pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unishox: A hybrid encoder for Short Unicode Strings
Authors: Arundale Ramanathan
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: The Journal of Open Source Software 2022 1

Unishox is a hybrid encoding technique with which short unicode strings could be compressed
using context aware pre-mapped codes and delta coding resulting in surprisingly good ratios.
Space occupied by short strings become significant in memory constrained environments such
as Arduino Uno and ESP8266. Text exchange in Chat applications and social media posts is
another area where cost savings could be seen using such compression. It is also possible to
achieve savings in bandwidth and storage cost by storing and retrieving independent strings
in Cloud databases.
On Estimating the Gradient of the Expected Information Gain in Bayesian Experimental Design
Authors: Ziqiao Ao, Jinglai Li
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Experimental Design

Bayesian Experimental Design (BED), which aims to find the optimal experimental conditions for Bayesian inference, is usually posed as to optimize the expected information gain (EIG). The gradient information is often needed for efficient EIG optimization, and as a result the ability to estimate the gradient of EIG is essential for BED problems. The primary goal of this work is to develop methods for estimating the gradient of EIG, which, combined with the stochastic gradient descent algorithms, result in efficient optimization of EIG. Specifically, we first introduce a posterior expected representation of the EIG gradient with respect to the design variables. Based on this, we propose two methods for estimating the EIG gradient, UEEG-MCMC that leverages posterior samples generated through Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to estimate the EIG gradient, and BEEG-AP that focuses on achieving high simulation efficiency by repeatedly using parameter samples. Theoretical analysis and numerical studies illustrate that UEEG-MCMC is robust agains the actual EIG value, while BEEG-AP is more efficient when the EIG value to be optimized is small. Moreover, both methods show superior performance compared to several popular benchmarks in our numerical experiments.
Discretionary Extensions to Unemployment-Insurance Compensation and Some Potential Costs for a McCall Worker
Authors: Rich Ryan
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00

Unemployment insurance provides temporary cash benefits to eligible unemployed workers. Benefits are sometimes extended by discretion during economic slumps. In a model that features temporary benefits and sequential job opportunities, a worker's reservation wages are studied when policymakers can make discretionary extensions to benefits. A worker's optimal labor-supply choice is characterized by a sequence of reservation wages that increases with weeks of remaining benefits. The possibility of an extension raises the entire sequence of reservation wages, meaning a worker is more selective when accepting job offers throughout their spell of unemployment. The welfare consequences of misperceiving the probability and length of an extension are investigated. Properties of the model can help policymakers interpret data on reservation wages, which may be important if extended benefits are used more often in response to economic slumps, virus pandemics, extreme heat, and natural disasters.
ViT-Lens: Initiating Omni-Modal Exploration through 3D Insights
Authors: Weixian Lei, Yixiao Ge, Jianfeng Zhang, Dylan Sun, Kun Yi, Ying Shan, Mike Zheng Shou
Date: 2023-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Classification, Question Answering, Representation Learning, Training-free 3D Point Cloud Classification, Zero-shot 3D classification, Zero-Shot Transfer 3D Point Cloud Classification

Though the success of CLIP-based training recipes in vision-language models, their scalability to more modalities (e.g., 3D, audio, etc.) is limited to large-scale data, which is expensive or even inapplicable for rare modalities. In this paper, we present ViT-Lens that facilitates efficient omni-modal representation learning by perceiving novel modalities with a pretrained ViT and aligning to a pre-defined space. Specifically, the modality-specific lens is tuned to project multimodal signals to the shared embedding space, which are then processed by a strong ViT that carries pre-trained image knowledge. The encoded multimodal representations are optimized toward aligning with the modal-independent space, pre-defined by off-the-shelf foundation models. A well-trained lens with a ViT backbone has the potential to serve as one of these foundation models, supervising the learning of subsequent modalities. ViT-Lens provides a unified solution for representation learning of increasing modalities with two appealing benefits: (i) Exploiting the pretrained ViT across tasks and domains effectively with efficient data regime; (ii) Emergent downstream capabilities of novel modalities are demonstrated due to the modality alignment space. We evaluate ViT-Lens in the context of 3D as an initial verification. In zero-shot 3D classification, ViT-Lens achieves substantial improvements over previous state-of-the-art, showing 52.0% accuracy on Objaverse-LVIS, 87.4% on ModelNet40, and 60.6% on ScanObjectNN. Furthermore, we enable zero-shot 3D question-answering by simply integrating the trained 3D lens into the InstructBLIP model without any adaptation. We will release the results of ViT-Lens on more modalities in the near future.
DFWLayer: Differentiable Frank-Wolfe Optimization Layer
Authors: Zixuan Liu, Liu Liu, Xueqian Wang, Peilin Zhao
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00

Differentiable optimization has received a significant amount of attention due to its foundational role in the domain of machine learning based on neural networks. This paper proposes a differentiable layer, named Differentiable Frank-Wolfe Layer (DFWLayer), by rolling out the Frank-Wolfe method, a well-known optimization algorithm which can solve constrained optimization problems without projections and Hessian matrix computations, thus leading to an efficient way of dealing with large-scale convex optimization problems with norm constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that the DFWLayer not only attains competitive accuracy in solutions and gradients but also consistently adheres to constraints.
ASY-VRNet: Waterway Panoptic Driving Perception Model based on Asymmetric Fair Fusion of Vision and 4D mmWave Radar
Authors: Runwei Guan, Shanliang Yao, Xiaohui Zhu, Ka Lok Man, Yong Yue, Jeremy Smith, Eng Gee Lim, Yutao Yue
Date: 2023-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Panoptic Driving Perception (PDP) is critical for the autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). A PDP model typically integrates multiple tasks, necessitating the simultaneous and robust execution of various perception tasks to facilitate downstream path planning. The fusion of visual and radar sensors is currently acknowledged as a robust and cost-effective approach. However, most existing research has primarily focused on fusing visual and radar features dedicated to object detection or utilizing a shared feature space for multiple tasks, neglecting the individual representation differences between various tasks. To address this gap, we propose a pair of Asymmetric Fair Fusion (AFF) modules with favorable explainability designed to efficiently interact with independent features from both visual and radar modalities, tailored to the specific requirements of object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. The AFF modules treat image and radar maps as irregular point sets and transform these features into a crossed-shared feature space for multitasking, ensuring equitable treatment of vision and radar point cloud features. Leveraging AFF modules, we propose a novel and efficient PDP model, ASY-VRNet, which processes image and radar features based on irregular super-pixel point sets. Additionally, we propose an effective multitask learning method specifically designed for PDP models. Compared to other lightweight models, ASY-VRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in object detection, semantic segmentation, and drivable-area segmentation on the WaterScenes benchmark. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/ASY-VRNet.
SwinLSTM:Improving Spatiotemporal Prediction Accuracy using Swin Transformer and LSTM
Authors: Song Tang, Chuang Li, Pu Zhang, RongNian Tang
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Video Prediction

Integrating CNNs and RNNs to capture spatiotemporal dependencies is a prevalent strategy for spatiotemporal prediction tasks. However, the property of CNNs to learn local spatial information decreases their efficiency in capturing spatiotemporal dependencies, thereby limiting their prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new recurrent cell, SwinLSTM, which integrates Swin Transformer blocks and the simplified LSTM, an extension that replaces the convolutional structure in ConvLSTM with the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, we construct a network with SwinLSTM cell as the core for spatiotemporal prediction. Without using unique tricks, SwinLSTM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on Moving MNIST, Human3.6m, TaxiBJ, and KTH datasets. In particular, it exhibits a significant improvement in prediction accuracy compared to ConvLSTM. Our competitive experimental results demonstrate that learning global spatial dependencies is more advantageous for models to capture spatiotemporal dependencies. We hope that SwinLSTM can serve as a solid baseline to promote the advancement of spatiotemporal prediction accuracy. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SongTang-x/SwinLSTM.
We Don't Need No Adam, All We Need Is EVE: On The Variance of Dual Learning Rate And Beyond
Authors: Afshin Khadangi
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: All

In the rapidly advancing field of deep learning, optimising deep neural networks is paramount. This paper introduces a novel method, Enhanced Velocity Estimation (EVE), which innovatively applies different learning rates to distinct components of the gradients. By bifurcating the learning rate, EVE enables more nuanced control and faster convergence, addressing the challenges associated with traditional single learning rate approaches. Utilising a momentum term that adapts to the learning landscape, the method achieves a more efficient navigation of the complex loss surface, resulting in enhanced performance and stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVE significantly outperforms existing optimisation techniques across various benchmark datasets and architectures.
DySuse: Susceptibility Estimation in Dynamic Social Networks
Authors: Yingdan Shi, Jingya Zhou, Congcong Zhang
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic graph embedding, Graph Embedding

Influence estimation aims to predict the total influence spread in social networks and has received surged attention in recent years. Most current studies focus on estimating the total number of influenced users in a social network, and neglect susceptibility estimation that aims to predict the probability of each user being influenced from the individual perspective. As a more fine-grained estimation task, susceptibility estimation is full of attractiveness and practical value. Based on the significance of susceptibility estimation and dynamic properties of social networks, we propose a task, called susceptibility estimation in dynamic social networks, which is even more realistic and valuable in real-world applications. Susceptibility estimation in dynamic networks has yet to be explored so far and is computationally intractable to naively adopt Monte Carlo simulation to obtain the results. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end framework DySuse based on dynamic graph embedding technology. Specifically, we leverage a structural feature module to independently capture the structural information of influence diffusion on each single graph snapshot. Besides, {we propose the progressive mechanism according to the property of influence diffusion,} to couple the structural and temporal information during diffusion tightly. Moreover, a self-attention block {is designed to} further capture temporal dependency by flexibly weighting historical timestamps. Experimental results show that our framework is superior to the existing dynamic graph embedding models and has satisfactory prediction performance in multiple influence diffusion models.
SRFormer: Text Detection Transformer with Incorporated Segmentation and Regression
Authors: Qingwen Bu, Sungrae Park, Minsoo Khang, Yichuan Cheng
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, regression, Scene Text Detection, Segmentation, Text Detection

Existing techniques for text detection can be broadly classified into two primary groups: segmentation-based and regression-based methods. Segmentation models offer enhanced robustness to font variations but require intricate post-processing, leading to high computational overhead. Regression-based methods undertake instance-aware prediction but face limitations in robustness and data efficiency due to their reliance on high-level representations. In our academic pursuit, we propose SRFormer, a unified DETR-based model with amalgamated Segmentation and Regression, aiming at the synergistic harnessing of the inherent robustness in segmentation representations, along with the straightforward post-processing of instance-level regression. Our empirical analysis indicates that favorable segmentation predictions can be obtained at the initial decoder layers. In light of this, we constrain the incorporation of segmentation branches to the first few decoder layers and employ progressive regression refinement in subsequent layers, achieving performance gains while minimizing computational load from the mask.Furthermore, we propose a Mask-informed Query Enhancement module. We take the segmentation result as a natural soft-ROI to pool and extract robust pixel representations, which are then employed to enhance and diversify instance queries. Extensive experimentation across multiple benchmarks has yielded compelling findings, highlighting our method's exceptional robustness, superior training and data efficiency, as well as its state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/retsuh-bqw/SRFormer-Text-Det.
DPMAC: Differentially Private Communication for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Canzhe Zhao, Yanjie Ze, Jing Dong, Baoxiang Wang, Shuai Li
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Privacy Preserving, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Communication lays the foundation for cooperation in human society and in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Humans also desire to maintain their privacy when communicating with others, yet such privacy concern has not been considered in existing works in MARL. To this end, we propose the \textit{differentially private multi-agent communication} (DPMAC) algorithm, which protects the sensitive information of individual agents by equipping each agent with a local message sender with rigorous $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy (DP) guarantee. In contrast to directly perturbing the messages with predefined DP noise as commonly done in privacy-preserving scenarios, we adopt a stochastic message sender for each agent respectively and incorporate the DP requirement into the sender, which automatically adjusts the learned message distribution to alleviate the instability caused by DP noise. Further, we prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium in cooperative MARL with privacy-preserving communication, which suggests that this problem is game-theoretically learnable. Extensive experiments demonstrate a clear advantage of DPMAC over baseline methods in privacy-preserving scenarios.
FocalDreamer: Text-driven 3D Editing via Focal-fusion Assembly
Authors: Yuhan Li, Yishun Dou, Yue Shi, Yu Lei, Xuanhong Chen, Yi Zhang, Peng Zhou, Bingbing Ni
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00

While text-3D editing has made significant strides in leveraging score distillation sampling, emerging approaches still fall short in delivering separable, precise and consistent outcomes that are vital to content creation. In response, we introduce FocalDreamer, a framework that merges base shape with editable parts according to text prompts for fine-grained editing within desired regions. Specifically, equipped with geometry union and dual-path rendering, FocalDreamer assembles independent 3D parts into a complete object, tailored for convenient instance reuse and part-wise control. We propose geometric focal loss and style consistency regularization, which encourage focal fusion and congruent overall appearance. Furthermore, FocalDreamer generates high-fidelity geometry and PBR textures which are compatible with widely-used graphics engines. Extensive experiments have highlighted the superior editing capabilities of FocalDreamer in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Designing and Evaluating Presentation Strategies for Fact-Checked Content
Authors: Danula Hettiachchi, Kaixin Ji, Jenny Kennedy, Anthony McCosker, Flora D. Salim, Mark Sanderson, Falk Scholer, Damiano Spina
Date: 2023-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Fact Checking, Misinformation

With the rapid growth of online misinformation, it is crucial to have reliable fact-checking methods. Recent research on finding check-worthy claims and automated fact-checking have made significant advancements. However, limited guidance exists regarding the presentation of fact-checked content to effectively convey verified information to users. We address this research gap by exploring the critical design elements in fact-checking reports and investigating whether credibility and presentation-based design improvements can enhance users' ability to interpret the report accurately. We co-developed potential content presentation strategies through a workshop involving fact-checking professionals, communication experts, and researchers. The workshop examined the significance and utility of elements such as veracity indicators and explored the feasibility of incorporating interactive components for enhanced information disclosure. Building on the workshop outcomes, we conducted an online experiment involving 76 crowd workers to assess the efficacy of different design strategies. The results indicate that proposed strategies significantly improve users' ability to accurately interpret the verdict of fact-checking articles. Our findings underscore the critical role of effective presentation of fact reports in addressing the spread of misinformation. By adopting appropriate design enhancements, the effectiveness of fact-checking reports can be maximized, enabling users to make informed judgments.
QD-BEV : Quantization-aware View-guided Distillation for Multi-view 3D Object Detection
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Zhen Dong, Huanrui Yang, Ming Lu, Cheng-Ching Tseng, Yuan Du, Kurt Keutzer, Li Du, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Model Compression, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization

Multi-view 3D detection based on BEV (bird-eye-view) has recently achieved significant improvements. However, the huge memory consumption of state-of-the-art models makes it hard to deploy them on vehicles, and the non-trivial latency will affect the real-time perception of streaming applications. Despite the wide application of quantization to lighten models, we show in our paper that directly applying quantization in BEV tasks will 1) make the training unstable, and 2) lead to intolerable performance degradation. To solve these issues, our method QD-BEV enables a novel view-guided distillation (VGD) objective, which can stabilize the quantization-aware training (QAT) while enhancing the model performance by leveraging both image features and BEV features. Our experiments show that QD-BEV achieves similar or even better accuracy than previous methods with significant efficiency gains. On the nuScenes datasets, the 4-bit weight and 6-bit activation quantized QD-BEV-Tiny model achieves 37.2% NDS with only 15.8 MB model size, outperforming BevFormer-Tiny by 1.8% with an 8x model compression. On the Small and Base variants, QD-BEV models also perform superbly and achieve 47.9% NDS (28.2 MB) and 50.9% NDS (32.9 MB), respectively.
Structured World Models from Human Videos
Authors: Russell Mendonca, Shikhar Bahl, Deepak Pathak
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00

We tackle the problem of learning complex, general behaviors directly in the real world. We propose an approach for robots to efficiently learn manipulation skills using only a handful of real-world interaction trajectories from many different settings. Inspired by the success of learning from large-scale datasets in the fields of computer vision and natural language, our belief is that in order to efficiently learn, a robot must be able to leverage internet-scale, human video data. Humans interact with the world in many interesting ways, which can allow a robot to not only build an understanding of useful actions and affordances but also how these actions affect the world for manipulation. Our approach builds a structured, human-centric action space grounded in visual affordances learned from human videos. Further, we train a world model on human videos and fine-tune on a small amount of robot interaction data without any task supervision. We show that this approach of affordance-space world models enables different robots to learn various manipulation skills in complex settings, in under 30 minutes of interaction. Videos can be found at https://human-world-model.github.io
TADA! Text to Animatable Digital Avatars
Authors: Tingting Liao, Hongwei Yi, Yuliang Xiu, Jiaxaing Tang, Yangyi Huang, Justus Thies, Michael J. Black
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00

We introduce TADA, a simple-yet-effective approach that takes textual descriptions and produces expressive 3D avatars with high-quality geometry and lifelike textures, that can be animated and rendered with traditional graphics pipelines. Existing text-based character generation methods are limited in terms of geometry and texture quality, and cannot be realistically animated due to inconsistent alignment between the geometry and the texture, particularly in the face region. To overcome these limitations, TADA leverages the synergy of a 2D diffusion model and an animatable parametric body model. Specifically, we derive an optimizable high-resolution body model from SMPL-X with 3D displacements and a texture map, and use hierarchical rendering with score distillation sampling (SDS) to create high-quality, detailed, holistic 3D avatars from text. To ensure alignment between the geometry and texture, we render normals and RGB images of the generated character and exploit their latent embeddings in the SDS training process. We further introduce various expression parameters to deform the generated character during training, ensuring that the semantics of our generated character remain consistent with the original SMPL-X model, resulting in an animatable character. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that TADA significantly surpasses existing approaches on both qualitative and quantitative measures. TADA enables creation of large-scale digital character assets that are ready for animation and rendering, while also being easily editable through natural language. The code will be public for research purposes.