pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ViLP: Knowledge Exploration using Vision, Language, and Pose Embeddings for Video Action Recognition
Authors: Soumyabrata Chaudhuri, Saumik Bhattacharya
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Temporal Action Localization

Video Action Recognition (VAR) is a challenging task due to its inherent complexities. Though different approaches have been explored in the literature, designing a unified framework to recognize a large number of human actions is still a challenging problem. Recently, Multi-Modal Learning (MML) has demonstrated promising results in this domain. In literature, 2D skeleton or pose modality has often been used for this task, either independently or in conjunction with the visual information (RGB modality) present in videos. However, the combination of pose, visual information, and text attributes has not been explored yet, though text and pose attributes independently have been proven to be effective in numerous computer vision tasks. In this paper, we present the first pose augmented Vision-language model (VLM) for VAR. Notably, our scheme achieves an accuracy of 92.81% and 73.02% on two popular human video action recognition benchmark datasets, UCF-101 and HMDB-51, respectively, even without any video data pre-training, and an accuracy of 96.11% and 75.75% after kinetics pre-training.
Intelligent Assistant Language Understanding On Device
Authors: Cecilia Aas, Hisham Abdelsalam, Irina Belousova, Shruti Bhargava, Jianpeng Cheng, Robert Daland, Joris Driesen, Federico Flego, Tristan Guigue, Anders Johannsen, Partha Lal, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Nathan Perkins, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Stephen Pulman, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, David Q. Sun, John Torr, Marco Del Vecchio, Jay Wacker, Jason D. Williams, Hong Yu
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding

It has recently become feasible to run personal digital assistants on phones and other personal devices. In this paper we describe a design for a natural language understanding system that runs on device. In comparison to a server-based assistant, this system is more private, more reliable, faster, more expressive, and more accurate. We describe what led to key choices about architecture and technologies. For example, some approaches in the dialog systems literature are difficult to maintain over time in a deployment setting. We hope that sharing learnings from our practical experiences may help inform future work in the research community.
FLIPS: Federated Learning using Intelligent Participant Selection
Authors: Rahul Atul Bhope, K. R. Jayaram, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Ashish Verma, Gegi Thomas
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Federated Learning, Management

This paper presents the design and implementation of FLIPS, a middleware system to manage data and participant heterogeneity in federated learning (FL) training workloads. In particular, we examine the benefits of label distribution clustering on participant selection in federated learning. FLIPS clusters parties involved in an FL training job based on the label distribution of their data apriori, and during FL training, ensures that each cluster is equitably represented in the participants selected. FLIPS can support the most common FL algorithms, including FedAvg, FedProx, FedDyn, FedOpt and FedYogi. To manage platform heterogeneity and dynamic resource availability, FLIPS incorporates a straggler management mechanism to handle changing capacities in distributed, smart community applications. Privacy of label distributions, clustering and participant selection is ensured through a trusted execution environment (TEE). Our comprehensive empirical evaluation compares FLIPS with random participant selection, as well as three other "smart" selection mechanisms - Oort, TiFL and gradient clustering using two real-world datasets, two benchmark datasets, two different non-IID distributions and three common FL algorithms (FedYogi, FedProx and FedAvg). We demonstrate that FLIPS significantly improves convergence, achieving higher accuracy by 17 - 20 % with 20 - 60 % lower communication costs, and these benefits endure in the presence of straggler participants.
Exploiting Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Unseen State Augmentations
Authors: Nirbhay Modhe, Qiaozi Gao, Ashwin Kalyan, Dhruv Batra, Govind Thattai, Gaurav Sukhatme
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods strike a balance between exploration and exploitation by conservative value estimation -- penalizing values of unseen states and actions. Model-free methods penalize values at all unseen actions, while model-based methods are able to further exploit unseen states via model rollouts. However, such methods are handicapped in their ability to find unseen states far away from the available offline data due to two factors -- (a) very short rollout horizons in models due to cascading model errors, and (b) model rollouts originating solely from states observed in offline data. We relax the second assumption and present a novel unseen state augmentation strategy to allow exploitation of unseen states where the learned model and value estimates generalize. Our strategy finds unseen states by value-informed perturbations of seen states followed by filtering out states with epistemic uncertainty estimates too high (high error) or too low (too similar to seen data). We observe improved performance in several offline RL tasks and find that our augmentation strategy consistently leads to overall lower average dataset Q-value estimates i.e. more conservative Q-value estimates than a baseline.
Guarding the Guardians: Automated Analysis of Online Child Sexual Abuse
Authors: Juanita Puentes, Angela Castillo, Wilmar Osejo, Yuly Calderón, Viviana Quintero, Lina Saldarriaga, Diana Agudelo, Pablo Arbeláez
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00

Online violence against children has increased globally recently, demanding urgent attention. Competent authorities manually analyze abuse complaints to comprehend crime dynamics and identify patterns. However, the manual analysis of these complaints presents a challenge because it exposes analysts to harmful content during the review process. Given these challenges, we present a novel solution, an automated tool designed to analyze children's sexual abuse reports comprehensively. By automating the analysis process, our tool significantly reduces the risk of exposure to harmful content by categorizing the reports on three dimensions: Subject, Degree of Criminality, and Damage. Furthermore, leveraging our multidisciplinary team's expertise, we introduce a novel approach to annotate the collected data, enabling a more in-depth analysis of the reports. This approach improves the comprehension of fundamental patterns and trends, enabling law enforcement agencies and policymakers to create focused strategies in the fight against children's violence.
Trusting Language Models in Education
Authors: Jogi Suda Neto, Li Deng, Thejaswi Raya, Reza Shahbazi, Nick Liu, Adhitya Venkatesh, Miral Shah, Neeru Khosla, Rodrigo Capobianco Guido
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Language Models are being widely used in Education. Even though modern deep learning models achieve very good performance on question-answering tasks, sometimes they make errors. To avoid misleading students by showing wrong answers, it is important to calibrate the confidence - that is, the prediction probability - of these models. In our work, we propose to use an XGBoost on top of BERT to output the corrected probabilities, using features based on the attention mechanism. Our hypothesis is that the level of uncertainty contained in the flow of attention is related to the quality of the model's response itself.
Mobile Supply: The Last Piece of Jigsaw of Recommender System
Authors: Zhenhao Jiang, Biao Zeng, Hao Feng, Jin Liu, Jie Zhang, Jia Jia, Ning Hu
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Re-Ranking

Recommendation system is a fundamental functionality of online platforms. With the development of computing power of mobile phones, some researchers have deployed recommendation algorithms on users' mobile devices to address the problems of data transmission delay and pagination trigger mechanism. However, the existing edge-side mobile rankings cannot completely solve the problem of pagination trigger mechanism. The mobile ranking can only sort the items on the current page, and the fixed set of candidate items limits the performance of the mobile ranking. Besides, after the user has viewed the items of interest to the user on the current page, the user refresh to get a new page of items. This will affect the user's immersive experience because the user is not satisfied with the left items on the current page. In order to address the problem of pagination trigger mechanism, we propose a completely new module in the pipeline of recommender system named Mobile Supply. The pipeline of recommender system is extended to "retrival->pre-ranking->ranking->re-ranking->Mobile Supply->mobile ranking". Specifically, we introduce the concept of list value and use point-wise paradigm to approximate list-wise estimation to calculate the maximum revenue that can be achieved by mobile ranking for the current page. We also design a new mobile ranking approach named device-aware mobile ranking considering the differences of mobile devices tailored to the new pipeline. Extensive offline and online experiments show the superiority of our proposed method and prove that Mobile Supply can further improve the performance of edge-side recommender system and user experience. Mobile Supply has been deployed on the homepage of a large-scale online food platform and has yielded considerable profits in our business.
Revisiting Prompt Engineering via Declarative Crowdsourcing
Authors: Aditya G. Parameswaran, Shreya Shankar, Parth Asawa, Naman jain, Yujie Wang
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Resolution, Imputation, Prompt Engineering

Large language models (LLMs) are incredibly powerful at comprehending and generating data in the form of text, but are brittle and error-prone. There has been an advent of toolkits and recipes centered around so-called prompt engineering-the process of asking an LLM to do something via a series of prompts. However, for LLM-powered data processing workflows, in particular, optimizing for quality, while keeping cost bounded, is a tedious, manual process. We put forth a vision for declarative prompt engineering. We view LLMs like crowd workers and leverage ideas from the declarative crowdsourcing literature-including leveraging multiple prompting strategies, ensuring internal consistency, and exploring hybrid-LLM-non-LLM approaches-to make prompt engineering a more principled process. Preliminary case studies on sorting, entity resolution, and imputation demonstrate the promise of our approach
Recurrent Multi-scale Transformer for High-Resolution Salient Object Detection
Authors: Xinhao Deng, Pingping Zhang, Wei Liu, Huchuan Lu
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k, 8k, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment the most conspicuous objects in an image or video. As an important pre-processing step, it has many potential applications in multimedia and vision tasks. With the advance of imaging devices, SOD with high-resolution images is of great demand, recently. However, traditional SOD methods are largely limited to low-resolution images, making them difficult to adapt to the development of High-Resolution SOD (HRSOD). Although some HRSOD methods emerge, there are no large enough datasets for training and evaluating. Besides, current HRSOD methods generally produce incomplete object regions and irregular object boundaries. To address above issues, in this work, we first propose a new HRS10K dataset, which contains 10,500 high-quality annotated images at 2K-8K resolution. As far as we know, it is the largest dataset for the HRSOD task, which will significantly help future works in training and evaluating models. Furthermore, to improve the HRSOD performance, we propose a novel Recurrent Multi-scale Transformer (RMFormer), which recurrently utilizes shared Transformers and multi-scale refinement architectures. Thus, high-resolution saliency maps can be generated with the guidance of lower-resolution predictions. Extensive experiments on both high-resolution and low-resolution benchmarks show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework. The source code and dataset are released at: https://github.com/DrowsyMon/RMFormer.
Stock Market Price Prediction: A Hybrid LSTM and Sequential Self-Attention based Approach
Authors: Karan Pardeshi, Sukhpal Singh Gill, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00

One of the most enticing research areas is the stock market, and projecting stock prices may help investors profit by making the best decisions at the correct time. Deep learning strategies have emerged as a critical technique in the field of the financial market. The stock market is impacted due to two aspects, one is the geo-political, social and global events on the bases of which the price trends could be affected. Meanwhile, the second aspect purely focuses on historical price trends and seasonality, allowing us to forecast stock prices. In this paper, our aim is to focus on the second aspect and build a model that predicts future prices with minimal errors. In order to provide better prediction results of stock price, we propose a new model named Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with Sequential Self-Attention Mechanism (LSTM-SSAM). Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on the three stock datasets: SBIN, HDFCBANK, and BANKBARODA. The experimental results prove the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model compared to existing models. The experimental findings demonstrate that the root-mean-squared error (RMSE), and R-square (R2) evaluation indicators are giving the best results.
High-Resolution Cranial Defect Reconstruction by Iterative, Low-Resolution, Point Cloud Completion Transformers
Authors: Marek Wodzinski, Mateusz Daniol, Daria Hemmerling, Miroslaw Socha
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Segmentation, Point Cloud Completion, Semantic Segmentation

Each year thousands of people suffer from various types of cranial injuries and require personalized implants whose manual design is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, an automatic, dedicated system to increase the availability of personalized cranial reconstruction is highly desirable. The problem of the automatic cranial defect reconstruction can be formulated as the shape completion task and solved using dedicated deep networks. Currently, the most common approach is to use the volumetric representation and apply deep networks dedicated to image segmentation. However, this approach has several limitations and does not scale well into high-resolution volumes, nor takes into account the data sparsity. In our work, we reformulate the problem into a point cloud completion task. We propose an iterative, transformer-based method to reconstruct the cranial defect at any resolution while also being fast and resource-efficient during training and inference. We compare the proposed methods to the state-of-the-art volumetric approaches and show superior performance in terms of GPU memory consumption while maintaining high-quality of the reconstructed defects.
Weakly Supervised Multi-Task Representation Learning for Human Activity Analysis Using Wearables
Authors: Taoran Sheng, Manfred Huber
Date: 2023-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition, Person Identification, Representation Learning

Sensor data streams from wearable devices and smart environments are widely studied in areas like human activity recognition (HAR), person identification, or health monitoring. However, most of the previous works in activity and sensor stream analysis have been focusing on one aspect of the data, e.g. only recognizing the type of the activity or only identifying the person who performed the activity. We instead propose an approach that uses a weakly supervised multi-output siamese network that learns to map the data into multiple representation spaces, where each representation space focuses on one aspect of the data. The representation vectors of the data samples are positioned in the space such that the data with the same semantic meaning in that aspect are closely located to each other. Therefore, as demonstrated with a set of experiments, the trained model can provide metrics for clustering data based on multiple aspects, allowing it to address multiple tasks simultaneously and even to outperform single task supervised methods in many situations. In addition, further experiments are presented that in more detail analyze the effect of the architecture and of using multiple tasks within this framework, that investigate the scalability of the model to include additional tasks, and that demonstrate the ability of the framework to combine data for which only partial relationship information with respect to the target tasks is available.
Textual Data Mining for Financial Fraud Detection: A Deep Learning Approach
Authors: Qiuru Li
Date: 2023-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Fraud Detection, text-classification, Text Classification

In this report, I present a deep learning approach to conduct a natural language processing (hereafter NLP) binary classification task for analyzing financial-fraud texts. First, I searched for regulatory announcements and enforcement bulletins from HKEX news to define fraudulent companies and to extract their MD&A reports before I organized the sentences from the reports with labels and reporting time. My methodology involved different kinds of neural network models, including Multilayer Perceptrons with Embedding layers, vanilla Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for the text classification task. By utilizing this diverse set of models, I aim to perform a comprehensive comparison of their accuracy in detecting financial fraud. My results bring significant implications for financial fraud detection as this work contributes to the growing body of research at the intersection of deep learning, NLP, and finance, providing valuable insights for industry practitioners, regulators, and researchers in the pursuit of more robust and effective fraud detection methodologies.
A Differential Datalog Interpreter
Authors: Bruno Rucy Carneiro Alves de Lima, Merlin Kramer, Kalmer Apinis
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00

The core reasoning task for datalog engines is materialization, the evaluation of a datalog program over a database alongside its physical incorporation into the database itself. The de-facto method of computing it, is through the recursive application of inference rules. Due to it being a costly operation, it is a must for datalog engines to provide incremental materialization, that is, to adjust the computation to new data, instead of restarting from scratch. One of the major caveats, is that deleting data is notoriously more involved than adding, since one has to take into account all possible data that has been entailed from what is being deleted. Differential Dataflow is a computational model that provides efficient incremental maintenance, notoriously with equal performance between additions and deletions, and work distribution, of iterative dataflows. In this paper we investigate the performance of materialization with three reference datalog implementations, out of which one is built on top of a lightweight relational engine, and the two others are differential-dataflow and non-differential versions of the same rewrite algorithm, with the same optimizations.
Semantic Channel Equalizer: Modelling Language Mismatch in Multi-User Semantic Communications
Authors: Mohamed Sana, Emilio Calvanese Strinati
Date: 2023-08-04 00:00:00

We consider a multi-user semantic communications system in which agents (transmitters and receivers) interact through the exchange of semantic messages to convey meanings. In this context, languages are instrumental in structuring the construction and consolidation of knowledge, influencing conceptual representation and semantic extraction and interpretation. Yet, the crucial role of languages in semantic communications is often overlooked. When this is not the case, agent languages are assumed compatible and unambiguously interoperable, ignoring practical limitations that may arise due to language mismatching. This is the focus of this work. When agents use distinct languages, message interpretation is prone to semantic noise resulting from critical distortion introduced by semantic channels. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new semantic channel equalizer to counteract and limit the critical ambiguity in message interpretation. Our proposed solution models the mismatch of languages with measurable transformations over semantic representation spaces. We achieve this using optimal transport theory, where we model such transformations as transportation maps. Then, to recover at the receiver the meaning intended by the teacher we operate semantic equalization to compensate for the transformation introduced by the semantic channel, either before transmission and/or after the reception of semantic messages. We implement the proposed approach as an operation over a codebook of transformations specifically designed for successful communication. Numerical results show that the proposed semantic channel equalizer outperforms traditional approaches in terms of operational complexity and transmission accuracy.
Bio+Clinical BERT, BERT Base, and CNN Performance Comparison for Predicting Drug-Review Satisfaction
Authors: Yue Ling
Date: 2023-08-02 00:00:00

The objective of this study is to develop natural language processing (NLP) models that can analyze patients' drug reviews and accurately classify their satisfaction levels as positive, neutral, or negative. Such models would reduce the workload of healthcare professionals and provide greater insight into patients' quality of life, which is a critical indicator of treatment effectiveness. To achieve this, we implemented and evaluated several classification models, including a BERT base model, Bio+Clinical BERT, and a simpler CNN. Results indicate that the medical domain-specific Bio+Clinical BERT model significantly outperformed the general domain base BERT model, achieving macro f1 and recall score improvement of 11%, as shown in Table 2. Future research could explore how to capitalize on the specific strengths of each model. Bio+Clinical BERT excels in overall performance, particularly with medical jargon, while the simpler CNN demonstrates the ability to identify crucial words and accurately classify sentiment in texts with conflicting sentiments.