pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Q-Learning versus Proximal Policy Optimization: Performance Comparison in a Material Sorting Task
Authors: Reuf Kozlica, Stefan Wegenkittl, Simon Hirländer
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper presents a comparison between two well-known deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms: Deep Q-Learning (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in a simulated production system. We utilize a Petri Net (PN)-based simulation environment, which was previously proposed in related work. The performance of the two algorithms is compared based on several evaluation metrics, including average percentage of correctly assembled and sorted products, average episode length, and percentage of successful episodes. The results show that PPO outperforms DQN in terms of all evaluation metrics. The study highlights the advantages of policy-based algorithms in problems with high-dimensional state and action spaces. The study contributes to the field of deep RL in context of production systems by providing insights into the effectiveness of different algorithms and their suitability for different tasks.
Unsupervised Paraphrasing of Multiword Expressions
Authors: Takashi Wada, Yuji Matsumoto, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: text similarity

We propose an unsupervised approach to paraphrasing multiword expressions (MWEs) in context. Our model employs only monolingual corpus data and pre-trained language models (without fine-tuning), and does not make use of any external resources such as dictionaries. We evaluate our method on the SemEval 2022 idiomatic semantic text similarity task, and show that it outperforms all unsupervised systems and rivals supervised systems.
A Modular Test Bed for Reinforcement Learning Incorporation into Industrial Applications
Authors: Reuf Kozlica, Georg Schäfer, Simon Hirländer, Stefan Wegenkittl
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This application paper explores the potential of using reinforcement learning (RL) to address the demands of Industry 4.0, including shorter time-to-market, mass customization, and batch size one production. Specifically, we present a use case in which the task is to transport and assemble goods through a model factory following predefined rules. Each simulation run involves placing a specific number of goods of random color at the entry point. The objective is to transport the goods to the assembly station, where two rivets are installed in each product, connecting the upper part to the lower part. Following the installation of rivets, blue products must be transported to the exit, while green products are to be transported to storage. The study focuses on the application of reinforcement learning techniques to address this problem and improve the efficiency of the production process.
Interpretable and Explainable Logical Policies via Neurally Guided Symbolic Abstraction
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The limited priors required by neural networks make them the dominating choice to encode and learn policies using reinforcement learning (RL). However, they are also black-boxes, making it hard to understand the agent's behaviour, especially when working on the image level. Therefore, neuro-symbolic RL aims at creating policies that are interpretable in the first place. Unfortunately, interpretability is not explainability. To achieve both, we introduce Neurally gUided Differentiable loGic policiEs (NUDGE). NUDGE exploits trained neural network-based agents to guide the search of candidate-weighted logic rules, then uses differentiable logic to train the logic agents. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that NUDGE agents can induce interpretable and explainable policies while outperforming purely neural ones and showing good flexibility to environments of different initial states and problem sizes.
On Knowledge Editing in Federated Learning: Perspectives, Challenges, and Future Directions
Authors: Leijie Wu, Song Guo, Junxiao Wang, Zicong Hong, Jie Zhang, Jingren Zhou
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, knowledge editing

As Federated Learning (FL) has gained increasing attention, it has become widely acknowledged that straightforwardly applying stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on the overall framework when learning over a sequence of tasks results in the phenomenon known as ``catastrophic forgetting''. Consequently, much FL research has centered on devising federated increasing learning methods to alleviate forgetting while augmenting knowledge. On the other hand, forgetting is not always detrimental. The selective amnesia, also known as federated unlearning, which entails the elimination of specific knowledge, can address privacy concerns and create additional ``space'' for acquiring new knowledge. However, there is a scarcity of extensive surveys that encompass recent advancements and provide a thorough examination of this issue. In this manuscript, we present an extensive survey on the topic of knowledge editing (augmentation/removal) in Federated Learning, with the goal of summarizing the state-of-the-art research and expanding the perspective for various domains. Initially, we introduce an integrated paradigm, referred to as Federated Editable Learning (FEL), by reevaluating the entire lifecycle of FL. Secondly, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing methods, evaluate their position within the proposed paradigm, and emphasize the current challenges they face. Lastly, we explore potential avenues for future research and identify unresolved issues.
An Architecture for Deploying Reinforcement Learning in Industrial Environments
Authors: Georg Schäfer, Reuf Kozlica, Stefan Wegenkittl, Stefan Huber
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Industry 4.0 is driven by demands like shorter time-to-market, mass customization of products, and batch size one production. Reinforcement Learning (RL), a machine learning paradigm shown to possess a great potential in improving and surpassing human level performance in numerous complex tasks, allows coping with the mentioned demands. In this paper, we present an OPC UA based Operational Technology (OT)-aware RL architecture, which extends the standard RL setting, combining it with the setting of digital twins. Moreover, we define an OPC UA information model allowing for a generalized plug-and-play like approach for exchanging the RL agent used. In conclusion, we demonstrate and evaluate the architecture, by creating a proof of concept. By means of solving a toy example, we show that this architecture can be used to determine the optimal policy using a real control system.
Knowledge Graph Reasoning over Entities and Numerical Values
Authors: Jiaxin Bai, Chen Luo, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Complex Query Answering, Knowledge Graphs

A complex logic query in a knowledge graph refers to a query expressed in logic form that conveys a complex meaning, such as where did the Canadian Turing award winner graduate from? Knowledge graph reasoning-based applications, such as dialogue systems and interactive search engines, rely on the ability to answer complex logic queries as a fundamental task. In most knowledge graphs, edges are typically used to either describe the relationships between entities or their associated attribute values. An attribute value can be in categorical or numerical format, such as dates, years, sizes, etc. However, existing complex query answering (CQA) methods simply treat numerical values in the same way as they treat entities. This can lead to difficulties in answering certain queries, such as which Australian Pulitzer award winner is born before 1927, and which drug is a pain reliever and has fewer side effects than Paracetamol. In this work, inspired by the recent advances in numerical encoding and knowledge graph reasoning, we propose numerical complex query answering. In this task, we introduce new numerical variables and operations to describe queries involving numerical attribute values. To address the difference between entities and numerical values, we also propose the framework of Number Reasoning Network (NRN) for alternatively encoding entities and numerical values into separate encoding structures. During the numerical encoding process, NRN employs a parameterized density function to encode the distribution of numerical values. During the entity encoding process, NRN uses established query encoding methods for the original CQA problem. Experimental results show that NRN consistently improves various query encoding methods on three different knowledge graphs and achieves state-of-the-art results.
ChatGPT for Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking: A Solution or an Opportunity?
Authors: Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Benjamin Ruppik, Renato Vukovic, Shutong Feng, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-Chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Milica Gašić
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Dialogue State Tracking, In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent research on dialogue state tracking (DST) focuses on methods that allow few- and zero-shot transfer to new domains or schemas. However, performance gains heavily depend on aggressive data augmentation and fine-tuning of ever larger language model based architectures. In contrast, general purpose language models, trained on large amounts of diverse data, hold the promise of solving any kind of task without task-specific training. We present preliminary experimental results on the ChatGPT research preview, showing that ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot DST. Despite our findings, we argue that properties inherent to general purpose models limit their ability to replace specialized systems. We further theorize that the in-context learning capabilities of such models will likely become powerful tools to support the development of dedicated and dynamic dialogue state trackers.
Adaptive Message Quantization and Parallelization for Distributed Full-graph GNN Training
Authors: Borui Wan, Juntao Zhao, Chuan Wu
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Distributed full-graph training of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over large graphs is bandwidth-demanding and time-consuming. Frequent exchanges of node features, embeddings and embedding gradients (all referred to as messages) across devices bring significant communication overhead for nodes with remote neighbors on other devices (marginal nodes) and unnecessary waiting time for nodes without remote neighbors (central nodes) in the training graph. This paper proposes an efficient GNN training system, AdaQP, to expedite distributed full-graph GNN training. We stochastically quantize messages transferred across devices to lower-precision integers for communication traffic reduction and advocate communication-computation parallelization between marginal nodes and central nodes. We provide theoretical analysis to prove fast training convergence (at the rate of O(T^{-1}) with T being the total number of training epochs) and design an adaptive quantization bit-width assignment scheme for each message based on the analysis, targeting a good trade-off between training convergence and efficiency. Extensive experiments on mainstream graph datasets show that AdaQP substantially improves distributed full-graph training's throughput (up to 3.01 X) with negligible accuracy drop (at most 0.30%) or even accuracy improvement (up to 0.19%) in most cases, showing significant advantages over the state-of-the-art works.
A systematic literature review on the code smells datasets and validation mechanisms
Authors: Morteza Zakeri-Nasrabadi, Saeed Parsa, Ehsan Esmaili, Fabio Palomba
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review

The accuracy reported for code smell-detecting tools varies depending on the dataset used to evaluate the tools. Our survey of 45 existing datasets reveals that the adequacy of a dataset for detecting smells highly depends on relevant properties such as the size, severity level, project types, number of each type of smell, number of smells, and the ratio of smelly to non-smelly samples in the dataset. Most existing datasets support God Class, Long Method, and Feature Envy while six smells in Fowler and Beck's catalog are not supported by any datasets. We conclude that existing datasets suffer from imbalanced samples, lack of supporting severity level, and restriction to Java language.
Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted IoT Data Collection via TSP-Based Solution Space Reduction
Authors: Sivaram Krishnan, Mahyar Nemati, Seng W. Loke, Jihong Park, Jinho Choi
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper presents a wireless data collection framework that employs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to efficiently gather data from distributed IoT sensors deployed in a large area. Our approach takes into account the non-zero communication ranges of the sensors to optimize the flight path of the UAV, resulting in a variation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). We prove mathematically that the optimal waypoints for this TSP-variant problem are restricted to the boundaries of the sensor communication ranges, greatly reducing the solution space. Building on this finding, we develop a low-complexity UAV-assisted sensor data collection algorithm, and demonstrate its effectiveness in a selected use case where we minimize the total energy consumption of the UAV and sensors by jointly optimizing the UAV's travel distance and the sensors' communication ranges.
Federated Domain Generalization: A Survey
Authors: Ying Li, Xingwei Wang, Rongfei Zeng, Praveen Kumar Donta, Ilir Murturi, Min Huang, Schahram Dustdar
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, Federated Learning, Survey

Machine learning typically relies on the assumption that training and testing distributions are identical and that data is centrally stored for training and testing. However, in real-world scenarios, distributions may differ significantly and data is often distributed across different devices, organizations, or edge nodes. Consequently, it is imperative to develop models that can effectively generalize to unseen distributions where data is distributed across different domains. In response to this challenge, there has been a surge of interest in federated domain generalization (FDG) in recent years. FDG combines the strengths of federated learning (FL) and domain generalization (DG) techniques to enable multiple source domains to collaboratively learn a model capable of directly generalizing to unseen domains while preserving data privacy. However, generalizing the federated model under domain shifts is a technically challenging problem that has received scant attention in the research area so far. This paper presents the first survey of recent advances in this area. Initially, we discuss the development process from traditional machine learning to domain adaptation and domain generalization, leading to FDG as well as provide the corresponding formal definition. Then, we categorize recent methodologies into four classes: federated domain alignment, data manipulation, learning strategies, and aggregation optimization, and present suitable algorithms in detail for each category. Next, we introduce commonly used datasets, applications, evaluations, and benchmarks. Finally, we conclude this survey by providing some potential research topics for the future.
Navigating Fairness in Radiology AI: Concepts, Consequences,and Crucial Considerations
Authors: Vasantha Kumar Venugopal, Abhishek Gupta, Rohit Takhar, Charlene Liew Jin Yee, Catherine Jones, Gilberto Szarf
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly revolutionized radiology, promising improved patient outcomes and streamlined processes. However, it's critical to ensure the fairness of AI models to prevent stealthy bias and disparities from leading to unequal outcomes. This review discusses the concept of fairness in AI, focusing on bias auditing using the Aequitas toolkit, and its real-world implications in radiology, particularly in disease screening scenarios. Aequitas, an open-source bias audit toolkit, scrutinizes AI models' decisions, identifying hidden biases that may result in disparities across different demographic groups and imaging equipment brands. This toolkit operates on statistical theories, analyzing a large dataset to reveal a model's fairness. It excels in its versatility to handle various variables simultaneously, especially in a field as diverse as radiology. The review explicates essential fairness metrics: Equal and Proportional Parity, False Positive Rate Parity, False Discovery Rate Parity, False Negative Rate Parity, and False Omission Rate Parity. Each metric serves unique purposes and offers different insights. We present hypothetical scenarios to demonstrate their relevance in disease screening settings, and how disparities can lead to significant real-world impacts.
EPIC: Graph Augmentation with Edit Path Interpolation via Learnable Cost
Authors: Jaeseung Heo, Seungbeom Lee, Sungsoo Ahn, Dongwoo Kim
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Graph Classification

Data augmentation plays a critical role in improving model performance across various domains, but it becomes challenging with graph data due to their complex and irregular structure. To address this issue, we propose EPIC (Edit Path Interpolation via learnable Cost), a novel interpolation-based method for augmenting graph datasets. To interpolate between two graphs lying in an irregular domain, EPIC leverages the concept of graph edit distance, constructing an edit path that represents the transformation process between two graphs via edit operations. Moreover, our method introduces a context-sensitive cost model that accounts for the importance of specific edit operations formulated through a learning framework. This allows for a more nuanced transformation process, where the edit distance is not merely count-based but reflects meaningful graph attributes. With randomly sampled graphs from the edit path, we enrich the training set to enhance the generalization capability of classification models. Experimental evaluations across several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing augmentation techniques in many tasks.
Egocentric Planning for Scalable Embodied Task Achievement
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Object

Embodied agents face significant challenges when tasked with performing actions in diverse environments, particularly in generalizing across object types and executing suitable actions to accomplish tasks. Furthermore, agents should exhibit robustness, minimizing the execution of illegal actions. In this work, we present Egocentric Planning, an innovative approach that combines symbolic planning and Object-oriented POMDPs to solve tasks in complex environments, harnessing existing models for visual perception and natural language processing. We evaluated our approach in ALFRED, a simulated environment designed for domestic tasks, and demonstrated its high scalability, achieving an impressive 36.07% unseen success rate in the ALFRED benchmark and winning the ALFRED challenge at CVPR Embodied AI workshop. Our method requires reliable perception and the specification or learning of a symbolic description of the preconditions and effects of the agent's actions, as well as what object types reveal information about others. It is capable of naturally scaling to solve new tasks beyond ALFRED, as long as they can be solved using the available skills. This work offers a solid baseline for studying end-to-end and hybrid methods that aim to generalize to new tasks, including recent approaches relying on LLMs, but often struggle to scale to long sequences of actions or produce robust plans for novel tasks.
KL-Divergence Guided Temperature Sampling
Authors: Chung-Ching Chang, David Reitter, Renat Aksitov, Yun-Hsuan Sung
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering

Temperature sampling is a conventional approach to diversify large language model predictions. As temperature increases, the prediction becomes diverse but also vulnerable to hallucinations -- generating tokens that are sensible but not factual. One common approach to mitigate hallucinations is to provide source/grounding documents and the model is trained to produce predictions that bind to and are attributable to the provided source. It appears that there is a trade-off between diversity and attribution. To mitigate any such trade-off, we propose to relax the constraint of having a fixed temperature over decoding steps, and a mechanism to guide the dynamic temperature according to its relevance to the source through KL-divergence. Our experiments justifies the trade-off, and shows that our sampling algorithm outperforms the conventional top-k and top-p algorithms in conversational question-answering and summarization tasks.
Recent Advances in Graph-based Machine Learning for Applications in Smart Urban Transportation Systems
Authors: Hongde Wu, Sen Yan, Mingming Liu
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is an important part of modern transportation infrastructure, employing a combination of communication technology, information processing and control systems to manage transportation networks. This integration of various components such as roads, vehicles, and communication systems, is expected to improve efficiency and safety by providing better information, services, and coordination of transportation modes. In recent years, graph-based machine learning has become an increasingly important research focus in the field of ITS aiming at the development of complex, data-driven solutions to address various ITS-related challenges. This chapter presents background information on the key technical challenges for ITS design, along with a review of research methods ranging from classic statistical approaches to modern machine learning and deep learning-based approaches. Specifically, we provide an in-depth review of graph-based machine learning methods, including basic concepts of graphs, graph data representation, graph neural network architectures and their relation to ITS applications. Additionally, two case studies of graph-based ITS applications proposed in our recent work are presented in detail to demonstrate the potential of graph-based machine learning in the ITS domain.