pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Uncertain Machine Ethical Decisions Using Hypothetical Retrospection
Authors: Simon Kolker, Louise Dennis, Ramon Fraga Pereira, Mengwei Xu
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Philosophy

We propose the use of the hypothetical retrospection argumentation procedure, developed by Sven Ove Hansson to improve existing approaches to machine ethical reasoning by accounting for probability and uncertainty from a position of Philosophy that resonates with humans. Actions are represented with a branching set of potential outcomes, each with a state, utility, and either a numeric or poetic probability estimate. Actions are chosen based on comparisons between sets of arguments favouring actions from the perspective of their branches, even those branches that led to an undesirable outcome. This use of arguments allows a variety of philosophical theories for ethical reasoning to be used, potentially in flexible combination with each other. We implement the procedure, applying consequentialist and deontological ethical theories, independently and concurrently, to an autonomous library system use case. We introduce a preliminary framework that seems to meet the varied requirements of a machine ethics system: versatility under multiple theories and a resonance with humans that enables transparency and explainability.
Get Back Here: Robust Imitation by Return-to-Distribution Planning
Authors: Geoffrey Cideron, Baruch Tabanpour, Sebastian Curi, Sertan Girgin, Leonard Hussenot, Gabriel Dulac-Arnold, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin, Robert Dadashi
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

We consider the Imitation Learning (IL) setup where expert data are not collected on the actual deployment environment but on a different version. To address the resulting distribution shift, we combine behavior cloning (BC) with a planner that is tasked to bring the agent back to states visited by the expert whenever the agent deviates from the demonstration distribution. The resulting algorithm, POIR, can be trained offline, and leverages online interactions to efficiently fine-tune its planner to improve performance over time. We test POIR on a variety of human-generated manipulation demonstrations in a realistic robotic manipulation simulator and show robustness of the learned policy to different initial state distributions and noisy dynamics.
Oil Spill Segmentation using Deep Encoder-Decoder models
Authors: Abhishek Ramanathapura Satyanarayana, Maruf A. Dhali
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Crude oil is an integral component of the modern world economy. With the growing demand for crude oil due to its widespread applications, accidental oil spills are unavoidable. Even though oil spills are in and themselves difficult to clean up, the first and foremost challenge is to detect spills. In this research, the authors test the feasibility of deep encoder-decoder models that can be trained effectively to detect oil spills. The work compares the results from several segmentation models on high dimensional satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image data. Multiple combinations of models are used in running the experiments. The best-performing model is the one with the ResNet-50 encoder and DeepLabV3+ decoder. It achieves a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 64.868% and a class IoU of 61.549% for the "oil spill" class when compared with the current benchmark model, which achieved a mean IoU of 65.05% and a class IoU of 53.38% for the "oil spill" class.
Sample Efficient Model-free Reinforcement Learning from LTL Specifications with Optimality Guarantees
Authors: Daqian Shao, Marta Kwiatkowska
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is widely used to specify high-level objectives for system policies, and it is highly desirable for autonomous systems to learn the optimal policy with respect to such specifications. However, learning the optimal policy from LTL specifications is not trivial. We present a model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach that efficiently learns an optimal policy for an unknown stochastic system, modelled using Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We propose a novel and more general product MDP, reward structure and discounting mechanism that, when applied in conjunction with off-the-shelf model-free RL algorithms, efficiently learn the optimal policy that maximizes the probability of satisfying a given LTL specification with optimality guarantees. We also provide improved theoretical results on choosing the key parameters in RL to ensure optimality. To directly evaluate the learned policy, we adopt probabilistic model checker PRISM to compute the probability of the policy satisfying such specifications. Several experiments on various tabular MDP environments across different LTL tasks demonstrate the improved sample efficiency and optimal policy convergence.
An Autonomous Non-monolithic Agent with Multi-mode Exploration based on Options Framework
Authors: Jaeyoon Kim, Junyu Xuan, Christy Liang, Farookh Hussain
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Most exploration research on reinforcement learning (RL) has paid attention to `the way of exploration', which is `how to explore'. The other exploration research, `when to explore', has not been the main focus of RL exploration research. The issue of `when' of a monolithic exploration in the usual RL exploration behaviour binds an exploratory action to an exploitational action of an agent. Recently, a non-monolithic exploration research has emerged to examine the mode-switching exploration behaviour of humans and animals. The ultimate purpose of our research is to enable an agent to decide when to explore or exploit autonomously. We describe the initial research of an autonomous multi-mode exploration of non-monolithic behaviour in an options framework. The higher performance of our method is shown against the existing non-monolithic exploration method through comparative experimental results.
How Simulation Helps Autonomous Driving:A Survey of Sim2real, Digital Twins, and Parallel Intelligence
Authors: Xuemin Hu, Shen Li, Tingyu Huang, Bo Tang, Rouxing Huai, Long Chen
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Safety and cost are two important concerns for the development of autonomous driving technologies. From the academic research to commercial applications of autonomous driving vehicles, sufficient simulation and real world testing are required. In general, a large scale of testing in simulation environment is conducted and then the learned driving knowledge is transferred to the real world, so how to adapt driving knowledge learned in simulation to reality becomes a critical issue. However, the virtual simulation world differs from the real world in many aspects such as lighting, textures, vehicle dynamics, and agents' behaviors, etc., which makes it difficult to bridge the gap between the virtual and real worlds. This gap is commonly referred to as the reality gap (RG). In recent years, researchers have explored various approaches to address the reality gap issue, which can be broadly classified into three categories: transferring knowledge from simulation to reality (sim2real), learning in digital twins (DTs), and learning by parallel intelligence (PI) technologies. In this paper, we consider the solutions through the sim2real, DTs, and PI technologies, and review important applications and innovations in the field of autonomous driving. Meanwhile, we show the state-of-the-arts from the views of algorithms, models, and simulators, and elaborate the development process from sim2real to DTs and PI. The presentation also illustrates the far-reaching effects and challenges in the development of sim2real, DTs, and PI in autonomous driving.
DreamPaint: Few-Shot Inpainting of E-Commerce Items for Virtual Try-On without 3D Modeling
Authors: Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Karim Bouyarmane, Suren Kumar, Amir Tavanaei, Ismail B. Tutar
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Virtual Try-on

We introduce DreamPaint, a framework to intelligently inpaint any e-commerce product on any user-provided context image. The context image can be, for example, the user's own image for virtual try-on of clothes from the e-commerce catalog on themselves, the user's room image for virtual try-on of a piece of furniture from the e-commerce catalog in their room, etc. As opposed to previous augmented-reality (AR)-based virtual try-on methods, DreamPaint does not use, nor does it require, 3D modeling of neither the e-commerce product nor the user context. Instead, it directly uses 2D images of the product as available in product catalog database, and a 2D picture of the context, for example taken from the user's phone camera. The method relies on few-shot fine tuning a pre-trained diffusion model with the masked latents (e.g., Masked DreamBooth) of the catalog images per item, whose weights are then loaded on a pre-trained inpainting module that is capable of preserving the characteristics of the context image. DreamPaint allows to preserve both the product image and the context (environment/user) image without requiring text guidance to describe the missing part (product/context). DreamPaint also allows to intelligently infer the best 3D angle of the product to place at the desired location on the user context, even if that angle was previously unseen in the product's reference 2D images. We compare our results against both text-guided and image-guided inpainting modules and show that DreamPaint yields superior performance in both subjective human study and quantitative metrics.
Reverse Engineering of Temporal Queries Mediated by LTL Ontologies
Authors: Marie Fortin, Boris Konev, Vladislav Ryzhikov, Yury Savateev, Frank Wolter, Michael Zakharyaschev
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00

In reverse engineering of database queries, we aim to construct a query from a given set of answers and non-answers; it can then be used to explore the data further or as an explanation of the answers and non-answers. We investigate this query-by-example problem for queries formulated in positive fragments of linear temporal logic LTL over timestamped data, focusing on the design of suitable query languages and the combined and data complexity of deciding whether there exists a query in the given language that separates the given answers from non-answers. We consider both plain LTL queries and those mediated by LTL-ontologies.
DRPT: Disentangled and Recurrent Prompt Tuning for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Xiaocheng Lu, Ziming Liu, Song Guo, Jingcai Guo, Fushuo Huo, Sikai Bai, Tao Han
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, Novel Concepts, Object, Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel concepts composed of known knowledge without training samples. Standard CZSL either identifies visual primitives or enhances unseen composed entities, and as a result, entanglement between state and object primitives cannot be fully utilized. Admittedly, vision- language models (VLMs) could naturally cope with CZSL through tuning prompts, while uneven entanglement leads prompts to be dragged into local optimum. In this paper, we take a further step to introduce a novel Disentangled and Recurrent Prompt Tuning framework termed DRPT to better tap the potential of VLMs in CZSL. Specifically, the state and object primitives are deemed as learnable tokens of vocabulary embedded in prompts and tuned on seen compositions. Instead of jointly tuning state and object, we devise a disentangled and recurrent tuning strategy to suppress the traction force caused by entanglement and gradually optimize the token parameters, leading to a better prompt space. Notably, we develop a progressive fine-tuning procedure that allows for incremental updates to the prompts, optimizing the object first, then the state, and vice versa. Meanwhile, the optimization of state and object is independent, thus clearer features can be learned to further alleviate the issue of entangling misleading optimization. Moreover, we quantify and analyze the entanglement in CZSL and supplement entanglement rebalancing optimization schemes. DRPT surpasses representative state-of-the-art methods on extensive benchmark datasets, demonstrating superiority in both accuracy and efficiency.
Prompt as Triggers for Backdoor Attack: Examining the Vulnerability in Language Models
Authors: Shuai Zhao, Jinming Wen, Luu Anh Tuan, Junbo Zhao, Jie Fu
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Few-Shot Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

The prompt-based learning paradigm, which bridges the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot settings. Despite being widely applied, prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Textual backdoor attacks are designed to introduce targeted vulnerabilities into models by poisoning a subset of training samples through trigger injection and label modification. However, they suffer from flaws such as abnormal natural language expressions resulting from the trigger and incorrect labeling of poisoned samples. In this study, we propose ProAttack, a novel and efficient method for performing clean-label backdoor attacks based on the prompt, which uses the prompt itself as a trigger. Our method does not require external triggers and ensures correct labeling of poisoned samples, improving the stealthy nature of the backdoor attack. With extensive experiments on rich-resource and few-shot text classification tasks, we empirically validate ProAttack's competitive performance in textual backdoor attacks. Notably, in the rich-resource setting, ProAttack achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates in the clean-label backdoor attack benchmark without external triggers.
MultiLegalSBD: A Multilingual Legal Sentence Boundary Detection Dataset
Authors: Tobias Brugger, Matthias Stürmer, Joel Niklaus
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Sentence

Sentence Boundary Detection (SBD) is one of the foundational building blocks of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with incorrectly split sentences heavily influencing the output quality of downstream tasks. It is a challenging task for algorithms, especially in the legal domain, considering the complex and different sentence structures used. In this work, we curated a diverse multilingual legal dataset consisting of over 130'000 annotated sentences in 6 languages. Our experimental results indicate that the performance of existing SBD models is subpar on multilingual legal data. We trained and tested monolingual and multilingual models based on CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and transformers, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. We also show that our multilingual models outperform all baselines in the zero-shot setting on a Portuguese test set. To encourage further research and development by the community, we have made our dataset, models, and code publicly available.
Chronosymbolic Learning: Efficient CHC Solving with Symbolic Reasoning and Inductive Learning
Authors: Ziyan Luo, Xujie Si
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Learning

Solving Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs) is a fundamental challenge behind a wide range of verification and analysis tasks. Data-driven approaches show great promise in improving CHC solving without the painstaking manual effort of creating and tuning various heuristics. However, a large performance gap exists between data-driven CHC solvers and symbolic reasoning-based solvers. In this work, we develop a simple but effective framework, "Chronosymbolic Learning", which unifies symbolic information and numerical data points to solve a CHC system efficiently. We also present a simple instance of Chronosymbolic Learning with a data-driven learner and a BMC-styled reasoner. Despite its relative simplicity, experimental results show the efficacy and robustness of our tool. It outperforms state-of-the-art CHC solvers on a dataset consisting of 288 benchmarks, including many instances with non-linear integer arithmetics.
Deconstructing Student Perceptions of Generative AI (GenAI) through an Expectancy Value Theory (EVT)-based Instrument
Authors: Cecilia Ka Yuk Chan, WenXin Zhou
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00

This study examines the relationship between student perceptions and their intention to use generative AI in higher education. Drawing on Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT), a questionnaire was developed to measure students' knowledge of generative AI, perceived value, and perceived cost. A sample of 405 students participated in the study, and confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the constructs. The results indicate a strong positive correlation between perceived value and intention to use generative AI, and a weak negative correlation between perceived cost and intention to use. As we continue to explore the implications of generative AI in education and other domains, it is crucial to carefully consider the potential long-term consequences and the ethical dilemmas that may arise from widespread adoption.
Complex Logical Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs using Large Language Models
Authors: Nurendra Choudhary, Chandan K. Reddy
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Logical Reasoning

Reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of the complex relationships between entities and the underlying logic of their relations. Current approaches rely on learning geometries to embed entities in vector space for logical query operations, but they suffer from subpar performance on complex queries and dataset-specific representations. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled approach, Language-guided Abstract Reasoning over Knowledge graphs (LARK), that formulates complex KG reasoning as a combination of contextual KG search and logical query reasoning, to leverage the strengths of graph extraction algorithms and large language models (LLM), respectively. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art KG reasoning methods on standard benchmark datasets across several logical query constructs, with significant performance gain for queries of higher complexity. Furthermore, we show that the performance of our approach improves proportionally to the increase in size of the underlying LLM, enabling the integration of the latest advancements in LLMs for logical reasoning over KGs. Our work presents a new direction for addressing the challenges of complex KG reasoning and paves the way for future research in this area.
Ripple Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks For Recommendation Systems
Authors: Chen Li, Yang Cao, Ye Zhu, Debo Cheng, Chengyuan Li, Yasuhiko Morimoto
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Recommendation Systems

Using knowledge graphs to assist deep learning models in making recommendation decisions has recently been proven to effectively improve the model's interpretability and accuracy. This paper introduces an end-to-end deep learning model, named RKGCN, which dynamically analyses each user's preferences and makes a recommendation of suitable items. It combines knowledge graphs on both the item side and user side to enrich their representations to maximize the utilization of the abundant information in knowledge graphs. RKGCN is able to offer more personalized and relevant recommendations in three different scenarios. The experimental results show the superior effectiveness of our model over 5 baseline models on three real-world datasets including movies, books, and music.
Analysis of different temporal graph neural network configurations on dynamic graphs
Authors: Rishu Verma, Ashmita Bhattacharya, Sai Naveen Katla
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Node Regression, Traffic Prediction

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the use of graph neural networks (GNNs) for analyzing dynamic graphs, which are graphs that evolve over time. However, there is still a lack of understanding of how different temporal graph neural network (TGNs) configurations can impact the accuracy of predictions on dynamic graphs. Moreover, the hunt for benchmark datasets for these TGNs models is still ongoing. Up until recently, Pytorch Geometric Temporal came up with a few benchmark datasets but most of these datasets have not been analyzed with different TGN models to establish the state-of-the-art. Therefore, this project aims to address this gap in the literature by performing a qualitative analysis of spatial-temporal dependence structure learning on dynamic graphs, as well as a comparative study of the effectiveness of selected TGNs on node and edge prediction tasks. Additionally, an extensive ablation study will be conducted on different variants of the best-performing TGN to identify the key factors contributing to its performance. By achieving these objectives, this project will provide valuable insights into the design and optimization of TGNs for dynamic graph analysis, with potential applications in areas such as disease spread prediction, social network analysis, traffic prediction, and more. Moreover, an attempt is made to convert snapshot-based data to the event-based dataset and make it compatible with the SOTA model namely TGN to perform node regression task.
Human adaptation to adaptive machines converges to game-theoretic equilibria
Authors: Benjamin J. Chasnov, Lillian J. Ratliff, Samuel A. Burden
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Adaptive machines have the potential to assist or interfere with human behavior in a range of contexts, from cognitive decision-making to physical device assistance. Therefore it is critical to understand how machine learning algorithms can influence human actions, particularly in situations where machine goals are misaligned with those of people. Since humans continually adapt to their environment using a combination of explicit and implicit strategies, when the environment contains an adaptive machine, the human and machine play a game. Game theory is an established framework for modeling interactions between two or more decision-makers that has been applied extensively in economic markets and machine algorithms. However, existing approaches make assumptions about, rather than empirically test, how adaptation by individual humans is affected by interaction with an adaptive machine. Here we tested learning algorithms for machines playing general-sum games with human subjects. Our algorithms enable the machine to select the outcome of the co-adaptive interaction from a constellation of game-theoretic equilibria in action and policy spaces. Importantly, the machine learning algorithms work directly from observations of human actions without solving an inverse problem to estimate the human's utility function as in prior work. Surprisingly, one algorithm can steer the human-machine interaction to the machine's optimum, effectively controlling the human's actions even while the human responds optimally to their perceived cost landscape. Our results show that game theory can be used to predict and design outcomes of co-adaptive interactions between intelligent humans and machines.