pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GPT Models in Construction Industry: Opportunities, Limitations, and a Use Case Validation
Authors: Abdullahi Saka, Ridwan Taiwo, Nurudeen Saka, Babatunde Salami, Saheed Ajayi, Kabiru Akande, Hadi Kazemi
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00

Large Language Models(LLMs) trained on large data sets came into prominence in 2018 after Google introduced BERT. Subsequently, different LLMs such as GPT models from OpenAI have been released. These models perform well on diverse tasks and have been gaining widespread applications in fields such as business and education. However, little is known about the opportunities and challenges of using LLMs in the construction industry. Thus, this study aims to assess GPT models in the construction industry. A critical review, expert discussion and case study validation are employed to achieve the study objectives. The findings revealed opportunities for GPT models throughout the project lifecycle. The challenges of leveraging GPT models are highlighted and a use case prototype is developed for materials selection and optimization. The findings of the study would be of benefit to researchers, practitioners and stakeholders, as it presents research vistas for LLMs in the construction industry.
IDToolkit: A Toolkit for Benchmarking and Developing Inverse Design Algorithms in Nanophotonics
Authors: Jia-Qi Yang, Yucheng Xu, Jia-Lei Shen, Kebin Fan, De-Chuan Zhan, Yang Yang
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Aiding humans with scientific designs is one of the most exciting of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), due to their potential for the discovery of new drugs, design of new materials and chemical compounds, etc. However, scientific design typically requires complex domain knowledge that is not familiar to AI researchers. Further, scientific studies involve professional skills to perform experiments and evaluations. These obstacles prevent AI researchers from developing specialized methods for scientific designs. To take a step towards easy-to-understand and reproducible research of scientific design, we propose a benchmark for the inverse design of nanophotonic devices, which can be verified computationally and accurately. Specifically, we implemented three different nanophotonic design problems, namely a radiative cooler, a selective emitter for thermophotovoltaics, and structural color filters, all of which are different in design parameter spaces, complexity, and design targets. The benchmark environments are implemented with an open-source simulator. We further implemented 10 different inverse design algorithms and compared them in a reproducible and fair framework. The results revealed the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods, which shed light on several future directions for developing more efficient inverse design algorithms. Our benchmark can also serve as the starting point for more challenging scientific design problems. The code of IDToolkit is available at https://github.com/ThyrixYang/IDToolkit.
Towards Machine Learning and Inference for Resource-constrained MCUs
Authors: Yushan Huang, Hamed Haddadi
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00

Machine learning (ML) is moving towards edge devices. However, ML models with high computational demands and energy consumption pose challenges for ML inference in resource-constrained environments, such as the deep sea. To address these challenges, we propose a battery-free ML inference and model personalization pipeline for microcontroller units (MCUs). As an example, we performed fish image recognition in the ocean. We evaluated and compared the accuracy, runtime, power, and energy consumption of the model before and after optimization. The results demonstrate that, our pipeline can achieve 97.78% accuracy with 483.82 KB Flash, 70.32 KB RAM, 118 ms runtime, 4.83 mW power, and 0.57 mJ energy consumption on MCUs, reducing by 64.17%, 12.31%, 52.42%, 63.74%, and 82.67%, compared to the baseline. The results indicate the feasibility of battery-free ML inference on MCUs.
Subequivariant Graph Reinforcement Learning in 3D Environments
Authors: Runfa Chen, Jiaqi Han, Fuchun Sun, Wenbing Huang
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Zero-shot Generalization

Learning a shared policy that guides the locomotion of different agents is of core interest in Reinforcement Learning (RL), which leads to the study of morphology-agnostic RL. However, existing benchmarks are highly restrictive in the choice of starting point and target point, constraining the movement of the agents within 2D space. In this work, we propose a novel setup for morphology-agnostic RL, dubbed Subequivariant Graph RL in 3D environments (3D-SGRL). Specifically, we first introduce a new set of more practical yet challenging benchmarks in 3D space that allows the agent to have full Degree-of-Freedoms to explore in arbitrary directions starting from arbitrary configurations. Moreover, to optimize the policy over the enlarged state-action space, we propose to inject geometric symmetry, i.e., subequivariance, into the modeling of the policy and Q-function such that the policy can generalize to all directions, improving exploration efficiency. This goal is achieved by a novel SubEquivariant Transformer (SET) that permits expressive message exchange. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method on the proposed benchmarks, where our method consistently and significantly outperforms existing approaches on single-task, multi-task, and zero-shot generalization scenarios. Extensive ablations are also conducted to verify our design. Code and videos are available on our project page: https://alpc91.github.io/SGRL/.
Chatbots put to the test in math and logic problems: A preliminary comparison and assessment of ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, and Google Bard
Authors: Vagelis Plevris, George Papazafeiropoulos, Alejandro Jiménez Rios
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Math

A comparison between three chatbots which are based on large language models, namely ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4 and Google Bard is presented, focusing on their ability to give correct answers to mathematics and logic problems. In particular, we check their ability to Understand the problem at hand; Apply appropriate algorithms or methods for its solution; and Generate a coherent response and a correct answer. We use 30 questions that are clear, without any ambiguities, fully described with plain text only, and have a unique, well defined correct answer. The questions are divided into two sets of 15 each. The questions of Set A are 15 "Original" problems that cannot be found online, while Set B contains 15 "Published" problems that one can find online, usually with their solution. Each question is posed three times to each chatbot. The answers are recorded and discussed, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. It has been found that for straightforward arithmetic, algebraic expressions, or basic logic puzzles, chatbots may provide accurate solutions, although not in every attempt. However, for more complex mathematical problems or advanced logic tasks, their answers, although written in a usually "convincing" way, may not be reliable. Consistency is also an issue, as many times a chatbot will provide conflicting answers when given the same question more than once. A comparative quantitative evaluation of the three chatbots is made through scoring their final answers based on correctness. It was found that ChatGPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT-3.5 in both sets of questions. Bard comes third in the original questions of Set A, behind the other two chatbots, while it has the best performance (first place) in the published questions of Set B. This is probably because Bard has direct access to the internet, in contrast to ChatGPT chatbots which do not have any communication with the outside world.
Bottom-Up Grounding in the Probabilistic Logic Programming System Fusemate
Authors: Peter Baumgartner, Elena Tartaglia
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00

This paper introduces the Fusemate probabilistic logic programming system. Fusemate's inference engine comprises a grounding component and a variable elimination method for probabilistic inference. Fusemate differs from most other systems by grounding the program in a bottom-up way instead of the common top-down way. While bottom-up grounding is attractive for a number of reasons, e.g., for dynamically creating distributions of varying support sizes, it makes it harder to control the amount of ground clauses generated. We address this problem by interleaving grounding with a query-guided relevance test which prunes rules whose bodies are inconsistent with the query. We present our method in detail and demonstrate it with examples that involve "time", such as (hidden) Markov models. Our experiments demonstrate competitive or better performance compared to a state-of-the art probabilistic logic programming system, in particular for high branching problems.
AlphaBlock: Embodied Finetuning for Vision-Language Reasoning in Robot Manipulation
Authors: Chuhao Jin, Wenhui Tan, Jiange Yang, Bei Liu, Ruihua Song, LiMin Wang, Jianlong Fu
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Manipulation

We propose a novel framework for learning high-level cognitive capabilities in robot manipulation tasks, such as making a smiley face using building blocks. These tasks often involve complex multi-step reasoning, presenting significant challenges due to the limited paired data connecting human instructions (e.g., making a smiley face) and robot actions (e.g., end-effector movement). Existing approaches relieve this challenge by adopting an open-loop paradigm decomposing high-level instructions into simple sub-task plans, and executing them step-by-step using low-level control models. However, these approaches are short of instant observations in multi-step reasoning, leading to sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we propose to automatically collect a cognitive robot dataset by Large Language Models (LLMs). The resulting dataset AlphaBlock consists of 35 comprehensive high-level tasks of multi-step text plans and paired observation sequences. To enable efficient data acquisition, we employ elaborated multi-round prompt designs that effectively reduce the burden of extensive human involvement. We further propose a closed-loop multi-modal embodied planning model that autoregressively generates plans by taking image observations as input. To facilitate effective learning, we leverage MiniGPT-4 with a frozen visual encoder and LLM, and finetune additional vision adapter and Q-former to enable fine-grained spatial perception for manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments to verify the superiority over existing open and closed-loop methods, and achieve a significant increase in success rate by 21.4% and 14.5% over ChatGPT and GPT-4 based robot tasks. Real-world demos are shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAzID1_qQk .
Learning Off-Road Terrain Traversability with Self-Supervisions Only
Authors: Junwon Seo, Sungdae Sim, Inwook Shim
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, One-Class Classification, Self-Supervised Learning

Estimating the traversability of terrain should be reliable and accurate in diverse conditions for autonomous driving in off-road environments. However, learning-based approaches often yield unreliable results when confronted with unfamiliar contexts, and it is challenging to obtain manual annotations frequently for new circumstances. In this paper, we introduce a method for learning traversability from images that utilizes only self-supervision and no manual labels, enabling it to easily learn traversability in new circumstances. To this end, we first generate self-supervised traversability labels from past driving trajectories by labeling regions traversed by the vehicle as highly traversable. Using the self-supervised labels, we then train a neural network that identifies terrains that are safe to traverse from an image using a one-class classification algorithm. Additionally, we supplement the limitations of self-supervised labels by incorporating methods of self-supervised learning of visual representations. To conduct a comprehensive evaluation, we collect data in a variety of driving environments and perceptual conditions and show that our method produces reliable estimations in various environments. In addition, the experimental results validate that our method outperforms other self-supervised traversability estimation methods and achieves comparable performances with supervised learning methods trained on manually labeled data.
EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation
Authors: Xingqun Qi, Chen Liu, Lincheng Li, Jie Hou, Haoran Xin, Xin Yu
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Generation, Rhythm

Generating vivid and diverse 3D co-speech gestures is crucial for various applications in animating virtual avatars. While most existing methods can generate gestures from audio directly, they usually overlook that emotion is one of the key factors of authentic co-speech gesture generation. In this work, we propose EmotionGesture, a novel framework for synthesizing vivid and diverse emotional co-speech 3D gestures from audio. Considering emotion is often entangled with the rhythmic beat in speech audio, we first develop an Emotion-Beat Mining module (EBM) to extract the emotion and audio beat features as well as model their correlation via a transcript-based visual-rhythm alignment. Then, we propose an initial pose based Spatial-Temporal Prompter (STP) to generate future gestures from the given initial poses. STP effectively models the spatial-temporal correlations between the initial poses and the future gestures, thus producing the spatial-temporal coherent pose prompt. Once we obtain pose prompts, emotion, and audio beat features, we will generate 3D co-speech gestures through a transformer architecture. However, considering the poses of existing datasets often contain jittering effects, this would lead to generating unstable gestures. To address this issue, we propose an effective objective function, dubbed Motion-Smooth Loss. Specifically, we model motion offset to compensate for jittering ground-truth by forcing gestures to be smooth. Last, we present an emotion-conditioned VAE to sample emotion features, enabling us to generate diverse emotional results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art, achieving vivid and diverse emotional co-speech 3D gestures. Our code and dataset will be released at the project page: https://xingqunqi-lab.github.io/Emotion-Gesture-Web/
How Does Information Bottleneck Help Deep Learning?
Authors: Kenji Kawaguchi, Zhun Deng, Xu Ji, Jiaoyang Huang
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Generalization Bounds, Learning Theory

Numerous deep learning algorithms have been inspired by and understood via the notion of information bottleneck, where unnecessary information is (often implicitly) minimized while task-relevant information is maximized. However, a rigorous argument for justifying why it is desirable to control information bottlenecks has been elusive. In this paper, we provide the first rigorous learning theory for justifying the benefit of information bottleneck in deep learning by mathematically relating information bottleneck to generalization errors. Our theory proves that controlling information bottleneck is one way to control generalization errors in deep learning, although it is not the only or necessary way. We investigate the merit of our new mathematical findings with experiments across a range of architectures and learning settings. In many cases, generalization errors are shown to correlate with the degree of information bottleneck: i.e., the amount of the unnecessary information at hidden layers. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for current and future methods through the lens of information bottleneck. Our new generalization bounds scale with the degree of information bottleneck, unlike the previous bounds that scale with the number of parameters, VC dimension, Rademacher complexity, stability or robustness. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/xu-ji/information-bottleneck
Criteria Tell You More than Ratings: Criteria Preference-Aware Light Graph Convolution for Effective Multi-Criteria Recommendation
Authors: Jin-Duk Park, Siqing Li, Xin Cao, Won-Yong Shin
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Recommendation Systems

The multi-criteria (MC) recommender system, which leverages MC rating information in a wide range of e-commerce areas, is ubiquitous nowadays. Surprisingly, although graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to develop various recommender systems due to GNN's high expressive capability in learning graph representations, it has been still unexplored how to design MC recommender systems with GNNs. In light of this, we make the first attempt towards designing a GNN-aided MC recommender system. Specifically, rather than straightforwardly adopting existing GNN-based recommendation methods, we devise a novel criteria preference-aware light graph convolution CPA-LGC method, which is capable of precisely capturing the criteria preference of users as well as the collaborative signal in complex high-order connectivities. To this end, we first construct an MC expansion graph that transforms user--item MC ratings into an expanded bipartite graph to potentially learn from the collaborative signal in MC ratings. Next, to strengthen the capability of criteria preference awareness, CPA-LGC incorporates newly characterized embeddings, including user-specific criteria-preference embeddings and item-specific criterion embeddings, into our graph convolution model. Through comprehensive evaluations using four real-world datasets, we demonstrate (a) the superiority over benchmark MC recommendation methods and benchmark recommendation methods using GNNs with tremendous gains, (b) the effectiveness of core components in CPA-LGC, and (c) the computational efficiency.
What is Essential for Unseen Goal Generalization of Offline Goal-conditioned RL?
Authors: Rui Yang, Yong Lin, Xiaoteng Ma, Hao Hu, Chongjie Zhang, Tong Zhang
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Offline RL

Offline goal-conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a way to train general-purpose agents from fully offline datasets. In addition to being conservative within the dataset, the generalization ability to achieve unseen goals is another fundamental challenge for offline GCRL. However, to the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been well studied yet. In this paper, we study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of offline GCRL both theoretically and empirically to identify factors that are important. In a number of experiments, we observe that weighted imitation learning enjoys better generalization than pessimism-based offline RL method. Based on this insight, we derive a theory for OOD generalization, which characterizes several important design choices. We then propose a new offline GCRL method, Generalizable Offline goAl-condiTioned RL (GOAT), by combining the findings from our theoretical and empirical studies. On a new benchmark containing 9 independent identically distributed (IID) tasks and 17 OOD tasks, GOAT outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics Based on Quantization with Increasing Resolution
Authors: Jinwuk Seok, Changsik Cho
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Stochastic learning dynamics based on Langevin or Levy stochastic differential equations (SDEs) in deep neural networks control the variance of noise by varying the size of the mini-batch or directly those of injecting noise. Since the noise variance affects the approximation performance, the design of the additive noise is significant in SDE-based learning and practical implementation. In this paper, we propose an alternative stochastic descent learning equation based on quantized optimization for non-convex objective functions, adopting a stochastic analysis perspective. The proposed method employs a quantized optimization approach that utilizes Langevin SDE dynamics, allowing for controllable noise with an identical distribution without the need for additive noise or adjusting the mini-batch size. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on vanilla convolution neural network(CNN) models and the ResNet-50 architecture across various data sets. Furthermore, we provide a simple PyTorch implementation of the proposed algorithm.
Large-scale Ridesharing DARP Instances Based on Real Travel Demand
Authors: David Fiedler, Jan Mrkos
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Accurately predicting the real-life performance of algorithms solving the Dial-a-Ride Problem (DARP) in the context of Mobility on Demand (MoD) systems with ridesharing requires evaluating them on representative instances. However, the benchmarking of state-of-the-art DARP solution methods has been limited to small, artificial instances or outdated non-public instances, hindering direct comparisons. With the rise of large MoD systems and the availability of open travel demand datasets for many US cities, there is now an opportunity to evaluate these algorithms on standardized, realistic, and representative instances. Despite the significant challenges involved in processing obfuscated and diverse datasets, we have developed a methodology using which we have created a comprehensive set of large-scale demand instances based on real-world data. These instances cover diverse use cases, one of which is demonstrated in an evaluation of two established DARP methods: the insertion heuristic and optimal vehicle-group assignment method. We publish the full results of both methods in a standardized format. The results show significant differences between areas in all measured quantities, emphasizing the importance of evaluating methods across different cities.
STT4SG-350: A Speech Corpus for All Swiss German Dialect Regions
Authors: Michel Plüss, Jan Deriu, Yanick Schraner, Claudio Paonessa, Julia Hartmann, Larissa Schmidt, Christian Scheller, Manuela Hürlimann, Tanja Samardžić, Manfred Vogel, Mark Cieliebak
Date: 2023-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Dialect Identification, Sentence, Speaker Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

We present STT4SG-350 (Speech-to-Text for Swiss German), a corpus of Swiss German speech, annotated with Standard German text at the sentence level. The data is collected using a web app in which the speakers are shown Standard German sentences, which they translate to Swiss German and record. We make the corpus publicly available. It contains 343 hours of speech from all dialect regions and is the largest public speech corpus for Swiss German to date. Application areas include automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech, dialect identification, and speaker recognition. Dialect information, age group, and gender of the 316 speakers are provided. Genders are equally represented and the corpus includes speakers of all ages. Roughly the same amount of speech is provided per dialect region, which makes the corpus ideally suited for experiments with speech technology for different dialects. We provide training, validation, and test splits of the data. The test set consists of the same spoken sentences for each dialect region and allows a fair evaluation of the quality of speech technologies in different dialects. We train an ASR model on the training set and achieve an average BLEU score of 74.7 on the test set. The model beats the best published BLEU scores on 2 other Swiss German ASR test sets, demonstrating the quality of the corpus.