pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Comparison of tree-based ensemble algorithms for merging satellite and earth-observed precipitation data at the daily time scale
Authors: Georgia Papacharalampous, Hristos Tyralis, Anastasios Doulamis, Nikolaos Doulamis
Date: 2022-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, regression

Merging satellite products and ground-based measurements is often required for obtaining precipitation datasets that simultaneously cover large regions with high density and are more accurate than pure satellite precipitation products. Machine and statistical learning regression algorithms are regularly utilized in this endeavour. At the same time, tree-based ensemble algorithms are adopted in various fields for solving regression problems with high accuracy and low computational cost. Still, information on which tree-based ensemble algorithm to select for correcting satellite precipitation products for the contiguous United States (US) at the daily time scale is missing from the literature. In this study, we worked towards filling this methodological gap by conducting an extensive comparison between three algorithms of the category of interest, specifically between random forests, gradient boosting machines (gbm) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). We used daily data from the PERSIANN (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks) and the IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM) gridded datasets. We also used earth-observed precipitation data from the Global Historical Climatology Network daily (GHCNd) database. The experiments referred to the entire contiguous US and additionally included the application of the linear regression algorithm for benchmarking purposes. The results suggest that XGBoost is the best-performing tree-based ensemble algorithm among those compared...
Unlearnable Clusters: Towards Label-agnostic Unlearnable Examples
Authors: Jiaming Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Qi Yi, Jitao Sang, Yu-Gang Jiang, YaoWei Wang, Changsheng Xu
Date: 2022-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Data Poisoning

There is a growing interest in developing unlearnable examples (UEs) against visual privacy leaks on the Internet. UEs are training samples added with invisible but unlearnable noise, which have been found can prevent unauthorized training of machine learning models. UEs typically are generated via a bilevel optimization framework with a surrogate model to remove (minimize) errors from the original samples, and then applied to protect the data against unknown target models. However, existing UE generation methods all rely on an ideal assumption called label-consistency, where the hackers and protectors are assumed to hold the same label for a given sample. In this work, we propose and promote a more practical label-agnostic setting, where the hackers may exploit the protected data quite differently from the protectors. E.g., a m-class unlearnable dataset held by the protector may be exploited by the hacker as a n-class dataset. Existing UE generation methods are rendered ineffective in this challenging setting. To tackle this challenge, we present a novel technique called Unlearnable Clusters (UCs) to generate label-agnostic unlearnable examples with cluster-wise perturbations. Furthermore, we propose to leverage VisionandLanguage Pre-trained Models (VLPMs) like CLIP as the surrogate model to improve the transferability of the crafted UCs to diverse domains. We empirically verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach under a variety of settings with different datasets, target models, and even commercial platforms Microsoft Azure and Baidu PaddlePaddle. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/jiamingzhang94/Unlearnable-Clusters}.
Average Is Not Enough: Caveats of Multilingual Evaluation
Authors: Matúš Pikuliak, Marián Šimko
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

This position paper discusses the problem of multilingual evaluation. Using simple statistics, such as average language performance, might inject linguistic biases in favor of dominant language families into evaluation methodology. We argue that a qualitative analysis informed by comparative linguistics is needed for multilingual results to detect this kind of bias. We show in our case study that results in published works can indeed be linguistically biased and we demonstrate that visualization based on URIEL typological database can detect it.
Large Language Models as Corporate Lobbyists
Authors: John J. Nay
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Natural Language Understanding

We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. An autoregressive large language model (OpenAI's text-davinci-003) determines if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provides explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. We use hundreds of novel ground-truth labels of the relevance of a bill to a company to benchmark the performance of the model. It outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common outcome of irrelevance. We also benchmark the performance of the previous OpenAI GPT-3 model (text-davinci-002), which was the state-of-the-art model on many academic natural language tasks until text-davinci-003 was recently released. The performance of text-davinci-002 is worse than the simple baseline. Longer-term, if AI begins to influence law in a manner that is not a direct extension of human intentions, this threatens the critical role that law as information could play in aligning AI with humans. Initially, AI is being used to simply augment human lobbyists for a small portion of their daily tasks. However, firms have an incentive to use less and less human oversight over automated assessments of policy ideas and the written communication to regulatory agencies and Congressional staffers. The core question raised is where to draw the line between human-driven and AI-driven policy influence.
Language Models are Drummers: Drum Composition with Natural Language Pre-Training
Authors: Li Zhang, Chris Callison-Burch
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation, Transfer Learning

Automatic music generation with artificial intelligence typically requires a large amount of data which is hard to obtain for many less common genres and musical instruments. To tackle this issue, we present ongoing work and preliminary findings on the possibility for deep models to transfer knowledge from language to music, by finetuning large language models pre-trained on a massive text corpus on only hundreds of MIDI files of drum performances. We show that by doing so, one of the largest, state-of-the-art models (GPT3) is capable of generating reasonable drum grooves, while models that are not pre-trained (Transformer) shows no such ability beyond naive repetition. Evaluating generated music is a challenging task, more so is evaluating drum grooves with little precedence in literature. Hence, we propose a tailored structural evaluation method and analyze drum grooves produced by GPT3 compared to those played by human professionals, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of such generation by language-to-music transfer. Our findings suggest that language-to-music transfer learning with large language models is viable and promising.
Towards Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing with Formulaic Knowledge
Authors: Longxu Dou, Yan Gao, Xuqi Liu, Mingyang Pan, Dingzirui Wang, Wanxiang Che, Dechen Zhan, Min-Yen Kan, Jian-Guang Lou
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

In this paper, we study the problem of knowledge-intensive text-to-SQL, in which domain knowledge is necessary to parse expert questions into SQL queries over domain-specific tables. We formalize this scenario by building a new Chinese benchmark KnowSQL consisting of domain-specific questions covering various domains. We then address this problem by presenting formulaic knowledge, rather than by annotating additional data examples. More concretely, we construct a formulaic knowledge bank as a domain knowledge base and propose a framework (ReGrouP) to leverage this formulaic knowledge during parsing. Experiments using ReGrouP demonstrate a significant 28.2% improvement overall on KnowSQL.
Supervised Acoustic Embeddings And Their Transferability Across Languages
Authors: Sreepratha Ram, Hanan Aldarmaki
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Unsupervised Speech Recognition, Word Embeddings

In speech recognition, it is essential to model the phonetic content of the input signal while discarding irrelevant factors such as speaker variations and noise, which is challenging in low-resource settings. Self-supervised pre-training has been proposed as a way to improve both supervised and unsupervised speech recognition, including frame-level feature representations and Acoustic Word Embeddings (AWE) for variable-length segments. However, self-supervised models alone cannot learn perfect separation of the linguistic content as they are trained to optimize indirect objectives. In this work, we experiment with different pre-trained self-supervised features as input to AWE models and show that they work best within a supervised framework. Models trained on English can be transferred to other languages with no adaptation and outperform self-supervised models trained solely on the target languages.
EZInterviewer: To Improve Job Interview Performance with Mock Interview Generator
Authors: Mingzhe Li, Xiuying Chen, Weiheng Liao, Yang song, Tao Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.
ClusTop: An unsupervised and integrated text clustering and topic extraction framework
Authors: Zhongtao Chen, Chenghu Mi, Siwei Duo, Jingfei He, Yatong Zhou
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Clustering

Text clustering and topic extraction are two important tasks in text mining. Usually, these two tasks are performed separately. For topic extraction to facilitate clustering, we can first project texts into a topic space and then perform a clustering algorithm to obtain clusters. To promote topic extraction by clustering, we can first obtain clusters with a clustering algorithm and then extract cluster-specific topics. However, this naive strategy ignores the fact that text clustering and topic extraction are strongly correlated and follow a chicken-and-egg relationship. Performing them separately fails to make them mutually benefit each other to achieve the best overall performance. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised text clustering and topic extraction framework (ClusTop) which integrates text clustering and topic extraction into a unified framework and can achieve high-quality clustering result and extract topics from each cluster simultaneously. Our framework includes four components: enhanced language model training, dimensionality reduction, clustering and topic extraction, where the enhanced language model can be viewed as a bridge between clustering and topic extraction. On one hand, it provides text embeddings with a strong cluster structure which facilitates effective text clustering; on the other hand, it pays high attention on the topic related words for topic extraction because of its self-attention architecture. Moreover, the training of enhanced language model is unsupervised. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and provide benchmarks for different model combinations in this framework.
Understanding Political Polarisation using Language Models: A dataset and method
Authors: Samiran Gode, Supreeth Bare, Bhiksha Raj, Hyungon Yoo
Date: 2023-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Our paper aims to analyze political polarization in US political system using Language Models, and thereby help candidates make an informed decision. The availability of this information will help voters understand their candidates views on the economy, healthcare, education and other social issues. Our main contributions are a dataset extracted from Wikipedia that spans the past 120 years and a Language model based method that helps analyze how polarized a candidate is. Our data is divided into 2 parts, background information and political information about a candidate, since our hypothesis is that the political views of a candidate should be based on reason and be independent of factors such as birthplace, alma mater, etc. We further split this data into 4 phases chronologically, to help understand if and how the polarization amongst candidates changes. This data has been cleaned to remove biases. To understand the polarization we begin by showing results from some classical language models in Word2Vec and Doc2Vec. And then use more powerful techniques like the Longformer, a transformer based encoder, to assimilate more information and find the nearest neighbors of each candidate based on their political view and their background.
Follow the Timeline! Generating Abstractive and Extractive Timeline Summary in Chronological Order
Authors: Xiuying Chen, Mingzhe Li, Shen Gao, Zhangming Chan, Dongyan Zhao, Xin Gao, Xiangliang Zhang, Rui Yan
Date: 2023-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Document Summarization, Timeline Summarization, Time Series Analysis

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.
Kannudi -- A Reference Editor for Kannada
Authors: Vishweshwar V. Dixit
Date: 2022-12-24 00:00:00

Kannudi is a reference editor for Kannada based on OPOK! and OHOK! principles, and domain knowledge. It introduces a method of input for Kannada, called OHOK!, that is, Ottu Haku Ottu Kodu! (apply pressure and give ottu). This is especially suited for pressure sensitive input devices, though the current online implementation uses the regular mechanical keyboard. OHOK! has three possible modes, namely, sva-ottu (self-conjunct), kandante (as you see), and andante (as you say). It may be noted that kandante mode does not follow the phonetic order. However, this mode may work well for those who are inclined to visualize as they type rather than vocalizing the sounds. Kannudi also demonstrates how domain knowledge can be effectively used to potentially increase speed, accuracy, and user friendliness. For example, selection of a default vowel, automatic shunyification, and arkification. Also implemented are four types Deletes that are necessary for phono-syllabic languages like Kannada.
Protein-Ligand Complex Generator & Drug Screening via Tiered Tensor Transform
Authors: Jonathan P. Mailoa, Zhaofeng Ye, Jiezhong Qiu, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Shengyu Zhang
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

The generation of small molecule candidate (ligand) binding poses in its target protein pocket is important for computer-aided drug discovery. Typical rigid-body docking methods ignore the pocket flexibility of protein, while the more accurate pose generation using molecular dynamics is hindered by slow protein dynamics. We develop a tiered tensor transform (3T) algorithm to rapidly generate diverse protein-ligand complex conformations for both pose and affinity estimation in drug screening, requiring neither machine learning training nor lengthy dynamics computation, while maintaining both coarse-grain-like coordinated protein dynamics and atomistic-level details of the complex pocket. The 3T conformation structures we generate achieve significantly higher accuracy in active ligand classification than traditional ensemble docking using hundreds of experimental protein conformations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that 3T can be used to explore distant protein-ligand binding poses within the protein pocket. 3T structure transformation is decoupled from the system physics, making future usage in other computational scientific domains possible.
AmbieGen: A Search-based Framework for Autonomous Systems Testing
Authors: Dmytro Humeniuk, Foutse khomh, Giuliano Antoniol
Date: 2023-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Driving Cars

Thorough testing of safety-critical autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, autonomous robots, and drones, is essential for detecting potential failures before deployment. One crucial testing stage is model-in-the-loop testing, where the system model is evaluated by executing various scenarios in a simulator. However, the search space of possible parameters defining these test scenarios is vast, and simulating all combinations is computationally infeasible. To address this challenge, we introduce AmbieGen, a search-based test case generation framework for autonomous systems. AmbieGen uses evolutionary search to identify the most critical scenarios for a given system, and has a modular architecture that allows for the addition of new systems under test, algorithms, and search operators. Currently, AmbieGen supports test case generation for autonomous robots and autonomous car lane keeping assist systems. In this paper, we provide a high-level overview of the framework's architecture and demonstrate its practical use cases.
State and parameter learning with PaRIS particle Gibbs
Authors: Gabriel Cardoso, Yazid Janati El Idrissi, Sylvain Le Corff, Eric Moulines, Jimmy Olsson
Date: 2023-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: State Space Models

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.
Uptrendz: API-Centric Real-time Recommendations in Multi-Domain Settings
Authors: Emanuel Lacic, Tomislav Duricic, Leon Fadljevic, Dieter Theiler, Dominik Kowald
Date: 2023-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In this work, we tackle the problem of adapting a real-time recommender system to multiple application domains, and their underlying data models and customization requirements. To do that, we present Uptrendz, a multi-domain recommendation platform that can be customized to provide real-time recommendations in an API-centric way. We demonstrate (i) how to set up a real-time movie recommender using the popular MovieLens-100k dataset, and (ii) how to simultaneously support multiple application domains based on the use-case of recommendations in entrepreneurial start-up founding. For that, we differentiate between domains on the item- and system-level. We believe that our demonstration shows a convenient way to adapt, deploy and evaluate a recommender system in an API-centric way. The source-code and documentation that demonstrates how to utilize the configured Uptrendz API is available on GitHub.