pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Show me what you want: Inverse reinforcement learning to automatically design robot swarms by demonstration
Authors: Ilyes Gharbi, Jonas Kuckling, David Garzón Ramos, Mauro Birattari
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Automatic design is a promising approach to generating control software for robot swarms. So far, automatic design has relied on mission-specific objective functions to specify the desired collective behavior. In this paper, we explore the possibility to specify the desired collective behavior via demonstrations. We develop Demo-Cho, an automatic design method that combines inverse reinforcement learning with automatic modular design of control software for robot swarms. We show that, only on the basis of demonstrations and without the need to be provided with an explicit objective function, Demo-Cho successfully generated control software to perform four missions. We present results obtained in simulation and with physical robots.
CS-lol: a Dataset of Viewer Comment with Scene in E-sports Live-streaming
Authors: Junjie H. Xu, Yu Nakano, Lingrong Kong, Kojiro Iizuka
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Billions of live-streaming viewers share their opinions on scenes they are watching in real-time and interact with the event, commentators as well as other viewers via text comments. Thus, there is necessary to explore viewers' comments with scenes in E-sport live-streaming events. In this paper, we developed CS-lol, a new large-scale dataset containing comments from viewers paired with descriptions of game scenes in E-sports live-streaming. Moreover, we propose a task, namely viewer comment retrieval, to retrieve the viewer comments for the scene of the live-streaming event. Results on a series of baseline retrieval methods derived from typical IR evaluation methods show our task as a challenging task. Finally, we release CS-lol and baseline implementation to the research community as a resource.
Sim-Anchored Learning for On-the-Fly Adaptation
Authors: Bassel El Mabsout, Shahin Roozkhosh, Siddharth Mysore, Kate Saenko, Renato Mancuso
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Fine-tuning simulation-trained RL agents with real-world data often degrades crucial behaviors due to limited or skewed data distributions. We argue that designer priorities exist not just in reward functions, but also in simulation design choices like task selection and state initialization. When adapting to real-world data, agents can experience catastrophic forgetting in important but underrepresented scenarios. We propose framing live-adaptation as a multi-objective optimization problem, where policy objectives must be satisfied both in simulation and reality. Our approach leverages critics from simulation as "anchors for design intent" (anchor critics). By jointly optimizing policies against both anchor critics and critics trained on real-world experience, our method enables adaptation while preserving prioritized behaviors from simulation. Evaluations demonstrate robust behavior retention in sim-to-sim benchmarks and a sim-to-real scenario with a racing quadrotor, allowing for power consumption reductions of up to 50% without control loss. We also contribute SwaNNFlight, an open-source firmware for enabling live adaptation on similar robotic platforms.
Dynamic Combination of Heterogeneous Models for Hierarchical Time Series
Authors: Xing Han, Jing Hu, Joydeep Ghosh
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We introduce a framework to dynamically combine heterogeneous models called \texttt{DYCHEM}, which forecasts a set of time series that are related through an aggregation hierarchy. Different types of forecasting models can be employed as individual ``experts'' so that each model is tailored to the nature of the corresponding time series. \texttt{DYCHEM} learns hierarchical structures during the training stage to help generalize better across all the time series being modeled and also mitigates coherency issues that arise due to constraints imposed by the hierarchy. To improve the reliability of forecasts, we construct quantile estimations based on the point forecasts obtained from combined heterogeneous models. The resulting quantile forecasts are coherent and independent of the choice of forecasting models. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of both point and quantile forecasts for hierarchical time series (HTS), including public data and user records from a large financial software company. In general, our method is robust, adaptive to datasets with different properties, and highly configurable and efficient for large-scale forecasting pipelines.
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Authors: fd
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: sdf 2020 2

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A Step-by-Step Gradient Penalty with Similarity Calculation for Text Summary Generation
Authors: Shuai Zhao
Date: 2022-09-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Neural Processing Letters 2022 9
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization

The summary generation model equipped with gradient penalty avoids overfitting and makes the model more stable. However, the traditional gradient penalty faces two issues: (i) calculating the gradient twice increases training time, and (ii) the disturbance factor requires repeated trials to find the best value. To this end, we propose a step-by-step gradient penalty model with similarity calculation (S2SGP). Firstly, the step-by-step gradient penalty is applied to the summary generation model, effectively reducing the training time without sacrificing accuracy. Secondly, the similarity score between reference and candidate summary is calculated as disturbance factor. To show the performance of our proposed solution, we conduct experiments on four summary generation datasets, among which the EDUSum dataset is newly produced by us. Experimental results show that S2SGP effectively reduces training time, and the disturbance factors do not rely on repeated trials. Especially, our model outperforms the baseline by more than 2.4 ROUGE-L points when tested on the CSL dataset.
CaRE: Finding Root Causes of Configuration Issues in Highly-Configurable Robots
Authors: Md Abir Hossen, Sonam Kharade, Bradley Schmerl, Javier Cámara, Jason M. O'Kane, Ellen C. Czaplinski, Katherine A. Dzurilla, David Garlan, Pooyan Jamshidi
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00

Robotic systems have subsystems with a combinatorially large configuration space and hundreds or thousands of possible software and hardware configuration options interacting non-trivially. The configurable parameters are set to target specific objectives, but they can cause functional faults when incorrectly configured. Finding the root cause of such faults is challenging due to the exponentially large configuration space and the dependencies between the robot's configuration settings and performance. This paper proposes CaRE -- a method for diagnosing the root cause of functional faults through the lens of causality. CaRE abstracts the causal relationships between various configuration options and the robot's performance objectives by learning a causal structure and estimating the causal effects of options on robot performance indicators. We demonstrate CaRE's efficacy by finding the root cause of the observed functional faults and validating the diagnosed root cause by conducting experiments in both physical robots (Husky and Turtlebot 3) and in simulation (Gazebo). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the causal models learned from robots in simulation (e.g., Husky in Gazebo) are transferable to physical robots across different platforms (e.g., Husky and Turtlebot 3).
Non-parametric identifiability and sensitivity analysis of synthetic control models
Authors: Jakob Zeitler, Athanasios Vlontzos, Ciaran M. Gilligan-Lee
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Sensitivity

Quantifying cause and effect relationships is an important problem in many domains. The gold standard solution is to conduct a randomised controlled trial. However, in many situations such trials cannot be performed. In the absence of such trials, many methods have been devised to quantify the causal impact of an intervention from observational data given certain assumptions. One widely used method are synthetic control models. While identifiability of the causal estimand in such models has been obtained from a range of assumptions, it is widely and implicitly assumed that the underlying assumptions are satisfied for all time periods both pre- and post-intervention. This is a strong assumption, as synthetic control models can only be learned in pre-intervention period. In this paper we address this challenge, and prove identifiability can be obtained without the need for this assumption, by showing it follows from the principle of invariant causal mechanisms. Moreover, for the first time, we formulate and study synthetic control models in Pearl's structural causal model framework. Importantly, we provide a general framework for sensitivity analysis of synthetic control causal inference to violations of the assumptions underlying non-parametric identifiability. We end by providing an empirical demonstration of our sensitivity analysis framework on simulated and real data in the widely-used linear synthetic control framework.
A Comparative Analysis of Bias Amplification in Graph Neural Network Approaches for Recommender Systems
Authors: Nikzad Chizari, Niloufar Shoeibi, María N. Moreno-García
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Recommendation Systems

Recommender Systems (RSs) are used to provide users with personalized item recommendations and help them overcome the problem of information overload. Currently, recommendation methods based on deep learning are gaining ground over traditional methods such as matrix factorization due to their ability to represent the complex relationships between users and items and to incorporate additional information. The fact that these data have a graph structure and the greater capability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn from these structures has led to their successful incorporation into recommender systems. However, the bias amplification issue needs to be investigated while using these algorithms. Bias results in unfair decisions, which can negatively affect the company reputation and financial status due to societal disappointment and environmental harm. In this paper, we aim to comprehensively study this problem through a literature review and an analysis of the behavior against biases of different GNN-based algorithms compared to state-of-the-art methods. We also intend to explore appropriate solutions to tackle this issue with the least possible impact on the model performance.
Generative AI-empowered Effective Physical-Virtual Synchronization in the Vehicular Metaverse
Authors: Minrui Xu, Dusit Niyato, Hongliang Zhang, Jiawen Kang, Zehui Xiong, Shiwen Mao, Zhu Han
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

Metaverse seamlessly blends the physical world and virtual space via ubiquitous communication and computing infrastructure. In transportation systems, the vehicular Metaverse can provide a fully-immersive and hyperreal traveling experience (e.g., via augmented reality head-up displays, AR-HUDs) to drivers and users in autonomous vehicles (AVs) via roadside units (RSUs). However, provisioning real-time and immersive services necessitates effective physical-virtual synchronization between physical and virtual entities, i.e., AVs and Metaverse AR recommenders (MARs). In this paper, we propose a generative AI-empowered physical-virtual synchronization framework for the vehicular Metaverse. In physical-to-virtual synchronization, digital twin (DT) tasks generated by AVs are offloaded for execution in RSU with future route generation. In virtual-to-physical synchronization, MARs customize diverse and personal AR recommendations via generative AI models based on user preferences. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task enhanced auction-based mechanism to match and price AVs and MARs for RSUs to provision real-time and effective services. Finally, property analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is strategy-proof and adverse-selection free while increasing social surplus by 50%.
Training Semantic Segmentation on Heterogeneous Datasets
Authors: Panagiotis Meletis, Gijs Dubbelman
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We explore semantic segmentation beyond the conventional, single-dataset homogeneous training and bring forward the problem of Heterogeneous Training of Semantic Segmentation (HTSS). HTSS involves simultaneous training on multiple heterogeneous datasets, i.e. datasets with conflicting label spaces and different (weak) annotation types from the perspective of semantic segmentation. The HTSS formulation exposes deep networks to a larger and previously unexplored aggregation of information that can potentially enhance semantic segmentation in three directions: i) performance: increased segmentation metrics on seen datasets, ii) generalization: improved segmentation metrics on unseen datasets, and iii) knowledgeability: increased number of recognizable semantic concepts. To research these benefits of HTSS, we propose a unified framework, that incorporates heterogeneous datasets in a single-network training pipeline following the established FCN standard. Our framework first curates heterogeneous datasets to bring them into a common format and then trains a single-backbone FCN on all of them simultaneously. To achieve this, it transforms weak annotations, which are incompatible with semantic segmentation, to per-pixel labels, and hierarchizes their label spaces into a universal taxonomy. The trained HTSS models demonstrate performance and generalization gains over a wide range of datasets and extend the inference label space entailing hundreds of semantic classes.
Generalisation Through Negation and Predicate Invention
Authors: David M. Cerna, Andrew Cropper
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive logic programming, Negation

The ability to generalise from a small number of examples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an inductive logic programming (ILP) approach that combines negation and predicate invention. Combining these two features allows an ILP system to generalise better by learning rules with universally quantified body-only variables. We implement our idea in NOPI, which can learn normal logic programs with predicate invention, including Datalog programs with stratified negation. Our experimental results on multiple domains show that our approach can improve predictive accuracies and learning times.
A novel dataset and a two-stage mitosis nuclei detection method based on hybrid anchor branch
Authors: Huadeng Wang, Hao Xu, Bingbing Li, Xipeng Pan, Lingqi Zeng, Rushi Lan, Xiaonan Luo
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Mitosis Detection

Mitosis detection is one of the challenging problems in computational pathology, and mitotic count is an important index of cancer grading for pathologists. However, current counts of mitotic nuclei rely on pathologists looking microscopically at the number of mitotic nuclei in hot spots, which is subjective and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a two-stage cascaded network, named FoCasNet, for mitosis detection. In the first stage, a detection network named M_det is proposed to detect as many mitoses as possible. In the second stage, a classification network M_class is proposed to refine the results of the first stage. In addition, the attention mechanism, normalization method, and hybrid anchor branch classification subnet are introduced to improve the overall detection performance. Our method achieves the current highest F1-score of 0.888 on the public dataset ICPR 2012. We also evaluated our method on the GZMH dataset released by our research team for the first time and reached the highest F1-score of 0.563, which is also better than multiple classic detection networks widely used at present. It confirmed the effectiveness and generalization of our method. The code will be available at: https://github.com/antifen/mitosis-nuclei-detection.
Performance-Preserving Event Log Sampling for Predictive Monitoring
Authors: Mohammadreza Fani Sani, Mozhgan Vazifehdoostirani, Gyunam Park, Marco Pegoraro, Sebastiaan J. van Zelst, Wil M. P. van der Aalst
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Predictive Process Monitoring

Predictive process monitoring is a subfield of process mining that aims to estimate case or event features for running process instances. Such predictions are of significant interest to the process stakeholders. However, most of the state-of-the-art methods for predictive monitoring require the training of complex machine learning models, which is often inefficient. Moreover, most of these methods require a hyper-parameter optimization that requires several repetitions of the training process which is not feasible in many real-life applications. In this paper, we propose an instance selection procedure that allows sampling training process instances for prediction models. We show that our instance selection procedure allows for a significant increase of training speed for next activity and remaining time prediction methods while maintaining reliable levels of prediction accuracy.
Human-Timescale Adaptation in an Open-Ended Task Space
Authors: Adaptive Agent Team, Jakob Bauer, Kate Baumli, Satinder Baveja, Feryal Behbahani, Avishkar Bhoopchand, Nathalie Bradley-Schmieg, Michael Chang, Natalie Clay, Adrian Collister, Vibhavari Dasagi, Lucy Gonzalez, Karol Gregor, Edward Hughes, Sheleem Kashem, Maria Loks-Thompson, Hannah Openshaw, Jack Parker-Holder, Shreya Pathak, Nicolas Perez-Nieves, Nemanja Rakicevic, Tim Rocktäschel, Yannick Schroecker, Jakub Sygnowski, Karl Tuyls, Sarah York, Alexander Zacherl, Lei Zhang
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Meta Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Self-Supervised Learning

Foundation models have shown impressive adaptation and scalability in supervised and self-supervised learning problems, but so far these successes have not fully translated to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we demonstrate that training an RL agent at scale leads to a general in-context learning algorithm that can adapt to open-ended novel embodied 3D problems as quickly as humans. In a vast space of held-out environment dynamics, our adaptive agent (AdA) displays on-the-fly hypothesis-driven exploration, efficient exploitation of acquired knowledge, and can successfully be prompted with first-person demonstrations. Adaptation emerges from three ingredients: (1) meta-reinforcement learning across a vast, smooth and diverse task distribution, (2) a policy parameterised as a large-scale attention-based memory architecture, and (3) an effective automated curriculum that prioritises tasks at the frontier of an agent's capabilities. We demonstrate characteristic scaling laws with respect to network size, memory length, and richness of the training task distribution. We believe our results lay the foundation for increasingly general and adaptive RL agents that perform well across ever-larger open-ended domains.
Joint Representation Learning for Text and 3D Point Cloud
Authors: Rui Huang, Xuran Pan, Henry Zheng, Haojun Jiang, Zhifeng Xie, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advancements in vision-language pre-training (e.g. CLIP) have shown that vision models can benefit from language supervision. While many models using language modality have achieved great success on 2D vision tasks, the joint representation learning of 3D point cloud with text remains under-explored due to the difficulty of 3D-Text data pair acquisition and the irregularity of 3D data structure. In this paper, we propose a novel Text4Point framework to construct language-guided 3D point cloud models. The key idea is utilizing 2D images as a bridge to connect the point cloud and the language modalities. The proposed Text4Point follows the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. During the pre-training stage, we establish the correspondence of images and point clouds based on the readily available RGB-D data and use contrastive learning to align the image and point cloud representations. Together with the well-aligned image and text features achieved by CLIP, the point cloud features are implicitly aligned with the text embeddings. Further, we propose a Text Querying Module to integrate language information into 3D representation learning by querying text embeddings with point cloud features. For fine-tuning, the model learns task-specific 3D representations under informative language guidance from the label set without 2D images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model shows consistent improvement on various downstream tasks, such as point cloud semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. The code will be available here: https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Text4Point
Synthcity: facilitating innovative use cases of synthetic data in different data modalities
Authors: Zhaozhi Qian, Bogdan-Constantin Cebere, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Irregular Time Series, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Synthcity is an open-source software package for innovative use cases of synthetic data in ML fairness, privacy and augmentation across diverse tabular data modalities, including static data, regular and irregular time series, data with censoring, multi-source data, composite data, and more. Synthcity provides the practitioners with a single access point to cutting edge research and tools in synthetic data. It also offers the community a playground for rapid experimentation and prototyping, a one-stop-shop for SOTA benchmarks, and an opportunity for extending research impact. The library can be accessed on GitHub (https://github.com/vanderschaarlab/synthcity) and pip (https://pypi.org/project/synthcity/). We warmly invite the community to join the development effort by providing feedback, reporting bugs, and contributing code.
Targeted Image Reconstruction by Sampling Pre-trained Diffusion Model
Authors: Jiageng Zheng
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

A trained neural network model contains information on the training data. Given such a model, malicious parties can leverage the "knowledge" in this model and design ways to print out any usable information (known as model inversion attack). Therefore, it is valuable to explore the ways to conduct a such attack and demonstrate its severity. In this work, we proposed ways to generate a data point of the target class without prior knowledge of the exact target distribution by using a pre-trained diffusion model.
Logic programming for deliberative robotic task planning
Authors: Daniele Meli, Hirenkumar Nakawala, Paolo Fiorini
Date: 2023-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Task Planning

Over the last decade, the use of robots in production and daily life has increased. With increasingly complex tasks and interaction in different environments including humans, robots are required a higher level of autonomy for efficient deliberation. Task planning is a key element of deliberation. It combines elementary operations into a structured plan to satisfy a prescribed goal, given specifications on the robot and the environment. In this manuscript, we present a survey on recent advances in the application of logic programming to the problem of task planning. Logic programming offers several advantages compared to other approaches, including greater expressivity and interpretability which may aid in the development of safe and reliable robots. We analyze different planners and their suitability for specific robotic applications, based on expressivity in domain representation, computational efficiency and software implementation. In this way, we support the robotic designer in choosing the best tool for his application.