories without relative comparisons between sample pairs. The rating-based reinforcement learning approach builds on a new prediction model for human ratings and a novel multi-class loss function. We conduct several experimental studies based on synthetic ratings and real human ratings to evaluate the effectiveness and benefits of the new rating-based reinforcement learning approach.