pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Adapting Behaviour Based On Trust In Human-Agent Ad Hoc Teamwork
Authors: Ana Carrasco
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

This work proposes a framework that incorporates trust in an ad hoc teamwork scenario with human-agent teams, where an agent must collaborate with a human to perform a task. During the task, the agent must infer, through interactions and observations, how much the human trusts it and adapt its behaviour to maximize the team's performance. To achieve this, we propose collecting data from human participants in experiments to define different settings (based on trust levels) and learning optimal policies for each of them. Then, we create a module to infer the current setting (depending on the amount of trust). Finally, we validate this framework in a real-world scenario and analyse how this adaptable behaviour affects trust.
Experimental Design for Multi-Channel Imaging via Task-Driven Feature Selection
Authors: Stefano B. Blumberg, Paddy J. Slator, Daniel C. Alexander
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design, feature selection, parameter estimation

This paper presents a data-driven, task-specific paradigm for experimental design, to shorten acquisition time, reduce costs, and accelerate the deployment of imaging devices. Current approaches in experimental design focus on model-parameter estimation and require specification of a particular model, whereas in imaging, other tasks may drive the design. Furthermore, such approaches often lead to intractable optimization problems in real-world imaging applications. Here we present a new paradigm for experimental design that simultaneously optimizes the design (set of image channels) and trains a machine-learning model to execute a user-specified image-analysis task. The approach obtains data densely-sampled over the measurement space (many image channels) for a small number of acquisitions, then identifies a subset of channels of prespecified size that best supports the task. We propose a method: TADRED for TAsk-DRiven Experimental Design in imaging, to identify the most informative channel-subset whilst simultaneously training a network to execute the task given the subset. Experiments demonstrate the potential of TADRED in diverse imaging applications: several clinically-relevant tasks in magnetic resonance imaging; and remote sensing and physiological applications of hyperspectral imaging. Results show substantial improvement over classical experimental design, two recent application-specific methods within the new paradigm, and state-of-the-art approaches in supervised feature selection. We anticipate further applications of our approach. Code is available: https://github.com/sbb-gh/experimental-design-multichannel
RaP: Redundancy-aware Video-language Pre-training for Text-Video Retrieval
Authors: Xing Wu, Chaochen Gao, Zijia Lin, Zhongyuan Wang, Jizhong Han, Songlin Hu
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Retrieval, Video Retrieval

Video language pre-training methods have mainly adopted sparse sampling techniques to alleviate the temporal redundancy of videos. Though effective, sparse sampling still suffers inter-modal redundancy: visual redundancy and textual redundancy. Compared with highly generalized text, sparsely sampled frames usually contain text-independent portions, called visual redundancy. Sparse sampling is also likely to miss important frames corresponding to some text portions, resulting in textual redundancy. Inter-modal redundancy leads to a mismatch of video and text information, hindering the model from better learning the shared semantics across modalities. To alleviate it, we propose Redundancy-aware Video-language Pre-training. We design a redundancy measurement of video patches and text tokens by calculating the cross-modal minimum dis-similarity. Then, we penalize the highredundant video patches and text tokens through a proposed redundancy-aware contrastive learning. We evaluate our method on four benchmark datasets, MSRVTT, MSVD, DiDeMo, and LSMDC, achieving a significant improvement over the previous stateof-the-art results. Our code are available at https://github.com/caskcsg/VLP/tree/main/RaP.
Pre-Avatar: An Automatic Presentation Generation Framework Leveraging Talking Avatar
Authors: Aolan Sun, xulong Zhang, Tiandong Ling, Jianzong Wang, Ning Cheng, Jing Xiao
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote conferencing and school-teaching have become important tools. The previous applications aim to save the commuting cost with real-time interactions. However, our application is going to lower the production and reproduction costs when preparing the communication materials. This paper proposes a system called Pre-Avatar, generating a presentation video with a talking face of a target speaker with 1 front-face photo and a 3-minute voice recording. Technically, the system consists of three main modules, user experience interface (UEI), talking face module and few-shot text-to-speech (TTS) module. The system firstly clones the target speaker's voice, and then generates the speech, and finally generate an avatar with appropriate lip and head movements. Under any scenario, users only need to replace slides with different notes to generate another new video. The demo has been released here and will be published as free software for use.
Learning Physical Dynamics with Subequivariant Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Jiaqi Han, Wenbing Huang, Hengbo Ma, Jiachen Li, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Inductive Bias

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a prevailing tool for learning physical dynamics. However, they still encounter several challenges: 1) Physical laws abide by symmetry, which is a vital inductive bias accounting for model generalization and should be incorporated into the model design. Existing simulators either consider insufficient symmetry, or enforce excessive equivariance in practice when symmetry is partially broken by gravity. 2) Objects in the physical world possess diverse shapes, sizes, and properties, which should be appropriately processed by the model. To tackle these difficulties, we propose a novel backbone, Subequivariant Graph Neural Network, which 1) relaxes equivariance to subequivariance by considering external fields like gravity, where the universal approximation ability holds theoretically; 2) introduces a new subequivariant object-aware message passing for learning physical interactions between multiple objects of various shapes in the particle-based representation; 3) operates in a hierarchical fashion, allowing for modeling long-range and complex interactions. Our model achieves on average over 3% enhancement in contact prediction accuracy across 8 scenarios on Physion and 2X lower rollout MSE on RigidFall compared with state-of-the-art GNN simulators, while exhibiting strong generalization and data efficiency.
Overview of BioASQ 2022: The tenth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering
Authors: Anastasios Nentidis, Georgios Katsimpras, Eirini Vandorou, Anastasia Krithara, Antonio Miranda-Escalada, Luis Gasco, Martin Krallinger, Georgios Paliouras
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

This paper presents an overview of the tenth edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2022. BioASQ is an ongoing series of challenges that promotes advances in the domain of large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. In this edition, the challenge was composed of the three established tasks a, b, and Synergy, and a new task named DisTEMIST for automatic semantic annotation and grounding of diseases from clinical content in Spanish, a key concept for semantic indexing and search engines of literature and clinical records. This year, BioASQ received more than 170 distinct systems from 38 teams in total for the four different tasks of the challenge. As in previous years, the majority of the competing systems outperformed the strong baselines, indicating the continuous advancement of the state-of-the-art in this domain.
Sample-Then-Optimize Batch Neural Thompson Sampling
Authors: Zhongxiang Dai, Yao Shu, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Patrick Jaillet
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Bayesian Optimization, Thompson Sampling

Bayesian optimization (BO), which uses a Gaussian process (GP) as a surrogate to model its objective function, is popular for black-box optimization. However, due to the limitations of GPs, BO underperforms in some problems such as those with categorical, high-dimensional or image inputs. To this end, recent works have used the highly expressive neural networks (NNs) as the surrogate model and derived theoretical guarantees using the theory of neural tangent kernel (NTK). However, these works suffer from the limitations of the requirement to invert an extremely large parameter matrix and the restriction to the sequential (rather than batch) setting. To overcome these limitations, we introduce two algorithms based on the Thompson sampling (TS) policy named Sample-Then-Optimize Batch Neural TS (STO-BNTS) and STO-BNTS-Linear. To choose an input query, we only need to train an NN (resp. a linear model) and then choose the query by maximizing the trained NN (resp. linear model), which is equivalently sampled from the GP posterior with the NTK as the kernel function. As a result, our algorithms sidestep the need to invert the large parameter matrix yet still preserve the validity of the TS policy. Next, we derive regret upper bounds for our algorithms with batch evaluations, and use insights from batch BO and NTK to show that they are asymptotically no-regret under certain conditions. Finally, we verify their empirical effectiveness using practical AutoML and reinforcement learning experiments.
Multi-agent Dynamic Algorithm Configuration
Authors: Ke Xue, Jiacheng Xu, Lei Yuan, Miqing Li, Chao Qian, Zongzhang Zhang, Yang Yu
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Automated algorithm configuration relieves users from tedious, trial-and-error tuning tasks. A popular algorithm configuration tuning paradigm is dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC), in which an agent learns dynamic configuration policies across instances by reinforcement learning (RL). However, in many complex algorithms, there may exist different types of configuration hyperparameters, and such heterogeneity may bring difficulties for classic DAC which uses a single-agent RL policy. In this paper, we aim to address this issue and propose multi-agent DAC (MA-DAC), with one agent working for one type of configuration hyperparameter. MA-DAC formulates the dynamic configuration of a complex algorithm with multiple types of hyperparameters as a contextual multi-agent Markov decision process and solves it by a cooperative multi-agent RL (MARL) algorithm. To instantiate, we apply MA-DAC to a well-known optimization algorithm for multi-objective optimization problems. Experimental results show the effectiveness of MA-DAC in not only achieving superior performance compared with other configuration tuning approaches based on heuristic rules, multi-armed bandits, and single-agent RL, but also being capable of generalizing to different problem classes. Furthermore, we release the environments in this paper as a benchmark for testing MARL algorithms, with the hope of facilitating the application of MARL.
Fast Optimization of Weighted Sparse Decision Trees for use in Optimal Treatment Regimes and Optimal Policy Design
Authors: Ali Behrouz, Mathias Lecuyer, Cynthia Rudin, Margo Seltzer
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

Sparse decision trees are one of the most common forms of interpretable models. While recent advances have produced algorithms that fully optimize sparse decision trees for prediction, that work does not address policy design, because the algorithms cannot handle weighted data samples. Specifically, they rely on the discreteness of the loss function, which means that real-valued weights cannot be directly used. For example, none of the existing techniques produce policies that incorporate inverse propensity weighting on individual data points. We present three algorithms for efficient sparse weighted decision tree optimization. The first approach directly optimizes the weighted loss function; however, it tends to be computationally inefficient for large datasets. Our second approach, which scales more efficiently, transforms weights to integer values and uses data duplication to transform the weighted decision tree optimization problem into an unweighted (but larger) counterpart. Our third algorithm, which scales to much larger datasets, uses a randomized procedure that samples each data point with a probability proportional to its weight. We present theoretical bounds on the error of the two fast methods and show experimentally that these methods can be two orders of magnitude faster than the direct optimization of the weighted loss, without losing significant accuracy.
Personalized Federated Hypernetworks for Privacy Preservation in Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Doseok Jang, Larry Yan, Lucas Spangher, Costas J. Spanos
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Personalized Federated Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning currently focuses on implementations where all data and training can be centralized to one machine. But what if local agents are split across multiple tasks, and need to keep data private between each? We develop the first application of Personalized Federated Hypernetworks (PFH) to Reinforcement Learning (RL). We then present a novel application of PFH to few-shot transfer, and demonstrate significant initial increases in learning. PFH has never been demonstrated beyond supervised learning benchmarks, so we apply PFH to an important domain: RL price-setting for energy demand response. We consider a general case across where agents are split across multiple microgrids, wherein energy consumption data must be kept private within each microgrid. Together, our work explores how the fields of personalized federated learning and RL can come together to make learning efficient across multiple tasks while keeping data secure.
SDW-ASL: A Dynamic System to Generate Large Scale Dataset for Continuous American Sign Language
Authors: Yehong Jiang
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Deep Learning, Sign Language Production

Despite tremendous progress in natural language processing using deep learning techniques in recent years, sign language production and comprehension has advanced very little. One critical barrier is the lack of largescale datasets available to the public due to the unbearable cost of labeled data generation. Efforts to provide public data for American Sign Language (ASL) comprehension have yielded two datasets, comprising more than thousand video clips. These datasets are large enough to enable a meaningful start to deep learning research on sign languages but are far too small to lead to any solution that can be practically deployed. So far, there is still no suitable dataset for ASL production. We proposed a system that can generate large scale ASL datasets for continuous ASL. It is suitable for general ASL processing and is particularly useful for ASL production. The continuous ASL dataset contains English labeled human articulations in condensed body pose data formats. To better serve the research community, we are releasing the first version of our ASL dataset, which contains 30k sentences, 416k words, a vocabulary of 18k words, in a total of 104 hours. This is the largest continuous sign language dataset published to date in terms of video duration. We also describe a system that can evolve and expand the dataset to incorporate better data processing techniques and more contents when available. It is our hope that the release of this ASL dataset and the sustainable dataset generation system to the public will propel better deep-learning research in ASL natural language processing.
Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision
Authors: Kevin Yang, Yuandong Tian, Nanyun Peng, Dan Klein
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Reranking

We consider the problem of automatically generating longer stories of over two thousand words. Compared to prior work on shorter stories, long-range plot coherence and relevance are more central challenges here. We propose the Recursive Reprompting and Revision framework (Re3) to address these challenges by (a) prompting a general-purpose language model to construct a structured overarching plan, and (b) generating story passages by repeatedly injecting contextual information from both the plan and current story state into a language model prompt. We then revise by (c) reranking different continuations for plot coherence and premise relevance, and finally (d) editing the best continuation for factual consistency. Compared to similar-length stories generated directly from the same base model, human evaluators judged substantially more of Re3's stories as having a coherent overarching plot (by 14% absolute increase), and relevant to the given initial premise (by 20%).
An Additive Autoencoder for Dimension Estimation
Authors: Tommi Kärkkäinen, Jan Hänninen
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

An additive autoencoder for dimension reduction, which is composed of a serially performed bias estimation, linear trend estimation, and nonlinear residual estimation, is proposed and analyzed. Computational experiments confirm that an autoencoder of this form, with only a shallow network to encapsulate the nonlinear behavior, is able to identify an intrinsic dimension of a dataset with a low autoencoding error. This observation leads to an investigation in which shallow and deep network structures, and how they are trained, are compared. We conclude that the deeper network structures obtain lower autoencoding errors during the identification of the intrinsic dimension. However, the detected dimension does not change compared to a shallow network.
Policy Gradient With Serial Markov Chain Reasoning
Authors: Edoardo Cetin, Oya Celiktutan
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We introduce a new framework that performs decision-making in reinforcement learning (RL) as an iterative reasoning process. We model agent behavior as the steady-state distribution of a parameterized reasoning Markov chain (RMC), optimized with a new tractable estimate of the policy gradient. We perform action selection by simulating the RMC for enough reasoning steps to approach its steady-state distribution. We show our framework has several useful properties that are inherently missing from traditional RL. For instance, it allows agent behavior to approximate any continuous distribution over actions by parameterizing the RMC with a simple Gaussian transition function. Moreover, the number of reasoning steps to reach convergence can scale adaptively with the difficulty of each action selection decision and can be accelerated by re-using past solutions. Our resulting algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance in popular Mujoco and DeepMind Control benchmarks, both for proprioceptive and pixel-based tasks.
Decoding Visual Neural Representations by Multimodal Learning of Brain-Visual-Linguistic Features
Authors: Changde Du, Kaicheng Fu, Jinpeng Li, Huiguang He
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00

Decoding human visual neural representations is a challenging task with great scientific significance in revealing vision-processing mechanisms and developing brain-like intelligent machines. Most existing methods are difficult to generalize to novel categories that have no corresponding neural data for training. The two main reasons are 1) the under-exploitation of the multimodal semantic knowledge underlying the neural data and 2) the small number of paired (stimuli-responses) training data. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a generic neural decoding method called BraVL that uses multimodal learning of brain-visual-linguistic features. We focus on modeling the relationships between brain, visual and linguistic features via multimodal deep generative models. Specifically, we leverage the mixture-of-product-of-experts formulation to infer a latent code that enables a coherent joint generation of all three modalities. To learn a more consistent joint representation and improve the data efficiency in the case of limited brain activity data, we exploit both intra- and inter-modality mutual information maximization regularization terms. In particular, our BraVL model can be trained under various semi-supervised scenarios to incorporate the visual and textual features obtained from the extra categories. Finally, we construct three trimodal matching datasets, and the extensive experiments lead to some interesting conclusions and cognitive insights: 1) decoding novel visual categories from human brain activity is practically possible with good accuracy; 2) decoding models using the combination of visual and linguistic features perform much better than those using either of them alone; 3) visual perception may be accompanied by linguistic influences to represent the semantics of visual stimuli. Code and data: https://github.com/ChangdeDu/BraVL.
H2RBox: Horizontal Box Annotation is All You Need for Oriented Object Detection
Authors: Xue Yang, Gefan Zhang, Wentong Li, Xuehui Wang, Yue Zhou, Junchi Yan
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Autonomous Driving, Box-supervised Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Oriented Object Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Oriented object detection emerges in many applications from aerial images to autonomous driving, while many existing detection benchmarks are annotated with horizontal bounding box only which is also less costive than fine-grained rotated box, leading to a gap between the readily available training corpus and the rising demand for oriented object detection. This paper proposes a simple yet effective oriented object detection approach called H2RBox merely using horizontal box annotation for weakly-supervised training, which closes the above gap and shows competitive performance even against those trained with rotated boxes. The cores of our method are weakly- and self-supervised learning, which predicts the angle of the object by learning the consistency of two different views. To our best knowledge, H2RBox is the first horizontal box annotation-based oriented object detector. Compared to an alternative i.e. horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation with our post adaption to oriented object detection, our approach is not susceptible to the prediction quality of mask and can perform more robustly in complex scenes containing a large number of dense objects and outliers. Experimental results show that H2RBox has significant performance and speed advantages over horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation methods, as well as lower memory requirements. While compared to rotated box-supervised oriented object detectors, our method shows very close performance and speed. The source code is available at PyTorch-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-mmrotate}{MMRotate} and Jittor-based \href{https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-jittor}{JDet}.