pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Survey on Memory-Augmented Neural Networks: Cognitive Insights to AI Applications
Authors: Savya Khosla, Zhen Zhu, Yifei He
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

This paper explores Memory-Augmented Neural Networks (MANNs), delving into how they blend human-like memory processes into AI. It covers different memory types, like sensory, short-term, and long-term memory, linking psychological theories with AI applications. The study investigates advanced architectures such as Hopfield Networks, Neural Turing Machines, Correlation Matrix Memories, Memformer, and Neural Attention Memory, explaining how they work and where they excel. It dives into real-world uses of MANNs across Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Multimodal Learning, and Retrieval Models, showing how memory boosters enhance accuracy, efficiency, and reliability in AI tasks. Overall, this survey provides a comprehensive view of MANNs, offering insights for future research in memory-based AI systems.
Spreeze: High-Throughput Parallel Reinforcement Learning Framework
Authors: Jing Hou, Guang Chen, Ruiqi Zhang, Zhijun Li, Shangding Gu, Changjun Jiang
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The promotion of large-scale applications of reinforcement learning (RL) requires efficient training computation. While existing parallel RL frameworks encompass a variety of RL algorithms and parallelization techniques, the excessively burdensome communication frameworks hinder the attainment of the hardware's limit for final throughput and training effects on a single desktop. In this paper, we propose Spreeze, a lightweight parallel framework for RL that efficiently utilizes a single desktop hardware resource to approach the throughput limit. We asynchronously parallelize the experience sampling, network update, performance evaluation, and visualization operations, and employ multiple efficient data transmission techniques to transfer various types of data between processes. The framework can automatically adjust the parallelization hyperparameters based on the computing ability of the hardware device in order to perform efficient large-batch updates. Based on the characteristics of the "Actor-Critic" RL algorithm, our framework uses dual GPUs to independently update the network of actors and critics in order to further improve throughput. Simulation results show that our framework can achieve up to 15,000Hz experience sampling and 370,000Hz network update frame rate using only a personal desktop computer, which is an order of magnitude higher than other mainstream parallel RL frameworks, resulting in a 73% reduction of training time. Our work on fully utilizing the hardware resources of a single desktop computer is fundamental to enabling efficient large-scale distributed RL training.
Can LLMs Configure Software Tools
Authors: Jai Kannan
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Hyperparameter Optimization

In software engineering, the meticulous configuration of software tools is crucial in ensuring optimal performance within intricate systems. However, the complexity inherent in selecting optimal configurations is exacerbated by the high-dimensional search spaces presented in modern applications. Conventional trial-and-error or intuition-driven methods are both inefficient and error-prone, impeding scalability and reproducibility. In this study, we embark on an exploration of leveraging Large-Language Models (LLMs) to streamline the software configuration process. We identify that the task of hyperparameter configuration for machine learning components within intelligent applications is particularly challenging due to the extensive search space and performance-critical nature. Existing methods, including Bayesian optimization, have limitations regarding initial setup, computational cost, and convergence efficiency. Our work presents a novel approach that employs LLMs, such as Chat-GPT, to identify starting conditions and narrow down the search space, improving configuration efficiency. We conducted a series of experiments to investigate the variability of LLM-generated responses, uncovering intriguing findings such as potential response caching and consistent behavior based on domain-specific keywords. Furthermore, our results from hyperparameter optimization experiments reveal the potential of LLMs in expediting initialization processes and optimizing configurations. While our initial insights are promising, they also indicate the need for further in-depth investigations and experiments in this domain.
ROSE: A Recognition-Oriented Speech Enhancement Framework in Air Traffic Control Using Multi-Objective Learning
Authors: Xincheng Yu, Dongyue Guo, Jianwei Zhang, Yi Lin
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech Enhancement, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Radio speech echo is a specific phenomenon in the air traffic control (ATC) domain, which degrades speech quality and further impacts automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy. In this work, a time-domain recognition-oriented speech enhancement (ROSE) framework is proposed to improve speech intelligibility and also advance ASR accuracy based on convolutional encoder-decoder-based U-Net framework, which serves as a plug-and-play tool in ATC scenarios and does not require additional retraining of the ASR model. Specifically, 1) In the U-Net architecture, an attention-based skip-fusion (ABSF) module is applied to mine shared features from encoders using an attention mask, which enables the model to effectively fuse the hierarchical features. 2) A channel and sequence attention (CSAtt) module is innovatively designed to guide the model to focus on informative features in dual parallel attention paths, aiming to enhance the effective representations and suppress the interference noises. 3) Based on the handcrafted features, ASR-oriented optimization targets are designed to improve recognition performance in the ATC environment by learning robust feature representations. By incorporating both the SE-oriented and ASR-oriented losses, ROSE is implemented in a multi-objective learning manner by optimizing shared representations across the two task objectives. The experimental results show that the ROSE significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for both the SE and ASR tasks, in which all the proposed improvements are confirmed by designed experiments. In addition, the proposed approach can contribute to the desired performance improvements on public datasets.
Stellar: Systematic Evaluation of Human-Centric Personalized Text-to-Image Methods
Authors: Panos Achlioptas, Alexandros Benetatos, Iordanis Fostiropoulos, Dimitris Skourtis
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

In this work, we systematically study the problem of personalized text-to-image generation, where the output image is expected to portray information about specific human subjects. E.g., generating images of oneself appearing at imaginative places, interacting with various items, or engaging in fictional activities. To this end, we focus on text-to-image systems that input a single image of an individual to ground the generation process along with text describing the desired visual context. Our first contribution is to fill the literature gap by curating high-quality, appropriate data for this task. Namely, we introduce a standardized dataset (Stellar) that contains personalized prompts coupled with images of individuals that is an order of magnitude larger than existing relevant datasets and where rich semantic ground-truth annotations are readily available. Having established Stellar to promote cross-systems fine-grained comparisons further, we introduce a rigorous ensemble of specialized metrics that highlight and disentangle fundamental properties such systems should obey. Besides being intuitive, our new metrics correlate significantly more strongly with human judgment than currently used metrics on this task. Last but not least, drawing inspiration from the recent works of ELITE and SDXL, we derive a simple yet efficient, personalized text-to-image baseline that does not require test-time fine-tuning for each subject and which sets quantitatively and in human trials a new SoTA. For more information, please visit our project's website: https://stellar-gen-ai.github.io/.
MAFA: Managing False Negatives for Vision-Language Pre-training
Authors: Jaeseok Byun, Dohoon Kim, Taesup Moon
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

We consider a critical issue of false negatives in Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP), a challenge that arises from the inherent many-to-many correspondence of image-text pairs in large-scale web-crawled datasets. The presence of false negatives can impede achieving optimal performance and even lead to a significant performance drop. To address this challenge, we propose MAFA (MAnaging FAlse negatives), which consists of two pivotal components building upon the recently developed GRouped mIni-baTch sampling (GRIT) strategy: 1) an efficient connection mining process that identifies and converts false negatives into positives, and 2) label smoothing for the image-text contrastive (ITC) loss. Our comprehensive experiments verify the effectiveness of MAFA across multiple downstream tasks, emphasizing the crucial role of addressing false negatives in VLP, potentially even surpassing the importance of addressing false positives. In addition, the compatibility of MAFA with the recent BLIP-family model is also demonstrated. Code is available at https://github.com/jaeseokbyun/MAFA.
Learning Unknown Intervention Targets in Structural Causal Models from Heterogeneous Data
Authors: Yuqin Yang, Saber Salehkaleybar, Negar Kiyavash
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00

We study the problem of identifying the unknown intervention targets in structural causal models where we have access to heterogeneous data collected from multiple environments. The unknown intervention targets are the set of endogenous variables whose corresponding exogenous noises change across the environments. We propose a two-phase approach which in the first phase recovers the exogenous noises corresponding to unknown intervention targets whose distributions have changed across environments. In the second phase, the recovered noises are matched with the corresponding endogenous variables. For the recovery phase, we provide sufficient conditions for learning these exogenous noises up to some component-wise invertible transformation. For the matching phase, under the causal sufficiency assumption, we show that the proposed method uniquely identifies the intervention targets. In the presence of latent confounders, the intervention targets among the observed variables cannot be determined uniquely. We provide a candidate intervention target set which is a superset of the true intervention targets. Our approach improves upon the state of the art as the returned candidate set is always a subset of the target set returned by previous work. Moreover, we do not require restrictive assumptions such as linearity of the causal model or performing invariance tests to learn whether a distribution is changing across environments which could be highly sample inefficient. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in practice.
TabMT: Generating tabular data with masked transformers
Authors: Manbir S Gulati, Paul F Roysdon
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Synthetic Data Generation

Autoregressive and Masked Transformers are incredibly effective as generative models and classifiers. While these models are most prevalent in NLP, they also exhibit strong performance in other domains, such as vision. This work contributes to the exploration of transformer-based models in synthetic data generation for diverse application domains. In this paper, we present TabMT, a novel Masked Transformer design for generating synthetic tabular data. TabMT effectively addresses the unique challenges posed by heterogeneous data fields and is natively able to handle missing data. Our design leverages improved masking techniques to allow for generation and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance from extremely small to extremely large tabular datasets. We evaluate TabMT for privacy-focused applications and find that it is able to generate high quality data with superior privacy tradeoffs.
XAI meets Biology: A Comprehensive Review of Explainable AI in Bioinformatics Applications
Authors: Zhongliang Zhou, Mengxuan Hu, Mariah Salcedo, Nathan Gravel, Wayland Yeung, Aarya Venkat, Dongliang Guo, Jielu Zhang, Natarajan Kannan, Sheng Li
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning and deep learning models, has significantly impacted bioinformatics research by offering powerful tools for analyzing complex biological data. However, the lack of interpretability and transparency of these models presents challenges in leveraging these models for deeper biological insights and for generating testable hypotheses. Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance the transparency and interpretability of AI models in bioinformatics. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of various XAI techniques and their applications across various bioinformatics domains including DNA, RNA, and protein sequence analysis, structural analysis, gene expression and genome analysis, and bioimaging analysis. We introduce the most pertinent machine learning and XAI methods, then discuss their diverse applications and address the current limitations of available XAI tools. By offering insights into XAI's potential and challenges, this review aims to facilitate its practical implementation in bioinformatics research and help researchers navigate the landscape of XAI tools.
An Ambiguity Measure for Recognizing the Unknowns in Deep Learning
Authors: Roozbeh Yousefzadeh
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We study the understanding of deep neural networks from the scope in which they are trained on. While the accuracy of these models is usually impressive on the aggregate level, they still make mistakes, sometimes on cases that appear to be trivial. Moreover, these models are not reliable in realizing what they do not know leading to failures such as adversarial vulnerability and out-of-distribution failures. Here, we propose a measure for quantifying the ambiguity of inputs for any given model with regard to the scope of its training. We define the ambiguity based on the geometric arrangements of the decision boundaries and the convex hull of training set in the feature space learned by the trained model, and demonstrate that a single ambiguity measure may detect a considerable portion of mistakes of a model on in-distribution samples, adversarial inputs, as well as out-of-distribution inputs. Using our ambiguity measure, a model may abstain from classification when it encounters ambiguous inputs leading to a better model accuracy not just on a given testing set, but on the inputs it may encounter at the world at large. In pursuit of this measure, we develop a theoretical framework that can identify the unknowns of the model in relation to its scope. We put this in perspective with the confidence of the model and develop formulations to identify the regions of the domain which are unknown to the model, yet the model is guaranteed to have high confidence.
A Vision for Operationalising Diversity and Inclusion in AI
Authors: Muneera Bano, Didar Zowghi, Vincenzo Gervasi
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The growing presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various sectors necessitates systems that accurately reflect societal diversity. This study seeks to envision the operationalization of the ethical imperatives of diversity and inclusion (D&I) within AI ecosystems, addressing the current disconnect between ethical guidelines and their practical implementation. A significant challenge in AI development is the effective operationalization of D&I principles, which is critical to prevent the reinforcement of existing biases and ensure equity across AI applications. This paper proposes a vision of a framework for developing a tool utilizing persona-based simulation by Generative AI (GenAI). The approach aims to facilitate the representation of the needs of diverse users in the requirements analysis process for AI software. The proposed framework is expected to lead to a comprehensive persona repository with diverse attributes that inform the development process with detailed user narratives. This research contributes to the development of an inclusive AI paradigm that ensures future technological advances are designed with a commitment to the diverse fabric of humanity.
Contrastive Multi-view Subspace Clustering of Hyperspectral Images based on Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Renxiang Guan, Zihao Li, Xianju Li, Chang Tang, Ruyi Feng
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Multi-view Subspace Clustering

High-dimensional and complex spectral structures make the clustering of hyperspectral images (HSI) a challenging task. Subspace clustering is an effective approach for addressing this problem. However, current subspace clustering algorithms are primarily designed for a single view and do not fully exploit the spatial or textural feature information in HSI. In this study, contrastive multi-view subspace clustering of HSI was proposed based on graph convolutional networks. Pixel neighbor textural and spatial-spectral information were sent to construct two graph convolutional subspaces to learn their affinity matrices. To maximize the interaction between different views, a contrastive learning algorithm was introduced to promote the consistency of positive samples and assist the model in extracting robust features. An attention-based fusion module was used to adaptively integrate these affinity matrices, constructing a more discriminative affinity matrix. The model was evaluated using four popular HSI datasets: Indian Pines, Pavia University, Houston, and Xu Zhou. It achieved overall accuracies of 97.61%, 96.69%, 87.21%, and 97.65%, respectively, and significantly outperformed state-of-the-art clustering methods. In conclusion, the proposed model effectively improves the clustering accuracy of HSI.
PCRDiffusion: Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Yue Wu, Yongzhe Yuan, Xiaolong Fan, Xiaoshui Huang, Maoguo Gong, Qiguang Miao
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Point Cloud Registration

We propose a new framework that formulates point cloud registration as a denoising diffusion process from noisy transformation to object transformation. During training stage, object transformation diffuses from ground-truth transformation to random distribution, and the model learns to reverse this noising process. In sampling stage, the model refines randomly generated transformation to the output result in a progressive way. We derive the variational bound in closed form for training and provide implementations of the model. Our work provides the following crucial findings: (i) In contrast to most existing methods, our framework, Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Point Cloud Registration (PCRDiffusion) does not require repeatedly update source point cloud to refine the predicted transformation. (ii) Point cloud registration, one of the representative discriminative tasks, can be solved by a generative way and the unified probabilistic formulation. Finally, we discuss and provide an outlook on the application of diffusion model in different scenarios for point cloud registration. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in point cloud registration. In correspondence-free and correspondence-based scenarios, PCRDifussion can both achieve exceeding 50\% performance improvements.
CONFORM: Contrast is All You Need For High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Tuna Han Salih Meral, Enis Simsar, Federico Tombari, Pinar Yanardag
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: All

Images produced by text-to-image diffusion models might not always faithfully represent the semantic intent of the provided text prompt, where the model might overlook or entirely fail to produce certain objects. Existing solutions often require customly tailored functions for each of these problems, leading to sub-optimal results, especially for complex prompts. Our work introduces a novel perspective by tackling this challenge in a contrastive context. Our approach intuitively promotes the segregation of objects in attention maps while also maintaining that pairs of related attributes are kept close to each other. We conduct extensive experiments across a wide variety of scenarios, each involving unique combinations of objects, attributes, and scenes. These experiments effectively showcase the versatility, efficiency, and flexibility of our method in working with both latent and pixel-based diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion and Imagen. Moreover, we publicly share our source code to facilitate further research.
METAL: Metamorphic Testing Framework for Analyzing Large-Language Model Qualities
Authors: Sangwon Hyun, Mingyu Guo, M. Ali Babar
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large-Language Models (LLMs) have shifted the paradigm of natural language data processing. However, their black-boxed and probabilistic characteristics can lead to potential risks in the quality of outputs in diverse LLM applications. Recent studies have tested Quality Attributes (QAs), such as robustness or fairness, of LLMs by generating adversarial input texts. However, existing studies have limited their coverage of QAs and tasks in LLMs and are difficult to extend. Additionally, these studies have only used one evaluation metric, Attack Success Rate (ASR), to assess the effectiveness of their approaches. We propose a MEtamorphic Testing for Analyzing LLMs (METAL) framework to address these issues by applying Metamorphic Testing (MT) techniques. This approach facilitates the systematic testing of LLM qualities by defining Metamorphic Relations (MRs), which serve as modularized evaluation metrics. The METAL framework can automatically generate hundreds of MRs from templates that cover various QAs and tasks. In addition, we introduced novel metrics that integrate the ASR method into the semantic qualities of text to assess the effectiveness of MRs accurately. Through the experiments conducted with three prominent LLMs, we have confirmed that the METAL framework effectively evaluates essential QAs on primary LLM tasks and reveals the quality risks in LLMs. Moreover, the newly proposed metrics can guide the optimal MRs for testing each task and suggest the most effective method for generating MRs.