pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
IQAGPT: Image Quality Assessment with Vision-language and ChatGPT Models
Authors: Zhihao Chen, Bin Hu, Chuang Niu, Tao Chen, Yuxin Li, Hongming Shan, Ge Wang
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various tasks and attracted an increasing interest as a natural language interface across many domains. Recently, large vision-language models (VLMs) like BLIP-2 and GPT-4 have been intensively investigated, which learn rich vision-language correlation from image-text pairs. However, despite these developments, the application of LLMs and VLMs in image quality assessment (IQA), particularly in medical imaging, remains to be explored, which is valuable for objective performance evaluation and potential supplement or even replacement of radiologists' opinions. To this end, this paper introduces IQAGPT, an innovative image quality assessment system integrating an image quality captioning VLM with ChatGPT for generating quality scores and textual reports. First, we build a CT-IQA dataset for training and evaluation, comprising 1,000 CT slices with diverse quality levels professionally annotated. To better leverage the capabilities of LLMs, we convert annotated quality scores into semantically rich text descriptions using a prompt template. Second, we fine-tune the image quality captioning VLM on the CT-IQA dataset to generate quality descriptions. The captioning model fuses the image and text features through cross-modal attention. Third, based on the quality descriptions, users can talk with ChatGPT to rate image quality scores or produce a radiological quality report. Our preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of assessing image quality with large models. Remarkably, our IQAGPT outperforms GPT-4 and CLIP-IQA, as well as the multi-task classification and regression models that solely rely on images.
Unlocking the Potential of Large Language Models for Explainable Recommendations
Authors: Yucong Luo, Mingyue Cheng, Hao Zhang, Junyu Lu, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable Recommendation, Recommendation Systems, Text Generation

Generating user-friendly explanations regarding why an item is recommended has become increasingly common, largely due to advances in language generation technology, which can enhance user trust and facilitate more informed decision-making when using online services. However, existing explainable recommendation systems focus on using small-size language models. It remains uncertain what impact replacing the explanation generator with the recently emerging large language models (LLMs) would have. Can we expect unprecedented results? In this study, we propose LLMXRec, a simple yet effective two-stage explainable recommendation framework aimed at further boosting the explanation quality by employing LLMs. Unlike most existing LLM-based recommendation works, a key characteristic of LLMXRec is its emphasis on the close collaboration between previous recommender models and LLM-based explanation generators. Specifically, by adopting several key fine-tuning techniques, including parameter-efficient instructing tuning and personalized prompt techniques, controllable and fluent explanations can be well generated to achieve the goal of explanation recommendation. Most notably, we provide three different perspectives to evaluate the effectiveness of the explanations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments over several benchmark recommender models and publicly available datasets. The experimental results not only yield positive results in terms of effectiveness and efficiency but also uncover some previously unknown outcomes. To facilitate further explorations in this area, the full code and detailed original results are open-sourced at https://github.com/GodFire66666/LLM_rec_explanation/.
Swap-based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Facility Location Problems in Networks
Authors: Wenxuan Guo, Yanyan Xu, Yaohui Jin
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Graph Generation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Facility location problems on graphs are ubiquitous in real world and hold significant importance, yet their resolution is often impeded by NP-hardness. Recently, machine learning methods have been proposed to tackle such classical problems, but they are limited to the myopic constructive pattern and only consider the problems in Euclidean space. To overcome these limitations, we propose a general swap-based framework that addresses the p-median problem and the facility relocation problem on graphs and a novel reinforcement learning model demonstrating a keen awareness of complex graph structures. Striking a harmonious balance between solution quality and running time, our method surpasses handcrafted heuristics on intricate graph datasets. Additionally, we introduce a graph generation process to simulate real-world urban road networks with demand, facilitating the construction of large datasets for the classic problem. For the initialization of the locations of facilities, we introduce a physics-inspired strategy for the p-median problem, reaching more stable solutions than the random strategy. The proposed pipeline coupling the classic swap-based method with deep reinforcement learning marks a significant step forward in addressing the practical challenges associated with facility location on graphs.
A graph-based multimodal framework to predict gentrification
Authors: Javad Eshtiyagh, Baotong Zhang, Yujing Sun, Linhui Wu, Zhao Wang
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Deep Learning

Gentrification--the transformation of a low-income urban area caused by the influx of affluent residents--has many revitalizing benefits. However, it also poses extremely concerning challenges to low-income residents. To help policymakers take targeted and early action in protecting low-income residents, researchers have recently proposed several machine learning models to predict gentrification using socioeconomic and image features. Building upon previous studies, we propose a novel graph-based multimodal deep learning framework to predict gentrification based on urban networks of tracts and essential facilities (e.g., schools, hospitals, and subway stations). We train and test the proposed framework using data from Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. The model successfully predicts census-tract level gentrification with 0.9 precision on average. Moreover, the framework discovers a previously unexamined strong relationship between schools and gentrification, which provides a basis for further exploration of social factors affecting gentrification.
Advancing Abductive Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs through Complex Logical Hypothesis Generation
Authors: Jiaxin Bai, Yicheng Wang, Tianshi Zheng, Yue Guo, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Logical Reasoning

Abductive reasoning is the process of making educated guesses to provide explanations for observations. Although many applications require the use of knowledge for explanations, the utilization of abductive reasoning in conjunction with structured knowledge, such as a knowledge graph, remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the task of complex logical hypothesis generation, as an initial step towards abductive logical reasoning with KG. In this task, we aim to generate a complex logical hypothesis so that it can explain a set of observations. We find that the supervised trained generative model can generate logical hypotheses that are structurally closer to the reference hypothesis. However, when generalized to unseen observations, this training objective does not guarantee better hypothesis generation. To address this, we introduce the Reinforcement Learning from Knowledge Graph (RLF-KG) method, which minimizes differences between observations and conclusions drawn from generated hypotheses according to the KG. Experiments show that, with RLF-KG's assistance, the generated hypotheses provide better explanations, and achieve state-of-the-art results on three widely used KGs.
Scalable Face Image Coding via StyleGAN Prior: Towards Compression for Human-Machine Collaborative Vision
Authors: Qi Mao, Chongyu Wang, Meng Wang, Shiqi Wang, Ruijie Chen, Libiao Jin, Siwei Ma
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

The accelerated proliferation of visual content and the rapid development of machine vision technologies bring significant challenges in delivering visual data on a gigantic scale, which shall be effectively represented to satisfy both human and machine requirements. In this work, we investigate how hierarchical representations derived from the advanced generative prior facilitate constructing an efficient scalable coding paradigm for human-machine collaborative vision. Our key insight is that by exploiting the StyleGAN prior, we can learn three-layered representations encoding hierarchical semantics, which are elaborately designed into the basic, middle, and enhanced layers, supporting machine intelligence and human visual perception in a progressive fashion. With the aim of achieving efficient compression, we propose the layer-wise scalable entropy transformer to reduce the redundancy between layers. Based on the multi-task scalable rate-distortion objective, the proposed scheme is jointly optimized to achieve optimal machine analysis performance, human perception experience, and compression ratio. We validate the proposed paradigm's feasibility in face image compression. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed paradigm over the latest compression standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC) in terms of both machine analysis as well as human perception at extremely low bitrates ($<0.01$ bpp), offering new insights for human-machine collaborative compression.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning on Software Engineering Tasks
Authors: Wentao Zou, Qi Li, Jidong Ge, Chuanyi Li, Xiaoyu Shen, LiGuo Huang, Bin Luo
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have achieved great success in various Software Engineering (SE) downstream tasks following the ``pre-train then fine-tune'' paradigm. As fully fine-tuning all parameters of PTMs can be computationally expensive, a widely used solution is parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), which freezes PTMs while introducing extra parameters. Though work has been done to test PEFT methods in the SE field, a comprehensive evaluation is still lacking. This paper aims to fill in this gap by evaluating the effectiveness of five PEFT methods on eight PTMs and four SE downstream tasks. For different tasks and PEFT methods, we seek answers to the following research questions: 1) Is it more effective to use PTMs trained specifically on source code, or is it sufficient to use PTMs trained on natural language text? 2) What is the impact of varying model sizes? 3) How does the model architecture affect the performance? Besides effectiveness, we also discuss the efficiency of PEFT methods, concerning the costs of required training time and GPU resource consumption. We hope that our findings can provide a deeper understanding of PEFT methods on various PTMs and SE downstream tasks. All the codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/zwtnju/PEFT.git}.
DSNet: Disentangled Siamese Network with Neutral Calibration for Speech Emotion Recognition
Authors: Chengxin Chen, Pengyuan Zhang
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

One persistent challenge in deep learning based speech emotion recognition (SER) is the unconscious encoding of emotion-irrelevant factors (e.g., speaker or phonetic variability), which limits the generalization of SER in practical use. In this paper, we propose DSNet, a Disentangled Siamese Network with neutral calibration, to meet the demand for a more robust and explainable SER model. Specifically, we introduce an orthogonal feature disentanglement module to explicitly project the high-level representation into two distinct subspaces. Later, we propose a novel neutral calibration mechanism to encourage one subspace to capture sufficient emotion-irrelevant information. In this way, the other one can better isolate and emphasize the emotion-relevant information within speech signals. Experimental results on two popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of DSNet over various state-of-the-art methods for speaker-independent SER.
Deep Structure and Attention Aware Subspace Clustering
Authors: Wenhao Wu, Weiwei Wang, Shengjiang Kong
Date: 2023-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering, Image Clustering, Representation Learning

Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised representation learning task with wide application in computer vision and pattern recognition. Deep clustering utilizes deep neural networks to learn latent representation, which is suitable for clustering. However, previous deep clustering methods, especially image clustering, focus on the features of the data itself and ignore the relationship between the data, which is crucial for clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Structure and Attention aware Subspace Clustering (DSASC), which simultaneously considers data content and structure information. We use a vision transformer to extract features, and the extracted features are divided into two parts, structure features, and content features. The two features are used to learn a more efficient subspace structure for spectral clustering. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be available at https://github.com/cs-whh/DSASC
README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP
Authors: Zonghai Yao, Nandyala Siddharth Kantu, Guanghao Wei, Hieu Tran, Zhangqi Duan, Sunjae Kwon, Zhichao Yang, README annotation team, Hong Yu
Date: 2023-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval-augmented Generation

The advancement in healthcare has shifted focus toward patient-centric approaches, particularly in self-care and patient education, facilitated by access to Electronic Health Records (EHR). However, medical jargon in EHRs poses significant challenges in patient comprehension. To address this, we introduce a new task of automatically generating lay definitions, aiming to simplify complex medical terms into patient-friendly lay language. We first created the README dataset, an extensive collection of over 50,000 unique (medical term, lay definition) pairs and 300,000 mentions, each offering context-aware lay definitions manually annotated by domain experts. We have also engineered a data-centric Human-AI pipeline that synergizes data filtering, augmentation, and selection to improve data quality. We then used README as the training data for models and leveraged a Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to reduce hallucinations and improve the quality of model outputs. Our extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that open-source mobile-friendly models, when fine-tuned with high-quality data, are capable of matching or even surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art closed-source large language models like ChatGPT. This research represents a significant stride in closing the knowledge gap in patient education and advancing patient-centric healthcare solutions.
Multi-level biomedical NER through multi-granularity embeddings and enhanced labeling
Authors: Fahime Shahrokh, Nasser Ghadiri, Rasoul Samani, Milad Moradi
Date: 2023-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Word Embeddings

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task of Biomedical Natural Language Processing for extracting relevant information from biomedical texts, such as clinical records, scientific publications, and electronic health records. The conventional approaches for biomedical NER mainly use traditional machine learning techniques, such as Conditional Random Fields and Support Vector Machines or deep learning-based models like Recurrent Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks. Recently, Transformer-based models, including BERT, have been used in the domain of biomedical NER and have demonstrated remarkable results. However, these models are often based on word-level embeddings, limiting their ability to capture character-level information, which is effective in biomedical NER due to the high variability and complexity of biomedical texts. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a hybrid approach that integrates the strengths of multiple models. In this paper, we proposed an approach that leverages fine-tuned BERT to provide contextualized word embeddings, a pre-trained multi-channel CNN for character-level information capture, and following by a BiLSTM + CRF for sequence labelling and modelling dependencies between the words in the text. In addition, also we propose an enhanced labelling method as part of pre-processing to enhance the identification of the entity's beginning word and thus improve the identification of multi-word entities, a common challenge in biomedical NER. By integrating these models and the pre-processing method, our proposed model effectively captures both contextual information and detailed character-level information. We evaluated our model on the benchmark i2b2/2010 dataset, achieving an F1-score of 90.11. These results illustrate the proficiency of our proposed model in performing biomedical Named Entity Recognition.
The Challenge of Using LLMs to Simulate Human Behavior: A Causal Inference Perspective
Authors: George Gui, Olivier Toubia
Date: 2023-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Experimental Design

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive potential to simulate human behavior. We identify a fundamental challenge in using them to simulate experiments: when LLM-simulated subjects are blind to the experimental design (as is standard practice with human subjects), variations in treatment systematically affect unspecified variables that should remain constant, violating the unconfoundedness assumption. Using demand estimation as a context and an actual experiment as a benchmark, we show this can lead to implausible results. While confounding may in principle be addressed by controlling for covariates, this can compromise ecological validity in the context of LLM simulations: controlled covariates become artificially salient in the simulated decision process, which introduces focalism. This trade-off between unconfoundedness and ecological validity is usually absent in traditional experimental design and represents a unique challenge in LLM simulations. We formalize this challenge theoretically, showing it stems from ambiguous prompting strategies, and hence cannot be fully addressed by improving training data or by fine-tuning. Alternative approaches that unblind the experimental design to the LLM show promise. Our findings suggest that effectively leveraging LLMs for experimental simulations requires fundamentally rethinking established experimental design practices rather than simply adapting protocols developed for human subjects.
Towards Reliable AI Model Deployments: Multiple Input Mixup for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Dasol Choi, Dongbin Na
Date: 2023-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Recent remarkable success in the deep-learning industries has unprecedentedly increased the need for reliable model deployment. For example, the model should alert the user if the produced model outputs might not be reliable. Previous studies have proposed various methods to solve the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection problem, however, they generally require a burden of resources. In this work, we propose a novel and simple method, Multiple Input Mixup (MIM). Our method can help improve the OOD detection performance with only single epoch fine-tuning. Our method does not require training the model from scratch and can be attached to the classifier simply. Despite its simplicity, our MIM shows competitive performance. Our method can be suitable for various environments because our method only utilizes the In-Distribution (ID) samples to generate the synthesized OOD data. With extensive experiments with CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 benchmarks that have been largely adopted in out-of-distribution detection fields, we have demonstrated our MIM shows comprehensively superior performance compared to the SOTA method. Especially, our method does not need additional computation on the feature vectors compared to the previous studies. All source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/MultipleInputMixup.
Agent based modelling for continuously varying supply chains
Authors: Wan Wang, HaiYan Wang, Adam J. Sobey
Date: 2023-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Problem definition: Supply chains are constantly evolving networks. Reinforcement learning is increasingly proposed as a solution to provide optimal control of these networks. Academic/practical: However, learning in continuously varying environments remains a challenge in the reinforcement learning literature.Methodology: This paper therefore seeks to address whether agents can control varying supply chain problems, transferring learning between environments that require different strategies and avoiding catastrophic forgetting of tasks that have not been seen in a while. To evaluate this approach, two state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are compared: an actor-critic learner, Proximal Policy Optimisation(PPO), and a Recurrent Proximal Policy Optimisation (RPPO), PPO with a Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM) layer, which is showing popularity in online learning environments. Results: First these methods are compared on six sets of environments with varying degrees of stochasticity. The results show that more lean strategies adopted in Batch environments are different from those adopted in Stochastic environments with varying products. The methods are also compared on various continuous supply chain scenarios, where the PPO agents are shown to be able to adapt through continuous learning when the tasks are similar but show more volatile performance when changing between the extreme tasks. However, the RPPO, with an ability to remember histories, is able to overcome this to some extent and takes on a more realistic strategy. Managerial implications: Our results provide a new perspective on the continuously varying supply chain, the cooperation and coordination of agents are crucial for improving the overall performance in uncertain and semi-continuous non-stationary supply chain environments without the need to retrain the environment as the demand changes.