pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Synthesizing Long-Term Human Motions with Diffusion Models via Coherent Sampling
Authors: Zhao Yang, Bing Su, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation, Sentence

Text-to-motion generation has gained increasing attention, but most existing methods are limited to generating short-term motions that correspond to a single sentence describing a single action. However, when a text stream describes a sequence of continuous motions, the generated motions corresponding to each sentence may not be coherently linked. Existing long-term motion generation methods face two main issues. Firstly, they cannot directly generate coherent motions and require additional operations such as interpolation to process the generated actions. Secondly, they generate subsequent actions in an autoregressive manner without considering the influence of future actions on previous ones. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that utilizes a past-conditioned diffusion model with two optional coherent sampling methods: Past Inpainting Sampling and Compositional Transition Sampling. Past Inpainting Sampling completes subsequent motions by treating previous motions as conditions, while Compositional Transition Sampling models the distribution of the transition as the composition of two adjacent motions guided by different text prompts. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of generating compositional and coherent long-term 3D human motions controlled by a user-instructed long text stream. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/yangzhao1230/PCMDM}{https://github.com/yangzhao1230/PCMDM}.
URET: Universal Robustness Evaluation Toolkit (for Evasion)
Authors: Kevin Eykholt, Taesung Lee, Douglas Schales, Jiyong Jang, Ian Molloy, Masha Zorin
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Machine learning models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial evasion attacks as illustrated by image classification models. Thoroughly understanding such attacks is critical in order to ensure the safety and robustness of critical AI tasks. However, most evasion attacks are difficult to deploy against a majority of AI systems because they have focused on image domain with only few constraints. An image is composed of homogeneous, numerical, continuous, and independent features, unlike many other input types to AI systems used in practice. Furthermore, some input types include additional semantic and functional constraints that must be observed to generate realistic adversarial inputs. In this work, we propose a new framework to enable the generation of adversarial inputs irrespective of the input type and task domain. Given an input and a set of pre-defined input transformations, our framework discovers a sequence of transformations that result in a semantically correct and functional adversarial input. We demonstrate the generality of our approach on several diverse machine learning tasks with various input representations. We also show the importance of generating adversarial examples as they enable the deployment of mitigation techniques.
The Capability of Large Language Models to Measure Psychiatric Functioning
Authors: Isaac R. Galatzer-Levy, Daniel McDuff, Vivek Natarajan, Alan Karthikesalingam, Matteo Malgaroli
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00

The current work investigates the capability of Large language models (LLMs) that are explicitly trained on large corpuses of medical knowledge (Med-PaLM 2) to predict psychiatric functioning from patient interviews and clinical descriptions without being trained to do so. To assess this, n = 145 depression and n =115 PTSD assessments and n = 46 clinical case studies across high prevalence/high comorbidity disorders (Depressive, Anxiety, Psychotic, trauma and stress, Addictive disorders) were analyzed using prompts to extract estimated clinical scores and diagnoses. Results demonstrate that Med-PaLM 2 is capable of assessing psychiatric functioning across a range of psychiatric conditions with the strongest performance being the prediction of depression scores based on standardized assessments (Accuracy range= 0.80 - 0.84) which were statistically indistinguishable from human clinical raters t(1,144) = 1.20; p = 0.23. Results show the potential for general clinical language models to flexibly predict psychiatric risk based on free descriptions of functioning from both patients and clinicians.
Learning beyond sensations: how dreams organize neuronal representations
Authors: Nicolas Deperrois, Mihai A. Petrovici, Walter Senn, Jakob Jordan
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Semantic representations in higher sensory cortices form the basis for robust, yet flexible behavior. These representations are acquired over the course of development in an unsupervised fashion and continuously maintained over an organism's lifespan. Predictive learning theories propose that these representations emerge from predicting or reconstructing sensory inputs. However, brains are known to generate virtual experiences, such as during imagination and dreaming, that go beyond previously experienced inputs. Here, we suggest that virtual experiences may be just as relevant as actual sensory inputs in shaping cortical representations. In particular, we discuss two complementary learning principles that organize representations through the generation of virtual experiences. First, "adversarial dreaming" proposes that creative dreams support a cortical implementation of adversarial learning in which feedback and feedforward pathways engage in a productive game of trying to fool each other. Second, "contrastive dreaming" proposes that the invariance of neuronal representations to irrelevant factors of variation is acquired by trying to map similar virtual experiences together via a contrastive learning process. These principles are compatible with known cortical structure and dynamics and the phenomenology of sleep thus providing promising directions to explain cortical learning beyond the classical predictive learning paradigm.
Hard Adversarial Example Mining for Improving Robust Fairness
Authors: Chenhao Lin, Xiang Ji, Yulong Yang, Qian Li, Chao Shen, Run Wang, Liming Fang
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Adversarial training (AT) is widely considered the state-of-the-art technique for improving the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) against adversarial examples (AE). Nevertheless, recent studies have revealed that adversarially trained models are prone to unfairness problems, restricting their applicability. In this paper, we empirically observe that this limitation may be attributed to serious adversarial confidence overfitting, i.e., certain adversarial examples with overconfidence. To alleviate this problem, we propose HAM, a straightforward yet effective framework via adaptive Hard Adversarial example Mining.HAM concentrates on mining hard adversarial examples while discarding the easy ones in an adaptive fashion. Specifically, HAM identifies hard AEs in terms of their step sizes needed to cross the decision boundary when calculating loss value. Besides, an early-dropping mechanism is incorporated to discard the easy examples at the initial stages of AE generation, resulting in efficient AT. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and Imagenette demonstrate that HAM achieves significant improvement in robust fairness while reducing computational cost compared to several state-of-the-art adversarial training methods. The code will be made publicly available.
Deep Neural Networks Fused with Textures for Image Classification
Authors: Asish Bera, Debotosh Bhattacharjee, Mita Nasipuri
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Fine-Grained Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Fine-grained image classification (FGIC) is a challenging task in computer vision for due to small visual differences among inter-subcategories, but, large intra-class variations. Deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in solving FGIC. In this paper, we propose a fusion approach to address FGIC by combining global texture with local patch-based information. The first pipeline extracts deep features from various fixed-size non-overlapping patches and encodes features by sequential modelling using the long short-term memory (LSTM). Another path computes image-level textures at multiple scales using the local binary patterns (LBP). The advantages of both streams are integrated to represent an efficient feature vector for image classification. The method is tested on eight datasets representing the human faces, skin lesions, food dishes, marine lives, etc. using four standard backbone CNNs. Our method has attained better classification accuracy over existing methods with notable margins.
Job Shop Scheduling via Deep Reinforcement Learning: a Sequence to Sequence approach
Authors: Giovanni Bonetta, Davide Zago, Rossella Cancelliere, Andrea Grosso
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Decoder, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Job Shop Scheduling, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

Job scheduling is a well-known Combinatorial Optimization problem with endless applications. Well planned schedules bring many benefits in the context of automated systems: among others, they limit production costs and waste. Nevertheless, the NP-hardness of this problem makes it essential to use heuristics whose design is difficult, requires specialized knowledge and often produces methods tailored to the specific task. This paper presents an original end-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning approach to scheduling that automatically learns dispatching rules. Our technique is inspired by natural language encoder-decoder models for sequence processing and has never been used, to the best of our knowledge, for scheduling purposes. We applied and tested our method in particular to some benchmark instances of Job Shop Problem, but this technique is general enough to be potentially used to tackle other different optimal job scheduling tasks with minimal intervention. Results demonstrate that we outperform many classical approaches exploiting priority dispatching rules and show competitive results on state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning ones.
MAP: A Model-agnostic Pretraining Framework for Click-through Rate Prediction
Authors: Jianghao Lin, Yanru Qu, Wei Guo, Xinyi Dai, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Click-Through Rate Prediction, Prediction, Self-Supervised Learning

With the widespread application of personalized online services, click-through rate (CTR) prediction has received more and more attention and research. The most prominent features of CTR prediction are its multi-field categorical data format, and vast and daily-growing data volume. The large capacity of neural models helps digest such massive amounts of data under the supervised learning paradigm, yet they fail to utilize the substantial data to its full potential, since the 1-bit click signal is not sufficient to guide the model to learn capable representations of features and instances. The self-supervised learning paradigm provides a more promising pretrain-finetune solution to better exploit the large amount of user click logs, and learn more generalized and effective representations. However, self-supervised learning for CTR prediction is still an open question, since current works on this line are only preliminary and rudimentary. To this end, we propose a Model-agnostic pretraining (MAP) framework that applies feature corruption and recovery on multi-field categorical data, and more specifically, we derive two practical algorithms: masked feature prediction (MFP) and replaced feature detection (RFD). MFP digs into feature interactions within each instance through masking and predicting a small portion of input features, and introduces noise contrastive estimation (NCE) to handle large feature spaces. RFD further turns MFP into a binary classification mode through replacing and detecting changes in input features, making it even simpler and more effective for CTR pretraining. Our extensive experiments on two real-world large-scale datasets (i.e., Avazu, Criteo) demonstrate the advantages of these two methods on several strong backbones (e.g., DCNv2, DeepFM), and achieve new state-of-the-art performance in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency for CTR prediction.
Towards Self-organizing Personal Knowledge Assistants in Evolving Corporate Memories
Authors: Christian Jilek, Markus Schröder, Heiko Maus, Sven Schwarz, Andreas Dengel
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, Management

This paper presents a retrospective overview of a decade of research in our department towards self-organizing personal knowledge assistants in evolving corporate memories. Our research is typically inspired by real-world problems and often conducted in interdisciplinary collaborations with research and industry partners. We summarize past experiments and results comprising topics like various ways of knowledge graph construction in corporate and personal settings, Managed Forgetting and (Self-organizing) Context Spaces as a novel approach to Personal Information Management (PIM) and knowledge work support. Past results are complemented by an overview of related work and some of our latest findings not published so far. Last, we give an overview of our related industry use cases including a detailed look into CoMem, a Corporate Memory based on our presented research already in productive use and providing challenges for further research. Many contributions are only first steps in new directions with still a lot of untapped potential, especially with regard to further increasing the automation in PIM and knowledge work support.
Local Large Language Models for Complex Structured Medical Tasks
Authors: V. K. Cody Bumgardner, Aaron Mullen, Sam Armstrong, Caylin Hickey, Jeff Talbert
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00

This paper introduces an approach that combines the language reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with the benefits of local training to tackle complex, domain-specific tasks. Specifically, the authors demonstrate their approach by extracting structured condition codes from pathology reports. The proposed approach utilizes local LLMs, which can be fine-tuned to respond to specific generative instructions and provide structured outputs. The authors collected a dataset of over 150k uncurated surgical pathology reports, containing gross descriptions, final diagnoses, and condition codes. They trained different model architectures, including LLaMA, BERT and LongFormer and evaluated their performance. The results show that the LLaMA-based models significantly outperform BERT-style models across all evaluated metrics, even with extremely reduced precision. The LLaMA models performed especially well with large datasets, demonstrating their ability to handle complex, multi-label tasks. Overall, this work presents an effective approach for utilizing LLMs to perform domain-specific tasks using accessible hardware, with potential applications in the medical domain, where complex data extraction and classification are required.
Bees Local Phase Quantization Feature Selection for RGB-D Facial Expressions Recognition
Authors: Seyed Muhammad Hossein Mousavi, Atiye Ilanloo
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Quantization

Feature selection could be defined as an optimization problem and solved by bio-inspired algorithms. Bees Algorithm (BA) shows decent performance in feature selection optimization tasks. On the other hand, Local Phase Quantization (LPQ) is a frequency domain feature which has excellent performance on Depth images. Here, after extracting LPQ features out of RGB (colour) and Depth images from the Iranian Kinect Face Database (IKFDB), the Bees feature selection algorithm applies to select the desired number of features for final classification tasks. IKFDB is recorded with Kinect sensor V.2 and contains colour and depth images for facial and facial micro-expressions recognition purposes. Here five facial expressions of Anger, Joy, Surprise, Disgust and Fear are used for final validation. The proposed Bees LPQ method is compared with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) LPQ, PCA LPQ, Lasso LPQ, and just LPQ features for classification tasks with Support Vector Machines (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbourhood (KNN), Shallow Neural Network and Ensemble Subspace KNN. Returned results, show a decent performance of the proposed algorithm (99 % accuracy) in comparison with others.
LiDAR-Camera Panoptic Segmentation via Geometry-Consistent and Semantic-Aware Alignment
Authors: Zhiwei Zhang, Zhizhong Zhang, Qian Yu, Ran Yi, Yuan Xie, Lizhuang Ma
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Panoptic Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

3D panoptic segmentation is a challenging perception task that requires both semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. In this task, we notice that images could provide rich texture, color, and discriminative information, which can complement LiDAR data for evident performance improvement, but their fusion remains a challenging problem. To this end, we propose LCPS, the first LiDAR-Camera Panoptic Segmentation network. In our approach, we conduct LiDAR-Camera fusion in three stages: 1) an Asynchronous Compensation Pixel Alignment (ACPA) module that calibrates the coordinate misalignment caused by asynchronous problems between sensors; 2) a Semantic-Aware Region Alignment (SARA) module that extends the one-to-one point-pixel mapping to one-to-many semantic relations; 3) a Point-to-Voxel feature Propagation (PVP) module that integrates both geometric and semantic fusion information for the entire point cloud. Our fusion strategy improves about 6.9% PQ performance over the LiDAR-only baseline on NuScenes dataset. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel framework. The code will be released at https://github.com/zhangzw12319/lcps.git.
Evaluating Link Prediction Explanations for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Claudio Borile, Alan Perotti, André Panisson
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification, Link Prediction, Prediction

Graph Machine Learning (GML) has numerous applications, such as node/graph classification and link prediction, in real-world domains. Providing human-understandable explanations for GML models is a challenging yet fundamental task to foster their adoption, but validating explanations for link prediction models has received little attention. In this paper, we provide quantitative metrics to assess the quality of link prediction explanations, with or without ground-truth. State-of-the-art explainability methods for Graph Neural Networks are evaluated using these metrics. We discuss how underlying assumptions and technical details specific to the link prediction task, such as the choice of distance between node embeddings, can influence the quality of the explanations.
NBIAS: A Natural Language Processing Framework for Bias Identification in Text
Authors: Shaina Raza, Muskan Garg, Deepak John Reji, Syed Raza Bashir, Chen Ding
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: token-classification, Token Classification

Bias in textual data can lead to skewed interpretations and outcomes when the data is used. These biases could perpetuate stereotypes, discrimination, or other forms of unfair treatment. An algorithm trained on biased data may end up making decisions that disproportionately impact a certain group of people. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and remove these biases to ensure the fair and ethical use of data. To this end, we develop a comprehensive and robust framework NBIAS that consists of four main layers: data, corpus construction, model development and an evaluation layer. The dataset is constructed by collecting diverse data from various domains, including social media, healthcare, and job hiring portals. As such, we applied a transformer-based token classification model that is able to identify bias words/ phrases through a unique named entity BIAS. In the evaluation procedure, we incorporate a blend of quantitative and qualitative measures to gauge the effectiveness of our models. We achieve accuracy improvements ranging from 1% to 8% compared to baselines. We are also able to generate a robust understanding of the model functioning. The proposed approach is applicable to a variety of biases and contributes to the fair and ethical use of textual data.
MARLIM: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Inventory Management
Authors: Rémi Leluc, Elie Kadoche, Antoine Bertoncello, Sébastien Gourvénec
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Maintaining a balance between the supply and demand of products by optimizing replenishment decisions is one of the most important challenges in the supply chain industry. This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning framework called MARLIM, to address the inventory management problem for a single-echelon multi-products supply chain with stochastic demands and lead-times. Within this context, controllers are developed through single or multiple agents in a cooperative setting. Numerical experiments on real data demonstrate the benefits of reinforcement learning methods over traditional baselines.
Improving Wind Resistance Performance of Cascaded PID Controlled Quadcopters using Residual Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yu Ishihara, Yuichi Hazama, Kousuke Suzuki, Jerry Jun Yokono, Kohtaro Sabe, Kenta Kawamoto
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Wind resistance control is an essential feature for quadcopters to maintain their position to avoid deviation from target position and prevent collisions with obstacles. Conventionally, cascaded PID controller is used for the control of quadcopters for its simplicity and ease of tuning its parameters. However, it is weak against wind disturbances and the quadcopter can easily deviate from target position. In this work, we propose a residual reinforcement learning based approach to build a wind resistance controller of a quadcopter. By learning only the residual that compensates the disturbance, we can continue using the cascaded PID controller as the base controller of the quadcopter but improve its performance against wind disturbances. To avoid unexpected crashes and destructions of quadcopters, our method does not require real hardware for data collection and training. The controller is trained only on a simulator and directly applied to the target hardware without extra finetuning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through various experiments including an experiment in an outdoor scene with wind speed greater than 13 m/s. Despite its simplicity, our controller reduces the position deviation by approximately 50% compared to the quadcopter controlled with the conventional cascaded PID controller. Furthermore, trained controller is robust and preserves its performance even though the quadcopter's mass and propeller's lift coefficient is changed between 50% to 150% from original training time.
Interleaving GANs with knowledge graphs to support design creativity for book covers
Authors: Alexandru Motogna, Adrian Groza
Date: 2023-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

An attractive book cover is important for the success of a book. In this paper, we apply Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to the book covers domain, using different methods for training in order to obtain better generated images. We interleave GANs with knowledge graphs to alter the input title to obtain multiple possible options for any given title, which are then used as an augmented input to the generator. Finally, we use the discriminator obtained during the training phase to select the best images generated with new titles. Our method performed better at generating book covers than previous attempts, and the knowledge graph gives better options to the book author or editor compared to using GANs alone.