pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Lessons Learned in ATCO2: 5000 hours of Air Traffic Control Communications for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding
Authors: Juan Zuluaga-Gomez, Iuliia Nigmatulina, Amrutha Prasad, Petr Motlicek, Driss Khalil, Srikanth Madikeri, Allan Tart, Igor Szoke, Vincent Lenders, Mickael Rigault, Khalid Choukri
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Language Identification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Voice communication between air traffic controllers (ATCos) and pilots is critical for ensuring safe and efficient air traffic control (ATC). This task requires high levels of awareness from ATCos and can be tedious and error-prone. Recent attempts have been made to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into ATC in order to reduce the workload of ATCos. However, the development of data-driven AI systems for ATC demands large-scale annotated datasets, which are currently lacking in the field. This paper explores the lessons learned from the ATCO2 project, a project that aimed to develop a unique platform to collect and preprocess large amounts of ATC data from airspace in real time. Audio and surveillance data were collected from publicly accessible radio frequency channels with VHF receivers owned by a community of volunteers and later uploaded to Opensky Network servers, which can be considered an "unlimited source" of data. In addition, this paper reviews previous work from ATCO2 partners, including (i) robust automatic speech recognition, (ii) natural language processing, (iii) English language identification of ATC communications, and (iv) the integration of surveillance data such as ADS-B. We believe that the pipeline developed during the ATCO2 project, along with the open-sourcing of its data, will encourage research in the ATC field. A sample of the ATCO2 corpus is available on the following website: https://www.atco2.org/data, while the full corpus can be purchased through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. We demonstrated that ATCO2 is an appropriate dataset to develop ASR engines when little or near to no ATC in-domain data is available. For instance, with the CNN-TDNNf kaldi model, we reached the performance of as low as 17.9% and 24.9% WER on public ATC datasets which is 6.6/7.6% better than "out-of-domain" but supervised CNN-TDNNf model.
RadAdapt: Radiology Report Summarization via Lightweight Domain Adaptation of Large Language Models
Authors: Dave Van Veen, Cara Van Uden, Maayane Attias, Anuj Pareek, Christian Bluethgen, Malgorzata Polacin, Wah Chiu, Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Juan Manuel Zambrano Chaves, Curtis P. Langlotz, Akshay S. Chaudhari, John Pauly
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

We systematically investigate lightweight strategies to adapt large language models (LLMs) for the task of radiology report summarization (RRS). Specifically, we focus on domain adaptation via pretraining (on natural language, biomedical text, or clinical text) and via discrete prompting or parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our results consistently achieve best performance by maximally adapting to the task via pretraining on clinical text and fine-tuning on RRS examples. Importantly, this method fine-tunes a mere 0.32% of parameters throughout the model, in contrast to end-to-end fine-tuning (100% of parameters). Additionally, we study the effect of in-context examples and out-of-distribution (OOD) training before concluding with a radiologist reader study and qualitative analysis. Our findings highlight the importance of domain adaptation in RRS and provide valuable insights toward developing effective natural language processing solutions for clinical tasks.
ADVISE: AI-accelerated Design of Evidence Synthesis for Global Development
Authors: Kristen M. Edwards, Binyang Song, Jaron Porciello, Mark Engelbert, Carolyn Huang, Faez Ahmed
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, AI Agent, Decision Making

When designing evidence-based policies and programs, decision-makers must distill key information from a vast and rapidly growing literature base. Identifying relevant literature from raw search results is time and resource intensive, and is often done by manual screening. In this study, we develop an AI agent based on a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model and incorporate it into a human team designing an evidence synthesis product for global development. We explore the effectiveness of the human-AI hybrid team in accelerating the evidence synthesis process. To further improve team efficiency, we enhance the human-AI hybrid team through active learning (AL). Specifically, we explore different sampling strategies, including random sampling, least confidence (LC) sampling, and highest priority (HP) sampling, to study their influence on the collaborative screening process. Results show that incorporating the BERT-based AI agent into the human team can reduce the human screening effort by 68.5% compared to the case of no AI assistance and by 16.8% compared to the case of using a support vector machine (SVM)-based AI agent for identifying 80% of all relevant documents. When we apply the HP sampling strategy for AL, the human screening effort can be reduced even more: by 78.3% for identifying 80% of all relevant documents compared to no AI assistance. We apply the AL-enhanced human-AI hybrid teaming workflow in the design process of three evidence gap maps (EGMs) for USAID and find it to be highly effective. These findings demonstrate how AI can accelerate the development of evidence synthesis products and promote timely evidence-based decision making in global development in a human-AI hybrid teaming context.
NewsPanda: Media Monitoring for Timely Conservation Action
Authors: Sedrick Scott Keh, Zheyuan Ryan Shi, David J. Patterson, Nirmal Bhagabati, Karun Dewan, Areendran Gopala, Pablo Izquierdo, Debojyoti Mallick, Ambika Sharma, Pooja Shrestha, Fei Fang
Date: 2023-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Articles

Non-governmental organizations for environmental conservation have a significant interest in monitoring conservation-related media and getting timely updates about infrastructure construction projects as they may cause massive impact to key conservation areas. Such monitoring, however, is difficult and time-consuming. We introduce NewsPanda, a toolkit which automatically detects and analyzes online articles related to environmental conservation and infrastructure construction. We fine-tune a BERT-based model using active learning methods and noise correction algorithms to identify articles that are relevant to conservation and infrastructure construction. For the identified articles, we perform further analysis, extracting keywords and finding potentially related sources. NewsPanda has been successfully deployed by the World Wide Fund for Nature teams in the UK, India, and Nepal since February 2022. It currently monitors over 80,000 websites and 1,074 conservation sites across India and Nepal, saving more than 30 hours of human efforts weekly. We have now scaled it up to cover 60,000 conservation sites globally.
Multi-Task Multi-Behavior MAP-Elites
Authors: Anne, Mouret
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

We propose Multi-Task Multi-Behavior MAP-Elites, a variant of MAP-Elites that finds a large number of high-quality solutions for a large set of tasks (optimization problems from a given family). It combines the original MAP-Elites for the search for diversity and Multi-Task MAP-Elites for leveraging similarity between tasks. It performs better than three baselines on a humanoid fault-recovery set of tasks, solving more tasks and finding twice as many solutions per solved task.
Open-ended search for environments and adapted agents using MAP-Elites
Authors: Emma Stensby Norstein, Kai Olav Ellefsen, Kyrre Glette
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00

Creatures in the real world constantly encounter new and diverse challenges they have never seen before. They will often need to adapt to some of these tasks and solve them in order to survive. This almost endless world of novel challenges is not as common in virtual environments, where artificially evolving agents often have a limited set of tasks to solve. An exception to this is the field of open-endedness where the goal is to create unbounded exploration of interesting artefacts. We want to move one step closer to creating simulated environments similar to the diverse real world, where agents can both find solvable tasks, and adapt to them. Through the use of MAP-Elites we create a structured repertoire, a map, of terrains and virtual creatures that locomote through them. By using novelty as a dimension in the grid, the map can continuously develop to encourage exploration of new environments. The agents must adapt to the environments found, but can also search for environments within each cell of the grid to find the one that best fits their set of skills. Our approach combines the structure of MAP-Elites, which can allow the virtual creatures to use adjacent cells as stepping stones to solve increasingly difficult environments, with open-ended innovation. This leads to a search that is unbounded, but still has a clear structure. We find that while handcrafted bounded dimensions for the map lead to quicker exploration of a large set of environments, both the bounded and unbounded approach manage to solve a diverse set of terrains.
Unbounded Differentially Private Quantile and Maximum Estimation
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

In this work we consider the problem of differentially private computation of quantiles for the data, especially the highest quantiles such as maximum, but with an unbounded range for the dataset. We show that this can be done efficiently through a simple invocation of $\texttt{AboveThreshold}$, a subroutine that is iteratively called in the fundamental Sparse Vector Technique, even when there is no upper bound on the data. In particular, we show that this procedure can give more accurate and robust estimates on the highest quantiles with applications towards clipping that is essential for differentially private sum and mean estimation. In addition, we show how two invocations can handle the fully unbounded data setting. Within our study, we show that an improved analysis of $\texttt{AboveThreshold}$ can improve the privacy guarantees for the widely used Sparse Vector Technique that is of independent interest. We give a more general characterization of privacy loss for $\texttt{AboveThreshold}$ which we immediately apply to our method for improved privacy guarantees. Our algorithm only requires one $O(n)$ pass through the data, which can be unsorted, and each subsequent query takes $O(1)$ time. We empirically compare our unbounded algorithm with the state-of-the-art algorithms in the bounded setting. For inner quantiles, we find that our method often performs better on non-synthetic datasets. For the maximal quantiles, which we apply to differentially private sum computation, we find that our method performs significantly better.
Spectral clustering in the Gaussian mixture block model
Authors: Shuangping Li, Tselil Schramm
Date: 2023-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, model

Gaussian mixture block models are distributions over graphs that strive to model modern networks: to generate a graph from such a model, we associate each vertex $i$ with a latent feature vector $u_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$ sampled from a mixture of Gaussians, and we add edge $(i,j)$ if and only if the feature vectors are sufficiently similar, in that $\langle u_i,u_j \rangle \ge \tau$ for a pre-specified threshold $\tau$. The different components of the Gaussian mixture represent the fact that there may be different types of nodes with different distributions over features -- for example, in a social network each component represents the different attributes of a distinct community. Natural algorithmic tasks associated with these networks are embedding (recovering the latent feature vectors) and clustering (grouping nodes by their mixture component). In this paper we initiate the study of clustering and embedding graphs sampled from high-dimensional Gaussian mixture block models, where the dimension of the latent feature vectors $d\to \infty$ as the size of the network $n \to \infty$. This high-dimensional setting is most appropriate in the context of modern networks, in which we think of the latent feature space as being high-dimensional. We analyze the performance of canonical spectral clustering and embedding algorithms for such graphs in the case of 2-component spherical Gaussian mixtures, and begin to sketch out the information-computation landscape for clustering and embedding in these models.
The Topology of a Family Tree Graph and Its Members' Satisfaction with One Another: A Machine Learning Approach
Authors: Teddy Lazebnik, Amit Yaniv-Rosenfeld
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00

Family members' satisfaction with one another is central to creating healthy and supportive family environments. In this work, we propose and implement a novel computational technique aimed at exploring the possible relationship between the topology of a given family tree graph and its members' satisfaction with one another. Through an extensive empirical evaluation ($N=486$ families), we show that the proposed technique brings about highly accurate results in predicting family members' satisfaction with one another based solely on the family graph's topology. Furthermore, the results indicate that our technique favorably compares to baseline regression models which rely on established features associated with family members' satisfaction with one another in prior literature.
Explainable Conversational Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources via Iterative Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Philipp Christmann, Rishiraj Saha Roy, Gerhard Weikum
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Question Answering

In conversational question answering, users express their information needs through a series of utterances with incomplete context. Typical ConvQA methods rely on a single source (a knowledge base (KB), or a text corpus, or a set of tables), thus being unable to benefit from increased answer coverage and redundancy of multiple sources. Our method EXPLAIGNN overcomes these limitations by integrating information from a mixture of sources with user-comprehensible explanations for answers. It constructs a heterogeneous graph from entities and evidence snippets retrieved from a KB, a text corpus, web tables, and infoboxes. This large graph is then iteratively reduced via graph neural networks that incorporate question-level attention, until the best answers and their explanations are distilled. Experiments show that EXPLAIGNN improves performance over state-of-the-art baselines. A user study demonstrates that derived answers are understandable by end users.
An experimental framework for designing document structure for users' decision making - An empirical study of recipes
Authors: Rina Kagawa, Masaki Matsubara, Rei Miyata, Takuya Matsuzaki, Yukino Baba, Yoko Yamakata
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Textual documents need to be of good quality to ensure effective asynchronous communication in remote areas, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, defining a preferred document structure (content and arrangement) for improving lay readers' decision-making is challenging. First, the types of useful content for various readers cannot be determined simply by gathering expert knowledge. Second, methodologies to evaluate the document's usefulness from the user's perspective have not been established. This study proposed the experimental framework to identify useful contents of documents by aggregating lay readers' insights. This study used 200 online recipes as research subjects and recruited 1,340 amateur cooks as lay readers. The proposed framework identified six useful contents of recipes. Multi-level modeling then showed that among the six identified contents, suitable ingredients or notes arranged with a subheading at the end of each cooking step significantly increased recipes' usefulness. Our framework contributes to the communication design via documents.
Structure Aware Incremental Learning with Personalized Imitation Weights for Recommender Systems
Authors: Yuening Wang, Yingxue Zhang, Antonios Valkanas, Ruiming Tang, Chen Ma, Jianye Hao, Mark Coates
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems now consume large-scale data and play a significant role in improving user experience. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as one of the most effective recommender system models because they model the rich relational information. The ever-growing volume of data can make training GNNs prohibitively expensive. To address this, previous attempts propose to train the GNN models incrementally as new data blocks arrive. Feature and structure knowledge distillation techniques have been explored to allow the GNN model to train in a fast incremental fashion while alleviating the catastrophic forgetting problem. However, preserving the same amount of the historical information for all users is sub-optimal since it fails to take into account the dynamics of each user's change of preferences. For the users whose interests shift substantially, retaining too much of the old knowledge can overly constrain the model, preventing it from quickly adapting to the users' novel interests. In contrast, for users who have static preferences, model performance can benefit greatly from preserving as much of the user's long-term preferences as possible. In this work, we propose a novel training strategy that adaptively learns personalized imitation weights for each user to balance the contribution from the recent data and the amount of knowledge to be distilled from previous time periods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of learning imitation weights via a comparison on five diverse datasets for three state-of-art structure distillation based recommender systems. The performance shows consistent improvement over competitive incremental learning techninques.
Optimizing Guided Traversal for Fast Learned Sparse Retrieval
Authors: Yifan Qiao, Yingrui Yang, Haixin Lin, Tao Yang
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Recent studies show that BM25-driven dynamic index skipping can greatly accelerate MaxScore-based document retrieval based on the learned sparse representation derived by DeepImpact. This paper investigates the effectiveness of such a traversal guidance strategy during top k retrieval when using other models such as SPLADE and uniCOIL, and finds that unconstrained BM25-driven skipping could have a visible relevance degradation when the BM25 model is not well aligned with a learned weight model or when retrieval depth k is small. This paper generalizes the previous work and optimizes the BM25 guided index traversal with a two-level pruning control scheme and model alignment for fast retrieval using a sparse representation. Although there can be a cost of increased latency, the proposed scheme is much faster than the original MaxScore method without BM25 guidance while retaining the relevance effectiveness. This paper analyzes the competitiveness of this two-level pruning scheme, and evaluates its tradeoff in ranking relevance and time efficiency when searching several test datasets.
Multidimensional Fairness in Paper Recommendation
Authors: Reem AlSaffar, Susan Gauch, Hinab Al-Kawaz
Date: 2023-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Diversity, Fairness

To prevent potential bias in the paper review and selection process for conferences and journals, most include double blind review. Despite this, studies show that bias still exists. Recommendation algorithms for paper review also may have implicit bias. We offer three fair methods that specifically take into account author diversity in paper recommendation to address this. Our methods provide fair outcomes across many protected variables concurrently, in contrast to typical fair algorithms that only use one protected variable. Five demographic characteristics-gender, ethnicity, career stage, university rank, and geolocation-are included in our multidimensional author profiles. The Overall Diversity approach uses a score for overall diversity to rank publications. The Round Robin Diversity technique chooses papers from authors who are members of each protected group in turn, whereas the Multifaceted Diversity method chooses papers that initially fill the demographic feature with the highest importance. We compare the effectiveness of author diversity profiles based on Boolean and continuous-valued features. By selecting papers from a pool of SIGCHI 2017, DIS 2017, and IUI 2017 papers, we recommend papers for SIGCHI 2017 and evaluate these algorithms using the user profiles. We contrast the papers that were recommended with those that were selected by the conference. We find that utilizing profiles with either Boolean or continuous feature values, all three techniques boost diversity while just slightly decreasing utility or not decreasing. By choosing authors who are 42.50% more diverse and with a 2.45% boost in utility, our best technique, Multifaceted Diversity, suggests a set of papers that match demographic parity. The selection of grant proposals, conference papers, journal articles, and other academic duties might all use this strategy.
CHIC: Corporate Document for Visual question Answering
Authors: Ibrahim Souleiman Mahamoud, Mickael Coustaty, Aurelie Joseph, Vincent Poulain d Andecy, Jean-Marc Ogier
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval, Visual Question Answering

The massive use of digital documents due to the substantial trend of paperless initiatives confronted some companies to find ways to process thousands of documents per day automatically. To achieve this, they use automatic information retrieval (IR) allowing them to extract useful information from large datasets quickly. In order to have effective IR methods, it is first necessary to have an adequate dataset. Although companies have enough data to take into account their needs, there is also a need for a public database to compare contributions between state-of-the-art methods. Public data on the document exists as DocVQA[2] and XFUND [10], but these do not fully satisfy the needs of companies. XFUND contains only form documents while the company uses several types of documents (i.e. structured documents like forms but also semi-structured as invoices, and unstructured as emails). Compared to XFUND, DocVQA has several types of documents but only 4.5% of them are corporate documents (i.e. invoice, purchase order, etc). All of this 4.5% of documents do not meet the diversity of documents required by the company. We propose CHIC a visual question-answering public dataset. This dataset contains different types of corporate documents and the information extracted from these documents meet the right expectations of companies.