pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Deep Reinforcement Learning for Metacognitive Interventions across Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Authors: Mark Abdelshiheed, John Wesley Hostetter, Tiffany Barnes, Min Chi
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning

This work compares two approaches to provide metacognitive interventions and their impact on preparing students for future learning across Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). In two consecutive semesters, we conducted two classroom experiments: Exp. 1 used a classic artificial intelligence approach to classify students into different metacognitive groups and provide static interventions based on their classified groups. In Exp. 2, we leveraged Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to provide adaptive interventions that consider the dynamic changes in the student's metacognitive levels. In both experiments, students received these interventions that taught how and when to use a backward-chaining (BC) strategy on a logic tutor that supports a default forward-chaining strategy. Six weeks later, we trained students on a probability tutor that only supports BC without interventions. Our results show that adaptive DRL-based interventions closed the metacognitive skills gap between students. In contrast, static classifier-based interventions only benefited a subset of students who knew how to use BC in advance. Additionally, our DRL agent prepared the experimental students for future learning by significantly surpassing their control peers on both ITSs.
Enhancing Personalized Ranking With Differentiable Group AUC Optimization
Authors: Xiao Sun, Bo Zhang, Chenrui Zhang, Han Ren, Mingchen Cai
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00

AUC is a common metric for evaluating the performance of a classifier. However, most classifiers are trained with cross entropy, and it does not optimize the AUC metric directly, which leaves a gap between the training and evaluation stage. In this paper, we propose the PDAOM loss, a Personalized and Differentiable AUC Optimization method with Maximum violation, which can be directly applied when training a binary classifier and optimized with gradient-based methods. Specifically, we construct the pairwise exponential loss with difficult pair of positive and negative samples within sub-batches grouped by user ID, aiming to guide the classifier to pay attention to the relation between hard-distinguished pairs of opposite samples from the perspective of independent users. Compared to the origin form of pairwise exponential loss, the proposed PDAOM loss not only improves the AUC and GAUC metrics in the offline evaluation, but also reduces the computation complexity of the training objective. Furthermore, online evaluation of the PDAOM loss on the 'Guess What You Like' feed recommendation application in Meituan manifests 1.40% increase in click count and 0.65% increase in order count compared to the baseline model, which is a significant improvement in this well-developed online life service recommendation system.
Memento: Facilitating Effortless, Efficient, and Reliable ML Experiments
Authors: Zac Pullar-Strecker, Xinglong Chang, Liam Brydon, Ioannis Ziogas, Katharina Dost, Jörg Wicker
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Running complex sets of machine learning experiments is challenging and time-consuming due to the lack of a unified framework. This leaves researchers forced to spend time implementing necessary features such as parallelization, caching, and checkpointing themselves instead of focussing on their project. To simplify the process, in this paper, we introduce Memento, a Python package that is designed to aid researchers and data scientists in the efficient management and execution of computationally intensive experiments. Memento has the capacity to streamline any experimental pipeline by providing a straightforward configuration matrix and the ability to concurrently run experiments across multiple threads. A demonstration of Memento is available at: https://wickerlab.org/publication/memento.
Fairness in AI and Its Long-Term Implications on Society
Authors: Ondrej Bohdal, Timothy Hospedales, Philip H. S. Torr, Fazl Barez
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

Successful deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in various settings has led to numerous positive outcomes for individuals and society. However, AI systems have also been shown to harm parts of the population due to biased predictions. AI fairness focuses on mitigating such biases to ensure AI decision making is not discriminatory towards certain groups. We take a closer look at AI fairness and analyze how lack of AI fairness can lead to deepening of biases over time and act as a social stressor. More specifically, we discuss how biased models can lead to more negative real-world outcomes for certain groups, which may then become more prevalent by deploying new AI models trained on increasingly biased data, resulting in a feedback loop. If the issues persist, they could be reinforced by interactions with other risks and have severe implications on society in the form of social unrest. We examine current strategies for improving AI fairness, assess their limitations in terms of real-world deployment, and explore potential paths forward to ensure we reap AI's benefits without causing society's collapse.
AutoSTL: Automated Spatio-Temporal Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Zijian Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Hao Miao, Chunxu Zhang, Hongwei Zhao, Junbo Zhang
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Spatio-Temporal prediction plays a critical role in smart city construction. Jointly modeling multiple spatio-temporal tasks can further promote an intelligent city life by integrating their inseparable relationship. However, existing studies fail to address this joint learning problem well, which generally solve tasks individually or a fixed task combination. The challenges lie in the tangled relation between different properties, the demand for supporting flexible combinations of tasks and the complex spatio-temporal dependency. To cope with the problems above, we propose an Automated Spatio-Temporal multi-task Learning (AutoSTL) method to handle multiple spatio-temporal tasks jointly. Firstly, we propose a scalable architecture consisting of advanced spatio-temporal operations to exploit the complicated dependency. Shared modules and feature fusion mechanism are incorporated to further capture the intrinsic relationship between tasks. Furthermore, our model automatically allocates the operations and fusion weight. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verified that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. As we can know, AutoSTL is the first automated spatio-temporal multi-task learning method.
Practical Differentially Private and Byzantine-resilient Federated Learning
Authors: Zihang Xiang, Tianhao Wang, WanYu Lin, Di Wang
Date: 2023-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Privacy and Byzantine resilience are two indispensable requirements for a federated learning (FL) system. Although there have been extensive studies on privacy and Byzantine security in their own track, solutions that consider both remain sparse. This is due to difficulties in reconciling privacy-preserving and Byzantine-resilient algorithms. In this work, we propose a solution to such a two-fold issue. We use our version of differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) algorithm to preserve privacy and then apply our Byzantine-resilient algorithms. We note that while existing works follow this general approach, an in-depth analysis on the interplay between DP and Byzantine resilience has been ignored, leading to unsatisfactory performance. Specifically, for the random noise introduced by DP, previous works strive to reduce its impact on the Byzantine aggregation. In contrast, we leverage the random noise to construct an aggregation that effectively rejects many existing Byzantine attacks. We provide both theoretical proof and empirical experiments to show our protocol is effective: retaining high accuracy while preserving the DP guarantee and Byzantine resilience. Compared with the previous work, our protocol 1) achieves significantly higher accuracy even in a high privacy regime; 2) works well even when up to 90% of distributive workers are Byzantine.
An innovative Deep Learning Based Approach for Accurate Agricultural Crop Price Prediction
Authors: Mayank Ratan Bhardwaj, Jaydeep Pawar, Abhijnya Bhat, Deepanshu, Inavamsi Enaganti, Kartik Sagar, Y. Narahari
Date: 2023-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Accurate prediction of agricultural crop prices is a crucial input for decision-making by various stakeholders in agriculture: farmers, consumers, retailers, wholesalers, and the Government. These decisions have significant implications including, most importantly, the economic well-being of the farmers. In this paper, our objective is to accurately predict crop prices using historical price information, climate conditions, soil type, location, and other key determinants of crop prices. This is a technically challenging problem, which has been attempted before. In this paper, we propose an innovative deep learning based approach to achieve increased accuracy in price prediction. The proposed approach uses graph neural networks (GNNs) in conjunction with a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) model to exploit geospatial dependencies in prices. Our approach works well with noisy legacy data and produces a performance that is at least 20% better than the results available in the literature. We are able to predict prices up to 30 days ahead. We choose two vegetables, potato (stable price behavior) and tomato (volatile price behavior) and work with noisy public data available from Indian agricultural markets.
Skeleton-based action analysis for ADHD diagnosis
Authors: YiChun Li, Yi Li, Rajesh Nair, Syed Mohsen Naqvi
Date: 2023-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Analysis, Action Recognition, Diagnostic, EEG, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurobehavioral disorder worldwide. While extensive research has focused on machine learning methods for ADHD diagnosis, most research relies on high-cost equipment, e.g., MRI machine and EEG patch. Therefore, low-cost diagnostic methods based on the action characteristics of ADHD are desired. Skeleton-based action recognition has gained attention due to the action-focused nature and robustness. In this work, we propose a novel ADHD diagnosis system with a skeleton-based action recognition framework, utilizing a real multi-modal ADHD dataset and state-of-the-art detection algorithms. Compared to conventional methods, the proposed method shows cost-efficiency and significant performance improvement, making it more accessible for a broad range of initial ADHD diagnoses. Through the experiment results, the proposed method outperforms the conventional methods in accuracy and AUC. Meanwhile, our method is widely applicable for mass screening.
The Future of ChatGPT-enabled Labor Market: A Preliminary Study in China
Authors: Lan Chen, Xi Chen, Shiyu Wu, Yaqi Yang, Meng Chang, HengShu Zhu
Date: 2023-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

As a phenomenal large language model, ChatGPT has achieved unparalleled success in various real-world tasks and increasingly plays an important role in our daily lives and work. However, extensive concerns are also raised about the potential ethical issues, especially about whether ChatGPT-like artificial general intelligence (AGI) will replace human jobs. To this end, in this paper, we introduce a preliminary data-driven study on the future of ChatGPT-enabled labor market from the view of Human-AI Symbiosis instead of Human-AI Confrontation. To be specific, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of large-scale job posting data in BOSS Zhipin, the largest online recruitment platform in China. The results indicate that about 28% of occupations in the current labor market require ChatGPT-related skills. Furthermore, based on a large-scale occupation-centered knowledge graph, we develop a semantic information enhanced collaborative filtering algorithm to predict the future occupation-skill relations in the labor market. As a result, we find that additional 45% occupations in the future will require ChatGPT-related skills. In particular, industries related to technology, products, and operations are expected to have higher proficiency requirements for ChatGPT-related skills, while the manufacturing, services, education, and health science related industries will have lower requirements for ChatGPT-related skills.
Towards Spatio-temporal Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting via Static and Dynamic Learnable Personalized Graph Convolution Network
Authors: Xiaohan Li, Gaowei Zhang, Kai Huang, Zhaofeng He
Date: 2023-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

Sea surface temperature (SST) is uniquely important to the Earth's atmosphere since its dynamics are a major force in shaping local and global climate and profoundly affect our ecosystems. Accurate forecasting of SST brings significant economic and social implications, for example, better preparation for extreme weather such as severe droughts or tropical cyclones months ahead. However, such a task faces unique challenges due to the intrinsic complexity and uncertainty of ocean systems. Recently, deep learning techniques, such as graphical neural networks (GNN), have been applied to address this task. Even though these methods have some success, they frequently have serious drawbacks when it comes to investigating dynamic spatiotemporal dependencies between signals. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel static and dynamic learnable personalized graph convolution network (SD-LPGC). Specifically, two graph learning layers are first constructed to respectively model the stable long-term and short-term evolutionary patterns hidden in the multivariate SST signals. Then, a learnable personalized convolution layer is designed to fuse this information. Our experiments on real SST datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performances of the proposed approach on the forecasting task.
Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey
Authors: Xiangtai Li, Henghui Ding, Haobo Yuan, Wenwei Zhang, Jiangmiao Pang, Guangliang Cheng, Kai Chen, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Point Cloud Segmentation, Segmentation, Survey

Visual segmentation seeks to partition images, video frames, or point clouds into multiple segments or groups. This technique has numerous real-world applications, such as autonomous driving, image editing, robot sensing, and medical analysis. Over the past decade, deep learning-based methods have made remarkable strides in this area. Recently, transformers, a type of neural network based on self-attention originally designed for natural language processing, have considerably surpassed previous convolutional or recurrent approaches in various vision processing tasks. Specifically, vision transformers offer robust, unified, and even simpler solutions for various segmentation tasks. This survey provides a thorough overview of transformer-based visual segmentation, summarizing recent advancements. We first review the background, encompassing problem definitions, datasets, and prior convolutional methods. Next, we summarize a meta-architecture that unifies all recent transformer-based approaches. Based on this meta-architecture, we examine various method designs, including modifications to the meta-architecture and associated applications. We also present several closely related settings, including 3D point cloud segmentation, foundation model tuning, domain-aware segmentation, efficient segmentation, and medical segmentation. Additionally, we compile and re-evaluate the reviewed methods on several well-established datasets. Finally, we identify open challenges in this field and propose directions for future research. The project page can be found at https://github.com/lxtGH/Awesome-Segmentation-With-Transformer. We will also continually monitor developments in this rapidly evolving field.
VMA: Divide-and-Conquer Vectorized Map Annotation System for Large-Scale Driving Scene
Authors: Shaoyu Chen, Yunchi Zhang, Bencheng Liao, Jiafeng Xie, Tianheng Cheng, Wei Sui, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

High-definition (HD) map serves as the essential infrastructure of autonomous driving. In this work, we build up a systematic vectorized map annotation framework (termed VMA) for efficiently generating HD map of large-scale driving scene. We design a divide-and-conquer annotation scheme to solve the spatial extensibility problem of HD map generation, and abstract map elements with a variety of geometric patterns as unified point sequence representation, which can be extended to most map elements in the driving scene. VMA is highly efficient and extensible, requiring negligible human effort, and flexible in terms of spatial scale and element type. We quantitatively and qualitatively validate the annotation performance on real-world urban and highway scenes, as well as NYC Planimetric Database. VMA can significantly improve map generation efficiency and require little human effort. On average VMA takes 160min for annotating a scene with a range of hundreds of meters, and reduces 52.3% of the human cost, showing great application value. Code: https://github.com/hustvl/VMA.
MetaBEV: Solving Sensor Failures for BEV Detection and Map Segmentation
Authors: Chongjian Ge, Junsong Chen, Enze Xie, Zhongdao Wang, Lanqing Hong, Huchuan Lu, Zhenguo Li, Ping Luo
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Multi-Task Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation

Perception systems in modern autonomous driving vehicles typically take inputs from complementary multi-modal sensors, e.g., LiDAR and cameras. However, in real-world applications, sensor corruptions and failures lead to inferior performances, thus compromising autonomous safety. In this paper, we propose a robust framework, called MetaBEV, to address extreme real-world environments involving overall six sensor corruptions and two extreme sensor-missing situations. In MetaBEV, signals from multiple sensors are first processed by modal-specific encoders. Subsequently, a set of dense BEV queries are initialized, termed meta-BEV. These queries are then processed iteratively by a BEV-Evolving decoder, which selectively aggregates deep features from either LiDAR, cameras, or both modalities. The updated BEV representations are further leveraged for multiple 3D prediction tasks. Additionally, we introduce a new M2oE structure to alleviate the performance drop on distinct tasks in multi-task joint learning. Finally, MetaBEV is evaluated on the nuScenes dataset with 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks. Experiments show MetaBEV outperforms prior arts by a large margin on both full and corrupted modalities. For instance, when the LiDAR signal is missing, MetaBEV improves 35.5% detection NDS and 17.7% segmentation mIoU upon the vanilla BEVFusion model; and when the camera signal is absent, MetaBEV still achieves 69.2% NDS and 53.7% mIoU, which is even higher than previous works that perform on full-modalities. Moreover, MetaBEV performs fairly against previous methods in both canonical perception and multi-task learning settings, refreshing state-of-the-art nuScenes BEV map segmentation with 70.4% mIoU.
Event-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Kunping Huang, Sen Zhang, Jing Zhang, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Compensation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Survey

In recent decades, visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) has gained significant interest in both academia and industry. It estimates camera motion and reconstructs the environment concurrently using visual sensors on a moving robot. However, conventional cameras are limited by hardware, including motion blur and low dynamic range, which can negatively impact performance in challenging scenarios like high-speed motion and high dynamic range illumination. Recent studies have demonstrated that event cameras, a new type of bio-inspired visual sensor, offer advantages such as high temporal resolution, dynamic range, low power consumption, and low latency. This paper presents a timely and comprehensive review of event-based vSLAM algorithms that exploit the benefits of asynchronous and irregular event streams for localization and mapping tasks. The review covers the working principle of event cameras and various event representations for preprocessing event data. It also categorizes event-based vSLAM methods into four main categories: feature-based, direct, motion-compensation, and deep learning methods, with detailed discussions and practical guidance for each approach. Furthermore, the paper evaluates the state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks, highlighting current challenges and future opportunities in this emerging research area. A public repository will be maintained to keep track of the rapid developments in this field at {\url{https://github.com/kun150kun/ESLAM-survey}}.
AMT: All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms for Efficient Frame Interpolation
Authors: Zhen Li, Zuo-Liang Zhu, Ling-Hao Han, Qibin Hou, Chun-Le Guo, Ming-Ming Cheng
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: All, Video Frame Interpolation

We present All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms (AMT), a new network architecture for video frame interpolation. It is based on two essential designs. First, we build bidirectional correlation volumes for all pairs of pixels, and use the predicted bilateral flows to retrieve correlations for updating both flows and the interpolated content feature. Second, we derive multiple groups of fine-grained flow fields from one pair of updated coarse flows for performing backward warping on the input frames separately. Combining these two designs enables us to generate promising task-oriented flows and reduce the difficulties in modeling large motions and handling occluded areas during frame interpolation. These qualities promote our model to achieve state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks with high efficiency. Moreover, our convolution-based model competes favorably compared to Transformer-based models in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NKU/AMT.
Automatic Interaction and Activity Recognition from Videos of Human Manual Demonstrations with Application to Anomaly Detection
Authors: Elena Merlo, Marta Lagomarsino, Edoardo Lamon, Arash Ajoudani
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Anomaly Detection, Clustering, Object, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a new method to describe spatio-temporal relations between objects and hands, to recognize both interactions and activities within video demonstrations of manual tasks. The approach exploits Scene Graphs to extract key interaction features from image sequences while simultaneously encoding motion patterns and context. Additionally, the method introduces event-based automatic video segmentation and clustering, which allow for the grouping of similar events and detect if a monitored activity is executed correctly. The effectiveness of the approach was demonstrated in two multi-subject experiments, showing the ability to recognize and cluster hand-object and object-object interactions without prior knowledge of the activity, as well as matching the same activity performed by different subjects.