pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Belief revision and incongruity: is it a joke?
Authors: Florence Dupin de Saint Cyr - Bannay, Henri Prade
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

Incongruity often makes people laugh. You have to be smart to say stupid things. It requires to be even smarter for understanding them. This paper is a shameless attempt to formalize this intelligent behavior in the case of an agent listening to a joke. All this is a matter of revision of beliefs, surprise and violation of norms.
Aggregating Correlated Estimations with (Almost) no Training
Authors: Theo Delemazure, François Durand, Fabien Mathieu
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Many decision problems cannot be solved exactly and use several estimation algorithms that assign scores to the different available options. The estimation errors can have various correlations, from low (e.g. between two very different approaches) to high (e.g. when using a given algorithm with different hyperparameters). Most aggregation rules would suffer from this diversity of correlations. In this article, we propose different aggregation rules that take correlations into account, and we compare them to naive rules in various experiments based on synthetic data. Our results show that when sufficient information is known about the correlations between errors, a maximum likelihood aggregation should be preferred. Otherwise, typically with limited training data, we recommend a method that we call Embedded Voting (EV).
Analyzing domain shift when using additional data for the MICCAI KiTS23 Challenge
Authors: George Stoica, Mihaela Breaban, Vlad Barbu
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

Using additional training data is known to improve the results, especially for medical image 3D segmentation where there is a lack of training material and the model needs to generalize well from few available data. However, the new data could have been acquired using other instruments and preprocessed such its distribution is significantly different from the original training data. Therefore, we study techniques which ameliorate domain shift during training so that the additional data becomes better usable for preprocessing and training together with the original data. Our results show that transforming the additional data using histogram matching has better results than using simple normalization.
Photonic Structures Optimization Using Highly Data-Efficient Deep Learning: Application To Nanofin And Annular Groove Phase Masks
Authors: Nicolas Roy, Lorenzo König, Olivier Absil, Charlotte Beauthier, Alexandre Mayer, Michaël Lobet
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

Metasurfaces offer a flexible framework for the manipulation of light properties in the realm of thin film optics. Specifically, the polarization of light can be effectively controlled through the use of thin phase plates. This study aims to introduce a surrogate optimization framework for these devices. The framework is applied to develop two kinds of vortex phase masks (VPMs) tailored for application in astronomical high-contrast imaging. Computational intelligence techniques are exploited to optimize the geometric features of these devices. The large design space and computational limitations necessitate the use of surrogate models like partial least squares Kriging, radial basis functions, or neural networks. However, we demonstrate the inadequacy of these methods in modeling the performance of VPMs. To address the shortcomings of these methods, a data-efficient evolutionary optimization setup using a deep neural network as a highly accurate and efficient surrogate model is proposed. The optimization process in this study employs a robust particle swarm evolutionary optimization scheme, which operates on explicit geometric parameters of the photonic device. Through this approach, optimal designs are developed for two design candidates. In the most complex case, evolutionary optimization enables optimization of the design that would otherwise be impractical (requiring too much simulations). In both cases, the surrogate model improves the reliability and efficiency of the procedure, effectively reducing the required number of simulations by up to 75% compared to conventional optimization techniques.
Graph-Based Interaction-Aware Multimodal 2D Vehicle Trajectory Prediction using Diffusion Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Keshu Wu, Yang Zhou, Haotian Shi, Xiaopeng Li, Bin Ran
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Intent Detection, Trajectory Prediction

Predicting vehicle trajectories is crucial for ensuring automated vehicle operation efficiency and safety, particularly on congested multi-lane highways. In such dynamic environments, a vehicle's motion is determined by its historical behaviors as well as interactions with surrounding vehicles. These intricate interactions arise from unpredictable motion patterns, leading to a wide range of driving behaviors that warrant in-depth investigation. This study presents the Graph-based Interaction-aware Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction (GIMTP) framework, designed to probabilistically predict future vehicle trajectories by effectively capturing these interactions. Within this framework, vehicles' motions are conceptualized as nodes in a time-varying graph, and the traffic interactions are represented by a dynamic adjacency matrix. To holistically capture both spatial and temporal dependencies embedded in this dynamic adjacency matrix, the methodology incorporates the Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (DGCN), thereby providing a graph embedding of both historical states and future states. Furthermore, we employ a driving intention-specific feature fusion, enabling the adaptive integration of historical and future embeddings for enhanced intention recognition and trajectory prediction. This model gives two-dimensional predictions for each mode of longitudinal and lateral driving behaviors and offers probabilistic future paths with corresponding probabilities, addressing the challenges of complex vehicle interactions and multi-modality of driving behaviors. Validation using real-world trajectory datasets demonstrates the efficiency and potential.
Linear Regression using Heterogeneous Data Batches
Authors: Ayush Jain, Rajat Sen, Weihao Kong, Abhimanyu Das, Alon Orlitsky
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

In many learning applications, data are collected from multiple sources, each providing a \emph{batch} of samples that by itself is insufficient to learn its input-output relationship. A common approach assumes that the sources fall in one of several unknown subgroups, each with an unknown input distribution and input-output relationship. We consider one of this setup's most fundamental and important manifestations where the output is a noisy linear combination of the inputs, and there are $k$ subgroups, each with its own regression vector. Prior work~\cite{kong2020meta} showed that with abundant small-batches, the regression vectors can be learned with only few, $\tilde\Omega( k^{3/2})$, batches of medium-size with $\tilde\Omega(\sqrt k)$ samples each. However, the paper requires that the input distribution for all $k$ subgroups be isotropic Gaussian, and states that removing this assumption is an ``interesting and challenging problem". We propose a novel gradient-based algorithm that improves on the existing results in several ways. It extends the applicability of the algorithm by: (1) allowing the subgroups' underlying input distributions to be different, unknown, and heavy-tailed; (2) recovering all subgroups followed by a significant proportion of batches even for infinite $k$; (3) removing the separation requirement between the regression vectors; (4) reducing the number of batches and allowing smaller batch sizes.
A Survey on Interpretable Cross-modal Reasoning
Authors: Dizhan Xue, Shengsheng Qian, Zuyi Zhou, Changsheng Xu
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Decision Making, Explanation Generation, Factual Visual Question Answering, Fake News Detection, Image-guided Story Ending Generation, Phrase Grounding, Science Question Answering, Survey, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Question Answering, Visual Reasoning

In recent years, cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the process of understanding and reasoning across different modalities, has emerged as a pivotal area with applications spanning from multimedia analysis to healthcare diagnostics. As the deployment of AI systems becomes more ubiquitous, the demand for transparency and comprehensibility in these systems' decision-making processes has intensified. This survey delves into the realm of interpretable cross-modal reasoning (I-CMR), where the objective is not only to achieve high predictive performance but also to provide human-understandable explanations for the results. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the typical methods with a three-level taxonomy for I-CMR. Furthermore, this survey reviews the existing CMR datasets with annotations for explanations. Finally, this survey summarizes the challenges for I-CMR and discusses potential future directions. In conclusion, this survey aims to catalyze the progress of this emerging research area by providing researchers with a panoramic and comprehensive perspective, illuminating the state of the art and discerning the opportunities. The summarized methods, datasets, and other resources are available at https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Interpretable-Cross-modal-Reasoning.
RADIO: Reference-Agnostic Dubbing Video Synthesis
Authors: Dongyeun Lee, Chaewon Kim, Sangjoon Yu, Jaejun Yoo, Gyeong-Moon Park
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Talking Head Generation

One of the most challenging problems in audio-driven talking head generation is achieving high-fidelity detail while ensuring precise synchronization. Given only a single reference image, extracting meaningful identity attributes becomes even more challenging, often causing the network to mirror the facial and lip structures too closely. To address these issues, we introduce RADIO, a framework engineered to yield high-quality dubbed videos regardless of the pose or expression in reference images. The key is to modulate the decoder layers using latent space composed of audio and reference features. Additionally, we incorporate ViT blocks into the decoder to emphasize high-fidelity details, especially in the lip region. Our experimental results demonstrate that RADIO displays high synchronization without the loss of fidelity. Especially in harsh scenarios where the reference frame deviates significantly from the ground truth, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness.
On-Chip Hardware-Aware Quantization for Mixed Precision Neural Networks
Authors: Wei Huang, Haotong Qin, Yangdong Liu, Jingzhuo Liang, Yulun Zhang, Ying Li, Xianglong Liu
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Low-bit quantization emerges as one of the most promising compression approaches for deploying deep neural networks on edge devices. Mixed-precision quantization leverages a mixture of bit-widths to unleash the accuracy and efficiency potential of quantized models. However, existing mixed-precision quantization methods rely on simulations in high-performance devices to achieve accuracy and efficiency trade-offs in immense search spaces. This leads to a non-negligible gap between the estimated efficiency metrics and the actual hardware that makes quantized models far away from the optimal accuracy and efficiency, and also causes the quantization process to rely on additional high-performance devices. In this paper, we propose an On-Chip Hardware-Aware Quantization (OHQ) framework, performing hardware-aware mixed-precision quantization on deployed edge devices to achieve accurate and efficient computing. Specifically, for efficiency metrics, we built an On-Chip Quantization Aware pipeline, which allows the quantization process to perceive the actual hardware efficiency of the quantization operator and avoid optimization errors caused by inaccurate simulation. For accuracy metrics, we propose Mask-Guided Quantization Estimation technology to effectively estimate the accuracy impact of operators in the on-chip scenario, getting rid of the dependence of the quantization process on high computing power. By synthesizing insights from quantized models and hardware through linear optimization, we can obtain optimized bit-width configurations to achieve outstanding performance on accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate inference accuracy and acceleration with quantization for various architectures and compression ratios on hardware. OHQ achieves 70% and 73% accuracy for ResNet-18 and MobileNetV3, respectively, and can reduce latency by 15~30% compared to INT8 on real deployment.
Quantum-AI empowered Intelligent Surveillance: Advancing Public Safety Through Innovative Contraband Detection
Authors: Syed Atif Ali Shah, Nasir Algeelani, Najeeb Al-Sammarraie
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

Surveillance systems have emerged as crucial elements in upholding peace and security in the modern world. Their ubiquity aids in monitoring suspicious activities effectively. However, in densely populated environments, continuous active monitoring becomes impractical, necessitating the development of intelligent surveillance systems. AI integration in the surveillance domain was a big revolution, however, speed issues have prevented its widespread implementation in the field. It has been observed that quantum artificial intelligence has led to a great breakthrough. Quantum artificial intelligence-based surveillance systems have shown to be more accurate as well as capable of performing well in real-time scenarios, which had never been seen before. In this research, a RentinaNet model is integrated with Quantum CNN and termed as Quantum-RetinaNet. By harnessing the Quantum capabilities of QCNN, Quantum-RetinaNet strikes a balance between accuracy and speed. This innovative integration positions it as a game-changer, addressing the challenges of active monitoring in densely populated scenarios. As demand for efficient surveillance solutions continues to grow, Quantum-RetinaNet offers a compelling alternative to existing CNN models, upholding accuracy standards without sacrificing real-time performance. The unique attributes of Quantum-RetinaNet have far-reaching implications for the future of intelligent surveillance. With its enhanced processing speed, it is poised to revolutionize the field, catering to the pressing need for rapid yet precise monitoring. As Quantum-RetinaNet becomes the new standard, it ensures public safety and security while pushing the boundaries of AI in surveillance.
Dynamic Brain Transformer with Multi-level Attention for Functional Brain Network Analysis
Authors: Xuan Kan, Antonio Aodong Chen Gu, Hejie Cui, Ying Guo, Carl Yang
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

Recent neuroimaging studies have highlighted the importance of network-centric brain analysis, particularly with functional magnetic resonance imaging. The emergence of Deep Neural Networks has fostered a substantial interest in predicting clinical outcomes and categorizing individuals based on brain networks. However, the conventional approach involving static brain network analysis offers limited potential in capturing the dynamism of brain function. Although recent studies have attempted to harness dynamic brain networks, their high dimensionality and complexity present substantial challenges. This paper proposes a novel methodology, Dynamic bRAin Transformer (DART), which combines static and dynamic brain networks for more effective and nuanced brain function analysis. Our model uses the static brain network as a baseline, integrating dynamic brain networks to enhance performance against traditional methods. We innovatively employ attention mechanisms, enhancing model explainability and exploiting the dynamic brain network's temporal variations. The proposed approach offers a robust solution to the low signal-to-noise ratio of blood-oxygen-level-dependent signals, a recurring issue in direct DNN modeling. It also provides valuable insights into which brain circuits or dynamic networks contribute more to final predictions. As such, DRAT shows a promising direction in neuroimaging studies, contributing to the comprehensive understanding of brain organization and the role of neural circuits.
Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGI
Authors: Max Tegmark, Steve Omohundro
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

We describe a path to humanity safely thriving with powerful Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) by building them to provably satisfy human-specified requirements. We argue that this will soon be technically feasible using advanced AI for formal verification and mechanistic interpretability. We further argue that it is the only path which guarantees safe controlled AGI. We end with a list of challenge problems whose solution would contribute to this positive outcome and invite readers to join in this work.
Regret Analysis of Policy Gradient Algorithm for Infinite Horizon Average Reward Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Qinbo Bai, Washim Uddin Mondal, Vaneet Aggarwal
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Distinguishing itself from existing works within this context, our approach harnesses the power of the general policy gradient-based algorithm, liberating it from the constraints of assuming a linear MDP structure. We propose a policy gradient-based algorithm and show its global convergence property. We then prove that the proposed algorithm has $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}({T}^{3/4})$ regret. Remarkably, this paper marks a pioneering effort by presenting the first exploration into regret-bound computation for the general parameterized policy gradient algorithm in the context of average reward scenarios.
Towards General and Efficient Online Tuning for Spark
Authors: Yang Li, Huaijun Jiang, Yu Shen, Yide Fang, Xiaofeng Yang, Danqing Huang, Xinyi Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Ce Zhang, Peng Chen, Bin Cui
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, CPU, Meta-Learning

The distributed data analytic system -- Spark is a common choice for processing massive volumes of heterogeneous data, while it is challenging to tune its parameters to achieve high performance. Recent studies try to employ auto-tuning techniques to solve this problem but suffer from three issues: limited functionality, high overhead, and inefficient search. In this paper, we present a general and efficient Spark tuning framework that can deal with the three issues simultaneously. First, we introduce a generalized tuning formulation, which can support multiple tuning goals and constraints conveniently, and a Bayesian optimization (BO) based solution to solve this generalized optimization problem. Second, to avoid high overhead from additional offline evaluations in existing methods, we propose to tune parameters along with the actual periodic executions of each job (i.e., online evaluations). To ensure safety during online job executions, we design a safe configuration acquisition method that models the safe region. Finally, three innovative techniques are leveraged to further accelerate the search process: adaptive sub-space generation, approximate gradient descent, and meta-learning method. We have implemented this framework as an independent cloud service, and applied it to the data platform in Tencent. The empirical results on both public benchmarks and large-scale production tasks demonstrate its superiority in terms of practicality, generality, and efficiency. Notably, this service saves an average of 57.00% memory cost and 34.93% CPU cost on 25K in-production tasks within 20 iterations, respectively.
Inferring Actual Treatment Pathways from Patient Records
Authors: Adrian Wilkins-Caruana, Madhushi Bandara, Katarzyna Musial, Daniel Catchpoole, Paul J. Kennedy
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Treatment pathways are step-by-step plans outlining the recommended medical care for specific diseases; they get revised when different treatments are found to improve patient outcomes. Examining health records is an important part of this revision process, but inferring patients' actual treatments from health data is challenging due to complex event-coding schemes and the absence of pathway-related annotations. This study aims to infer the actual treatment steps for a particular patient group from administrative health records (AHR) - a common form of tabular healthcare data - and address several technique- and methodology-based gaps in treatment pathway-inference research. We introduce Defrag, a method for examining AHRs to infer the real-world treatment steps for a particular patient group. Defrag learns the semantic and temporal meaning of healthcare event sequences, allowing it to reliably infer treatment steps from complex healthcare data. To our knowledge, Defrag is the first pathway-inference method to utilise a neural network (NN), an approach made possible by a novel, self-supervised learning objective. We also developed a testing and validation framework for pathway inference, which we use to characterise and evaluate Defrag's pathway inference ability and compare against baselines. We demonstrate Defrag's effectiveness by identifying best-practice pathway fragments for breast cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma in public healthcare records. Additionally, we use synthetic data experiments to demonstrate the characteristics of the Defrag method, and to compare Defrag to several baselines where it significantly outperforms non-NN-based methods. Defrag significantly outperforms several existing pathway-inference methods and offers an innovative and effective approach for inferring treatment pathways from AHRs. Open-source code is provided to encourage further research in this area.
On the Planning, Search, and Memorization Capabilities of Large Language Models
Authors: Yunhao Yang, Anshul Tomar
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Memorization

The rapid advancement of large language models, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series, has had significant implications across various disciplines. In this study, we investigate the potential of the state-of-the-art large language model (GPT-4) for planning tasks. We explore its effectiveness in multiple planning subfields, highlighting both its strengths and limitations. Through a comprehensive examination, we identify areas where large language models excel in solving planning problems and reveal the constraints that limit their applicability. Our empirical analysis focuses on GPT-4's performance in planning domain extraction, graph search path planning, and adversarial planning. We then propose a way of fine-tuning a domain-specific large language model to improve its Chain of Thought (CoT) capabilities for the above-mentioned tasks. The results provide valuable insights into the potential applications of large language models in the planning domain and pave the way for future research to overcome their limitations and expand their capabilities.