pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fairness Hacking: The Malicious Practice of Shrouding Unfairness in Algorithms
Authors: Kristof Meding, Thilo Hagendorff
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Fairness in machine learning (ML) is an ever-growing field of research due to the manifold potential for harm from algorithmic discrimination. To prevent such harm, a large body of literature develops new approaches to quantify fairness. Here, we investigate how one can divert the quantification of fairness by describing a practice we call "fairness hacking" for the purpose of shrouding unfairness in algorithms. This impacts end-users who rely on learning algorithms, as well as the broader community interested in fair AI practices. We introduce two different categories of fairness hacking in reference to the established concept of p-hacking. The first category, intra-metric fairness hacking, describes the misuse of a particular metric by adding or removing sensitive attributes from the analysis. In this context, countermeasures that have been developed to prevent or reduce p-hacking can be applied to similarly prevent or reduce fairness hacking. The second category of fairness hacking is inter-metric fairness hacking. Inter-metric fairness hacking is the search for a specific fair metric with given attributes. We argue that countermeasures to prevent or reduce inter-metric fairness hacking are still in their infancy. Finally, we demonstrate both types of fairness hacking using real datasets. Our paper intends to serve as a guidance for discussions within the fair ML community to prevent or reduce the misuse of fairness metrics, and thus reduce overall harm from ML applications.
Training A Multi-stage Deep Classifier with Feedback Signals
Authors: Chao Xu, Yu Yang, Rongzhao Wang, Guan Wang, Bojia Lin
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

Multi-Stage Classifier (MSC) - several classifiers working sequentially in an arranged order and classification decision is partially made at each step - is widely used in industrial applications for various resource limitation reasons. The classifiers of a multi-stage process are usually Neural Network (NN) models trained independently or in their inference order without considering the signals from the latter stages. Aimed at two-stage binary classification process, the most common type of MSC, we propose a novel training framework, named Feedback Training. The classifiers are trained in an order reverse to their actual working order, and the classifier at the later stage is used to guide the training of initial-stage classifier via a sample weighting method. We experimentally show the efficacy of our proposed approach, and its great superiority under the scenario of few-shot training.
Dual-Branch Reconstruction Network for Industrial Anomaly Detection with RGB-D Data
Authors: Chenyang Bi, Yueyang Li, Haichi Luo
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection methods are at the forefront of industrial anomaly detection efforts and have made notable progress. Previous work primarily used 2D information as input, but multi-modal industrial anomaly detection based on 3D point clouds and RGB images is just beginning to emerge. The regular approach involves utilizing large pre-trained models for feature representation and storing them in memory banks. However, the above methods require a longer inference time and higher memory usage, which cannot meet the real-time requirements of the industry. To overcome these issues, we propose a lightweight dual-branch reconstruction network(DBRN) based on RGB-D input, learning the decision boundary between normal and abnormal examples. The requirement for alignment between the two modalities is eliminated by using depth maps instead of point cloud input. Furthermore, we introduce an importance scoring module in the discriminative network to assist in fusing features from these two modalities, thereby obtaining a comprehensive discriminative result. DBRN achieves 92.8% AUROC with high inference efficiency on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset without large pre-trained models and memory banks.
Alleviating Behavior Data Imbalance for Multi-Behavior Graph Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Yijie Zhang, Yuanchen Bei, Shiqi Yang, Hao Chen, Zhiqing Li, Lijia Chen, Feiran Huang
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Multi-Task Learning, Representation Learning

Graph collaborative filtering, which learns user and item representations through message propagation over the user-item interaction graph, has been shown to effectively enhance recommendation performance. However, most current graph collaborative filtering models mainly construct the interaction graph on a single behavior domain (e.g. click), even though users exhibit various types of behaviors on real-world platforms, including actions like click, cart, and purchase. Furthermore, due to variations in user engagement, there exists an imbalance in the scale of different types of behaviors. For instance, users may click and view multiple items but only make selective purchases from a small subset of them. How to alleviate the behavior imbalance problem and utilize information from the multiple behavior graphs concurrently to improve the target behavior conversion (e.g. purchase) remains underexplored. To this end, we propose IMGCF, a simple but effective model to alleviate behavior data imbalance for multi-behavior graph collaborative filtering. Specifically, IMGCF utilizes a multi-task learning framework for collaborative filtering on multi-behavior graphs. Then, to mitigate the data imbalance issue, IMGCF improves representation learning on the sparse behavior by leveraging representations learned from the behavior domain with abundant data volumes. Experiments on two widely-used multi-behavior datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of IMGCF.
ChatAnything: Facetime Chat with LLM-Enhanced Personas
Authors: Yilin Zhao, Xinbin Yuan, ShangHua Gao, Zhijie Lin, Qibin Hou, Jiashi Feng, Daquan Zhou
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, In-Context Learning, Motion Generation, Novel Concepts, Personality Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

In this technical report, we target generating anthropomorphized personas for LLM-based characters in an online manner, including visual appearance, personality and tones, with only text descriptions. To achieve this, we first leverage the in-context learning capability of LLMs for personality generation by carefully designing a set of system prompts. We then propose two novel concepts: the mixture of voices (MoV) and the mixture of diffusers (MoD) for diverse voice and appearance generation. For MoV, we utilize the text-to-speech (TTS) algorithms with a variety of pre-defined tones and select the most matching one based on the user-provided text description automatically. For MoD, we combine the recent popular text-to-image generation techniques and talking head algorithms to streamline the process of generating talking objects. We termed the whole framework as ChatAnything. With it, users could be able to animate anything with any personas that are anthropomorphic using just a few text inputs. However, we have observed that the anthropomorphic objects produced by current generative models are often undetectable by pre-trained face landmark detectors, leading to failure of the face motion generation, even if these faces possess human-like appearances because those images are nearly seen during the training (e.g., OOD samples). To address this issue, we incorporate pixel-level guidance to infuse human face landmarks during the image generation phase. To benchmark these metrics, we have built an evaluation dataset. Based on it, we verify that the detection rate of the face landmark is significantly increased from 57.0% to 92.5% thus allowing automatic face animation based on generated speech content. The code and more results can be found at https://chatanything.github.io/.
Learning Globally Optimized Language Structure via Adversarial Training
Authors: Xuwang Yin
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Text Generation

Recent work has explored integrating autoregressive language models with energy-based models (EBMs) to enhance text generation capabilities. However, learning effective EBMs for text is challenged by the discrete nature of language. This work proposes an adversarial training strategy to address limitations in prior efforts. Specifically, an iterative adversarial attack algorithm is presented to generate negative samples for training the EBM by perturbing text from the autoregressive model. This aims to enable the EBM to suppress spurious modes outside the support of the data distribution. Experiments on an arithmetic sequence generation task demonstrate that the proposed adversarial training approach can substantially enhance the quality of generated sequences compared to prior methods. The results highlight the promise of adversarial techniques to improve discrete EBM training. Key contributions include: (1) an adversarial attack strategy tailored to text to generate negative samples, circumventing MCMC limitations; (2) an adversarial training algorithm for EBMs leveraging these attacks; (3) empirical validation of performance improvements on a sequence generation task.
AudioChatLlama: Towards General-Purpose Speech Abilities for LLMs
Authors: Yassir Fathullah, Chunyang Wu, Egor Lakomkin, Ke Li, Junteng Jia, Yuan Shangguan, Jay Mahadeokar, Ozlem Kalinli, Christian Fuegen, Mike Seltzer
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

In this work, we extend the instruction-tuned Llama-2 model with end-to-end general-purpose speech processing and reasoning abilities while maintaining the wide range of original LLM capabilities, without using any carefully curated paired data. The resulting end-to-end model, named AudioChatLlama, can utilize audio prompts as a replacement for text and sustain a conversation. Such a model also has extended cross-modal capabilities such as being able to perform spoken question answering (QA), speech translation, and audio summarization amongst many other closed and open-domain tasks. This is unlike prior approaches in speech, in which LLMs are extended to handle audio for a limited number of pre-designated tasks. On both synthesized and recorded speech QA test sets, evaluations show that our end-to-end approach is on par with or outperforms cascaded systems (speech recognizer + LLM) in terms of modeling the response to a prompt. Furthermore, unlike cascades, our approach can interchange text and audio modalities and intrinsically utilize prior context in a conversation to provide better results.
Federated Learning for Generalization, Robustness, Fairness: A Survey and Benchmark
Authors: Wenke Huang, Mang Ye, Zekun Shi, Guancheng Wan, He Li, Bo Du, Qiang Yang
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Survey

Federated learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving collaboration among different parties. Recently, with the popularity of federated learning, an influx of approaches have delivered towards different realistic challenges. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of the important and recent developments of research on federated learning. Firstly, we introduce the study history and terminology definition of this area. Then, we comprehensively review three basic lines of research: generalization, robustness, and fairness, by introducing their respective background concepts, task settings, and main challenges. We also offer a detailed overview of representative literature on both methods and datasets. We further benchmark the reviewed methods on several well-known datasets. Finally, we point out several open issues in this field and suggest opportunities for further research. We also provide a public website to continuously track developments in this fast advancing field: https://github.com/WenkeHuang/MarsFL.
Aggregate, Decompose, and Fine-Tune: A Simple Yet Effective Factor-Tuning Method for Vision Transformer
Authors: Dongping Chen
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Recent advancements have illuminated the efficacy of some tensorization-decomposition Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods like LoRA and FacT in the context of Vision Transformers (ViT). However, these methods grapple with the challenges of inadequately addressing inner- and cross-layer redundancy. To tackle this issue, we introduce EFfective Factor-Tuning (EFFT), a simple yet effective fine-tuning method. Within the VTAB-1K dataset, our EFFT surpasses all baselines, attaining state-of-the-art performance with a categorical average of 75.9% in top-1 accuracy with only 0.28% of the parameters for full fine-tuning. Considering the simplicity and efficacy of EFFT, it holds the potential to serve as a foundational benchmark. The code and model are now available at https://github.com/Dongping-Chen/EFFT-EFfective-Factor-Tuning.
Two Stream Scene Understanding on Graph Embedding
Authors: Wenkai Yang, Wenyuan Sun, Runxaing Huang
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Graph Embedding, Graph Generation, image-classification, Image Classification, Scene Graph Generation, Scene Understanding

The paper presents a novel two-stream network architecture for enhancing scene understanding in computer vision. This architecture utilizes a graph feature stream and an image feature stream, aiming to merge the strengths of both modalities for improved performance in image classification and scene graph generation tasks. The graph feature stream network comprises a segmentation structure, scene graph generation, and a graph representation module. The segmentation structure employs the UPSNet architecture with a backbone that can be a residual network, Vit, or Swin Transformer. The scene graph generation component focuses on extracting object labels and neighborhood relationships from the semantic map to create a scene graph. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), GraphSAGE, and Graph Attention Networks (GAT) are employed for graph representation, with an emphasis on capturing node features and their interconnections. The image feature stream network, on the other hand, focuses on image classification through the use of Vision Transformer and Swin Transformer models. The two streams are fused using various data fusion methods. This fusion is designed to leverage the complementary strengths of graph-based and image-based features.Experiments conducted on the ADE20K dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-stream network in improving image classification accuracy compared to conventional methods. This research provides a significant contribution to the field of computer vision, particularly in the areas of scene understanding and image classification, by effectively combining graph-based and image-based approaches.
Detecting and Correcting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes with Large Visual Language Model
Authors: Minh-Hao Van, Xintao Wu
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have taken the spotlight in natural language processing. Further, integrating LLMs with vision enables the users to explore more emergent abilities in multimodality. Visual language models (VLMs), such as LLaVA, Flamingo, or GPT-4, have demonstrated impressive performance on various visio-linguistic tasks. Consequently, there are enormous applications of large models that could be potentially used on social media platforms. Despite that, there is a lack of related work on detecting or correcting hateful memes with VLMs. In this work, we study the ability of VLMs on hateful meme detection and hateful meme correction tasks with zero-shot prompting. From our empirical experiments, we show the effectiveness of the pretrained LLaVA model and discuss its strengths and weaknesses in these tasks.
DeepQC: A Deep Learning System for Automatic Quality Control of In-situ Soil Moisture Sensor Time Series Data
Authors: Lahari Bandaru, Bharat C Irigireddy, Brian Davis
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series

Amidst changing climate, real-time soil moisture monitoring is vital for the development of in-season decision support tools to help farmers manage weather related risks. Precision Sustainable Agriculture (PSA) recently established a real-time soil moisture monitoring network across the central, Midwest, and eastern U.S., but field-scale sensor observations often come with data gaps and anomalies. To maintain the data quality needed for development of decision tools, a quality control system is necessary. The International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) introduced the Flagit module for anomaly detection in soil moisture observations. However, under certain conditions, Flagit's quality control approaches may underperform in identifying anomalies. Recently deep learning methods have been successfully applied to detect anomalies in time series data in various disciplines. However, their use in agriculture has not been yet investigated. This study focuses on developing a Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, referred to as DeepQC, to identify anomalies in soil moisture data. Manual flagged PSA observations were used for training, validation, and testing the model, following an 80:10:10 split. The study then compared the DeepQC and Flagit based estimates to assess their relative performance. Flagit corrected flagged 95.5% of the corrected observations and 50.3% of the anomaly observations, indicating its limitations in identifying anomalies. On the other hand, the DeepQC correctly flagged 99.7% of the correct observations and 95.6% of the anomalies in significantly less time, demonstrating its superiority over Flagit approach. Importantly, DeepQC's performance remained consistent regardless of the number of anomalies. Given the promising results obtained with the DeepQC, future studies will focus on implementing this model on national and global soil moisture networks.
An advantage based policy transfer algorithm for reinforcement learning with measures of transferability
Authors: Md Ferdous Alam, Parinaz Naghizadeh, David Hoelzle
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Decision Making, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments through interaction with the environment. In most real-world applications, however, a high number of interactions are infeasible. In these environments, transfer RL algorithms, which can be used for the transfer of knowledge from one or multiple source environments to a target environment, have been shown to increase learning speed and improve initial and asymptotic performance. However, most existing transfer RL algorithms are on-policy and sample inefficient, fail in adversarial target tasks, and often require heuristic choices in algorithm design. This paper proposes an off-policy Advantage-based Policy Transfer algorithm, APT-RL, for fixed domain environments. Its novelty is in using the popular notion of ``advantage'' as a regularizer, to weigh the knowledge that should be transferred from the source, relative to new knowledge learned in the target, removing the need for heuristic choices. Further, we propose a new transfer performance measure to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and unify existing transfer RL frameworks. Finally, we present a scalable, theoretically-backed task similarity measurement algorithm to illustrate the alignments between our proposed transferability measure and similarities between source and target environments. We compare APT-RL with several baselines, including existing transfer-RL algorithms, in three high-dimensional continuous control tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that APT-RL outperforms existing transfer RL algorithms and is at least as good as learning from scratch in adversarial tasks.
Enabling Human-Centered AI: A Methodological Perspective
Authors: Wei Xu, Zaifeng Gao
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

Human-centered AI (HCAI) is a design philosophy that advocates prioritizing humans in designing, developing, and deploying intelligent systems, aiming to maximize the benefits of AI to humans and avoid potential adverse impacts. While HCAI continues to influence, the lack of guidance on methodology in practice makes its adoption challenging. This paper proposes a comprehensive HCAI framework based on our previous work with integrated components, including design goals, design principles, implementation approaches, interdisciplinary teams, HCAI methods, and HCAI processes. This paper also presents a "three-layer" approach to facilitate the implementation of the framework. We believe this systematic and executable framework can overcome the weaknesses in current HCAI frameworks and the challenges currently faced in practice, putting it into action to enable HCAI further.
An Investigation of Hepatitis B Virus Genome using Markov Models
Authors: Khadijeh, Jahanian, Elnaz Shalbafian, Morteza Saberi, Roohallah Alizadehsani, Iman Dehzangi
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00

The human genome encodes a family of editing enzymes known as APOBEC3 (apolipoprotein B mRNA editing enzyme, catalytic polypeptide-like 3). Several family members, such as APO-BEC3G, APOBEC3F, and APOBEC3H haplotype II, exhibit activity against viruses such as HIV. These enzymes induce C-to-U mutations in the negative strand of viral genomes, resulting in multiple G-to-A changes, commonly referred to as 'hypermutation.' Mutations catalyzed by these enzymes are sequence context-dependent in the HIV genome; for instance, APOBEC3G preferen-tially mutates G within GG, TGG, and TGGG contexts, while other members mutate G within GA, TGA, and TGAA contexts. However, the same sequence context has not been explored in relation to these enzymes and HBV. In this study, our objective is to identify the mutational footprint of APOBEC3 enzymes in the HBV genome. To achieve this, we employ a multivariable data analytics technique to investigate motif preferences and potential sequence hierarchies of mutation by APOBEC3 enzymes using full genome HBV sequences from a diverse range of naturally infected patients. This approach allows us to distinguish between normal and hypermutated sequences based on the representation of mono- to tetra-nucleotide motifs. Additionally, we aim to identify motifs associated with hypermutation induced by different APOBEC3 enzymes in HBV genomes. Our analyses reveal that either APOBEC3 enzymes are not active against HBV, or the induction of G-to-A mutations by these enzymes is not sequence context-dependent in the HBV genome.
Conversational Data Exploration: A Game-Changer for Designing Data Science Pipelines
Authors: Genoveva Vargas-Solar, Tania Cerquitelli, Javier A. Espinosa-Oviedo, François Cheval, Anthelme Buchaille, Luca Polgar
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00

This paper proposes a conversational approach implemented by the system Chatin for driving an intuitive data exploration experience. Our work aims to unlock the full potential of data analytics and artificial intelligence with a new generation of data science solutions. Chatin is a cutting-edge tool that democratises access to AI-driven solutions, empowering non-technical users from various disciplines to explore data and extract knowledge from it.