pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Joint-Individual Fusion Structure with Fusion Attention Module for Multi-Modal Skin Cancer Classification
Authors: Peng Tang, Xintong Yan, Yang Nan, Xiaobin Hu, Bjoern H Menzee. Sebastian Krammer, Tobias Lasser
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Classification, Decision Making, Multi-modal Classification, Skin Cancer Classification

Most convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods for skin cancer classification obtain their results using only dermatological images. Although good classification results have been shown, more accurate results can be achieved by considering the patient's metadata, which is valuable clinical information for dermatologists. Current methods only use the simple joint fusion structure (FS) and fusion modules (FMs) for the multi-modal classification methods, there still is room to increase the accuracy by exploring more advanced FS and FM. Therefore, in this paper, we design a new fusion method that combines dermatological images (dermoscopy images or clinical images) and patient metadata for skin cancer classification from the perspectives of FS and FM. First, we propose a joint-individual fusion (JIF) structure that learns the shared features of multi-modality data and preserves specific features simultaneously. Second, we introduce a fusion attention (FA) module that enhances the most relevant image and metadata features based on both the self and mutual attention mechanism to support the decision-making pipeline. We compare the proposed JIF-MMFA method with other state-of-the-art fusion methods on three different public datasets. The results show that our JIF-MMFA method improves the classification results for all tested CNN backbones and performs better than the other fusion methods on the three public datasets, demonstrating our method's effectiveness and robustness
AI and Jobs: Has the Inflection Point Arrived? Evidence from an Online Labor Platform
Authors: Dandan Qiao, Huaxia Rui, Qian Xiong
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has renewed the debate on the important issue of "technology displacement". While prior research has investigated the effect of information technology in general on human labor from a macro perspective, this paper complements the literature by examining the impact of LLMs on freelancers from a micro perspective. Specifically, we leverage the release of ChatGPT to investigate how AI influences freelancers across different online labor markets (OLMs). Employing the Difference-in-Differences method, we discovered two distinct scenarios following ChatGPT's release: 1) the displacement effect of LLMs, featuring reduced work volume and earnings, as is exemplified by the translation & localization OLM; 2) the productivity effect of LLMs, featuring increased work volume and earnings, as is exemplified by the web development OLM. To shed light on the underlying mechanisms, we developed a Cournot-type competition model to highlight the existence of an inflection point for each occupation which separates the timeline of AI progress into a honeymoon phase and a substitution phase. Before AI performance crosses the inflection point, human labor benefits each time AI improves, resulting in the honeymoon phase. However, after AI performance crosses the inflection point, additional AI enhancement hurts human labor. Further analyzing the progression from ChatGPT 3.5 to 4.0, we found three effect scenarios (i.e., productivity to productivity, displacement to displacement, and productivity to displacement), consistent with the inflection point conjecture. Heterogeneous analyses reveal that U.S. web developers tend to benefit more from the release of ChatGPT compared to their counterparts in other regions, and somewhat surprisingly, experienced translators seem more likely to exit the market than less experienced translators after the release of ChatGPT.
Augmentation-Free Dense Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jiawei Fan, Chao Li, Xiaolong Liu, Meina Song, Anbang Yao
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, knowledge distillation methods based on contrastive learning have achieved promising results on image classification and object detection tasks. However, in this line of research, we note that less attention is paid to semantic segmentation. Existing methods heavily rely on data augmentation and memory buffer, which entail high computational resource demands when applying them to handle semantic segmentation that requires to preserve high-resolution feature maps for making dense pixel-wise predictions. In order to address this problem, we present Augmentation-free Dense Contrastive Knowledge Distillation (Af-DCD), a new contrastive distillation learning paradigm to train compact and accurate deep neural networks for semantic segmentation applications. Af-DCD leverages a masked feature mimicking strategy, and formulates a novel contrastive learning loss via taking advantage of tactful feature partitions across both channel and spatial dimensions, allowing to effectively transfer dense and structured local knowledge learnt by the teacher model to a target student model while maintaining training efficiency. Extensive experiments on five mainstream benchmarks with various teacher-student network pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. For instance, the DeepLabV3-Res18|DeepLabV3-MBV2 model trained by Af-DCD reaches 77.03%|76.38% mIOU on Cityscapes dataset when choosing DeepLabV3-Res101 as the teacher, setting new performance records. Besides that, Af-DCD achieves an absolute mIOU improvement of 3.26%|3.04%|2.75%|2.30%|1.42% compared with individually trained counterpart on Cityscapes|Pascal VOC|Camvid|ADE20K|COCO-Stuff-164K. Code is available at https://github.com/OSVAI/Af-DCD
TimeDRL: Disentangled Representation Learning for Multivariate Time-Series
Authors: Ching Chang, Chiao-Tung Chan, Wei-Yao Wang, Wen-Chih Peng, Tien-Fu Chen
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Time Series, Time Series Classification, Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time-series data in numerous real-world applications (e.g., healthcare and industry) are informative but challenging due to the lack of labels and high dimensionality. Recent studies in self-supervised learning have shown their potential in learning rich representations without relying on labels, yet they fall short in learning disentangled embeddings and addressing issues of inductive bias (e.g., transformation-invariance). To tackle these challenges, we propose TimeDRL, a generic multivariate time-series representation learning framework with disentangled dual-level embeddings. TimeDRL is characterized by three novel features: (i) disentangled derivation of timestamp-level and instance-level embeddings from patched time-series data using a [CLS] token strategy; (ii) utilization of timestamp-predictive and instance-contrastive tasks for disentangled representation learning, with the former optimizing timestamp-level embeddings with predictive loss, and the latter optimizing instance-level embeddings with contrastive loss; and (iii) avoidance of augmentation methods to eliminate inductive biases, such as transformation-invariance from cropping and masking. Comprehensive experiments on 6 time-series forecasting datasets and 5 time-series classification datasets have shown that TimeDRL consistently surpasses existing representation learning approaches, achieving an average improvement of forecasting by 58.02% in MSE and classification by 1.48% in accuracy. Furthermore, extensive ablation studies confirmed the relative contribution of each component in TimeDRL's architecture, and semi-supervised learning evaluations demonstrated its effectiveness in real-world scenarios, even with limited labeled data. The code is available at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/TimeDRL.
Using a Large Language Model to generate a Design Structure Matrix
Authors: Edwin C. Y. Koh
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is an established method used in dependency modelling, especially in the design of complex engineering systems. The generation of DSM is traditionally carried out through manual means and can involve interviewing experts to elicit critical system elements and the relationships between them. Such manual approaches can be time-consuming and costly. This paper presents a workflow that uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to support the generation of DSM and improve productivity. A prototype of the workflow was developed in this work and applied on a diesel engine DSM published previously. It was found that the prototype could reproduce 357 out of 462 DSM entries published (i.e. 77.3%), suggesting that the work can aid DSM generation. A no-code version of the prototype is made available online to support future research.
Caregiver Talk Shapes Toddler Vision: A Computational Study of Dyadic Play
Authors: Timothy Schaumlöffel, Arthur Aubret, Gemma Roig, Jochen Triesch
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Infants' ability to recognize and categorize objects develops gradually. The second year of life is marked by both the emergence of more semantic visual representations and a better understanding of word meaning. This suggests that language input may play an important role in shaping visual representations. However, even in suitable contexts for word learning like dyadic play sessions, caregivers utterances are sparse and ambiguous, often referring to objects that are different from the one to which the child attends. Here, we systematically investigate to what extent caregivers' utterances can nevertheless enhance visual representations. For this we propose a computational model of visual representation learning during dyadic play. We introduce a synthetic dataset of ego-centric images perceived by a toddler-agent that moves and rotates toy objects in different parts of its home environment while hearing caregivers' utterances, modeled as captions. We propose to model toddlers' learning as simultaneously aligning representations for 1) close-in-time images and 2) co-occurring images and utterances. We show that utterances with statistics matching those of real caregivers give rise to representations supporting improved category recognition. Our analysis reveals that a small decrease/increase in object-relevant naming frequencies can drastically impact the learned representations. This affects the attention on object names within an utterance, which is required for efficient visuo-linguistic alignment. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that caregivers' naming utterances can improve toddlers' visual representations.
Breaking the Entanglement of Homophily and Heterophily in Semi-supervised Node Classification
Authors: Henan Sun, Xunkai Li, Zhengyu Wu, Daohan Su, Rong-Hua Li, Guoren Wang
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Node Classification

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown prominent performance in semi-supervised node classification by leveraging knowledge from the graph database. However, most existing GNNs follow the homophily assumption, where connected nodes are more likely to exhibit similar feature distributions and the same labels, and such an assumption has proven to be vulnerable in a growing number of practical applications. As a supplement, heterophily reflects dissimilarity in connected nodes, which has gained significant attention in graph learning. To this end, data engineers aim to develop a powerful GNN model that can ensure performance under both homophily and heterophily. Despite numerous attempts, most existing GNNs struggle to achieve optimal node representations due to the constraints of undirected graphs. The neglect of directed edges results in sub-optimal graph representations, thereby hindering the capacity of GNNs. To address this issue, we introduce AMUD, which quantifies the relationship between node profiles and topology from a statistical perspective, offering valuable insights for Adaptively Modeling the natural directed graphs as the Undirected or Directed graph to maximize the benefits from subsequent graph learning. Furthermore, we propose Adaptive Directed Pattern Aggregation (ADPA) as a new directed graph learning paradigm for AMUD. Empirical studies have demonstrated that AMUD guides efficient graph learning. Meanwhile, extensive experiments on 16 benchmark datasets substantiate the impressive performance of ADPA, outperforming baselines by significant margins of 3.96.
Enhancing the Rationale-Input Alignment for Self-explaining Rationalization
Authors: Wei Liu, Haozhao Wang, Jun Wang, Zhiying Deng, Yuankai Zhang, Cheng Wang, Ruixuan Li
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00

Rationalization empowers deep learning models with self-explaining capabilities through a cooperative game, where a generator selects a semantically consistent subset of the input as a rationale, and a subsequent predictor makes predictions based on the selected rationale. In this paper, we discover that rationalization is prone to a problem named \emph{rationale shift}, which arises from the algorithmic bias of the cooperative game. Rationale shift refers to a situation where the semantics of the selected rationale may deviate from the original input, but the predictor still produces accurate predictions based on the deviation, resulting in a compromised generator with misleading feedback. To address this issue, we first demonstrate the importance of the alignment between the rationale and the full input through both empirical observations and theoretical analysis. Subsequently, we introduce a novel approach called DAR (\textbf{D}iscriminatively \textbf{A}ligned \textbf{R}ationalization), which utilizes an auxiliary module pretrained on the full input to discriminatively align the selected rationale and the original input. We theoretically illustrate how DAR accomplishes the desired alignment, thereby overcoming the rationale shift problem. The experiments on two widely used real-world benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly improves the explanation quality (measured by the overlap between the model-selected explanation and the human-annotated rationale) as compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, results on two synthetic settings further validate the effectiveness of DAR in addressing the rationale shift problem.
VRPTEST: Evaluating Visual Referring Prompting in Large Multimodal Models
Authors: Zongjie Li, Chaozheng Wang, Chaowei Liu, Pingchuan Ma, Daoyuan Wu, Shuai Wang, Cuiyun Gao
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00

With recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) across various domains, a novel prompting method called visual referring prompting has emerged, showing significant potential in enhancing human-computer interaction within multimodal systems. This method offers a more natural and flexible approach to human interaction with these systems compared to traditional text descriptions or coordinates. However, the categorization of visual referring prompting remains undefined, and its impact on the performance of LMMs has yet to be formally examined. In this study, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LMMs using a variety of visual referring prompting strategies. We introduce a benchmark dataset called VRPTEST, comprising 3 different visual tasks and 2,275 images, spanning diverse combinations of prompt strategies. Using VRPTEST, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of eight versions of prominent open-source and proprietary foundation models, including two early versions of GPT-4V. We develop an automated assessment framework based on software metamorphic testing techniques to evaluate the accuracy of LMMs without the need for human intervention or manual labeling. We find that the current proprietary models generally outperform the open-source ones, showing an average accuracy improvement of 22.70%; however, there is still potential for improvement. Moreover, our quantitative analysis shows that the choice of prompt strategy significantly affects the accuracy of LMMs, with variations ranging from -17.5% to +7.3%. Further case studies indicate that an appropriate visual referring prompting strategy can improve LMMs' understanding of context and location information, while an unsuitable one might lead to answer rejection. We also provide insights on minimizing the negative impact of visual referring prompting on LMMs.
Voice Recognition Robot with Real-Time Surveillance and Automation
Authors: Lochan Basyal
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00

Voice recognition technology enables the execution of real-world operations through a single voice command. This paper introduces a voice recognition system that involves converting input voice signals into corresponding text using an Android application. The text messages are then transmitted through Bluetooth connectivity, serving as a communication platform. Simultaneously, a controller circuit, equipped with a Bluetooth module, receives the text signal and, following a coding mechanism, executes real-world operations. The paper extends the application of voice recognition to real-time surveillance and automation, incorporating obstacle detection and avoidance mechanisms, as well as control over lighting and horn functions through predefined voice commands. The proposed technique not only serves as an assistive tool for individuals with disabilities but also finds utility in industrial automation, enabling robots to perform specific tasks with precision.
Synergistic Signals: Exploiting Co-Engagement and Semantic Links via Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zijie Huang, Baolin Li, Hafez Asgharzadeh, Anne Cocos, Lingyi Liu, Evan Cox, Colby Wise, Sudarshan Lamkhede
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Graph Neural Network, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

Given a set of candidate entities (e.g. movie titles), the ability to identify similar entities is a core capability of many recommender systems. Most often this is achieved by collaborative filtering approaches, i.e. if users co-engage with a pair of entities frequently enough, the embeddings should be similar. However, relying on co-engagement data alone can result in lower-quality embeddings for new and unpopular entities. We study this problem in the context recommender systems at Netflix. We observe that there is abundant semantic information such as genre, content maturity level, themes, etc. that complements co-engagement signals and provides interpretability in similarity models. To learn entity similarities from both data sources holistically, we propose a novel graph-based approach called SemanticGNN. SemanticGNN models entities, semantic concepts, collaborative edges, and semantic edges within a large-scale knowledge graph and conducts representation learning over it. Our key technical contributions are twofold: (1) we develop a novel relation-aware attention graph neural network (GNN) to handle the imbalanced distribution of relation types in our graph; (2) to handle web-scale graph data that has millions of nodes and billions of edges, we develop a novel distributed graph training paradigm. The proposed model is successfully deployed within Netflix and empirical experiments indicate it yields up to 35% improvement in performance on similarity judgment tasks.
Making Translators Privacy-aware on the User's Side
Authors: Ryoma Sato
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We propose PRISM to enable users of machine translation systems to preserve the privacy of data on their own initiative. There is a growing demand to apply machine translation systems to data that require privacy protection. While several machine translation engines claim to prioritize privacy, the extent and specifics of such protection are largely ambiguous. First, there is often a lack of clarity on how and to what degree the data is protected. Even if service providers believe they have sufficient safeguards in place, sophisticated adversaries might still extract sensitive information. Second, vulnerabilities may exist outside of these protective measures, such as within communication channels, potentially leading to data leakage. As a result, users are hesitant to utilize machine translation engines for data demanding high levels of privacy protection, thereby missing out on their benefits. PRISM resolves this problem. Instead of relying on the translation service to keep data safe, PRISM provides the means to protect data on the user's side. This approach ensures that even machine translation engines with inadequate privacy measures can be used securely. For platforms already equipped with privacy safeguards, PRISM acts as an additional protection layer, reinforcing their security furthermore. PRISM adds these privacy features without significantly compromising translation accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PRISM using real-world translators, T5 and ChatGPT (GPT-3.5-turbo), and the datasets with two languages. PRISM effectively balances privacy protection with translation accuracy.
A Low-Overhead Incorporation-Extrapolation based Few-Shot CSI Feedback Framework for Massive MIMO Systems
Authors: Binggui Zhou, Xi Yang, Jintao Wang, Shaodan Ma, Feifei Gao, Guanghua Yang
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential for downlink precoding in frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). However, obtaining CSI through feedback from the user equipment (UE) becomes challenging with the increasing scale of antennas and subcarriers and leads to extremely high CSI feedback overhead. Deep learning-based methods have emerged for compressing CSI but these methods generally require substantial collected samples and thus pose practical challenges. Moreover, existing deep learning methods also suffer from dramatically growing feedback overhead owing to their focus on full-dimensional CSI feedback. To address these issues, we propose a low-overhead Incorporation-Extrapolation based Few-Shot CSI feedback Framework (IEFSF) for massive MIMO systems. An incorporation-extrapolation scheme for eigenvector-based CSI feedback is proposed to reduce the feedback overhead. Then, to alleviate the necessity of extensive collected samples and enable few-shot CSI feedback, we further propose a knowledge-driven data augmentation (KDDA) method and an artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) -based data augmentation method by exploiting the domain knowledge of wireless channels and by exploiting a novel generative model, respectively. Experimental results based on the DeepMIMO dataset demonstrate that the proposed IEFSF significantly reduces CSI feedback overhead by 64 times compared with existing methods while maintaining higher feedback accuracy using only several hundred collected samples.