pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PanopticNDT: Efficient and Robust Panoptic Mapping
Authors: Daniel Seichter, Benedict Stephan, Söhnke Benedikt Fischedick, Steffen Müller, Leonard Rabes, Horst-Michael Gross
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Panoptic Segmentation, 3D Panoptic Segmentation, 3D Semantic Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation (PanopticNDT instances), Scene Classification (unified classes), Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

As the application scenarios of mobile robots are getting more complex and challenging, scene understanding becomes increasingly crucial. A mobile robot that is supposed to operate autonomously in indoor environments must have precise knowledge about what objects are present, where they are, what their spatial extent is, and how they can be reached; i.e., information about free space is also crucial. Panoptic mapping is a powerful instrument providing such information. However, building 3D panoptic maps with high spatial resolution is challenging on mobile robots, given their limited computing capabilities. In this paper, we propose PanopticNDT - an efficient and robust panoptic mapping approach based on occupancy normal distribution transform (NDT) mapping. We evaluate our approach on the publicly available datasets Hypersim and ScanNetV2. The results reveal that our approach can represent panoptic information at a higher level of detail than other state-of-the-art approaches while enabling real-time panoptic mapping on mobile robots. Finally, we prove the real-world applicability of PanopticNDT with qualitative results in a domestic application.
EvalLM: Interactive Evaluation of Large Language Model Prompts on User-Defined Criteria
Authors: Tae Soo Kim, Yoonjoo Lee, Jamin Shin, Young-Ho Kim, Juho Kim
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

By simply composing prompts, developers can prototype novel generative applications with Large Language Models (LLMs). To refine prototypes into products, however, developers must iteratively revise prompts by evaluating outputs to diagnose weaknesses. Formative interviews (N=8) revealed that developers invest significant effort in manually evaluating outputs as they assess context-specific and subjective criteria. We present EvalLM, an interactive system for iteratively refining prompts by evaluating multiple outputs on user-defined criteria. By describing criteria in natural language, users can employ the system's LLM-based evaluator to get an overview of where prompts excel or fail, and improve these based on the evaluator's feedback. A comparative study (N=12) showed that EvalLM, when compared to manual evaluation, helped participants compose more diverse criteria, examine twice as many outputs, and reach satisfactory prompts with 59% fewer revisions. Beyond prompts, our work can be extended to augment model evaluation and alignment in specific application contexts.
PRIS: Practical robust invertible network for image steganography
Authors: Hang Yang, Yitian Xu, Xuhua Liu, Xiaodong Ma
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Steganography

Image steganography is a technique of hiding secret information inside another image, so that the secret is not visible to human eyes and can be recovered when needed. Most of the existing image steganography methods have low hiding robustness when the container images affected by distortion. Such as Gaussian noise and lossy compression. This paper proposed PRIS to improve the robustness of image steganography, it based on invertible neural networks, and put two enhance modules before and after the extraction process with a 3-step training strategy. Moreover, rounding error is considered which is always ignored by existing methods, but actually it is unavoidable in practical. A gradient approximation function (GAF) is also proposed to overcome the undifferentiable issue of rounding distortion. Experimental results show that our PRIS outperforms the state-of-the-art robust image steganography method in both robustness and practicability. Codes are available at https://github.com/yanghangAI/PRIS, demonstration of our model in practical at http://yanghang.site/hide/.
Boosting Offline Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving with Hierarchical Latent Skills
Authors: Zenan Li, Fan Nie, Qiao Sun, Fang Da, Hang Zhao
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Learning-based vehicle planning is receiving increasing attention with the emergence of diverse driving simulators and large-scale driving datasets. While offline reinforcement learning (RL) is well suited for these safety-critical tasks, it still struggles to plan over extended periods. In this work, we present a skill-based framework that enhances offline RL to overcome the long-horizon vehicle planning challenge. Specifically, we design a variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn skills from offline demonstrations. To mitigate posterior collapse of common VAEs, we introduce a two-branch sequence encoder to capture both discrete options and continuous variations of the complex driving skills. The final policy treats learned skills as actions and can be trained by any off-the-shelf offline RL algorithms. This facilitates a shift in focus from per-step actions to temporally extended skills, thereby enabling long-term reasoning into the future. Extensive results on CARLA prove that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines at both training and new scenarios. Additional visualizations and experiments demonstrate the interpretability and transferability of extracted skills.
MM-NeRF: Multimodal-Guided 3D Multi-Style Transfer of Neural Radiance Field
Authors: Zijiang Yang, Zhongwei Qiu, Chang Xu, Dongmei Fu
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, NeRF, Style Transfer

3D style transfer aims to generate stylized views of 3D scenes with specified styles, which requires high-quality generating and keeping multi-view consistency. Existing methods still suffer the challenges of high-quality stylization with texture details and stylization with multimodal guidance. In this paper, we reveal that the common training method of stylization with NeRF, which generates stylized multi-view supervision by 2D style transfer models, causes the same object in supervision to show various states (color tone, details, etc.) in different views, leading NeRF to tend to smooth the texture details, further resulting in low-quality rendering for 3D multi-style transfer. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Multimodal-guided 3D Multi-style transfer of NeRF, termed MM-NeRF. First, MM-NeRF projects multimodal guidance into a unified space to keep the multimodal styles consistency and extracts multimodal features to guide the 3D stylization. Second, a novel multi-head learning scheme is proposed to relieve the difficulty of learning multi-style transfer, and a multi-view style consistent loss is proposed to track the inconsistency of multi-view supervision data. Finally, a novel incremental learning mechanism is proposed to generalize MM-NeRF to any new style with small costs. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets show that MM-NeRF achieves high-quality 3D multi-style stylization with multimodal guidance, and keeps multi-view consistency and style consistency between multimodal guidance.
Distribution-Aware Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jiayi Ni, Senqiao Yang, ran Xu, Jiaming Liu, Xiaoqi Li, Wenyu Jiao, Zehui Chen, Yi Liu, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Semantic Segmentation, Test-time Adaptation

Since autonomous driving systems usually face dynamic and ever-changing environments, continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) has been proposed as a strategy for transferring deployed models to continually changing target domains. However, the pursuit of long-term adaptation often introduces catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation problems, which impede the practical implementation of CTTA in the real world. Recently, existing CTTA methods mainly focus on utilizing a majority of parameters to fit target domain knowledge through self-training. Unfortunately, these approaches often amplify the challenge of error accumulation due to noisy pseudo-labels, and pose practical limitations stemming from the heavy computational costs associated with entire model updates. In this paper, we propose a distribution-aware tuning (DAT) method to make the semantic segmentation CTTA efficient and practical in real-world applications. DAT adaptively selects and updates two small groups of trainable parameters based on data distribution during the continual adaptation process, including domain-specific parameters (DSP) and task-relevant parameters (TRP). Specifically, DSP exhibits sensitivity to outputs with substantial distribution shifts, effectively mitigating the problem of error accumulation. In contrast, TRP are allocated to positions that are responsive to outputs with minor distribution shifts, which are fine-tuned to avoid the catastrophic forgetting problem. In addition, since CTTA is a temporal task, we introduce the Parameter Accumulation Update (PAU) strategy to collect the updated DSP and TRP in target domain sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on two widely-used semantic segmentation CTTA benchmarks, achieving promising performance compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.
From Cluster Assumption to Graph Convolution: Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning Revisited
Authors: Zheng Wang, Hongming Ding, Li Pan, Jianhua Li, Zhiguo Gong, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

Graph-based semi-supervised learning (GSSL) has long been a hot research topic. Traditional methods are generally shallow learners, based on the cluster assumption. Recently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have become the predominant techniques for their promising performance. In this paper, we theoretically discuss the relationship between these two types of methods in a unified optimization framework. One of the most intriguing findings is that, unlike traditional ones, typical GCNs may not jointly consider the graph structure and label information at each layer. Motivated by this, we further propose three simple but powerful graph convolution methods. The first is a supervised method OGC which guides the graph convolution process with labels. The others are two unsupervised methods: GGC and its multi-scale version GGCM, both aiming to preserve the graph structure information during the convolution process. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our methods.
Seeing Is Not Always Believing: Invisible Collision Attack and Defence on Pre-Trained Models
Authors: Minghang Deng, Zhong Zhang, Junming Shao
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning

Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have achieved great success in diverse fields. The typical paradigm is to pre-train a big deep learning model on large-scale data sets, and then fine-tune the model on small task-specific data sets for downstream tasks. Although PTMs have rapidly progressed with wide real-world applications, they also pose significant risks of potential attacks. Existing backdoor attacks or data poisoning methods often build up the assumption that the attacker invades the computers of victims or accesses the target data, which is challenging in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for an invisible attack on PTMs with enhanced MD5 collision. The key idea is to generate two equal-size models with the same MD5 checksum by leveraging the MD5 chosen-prefix collision. Afterwards, the two ``same" models will be deployed on public websites to induce victims to download the poisoned model. Unlike conventional attacks on deep learning models, this new attack is flexible, covert, and model-independent. Additionally, we propose a simple defensive strategy for recognizing the MD5 chosen-prefix collision and provide a theoretical justification for its feasibility. We extensively validate the effectiveness and stealthiness of our proposed attack and defensive method on different models and data sets.
Probabilistic Weight Fixing: Large-scale training of neural network weight uncertainties for quantization
Authors: Christopher Subia-Waud, Srinandan Dasmahapatra
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Quantization

Weight-sharing quantization has emerged as a technique to reduce energy expenditure during inference in large neural networks by constraining their weights to a limited set of values. However, existing methods for weight-sharing quantization often make assumptions about the treatment of weights based on value alone that neglect the unique role weight position plays. This paper proposes a probabilistic framework based on Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) and a variational relaxation to identify which weights can be moved to which cluster centre and to what degree based on their individual position-specific learned uncertainty distributions. We introduce a new initialisation setting and a regularisation term which allow for the training of BNNs under complex dataset-model combinations. By leveraging the flexibility of weight values captured through a probability distribution, we enhance noise resilience and downstream compressibility. Our iterative clustering procedure demonstrates superior compressibility and higher accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods on both ResNet models and the more complex transformer-based architectures. In particular, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art quantization method top-1 accuracy by 1.6% on ImageNet using DeiT-Tiny, with its 5 million+ weights now represented by only 296 unique values.
Keeping in Time: Adding Temporal Context to Sentiment Analysis Models
Authors: Dean Ninalga
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentiment Analysis, Task 2

This paper presents a state-of-the-art solution to the LongEval CLEF 2023 Lab Task 2: LongEval-Classification. The goal of this task is to improve and preserve the performance of sentiment analysis models across shorter and longer time periods. Our framework feeds date-prefixed textual inputs to a pre-trained language model, where the timestamp is included in the text. We show date-prefixed samples better conditions model outputs on the temporal context of the respective texts. Moreover, we further boost performance by performing self-labeling on unlabeled data to train a student model. We augment the self-labeling process using a novel augmentation strategy leveraging the date-prefixed formatting of our samples. We demonstrate concrete performance gains on the LongEval-Classification evaluation set over non-augmented self-labeling. Our framework achieves a 2nd place ranking with an overall score of 0.6923 and reports the best Relative Performance Drop (RPD) of -0.0656 over the short evaluation set.
Cordyceps@LT-EDI: Patching Language-Specific Homophobia/Transphobia Classifiers with a Multilingual Understanding
Authors: Dean Ninalga
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

Detecting transphobia, homophobia, and various other forms of hate speech is difficult. Signals can vary depending on factors such as language, culture, geographical region, and the particular online platform. Here, we present a joint multilingual (M-L) and language-specific (L-S) approach to homophobia and transphobic hate speech detection (HSD). M-L models are needed to catch words, phrases, and concepts that are less common or missing in a particular language and subsequently overlooked by L-S models. Nonetheless, L-S models are better situated to understand the cultural and linguistic context of the users who typically write in a particular language. Here we construct a simple and successful way to merge the M-L and L-S approaches through simple weight interpolation in such a way that is interpretable and data-driven. We demonstrate our system on task A of the 'Shared Task on Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments' dataset for homophobia and transphobic HSD. Our system achieves the best results in three of five languages and achieves a 0.997 macro average F1-score on Malayalam texts.
I-AI: A Controllable & Interpretable AI System for Decoding Radiologists' Intense Focus for Accurate CXR Diagnoses
Authors: Trong Thang Pham, Jacob Brecheisen, Anh Nguyen, Hien Nguyen, Ngan Le
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

In the field of chest X-ray (CXR) diagnosis, existing works often focus solely on determining where a radiologist looks, typically through tasks such as detection, segmentation, or classification. However, these approaches are often designed as black-box models, lacking interpretability. In this paper, we introduce Interpretable Artificial Intelligence (I-AI) a novel and unified controllable interpretable pipeline for decoding the intense focus of radiologists in CXR diagnosis. Our I-AI addresses three key questions: where a radiologist looks, how long they focus on specific areas, and what findings they diagnose. By capturing the intensity of the radiologist's gaze, we provide a unified solution that offers insights into the cognitive process underlying radiological interpretation. Unlike current methods that rely on black-box machine learning models, which can be prone to extracting erroneous information from the entire input image during the diagnosis process, we tackle this issue by effectively masking out irrelevant information. Our proposed I-AI leverages a vision-language model, allowing for precise control over the interpretation process while ensuring the exclusion of irrelevant features. To train our I-AI model, we utilize an eye gaze dataset to extract anatomical gaze information and generate ground truth heatmaps. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method. We showcase that the attention heatmaps, designed to mimic radiologists' focus, encode sufficient and relevant information, enabling accurate classification tasks using only a portion of CXR. The code, checkpoints, and data are at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/IAI
Related Rhythms: Recommendation System To Discover Music You May Like
Authors: Rahul Singh, Pranav Kanuparthi
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Machine Learning models are being utilized extensively to drive recommender systems, which is a widely explored topic today. This is especially true of the music industry, where we are witnessing a surge in growth. Besides a large chunk of active users, these systems are fueled by massive amounts of data. These large-scale systems yield applications that aim to provide a better user experience and to keep customers actively engaged. In this paper, a distributed Machine Learning (ML) pipeline is delineated, which is capable of taking a subset of songs as input and producing a new subset of songs identified as being similar to the inputted subset. The publicly accessible Million Songs Dataset (MSD) enables researchers to develop and explore reasonably efficient systems for audio track analysis and recommendations, without having to access a commercialized music platform. The objective of the proposed application is to leverage an ML system trained to optimally recommend songs that a user might like.
Speech enhancement with frequency domain auto-regressive modeling
Authors: Anurenjan Purushothaman, Debottam Dutta, Rohit Kumar, Sriram Ganapathy
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech Dereverberation, Speech Enhancement, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech applications in far-field real world settings often deal with signals that are corrupted by reverberation. The task of dereverberation constitutes an important step to improve the audible quality and to reduce the error rates in applications like automatic speech recognition (ASR). We propose a unified framework of speech dereverberation for improving the speech quality and the ASR performance using the approach of envelope-carrier decomposition provided by an autoregressive (AR) model. The AR model is applied in the frequency domain of the sub-band speech signals to separate the envelope and carrier parts. A novel neural architecture based on dual path long short term memory (DPLSTM) model is proposed, which jointly enhances the sub-band envelope and carrier components. The dereverberated envelope-carrier signals are modulated and the sub-band signals are synthesized to reconstruct the audio signal back. The DPLSTM model for dereverberation of envelope and carrier components also allows the joint learning of the network weights for the down stream ASR task. In the ASR tasks on the REVERB challenge dataset as well as on the VOiCES dataset, we illustrate that the joint learning of speech dereverberation network and the E2E ASR model yields significant performance improvements over the baseline ASR system trained on log-mel spectrogram as well as other benchmarks for dereverberation (average relative improvements of 10-24% over the baseline system). The speech quality improvements, evaluated using subjective listening tests, further highlight the improved quality of the reconstructed audio.
Iterative Reachability Estimation for Safe Reinforcement Learning
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Reinforcement Learning

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise safety satisfaction, and avoiding overly conservative behaviors that sacrifice performance. We propose a new framework, Reachability Estimation for Safe Policy Optimization (RESPO), for safety-constrained RL in general stochastic settings. In the feasible set where there exist violation-free policies, we optimize for rewards while maintaining persistent safety. Outside this feasible set, our optimization produces the safest behavior by guaranteeing entrance into the feasible set whenever possible with the least cumulative discounted violations. We introduce a class of algorithms using our novel reachability estimation function to optimize in our proposed framework and in similar frameworks such as those concurrently handling multiple hard and soft constraints. We theoretically establish that our algorithms almost surely converge to locally optimal policies of our safe optimization framework. We evaluate the proposed methods on a diverse suite of safe RL environments from Safety Gym, PyBullet, and MuJoCo, and show the benefits in improving both reward performance and safety compared with state-of-the-art baselines.