pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Designing Stable Neural Networks using Convex Analysis and ODEs
Authors: Ferdia Sherry, Elena Celledoni, Matthias J. Ehrhardt, Davide Murari, Brynjulf Owren, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Denoising, Numerical Integration

Motivated by classical work on the numerical integration of ordinary differential equations we present a ResNet-styled neural network architecture that encodes non-expansive (1-Lipschitz) operators, as long as the spectral norms of the weights are appropriately constrained. This is to be contrasted with the ordinary ResNet architecture which, even if the spectral norms of the weights are constrained, has a Lipschitz constant that, in the worst case, grows exponentially with the depth of the network. Further analysis of the proposed architecture shows that the spectral norms of the weights can be further constrained to ensure that the network is an averaged operator, making it a natural candidate for a learned denoiser in Plug-and-Play algorithms. Using a novel adaptive way of enforcing the spectral norm constraints, we show that, even with these constraints, it is possible to train performant networks. The proposed architecture is applied to the problem of adversarially robust image classification, to image denoising, and finally to the inverse problem of deblurring.
Kernel $ε$-Greedy for Multi-Armed Bandits with Covariates
Authors: Sakshi Arya, Bharath K. Sriperumbudur
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

We consider the $\epsilon$-greedy strategy for the multi-arm bandit with covariates (MABC) problem, where the mean reward functions are assumed to lie in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). We propose to estimate the unknown mean reward functions using an online weighted kernel ridge regression estimator, and show the resultant estimator to be consistent under appropriate decay rates of the exploration probability sequence, $\{\epsilon_t\}_t$, and regularization parameter, $\{\lambda_t\}_t$. Moreover, we show that for any choice of kernel and the corresponding RKHS, we achieve a sub-linear regret rate depending on the intrinsic dimensionality of the RKHS. Furthermore, we achieve the optimal regret rate of $\sqrt{T}$ under a margin condition for finite-dimensional RKHS.
Why Shallow Networks Struggle to Approximate and Learn High Frequencies
Authors: Shijun Zhang, Hongkai Zhao, Yimin Zhong, Haomin Zhou
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00

In this work, we present a comprehensive study combining mathematical and computational analysis to explain why a two-layer neural network struggles to handle high frequencies in both approximation and learning, especially when machine precision, numerical noise, and computational cost are significant factors in practice. Specifically, we investigate the following fundamental computational issues: (1) the minimal numerical error achievable under finite precision, (2) the computational cost required to attain a given accuracy, and (3) the stability of the method with respect to perturbations. The core of our analysis lies in the conditioning of the representation and its learning dynamics. Explicit answers to these questions are provided, along with supporting numerical evidence.
DisasterResponseGPT: Large Language Models for Accelerated Plan of Action Development in Disaster Response Scenarios
Authors: Vinicius G. Goecks, Nicholas R. Waytowich
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Disaster Response, In-Context Learning, valid

The development of plans of action in disaster response scenarios is a time-consuming process. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a powerful solution to expedite this process through in-context learning. This study presents DisasterResponseGPT, an algorithm that leverages LLMs to generate valid plans of action quickly by incorporating disaster response and planning guidelines in the initial prompt. In DisasterResponseGPT, users input the scenario description and receive a plan of action as output. The proposed method generates multiple plans within seconds, which can be further refined following the user's feedback. Preliminary results indicate that the plans of action developed by DisasterResponseGPT are comparable to human-generated ones while offering greater ease of modification in real-time. This approach has the potential to revolutionize disaster response operations by enabling rapid updates and adjustments during the plan's execution.
Fast and Robust State Estimation and Tracking via Hierarchical Learning
Authors: Connor Mclaughlin, Matthew Ding, Deniz Erdogmus, Lili Su
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

Fast and reliable state estimation and tracking are essential for real-time situation awareness in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) operating in tactical environments or complicated civilian environments. Traditional centralized solutions do not scale well whereas existing fully distributed solutions over large networks suffer slow convergence, and are vulnerable to a wide spectrum of communication failures. In this paper, we aim to speed up the convergence and enhance the resilience of state estimation and tracking for large-scale networks using a simple hierarchical system architecture. We propose two ``consensus + innovation'' algorithms, both of which rely on a novel hierarchical push-sum consensus component. We characterize their convergence rates under a linear local observation model and minimal technical assumptions. We numerically validate our algorithms through simulation studies of underwater acoustic networks and large-scale synthetic networks.
TemperatureGAN: Generative Modeling of Regional Atmospheric Temperatures
Authors: Emmanuel Balogun, Ram Rajagopal, Arun Majumdar
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Stochastic generators are useful for estimating climate impacts on various sectors. Projecting climate risk in various sectors, e.g. energy systems, requires generators that are accurate (statistical resemblance to ground-truth), reliable (do not produce erroneous examples), and efficient. Leveraging data from the North American Land Data Assimilation System, we introduce TemperatureGAN, a Generative Adversarial Network conditioned on months, locations, and time periods, to generate 2m above ground atmospheric temperatures at an hourly resolution. We propose evaluation methods and metrics to measure the quality of generated samples. We show that TemperatureGAN produces high-fidelity examples with good spatial representation and temporal dynamics consistent with known diurnal cycles.
Statler: State-Maintaining Language Models for Embodied Reasoning
Authors: Takuma Yoneda, Jiading Fang, Peng Li, Huanyu Zhang, Tianchong Jiang, Shengjie Lin, Ben Picker, David Yunis, Hongyuan Mei, Matthew R. Walter
Date: 2023-06-30 00:00:00

There has been a significant research interest in employing large language models to empower intelligent robots with complex reasoning. Existing work focuses on harnessing their abilities to reason about the histories of their actions and observations. In this paper, we explore a new dimension in which large language models may benefit robotics planning. In particular, we propose Statler, a framework in which large language models are prompted to maintain an estimate of the world state, which are often unobservable, and track its transition as new actions are taken. Our framework then conditions each action on the estimate of the current world state. Despite being conceptually simple, our Statler framework significantly outperforms strong competing methods (e.g., Code-as-Policies) on several robot planning tasks. Additionally, it has the potential advantage of scaling up to more challenging long-horizon planning tasks.
Analyzing Multiple-Choice Reading and Listening Comprehension Tests
Authors: Vatsal Raina, Adian Liusie, Mark Gales
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Reading Comprehension, World Knowledge

Multiple-choice reading and listening comprehension tests are an important part of language assessment. Content creators for standard educational tests need to carefully curate questions that assess the comprehension abilities of candidates taking the tests. However, recent work has shown that a large number of questions in general multiple-choice reading comprehension datasets can be answered without comprehension, by leveraging world knowledge instead. This work investigates how much of a contextual passage needs to be read in multiple-choice reading based on conversation transcriptions and listening comprehension tests to be able to work out the correct answer. We find that automated reading comprehension systems can perform significantly better than random with partial or even no access to the context passage. These findings offer an approach for content creators to automatically capture the trade-off between comprehension and world knowledge required for their proposed questions.
Estimating Post-OCR Denoising Complexity on Numerical Texts
Authors: Arthur Hemmer, Jérôme Brachat, Mickaël Coustaty, Jean-Marc Ogier
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Post-OCR processing has significantly improved over the past few years. However, these have been primarily beneficial for texts consisting of natural, alphabetical words, as opposed to documents of numerical nature such as invoices, payslips, medical certificates, etc. To evaluate the OCR post-processing difficulty of these datasets, we propose a method to estimate the denoising complexity of a text and evaluate it on several datasets of varying nature, and show that texts of numerical nature have a significant disadvantage. We evaluate the estimated complexity ranking with respect to the error rates of modern-day denoising approaches to show the validity of our estimator.
Data-Driven Information Extraction and Enrichment of Molecular Profiling Data for Cancer Cell Lines
Authors: Ellery Smith, Rahel Paloots, Dimitris Giagkos, Michael Baudis, Kurt Stockinger
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00

With the proliferation of research means and computational methodologies, published biomedical literature is growing exponentially in numbers and volume. Cancer cell lines are frequently used models in biological and medical research that are currently applied for a wide range of purposes, from studies of cellular mechanisms to drug development, which has led to a wealth of related data and publications. Sifting through large quantities of text to gather relevant information on the cell lines of interest is tedious and extremely slow when performed by humans. Hence, novel computational information extraction and correlation mechanisms are required to boost meaningful knowledge extraction. In this work, we present the design, implementation and application of a novel data extraction and exploration system. This system extracts deep semantic relations between textual entities from scientific literature to enrich existing structured clinical data in the domain of cancer cell lines. We introduce a new public data exploration portal, which enables automatic linking of genomic copy number variants plots with ranked, related entities such as affected genes. Each relation is accompanied by literature-derived evidences, allowing for deep, yet rapid, literature search, using existing structured data as a springboard. Our system is publicly available on the web at https://cancercelllines.org
VOLTA: Improving Generative Diversity by Variational Mutual Information Maximizing Autoencoder
Authors: Yueen Ma, Dafeng Chi, Jingjing Li, Kai Song, Yuzheng Zhuang, Irwin King
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Text Generation

The natural language generation domain has witnessed great success thanks to Transformer models. Although they have achieved state-of-the-art generative quality, they often neglect generative diversity. Prior attempts to tackle this issue suffer from either low model capacity or over-complicated architectures. Some recent methods employ the VAE framework to enhance diversity, but their latent variables fully depend on the input context, restricting exploration of the latent space. In this paper, we introduce VOLTA, a framework that elevates generative diversity by bridging Transformer with VAE via a more effective cross-attention-based connection, departing from conventional embedding concatenation or summation. Additionally, we propose integrating InfoGAN-style latent codes to enable input-independent variability, further diversifying the generation. Moreover, our framework accommodates discrete inputs alongside its existing support for continuous inputs. We perform comprehensive experiments with two types of Transformers on six datasets from three different NLG tasks to show that our approach can significantly improve generative diversity while maintaining generative quality.
CollabKG: A Learnable Human-Machine-Cooperative Information Extraction Toolkit for (Event) Knowledge Graph Construction
Authors: Xiang Wei, Yufeng Chen, Ning Cheng, Xingyu Cui, Jinan Xu, Wenjuan Han
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction, graph construction, Knowledge Graphs, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

In order to construct or extend entity-centric and event-centric knowledge graphs (KG and EKG), the information extraction (IE) annotation toolkit is essential. However, existing IE toolkits have several non-trivial problems, such as not supporting multi-tasks, not supporting automatic updates. In this work, we present CollabKG, a learnable human-machine-cooperative IE toolkit for KG and EKG construction. Specifically, for the multi-task issue, CollabKG unifies different IE subtasks, including named entity recognition (NER), entity-relation triple extraction (RE), and event extraction (EE), and supports both KG and EKG. Then, combining advanced prompting-based IE technology, the human-machine-cooperation mechanism with LLMs as the assistant machine is presented which can provide a lower cost as well as a higher performance. Lastly, owing to the two-way interaction between the human and machine, CollabKG with learning ability allows self-renewal. Besides, CollabKG has several appealing features (e.g., customization, training-free, propagation, etc.) that make the system powerful, easy-to-use, and high-productivity. We holistically compare our toolkit with other existing tools on these features. Human evaluation quantitatively illustrates that CollabKG significantly improves annotation quality, efficiency, and stability simultaneously.
Correct Like Humans: Progressive Learning Framework for Chinese Text Error Correction
Authors: Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Shaoshen Chen, Haojing Huang, Shulin Huang, Yangning Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
Date: 2023-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Chinese Text Error Correction (CTEC) aims to detect and correct errors in the input text, which benefits human daily life and various downstream tasks. Recent approaches mainly employ Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to resolve CTEC. Although PLMs have achieved remarkable success in CTEC, we argue that previous studies still overlook the importance of human thinking patterns. To enhance the development of PLMs for CTEC, inspired by humans' daily error-correcting behavior, we propose a novel model-agnostic progressive learning framework, named ProTEC, which guides PLMs-based CTEC models to learn to correct like humans. During the training process, ProTEC guides the model to learn text error correction by incorporating these sub-tasks into a progressive paradigm. During the inference process, the model completes these sub-tasks in turn to generate the correction results. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed model-agnostic ProTEC framework.
Multilingual Contextual Adapters To Improve Custom Word Recognition In Low-resource Languages
Authors: Devang Kulshreshtha, Saket Dingliwal, Brady Houston, Sravan Bodapati
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) models are popular for their balance between speed and performance for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, these CTC models still struggle in other areas, such as personalization towards custom words. A recent approach explores Contextual Adapters, wherein an attention-based biasing model for CTC is used to improve the recognition of custom entities. While this approach works well with enough data, we showcase that it isn't an effective strategy for low-resource languages. In this work, we propose a supervision loss for smoother training of the Contextual Adapters. Further, we explore a multilingual strategy to improve performance with limited training data. Our method achieves 48% F1 improvement in retrieving unseen custom entities for a low-resource language. Interestingly, as a by-product of training the Contextual Adapters, we see a 5-11% Word Error Rate (WER) reduction in the performance of the base CTC model as well.
An End-to-End Multi-Module Audio Deepfake Generation System for ADD Challenge 2023
Authors: Sheng Zhao, Qilong Yuan, Yibo Duan, Zhuoyue Chen
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Swapping

The task of synthetic speech generation is to generate language content from a given text, then simulating fake human voice.The key factors that determine the effect of synthetic speech generation mainly include speed of generation, accuracy of word segmentation, naturalness of synthesized speech, etc. This paper builds an end-to-end multi-module synthetic speech generation model, including speaker encoder, synthesizer based on Tacotron2, and vocoder based on WaveRNN. In addition, we perform a lot of comparative experiments on different datasets and various model structures. Finally, we won the first place in the ADD 2023 challenge Track 1.1 with the weighted deception success rate (WDSR) of 44.97%.
SSP: Self-Supervised Post-training for Conversational Search
Authors: Quan Tu, Shen Gao, Xiaolong Wu, Zhao Cao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan
Date: 2023-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search

Conversational search has been regarded as the next-generation search paradigm. Constrained by data scarcity, most existing methods distill the well-trained ad-hoc retriever to the conversational retriever. However, these methods, which usually initialize parameters by query reformulation to discover contextualized dependency, have trouble in understanding the dialogue structure information and struggle with contextual semantic vanishing. In this paper, we propose \fullmodel (\model) which is a new post-training paradigm with three self-supervised tasks to efficiently initialize the conversational search model to enhance the dialogue structure and contextual semantic understanding. Furthermore, the \model can be plugged into most of the existing conversational models to boost their performance. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we apply the conversational encoder post-trained by \model on the conversational search task using two benchmark datasets: CAsT-19 and CAsT-20. Extensive experiments that our \model can boost the performance of several existing conversational search methods. Our source code is available at \url{https://github.com/morecry/SSP}.
Large Language Models Enable Few-Shot Clustering
Authors: Vijay Viswanathan, Kiril Gashteovski, Carolin Lawrence, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig
Date: 2023-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text Clustering

Unlike traditional unsupervised clustering, semi-supervised clustering allows users to provide meaningful structure to the data, which helps the clustering algorithm to match the user's intent. Existing approaches to semi-supervised clustering require a significant amount of feedback from an expert to improve the clusters. In this paper, we ask whether a large language model can amplify an expert's guidance to enable query-efficient, few-shot semi-supervised text clustering. We show that LLMs are surprisingly effective at improving clustering. We explore three stages where LLMs can be incorporated into clustering: before clustering (improving input features), during clustering (by providing constraints to the clusterer), and after clustering (using LLMs post-correction). We find incorporating LLMs in the first two stages can routinely provide significant improvements in cluster quality, and that LLMs enable a user to make trade-offs between cost and accuracy to produce desired clusters. We release our code and LLM prompts for the public to use.
Don't Stop Self-Supervision: Accent Adaptation of Speech Representations via Residual Adapters
Authors: Anshu Bhatia, Sanchit Sinha, Saket Dingliwal, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Sravan Bodapati, Katrin Kirchhoff
Date: 2023-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech representations learned in a self-supervised fashion from massive unlabeled speech corpora have been adapted successfully toward several downstream tasks. However, such representations may be skewed toward canonical data characteristics of such corpora and perform poorly on atypical, non-native accented speaker populations. With the state-of-the-art HuBERT model as a baseline, we propose and investigate self-supervised adaptation of speech representations to such populations in a parameter-efficient way via training accent-specific residual adapters. We experiment with 4 accents and choose automatic speech recognition (ASR) as the downstream task of interest. We obtain strong word error rate reductions (WERR) over HuBERT-large for all 4 accents, with a mean WERR of 22.7% with accent-specific adapters and a mean WERR of 25.1% if the entire encoder is accent-adapted. While our experiments utilize HuBERT and ASR as the downstream task, our proposed approach is both model and task-agnostic.
A Dual-Stream Recurrence-Attention Network With Global-Local Awareness for Emotion Recognition in Textual Dialog
Authors: Jiang Li, XiaoPing Wang, Zhigang Zeng
Date: 2023-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition in Conversation

In real-world dialog systems, the ability to understand the user's emotions and interact anthropomorphically is of great significance. Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is one of the key ways to accomplish this goal and has attracted growing attention. How to model the context in a conversation is a central aspect and a major challenge of ERC tasks. Most existing approaches struggle to adequately incorporate both global and local contextual information, and their network structures are overly sophisticated. For this reason, we propose a simple and effective Dual-stream Recurrence-Attention Network (DualRAN), which is based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Multi-head ATtention network (MAT). DualRAN eschews the complex components of current methods and focuses on combining recurrence-based methods with attention-based ones. DualRAN is a dual-stream structure mainly consisting of local- and global-aware modules, modeling a conversation simultaneously from distinct perspectives. In addition, we develop two single-stream network variants for DualRAN, i.e., SingleRANv1 and SingleRANv2. According to the experimental findings, DualRAN boosts the weighted F1 scores by 1.43% and 0.64% on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets, respectively, in comparison to the strongest baseline. On two other datasets (i.e., EmoryNLP and DailyDialog), our method also attains competitive results.