pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
I Was Blind but Now I See: Implementing Vision-Enabled Dialogue in Social Robots
Authors: Giulio Antonio Abbo, Tony Belpaeme
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Prompt Engineering

In the rapidly evolving landscape of human-computer interaction, the integration of vision capabilities into conversational agents stands as a crucial advancement. This paper presents an initial implementation of a dialogue manager that leverages the latest progress in Large Language Models (e.g., GPT-4, IDEFICS) to enhance the traditional text-based prompts with real-time visual input. LLMs are used to interpret both textual prompts and visual stimuli, creating a more contextually aware conversational agent. The system's prompt engineering, incorporating dialogue with summarisation of the images, ensures a balance between context preservation and computational efficiency. Six interactions with a Furhat robot powered by this system are reported, illustrating and discussing the results obtained. By implementing this vision-enabled dialogue system, the paper envisions a future where conversational agents seamlessly blend textual and visual modalities, enabling richer, more context-aware dialogues.
Safety, Trust, and Ethics Considerations for Human-AI Teaming in Aerospace Control
Authors: Kerianne L. Hobbs, Bernard Li
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Ethics

Designing a safe, trusted, and ethical AI may be practically impossible; however, designing AI with safe, trusted, and ethical use in mind is possible and necessary in safety and mission-critical domains like aerospace. Safe, trusted, and ethical use of AI are often used interchangeably; however, a system can be safely used but not trusted or ethical, have a trusted use that is not safe or ethical, and have an ethical use that is not safe or trusted. This manuscript serves as a primer to illuminate the nuanced differences between these concepts, with a specific focus on applications of Human-AI teaming in aerospace system control, where humans may be in, on, or out-of-the-loop of decision-making.
Transformers in the Service of Description Logic-based Contexts
Authors: Angelos Poulis, Eleni Tsalapati, Manolis Koubarakis
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Recent advancements in transformer-based models have initiated research interests in investigating their ability to learn to perform reasoning tasks. However, most of the contexts used for this purpose are in practice very simple: generated from short (fragments of) first-order logic sentences with only a few logical operators and quantifiers. In this work, we construct the natural language dataset, DELTA$_D$, using the description logic language $\mathcal{ALCQ}$. DELTA$_D$ contains 384K examples, and increases in two dimensions: i) reasoning depth, and ii) linguistic complexity. In this way, we systematically investigate the reasoning ability of a supervised fine-tuned DeBERTa-based model and of two large language models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4) with few-shot prompting. Our results demonstrate that the DeBERTa-based model can master the reasoning task and that the performance of GPTs can improve significantly even when a small number of samples is provided (9 shots). We open-source our code and datasets.
Supported Trust Region Optimization for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yixiu Mao, Hongchang Zhang, Chen Chen, Yi Xu, Xiangyang Ji
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning suffers from the out-of-distribution issue and extrapolation error. Most policy constraint methods regularize the density of the trained policy towards the behavior policy, which is too restrictive in most cases. We propose Supported Trust Region optimization (STR) which performs trust region policy optimization with the policy constrained within the support of the behavior policy, enjoying the less restrictive support constraint. We show that, when assuming no approximation and sampling error, STR guarantees strict policy improvement until convergence to the optimal support-constrained policy in the dataset. Further with both errors incorporated, STR still guarantees safe policy improvement for each step. Empirical results validate the theory of STR and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on MuJoCo locomotion domains and much more challenging AntMaze domains.
Leveraging Activation Maximization and Generative Adversarial Training to Recognize and Explain Patterns in Natural Areas in Satellite Imagery
Authors: Ahmed Emam, Timo T. Stomberg, Ribana Roscher
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Natural protected areas are vital for biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and supporting ecological processes. Despite their significance, comprehensive mapping is hindered by a lack of understanding of their characteristics and a missing land cover class definition. This paper aims to advance the explanation of the designating patterns forming protected and wild areas. To this end, we propose a novel framework that uses activation maximization and a generative adversarial model. With this, we aim to generate satellite images that, in combination with domain knowledge, are capable of offering complete and valid explanations for the spatial and spectral patterns that define the natural authenticity of these regions. Our proposed framework produces more precise attribution maps pinpointing the designating patterns forming the natural authenticity of protected areas. Our approach fosters our understanding of the ecological integrity of the protected natural areas and may contribute to future monitoring and preservation efforts.
Few-shot Transfer Learning for Knowledge Base Question Answering: Fusing Supervised Models with In-Context Learning
Authors: Mayur Patidar, Riya Sawhney, Avinash Singh, Biswajit Chatterjee, Mausam, Indrajit Bhattacharya
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Knowledge Base Question Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval, Transfer Learning

Existing Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) architectures are hungry for annotated data, which make them costly and time-consuming to deploy. We introduce the problem of few-shot transfer learning for KBQA, where the target domain offers only a few labeled examples, but a large labeled training dataset is available in a source domain. We propose a novel KBQA architecture called FuSIC-KBQA that performs KB-retrieval using multiple source-trained retrievers, re-ranks using an LLM and uses this as input for LLM few-shot in-context learning to generate logical forms. These are further refined using execution-guided feedback. Experiments over multiple source-target KBQA pairs of varying complexity show that FuSIC-KBQA significantly outperforms adaptations of SoTA KBQA models for this setting. Additional experiments show that FuSIC-KBQA also outperforms SoTA KBQA models in the in-domain setting when training data is limited.
Advances in ACL2 Proof Debugging Tools
Authors: Matt Kaufmann, J Strother Moore
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

The experience of an ACL2 user generally includes many failed proof attempts. A key to successful use of the ACL2 prover is the effective use of tools to debug those failures. We focus on changes made after ACL2 Version 8.5: the improved break-rewrite utility and the new utility, with-brr-data.
Evaluating Gender Bias in the Translation of Gender-Neutral Languages into English
Authors: Spencer Rarrick, Ranjita Naik, Sundar Poudel, Vishal Chowdhary
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Machine Translation (MT) continues to improve in quality and adoption, yet the inadvertent perpetuation of gender bias remains a significant concern. Despite numerous studies into gender bias in translations from gender-neutral languages such as Turkish into more strongly gendered languages like English, there are no benchmarks for evaluating this phenomenon or for assessing mitigation strategies. To address this gap, we introduce GATE X-E, an extension to the GATE (Rarrick et al., 2023) corpus, that consists of human translations from Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, and Persian into English. Each translation is accompanied by feminine, masculine, and neutral variants for each possible gender interpretation. The dataset, which contains between 1250 and 1850 instances for each of the four language pairs, features natural sentences with a wide range of sentence lengths and domains, challenging translation rewriters on various linguistic phenomena. Additionally, we present an English gender rewriting solution built on GPT-3.5 Turbo and use GATE X-E to evaluate it. We open source our contributions to encourage further research on gender debiasing.
A* search algorithm for an optimal investment problem in vehicle-sharing systems
Authors: Ba Luat Le, Layla Martin, Emrah Demir, Duc Minh Vu
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Traveling Salesman Problem

We study an optimal investment problem that arises in the context of the vehicle-sharing system. Given a set of locations to build stations, we need to determine i) the sequence of stations to be built and the number of vehicles to acquire in order to obtain the target state where all stations are built, and ii) the number of vehicles to acquire and their allocation in order to maximize the total profit returned by operating the system when some or all stations are open. The profitability associated with operating open stations, measured over a specific time period, is represented as a linear optimization problem applied to a collection of open stations. With operating capital, the owner of the system can open new stations. This property introduces a set-dependent aspect to the duration required for opening a new station, and the optimal investment problem can be viewed as a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) with set-dependent cost. We propose an A* search algorithm to address this particular variant of the TSP. Computational experiments highlight the benefits of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the widely recognized Dijkstra algorithm and propose future research to explore new possibilities and applications for both exact and approximate A* algorithms.
Exploring Links between Conversational Agent Design Challenges and Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Authors: Malak Sadek, Céline Mougenot
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

Recent years have seen a steady rise in the popularity and use of Conversational Agents (CA) for different applications, well before the more immediate impact of large language models. This rise has been accompanied by an extensive exploration and documentation of the challenges of designing and creating conversational agents. Focusing on a recent scoping review of the socio-technical challenges of CA creation, this opinion paper calls for an examination of the extent to which interdisciplinary collaboration (IDC) challenges might contribute towards socio-technical CA design challenges. The paper proposes a taxonomy of CA design challenges using IDC as a lens, and proposes practical strategies to overcome them which complement existing design principles. The paper invites future work to empirically verify suggested conceptual links and apply the proposed strategies within the space of CA design to evaluate their effectiveness.
Reinforcement Learning with Model Predictive Control for Highway Ramp Metering
Authors: Filippo Airaldi, Bart De Schutter, Azita Dabiri
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Model Predictive Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In the backdrop of an increasingly pressing need for effective urban and highway transportation systems, this work explores the synergy between model-based and learning-based strategies to enhance traffic flow management by use of an innovative approach to the problem of ramp metering control that embeds Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques within the Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework. The control problem is formulated as an RL task by crafting a suitable stage cost function that is representative of the traffic conditions, variability in the control action, and violations of the constraint on the maximum number of vehicles in queue. An MPC-based RL approach, which leverages the MPC optimal problem as a function approximation for the RL algorithm, is proposed to learn to efficiently control an on-ramp and satisfy its constraints despite uncertainties in the system model and variable demands. Simulations are performed on a benchmark small-scale highway network to compare the proposed methodology against other state-of-the-art control approaches. Results show that, starting from an MPC controller that has an imprecise model and is poorly tuned, the proposed methodology is able to effectively learn to improve the control policy such that congestion in the network is reduced and constraints are satisfied, yielding an improved performance that is superior to the other controllers.
MAP's not dead yet: Uncovering true language model modes by conditioning away degeneracy
Authors: Davis Yoshida, Kartik Goyal, Kevin Gimpel
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Text Generation

It has been widely observed that exact or approximate MAP (mode-seeking) decoding from natural language generation (NLG) models consistently leads to degenerate outputs (Holtzman et al., 2019; Stahlberg and Byrne, 2019). Prior work has attributed this behavior to either a fundamental and unavoidable inadequacy of modes in probabilistic models or weaknesses in language modeling. Contrastingly, we argue that degenerate modes can even occur in the absence of any modeling error, due to contamination of the training data. Specifically, we argue that mixing even a tiny amount of low-entropy noise with a population text distribution can cause the data distribution's mode to become degenerate. We therefore propose to apply MAP decoding to the model's true conditional distribution where the conditioning variable explicitly avoids specific degenerate behavior. Using exact search, we empirically verify that the length-conditional modes of machine translation models and language models are indeed more fluent and topical than their unconditional modes. For the first time, we also share many examples of exact modal sequences from these models, and from several variants of the LLaMA-7B model. Notably, we observe that various kinds of degenerate modes persist, even at the scale of LLaMA-7B. Although we cannot tractably address these degeneracies with exact search, we perform a classifier-based approximate search on LLaMA-7B, a model which was not trained for instruction following, and find that we are able to elicit reasonable outputs without any finetuning.
Self-Supervised Disentanglement by Leveraging Structure in Data Augmentations
Authors: Cian Eastwood, Julius von Kügelgen, Linus Ericsson, Diane Bouchacourt, Pascal Vincent, Bernhard Schölkopf, Mark Ibrahim
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Disentanglement, Representation Learning

Self-supervised representation learning often uses data augmentations to induce some invariance to "style" attributes of the data. However, with downstream tasks generally unknown at training time, it is difficult to deduce a priori which attributes of the data are indeed "style" and can be safely discarded. To deal with this, current approaches try to retain some style information by tuning the degree of invariance to some particular task, such as ImageNet object classification. However, prior work has shown that such task-specific tuning can lead to significant performance degradation on other tasks that rely on the discarded style. To address this, we introduce a more principled approach that seeks to disentangle style features rather than discard them. The key idea is to add multiple style embedding spaces where: (i) each is invariant to all-but-one augmentation; and (ii) joint entropy is maximized. We formalize our structured data-augmentation procedure from a causal latent-variable-model perspective, and prove identifiability of both content and individual style variables. We empirically demonstrate the benefits of our approach on both synthetic and real-world data.
SparseSpikformer: A Co-Design Framework for Token and Weight Pruning in Spiking Transformer
Authors: Yue Liu, Shanlin Xiao, Bo Li, Zhiyi Yu
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

As the third-generation neural network, the Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has the advantages of low power consumption and high energy efficiency, making it suitable for implementation on edge devices. More recently, the most advanced SNN, Spikformer, combines the self-attention module from Transformer with SNN to achieve remarkable performance. However, it adopts larger channel dimensions in MLP layers, leading to an increased number of redundant model parameters. To effectively decrease the computational complexity and weight parameters of the model, we explore the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and discover a very sparse ($\ge$90%) subnetwork that achieves comparable performance to the original network. Furthermore, we also design a lightweight token selector module, which can remove unimportant background information from images based on the average spike firing rate of neurons, selecting only essential foreground image tokens to participate in attention calculation. Based on that, we present SparseSpikformer, a co-design framework aimed at achieving sparsity in Spikformer through token and weight pruning techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework can significantly reduce 90% model parameters and cut down Giga Floating-Point Operations (GFLOPs) by 20% while maintaining the accuracy of the original model.
X-Eval: Generalizable Multi-aspect Text Evaluation via Augmented Instruction Tuning with Auxiliary Evaluation Aspects
Authors: Minqian Liu, Ying Shen, Zhiyang Xu, Yixin Cao, Eunah Cho, Vaibhav Kumar, Reza Ghanadan, Lifu Huang
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Language Modelling, nlg evaluation, Question Answering, Text Generation

Natural Language Generation (NLG) typically involves evaluating the generated text in various aspects (e.g., consistency and naturalness) to obtain a comprehensive assessment. However, multi-aspect evaluation remains challenging as it may require the evaluator to generalize to any given evaluation aspect even if it's absent during training. In this paper, we introduce X-Eval, a two-stage instruction tuning framework to evaluate the text in both seen and unseen aspects customized by end users. X-Eval consists of two learning stages: the vanilla instruction tuning stage that improves the model's ability to follow evaluation instructions, and an enhanced instruction tuning stage that exploits the connections between fine-grained evaluation aspects to better assess text quality. To support the training of X-Eval, we collect AspectInstruct, the first instruction tuning dataset tailored for multi-aspect NLG evaluation spanning 27 diverse evaluation aspects with 65 tasks. To enhance task diversity, we devise an augmentation strategy that converts human rating annotations into diverse forms of NLG evaluation tasks, including scoring, comparison, ranking, and Boolean question answering. Extensive experiments across three essential categories of NLG tasks: dialogue generation, summarization, and data-to-text coupled with 21 aspects in meta-evaluation, demonstrate that our X-Eval enables even a lightweight language model to achieve a comparable if not higher correlation with human judgments compared to the state-of-the-art NLG evaluators, such as GPT-4.
ICRA Roboethics Challenge 2023: Intelligent Disobedience in an Elderly Care Home
Authors: Sveta Paster, Kantwon Rogers, Gordon Briggs, Peter Stone, Reuth Mirsky
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

With the projected surge in the elderly population, service robots offer a promising avenue to enhance their well-being in elderly care homes. Such robots will encounter complex scenarios which will require them to perform decisions with ethical consequences. In this report, we propose to leverage the Intelligent Disobedience framework in order to give the robot the ability to perform a deliberation process over decisions with potential ethical implications. We list the issues that this framework can assist with, define it formally in the context of the specific elderly care home scenario, and delineate the requirements for implementing an intelligently disobeying robot. We conclude this report with some critical analysis and suggestions for future work.
Three Conjectures on Unexpectedeness
Authors: Giovanni Sileno, Jean-Louis Dessalles
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

Unexpectedness is a central concept in Simplicity Theory, a theory of cognition relating various inferential processes to the computation of Kolmogorov complexities, rather than probabilities. Its predictive power has been confirmed by several experiments with human subjects, yet its theoretical basis remains largely unexplored: why does it work? This paper lays the groundwork for three theoretical conjectures. First, unexpectedness can be seen as a generalization of Bayes' rule. Second, the frequentist core of unexpectedness can be connected to the function of tracking ergodic properties of the world. Third, unexpectedness can be seen as constituent of various measures of divergence between the entropy of the world (environment) and the variety of the observer (system). The resulting framework hints to research directions that go beyond the division between probabilistic and logical approaches, potentially bringing new insights into the extraction of causal relations, and into the role of descriptive mechanisms in learning.
Combining Past, Present and Future: A Self-Supervised Approach for Class Incremental Learning
Authors: Xiaoshuang Chen, Zhongyi Sun, Ke Yan, Shouhong Ding, Hongtao Lu
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to handle the scenario where data of novel classes occur continuously and sequentially. The model should recognize the sequential novel classes while alleviating the catastrophic forgetting. In the self-supervised manner, it becomes more challenging to avoid the conflict between the feature embedding spaces of novel classes and old ones without any class labels. To address the problem, we propose a self-supervised CIL framework CPPF, meaning Combining Past, Present and Future. In detail, CPPF consists of a prototype clustering module (PC), an embedding space reserving module (ESR) and a multi-teacher distillation module (MTD). 1) The PC and the ESR modules reserve embedding space for subsequent phases at the prototype level and the feature level respectively to prepare for knowledge learned in the future. 2) The MTD module maintains the representations of the current phase without the interference of past knowledge. One of the teacher networks retains the representations of the past phases, and the other teacher network distills relation information of the current phase to the student network. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100 and ImageNet100 datasets demonstrate that our proposed method boosts the performance of self-supervised class incremental learning. We will release code in the near future.