pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Domain Transfer in Latent Space (DTLS) Wins on Image Super-Resolution -- a Non-Denoising Model
Authors: Chun-Chuen Hui, Wan-Chi Siu, Ngai-Fong Law
Date: 2023-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Large scale image super-resolution is a challenging computer vision task, since vast information is missing in a highly degraded image, say for example forscale x16 super-resolution. Diffusion models are used successfully in recent years in extreme super-resolution applications, in which Gaussian noise is used as a means to form a latent photo-realistic space, and acts as a link between the space of latent vectors and the latent photo-realistic space. There are quite a few sophisticated mathematical derivations on mapping the statistics of Gaussian noises making Diffusion Models successful. In this paper we propose a simple approach which gets away from using Gaussian noise but adopts some basic structures of diffusion models for efficient image super-resolution. Essentially, we propose a DNN to perform domain transfer between neighbor domains, which can learn the differences in statistical properties to facilitate gradual interpolation with results of reasonable quality. Further quality improvement is achieved by conditioning the domain transfer with reference to the input LR image. Experimental results show that our method outperforms not only state-of-the-art large scale super resolution models, but also the current diffusion models for image super-resolution. The approach can readily be extended to other image-to-image tasks, such as image enlightening, inpainting, denoising, etc.
GLEN: Generative Retrieval via Lexical Index Learning
Authors: Sunkyung Lee, Minjin Choi, Jongwuk Lee
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Generative retrieval shed light on a new paradigm of document retrieval, aiming to directly generate the identifier of a relevant document for a query. While it takes advantage of bypassing the construction of auxiliary index structures, existing studies face two significant challenges: (i) the discrepancy between the knowledge of pre-trained language models and identifiers and (ii) the gap between training and inference that poses difficulty in learning to rank. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel generative retrieval method, namely Generative retrieval via LExical iNdex learning (GLEN). For training, GLEN effectively exploits a dynamic lexical identifier using a two-phase index learning strategy, enabling it to learn meaningful lexical identifiers and relevance signals between queries and documents. For inference, GLEN utilizes collision-free inference, using identifier weights to rank documents without additional overhead. Experimental results prove that GLEN achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance against existing generative retrieval methods on various benchmark datasets, e.g., NQ320k, MS MARCO, and BEIR. The code is available at https://github.com/skleee/GLEN.
Hierarchical Simplicity Bias of Neural Networks
Authors: Zhehang Du
Date: 2023-11-05 00:00:00

Neural networks often exhibit simplicity bias, favoring simpler features over more complex ones, even when both are equally predictive. We introduce a novel method called imbalanced label coupling to explore and extend this simplicity bias across multiple hierarchical levels. Our approach demonstrates that trained networks sequentially consider features of increasing complexity based on their correlation with labels in the training set, regardless of their actual predictive power. For example, in CIFAR-10, simple spurious features can cause misclassifications where most cats are predicted as dogs and most trucks as automobiles. We empirically show that last-layer retraining with target data distribution \citep{kirichenko2022last} is insufficient to fully recover core features when spurious features perfectly correlate with target labels in our synthetic datasets. Our findings deepen the understanding of the implicit biases inherent in neural networks.
LCPR: A Multi-Scale Attention-Based LiDAR-Camera Fusion Network for Place Recognition
Authors: Zijie Zhou, Jingyi Xu, Guangming Xiong, Junyi Ma
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Sensor Fusion

Place recognition is one of the most crucial modules for autonomous vehicles to identify places that were previously visited in GPS-invalid environments. Sensor fusion is considered an effective method to overcome the weaknesses of individual sensors. In recent years, multimodal place recognition fusing information from multiple sensors has gathered increasing attention. However, most existing multimodal place recognition methods only use limited field-of-view camera images, which leads to an imbalance between features from different modalities and limits the effectiveness of sensor fusion. In this paper, we present a novel neural network named LCPR for robust multimodal place recognition, which fuses LiDAR point clouds with multi-view RGB images to generate discriminative and yaw-rotation invariant representations of the environment. A multi-scale attention-based fusion module is proposed to fully exploit the panoramic views from different modalities of the environment and their correlations. We evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset, and the experimental results show that our method can effectively utilize multi-view camera and LiDAR data to improve the place recognition performance while maintaining strong robustness to viewpoint changes. Our open-source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ZhouZijie77/LCPR .
DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreaker
Authors: Xuan Li, Zhanke Zhou, Jianing Zhu, Jiangchao Yao, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

Large language models (LLMs) have succeeded significantly in various applications but remain susceptible to adversarial jailbreaks that void their safety guardrails. Previous attempts to exploit these vulnerabilities often rely on high-cost computational extrapolations, which may not be practical or efficient. In this paper, inspired by the authority influence demonstrated in the Milgram experiment, we present a lightweight method to take advantage of the LLMs' personification capabilities to construct $\textit{a virtual, nested scene}$, allowing it to realize an adaptive way to escape the usage control in a normal scenario. Empirically, the contents induced by our approach can achieve leading harmfulness rates with previous counterparts and realize a continuous jailbreak in subsequent interactions, which reveals the critical weakness of self-losing on both open-source and closed-source LLMs, $\textit{e.g.}$, Llama-2, Llama-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/DeepInception.
BanLemma: A Word Formation Dependent Rule and Dictionary Based Bangla Lemmatizer
Authors: Sadia Afrin, Md. Shahad Mahmud Chowdhury, Md. Ekramul Islam, Faisal Ahamed Khan, Labib Imam Chowdhury, MD. Motahar Mahtab, Nazifa Nuha Chowdhury, Massud Forkan, Neelima Kundu, Hakim Arif, Mohammad Mamun Or Rashid, Mohammad Ruhul Amin, Nabeel Mohammed
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Lemmatization, Sentence

Lemmatization holds significance in both natural language processing (NLP) and linguistics, as it effectively decreases data density and aids in comprehending contextual meaning. However, due to the highly inflected nature and morphological richness, lemmatization in Bangla text poses a complex challenge. In this study, we propose linguistic rules for lemmatization and utilize a dictionary along with the rules to design a lemmatizer specifically for Bangla. Our system aims to lemmatize words based on their parts of speech class within a given sentence. Unlike previous rule-based approaches, we analyzed the suffix marker occurrence according to the morpho-syntactic values and then utilized sequences of suffix markers instead of entire suffixes. To develop our rules, we analyze a large corpus of Bangla text from various domains, sources, and time periods to observe the word formation of inflected words. The lemmatizer achieves an accuracy of 96.36% when tested against a manually annotated test dataset by trained linguists and demonstrates competitive performance on three previously published Bangla lemmatization datasets. We are making the code and datasets publicly available at https://github.com/eblict-gigatech/BanLemma in order to contribute to the further advancement of Bangla NLP.
Nepali Video Captioning using CNN-RNN Architecture
Authors: Bipesh Subedi, Saugat Singh, Bal Krishna Bal
Date: 2023-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Captioning

This article presents a study on Nepali video captioning using deep neural networks. Through the integration of pre-trained CNNs and RNNs, the research focuses on generating precise and contextually relevant captions for Nepali videos. The approach involves dataset collection, data preprocessing, model implementation, and evaluation. By enriching the MSVD dataset with Nepali captions via Google Translate, the study trains various CNN-RNN architectures. The research explores the effectiveness of CNNs (e.g., EfficientNetB0, ResNet101, VGG16) paired with different RNN decoders like LSTM, GRU, and BiLSTM. Evaluation involves BLEU and METEOR metrics, with the best model being EfficientNetB0 + BiLSTM with 1024 hidden dimensions, achieving a BLEU-4 score of 17 and METEOR score of 46. The article also outlines challenges and future directions for advancing Nepali video captioning, offering a crucial resource for further research in this area.
Exploitation-Guided Exploration for Semantic Embodied Navigation
Authors: Justin Wasserman, Girish Chowdhary, Abhinav Gupta, Unnat Jain
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

In the recent progress in embodied navigation and sim-to-robot transfer, modular policies have emerged as a de facto framework. However, there is more to compositionality beyond the decomposition of the learning load into modular components. In this work, we investigate a principled way to syntactically combine these components. Particularly, we propose Exploitation-Guided Exploration (XGX) where separate modules for exploration and exploitation come together in a novel and intuitive manner. We configure the exploitation module to take over in the deterministic final steps of navigation i.e. when the goal becomes visible. Crucially, an exploitation module teacher-forces the exploration module and continues driving an overridden policy optimization. XGX, with effective decomposition and novel guidance, improves the state-of-the-art performance on the challenging object navigation task from 70% to 73%. Along with better accuracy, through targeted analysis, we show that XGX is also more efficient at goal-conditioned exploration. Finally, we show sim-to-real transfer to robot hardware and XGX performs over two-fold better than the best baseline from simulation benchmarking. Project page: xgxvisnav.github.io
SegGen: Supercharging Segmentation Models with Text2Mask and Mask2Img Synthesis
Authors: Hanrong Ye, Jason Kuen, Qing Liu, Zhe Lin, Brian Price, Dan Xu
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Image Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We propose SegGen, a highly-effective training data generation method for image segmentation, which pushes the performance limits of state-of-the-art segmentation models to a significant extent. SegGen designs and integrates two data generation strategies: MaskSyn and ImgSyn. (i) MaskSyn synthesizes new mask-image pairs via our proposed text-to-mask generation model and mask-to-image generation model, greatly improving the diversity in segmentation masks for model supervision; (ii) ImgSyn synthesizes new images based on existing masks using the mask-to-image generation model, strongly improving image diversity for model inputs. On the highly competitive ADE20K and COCO benchmarks, our data generation method markedly improves the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models in semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and instance segmentation. Notably, in terms of the ADE20K mIoU, Mask2Former R50 is largely boosted from 47.2 to 49.9 (+2.7); Mask2Former Swin-L is also significantly increased from 56.1 to 57.4 (+1.3). These promising results strongly suggest the effectiveness of our SegGen even when abundant human-annotated training data is utilized. Moreover, training with our synthetic data makes the segmentation models more robust towards unseen domains. Project website: https://seggenerator.github.io
GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model
Authors: Hanoona Rasheed, Muhammad Maaz, Sahal Shaji Mullappilly, Abdelrahman Shaker, Salman Khan, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao M. Anwer, Erix Xing, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Fahad S. Khan
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Image Captioning, model, Referring Expression, Referring expression generation, Referring Expression Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extend Large Language Models to the vision domain. Initial LMMs used holistic images and text prompts to generate ungrounded textual responses. Recently, region-level LMMs have been used to generate visually grounded responses. However, they are limited to only referring to a single object category at a time, require users to specify the regions, or cannot offer dense pixel-wise object grounding. In this work, we present Grounding LMM (GLaMM), the first model that can generate natural language responses seamlessly intertwined with corresponding object segmentation masks. GLaMM not only grounds objects appearing in the conversations but is flexible enough to accept both textual and optional visual prompts (region of interest) as input. This empowers users to interact with the model at various levels of granularity, both in textual and visual domains. Due to the lack of standard benchmarks for the novel setting of visually Grounded Conversation Generation (GCG), we introduce a comprehensive evaluation protocol with our curated grounded conversations. Our proposed GCG task requires densely grounded concepts in natural scenes at a large-scale. To this end, we propose a densely annotated Grounding-anything Dataset (GranD) using our proposed automated annotation pipeline that encompasses 7.5M unique concepts grounded in a total of 810M regions available with segmentation masks. Besides GCG, GLaMM also performs effectively on several downstream tasks, e.g., referring expression segmentation, image and region-level captioning and vision-language conversations.
Scalable and Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks for Language Models via Persona Modulation
Authors: Rusheb Shah, Quentin Feuillade--Montixi, Soroush Pour, Arush Tagade, Stephen Casper, Javier Rando
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Despite efforts to align large language models to produce harmless responses, they are still vulnerable to jailbreak prompts that elicit unrestricted behaviour. In this work, we investigate persona modulation as a black-box jailbreaking method to steer a target model to take on personalities that are willing to comply with harmful instructions. Rather than manually crafting prompts for each persona, we automate the generation of jailbreaks using a language model assistant. We demonstrate a range of harmful completions made possible by persona modulation, including detailed instructions for synthesising methamphetamine, building a bomb, and laundering money. These automated attacks achieve a harmful completion rate of 42.5% in GPT-4, which is 185 times larger than before modulation (0.23%). These prompts also transfer to Claude 2 and Vicuna with harmful completion rates of 61.0% and 35.9%, respectively. Our work reveals yet another vulnerability in commercial large language models and highlights the need for more comprehensive safeguards.
Multitask Kernel-based Learning with First-Order Logic Constraints
Authors: Michelangelo Diligenti, Marco Gori, Marco Maggini, Leonardo Rigutini
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

In this paper we propose a general framework to integrate supervised and unsupervised examples with background knowledge expressed by a collection of first-order logic clauses into kernel machines. In particular, we consider a multi-task learning scheme where multiple predicates defined on a set of objects are to be jointly learned from examples, enforcing a set of FOL constraints on the admissible configurations of their values. The predicates are defined on the feature spaces, in which the input objects are represented, and can be either known a priori or approximated by an appropriate kernel-based learner. A general approach is presented to convert the FOL clauses into a continuous implementation that can deal with the outputs computed by the kernel-based predicates. The learning problem is formulated as a semi-supervised task that requires the optimization in the primal of a loss function that combines a fitting loss measure on the supervised examples, a regularization term, and a penalty term that enforces the constraints on both the supervised and unsupervised examples. Unfortunately, the penalty term is not convex and it can hinder the optimization process. However, it is possible to avoid poor solutions by using a two stage learning schema, in which the supervised examples are learned first and then the constraints are enforced.
FLOGA: A machine learning ready dataset, a benchmark and a novel deep learning model for burnt area mapping with Sentinel-2
Authors: Maria Sdraka, Alkinoos Dimakos, Alexandros Malounis, Zisoula Ntasiou, Konstantinos Karantzalos, Dimitrios Michail, Ioannis Papoutsis
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

Over the last decade there has been an increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires across the globe, posing significant threats to human and animal lives, ecosystems, and socio-economic stability. Therefore urgent action is required to mitigate their devastating impact and safeguard Earth's natural resources. Robust Machine Learning methods combined with the abundance of high-resolution satellite imagery can provide accurate and timely mappings of the affected area in order to assess the scale of the event, identify the impacted assets and prioritize and allocate resources effectively for the proper restoration of the damaged region. In this work, we create and introduce a machine-learning ready dataset we name FLOGA (Forest wiLdfire Observations for the Greek Area). This dataset is unique as it comprises of satellite imagery acquired before and after a wildfire event, it contains information from Sentinel-2 and MODIS modalities with variable spatial and spectral resolution, and contains a large number of events where the corresponding burnt area ground truth has been annotated by domain experts. FLOGA covers the wider region of Greece, which is characterized by a Mediterranean landscape and climatic conditions. We use FLOGA to provide a thorough comparison of multiple Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms for the automatic extraction of burnt areas, approached as a change detection task. We also compare the results to those obtained using standard specialized spectral indices for burnt area mapping. Finally, we propose a novel Deep Learning model, namely BAM-CD. Our benchmark results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique in the automatic extraction of burnt areas, outperforming all other methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Orion-AI-Lab/FLOGA.
DAIL: Data Augmentation for In-Context Learning via Self-Paraphrase
Authors: Dawei Li, Yaxuan Li, Dheeraj Mekala, Shuyao Li, Yulin Wang, Xueqi Wang, William Hogan, Jingbo Shang
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In-Context Learning (ICL) combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved promising results on various NLP tasks. However, ICL requires high-quality annotated demonstrations which might not be available in real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{D}ata \textbf{A}ugmentation for \textbf{I}n-Context \textbf{L}earning (\textbf{DAIL}). DAIL leverages the intuition that large language models are more familiar with the content generated by themselves. It first utilizes the language model to generate paraphrases of the test sample and employs majority voting to determine the final result based on individual predictions. Our extensive empirical evaluation shows that DAIL outperforms the standard ICL method and other ensemble-based methods in the low-resource scenario. Additionally, we explore the use of voting consistency as a confidence score of the model when the logits of predictions are inaccessible. We believe our work will stimulate further research on ICL in low-resource settings.
Neural Structure Learning with Stochastic Differential Equations
Authors: Benjie Wang, Joel Jennings, Wenbo Gong
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

Discovering the underlying relationships among variables from temporal observations has been a longstanding challenge in numerous scientific disciplines, including biology, finance, and climate science. The dynamics of such systems are often best described using continuous-time stochastic processes. Unfortunately, most existing structure learning approaches assume that the underlying process evolves in discrete-time and/or observations occur at regular time intervals. These mismatched assumptions can often lead to incorrect learned structures and models. In this work, we introduce a novel structure learning method, SCOTCH, which combines neural stochastic differential equations (SDE) with variational inference to infer a posterior distribution over possible structures. This continuous-time approach can naturally handle both learning from and predicting observations at arbitrary time points. Theoretically, we establish sufficient conditions for an SDE and SCOTCH to be structurally identifiable, and prove its consistency under infinite data limits. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach leads to improved structure learning performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets compared to relevant baselines under regular and irregular sampling intervals.
Learning Reusable Manipulation Strategies
Authors: Jiayuan Mao, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Humans demonstrate an impressive ability to acquire and generalize manipulation "tricks." Even from a single demonstration, such as using soup ladles to reach for distant objects, we can apply this skill to new scenarios involving different object positions, sizes, and categories (e.g., forks and hammers). Additionally, we can flexibly combine various skills to devise long-term plans. In this paper, we present a framework that enables machines to acquire such manipulation skills, referred to as "mechanisms," through a single demonstration and self-play. Our key insight lies in interpreting each demonstration as a sequence of changes in robot-object and object-object contact modes, which provides a scaffold for learning detailed samplers for continuous parameters. These learned mechanisms and samplers can be seamlessly integrated into standard task and motion planners, enabling their compositional use.