pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Responsibility in Extensive Form Games
Authors: Qi Shi
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Form, Philosophy

Two different forms of responsibility, counterfactual and seeing-to-it, have been extensively discussed in the philosophy and AI in the context of a single agent or multiple agents acting simultaneously. Although the generalisation of counterfactual responsibility to a setting where multiple agents act in some order is relatively straightforward, the same cannot be said about seeing-to-it responsibility. Two versions of seeing-to-it modality applicable to such settings have been proposed in the literature. Neither of them perfectly captures the intuition of responsibility. This paper proposes a definition of seeing-to-it responsibility for such settings that amalgamate the two modalities. This paper shows that the newly proposed notion of responsibility and counterfactual responsibility are not definable through each other and studies the responsibility gap for these two forms of responsibility. It shows that although these two forms of responsibility are not enough to ascribe responsibility in each possible situation, this gap does not exist if higher-order responsibility is taken into account.
Clash of the Explainers: Argumentation for Context-Appropriate Explanations
Authors: Leila Methnani, Virginia Dignum, Andreas Theodorou
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Understanding when and why to apply any given eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) technique is not a straightforward task. There is no single approach that is best suited for a given context. This paper aims to address the challenge of selecting the most appropriate explainer given the context in which an explanation is required. For AI explainability to be effective, explanations and how they are presented needs to be oriented towards the stakeholder receiving the explanation. If -- in general -- no single explanation technique surpasses the rest, then reasoning over the available methods is required in order to select one that is context-appropriate. Due to the transparency they afford, we propose employing argumentation techniques to reach an agreement over the most suitable explainers from a given set of possible explainers. In this paper, we propose a modular reasoning system consisting of a given mental model of the relevant stakeholder, a reasoner component that solves the argumentation problem generated by a multi-explainer component, and an AI model that is to be explained suitably to the stakeholder of interest. By formalising supporting premises -- and inferences -- we can map stakeholder characteristics to those of explanation techniques. This allows us to reason over the techniques and prioritise the best one for the given context, while also offering transparency into the selection decision.
AI-driven projection tomography with multicore fibre-optic cell rotation
Authors: Jiawei Sun, Bin Yang, Nektarios Koukourakis, Jochen Guck, Juergen W. Czarske
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00

Optical tomography has emerged as a non-invasive imaging method, providing three-dimensional insights into subcellular structures and thereby enabling a deeper understanding of cellular functions, interactions, and processes. Conventional optical tomography methods are constrained by a limited illumination scanning range, leading to anisotropic resolution and incomplete imaging of cellular structures. To overcome this problem, we employ a compact multi-core fibre-optic cell rotator system that facilitates precise optical manipulation of cells within a microfluidic chip, achieving full-angle projection tomography with isotropic resolution. Moreover, we demonstrate an AI-driven tomographic reconstruction workflow, which can be a paradigm shift from conventional computational methods, often demanding manual processing, to a fully autonomous process. The performance of the proposed cell rotation tomography approach is validated through the three-dimensional reconstruction of cell phantoms and HL60 human cancer cells. The versatility of this learning-based tomographic reconstruction workflow paves the way for its broad application across diverse tomographic imaging modalities, including but not limited to flow cytometry tomography and acoustic rotation tomography. Therefore, this AI-driven approach can propel advancements in cell biology, aiding in the inception of pioneering therapeutics, and augmenting early-stage cancer diagnostics.
Astrocyte-Enabled Advancements in Spiking Neural Networks for Large Language Modeling
Authors: Guobin Shen, Dongcheng Zhao, Yiting Dong, Yang Li, Jindong Li, Kang Sun, Yi Zeng
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Within the complex neuroarchitecture of the brain, astrocytes play crucial roles in development, structure, and metabolism. These cells regulate neural activity through tripartite synapses, directly impacting cognitive processes such as learning and memory. Despite the growing recognition of astrocytes' significance, traditional Spiking Neural Network (SNN) models remain predominantly neuron-centric, overlooking the profound influence of astrocytes on neural dynamics. Inspired by these biological insights, we have developed an Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Unit (AM-SU), an innovative framework that integrates neuron-astrocyte interactions into the computational paradigm, demonstrating wide applicability across various hardware platforms. Our Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Neural Network (AstroSNN) exhibits exceptional performance in tasks involving memory retention and natural language generation, particularly in handling long-term dependencies and complex linguistic structures. The design of AstroSNN not only enhances its biological authenticity but also introduces novel computational dynamics, enabling more effective processing of complex temporal dependencies. Furthermore, AstroSNN shows low latency, high throughput, and reduced memory usage in practical applications, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained environments. By successfully integrating astrocytic dynamics into intelligent neural networks, our work narrows the gap between biological plausibility and neural modeling, laying the groundwork for future biologically-inspired neural computing research that includes both neurons and astrocytes.
A dynamical clipping approach with task feedback for Proximal Policy Optimization
Authors: Ziqi Zhang, Jingzehua Xu, Zifeng Zhuang, Hongyin Zhang, Jinxin Liu, Donglin Wang, Shuai Zhang
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been broadly applied to robotics learning, showcasing stable training performance. However, the fixed clipping bound setting may limit the performance of PPO. Specifically, there is no theoretical proof that the optimal clipping bound remains consistent throughout the entire training process. Meanwhile, previous researches suggest that a fixed clipping bound restricts the policy's ability to explore. Therefore, many past studies have aimed to dynamically adjust the PPO clipping bound to enhance PPO's performance. However, the objective of these approaches are not directly aligned with the objective of reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, which is to maximize the cumulative Return. Unlike previous clipping approaches, we propose a bi-level proximal policy optimization objective that can dynamically adjust the clipping bound to better reflect the preference (maximizing Return) of these RL tasks. Based on this bi-level proximal policy optimization paradigm, we introduce a new algorithm named Preference based Proximal Policy Optimization (Pb-PPO). Pb-PPO utilizes a multi-armed bandit approach to refelect RL preference, recommending the clipping bound for PPO that can maximizes the current Return. Therefore, Pb-PPO results in greater stability and improved performance compared to PPO with a fixed clipping bound. We test Pb-PPO on locomotion benchmarks across multiple environments, including Gym-Mujoco and legged-gym. Additionally, we validate Pb-PPO on customized navigation tasks. Meanwhile, we conducted comparisons with PPO using various fixed clipping bounds and various of clipping approaches. The experimental results indicate that Pb-PPO demonstrates superior training performance compared to PPO and its variants. Our codebase has been released at : https://github.com/stevezhangzA/pb_ppo
Pedestrian and Passenger Interaction with Autonomous Vehicles: Field Study in a Crosswalk Scenario
Authors: Rubén Izquierdo, Javier Alonso, Ola Benderius, Miguel Ángel Sotelo, David Fernández Llorca
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

This study presents the outcomes of empirical investigations pertaining to human-vehicle interactions involving an autonomous vehicle equipped with both internal and external Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) within a crosswalk scenario. The internal and external HMIs were integrated with implicit communication techniques, incorporating a combination of gentle and aggressive braking maneuvers within the crosswalk. Data were collected through a combination of questionnaires and quantifiable metrics, including pedestrian decision to cross related to the vehicle distance and speed. The questionnaire responses reveal that pedestrians experience enhanced safety perceptions when the external HMI and gentle braking maneuvers are used in tandem. In contrast, the measured variables demonstrate that the external HMI proves effective when complemented by the gentle braking maneuver. Furthermore, the questionnaire results highlight that the internal HMI enhances passenger confidence only when paired with the aggressive braking maneuver.
Sense, Predict, Adapt, Repeat: A Blueprint for Design of New Adaptive AI-Centric Sensing Systems
Authors: Soheil Hor, Amin Arbabian
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00

As Moore's Law loses momentum, improving size, performance, and efficiency of processors has become increasingly challenging, ending the era of predictable improvements in hardware performance. Meanwhile, the widespread incorporation of high-definition sensors in consumer devices and autonomous technologies has fueled a significant upsurge in sensory data. Current global trends reveal that the volume of generated data already exceeds human consumption capacity, making AI algorithms the primary consumers of data worldwide. To address this, a novel approach to designing AI-centric sensing systems is needed that can bridge the gap between the increasing capabilities of high-definition sensors and the limitations of AI processors. This paper provides an overview of efficient sensing and perception methods in both AI and sensing domains, emphasizing the necessity of co-designing AI algorithms and sensing systems for dynamic perception. The proposed approach involves a framework for designing and analyzing dynamic AI-in-the-loop sensing systems, suggesting a fundamentally new method for designing adaptive sensing systems through inference-time AI-to-sensor feedback and end-to-end efficiency and performance optimization.
Evaluating ChatGPT as a Question Answering System: A Comprehensive Analysis and Comparison with Existing Models
Authors: Hossein Bahak, Farzaneh Taheri, Zahra Zojaji, Arefeh Kazemi
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Language Modelling, Prompt Engineering, Question Answering

In the current era, a multitude of language models has emerged to cater to user inquiries. Notably, the GPT-3.5 Turbo language model has gained substantial attention as the underlying technology for ChatGPT. Leveraging extensive parameters, this model adeptly responds to a wide range of questions. However, due to its reliance on internal knowledge, the accuracy of responses may not be absolute. This article scrutinizes ChatGPT as a Question Answering System (QAS), comparing its performance to other existing QASs. The primary focus is on evaluating ChatGPT's proficiency in extracting responses from provided paragraphs, a core QAS capability. Additionally, performance comparisons are made in scenarios without a surrounding passage. Multiple experiments, exploring response hallucination and considering question complexity, were conducted on ChatGPT. Evaluation employed well-known Question Answering (QA) datasets, including SQuAD, NewsQA, and PersianQuAD, across English and Persian languages. Metrics such as F-score, exact match, and accuracy were employed in the assessment. The study reveals that, while ChatGPT demonstrates competence as a generative model, it is less effective in question answering compared to task-specific models. Providing context improves its performance, and prompt engineering enhances precision, particularly for questions lacking explicit answers in provided paragraphs. ChatGPT excels at simpler factual questions compared to "how" and "why" question types. The evaluation highlights occurrences of hallucinations, where ChatGPT provides responses to questions without available answers in the provided context.
ConvD: Attention Enhanced Dynamic Convolutional Embeddings for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Wenbin Guo, Zhao Li, Xin Wang, Zirui Chen
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Embeddings, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graphs, Relation

Knowledge graphs generally suffer from incompleteness, which can be alleviated by completing the missing information. Deep knowledge convolutional embedding models based on neural networks are currently popular methods for knowledge graph completion. However, most existing methods use external convolution kernels and traditional plain convolution processes, which limits the feature interaction capability of the model. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic convolutional embedding model ConvD for knowledge graph completion, which directly reshapes the relation embeddings into multiple internal convolution kernels to improve the external convolution kernels of the traditional convolutional embedding model. The internal convolution kernels can effectively augment the feature interaction between the relation embeddings and entity embeddings, thus enhancing the model embedding performance. Moreover, we design a priori knowledge-optimized attention mechanism, which can assign different contribution weight coefficients to multiple relation convolution kernels for dynamic convolution to improve the expressiveness of the model further. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our proposed model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods, with average improvements ranging from 11.30\% to 16.92\% across all model evaluation metrics. Ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of each component module of the ConvD model.
Characteristic Guidance: Non-linear Correction for Diffusion Model at Large Guidance Scale
Authors: Candi Zheng, Yuan Lan
Date: 2023-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Popular guidance for denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) linearly combines distinct conditional models together to provide enhanced control over samples. However, this approach overlooks nonlinear effects that become significant when guidance scale is large. To address this issue, we propose characteristic guidance, a guidance method that provides first-principle non-linear correction for classifier-free guidance. Such correction forces the guided DDPMs to respect the Fokker-Planck (FP) equation of diffusion process, in a way that is training-free and compatible with existing sampling methods. Experiments show that characteristic guidance enhances semantic characteristics of prompts and mitigate irregularities in image generation, proving effective in diverse applications ranging from simulating magnet phase transitions to latent space sampling.
Cross Fertilizing Empathy from Brain to Machine as a Value Alignment Strategy
Authors: Devin Gonier, Adrian Adduci, Cassidy LoCascio
Date: 2023-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

AI Alignment research seeks to align human and AI goals to ensure independent actions by a machine are always ethical. This paper argues empathy is necessary for this task, despite being often neglected in favor of more deductive approaches. We offer an inside-out approach that grounds morality within the context of the brain as a basis for algorithmically understanding ethics and empathy. These arguments are justified via a survey of relevant literature. The paper concludes with a suggested experimental approach to future research and some initial experimental observations.
Investigating YOLO Models Towards Outdoor Obstacle Detection For Visually Impaired People
Authors: Chenhao He, Pramit Saha
Date: 2023-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

The utilization of deep learning-based object detection is an effective approach to assist visually impaired individuals in avoiding obstacles. In this paper, we implemented seven different YOLO object detection models \textit{viz}., YOLO-NAS (small, medium, large), YOLOv8, YOLOv7, YOLOv6, and YOLOv5 and performed comprehensive evaluation with carefully tuned hyperparameters, to analyze how these models performed on images containing common daily-life objects presented on roads and sidewalks. After a systematic investigation, YOLOv8 was found to be the best model, which reached a precision of $80\%$ and a recall of $68.2\%$ on a well-known Obstacle Dataset which includes images from VOC dataset, COCO dataset, and TT100K dataset along with images collected by the researchers in the field. Despite being the latest model and demonstrating better performance in many other applications, YOLO-NAS was found to be suboptimal for the obstacle detection task.
SAM-guided Graph Cut for 3D Instance Segmentation
Authors: Haoyu Guo, He Zhu, Sida Peng, Yuang Wang, Yujun Shen, Ruizhen Hu, Xiaowei Zhou
Date: 2023-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Graph Neural Network, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper addresses the challenge of 3D instance segmentation by simultaneously leveraging 3D geometric and multi-view image information. Many previous works have applied deep learning techniques to 3D point clouds for instance segmentation. However, these methods often failed to generalize to various types of scenes due to the scarcity and low-diversity of labeled 3D point cloud data. Some recent works have attempted to lift 2D instance segmentations to 3D within a bottom-up framework. The inconsistency in 2D instance segmentations among views can substantially degrade the performance of 3D segmentation. In this work, we introduce a novel 3D-to-2D query framework to effectively exploit 2D segmentation models for 3D instance segmentation. Specifically, we pre-segment the scene into several superpoints in 3D, formulating the task into a graph cut problem. The superpoint graph is constructed based on 2D segmentation models, where node features are obtained from multi-view image features and edge weights are computed based on multi-view segmentation results, enabling the better generalization ability. To process the graph, we train a graph neural network using pseudo 3D labels from 2D segmentation models. Experimental results on the ScanNet, ScanNet++ and KITTI-360 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves robust segmentation performance and can generalize across different types of scenes. Our project page is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/sam_graph.
PTT: Point-Trajectory Transformer for Efficient Temporal 3D Object Detection
Authors: Kuan-Chih Huang, Weijie Lyu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yi-Hsuan Tsai
Date: 2023-12-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Recent temporal LiDAR-based 3D object detectors achieve promising performance based on the two-stage proposal-based approach. They generate 3D box candidates from the first-stage dense detector, followed by different temporal aggregation methods. However, these approaches require per-frame objects or whole point clouds, posing challenges related to memory bank utilization. Moreover, point clouds and trajectory features are combined solely based on concatenation, which may neglect effective interactions between them. In this paper, we propose a point-trajectory transformer with long short-term memory for efficient temporal 3D object detection. To this end, we only utilize point clouds of current-frame objects and their historical trajectories as input to minimize the memory bank storage requirement. Furthermore, we introduce modules to encode trajectory features, focusing on long short-term and future-aware perspectives, and then effectively aggregate them with point cloud features. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo dataset to demonstrate that our approach performs well against state-of-the-art methods. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/PTT.
ViLA: Efficient Video-Language Alignment for Video Question Answering
Authors: Xijun Wang, Junbang Liang, Chun-Kai Wang, Kenan Deng, Yu Lou, Ming Lin, Shan Yang
Date: 2023-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

In this work, we propose an efficient Video-Language Alignment (ViLA) network. Our ViLA model addresses both efficient frame sampling and effective cross-modal alignment in a unified way. In our ViLA network, we design a new learnable text-guided Frame-Prompter together with a new cross-modal distillation (QFormer-Distiller) module. Pre-trained large image-language models have shown promising results on problems such as visual question answering (VQA). However, how to efficiently and effectively sample video frames when adapting pre-trained large image-language model to video-language alignment is still the major challenge. Compared with prior work, our ViLA model demonstrates the capability of selecting key frames with critical contents, thus improving the video-language alignment accuracy while reducing the inference latency +3.3% on NExT-QA Temporal with 3.0X speed up). Overall, our ViLA network outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the video question-answering benchmarks: +4.6% on STAR Interaction, +2.2% on STAR average with 3.0X speed up, ours 2-frames out-perform SeViLA 4-frames on the VLEP dataset with 4.2X speed-up. The code will be available at https://github.com/xijun-cs/ViLA.
See, Say, and Segment: Teaching LMMs to Overcome False Premises
Authors: Tsung-Han Wu, Giscard Biamby, David Chan, Lisa Dunlap, Ritwik Gupta, Xudong Wang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Trevor Darrell
Date: 2023-12-13 00:00:00

Current open-source Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel at tasks such as open-vocabulary language grounding and segmentation but can suffer under false premises when queries imply the existence of something that is not actually present in the image. We observe that existing methods that fine-tune an LMM to segment images significantly degrade their ability to reliably determine ("see") if an object is present and to interact naturally with humans ("say"), a form of catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose a cascading and joint training approach for LMMs to solve this task, avoiding catastrophic forgetting of previous skills. Our resulting model can "see" by detecting whether objects are present in an image, "say" by telling the user if they are not, proposing alternative queries or correcting semantic errors in the query, and finally "segment" by outputting the mask of the desired objects if they exist. Additionally, we introduce a novel False Premise Correction benchmark dataset, an extension of existing RefCOCO(+/g) referring segmentation datasets (which we call FP-RefCOCO(+/g)). The results show that our method not only detects false premises up to 55% better than existing approaches, but under false premise conditions produces relative cIOU improvements of more than 31% over baselines, and produces natural language feedback judged helpful up to 67% of the time.