pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
k-Parameter Approach for False In-Season Anomaly Suppression in Daily Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Vincent Yuansang Zha, Vaishnavi Kommaraju, Okenna Obi-Njoku, Vijay Dakshinamoorthy, Anirudh Agnihotri, Nantes Kirsten
Date: 2023-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Position, Time Series, Time Series Anomaly Detection

Detecting anomalies in a daily time series with a weekly pattern is a common task with a wide range of applications. A typical way of performing the task is by using decomposition method. However, the method often generates false positive results where a data point falls within its weekly range but is just off from its weekday position. We refer to this type of anomalies as "in-season anomalies", and propose a k-parameter approach to address the issue. The approach provides configurable extra tolerance for in-season anomalies to suppress misleading alerts while preserving real positives. It yields favorable result.
Replay Memory as An Empirical MDP: Combining Conservative Estimation with Experience Replay
Authors: Hongming Zhang, Chenjun Xiao, Han Wang, Jun Jin, Bo Xu, Martin Müller
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2023 5

Experience replay, which stores transitions in a replay memory for repeated use, plays an important role of improving sample efficiency in reinforcement learning. Existing techniques such as reweighted sampling, episodic learning and reverse sweep update further process the information in the replay memory to make experience replay more efficient. In this work, we further exploit the information in the replay memory by treating it as an empirical \emph{Replay Memory MDP (RM-MDP)}. By solving it with dynamic programming, we learn a conservative value estimate that \emph{only} considers transitions observed in the replay memory. Both value and policy regularizers based on this conservative estimate are developed and integrated with model-free learning algorithms. We design the metric \textit{memory density} to measure the quality of RM-MDP. Our empirical studies quantitatively find a strong correlation between performance improvement and memory density. Our method combines \emph{Conservative Estimation with Experience Replay (CEER)}, improving sample efficiency by a large margin, especially when the memory density is high. Even when the memory density is low, such a conservative estimate can still help to avoid suicidal actions and thereby improve performance.
LymphoML: An interpretable artificial intelligence-based method identifies morphologic features that correlate with lymphoma subtype
Authors: Vivek Shankar, Xiaoli Yang, Vrishab Krishna, Brent Tan, Oscar Silva, Rebecca Rojansky, Andrew Ng, Fabiola Valvert, Edward Briercheck, David Weinstock, Yasodha Natkunam, Sebastian Fernandez-Pol, Pranav Rajpurkar
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Interpretable Machine Learning, whole slide images

The accurate classification of lymphoma subtypes using hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue is complicated by the wide range of morphological features these cancers can exhibit. We present LymphoML - an interpretable machine learning method that identifies morphologic features that correlate with lymphoma subtypes. Our method applies steps to process H&E-stained tissue microarray cores, segment nuclei and cells, compute features encompassing morphology, texture, and architecture, and train gradient-boosted models to make diagnostic predictions. LymphoML's interpretable models, developed on a limited volume of H&E-stained tissue, achieve non-inferior diagnostic accuracy to pathologists using whole-slide images and outperform black box deep-learning on a dataset of 670 cases from Guatemala spanning 8 lymphoma subtypes. Using SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) analysis, we assess the impact of each feature on model prediction and find that nuclear shape features are most discriminative for DLBCL (F1-score: 78.7%) and classical Hodgkin lymphoma (F1-score: 74.5%). Finally, we provide the first demonstration that a model combining features from H&E-stained tissue with features from a standardized panel of 6 immunostains results in a similar diagnostic accuracy (85.3%) to a 46-stain panel (86.1%).
Temporal-Aware Refinement for Video-based Human Pose and Shape Recovery
Authors: Ming Chen, Yan Zhou, Weihua Jian, Pengfei Wan, Zhongyuan Wang
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, TAR

Though significant progress in human pose and shape recovery from monocular RGB images has been made in recent years, obtaining 3D human motion with high accuracy and temporal consistency from videos remains challenging. Existing video-based methods tend to reconstruct human motion from global image features, which lack detailed representation capability and limit the reconstruction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Temporal-Aware Refining Network (TAR), to synchronously explore temporal-aware global and local image features for accurate pose and shape recovery. First, a global transformer encoder is introduced to obtain temporal global features from static feature sequences. Second, a bidirectional ConvGRU network takes the sequence of high-resolution feature maps as input, and outputs temporal local feature maps that maintain high resolution and capture the local motion of the human body. Finally, a recurrent refinement module iteratively updates estimated SMPL parameters by leveraging both global and local temporal information to achieve accurate and smooth results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TAR obtains more accurate results than previous state-of-the-art methods on popular benchmarks, i.e., 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M.
Efficacy of Wolbachia-mediated sterility to suppress dengue: a synthetic control study
Authors: Jue Tao Lim, Somya Bansal, Chee Seng Chong, Borame Dickens, Youming Ng, Lu Deng, Caleb Lee, Li Yun Tan, Grace Chain, Pei Ma, Shuzhen Sim, Cheong Huat Tan, Alex R Cook, Lee Ching Ng
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00

In a study conducted in Singapore, a country prone to dengue outbreaks due to its climate and urban population, researchers examined the effectiveness of releasing male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia (wAlbB strain) to reduce dengue transmission. These infected males, when mating with wild-type females, produced non-viable eggs, leading to vector suppression. Extensive field trials involving over 600,000 residents in four townships were conducted from 2018 to 2022. The results showed a 57% decline in total dengue incidence and a 64% decline in clustered dengue incidence. This approach offers promise for large-scale dengue control in regions facing rising dengue cases, providing a critical solution in combating the disease.
Evaluating the Efficacy of Interactive Language Therapy Based on LLM for High-Functioning Autistic Adolescent Psychological Counseling
Authors: Yujin Cho, Mingeon Kim, Seojin Kim, Oyun Kwon, Ryan Donghan Kwon, Yoonha Lee, Dohyun Lim
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00

This study investigates the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactive language therapy for high-functioning autistic adolescents. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, particularly in natural language processing, LLMs present a novel opportunity to augment traditional psychological counseling methods. This research primarily focuses on evaluating the LLM's ability to engage in empathetic, adaptable, and contextually appropriate interactions within a therapeutic setting. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted by a panel of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists using a specially developed scorecard. The assessment covered various aspects of the LLM's performance, including empathy, communication skills, adaptability, engagement, and the ability to establish a therapeutic alliance. The study avoided direct testing with patients, prioritizing privacy and ethical considerations, and instead relied on simulated scenarios to gauge the LLM's effectiveness. The results indicate that LLMs hold significant promise as supportive tools in therapy, demonstrating strengths in empathetic engagement and adaptability in conversation. However, challenges in achieving the depth of personalization and emotional understanding characteristic of human therapists were noted. The study also highlights the importance of ethical considerations in the application of AI in therapeutic contexts. This research provides valuable insights into the potential and limitations of using LLMs in psychological counseling for autistic adolescents. It lays the groundwork for future explorations into AI's role in mental health care, emphasizing the need for ongoing development to enhance the capabilities of these models in therapeutic settings.
PWISeg: Point-based Weakly-supervised Instance Segmentation for Surgical Instruments
Authors: Zhen Sun, Huan Xu, Jinlin Wu, Zhen Chen, Zhen Lei, Hongbin Liu
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Surgical tool detection, Weakly-supervised instance segmentation, Weakly supervised segmentation

In surgical procedures, correct instrument counting is essential. Instance segmentation is a location method that locates not only an object's bounding box but also each pixel's specific details. However, obtaining mask-level annotations is labor-intensive in instance segmentation. To address this issue, we propose a novel yet effective weakly-supervised surgical instrument instance segmentation approach, named Point-based Weakly-supervised Instance Segmentation (PWISeg). PWISeg adopts an FCN-based architecture with point-to-box and point-to-mask branches to model the relationships between feature points and bounding boxes, as well as feature points and segmentation masks on FPN, accomplishing instrument detection and segmentation jointly in a single model. Since mask level annotations are hard to available in the real world, for point-to-mask training, we introduce an unsupervised projection loss, utilizing the projected relation between predicted masks and bboxes as supervision signal. On the other hand, we annotate a few pixels as the key pixel for each instrument. Based on this, we further propose a key pixel association loss and a key pixel distribution loss, driving the point-to-mask branch to generate more accurate segmentation predictions. To comprehensively evaluate this task, we unveil a novel surgical instrument dataset with manual annotations, setting up a benchmark for further research. Our comprehensive research trial validated the superior performance of our PWISeg. The results show that the accuracy of surgical instrument segmentation is improved, surpassing most methods of instance segmentation via weakly supervised bounding boxes. This improvement is consistently observed in our proposed dataset and when applied to the public HOSPI-Tools dataset.
JaxMARL: Multi-Agent RL Environments and Algorithms in JAX
Authors: Alexander Rutherford, Benjamin Ellis, Matteo Gallici, Jonathan Cook, Andrei Lupu, Gardar Ingvarsson, Timon Willi, Ravi Hammond, Akbir Khan, Christian Schroeder de Witt, Alexandra Souly, Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay, Mikayel Samvelyan, Minqi Jiang, Robert Tjarko Lange, Shimon Whiteson, Bruno Lacerda, Nick Hawes, Tim Rocktaschel, Chris Lu, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Meta-Learning, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Starcraft, Starcraft II

Benchmarks are crucial in the development of machine learning algorithms, with available environments significantly influencing reinforcement learning (RL) research. Traditionally, RL environments run on the CPU, which limits their scalability with typical academic compute. However, recent advancements in JAX have enabled the wider use of hardware acceleration, enabling massively parallel RL training pipelines and environments. While this has been successfully applied to single-agent RL, it has not yet been widely adopted for multi-agent scenarios. In this paper, we present JaxMARL, the first open-source, Python-based library that combines GPU-enabled efficiency with support for a large number of commonly used MARL environments and popular baseline algorithms. Our experiments show that, in terms of wall clock time, our JAX-based training pipeline is around 14 times faster than existing approaches, and up to 12500x when multiple training runs are vectorized. This enables efficient and thorough evaluations, potentially alleviating the evaluation crisis in the field. We also introduce and benchmark SMAX, a JAX-based approximate reimplementation of the popular StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge, which removes the need to run the StarCraft II game engine. This not only enables GPU acceleration, but also provides a more flexible MARL environment, unlocking the potential for self-play, meta-learning, and other future applications in MARL. The code is available at https://github.com/flairox/jaxmarl.
Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks
Authors: Shelly Sheynin, Adam Polyak, Uriel Singer, Yuval Kirstain, Amit Zohar, Oron Ashual, Devi Parikh, Yaniv Taigman
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Multi-Task Learning, Super-Resolution

Instruction-based image editing holds immense potential for a variety of applications, as it enables users to perform any editing operation using a natural language instruction. However, current models in this domain often struggle with accurately executing user instructions. We present Emu Edit, a multi-task image editing model which sets state-of-the-art results in instruction-based image editing. To develop Emu Edit we train it to multi-task across an unprecedented range of tasks, such as region-based editing, free-form editing, and Computer Vision tasks, all of which are formulated as generative tasks. Additionally, to enhance Emu Edit's multi-task learning abilities, we provide it with learned task embeddings which guide the generation process towards the correct edit type. Both these elements are essential for Emu Edit's outstanding performance. Furthermore, we show that Emu Edit can generalize to new tasks, such as image inpainting, super-resolution, and compositions of editing tasks, with just a few labeled examples. This capability offers a significant advantage in scenarios where high-quality samples are scarce. Lastly, to facilitate a more rigorous and informed assessment of instructable image editing models, we release a new challenging and versatile benchmark that includes seven different image editing tasks.
ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, Google Bard, and Microsoft Bing to Improve Health Literacy and Communication in Pediatric Populations and Beyond
Authors: Kanhai S. Amin, Linda Mayes, Pavan Khosla, Rushabh Doshi
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00

Purpose: Enhanced health literacy has been linked to better health outcomes; however, few interventions have been studied. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as a medium to improve health literacy in children and other populations. Methods: We ran 288 conditions using 26 different prompts through ChatGPT-3.5, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard. Given constraints imposed by rate limits, we tested a subset of 150 conditions through ChatGPT-4. The primary outcome measurements were the reading grade level (RGL) and word counts of output. Results: Across all models, output for basic prompts such as "Explain" and "What is (are)" were at, or exceeded, a 10th-grade RGL. When prompts were specified to explain conditions from the 1st to 12th RGL, we found that LLMs had varying abilities to tailor responses based on RGL. ChatGPT-3.5 provided responses that ranged from the 7th-grade to college freshmen RGL while ChatGPT-4 outputted responses from the 6th-grade to the college-senior RGL. Microsoft Bing provided responses from the 9th to 11th RGL while Google Bard provided responses from the 7th to 10th RGL. Discussion: ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 did better in achieving lower-grade level outputs. Meanwhile Bard and Bing tended to consistently produce an RGL that is at the high school level regardless of prompt. Additionally, Bard's hesitancy in providing certain outputs indicates a cautious approach towards health information. LLMs demonstrate promise in enhancing health communication, but future research should verify the accuracy and effectiveness of such tools in this context. Implications: LLMs face challenges in crafting outputs below a sixth-grade reading level. However, their capability to modify outputs above this threshold provides a potential mechanism to improve health literacy and communication in a pediatric population and beyond.
The Song Describer Dataset: a Corpus of Audio Captions for Music-and-Language Evaluation
Authors: Ilaria Manco, Benno Weck, Seungheon Doh, Minz Won, Yixiao Zhang, Dmitry Bogdanov, Yusong Wu, Ke Chen, Philip Tovstogan, Emmanouil Benetos, Elio Quinton, György Fazekas, Juhan Nam
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Captioning, Music Generation, Retrieval, Text to Audio Retrieval, Text-to-Music Generation

We introduce the Song Describer dataset (SDD), a new crowdsourced corpus of high-quality audio-caption pairs, designed for the evaluation of music-and-language models. The dataset consists of 1.1k human-written natural language descriptions of 706 music recordings, all publicly accessible and released under Creative Common licenses. To showcase the use of our dataset, we benchmark popular models on three key music-and-language tasks (music captioning, text-to-music generation and music-language retrieval). Our experiments highlight the importance of cross-dataset evaluation and offer insights into how researchers can use SDD to gain a broader understanding of model performance.
When "A Helpful Assistant" Is Not Really Helpful: Personas in System Prompts Do Not Improve Performances of Large Language Models
Authors: Mingqian Zheng, Jiaxin Pei, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, David Jurgens
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00

Prompting serves as the major way humans interact with Large Language Models (LLM). Commercial AI systems commonly define the role of the LLM in system prompts. For example, ChatGPT uses ``You are a helpful assistant'' as part of its default system prompt. Despite current practices of adding personas to system prompts, it remains unclear how different personas affect a model's performance on objective tasks. In this study, we present a systematic evaluation of personas in system prompts. We curate a list of 162 roles covering 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise. Through extensive analysis of 4 popular families of LLMs and 2,410 factual questions, we demonstrate that adding personas in system prompts does not improve model performance across a range of questions compared to the control setting where no persona is added. Nevertheless, further analysis suggests that the gender, type, and domain of the persona can all influence the resulting prediction accuracies. We further experimented with a list of persona search strategies and found that, while aggregating results from the best persona for each question significantly improves prediction accuracy, automatically identifying the best persona is challenging, with predictions often performing no better than random selection. Overall, our findings suggest that while adding a persona may lead to performance gains in certain settings, the effect of each persona can be largely random. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Pei/Prompting-with-Social-Roles.
Inherently Interpretable Time Series Classification via Multiple Instance Learning
Authors: Joseph Early, Gavin KC Cheung, Kurt Cutajar, Hanting Xie, Jas Kandola, Niall Twomey
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multiple Instance Learning, Time Series, Time Series Classification

Conventional Time Series Classification (TSC) methods are often black boxes that obscure inherent interpretation of their decision-making processes. In this work, we leverage Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) to overcome this issue, and propose a new framework called MILLET: Multiple Instance Learning for Locally Explainable Time series classification. We apply MILLET to existing deep learning TSC models and show how they become inherently interpretable without compromising (and in some cases, even improving) predictive performance. We evaluate MILLET on 85 UCR TSC datasets and also present a novel synthetic dataset that is specially designed to facilitate interpretability evaluation. On these datasets, we show MILLET produces sparse explanations quickly that are of higher quality than other well-known interpretability methods. To the best of our knowledge, our work with MILLET, which is available on GitHub (https://github.com/JAEarly/MILTimeSeriesClassification), is the first to develop general MIL methods for TSC and apply them to an extensive variety of domains
A Novel Neural Network-Based Federated Learning System for Imbalanced and Non-IID Data
Authors: Mahfuzur Rahman Chowdhury, Muhammad Ibrahim
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Federated Learning

With the growth of machine learning techniques, privacy of data of users has become a major concern. Most of the machine learning algorithms rely heavily on large amount of data which may be collected from various sources. Collecting these data yet maintaining privacy policies has become one of the most challenging tasks for the researchers. To combat this issue, researchers have introduced federated learning, where a prediction model is learnt by ensuring the privacy of data of clients data. However, the prevalent federated learning algorithms possess an accuracy and efficiency trade-off, especially for non-IID data. In this research, we propose a centralized, neural network-based federated learning system. The centralized algorithm incorporates micro-level parallel processing inspired by the traditional mini-batch algorithm where the client devices and the server handle the forward and backward propagation respectively. We also devise a semi-centralized version of our proposed algorithm. This algorithm takes advantage of edge computing for minimizing the load from the central server, where clients handle both the forward and backward propagation while sacrificing the overall train time to some extent. We evaluate our proposed systems on five well-known benchmark datasets and achieve satisfactory performance in a reasonable time across various data distribution settings as compared to some existing benchmark algorithms.
Straggler-resilient Federated Learning: Tackling Computation Heterogeneity with Layer-wise Partial Model Training in Mobile Edge Network
Authors: Hongda Wu, Ping Wang, C V Aswartha Narayana
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables many resource-limited devices to train a model collaboratively without data sharing. However, many existing works focus on model-homogeneous FL, where the global and local models are the same size, ignoring the inherently heterogeneous computational capabilities of different devices and restricting resource-constrained devices from contributing to FL. In this paper, we consider model-heterogeneous FL and propose Federated Partial Model Training (FedPMT), where devices with smaller computational capabilities work on partial models (subsets of the global model) and contribute to the global model. Different from Dropout-based partial model generation, which removes neurons in hidden layers at random, model training in FedPMT is achieved from the back-propagation perspective. As such, all devices in FedPMT prioritize the most crucial parts of the global model. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed partial model training design has a similar convergence rate to the widely adopted Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm, $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$, with the sub-optimality gap enlarged by a constant factor related to the model splitting design in FedPMT. Empirical results show that FedPMT significantly outperforms the existing benchmark FedDrop. Meanwhile, compared to the popular model-homogeneous benchmark, FedAvg, FedPMT reaches the learning target in a shorter completion time, thus achieving a better trade-off between learning accuracy and completion time.