pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Comparative Analysis of Kinect-Based and Oculus-Based Gaze Region Estimation Methods in a Driving Simulator
Authors: David González-Ortega, Francisco Javier Díaz-Perna, Mario Martínez-Zarzuela, Míriam Antón-Rodríguez
Date: 2024-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaze Estimation, Relation

Driver's gaze information can be crucial in driving research because of its relation to driver attention. Particularly, the inclusion of gaze data in driving simulators broadens the scope of research studies as they can relate drivers' gaze patterns to their features and performance. In this paper, we present two gaze region estimation modules integrated in a driving simulator. One uses the 3D Kinect device and another uses the virtual reality Oculus Rift device. The modules are able to detect the region, out of seven in which the driving scene was divided, where a driver is gazing at in every route processed frame. Four methods were implemented and compared for gaze estimation, which learn the relation between gaze displacement and head movement. Two are simpler and based on points that try to capture this relation and two are based on classifiers such as MLP and SVM. Experiments were carried out with 12 users that drove on the same scenario twice, each one with a different visualization display, first with a big screen and later with Oculus Rift. On the whole, Oculus Rift outperformed Kinect as the best hardware for gaze estimation. The Oculus-based gaze region estimation method with the highest performance achieved an accuracy of 97.94%. The information provided by the Oculus Rift module enriches the driving simulator data and makes it possible a multimodal driving performance analysis apart from the immersion and realism obtained with the virtual reality experience provided by Oculus.
A Light-weight and Unsupervised Method for Near Real-time Behavioral Analysis using Operational Data Measurement
Authors: Tom Richard Vargis, Siavash Ghiasvand
Date: 2024-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Monitoring the status of large computing systems is essential to identify unexpected behavior and improve their performance and uptime. However, due to the large-scale and distributed design of such computing systems as well as a large number of monitoring parameters, automated monitoring methods should be applied. Such automatic monitoring methods should also have the ability to adapt themselves to the continuous changes in the computing system. In addition, they should be able to identify behavioral anomalies in useful time, to perform appropriate reactions. This work proposes a general lightweight and unsupervised method for near real-time anomaly detection using operational data measurement on large computing systems. The proposed model requires as little as 4 hours of data and 50 epochs for each training process to accurately resemble the behavioral pattern of computing systems.
MedTSS: transforming abstractive summarization of scientific articles with linguistic analysis and concept reinforcement
Authors: Dr. Nadia Saeed, Dr. Hammad Naveed
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: Knowledge and Information Systems 2024 1
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Articles, Hallucination, Text Simplification

This research addresses the limitations of pretrained models (PTMs) in generating accurate and comprehensive abstractive summaries for scientific articles, with a specific focus on the challenges posed by medical research. The proposed solution named medical text simplification and summarization (MedTSS) introduces a dedicated module designed to enrich source text for PTMs. MedTSS addresses issues related to token limits, reinforces multiple concepts, and mitigates entity hallucination problems without necessitating additional training. Furthermore, the module conducts linguistic analysis to simplify generated summaries, particularly tailored for the complex nature of medical research articles. The results demonstrate a significant enhancement, with MedTSS improving the Rouge-1 score from 16.46 to 35.17 without requiring additional training. By emphasizing knowledge-driven components, this framework offers a distinct perspective, challenging the common narrative of ’more data’ or ’more parameters.’ This alternative approach, especially applicable in health-related domains, signifies a broader contribution to the field of NLP. MedTSS serves as an innovative model that not only addresses the intricacies of medical research summarization but also presents a paradigm shift with implications for diverse domains beyond its initial scope.
Normalization Layers Are All That Sharpness-Aware Minimization Needs
Authors: Maximilian Mueller, Tiffany Vlaar, David Rolnick, Matthias Hein
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: All

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) was proposed to reduce sharpness of minima and has been shown to enhance generalization performance in various settings. In this work we show that perturbing only the affine normalization parameters (typically comprising 0.1% of the total parameters) in the adversarial step of SAM can outperform perturbing all of the parameters.This finding generalizes to different SAM variants and both ResNet (Batch Normalization) and Vision Transformer (Layer Normalization) architectures. We consider alternative sparse perturbation approaches and find that these do not achieve similar performance enhancement at such extreme sparsity levels, showing that this behaviour is unique to the normalization layers. Although our findings reaffirm the effectiveness of SAM in improving generalization performance, they cast doubt on whether this is solely caused by reduced sharpness.
AROT-COV23: A Dataset of 500K Original Arabic Tweets on COVID-19
Authors: Cheng Xu, Nan Yan
Date: 2023-04-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: 4th Workshop on African Natural Language Processing 2023 4

This paper presents a dataset called AROT-COV23 (ARabic Original Tweets on COVID-19 as of 2023) containing about 500,000 original Arabic COVID-19-related tweets from January 2020 to January 2023. The dataset has been analyzed using a corpus-based approach to identify common themes and trends in the data and gain insights into the ways in which Arabic Twitter users have discussed the pandemic. The results of the analysis are also presented and discussed in terms of their implications for the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Africa and for understanding the role of Twitter in the spread of COVID-19-related information in the region.
BarlowTwins-CXR : Enhancing Chest X-Ray abnormality localization in heterogeneous data with cross-domain self-supervised learning
Authors: Haoyue Sheng, Linrui Ma, Jean-Francois Samson, Dianbo Liu
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Self-Supervised Learning, Transfer Learning

Background: Chest X-ray imaging-based abnormality localization, essential in diagnosing various diseases, faces significant clinical challenges due to complex interpretations and the growing workload of radiologists. While recent advances in deep learning offer promising solutions, there is still a critical issue of domain inconsistency in cross-domain transfer learning, which hampers the efficiency and accuracy of diagnostic processes. This study aims to address the domain inconsistency problem and improve autonomic abnormality localization performance of heterogeneous chest X-ray image analysis, by developing a self-supervised learning strategy called "BarlwoTwins-CXR". Methods: We utilized two publicly available datasets: the NIH Chest X-ray Dataset and the VinDr-CXR. The BarlowTwins-CXR approach was conducted in a two-stage training process. Initially, self-supervised pre-training was performed using an adjusted Barlow Twins algorithm on the NIH dataset with a Resnet50 backbone pre-trained on ImageNet. This was followed by supervised fine-tuning on the VinDr-CXR dataset using Faster R-CNN with Feature Pyramid Network (FPN). Results: Our experiments showed a significant improvement in model performance with BarlowTwins-CXR. The approach achieved a 3% increase in mAP50 accuracy compared to traditional ImageNet pre-trained models. In addition, the Ablation CAM method revealed enhanced precision in localizing chest abnormalities. Conclusion: BarlowTwins-CXR significantly enhances the efficiency and accuracy of chest X-ray image-based abnormality localization, outperforming traditional transfer learning methods and effectively overcoming domain inconsistency in cross-domain scenarios. Our experiment results demonstrate the potential of using self-supervised learning to improve the generalizability of models in medical settings with limited amounts of heterogeneous data.
An explainable machine learning-based approach for analyzing customers' online data to identify the importance of product attributes
Authors: Aigin Karimzadeh, Amir Zakery, Mohammadreza Mohammadi, Ali Yavari
Date: 2024-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Marketing

Online customer data provides valuable information for product design and marketing research, as it can reveal the preferences of customers. However, analyzing these data using artificial intelligence (AI) for data-driven design is a challenging task due to potential concealed patterns. Moreover, in these research areas, most studies are only limited to finding customers' needs. In this study, we propose a game theory machine learning (ML) method that extracts comprehensive design implications for product development. The method first uses a genetic algorithm to select, rank, and combine product features that can maximize customer satisfaction based on online ratings. Then, we use SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), a game theory method that assigns a value to each feature based on its contribution to the prediction, to provide a guideline for assessing the importance of each feature for the total satisfaction. We apply our method to a real-world dataset of laptops from Kaggle, and derive design implications based on the results. Our approach tackles a major challenge in the field of multi-criteria decision making and can help product designers and marketers, to understand customer preferences better with less data and effort. The proposed method outperforms benchmark methods in terms of relevant performance metrics.
Feedback Loops With Language Models Drive In-Context Reward Hacking
Authors: Alexander Pan, Erik Jones, Meena Jagadeesan, Jacob Steinhardt
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

Language models influence the external world: they query APIs that read and write to web pages, generate content that shapes human behavior, and run system commands as autonomous agents. These interactions form feedback loops: LLM outputs affect the world, which in turn affect subsequent LLM outputs. In this work, we show that feedback loops can cause in-context reward hacking (ICRH), where the LLM at test-time optimizes a (potentially implicit) objective but creates negative side effects in the process. For example, consider an LLM agent deployed to increase Twitter engagement; the LLM may retrieve its previous tweets into the context window and make them more controversial, increasing engagement but also toxicity. We identify and study two processes that lead to ICRH: output-refinement and policy-refinement. For these processes, evaluations on static datasets are insufficient -- they miss the feedback effects and thus cannot capture the most harmful behavior. In response, we provide three recommendations for evaluation to capture more instances of ICRH. As AI development accelerates, the effects of feedback loops will proliferate, increasing the need to understand their role in shaping LLM behavior.
Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Shivalika Singh, Freddie Vargus, Daniel Dsouza, Börje F. Karlsson, Abinaya Mahendiran, Wei-Yin Ko, Herumb Shandilya, Jay Patel, Deividas Mataciunas, Laura OMahony, Mike Zhang, Ramith Hettiarachchi, Joseph Wilson, Marina Machado, Luisa Souza Moura, Dominik Krzemiński, Hakimeh Fadaei, Irem Ergün, Ifeoma Okoh, Aisha Alaagib, Oshan Mudannayake, Zaid Alyafeai, Vu Minh Chien, Sebastian Ruder, Surya Guthikonda, Emad A. Alghamdi, Sebastian Gehrmann, Niklas Muennighoff, Max Bartolo, Julia Kreutzer, Ahmet Üstün, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Datasets are foundational to many breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. Many recent achievements in the space of natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to the finetuning of pre-trained models on a diverse set of tasks that enables a large language model (LLM) to respond to instructions. Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) requires specifically constructed and annotated datasets. However, existing datasets are almost all in the English language. In this work, our primary goal is to bridge the language gap by building a human-curated instruction-following dataset spanning 65 languages. We worked with fluent speakers of languages from around the world to collect natural instances of instructions and completions. Furthermore, we create the most extensive multilingual collection to date, comprising 513 million instances through templating and translating existing datasets across 114 languages. In total, we contribute four key resources: we develop and open-source the Aya Annotation Platform, the Aya Dataset, the Aya Collection, and the Aya Evaluation Suite. The Aya initiative also serves as a valuable case study in participatory research, involving collaborators from 119 countries. We see this as a valuable framework for future research collaborations that aim to bridge gaps in resources.
TIC: Translate-Infer-Compile for accurate "text to plan" using LLMs and Logical Representations
Authors: Sudhir Agarwal, Anu Sreepathy
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

We study the problem of generating plans for given natural language planning task requests. On one hand, LLMs excel at natural language processing but do not perform well on planning. On the other hand, classical planning tools excel at planning tasks but require input in a structured language such as the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). We leverage the strengths of both the techniques by using an LLM for generating the PDDL representation (task PDDL) of planning task requests followed by using a classical planner for computing a plan. Unlike previous approaches that use LLMs for generating task PDDLs directly, our approach comprises of (a) translate: using an LLM only for generating a logically interpretable intermediate representation of natural language task description, (b) infer: deriving additional logically dependent information from the intermediate representation using a logic reasoner (currently, Answer Set Programming solver), and (c) compile: generating the target task PDDL from the base and inferred information. We observe that using an LLM to only output the intermediate representation significantly reduces LLM errors. Consequently, TIC approach achieves, for at least one LLM, high accuracy on task PDDL generation for all seven domains of our evaluation dataset.
RQP-SGD: Differential Private Machine Learning through Noisy SGD and Randomized Quantization
Authors: Ce Feng, Parv Venkitasubramaniam
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Quantization

The rise of IoT devices has prompted the demand for deploying machine learning at-the-edge with real-time, efficient, and secure data processing. In this context, implementing machine learning (ML) models with real-valued weight parameters can prove to be impractical particularly for large models, and there is a need to train models with quantized discrete weights. At the same time, these low-dimensional models also need to preserve privacy of the underlying dataset. In this work, we present RQP-SGD, a new approach for privacy-preserving quantization to train machine learning models for low-memory ML-at-the-edge. This approach combines differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) with randomized quantization, providing a measurable privacy guarantee in machine learning. In particular, we study the utility convergence of implementing RQP-SGD on ML tasks with convex objectives and quantization constraints and demonstrate its efficacy over deterministic quantization. Through experiments conducted on two datasets, we show the practical effectiveness of RQP-SGD.
On the Out-Of-Distribution Generalization of Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Xingxuan Zhang, Jiansheng Li, Wenjing Chu, Junjia Hai, Renzhe Xu, Yuqing Yang, Shikai Guan, Jiazheng Xu, Peng Cui
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Zero-shot Generalization

We investigate the generalization boundaries of current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via comprehensive evaluation under out-of-distribution scenarios and domain-specific tasks. We evaluate their zero-shot generalization across synthetic images, real-world distributional shifts, and specialized datasets like medical and molecular imagery. Empirical results indicate that MLLMs struggle with generalization beyond common training domains, limiting their direct application without adaptation. To understand the cause of unreliable performance, we analyze three hypotheses: semantic misinterpretation, visual feature extraction insufficiency, and mapping deficiency. Results identify mapping deficiency as the primary hurdle. To address this problem, we show that in-context learning (ICL) can significantly enhance MLLMs' generalization, opening new avenues for overcoming generalization barriers. We further explore the robustness of ICL under distribution shifts and show its vulnerability to domain shifts, label shifts, and spurious correlation shifts between in-context examples and test data.
Understanding the Weakness of Large Language Model Agents within a Complex Android Environment
Authors: Mingzhe Xing, Rongkai Zhang, Hui Xue, Qi Chen, Fan Yang, Zhen Xiao
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Date Understanding, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have empowered intelligent agents to execute intricate tasks within domain-specific software such as browsers and games. However, when applied to general-purpose software systems like operating systems, LLM agents face three primary challenges. Firstly, the action space is vast and dynamic, posing difficulties for LLM agents to maintain an up-to-date understanding and deliver accurate responses. Secondly, real-world tasks often require inter-application cooperation}, demanding farsighted planning from LLM agents. Thirdly, agents need to identify optimal solutions aligning with user constraints, such as security concerns and preferences. These challenges motivate AndroidArena, an environment and benchmark designed to evaluate LLM agents on a modern operating system. To address high-cost of manpower, we design a scalable and semi-automated method to construct the benchmark. In the task evaluation, AndroidArena incorporates accurate and adaptive metrics to address the issue of non-unique solutions. Our findings reveal that even state-of-the-art LLM agents struggle in cross-APP scenarios and adhering to specific constraints. Additionally, we identify a lack of four key capabilities, i.e., understanding, reasoning, exploration, and reflection, as primary reasons for the failure of LLM agents. Furthermore, we provide empirical analysis on the failure of reflection, and improve the success rate by 27% with our proposed exploration strategy. This work is the first to present valuable insights in understanding fine-grained weakness of LLM agents, and offers a path forward for future research in this area. Environment, benchmark, and evaluation code for AndroidArena are released at https://github.com/AndroidArenaAgent/AndroidArena.
Predictive representations: building blocks of intelligence
Authors: Wilka Carvalho, Momchil S. Tomov, William de Cothi, Caswell Barry, Samuel J. Gershman
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning

Adaptive behavior often requires predicting future events. The theory of reinforcement learning prescribes what kinds of predictive representations are useful and how to compute them. This paper integrates these theoretical ideas with work on cognition and neuroscience. We pay special attention to the successor representation (SR) and its generalizations, which have been widely applied both as engineering tools and models of brain function. This convergence suggests that particular kinds of predictive representations may function as versatile building blocks of intelligence.
G-SciEdBERT: A Contextualized LLM for Science Assessment Tasks in German
Authors: Ehsan Latif, Gyeong-Geon Lee, Knut Neumann, Tamara Kastorff, Xiaoming Zhai
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The advancement of natural language processing has paved the way for automated scoring systems in various languages, such as German (e.g., German BERT [G-BERT]). Automatically scoring written responses to science questions in German is a complex task and challenging for standard G-BERT as they lack contextual knowledge in the science domain and may be unaligned with student writing styles. This paper presents a contextualized German Science Education BERT (G-SciEdBERT), an innovative large language model tailored for scoring German-written responses to science tasks and beyond. Using G-BERT, we pre-trained G-SciEdBERT on a corpus of 30K German written science responses with 3M tokens on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018. We fine-tuned G-SciEdBERT on an additional 20K student-written responses with 2M tokens and examined the scoring accuracy. We then compared its scoring performance with G-BERT. Our findings revealed a substantial improvement in scoring accuracy with G-SciEdBERT, demonstrating a 10.2% increase of quadratic weighted Kappa compared to G-BERT (mean difference = 0.1026, SD = 0.069). These insights underline the significance of specialized language models like G-SciEdBERT, which is trained to enhance the accuracy of contextualized automated scoring, offering a substantial contribution to the field of AI in education.
What is Hiding in Medicine's Dark Matter? Learning with Missing Data in Medical Practices
Authors: Neslihan Suzen, Evgeny M. Mirkes, Damian Roland, Jeremy Levesley, Alexander N. Gorban, Tim J. Coats
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Imputation, Missing Values

Electronic patient records (EPRs) produce a wealth of data but contain significant missing information. Understanding and handling this missing data is an important part of clinical data analysis and if left unaddressed could result in bias in analysis and distortion in critical conclusions. Missing data may be linked to health care professional practice patterns and imputation of missing data can increase the validity of clinical decisions. This study focuses on statistical approaches for understanding and interpreting the missing data and machine learning based clinical data imputation using a single centre's paediatric emergency data and the data from UK's largest clinical audit for traumatic injury database (TARN). In the study of 56,961 data points related to initial vital signs and observations taken on children presenting to an Emergency Department, we have shown that missing data are likely to be non-random and how these are linked to health care professional practice patterns. We have then examined 79 TARN fields with missing values for 5,791 trauma cases. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN) based missing data imputation methods are used and imputation results against the original dataset are compared and statistically tested. We have concluded that the 1NN imputer is the best imputation which indicates a usual pattern of clinical decision making: find the most similar patients and take their attributes as imputation.