pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Datasets and Benchmarks for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zuxin Liu, Zijian Guo, Haohong Lin, Yihang Yao, Jiacheng Zhu, Zhepeng Cen, Hanjiang Hu, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Jie Tan, Ding Zhao
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Benchmarking, CPU, D4RL, GPU, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking suite tailored to offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) challenges, aiming to foster progress in the development and evaluation of safe learning algorithms in both the training and deployment phases. Our benchmark suite contains three packages: 1) expertly crafted safe policies, 2) D4RL-styled datasets along with environment wrappers, and 3) high-quality offline safe RL baseline implementations. We feature a methodical data collection pipeline powered by advanced safe RL algorithms, which facilitates the generation of diverse datasets across 38 popular safe RL tasks, from robot control to autonomous driving. We further introduce an array of data post-processing filters, capable of modifying each dataset's diversity, thereby simulating various data collection conditions. Additionally, we provide elegant and extensible implementations of prevalent offline safe RL algorithms to accelerate research in this area. Through extensive experiments with over 50000 CPU and 800 GPU hours of computations, we evaluate and compare the performance of these baseline algorithms on the collected datasets, offering insights into their strengths, limitations, and potential areas of improvement. Our benchmarking framework serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, facilitating the development of more robust and reliable offline safe RL solutions in safety-critical applications. The benchmark website is available at \url{www.offline-saferl.org}.
Knowledge Guided Representation Learning and Causal Structure Learning in Soil Science
Authors: Somya Sharma, Swati Sharma, Licheng Liu, Rishabh Tushir, Andy Neal, Robert Ness, John Crawford, Emre Kiciman, Ranveer Chandra
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Representation Learning

An improved understanding of soil can enable more sustainable land-use practices. Nevertheless, soil is called a complex, living medium due to the complex interaction of different soil processes that limit our understanding of soil. Process-based models and analyzing observed data provide two avenues for improving our understanding of soil processes. Collecting observed data is cost-prohibitive but reflects real-world behavior, while process-based models can be used to generate ample synthetic data which may not be representative of reality. We propose a framework, knowledge-guided representation learning, and causal structure learning (KGRCL), to accelerate scientific discoveries in soil science. The framework improves representation learning for simulated soil processes via conditional distribution matching with observed soil processes. Simultaneously, the framework leverages both observed and simulated data to learn a causal structure among the soil processes. The learned causal graph is more representative of ground truth than other graphs generated from other causal discovery methods. Furthermore, the learned causal graph is leveraged in a supervised learning setup to predict the impact of fertilizer use and changing weather on soil carbon. We present the results in five different locations to show the improvement in the prediction performance in out-of-sample and few-shots setting.
Can Language Models Teach Weaker Agents? Teacher Explanations Improve Students via Personalization
Authors: Swarnadeep Saha, Peter Hase, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00

A hallmark property of explainable AI models is the ability to teach other agents, communicating knowledge of how to perform a task. While Large Language Models perform complex reasoning by generating explanations for their predictions, it is unclear whether they also make good teachers for weaker agents. To address this, we consider a student-teacher framework between two LLM agents and study if, when, and how the teacher should intervene with natural language explanations to improve the student's performance. Since communication is expensive, we define a budget such that the teacher only communicates explanations for a fraction of the data, after which the student should perform well on its own. We decompose the teaching problem along four axes: (1) if teacher's test time intervention improve student predictions, (2) when it is worth explaining a data point, (3) how the teacher should personalize explanations to better teach the student, and (4) if teacher explanations also improve students on future unexplained data. We first show that teacher LLMs can indeed intervene on student reasoning to improve their performance. Next, inspired by the Theory of Mind abilities of effective teachers, we propose building two few-shot mental models of the student. The first model defines an Intervention Function that simulates the utility of an intervention, allowing the teacher to intervene when this utility is the highest and improving student performance at lower budgets. The second model enables the teacher to personalize explanations for a particular student and outperform unpersonalized teachers. We also demonstrate that in multi-turn interactions, teacher explanations generalize and learning from explained data improves student performance on future unexplained data. Finally, we verify that misaligned teachers can lower student performance to random chance by intentionally misleading them.
[Experiments & Analysis] Evaluating the Feasibility of Sampling-Based Techniques for Training Multilayer Perceptrons
Authors: Sana Ebrahimi, Rishi Advani, Abolfazl Asudeh
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

The training process of neural networks is known to be time-consuming, and having a deep architecture only aggravates the issue. This process consists mostly of matrix operations, among which matrix multiplication is the bottleneck. Several sampling-based techniques have been proposed for speeding up the training time of deep neural networks by approximating the matrix products. These techniques fall under two categories: (i) sampling a subset of nodes in every hidden layer as active at every iteration and (ii) sampling a subset of nodes from the previous layer to approximate the current layer's activations using the edges from the sampled nodes. In both cases, the matrix products are computed using only the selected samples. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of these approaches on CPU machines with limited computational resources. Making a connection between the two research directions as special cases of approximating matrix multiplications in the context of neural networks, we provide a negative theoretical analysis that shows feedforward approximation is an obstacle against scalability. We conduct comprehensive experimental evaluations that demonstrate the most pressing challenges and limitations associated with the studied approaches. We observe that the hashing-based node selection method is not scalable to a large number of layers, confirming our theoretical analysis. Finally, we identify directions for future research.
Are ChatGPT and Other Similar Systems the Modern Lernaean Hydras of AI?
Authors: Dimitrios Ioannidis, Jeremy Kepner, Andrew Bowne, Harriet S. Bryant
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence systems ("AI systems") has created unprecedented social engagement. AI code generation systems provide responses (output) to questions or requests by accessing the vast library of open-source code created by developers over the past few decades. However, they do so by allegedly stealing the open-source code stored in virtual libraries, known as repositories. This Article focuses on how this happens and whether there is a solution that protects innovation and avoids years of litigation. We also touch upon the array of issues raised by the relationship between AI and copyright. Looking ahead, we propose the following: (a) immediate changes to the licenses for open-source code created by developers that will limit access and/or use of any open-source code to humans only; (b) we suggest revisions to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("MIT") license so that AI systems are required to procure appropriate licenses from open-source code developers, which we believe will harmonize standards and build social consensus for the benefit of all of humanity, rather than promote profit-driven centers of innovation; (c) we call for urgent legislative action to protect the future of AI systems while also promoting innovation; and (d) we propose a shift in the burden of proof to AI systems in obfuscation cases.
LVLM-eHub: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Peng Xu, Wenqi Shao, Kaipeng Zhang, Peng Gao, Shuo Liu, Meng Lei, Fanqing Meng, Siyuan Huang, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Image Captioning, Instruction Following, Object Hallucination, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently played a dominant role in multimodal vision-language learning. Despite the great success, it lacks a holistic evaluation of their efficacy. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of publicly available large multimodal models by building a LVLM evaluation Hub (LVLM-eHub). Our LVLM-eHub consists of $8$ representative LVLMs such as InstructBLIP and MiniGPT-4, which are thoroughly evaluated by a quantitative capability evaluation and an online arena platform. The former evaluates $6$ categories of multimodal capabilities of LVLMs such as visual question answering and embodied artificial intelligence on $47$ standard text-related visual benchmarks, while the latter provides the user-level evaluation of LVLMs in an open-world question-answering scenario. The study reveals several innovative findings. First, instruction-tuned LVLM with massive in-domain data such as InstructBLIP heavily overfits many existing tasks, generalizing poorly in the open-world scenario. Second, instruction-tuned LVLM with moderate instruction-following data may result in object hallucination issues (i.e., generate objects that are inconsistent with target images in the descriptions). It either makes the current evaluation metric such as CIDEr for image captioning ineffective or generates wrong answers. Third, employing a multi-turn reasoning evaluation framework can mitigate the issue of object hallucination, shedding light on developing an effective pipeline for LVLM evaluation. The findings provide a foundational framework for the conception and assessment of innovative strategies aimed at enhancing zero-shot multimodal techniques. Our LVLM-eHub will be available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Multi-Modality-Arena
One Law, Many Languages: Benchmarking Multilingual Legal Reasoning for Judicial Support
Authors: Ronja Stern, Vishvaksenan Rasiah, Veton Matoshi, Srinanda Brügger Bose, Matthias Stürmer, Ilias Chalkidis, Daniel E. Ho, Joel Niklaus
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Information Retrieval, Language Modelling, Legal Reasoning, text-classification, Text Classification

Recent strides in Large Language Models (LLMs) have saturated many Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks, emphasizing the need for more challenging ones to properly assess LLM capabilities. However, domain-specific and multilingual benchmarks are rare because they require in-depth expertise to develop. Still, most public models are trained predominantly on English corpora, while other languages remain understudied, particularly for practical domain-specific NLP tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel NLP benchmark for the legal domain that challenges LLMs in five key dimensions: processing \emph{long documents} (up to 50K tokens), using \emph{domain-specific knowledge} (embodied in legal texts), \emph{multilingual} understanding (covering five languages), \emph{multitasking} (comprising legal document-to-document Information Retrieval, Court View Generation, Leading Decision Summarization, Citation Extraction, and eight challenging Text Classification tasks) and \emph{reasoning} (comprising especially Court View Generation, but also the Text Classification tasks). Our benchmark contains diverse datasets from the Swiss legal system, allowing for a comprehensive study of the underlying non-English, inherently multilingual legal system. Despite the large size of our datasets (some with hundreds of thousands of examples), existing publicly available multilingual models struggle with most tasks, even after extensive in-domain pre-training and fine-tuning. We publish all resources (benchmark suite, pre-trained models, code) under permissive open CC BY-SA licenses.
Stochastic Re-weighted Gradient Descent via Distributionally Robust Optimization
Authors: Ramnath Kumar, Kushal Majmundar, Dheeraj Nagaraj, Arun Sai Suggala
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, Meta-Learning, Representation Learning, tabular-classification

We present Re-weighted Gradient Descent (RGD), a novel optimization technique that improves the performance of deep neural networks through dynamic sample re-weighting. Leveraging insights from distributionally robust optimization (DRO) with Kullback-Leibler divergence, our method dynamically assigns importance weights to training data during each optimization step. RGD is simple to implement, computationally efficient, and compatible with widely used optimizers such as SGD and Adam. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RGD on various learning tasks, including supervised learning, meta-learning, and out-of-domain generalization. Notably, RGD achieves state-of-the-art results on diverse benchmarks, with improvements of +0.7% on DomainBed, +1.44% on tabular classification, \textcolor{blue}+1.94% on GLUE with BERT, and +1.01% on ImageNet-1K with ViT.
Neural World Models for Computer Vision
Authors: Anthony Hu
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Autonomous Driving, Inductive Bias, Navigate, Optical Flow Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Humans navigate in their environment by learning a mental model of the world through passive observation and active interaction. Their world model allows them to anticipate what might happen next and act accordingly with respect to an underlying objective. Such world models hold strong promises for planning in complex environments like in autonomous driving. A human driver, or a self-driving system, perceives their surroundings with their eyes or their cameras. They infer an internal representation of the world which should: (i) have spatial memory (e.g. occlusions), (ii) fill partially observable or noisy inputs (e.g. when blinded by sunlight), and (iii) be able to reason about unobservable events probabilistically (e.g. predict different possible futures). They are embodied intelligent agents that can predict, plan, and act in the physical world through their world model. In this thesis we present a general framework to train a world model and a policy, parameterised by deep neural networks, from camera observations and expert demonstrations. We leverage important computer vision concepts such as geometry, semantics, and motion to scale world models to complex urban driving scenes. First, we propose a model that predicts important quantities in computer vision: depth, semantic segmentation, and optical flow. We then use 3D geometry as an inductive bias to operate in the bird's-eye view space. We present for the first time a model that can predict probabilistic future trajectories of dynamic agents in bird's-eye view from 360{\deg} surround monocular cameras only. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of learning a world model in closed-loop driving. Our model can jointly predict static scene, dynamic scene, and ego-behaviour in an urban driving environment.
Opportunities for Large Language Models and Discourse in Engineering Design
Authors: Jan Göpfert, Jann M. Weinand, Patrick Kuckertz, Detlef Stolten
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00

In recent years, large language models have achieved breakthroughs on a wide range of benchmarks in natural language processing and continue to increase in performance. Recently, the advances of large language models have raised interest outside the natural language processing community and could have a large impact on daily life. In this paper, we pose the question: How will large language models and other foundation models shape the future product development process? We provide the reader with an overview of the subject by summarizing both recent advances in natural language processing and the use of information technology in the engineering design process. We argue that discourse should be regarded as the core of engineering design processes, and therefore should be represented in a digital artifact. On this basis, we describe how foundation models such as large language models could contribute to the design discourse by automating parts thereof that involve creativity and reasoning, and were previously reserved for humans. We describe how simulations, experiments, topology optimizations, and other process steps can be integrated into a machine-actionable, discourse-centric design process. Finally, we outline the future research that will be necessary for the implementation of the conceptualized framework.
Probabilistic Learning of Multivariate Time Series with Temporal Irregularity
Authors: Yijun Li, Cheuk Hang Leung, Qi Wu
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Time Series

Multivariate sequential data collected in practice often exhibit temporal irregularities, including nonuniform time intervals and component misalignment. However, if uneven spacing and asynchrony are endogenous characteristics of the data rather than a result of insufficient observation, the information content of these irregularities plays a defining role in characterizing the multivariate dependence structure. Existing approaches for probabilistic forecasting either overlook the resulting statistical heterogeneities, are susceptible to imputation biases, or impose parametric assumptions on the data distribution. This paper proposes an end-to-end solution that overcomes these limitations by allowing the observation arrival times to play the central role of model construction, which is at the core of temporal irregularities. To acknowledge temporal irregularities, we first enable unique hidden states for components so that the arrival times can dictate when, how, and which hidden states to update. We then develop a conditional flow representation to non-parametrically represent the data distribution, which is typically non-Gaussian, and supervise this representation by carefully factorizing the log-likelihood objective to select conditional information that facilitates capturing time variation and path dependency. The broad applicability and superiority of the proposed solution are confirmed by comparing it with existing approaches through ablation studies and testing on real-world datasets.
Exploiting Uncertainty for Querying Inconsistent Description Logics Knowledge Bases
Authors: Riccardo Zese, Evelina Lamma, Fabrizio Riguzzi
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00

The necessity to manage inconsistency in Description Logics Knowledge Bases (KBs) has come to the fore with the increasing importance gained by the Semantic Web, where information comes from different sources that constantly change their content and may contain contradictory descriptions when considered either alone or together. Classical reasoning algorithms do not handle inconsistent KBs, forcing the debugging of the KB in order to remove the inconsistency. In this paper, we exploit an existing probabilistic semantics called DISPONTE to overcome this problem and allow queries also in case of inconsistent KBs. We implemented our approach in the reasoners TRILL and BUNDLE and empirically tested the validity of our proposal. Moreover, we formally compare the presented approach to that of the repair semantics, one of the most established semantics when considering DL reasoning tasks.
DIFFender: Diffusion-Based Adversarial Defense against Patch Attacks
Authors: Caixin Kang, Yinpeng Dong, Zhengyi Wang, Shouwei Ruan, Yubo Chen, Hang Su, Xingxing Wei
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, Face Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification

Adversarial attacks, particularly patch attacks, pose significant threats to the robustness and reliability of deep learning models. Developing reliable defenses against patch attacks is crucial for real-world applications. This paper introduces DIFFender, a novel defense framework that harnesses the capabilities of a text-guided diffusion model to combat patch attacks. Central to our approach is the discovery of the Adversarial Anomaly Perception (AAP) phenomenon, which empowers the diffusion model to detect and localize adversarial patches through the analysis of distributional discrepancies. DIFFender integrates dual tasks of patch localization and restoration within a single diffusion model framework, utilizing their close interaction to enhance defense efficacy. Moreover, DIFFender utilizes vision-language pre-training coupled with an efficient few-shot prompt-tuning algorithm, which streamlines the adaptation of the pre-trained diffusion model to defense tasks, thus eliminating the need for extensive retraining. Our comprehensive evaluation spans image classification and face recognition tasks, extending to real-world scenarios, where DIFFender shows good robustness against adversarial attacks. The versatility and generalizability of DIFFender are evident across a variety of settings, classifiers, and attack methodologies, marking an advancement in adversarial patch defense strategies.
Hyperbolic Representation Learning: Revisiting and Advancing
Authors: Menglin Yang, Min Zhou, Rex Ying, Yankai Chen, Irwin King
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

The non-Euclidean geometry of hyperbolic spaces has recently garnered considerable attention in the realm of representation learning. Current endeavors in hyperbolic representation largely presuppose that the underlying hierarchies can be automatically inferred and preserved through the adaptive optimization process. This assumption, however, is questionable and requires further validation. In this work, we first introduce a position-tracking mechanism to scrutinize existing prevalent \hlms, revealing that the learned representations are sub-optimal and unsatisfactory. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, hyperbolic informed embedding (HIE), by incorporating cost-free hierarchical information deduced from the hyperbolic distance of the node to origin (i.e., induced hyperbolic norm) to advance existing \hlms. The proposed method HIE is both task-agnostic and model-agnostic, enabling its seamless integration with a broad spectrum of models and tasks. Extensive experiments across various models and different tasks demonstrate the versatility and adaptability of the proposed method. Remarkably, our method achieves a remarkable improvement of up to 21.4\% compared to the competing baselines.