pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Identification of Books That are Suitable for Middle School Students Using Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Alp Niksarli, Sadik Ozan Gorgu, Ege Gencer
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00

Reading right books contributes to children's imagination and brain development, enhances their language and emotional comprehension abilities, and strengthens their relationships with others. Building upon the critical role of reading books in individual development, this paper aims to develop an algorithm that determines the suitability of books for middle school students by analyzing their structural and semantic features. Using methods described, an algorithm will be created that can be utilized by institutions and individuals responsible for children's education, such as the Ministry of National Education officials and schools. This algorithm will facilitate the selection of books to be taught at the middle school level. With the algorithm, the book selection process for the middle school curriculum can be expedited, and it will serve as a preliminary reference source for those who evaluate books by reading them. In this paper, the Python programming language was employed, utilizing natural language processing methods. Additionally, an artificial neural network (ANN) was trained using the data which had been preprocessed to construct an original dataset. To train this network, suitable books for middle school students were provided by the MEB, Oxford and Cambridge and with content assessed based on the "R" criterion, and inappropriate books for middle school students in terms of content were included. This trained neural network achieved a 90.06% consistency rate in determining the appropriateness of the test-provided books. Considering the obtained findings, it can be concluded that the developed software has achieved the desired objective.
Dialogizer: Context-aware Conversational-QA Dataset Generation from Textual Sources
Authors: Yerin Hwang, Yongil Kim, Hyunkyung Bae, Jeesoo Bang, Hwanhee Lee, Kyomin Jung
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Dataset Generation, Question Answering, Re-Ranking

To address the data scarcity issue in Conversational question answering (ConvQA), a dialog inpainting method, which utilizes documents to generate ConvQA datasets, has been proposed. However, the original dialog inpainting model is trained solely on the dialog reconstruction task, resulting in the generation of questions with low contextual relevance due to insufficient learning of question-answer alignment. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel framework called Dialogizer, which has the capability to automatically generate ConvQA datasets with high contextual relevance from textual sources. The framework incorporates two training tasks: question-answer matching (QAM) and topic-aware dialog generation (TDG). Moreover, re-ranking is conducted during the inference phase based on the contextual relevance of the generated questions. Using our framework, we produce four ConvQA datasets by utilizing documents from multiple domains as the primary source. Through automatic evaluation using diverse metrics, as well as human evaluation, we validate that our proposed framework exhibits the ability to generate datasets of higher quality compared to the baseline dialog inpainting model.
NLQxform: A Language Model-based Question to SPARQL Transformer
Authors: Ruijie Wang, Zhiruo Zhang, Luca Rossetto, Florian Ruosch, Abraham Bernstein
Date: 2023-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Question Answering, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

In recent years, scholarly data has grown dramatically in terms of both scale and complexity. It becomes increasingly challenging to retrieve information from scholarly knowledge graphs that include large-scale heterogeneous relationships, such as authorship, affiliation, and citation, between various types of entities, e.g., scholars, papers, and organizations. As part of the Scholarly QALD Challenge, this paper presents a question-answering (QA) system called NLQxform, which provides an easy-to-use natural language interface to facilitate accessing scholarly knowledge graphs. NLQxform allows users to express their complex query intentions in natural language questions. A transformer-based language model, i.e., BART, is employed to translate questions into standard SPARQL queries, which can be evaluated to retrieve the required information. According to the public leaderboard of the Scholarly QALD Challenge at ISWC 2023 (Task 1: DBLP-QUAD - Knowledge Graph Question Answering over DBLP), NLQxform achieved an F1 score of 0.85 and ranked first on the QA task, demonstrating the competitiveness of the system.
Frontier Language Models are not Robust to Adversarial Arithmetic, or "What do I need to say so you agree 2+2=5?
Authors: C. Daniel Freeman, Laura Culp, Aaron Parisi, Maxwell L Bileschi, Gamaleldin F Elsayed, Alex Rizkowsky, Isabelle Simpson, Alex Alemi, Azade Nova, Ben Adlam, Bernd Bohnet, Gaurav Mishra, Hanie Sedghi, Igor Mordatch, Izzeddin Gur, Jaehoon Lee, JD Co-Reyes, Jeffrey Pennington, Kelvin Xu, Kevin Swersky, Kshiteej Mahajan, Lechao Xiao, Rosanne Liu, Simon Kornblith, Noah Constant, Peter J. Liu, Roman Novak, Yundi Qian, Noah Fiedel, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein
Date: 2023-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We introduce and study the problem of adversarial arithmetic, which provides a simple yet challenging testbed for language model alignment. This problem is comprised of arithmetic questions posed in natural language, with an arbitrary adversarial string inserted before the question is complete. Even in the simple setting of 1-digit addition problems, it is easy to find adversarial prompts that make all tested models (including PaLM2, GPT4, Claude2) misbehave, and even to steer models to a particular wrong answer. We additionally provide a simple algorithm for finding successful attacks by querying those same models, which we name "prompt inversion rejection sampling" (PIRS). We finally show that models can be partially hardened against these attacks via reinforcement learning and via agentic constitutional loops. However, we were not able to make a language model fully robust against adversarial arithmetic attacks.
Hybrid Synaptic Structure for Spiking Neural Network Realization
Authors: Sasan Razmkhah, Mustafa Altay Karamuftuoglu, Ali Bozbey
Date: 2023-11-13 00:00:00

Neural networks and neuromorphic computing play pivotal roles in deep learning and machine vision. Due to their dissipative nature and inherent limitations, traditional semiconductor-based circuits face challenges in realizing ultra-fast and low-power neural networks. However, the spiking behavior characteristic of single flux quantum (SFQ) circuits positions them as promising candidates for spiking neural networks (SNNs). Our previous work showcased a JJ-Soma design capable of operating at tens of gigahertz while consuming only a fraction of the power compared to traditional circuits, as documented in [1]. This paper introduces a compact SFQ-based synapse design that applies positive and negative weighted inputs to the JJ-Soma. Using an RSFQ synapse empowers us to replicate the functionality of a biological neuron, a crucial step in realizing a complete SNN. The JJ-Synapse can operate at ultra-high frequencies, exhibits orders of magnitude lower power consumption than CMOS counterparts, and can be conveniently fabricated using commercial Nb processes. Furthermore, the network's flexibility enables modifications by incorporating cryo-CMOS circuits for weight value adjustments. In our endeavor, we have successfully designed, fabricated, and partially tested the JJ-Synapse within our cryocooler system. Integration with the JJ-Soma further facilitates the realization of a high-speed inference SNN.
Causal Message Passing for Experiments with Unknown and General Network Interference
Authors: Sadegh Shirani, Mohsen Bayati
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design

Randomized experiments are a powerful methodology for data-driven evaluation of decisions or interventions. Yet, their validity may be undermined by network interference. This occurs when the treatment of one unit impacts not only its outcome but also that of connected units, biasing traditional treatment effect estimations. Our study introduces a new framework to accommodate complex and unknown network interference, moving beyond specialized models in the existing literature. Our framework, termed causal message-passing, is grounded in high-dimensional approximate message passing methodology. It is tailored for multi-period experiments and is particularly effective in settings with many units and prevalent network interference. The framework models causal effects as a dynamic process where a treated unit's impact propagates through the network via neighboring units until equilibrium is reached. This approach allows us to approximate the dynamics of potential outcomes over time, enabling the extraction of valuable information before treatment effects reach equilibrium. Utilizing causal message-passing, we introduce a practical algorithm to estimate the total treatment effect, defined as the impact observed when all units are treated compared to the scenario where no unit receives treatment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across five numerical scenarios, each characterized by a distinct interference structure.
Frequentist Guarantees of Distributed (Non)-Bayesian Inference
Authors: Bohan Wu, César A. Uribe
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Electrical Engineering, Uncertainty Quantification

Motivated by the need to analyze large, decentralized datasets, distributed Bayesian inference has become a critical research area across multiple fields, including statistics, electrical engineering, and economics. This paper establishes Frequentist properties, such as posterior consistency, asymptotic normality, and posterior contraction rates, for the distributed (non-)Bayes Inference problem among agents connected via a communication network. Our results show that, under appropriate assumptions on the communication graph, distributed Bayesian inference retains parametric efficiency while enhancing robustness in uncertainty quantification. We also explore the trade-off between statistical efficiency and communication efficiency by examining how the design and size of the communication graph impact the posterior contraction rate. Furthermore, We extend our analysis to time-varying graphs and apply our results to exponential family models, distributed logistic regression, and decentralized detection models.
Time-Uniform Confidence Spheres for Means of Random Vectors
Authors: Ben Chugg, Hongjian Wang, Aaditya Ramdas
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

We study sequential mean estimation in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In particular, we derive time-uniform confidence spheres -- confidence sphere sequences (CSSs) -- which contain the mean of random vectors with high probability simultaneously across all sample sizes. Our results include a dimension-free CSS for log-concave random vectors, a dimension-free CSS for sub-Gaussian random vectors, and CSSs for sub-$\psi$ random vectors (which includes sub-gamma, sub-Poisson, and sub-exponential distributions). Many of our results are optimal. For sub-Gaussian distributions we also provide a CSS which tracks a time-varying mean, generalizing Robbins' mixture approach to the multivariate setting. Finally, we provide several CSSs for heavy-tailed random vectors (two moments only). Our bounds hold under a martingale assumption on the mean and do not require that the observations be iid. Our work is based on PAC-Bayesian theory and inspired by an approach of Catoni and Giulini.
Feedforward neural networks as statistical models: Improving interpretability through uncertainty quantification
Authors: Andrew McInerney, Kevin Burke
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Feedforward neural networks (FNNs) are typically viewed as pure prediction algorithms, and their strong predictive performance has led to their use in many machine-learning applications. However, their flexibility comes with an interpretability trade-off; thus, FNNs have been historically less popular among statisticians. Nevertheless, classical statistical theory, such as significance testing and uncertainty quantification, is still relevant. Supplementing FNNs with methods of statistical inference, and covariate-effect visualisations, can shift the focus away from black-box prediction and make FNNs more akin to traditional statistical models. This can allow for more inferential analysis, and, hence, make FNNs more accessible within the statistical-modelling context.
Finite Mixtures of Multivariate Poisson-Log Normal Factor Analyzers for Clustering Count Data
Authors: Andrea Payne, Anjali Silva, Steven J. Rothstein, Paul D. McNicholas, Sanjeena Subedi
Date: 2023-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Model Selection, parameter estimation

A mixture of multivariate Poisson-log normal factor analyzers is introduced by imposing constraints on the covariance matrix, which resulted in flexible models for clustering purposes. In particular, a class of eight parsimonious mixture models based on the mixtures of factor analyzers model are introduced. Variational Gaussian approximation is used for parameter estimation, and information criteria are used for model selection. The proposed models are explored in the context of clustering discrete data arising from RNA sequencing studies. Using real and simulated data, the models are shown to give favourable clustering performance. The GitHub R package for this work is available at https://github.com/anjalisilva/mixMPLNFA and is released under the open-source MIT license.
ChoralSynth: Synthetic Dataset of Choral Singing
Authors: Jyoti Narang, Viviana De La Vega, Xavier Lizarraga, Oscar Mayor, Hector Parra, Jordi Janer, Xavier Serra
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Choral singing, a widely practiced form of ensemble singing, lacks comprehensive datasets in the realm of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research, due to challenges arising from the requirement to curate multitrack recordings. To address this, we devised a novel methodology, leveraging state-of-the-art synthesizers to create and curate quality renditions. The scores were sourced from Choral Public Domain Library(CPDL). This work is done in collaboration with a diverse team of musicians, software engineers and researchers. The resulting dataset, complete with its associated metadata, and methodology is released as part of this work, opening up new avenues for exploration and advancement in the field of singing voice research.
Text Retrieval with Multi-Stage Re-Ranking Models
Authors: Yuichi Sasazawa, Kenichi Yokote, Osamu Imaichi, Yasuhiro Sogawa
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

The text retrieval is the task of retrieving similar documents to a search query, and it is important to improve retrieval accuracy while maintaining a certain level of retrieval speed. Existing studies have reported accuracy improvements using language models, but many of these do not take into account the reduction in search speed that comes with increased performance. In this study, we propose three-stage re-ranking model using model ensembles or larger language models to improve search accuracy while minimizing the search delay. We ranked the documents by BM25 and language models, and then re-ranks by a model ensemble or a larger language model for documents with high similarity to the query. In our experiments, we train the MiniLM language model on the MS-MARCO dataset and evaluate it in a zero-shot setting. Our proposed method achieves higher retrieval accuracy while reducing the retrieval speed decay.
Towards a Technical Debt for Recommender System
Authors: Sergio Moreschini, Ludovik Coba, Valentina Lenarduzzi
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Recommendation Systems

Balancing the management of technical debt within recommender systems requires effectively juggling the introduction of new features with the ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the current system. Within the realm of recommender systems, technical debt encompasses the trade-offs and expedient choices made during the development and upkeep of the recommendation system, which could potentially have adverse effects on its long-term performance, scalability, and maintainability. In this vision paper, our objective is to kickstart a research direction regarding Technical Debt in Recommender Systems. We identified 15 potential factors, along with detailed explanations outlining why it is advisable to consider them.
Evaluating LLMs on Document-Based QA: Exact Answer Selection and Numerical Extraction using Cogtale dataset
Authors: Zafaryab Rasool, Stefanus Kurniawan, Sherwin Balugo, Scott Barnett, Rajesh Vasa, Courtney Chesser, Benjamin M. Hampstead, Sylvie Belleville, Kon Mouzakis, Alex Bahar-Fuchs
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Selection, Information Retrieval, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Retrieval

Document-based Question-Answering (QA) tasks are crucial for precise information retrieval. While some existing work focus on evaluating large language models performance on retrieving and answering questions from documents, assessing the LLMs performance on QA types that require exact answer selection from predefined options and numerical extraction is yet to be fully assessed. In this paper, we specifically focus on this underexplored context and conduct empirical analysis of LLMs (GPT-4 and GPT-3.5) on question types, including single-choice, yes-no, multiple-choice, and number extraction questions from documents in zero-shot setting. We use the CogTale dataset for evaluation, which provide human expert-tagged responses, offering a robust benchmark for precision and factual grounding. We found that LLMs, particularly GPT-4, can precisely answer many single-choice and yes-no questions given relevant context, demonstrating their efficacy in information retrieval tasks. However, their performance diminishes when confronted with multiple-choice and number extraction formats, lowering the overall performance of the model on this task, indicating that these models may not yet be sufficiently reliable for the task. This limits the applications of LLMs on applications demanding precise information extraction from documents, such as meta-analysis tasks. These findings hinge on the assumption that the retrievers furnish pertinent context necessary for accurate responses, emphasizing the need for further research. Our work offers a framework for ongoing dataset evaluation, ensuring that LLM applications for information retrieval and document analysis continue to meet evolving standards.
Modeling Sequences as Star Graphs to Address Over-smoothing in Self-attentive Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Bo Peng, Ziqi Chen, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Xia Ning
Date: 2023-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Self-attention (SA) mechanisms have been widely used in developing sequential recommendation (SR) methods, and demonstrated state-of-the-art performance. However, in this paper, we show that self-attentive SR methods substantially suffer from the over-smoothing issue that item embeddings within a sequence become increasingly similar across attention blocks. As widely demonstrated in the literature, this issue could lead to a loss of information in individual items, and significantly degrade models' scalability and performance. To address the over-smoothing issue, in this paper, we view items within a sequence constituting a star graph and develop a method, denoted as MSSG, for SR. Different from existing self-attentive methods, MSSG introduces an additional internal node to specifically capture the global information within the sequence, and does not require information propagation among items. This design fundamentally addresses the over-smoothing issue and enables MSSG a linear time complexity with respect to the sequence length. We compare MSSG with ten state-of-the-art baseline methods on six public benchmark datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that MSSG significantly outperforms the baseline methods, with an improvement of as much as 10.10%. Our analysis shows the superior scalability of MSSG over the state-of-the-art self-attentive methods. Our complexity analysis and run-time performance comparison together show that MSSG is both theoretically and practically more efficient than self-attentive methods. Our analysis of the attention weights learned in SA-based methods indicates that on sparse recommendation data, modeling dependencies in all item pairs using the SA mechanism yields limited information gain, and thus, might not benefit the recommendation performance
Performance Prediction of Data-Driven Knowledge summarization of High Entropy Alloys (HEAs) literature implementing Natural Language Processing algorithms
Authors: Akshansh Mishra, Vijaykumar S Jatti, Vaishnavi More, Anish Dasgupta, Devarrishi Dixit, Eyob Messele Sefene
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00

The ability to interpret spoken language is connected to natural language processing. It involves teaching the AI how words relate to one another, how they are meant to be used, and in what settings. The goal of natural language processing (NLP) is to get a machine intelligence to process words the same way a human brain does. This enables machine intelligence to interpret, arrange, and comprehend textual data by processing the natural language. The technology can comprehend what is communicated, whether it be through speech or writing because AI pro-cesses language more quickly than humans can. In the present study, five NLP algorithms, namely, Geneism, Sumy, Luhn, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and Kull-back-Liebler (KL) al-gorithm, are implemented for the first time for the knowledge summarization purpose of the High Entropy Alloys (HEAs). The performance prediction of these algorithms is made by using the BLEU score and ROUGE score. The results showed that the Luhn algorithm has the highest accuracy score for the knowledge summarization tasks compared to the other used algorithms.
Real-time 6DoF full-range markerless head pose estimation
Authors: Redhwan Algabri
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: journal 2023 11
Tasks: Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Head pose estimation is a fundamental function for several applications in human–computer interactions. Accurate six degrees of freedom head pose estimation (6DoF-HPE) with full-range angles make up most of these applications, which require sequential images of the human head as input. Most existing head pose estimation methods focus on a three degrees of freedom (3DoF) frontal head, which restricts their applications in real-world scenarios. This study presents a framework designed to estimate a head pose without landmark localization. The novelty of our framework is to estimate the 6DoF head poses under full-range angles in real-time. The proposed framework leverages deep neural networks to detect human heads and predict their angles using single shot multibox detector (SSD) and RepVGG-b1g4 backbone, respectively. This work uses red, green, blue, and depth (RGB-D) data to estimate the rotational and translational components relative to the camera pose. The proposed framework employs a continuous representation to predict the angles and a multi-loss approach to update the loss functions for the training strategy. The regression function combines the geodesic loss with the mean squared error. The ground-truth labels were extracted from the public dataset Carnegie Mellon university (CMU) Panoptic for full head angles. This study provides a comprehensive comparison with state-of-the-art methods using public benchmark datasets. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves or outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code and datasets are available at: (https://github.com/Redhwan-A/6DoFHPE).