pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Case-Based Persistent Memory for a Large Language Model
Authors: Ian Watson
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Position

Case-based reasoning (CBR) as a methodology for problem-solving can use any appropriate computational technique. This position paper argues that CBR researchers have somewhat overlooked recent developments in deep learning and large language models (LLMs). The underlying technical developments that have enabled the recent breakthroughs in AI have strong synergies with CBR and could be used to provide a persistent memory for LLMs to make progress towards Artificial General Intelligence.
Leveraging Optimal Transport for Enhanced Offline Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Robotic Environments
Authors: Maryam Zare, Parham M. Kebria, Abbas Khosravi
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Most Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are traditionally studied in an active learning setting, where agents directly interact with their environments, observe action outcomes, and learn through trial and error. However, allowing partially trained agents to interact with real physical systems poses significant challenges, including high costs, safety risks, and the need for constant supervision. Offline RL addresses these cost and safety concerns by leveraging existing datasets and reducing the need for resource-intensive real-time interactions. Nevertheless, a substantial challenge lies in the demand for these datasets to be meticulously annotated with rewards. In this paper, we introduce Optimal Transport Reward (OTR) labelling, an innovative algorithm designed to assign rewards to offline trajectories, using a small number of high-quality expert demonstrations. The core principle of OTR involves employing Optimal Transport (OT) to calculate an optimal alignment between an unlabeled trajectory from the dataset and an expert demonstration. This alignment yields a similarity measure that is effectively interpreted as a reward signal. An offline RL algorithm can then utilize these reward signals to learn a policy. This approach circumvents the need for handcrafted rewards, unlocking the potential to harness vast datasets for policy learning. Leveraging the SurRoL simulation platform tailored for surgical robot learning, we generate datasets and employ them to train policies using the OTR algorithm. By demonstrating the efficacy of OTR in a different domain, we emphasize its versatility and its potential to expedite RL deployment across a wide range of fields.
Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialogue
Authors: Hongru Wang, Minda Hu, Yang Deng, Rui Wang, Fei Mi, Weichao Wang, Yasheng Wang, Wai-Chung Kwan, Irwin King, Kam-Fai Wong
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation

Open-domain dialogue system usually requires different sources of knowledge to generate more informative and evidential responses. However, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems either focus on a single knowledge source or overlook the dependency between multiple sources of knowledge, which may result in generating inconsistent or even paradoxical responses. To incorporate multiple knowledge sources and dependencies between them, we propose SAFARI, a novel framework that leverages the exceptional capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in planning, understanding, and incorporating under both supervised and unsupervised settings. Specifically, SAFARI decouples the knowledge grounding into multiple sources and response generation, which allows easy extension to various knowledge sources including the possibility of not using any sources. To study the problem, we construct a personalized knowledge-grounded dialogue dataset \textit{\textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{B}ehind \textbf{P}ersona}~(\textbf{KBP}), which is the first to consider the dependency between persona and implicit knowledge. Experimental results on the KBP dataset demonstrate that the SAFARI framework can effectively produce persona-consistent and knowledge-enhanced responses.
A Framework for Few-Shot Policy Transfer through Observation Mapping and Behavior Cloning
Authors: Yash Shukla, Bharat Kesari, Shivam Goel, Robert Wright, Jivko Sinapov
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Despite recent progress in Reinforcement Learning for robotics applications, many tasks remain prohibitively difficult to solve because of the expensive interaction cost. Transfer learning helps reduce the training time in the target domain by transferring knowledge learned in a source domain. Sim2Real transfer helps transfer knowledge from a simulated robotic domain to a physical target domain. Knowledge transfer reduces the time required to train a task in the physical world, where the cost of interactions is high. However, most existing approaches assume exact correspondence in the task structure and the physical properties of the two domains. This work proposes a framework for Few-Shot Policy Transfer between two domains through Observation Mapping and Behavior Cloning. We use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) along with a cycle-consistency loss to map the observations between the source and target domains and later use this learned mapping to clone the successful source task behavior policy to the target domain. We observe successful behavior policy transfer with limited target task interactions and in cases where the source and target task are semantically dissimilar.
Urban Drone Navigation: Autoencoder Learning Fusion for Aerodynamics
Authors: Jiaohao Wu, Yang Ye, Jing Du
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Drone navigation, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning

Drones are vital for urban emergency search and rescue (SAR) due to the challenges of navigating dynamic environments with obstacles like buildings and wind. This paper presents a method that combines multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with a convolutional autoencoder to improve drone navigation in urban SAR. The approach uses MORL to achieve multiple goals and the autoencoder for cost-effective wind simulations. By utilizing imagery data of urban layouts, the drone can autonomously make navigation decisions, optimize paths, and counteract wind effects without traditional sensors. Tested on a New York City model, this method enhances drone SAR operations in complex urban settings.
Distance-rank Aware Sequential Reward Learning for Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Sub-optimal Demonstrations
Authors: Lu Li, Yuxin Pan, RuoBing Chen, Jie Liu, Zilin Wang, Yu Liu, Zhiheng Li
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explicitly infer an underlying reward function based on collected expert demonstrations. Considering that obtaining expert demonstrations can be costly, the focus of current IRL techniques is on learning a better-than-demonstrator policy using a reward function derived from sub-optimal demonstrations. However, existing IRL algorithms primarily tackle the challenge of trajectory ranking ambiguity when learning the reward function. They overlook the crucial role of considering the degree of difference between trajectories in terms of their returns, which is essential for further removing reward ambiguity. Additionally, it is important to note that the reward of a single transition is heavily influenced by the context information within the trajectory. To address these issues, we introduce the Distance-rank Aware Sequential Reward Learning (DRASRL) framework. Unlike existing approaches, DRASRL takes into account both the ranking of trajectories and the degrees of dissimilarity between them to collaboratively eliminate reward ambiguity when learning a sequence of contextually informed reward signals. Specifically, we leverage the distance between policies, from which the trajectories are generated, as a measure to quantify the degree of differences between traces. This distance-aware information is then used to infer embeddings in the representation space for reward learning, employing the contrastive learning technique. Meanwhile, we integrate the pairwise ranking loss function to incorporate ranking information into the latent features. Moreover, we resort to the Transformer architecture to capture the contextual dependencies within the trajectories in the latent space, leading to more accurate reward estimation. Through extensive experimentation, our DRASRL framework demonstrates significant performance improvements over previous SOTA methods.
Exploring the relationship between response time sequence in scale answering process and severity of insomnia: a machine learning approach
Authors: Zhao Su, Rongxun Liu, Keyin Zhou, Xinru Wei, Ning Wang, Zexin Lin, Yuanchen Xie, Jie Wang, Fei Wang, Shenzhong Zhang, Xizhe Zhang
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Objectives: The study aims to investigate the relationship between insomnia and response time. Additionally, it aims to develop a machine learning model to predict the presence of insomnia in participants using response time data. Methods: A mobile application was designed to administer scale tests and collect response time data from 2729 participants. The relationship between symptom severity and response time was explored, and a machine learning model was developed to predict the presence of insomnia. Results: The result revealed a statistically significant difference (p<.001) in the total response time between participants with or without insomnia symptoms. A correlation was observed between the severity of specific insomnia aspects and response times at the individual questions level. The machine learning model demonstrated a high predictive accuracy of 0.743 in predicting insomnia symptoms based on response time data. Conclusions: These findings highlight the potential utility of response time data to evaluate cognitive and psychological measures, demonstrating the effectiveness of using response time as a diagnostic tool in the assessment of insomnia.
DexCatch: Learning to Catch Arbitrary Objects with Dexterous Hands
Authors: Fengbo Lan, Shengjie Wang, Yunzhe Zhang, Haotian Xu, Oluwatosin Oseni, Ziye Zhang, Yang Gao, Tao Zhang
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00

Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a crucial area of research in robotics. Current research focuses on improving the success rate of pick-and-place tasks. Compared with pick-and-place, throwing-catching behavior has the potential to increase the speed of transporting objects to their destination. However, dynamic dexterous manipulation poses a major challenge for stable control due to a large number of dynamic contacts. In this paper, we propose a Learning-based framework for Throwing-Catching tasks using dexterous hands (LTC). Our method, LTC, achieves a 73\% success rate across 45 scenarios (diverse hand poses and objects), and the learned policies demonstrate strong zero-shot transfer performance on unseen objects. Additionally, in tasks where the object in hand faces sideways, an extremely unstable scenario due to the lack of support from the palm, all baselines fail, while our method still achieves a success rate of over 60\%.
Advancing Perception in Artificial Intelligence through Principles of Cognitive Science
Authors: Palaash Agrawal, Cheston Tan, Heena Rathore
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved many feats at a rapid pace, there still exist open problems and fundamental shortcomings related to performance and resource efficiency. Since AI researchers benchmark a significant proportion of performance standards through human intelligence, cognitive sciences-inspired AI is a promising domain of research. Studying cognitive science can provide a fresh perspective to building fundamental blocks in AI research, which can lead to improved performance and efficiency. In this review paper, we focus on the cognitive functions of perception, which is the process of taking signals from one's surroundings as input, and processing them to understand the environment. Particularly, we study and compare its various processes through the lens of both cognitive sciences and AI. Through this study, we review all current major theories from various sub-disciplines of cognitive science (specifically neuroscience, psychology and linguistics), and draw parallels with theories and techniques from current practices in AI. We, hence, present a detailed collection of methods in AI for researchers to build AI systems inspired by cognitive science. Further, through the process of reviewing the state of cognitive-inspired AI, we point out many gaps in the current state of AI (with respect to the performance of the human brain), and hence present potential directions for researchers to develop better perception systems in AI.
DDMT: Denoising Diffusion Mask Transformer Models for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Chaocheng Yang, Tingyin Wang, Xuanhui Yan
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Denoising, Fault Diagnosis, Fraud Detection, State Estimation, Time Series, Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series has emerged as a crucial challenge in time series research, with significant research implications in various fields such as fraud detection, fault diagnosis, and system state estimation. Reconstruction-based models have shown promising potential in recent years for detecting anomalies in time series data. However, due to the rapid increase in data scale and dimensionality, the issues of noise and Weak Identity Mapping (WIM) during time series reconstruction have become increasingly pronounced. To address this, we introduce a novel Adaptive Dynamic Neighbor Mask (ADNM) mechanism and integrate it with the Transformer and Denoising Diffusion Model, creating a new framework for multivariate time series anomaly detection, named Denoising Diffusion Mask Transformer (DDMT). The ADNM module is introduced to mitigate information leakage between input and output features during data reconstruction, thereby alleviating the problem of WIM during reconstruction. The Denoising Diffusion Transformer (DDT) employs the Transformer as an internal neural network structure for Denoising Diffusion Model. It learns the stepwise generation process of time series data to model the probability distribution of the data, capturing normal data patterns and progressively restoring time series data by removing noise, resulting in a clear recovery of anomalies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model that combines Denoising Diffusion Model and the Transformer for multivariate time series anomaly detection. Experimental evaluations were conducted on five publicly available multivariate time series anomaly detection datasets. The results demonstrate that the model effectively identifies anomalies in time series data, achieving state-of-the-art performance in anomaly detection.
A Comparative Analysis of Task-Agnostic Distillation Methods for Compressing Transformer Language Models
Authors: Takuma Udagawa, Aashka Trivedi, Michele Merler, Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Large language models have become a vital component in modern NLP, achieving state of the art performance in a variety of tasks. However, they are often inefficient for real-world deployment due to their expensive inference costs. Knowledge distillation is a promising technique to improve their efficiency while retaining most of their effectiveness. In this paper, we reproduce, compare and analyze several representative methods for task-agnostic (general-purpose) distillation of Transformer language models. Our target of study includes Output Distribution (OD) transfer, Hidden State (HS) transfer with various layer mapping strategies, and Multi-Head Attention (MHA) transfer based on MiniLMv2. Through our extensive experiments, we study the effectiveness of each method for various student architectures in both monolingual (English) and multilingual settings. Overall, we show that MHA transfer based on MiniLMv2 is generally the best option for distillation and explain the potential reasons behind its success. Moreover, we show that HS transfer remains as a competitive baseline, especially under a sophisticated layer mapping strategy, while OD transfer consistently lags behind other approaches. Findings from this study helped us deploy efficient yet effective student models for latency-critical applications.
Mitigating Bias for Question Answering Models by Tracking Bias Influence
Authors: Mingyu Derek Ma, Jiun-Yu Kao, Arpit Gupta, Yu-Hsiang Lin, Wenbo Zhao, Tagyoung Chung, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Multi-Task Learning, Question Answering

Models of various NLP tasks have been shown to exhibit stereotypes, and the bias in the question answering (QA) models is especially harmful as the output answers might be directly consumed by the end users. There have been datasets to evaluate bias in QA models, while bias mitigation technique for the QA models is still under-explored. In this work, we propose BMBI, an approach to mitigate the bias of multiple-choice QA models. Based on the intuition that a model would lean to be more biased if it learns from a biased example, we measure the bias level of a query instance by observing its influence on another instance. If the influenced instance is more biased, we derive that the query instance is biased. We then use the bias level detected as an optimization objective to form a multi-task learning setting in addition to the original QA task. We further introduce a new bias evaluation metric to quantify bias in a comprehensive and sensitive way. We show that our method could be applied to multiple QA formulations across multiple bias categories. It can significantly reduce the bias level in all 9 bias categories in the BBQ dataset while maintaining comparable QA accuracy.
Price of Stability in Quality-Aware Federated Learning
Authors: Yizhou Yan, Xinyu Tang, Chao Huang, Ming Tang
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning scheme that enables clients to train a shared global model without exchanging local data. The presence of label noise can severely degrade the FL performance, and some existing studies have focused on algorithm design for label denoising. However, they ignored the important issue that clients may not apply costly label denoising strategies due to them being self-interested and having heterogeneous valuations on the FL performance. To fill this gap, we model the clients' interactions as a novel label denoising game and characterize its equilibrium. We also analyze the price of stability, which quantifies the difference in the system performance (e.g., global model accuracy, social welfare) between the equilibrium outcome and the socially optimal solution. We prove that the equilibrium outcome always leads to a lower global model accuracy than the socially optimal solution does. We further design an efficient algorithm to compute the socially optimal solution. Numerical experiments on MNIST dataset show that the price of stability increases as the clients' data become noisier, calling for an effective incentive mechanism.
"Im not Racist but...": Discovering Bias in the Internal Knowledge of Large Language Models
Authors: Abel Salinas, Louis Penafiel, Robert McCormack, Fred Morstatter
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in a continuously expanding set of natural language processing tasks. However, these models have been shown to harbor inherent societal biases, or stereotypes, which can adversely affect their performance in their many downstream applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel, purely prompt-based approach to uncover hidden stereotypes within any arbitrary LLM. Our approach dynamically generates a knowledge representation of internal stereotypes, enabling the identification of biases encoded within the LLM's internal knowledge. By illuminating the biases present in LLMs and offering a systematic methodology for their analysis, our work contributes to advancing transparency and promoting fairness in natural language processing systems.
Examining the Potential and Pitfalls of ChatGPT in Science and Engineering Problem-Solving
Authors: Karen D. Wang, Eric Burkholder, Carl Wieman, Shima Salehi, Nick Haber
Date: 2023-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The study explores the capabilities of OpenAI's ChatGPT in solving different types of physics problems. ChatGPT (with GPT-4) was queried to solve a total of 40 problems from a college-level engineering physics course. These problems ranged from well-specified problems, where all data required for solving the problem was provided, to under-specified, real-world problems where not all necessary data were given. Our findings show that ChatGPT could successfully solve 62.5% of the well-specified problems, but its accuracy drops to 8.3% for under-specified problems. Analysis of the model's incorrect solutions revealed three distinct failure modes: 1) failure to construct accurate models of the physical world, 2) failure to make reasonable assumptions about missing data, and 3) calculation errors. The study offers implications for how to leverage LLM-augmented instructional materials to enhance STEM education. The insights also contribute to the broader discourse on AI's strengths and limitations, serving both educators aiming to leverage the technology and researchers investigating human-AI collaboration frameworks for problem-solving and decision-making.
Stabilizing Subject Transfer in EEG Classification with Divergence Estimation
Authors: Niklas Smedemark-Margulies, Ye Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Jing Liu, Kieran Parsons, Yunus Bicer, Deniz Erdogmus
Date: 2023-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Subject Transfer

Classification models for electroencephalogram (EEG) data show a large decrease in performance when evaluated on unseen test sub jects. We reduce this performance decrease using new regularization techniques during model training. We propose several graphical models to describe an EEG classification task. From each model, we identify statistical relationships that should hold true in an idealized training scenario (with infinite data and a globally-optimal model) but that may not hold in practice. We design regularization penalties to enforce these relationships in two stages. First, we identify suitable proxy quantities (divergences such as Mutual Information and Wasserstein-1) that can be used to measure statistical independence and dependence relationships. Second, we provide algorithms to efficiently estimate these quantities during training using secondary neural network models. We conduct extensive computational experiments using a large benchmark EEG dataset, comparing our proposed techniques with a baseline method that uses an adversarial classifier. We find our proposed methods significantly increase balanced accuracy on test subjects and decrease overfitting. The proposed methods exhibit a larger benefit over a greater range of hyperparameters than the baseline method, with only a small computational cost at training time. These benefits are largest when used for a fixed training period, though there is still a significant benefit for a subset of hyperparameters when our techniques are used in conjunction with early stopping regularization.