pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Domain Incremental Lifelong Learning in an Open World
Authors: Yi Dai, Hao Lang, Yinhe Zheng, Bowen Yu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Lifelong learning

Lifelong learning (LL) is an important ability for NLP models to learn new tasks continuously. Architecture-based approaches are reported to be effective implementations for LL models. However, it is non-trivial to extend previous approaches to domain incremental LL scenarios since they either require access to task identities in the testing phase or cannot handle samples from unseen tasks. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Diana}: a \underline{d}ynam\underline{i}c \underline{a}rchitecture-based lifelo\underline{n}g le\underline{a}rning model that tries to learn a sequence of tasks with a prompt-enhanced language model. Four types of hierarchically organized prompts are used in Diana to capture knowledge from different granularities. Specifically, we dedicate task-level prompts to capture task-specific knowledge to retain high LL performances and maintain instance-level prompts to learn knowledge shared across input samples to improve the model's generalization performance. Moreover, we dedicate separate prompts to explicitly model unseen tasks and introduce a set of prompt key vectors to facilitate knowledge sharing between tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Diana outperforms state-of-the-art LL models, especially in handling unseen tasks. We release the code and data at \url{https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/diana}.
GeoGLUE: A GeoGraphic Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark
Authors: Dongyang Li, Ruixue Ding, Qiang Zhang, Zheng Li, Boli Chen, Pengjun Xie, Yao Xu, Xin Li, Ning Guo, Fei Huang, Xiaofeng He
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Alignment, Natural Language Understanding

With a fast developing pace of geographic applications, automatable and intelligent models are essential to be designed to handle the large volume of information. However, few researchers focus on geographic natural language processing, and there has never been a benchmark to build a unified standard. In this work, we propose a GeoGraphic Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark, named GeoGLUE. We collect data from open-released geographic resources and introduce six natural language understanding tasks, including geographic textual similarity on recall, geographic textual similarity on rerank, geographic elements tagging, geographic composition analysis, geographic where what cut, and geographic entity alignment. We also pro vide evaluation experiments and analysis of general baselines, indicating the effectiveness and significance of the GeoGLUE benchmark.
Spectral Clustering on Large Datasets: When Does it Work? Theory from Continuous Clustering and Density Cheeger-Buser
Authors: Timothy Chu, Gary Miller, Noel Walkington
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Spectral clustering is one of the most popular clustering algorithms that has stood the test of time. It is simple to describe, can be implemented using standard linear algebra, and often finds better clusters than traditional clustering algorithms like $k$-means and $k$-centers. The foundational algorithm for two-way spectral clustering, by Shi and Malik, creates a geometric graph from data and finds a spectral cut of the graph. In modern machine learning, many data sets are modeled as a large number of points drawn from a probability density function. Little is known about when spectral clustering works in this setting -- and when it doesn't. Past researchers justified spectral clustering by appealing to the graph Cheeger inequality (which states that the spectral cut of a graph approximates the ``Normalized Cut''), but this justification is known to break down on large data sets. We provide theoretically-informed intuition about spectral clustering on large data sets drawn from probability densities, by proving when a continuous form of spectral clustering considered by past researchers (the unweighted spectral cut of a probability density) finds good clusters of the underlying density itself. Our work suggests that Shi-Malik spectral clustering works well on data drawn from mixtures of Laplace distributions, and works poorly on data drawn from certain other densities, such as a density we call the `square-root trough'. Our core theorem proves that weighted spectral cuts have low weighted isoperimetry for all probability densities. Our key tool is a new Cheeger-Buser inequality for all probability densities, including discontinuous ones.
How Good are Commercial Large Language Models on African Languages?
Authors: Jessica Ojo, Kelechi Ogueji
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, text-classification, Text Classification, Translation

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has led to the proliferation of large pretrained language models. These models have been shown to yield good performance, using in-context learning, even on unseen tasks and languages. They have also been exposed as commercial APIs as a form of language-model-as-a-service, with great adoption. However, their performance on African languages is largely unknown. We present a preliminary analysis of commercial large language models on two tasks (machine translation and text classification) across eight African languages, spanning different language families and geographical areas. Our results suggest that commercial language models produce below-par performance on African languages. We also find that they perform better on text classification than machine translation. In general, our findings present a call-to-action to ensure African languages are well represented in commercial large language models, given their growing popularity.
Randomized Smoothing with Masked Inference for Adversarially Robust Text Classifications
Authors: Han Cheol Moon, Shafiq Joty, Ruochen Zhao, Megh Thakkar, Xu Chi
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Large-scale pre-trained language models have shown outstanding performance in a variety of NLP tasks. However, they are also known to be significantly brittle against specifically crafted adversarial examples, leading to increasing interest in probing the adversarial robustness of NLP systems. We introduce RSMI, a novel two-stage framework that combines randomized smoothing (RS) with masked inference (MI) to improve the adversarial robustness of NLP systems. RS transforms a classifier into a smoothed classifier to obtain robust representations, whereas MI forces a model to exploit the surrounding context of a masked token in an input sequence. RSMI improves adversarial robustness by 2 to 3 times over existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. We also perform in-depth qualitative analysis to validate the effectiveness of the different stages of RSMI and probe the impact of its components through extensive ablations. By empirically proving the stability of RSMI, we put it forward as a practical method to robustly train large-scale NLP models. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Han8931/rsmi_nlp
Multimodal Contextualized Plan Prediction for Embodied Task Completion
Authors: Mert İnan, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Spandana Gella, Patrick Lange, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Task Planning

Task planning is an important component of traditional robotics systems enabling robots to compose fine grained skills to perform more complex tasks. Recent work building systems for translating natural language to executable actions for task completion in simulated embodied agents is focused on directly predicting low level action sequences that would be expected to be directly executable by a physical robot. In this work, we instead focus on predicting a higher level plan representation for one such embodied task completion dataset - TEACh, under the assumption that techniques for high-level plan prediction from natural language are expected to be more transferable to physical robot systems. We demonstrate that better plans can be predicted using multimodal context, and that plan prediction and plan execution modules are likely dependent on each other and hence it may not be ideal to fully decouple them. Further, we benchmark execution of oracle plans to quantify the scope for improvement in plan prediction models.
ChatGPT-Like Large-Scale Foundation Models for Prognostics and Health Management: A Survey and Roadmaps
Authors: Yan-Fu Li, Huan Wang, Muxia Sun
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Natural Language Understanding

Prognostics and health management (PHM) technology plays a critical role in industrial production and equipment maintenance by identifying and predicting possible equipment failures and damages, thereby allowing necessary maintenance measures to be taken to enhance equipment service life and reliability while reducing production costs and downtime. In recent years, PHM technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable achievements in the context of the industrial IoT and big data, and it is widely used in various industries, such as railway, energy, and aviation, for condition monitoring, fault prediction, and health management. The emergence of large-scale foundation models (LSF-Models) such as ChatGPT and DALLE-E marks the entry of AI into a new era of AI-2.0 from AI-1.0, where deep models have rapidly evolved from a research paradigm of single-modal, single-task, and limited-data to a multi-modal, multi-task, massive data, and super-large model paradigm. ChatGPT represents a landmark achievement in this research paradigm, offering hope for general artificial intelligence due to its highly intelligent natural language understanding ability. However, the PHM field lacks a consensus on how to respond to this significant change in the AI field, and a systematic review and roadmap is required to elucidate future development directions. To fill this gap, this paper systematically expounds on the key components and latest developments of LSF-Models. Then, we systematically answered how to build the LSF-Model applicable to PHM tasks and outlined the challenges and future development roadmaps for this research paradigm.
Autonomous GIS: the next-generation AI-powered GIS
Authors: Zhenlong Li, Huan Ning
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Understanding, Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, demonstrate a strong understanding of human natural language and have been explored and applied in various fields, including reasoning, creative writing, code generation, translation, and information retrieval. By adopting LLM as the reasoning core, we introduce Autonomous GIS as an AI-powered geographic information system (GIS) that leverages the LLM's general abilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and coding for addressing spatial problems with automatic spatial data collection, analysis, and visualization. We envision that autonomous GIS will need to achieve five autonomous goals: self-generating, self-organizing, self-verifying, self-executing, and self-growing. We developed a prototype system called LLM-Geo using the GPT-4 API in a Python environment, demonstrating what an autonomous GIS looks like and how it delivers expected results without human intervention using three case studies. For all case studies, LLM-Geo was able to return accurate results, including aggregated numbers, graphs, and maps, significantly reducing manual operation time. Although still in its infancy and lacking several important modules such as logging and code testing, LLM-Geo demonstrates a potential path toward the next-generation AI-powered GIS. We advocate for the GIScience community to dedicate more effort to the research and development of autonomous GIS, making spatial analysis easier, faster, and more accessible to a broader audience.
What Students Can Learn About Artificial Intelligence -- Recommendations for K-12 Computing Education
Authors: Tilman Michaeli, Stefan Seegerer, Ralf Romeike
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00

Technological advances in the context of digital transformation are the basis for rapid developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI is not a new topic in computer science (CS), recent developments are having an immense impact on everyday life and society. In consequence, everyone needs competencies to be able to adequately and competently analyze, discuss and help shape the impact, opportunities, and limits of artificial intelligence on their personal lives and our society. As a result, an increasing number of CS curricula are being extended to include the topic of AI. However, in order to integrate AI into existing CS curricula, what students can and should learn in the context of AI needs to be clarified. This has proven to be particularly difficult, considering that so far CS education research on central concepts and principles of AI lacks sufficient elaboration. Therefore, in this paper, we present a curriculum of learning objectives that addresses digital literacy and the societal perspective in particular. The learning objectives can be used to comprehensively design curricula, but also allow for analyzing current curricula and teaching materials and provide insights into the central concepts and corresponding competencies of AI.
Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Asynchronous Communication and Linear Function Approximation
Authors: Yifei Min, Jiafan He, Tianhao Wang, Quanquan Gu
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning

We study multi-agent reinforcement learning in the setting of episodic Markov decision processes, where multiple agents cooperate via communication through a central server. We propose a provably efficient algorithm based on value iteration that enable asynchronous communication while ensuring the advantage of cooperation with low communication overhead. With linear function approximation, we prove that our algorithm enjoys an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^{3/2}H^2\sqrt{K})$ regret with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(dHM^2)$ communication complexity, where $d$ is the feature dimension, $H$ is the horizon length, $M$ is the total number of agents, and $K$ is the total number of episodes. We also provide a lower bound showing that a minimal $\Omega(dM)$ communication complexity is required to improve the performance through collaboration.
Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning via Latent Time Navigation
Authors: Di Yang, Yaohui Wang, Quan Kong, Antitza Dantcheva, Lorenzo Garattoni, Gianpiero Francesca, Francois Bremond
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

Self-supervised video representation learning aimed at maximizing similarity between different temporal segments of one video, in order to enforce feature persistence over time. This leads to loss of pertinent information related to temporal relationships, rendering actions such as `enter' and `leave' to be indistinguishable. To mitigate this limitation, we propose Latent Time Navigation (LTN), a time-parameterized contrastive learning strategy that is streamlined to capture fine-grained motions. Specifically, we maximize the representation similarity between different video segments from one video, while maintaining their representations time-aware along a subspace of the latent representation code including an orthogonal basis to represent temporal changes. Our extensive experimental analysis suggests that learning video representations by LTN consistently improves performance of action classification in fine-grained and human-oriented tasks (e.g., on Toyota Smarthome dataset). In addition, we demonstrate that our proposed model, when pre-trained on Kinetics-400, generalizes well onto the unseen real world video benchmark datasets UCF101 and HMDB51, achieving state-of-the-art performance in action recognition.
Multi-Robot Coordination and Layout Design for Automated Warehousing
Authors: Yulun Zhang, Matthew C. Fontaine, Varun Bhatt, Stefanos Nikolaidis, Jiaoyang Li
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Layout Design, Multi-Agent Path Finding

With the rapid progress in Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), researchers have studied how MAPF algorithms can be deployed to coordinate hundreds of robots in large automated warehouses. While most works try to improve the throughput of such warehouses by developing better MAPF algorithms, we focus on improving the throughput by optimizing the warehouse layout. We show that, even with state-of-the-art MAPF algorithms, commonly used human-designed layouts can lead to congestion for warehouses with large numbers of robots and thus have limited scalability. We extend existing automatic scenario generation methods to optimize warehouse layouts. Results show that our optimized warehouse layouts (1) reduce traffic congestion and thus improve throughput, (2) improve the scalability of the automated warehouses by doubling the number of robots in some cases, and (3) are capable of generating layouts with user-specified diversity measures. We include the source code at: https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_public
Phase transitions in the mini-batch size for sparse and dense two-layer neural networks
Authors: Raffaele Marino, Federico Ricci-Tersenghi
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00

The use of mini-batches of data in training artificial neural networks is nowadays very common. Despite its broad usage, theories explaining quantitatively how large or small the optimal mini-batch size should be are missing. This work presents a systematic attempt at understanding the role of the mini-batch size in training two-layer neural networks. Working in the teacher-student scenario, with a sparse teacher, and focusing on tasks of different complexity, we quantify the effects of changing the mini-batch size $m$. We find that often the generalization performances of the student strongly depend on $m$ and may undergo sharp phase transitions at a critical value $m_c$, such that for $m<m_c$ the training process fails, while for $m>m_c$ the student learns perfectly or generalizes very well the teacher. Phase transitions are induced by collective phenomena firstly discovered in statistical mechanics and later observed in many fields of science. Observing a phase transition by varying the mini-batch size across different architectures raises several questions about the role of this hyperparameter in the neural network learning process.
HoneyIoT: Adaptive High-Interaction Honeypot for IoT Devices Through Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Chongqi Guan, Heting Liu, Guohong Cao, Sencun Zhu, Thomas La Porta
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

As IoT devices are becoming widely deployed, there exist many threats to IoT-based systems due to their inherent vulnerabilities. One effective approach to improving IoT security is to deploy IoT honeypot systems, which can collect attack information and reveal the methods and strategies used by attackers. However, building high-interaction IoT honeypots is challenging due to the heterogeneity of IoT devices. Vulnerabilities in IoT devices typically depend on specific device types or firmware versions, which encourages attackers to perform pre-attack checks to gather device information before launching attacks. Moreover, conventional honeypots are easily detected because their replying logic differs from that of the IoT devices they try to mimic. To address these problems, we develop an adaptive high-interaction honeypot for IoT devices, called HoneyIoT. We first build a real device based attack trace collection system to learn how attackers interact with IoT devices. We then model the attack behavior through markov decision process and leverage reinforcement learning techniques to learn the best responses to engage attackers based on the attack trace. We also use differential analysis techniques to mutate response values in some fields to generate high-fidelity responses. HoneyIoT has been deployed on the public Internet. Experimental results show that HoneyIoT can effectively bypass the pre-attack checks and mislead the attackers into uploading malware. Furthermore, HoneyIoT is covert against widely used reconnaissance and honeypot detection tools.
Mispronunciation Detection of Basic Quranic Recitation Rules using Deep Learning
Authors: Ahmad Al Harere, Khloud Al Jallad
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Time Series

In Islam, readers must apply a set of pronunciation rules called Tajweed rules to recite the Quran in the same way that the angel Jibrael taught the Prophet, Muhammad. The traditional process of learning the correct application of these rules requires a human who must have a license and great experience to detect mispronunciation. Due to the increasing number of Muslims around the world, the number of Tajweed teachers is not enough nowadays for daily recitation practice for every Muslim. Therefore, lots of work has been done for automatic Tajweed rules' mispronunciation detection to help readers recite Quran correctly in an easier way and shorter time than traditional learning ways. All previous works have three common problems. First, most of them focused on machine learning algorithms only. Second, they used private datasets with no benchmark to compare with. Third, they did not take into consideration the sequence of input data optimally, although the speech signal is time series. To overcome these problems, we proposed a solution that consists of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks which use the time series, to detect mispronunciation in Tajweed rules. In addition, our experiments were performed on a public dataset, the QDAT dataset, which contains more than 1500 voices of the correct and incorrect recitation of three Tajweed rules (Separate stretching , Tight Noon , and Hide ). To the best of our knowledge, the QDAT dataset has not been used by any research paper yet. We compared the performance of the proposed LSTM model with traditional machine learning algorithms used in SoTA. The LSTM model with time series showed clear superiority over traditional machine learning. The accuracy achieved by LSTM on the QDAT dataset was 96%, 95%, and 96% for the three rules (Separate stretching, Tight Noon, and Hide), respectively.