pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LipsFormer: Introducing Lipschitz Continuity to Vision Transformers
Authors: Xianbiao Qi, Jianan Wang, Yihao Chen, Yukai Shi, Lei Zhang
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00

We present a Lipschitz continuous Transformer, called LipsFormer, to pursue training stability both theoretically and empirically for Transformer-based models. In contrast to previous practical tricks that address training instability by learning rate warmup, layer normalization, attention formulation, and weight initialization, we show that Lipschitz continuity is a more essential property to ensure training stability. In LipsFormer, we replace unstable Transformer component modules with Lipschitz continuous counterparts: CenterNorm instead of LayerNorm, spectral initialization instead of Xavier initialization, scaled cosine similarity attention instead of dot-product attention, and weighted residual shortcut. We prove that these introduced modules are Lipschitz continuous and derive an upper bound on the Lipschitz constant of LipsFormer. Our experiments show that LipsFormer allows stable training of deep Transformer architectures without the need of careful learning rate tuning such as warmup, yielding a faster convergence and better generalization. As a result, on the ImageNet 1K dataset, LipsFormer-Swin-Tiny based on Swin Transformer training for 300 epochs can obtain 82.7\% without any learning rate warmup. Moreover, LipsFormer-CSwin-Tiny, based on CSwin, training for 300 epochs achieves a top-1 accuracy of 83.5\% with 4.7G FLOPs and 24M parameters. The code will be released at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/LipsFormer}.
Learning and Adapting Agile Locomotion Skills by Transferring Experience
Authors: Laura Smith, J. Chase Kew, Tianyu Li, Linda Luu, Xue Bin Peng, Sehoon Ha, Jie Tan, Sergey Levine
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Legged robots have enormous potential in their range of capabilities, from navigating unstructured terrains to high-speed running. However, designing robust controllers for highly agile dynamic motions remains a substantial challenge for roboticists. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising data-driven approach for automatically training such controllers. However, exploration in these high-dimensional, underactuated systems remains a significant hurdle for enabling legged robots to learn performant, naturalistic, and versatile agility skills. We propose a framework for training complex robotic skills by transferring experience from existing controllers to jumpstart learning new tasks. To leverage controllers we can acquire in practice, we design this framework to be flexible in terms of their source -- that is, the controllers may have been optimized for a different objective under different dynamics, or may require different knowledge of the surroundings -- and thus may be highly suboptimal for the target task. We show that our method enables learning complex agile jumping behaviors, navigating to goal locations while walking on hind legs, and adapting to new environments. We also demonstrate that the agile behaviors learned in this way are graceful and safe enough to deploy in the real world.
FastRLAP: A System for Learning High-Speed Driving via Deep RL and Autonomous Practicing
Authors: Kyle Stachowicz, Dhruv Shah, Arjun Bhorkar, Ilya Kostrikov, Sergey Levine
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a system that enables an autonomous small-scale RC car to drive aggressively from visual observations using reinforcement learning (RL). Our system, FastRLAP (faster lap), trains autonomously in the real world, without human interventions, and without requiring any simulation or expert demonstrations. Our system integrates a number of important components to make this possible: we initialize the representations for the RL policy and value function from a large prior dataset of other robots navigating in other environments (at low speed), which provides a navigation-relevant representation. From here, a sample-efficient online RL method uses a single low-speed user-provided demonstration to determine the desired driving course, extracts a set of navigational checkpoints, and autonomously practices driving through these checkpoints, resetting automatically on collision or failure. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that with appropriate initialization and choice of algorithm, our system can learn to drive over a variety of racing courses with less than 20 minutes of online training. The resulting policies exhibit emergent aggressive driving skills, such as timing braking and acceleration around turns and avoiding areas which impede the robot's motion, approaching the performance of a human driver using a similar first-person interface over the course of training.
On the Perception of Difficulty: Differences between Humans and AI
Authors: Philipp Spitzer, Joshua Holstein, Michael Vössing, Niklas Kühl
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design

With the increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in industry and society, effective human-AI interaction systems are becoming increasingly important. A central challenge in the interaction of humans with AI is the estimation of difficulty for human and AI agents for single task instances.These estimations are crucial to evaluate each agent's capabilities and, thus, required to facilitate effective collaboration. So far, research in the field of human-AI interaction estimates the perceived difficulty of humans and AI independently from each other. However, the effective interaction of human and AI agents depends on metrics that accurately reflect each agent's perceived difficulty in achieving valuable outcomes. Research to date has not yet adequately examined the differences in the perceived difficulty of humans and AI. Thus, this work reviews recent research on the perceived difficulty in human-AI interaction and contributing factors to consistently compare each agent's perceived difficulty, e.g., creating the same prerequisites. Furthermore, we present an experimental design to thoroughly examine the perceived difficulty of both agents and contribute to a better understanding of the design of such systems.
End-to-End Policy Gradient Method for POMDPs and Explainable Agents
Authors: Soichiro Nishimori, Sotetsu Koyamada, Shin Ishii
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Real-world decision-making problems are often partially observable, and many can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). When we apply reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the POMDP, reasonable estimation of the hidden states can help solve the problems. Furthermore, explainable decision-making is preferable, considering their application to real-world tasks such as autonomous driving cars. We proposed an RL algorithm that estimates the hidden states by end-to-end training, and visualize the estimation as a state-transition graph. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can solve simple POMDP problems and that the visualization makes the agent's behavior interpretable to humans.
Rehabilitation Exercise Repetition Segmentation and Counting using Skeletal Body Joints
Authors: Ali Abedi, Paritosh Bisht, Riddhi Chatterjee, Rachit Agrawal, Vyom Sharma, Dinesh Babu Jayagopi, Shehroz S. Khan
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00

Physical exercise is an essential component of rehabilitation programs that improve quality of life and reduce mortality and re-hospitalization rates. In AI-driven virtual rehabilitation programs, patients complete their exercises independently at home, while AI algorithms analyze the exercise data to provide feedback to patients and report their progress to clinicians. To analyze exercise data, the first step is to segment it into consecutive repetitions. There has been a significant amount of research performed on segmenting and counting the repetitive activities of healthy individuals using raw video data, which raises concerns regarding privacy and is computationally intensive. Previous research on patients' rehabilitation exercise segmentation relied on data collected by multiple wearable sensors, which are difficult to use at home by rehabilitation patients. Compared to healthy individuals, segmenting and counting exercise repetitions in patients is more challenging because of the irregular repetition duration and the variation between repetitions. This paper presents a novel approach for segmenting and counting the repetitions of rehabilitation exercises performed by patients, based on their skeletal body joints. Skeletal body joints can be acquired through depth cameras or computer vision techniques applied to RGB videos of patients. Various sequential neural networks are designed to analyze the sequences of skeletal body joints and perform repetition segmentation and counting. Extensive experiments on three publicly available rehabilitation exercise datasets, KIMORE, UI-PRMD, and IntelliRehabDS, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to previous methods. The proposed method enables accurate exercise analysis while preserving privacy, facilitating the effective delivery of virtual rehabilitation programs.
Sample-efficient Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Quantum Control
Authors: Irtaza Khalid, Carrie A. Weidner, Edmond A. Jonckheere, Sophie G. Shermer, Frank C. Langbein
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approach for noisy time-dependent gate optimization with improved sample complexity over model-free RL. Sample complexity is the number of controller interactions with the physical system. Leveraging an inductive bias, inspired by recent advances in neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), we use an auto-differentiable ODE parametrised by a learnable Hamiltonian ansatz to represent the model approximating the environment whose time-dependent part, including the control, is fully known. Control alongside Hamiltonian learning of continuous time-independent parameters is addressed through interactions with the system. We demonstrate an order of magnitude advantage in the sample complexity of our method over standard model-free RL in preparing some standard unitary gates with closed and open system dynamics, in realistic numerical experiments incorporating single shot measurements, arbitrary Hilbert space truncations and uncertainty in Hamiltonian parameters. Also, the learned Hamiltonian can be leveraged by existing control methods like GRAPE for further gradient-based optimization with the controllers found by RL as initializations. Our algorithm that we apply on nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers and transmons in this paper is well suited for controlling partially characterised one and two qubit systems.
Autonomous Agent for Beyond Visual Range Air Combat: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Joao P. A. Dantas, Marcos R. O. A. Maximo, Takashi Yoneyama
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning

This work contributes to developing an agent based on deep reinforcement learning capable of acting in a beyond visual range (BVR) air combat simulation environment. The paper presents an overview of building an agent representing a high-performance fighter aircraft that can learn and improve its role in BVR combat over time based on rewards calculated using operational metrics. Also, through self-play experiments, it expects to generate new air combat tactics never seen before. Finally, we hope to examine a real pilot's ability, using virtual simulation, to interact in the same environment with the trained agent and compare their performances. This research will contribute to the air combat training context by developing agents that can interact with real pilots to improve their performances in air defense missions.
GeneGPT: Augmenting Large Language Models with Domain Tools for Improved Access to Biomedical Information
Authors: Qiao Jin, Yifan Yang, Qingyu Chen, Zhiyong Lu
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Retrieval

While large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied to various tasks, they still face challenges with hallucinations. Augmenting LLMs with domain-specific tools such as database utilities can facilitate easier and more precise access to specialized knowledge. In this paper, we present GeneGPT, a novel method for teaching LLMs to use the Web APIs of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) for answering genomics questions. Specifically, we prompt Codex to solve the GeneTuring tests with NCBI Web APIs by in-context learning and an augmented decoding algorithm that can detect and execute API calls. Experimental results show that GeneGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight tasks in the GeneTuring benchmark with an average score of 0.83, largely surpassing retrieval-augmented LLMs such as the new Bing (0.44), biomedical LLMs such as BioMedLM (0.08) and BioGPT (0.04), as well as GPT-3 (0.16) and ChatGPT (0.12). Our further analyses suggest that: (1) API demonstrations have good cross-task generalizability and are more useful than documentations for in-context learning; (2) GeneGPT can generalize to longer chains of API calls and answer multi-hop questions in GeneHop, a novel dataset introduced in this work; (3) Different types of errors are enriched in different tasks, providing valuable insights for future improvements.
ReelFramer: Human-AI Co-Creation for News-to-Video Translation
Authors: Sitong Wang, Samia Menon, Tao Long, Keren Henderson, DIngzeyu Li, Kevin Crowston, Mark Hansen, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Lydia B. Chilton
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Diversity, Image Generation, Translation

Short videos on social media are the dominant way young people consume content. News outlets aim to reach audiences through news reels -- short videos conveying news -- but struggle to translate traditional journalistic formats into short, entertaining videos. To translate news into social media reels, we support journalists in reframing the narrative. In literature, narrative framing is a high-level structure that shapes the overall presentation of a story. We identified three narrative framings for reels that adapt social media norms but preserve news value, each with a different balance of information and entertainment. We introduce ReelFramer, a human-AI co-creative system that helps journalists translate print articles into scripts and storyboards. ReelFramer supports exploring multiple narrative framings to find one appropriate to the story. AI suggests foundational narrative details, including characters, plot, setting, and key information. ReelFramer also supports visual framing; AI suggests character and visual detail designs before generating a full storyboard. Our studies show that narrative framing introduces the necessary diversity to translate various articles into reels, and establishing foundational details helps generate scripts that are more relevant and coherent. We also discuss the benefits of using narrative framing and foundational details in content retargeting.
Quantum deep Q learning with distributed prioritized experience replay
Authors: Samuel Yen-Chi Chen
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

This paper introduces the QDQN-DPER framework to enhance the efficiency of quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) in solving sequential decision tasks. The framework incorporates prioritized experience replay and asynchronous training into the training algorithm to reduce the high sampling complexities. Numerical simulations demonstrate that QDQN-DPER outperforms the baseline distributed quantum Q learning with the same model architecture. The proposed framework holds potential for more complex tasks while maintaining training efficiency.
The Transformation Logics
Authors: Alessandro Ronca
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00

We introduce a new family of temporal logics designed to finely balance the trade-off between expressivity and complexity. Their key feature is the possibility of defining operators of a new kind that we call transformation operators. Some of them subsume existing temporal operators, while others are entirely novel. Of particular interest are transformation operators based on semigroups. They enable logics to harness the richness of semigroup theory, and we show them to yield logics capable of creating hierarchies of increasing expressivity and complexity which are non-trivial to characterise in existing logics. The result is a genuinely novel and yet unexplored landscape of temporal logics, each of them with the potential of matching the trade-off between expressivity and complexity required by specific applications.
StyleDEM: a Versatile Model for Authoring Terrains
Authors: Simon Perche, Adrien Peytavie, Bedrich Benes, Eric Galin, Eric Guérin
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, model, Super-Resolution

Many terrain modelling methods have been proposed for the past decades, providing efficient and often interactive authoring tools. However, they generally do not include any notion of style, which is a critical aspect for designers in the entertainment industry. We introduce StyleDEM, a new generative adversarial network method for terrain synthesis and authoring, with a versatile toolbox of authoring methods with style. This method starts from an input sketch or an existing terrain. It outputs a terrain with features that can be authored using interactive brushes and enhanced with additional tools such as style manipulation or super-resolution. The strength of our approach resides in the versatility and interoperability of the toolbox.
MMDR: A Result Feature Fusion Object Detection Approach for Autonomous System
Authors: Wendong Zhang
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Object detection has been extensively utilized in autonomous systems in recent years, encompassing both 2D and 3D object detection. Recent research in this field has primarily centered around multimodal approaches for addressing this issue.In this paper, a multimodal fusion approach based on result feature-level fusion is proposed. This method utilizes the outcome features generated from single modality sources, and fuses them for downstream tasks.Based on this method, a new post-fusing network is proposed for multimodal object detection, which leverages the single modality outcomes as features. The proposed approach, called Multi-Modal Detector based on Result features (MMDR), is designed to work for both 2D and 3D object detection tasks. Compared to previous multimodal models, the proposed approach in this paper performs feature fusion at a later stage, enabling better representation of the deep-level features of single modality sources. Additionally, the MMDR model incorporates shallow global features during the feature fusion stage, endowing the model with the ability to perceive background information and the overall input, thereby avoiding issues such as missed detections.
DECN: Evolution Inspired Deep Convolution Network for Black-box Optimization
Authors: Kai Wu, XiaoBin Li, Penghui Liu, Jing Liu
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Meta-Learning

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have emerged as a powerful framework for optimization, especially for black-box optimization. Existing evolutionary algorithms struggle to comprehend and effectively utilize task-specific information for adjusting their optimization strategies, leading to subpar performance on target tasks. Moreover, optimization strategies devised by experts tend to be highly biased. These challenges significantly impede the progress of the field of evolutionary computation. Therefore, this paper first introduces the concept of Automated EA: Automated EA exploits structure in the problem of interest to automatically generate update rules (optimization strategies) for generating and selecting potential solutions so that it can move a random population near the optimal solution. However, current EAs cannot achieve this goal due to the poor representation of the optimization strategy and the weak interaction between the optimization strategy and the target task. We design a deep evolutionary convolution network (DECN) to realize the move from hand-designed EAs to automated EAs without manual interventions. DECN has high adaptability to the target task and can obtain better solutions with less computational cost. DECN is also able to effectively utilize the low-fidelity information of the target task to form an efficient optimization strategy. The experiments on nine synthetics and two real-world cases show the advantages of learned optimization strategies over the state-of-the-art human-designed and meta-learning EA baselines. In addition, due to the tensorization of the operations, DECN is friendly to the acceleration provided by GPUs and runs 102 times faster than EA.
An Ecosystem for Personal Knowledge Graphs: A Survey and Research Roadmap
Authors: Martin G. Skjæveland, Krisztian Balog, Nolwenn Bernard, Weronika Łajewska, Trond Linjordet
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Management

This paper presents an ecosystem for personal knowledge graphs (PKGs), commonly defined as resources of structured information about entities related to an individual, their attributes, and the relations between them. PKGs are a key enabler of secure and sophisticated personal data management and personalized services. However, there are challenges that need to be addressed before PKGs can achieve widespread adoption. One of the fundamental challenges is the very definition of what constitutes a PKG, as there are multiple interpretations of the term. We propose our own definition of a PKG, emphasizing the aspects of (1) data ownership by a single individual and (2) the delivery of personalized services as the primary purpose. We further argue that a holistic view of PKGs is needed to unlock their full potential, and propose a unified framework for PKGs, where the PKG is a part of a larger ecosystem with clear interfaces towards data services and data sources. A comprehensive survey and synthesis of existing work is conducted, with a mapping of the surveyed work into the proposed unified ecosystem. Finally, we identify open challenges and research opportunities for the ecosystem as a whole, as well as for the specific aspects of PKGs, which include population, representation and management, and utilization.
SemEval 2023 Task 6: LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts
Authors: Ashutosh Modi, Prathamesh Kalamkar, Saurabh Karn, Aman Tiwari, Abhinav Joshi, Sai Kiran Tanikella, Shouvik Kumar Guha, Sachin Malhan, Vivek Raghavan
Date: 2023-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction. In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.