pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FRIGATE: Frugal Spatio-temporal Forecasting on Road Networks
Authors: Mridul Gupta, Hariprasad Kodamana, Sayan Ranu
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

Modelling spatio-temporal processes on road networks is a task of growing importance. While significant progress has been made on developing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (Gnns), existing works are built upon three assumptions that are not practical on real-world road networks. First, they assume sensing on every node of a road network. In reality, due to budget-constraints or sensor failures, all locations (nodes) may not be equipped with sensors. Second, they assume that sensing history is available at all installed sensors. This is unrealistic as well due to sensor failures, loss of packets during communication, etc. Finally, there is an assumption of static road networks. Connectivity within networks change due to road closures, constructions of new roads, etc. In this work, we develop FRIGATE to address all these shortcomings. FRIGATE is powered by a spatio-temporal Gnn that integrates positional, topological, and temporal information into rich inductive node representations. The joint fusion of this diverse information is made feasible through a novel combination of gated Lipschitz embeddings with Lstms. We prove that the proposed Gnn architecture is provably more expressive than message-passing Gnns used in state-of-the-art algorithms. The higher expressivity of FRIGATE naturally translates to superior empirical performance conducted on real-world network-constrained traffic data. In addition, FRIGATE is robust to frugal sensor deployment, changes in road network connectivity, and temporal irregularity in sensing.
GBSD: Generative Bokeh with Stage Diffusion
Authors: Jieren Deng, Xin Zhou, Hao Tian, Zhihong Pan, Derek Aguiar
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Manipulation, Neural Rendering

The bokeh effect is an artistic technique that blurs out-of-focus areas in a photograph and has gained interest due to recent developments in text-to-image synthesis and the ubiquity of smart-phone cameras and photo-sharing apps. Prior work on rendering bokeh effects have focused on post hoc image manipulation to produce similar blurring effects in existing photographs using classical computer graphics or neural rendering techniques, but have either depth discontinuity artifacts or are restricted to reproducing bokeh effects that are present in the training data. More recent diffusion based models can synthesize images with an artistic style, but either require the generation of high-dimensional masks, expensive fine-tuning, or affect global image characteristics. In this paper, we present GBSD, the first generative text-to-image model that synthesizes photorealistic images with a bokeh style. Motivated by how image synthesis occurs progressively in diffusion models, our approach combines latent diffusion models with a 2-stage conditioning algorithm to render bokeh effects on semantically defined objects. Since we can focus the effect on objects, this semantic bokeh effect is more versatile than classical rendering techniques. We evaluate GBSD both quantitatively and qualitatively and demonstrate its ability to be applied in both text-to-image and image-to-image settings.
Semi-supervised Cell Recognition under Point Supervision
Authors: Zhongyi Shui, Yizhi Zhao, Sunyi Zheng, Yunlong Zhang, Honglin Li, Shichuan Zhang, Xiaoxuan Yu, Chenglu Zhu, Lin Yang
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: whole slide images

Cell recognition is a fundamental task in digital histopathology image analysis. Point-based cell recognition (PCR) methods normally require a vast number of annotations, which is extremely costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) can provide a shortcut to make full use of cell information in gigapixel whole slide images without exhaustive labeling. However, research into semi-supervised point-based cell recognition (SSPCR) remains largely overlooked. Previous SSPCR works are all built on density map-based PCR models, which suffer from unsatisfactory accuracy, slow inference speed and high sensitivity to hyper-parameters. To address these issues, end-to-end PCR models are proposed recently. In this paper, we develop a SSPCR framework suitable for the end-to-end PCR models for the first time. Overall, we use the current models to generate pseudo labels for unlabeled images, which are in turn utilized to supervise the models training. Besides, we introduce a co-teaching strategy to overcome the confirmation bias problem that generally exists in self-training. A distribution alignment technique is also incorporated to produce high-quality, unbiased pseudo labels for unlabeled data. Experimental results on four histopathology datasets concerning different types of staining styles show the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed framework. Code is available at \textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/windygooo/SSPCR}
Maestro: A Gamified Platform for Teaching AI Robustness
Authors: Margarita Geleta, Jiacen Xu, Manikanta Loya, Junlin Wang, Sameer Singh, Zhou Li, Sergio Gago-Masague
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

Although the prevention of AI vulnerabilities is critical to preserve the safety and privacy of users and businesses, educational tools for robust AI are still underdeveloped worldwide. We present the design, implementation, and assessment of Maestro. Maestro is an effective open-source game-based platform that contributes to the advancement of robust AI education. Maestro provides goal-based scenarios where college students are exposed to challenging life-inspired assignments in a competitive programming environment. We assessed Maestro's influence on students' engagement, motivation, and learning success in robust AI. This work also provides insights into the design features of online learning tools that promote active learning opportunities in the robust AI domain. We analyzed the reflection responses (measured with Likert scales) of 147 undergraduate students using Maestro in two quarterly college courses in AI. According to the results, students who felt the acquisition of new skills in robust AI tended to appreciate highly Maestro and scored highly on material consolidation, curiosity, and mastery in robust AI. Moreover, the leaderboard, our key gamification element in Maestro, has effectively contributed to students' engagement and learning. Results also indicate that Maestro can be effectively adapted to any course length and depth without losing its educational quality.
Curricular Subgoals for Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Shunyu Liu, Yunpeng Qing, Shuqi Xu, Hongyan Wu, Jiangtao Zhang, Jingyuan Cong, Tianhao Chen, YunFu Liu, Mingli Song
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, D4RL, Imitation Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to reconstruct the reward function from expert demonstrations to facilitate policy learning, and has demonstrated its remarkable success in imitation learning. To promote expert-like behavior, existing IRL methods mainly focus on learning global reward functions to minimize the trajectory difference between the imitator and the expert. However, these global designs are still limited by the redundant noise and error propagation problems, leading to the unsuitable reward assignment and thus downgrading the agent capability in complex multi-stage tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Curricular Subgoal-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CSIRL) framework, that explicitly disentangles one task with several local subgoals to guide agent imitation. Specifically, CSIRL firstly introduces decision uncertainty of the trained agent over expert trajectories to dynamically select subgoals, which directly determines the exploration boundary of different task stages. To further acquire local reward functions for each stage, we customize a meta-imitation objective based on these curricular subgoals to train an intrinsic reward generator. Experiments on the D4RL and autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed methods yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts, as well as better interpretability. Our code is available at https://github.com/Plankson/CSIRL.
SMC-UDA: Structure-Modal Constraint for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Renal Segmentation
Authors: Zhusi Zhong, Jie Li, Lulu Bi, Li Yang, Ihab Kamel, Rama Chellappa, Xinbo Gao, Harrison Bai, Zhicheng Jiao
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Medical image segmentation based on deep learning often fails when deployed on images from a different domain. The domain adaptation methods aim to solve domain-shift challenges, but still face some problems. The transfer learning methods require annotation on the target domain, and the generative unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) models ignore domain-specific representations, whose generated quality highly restricts segmentation performance. In this study, we propose a novel Structure-Modal Constrained (SMC) UDA framework based on a discriminative paradigm and introduce edge structure as a bridge between domains. The proposed multi-modal learning backbone distills structure information from image texture to distinguish domain-invariant edge structure. With the structure-constrained self-learning and progressive ROI, our methods segment the kidney by locating the 3D spatial structure of the edge. We evaluated SMC-UDA on public renal segmentation datasets, adapting from the labeled source domain (CT) to the unlabeled target domain (CT/MRI). The experiments show that our proposed SMC-UDA has a strong generalization and outperforms generative UDA methods.
Ball Trajectory Inference from Multi-Agent Sports Contexts Using Set Transformer and Hierarchical Bi-LSTM
Authors: Hyunsung Kim, Han-Jun Choi, Chang Jo Kim, Jinsung Yoon, Sang-Ki Ko
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Sports Analytics

As artificial intelligence spreads out to numerous fields, the application of AI to sports analytics is also in the spotlight. However, one of the major challenges is the difficulty of automated acquisition of continuous movement data during sports matches. In particular, it is a conundrum to reliably track a tiny ball on a wide soccer pitch with obstacles such as occlusion and imitations. Tackling the problem, this paper proposes an inference framework of ball trajectory from player trajectories as a cost-efficient alternative to ball tracking. We combine Set Transformers to get permutation-invariant and equivariant representations of the multi-agent contexts with a hierarchical architecture that intermediately predicts the player ball possession to support the final trajectory inference. Also, we introduce the reality loss term and postprocessing to secure the estimated trajectories to be physically realistic. The experimental results show that our model provides natural and accurate trajectories as well as admissible player ball possession at the same time. Lastly, we suggest several practical applications of our framework including missing trajectory imputation, semi-automated pass annotation, automated zoom-in for match broadcasting, and calculating possession-wise running performance metrics.
Unraveling the ARC Puzzle: Mimicking Human Solutions with Object-Centric Decision Transformer
Authors: JaeHyun Park, Jaegyun Im, Sanha Hwang, Mintaek Lim, Sabina Ualibekova, Sejin Kim, Sundong Kim
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Clustering, Imitation Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

In the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), we tackle Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) tasks using a novel two-pronged approach. We employ the Decision Transformer in an imitation learning paradigm to model human problem-solving, and introduce an object detection algorithm, the Push and Pull clustering method. This dual strategy enhances AI's ARC problem-solving skills and provides insights for AGI progression. Yet, our work reveals the need for advanced data collection tools, robust training datasets, and refined model structures. This study highlights potential improvements for Decision Transformers and propels future AGI research.
Learning on Graphs under Label Noise
Authors: Jingyang Yuan, Xiao Luo, Yifang Qin, Yusheng Zhao, Wei Ju, Ming Zhang
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Contrastive Learning, Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network, Node Classification

Node classification on graphs is a significant task with a wide range of applications, including social analysis and anomaly detection. Even though graph neural networks (GNNs) have produced promising results on this task, current techniques often presume that label information of nodes is accurate, which may not be the case in real-world applications. To tackle this issue, we investigate the problem of learning on graphs with label noise and develop a novel approach dubbed Consistent Graph Neural Network (CGNN) to solve it. Specifically, we employ graph contrastive learning as a regularization term, which promotes two views of augmented nodes to have consistent representations. Since this regularization term cannot utilize label information, it can enhance the robustness of node representations to label noise. Moreover, to detect noisy labels on the graph, we present a sample selection technique based on the homophily assumption, which identifies noisy nodes by measuring the consistency between the labels with their neighbors. Finally, we purify these confident noisy labels to permit efficient semantic graph learning. Extensive experiments on three well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our CGNN over competing approaches.
Operationalising Representation in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Jacqueline Harding
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

Despite its centrality in the philosophy of cognitive science, there has been little prior philosophical work engaging with the notion of representation in contemporary NLP practice. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna: drawing on ideas from cognitive science, I introduce a framework for evaluating the representational claims made about components of neural NLP models, proposing three criteria with which to evaluate whether a component of a model represents a property and operationalising these criteria using probing classifiers, a popular analysis technique in NLP (and deep learning more broadly). The project of operationalising a philosophically-informed notion of representation should be of interest to both philosophers of science and NLP practitioners. It affords philosophers a novel testing-ground for claims about the nature of representation, and helps NLPers organise the large literature on probing experiments, suggesting novel avenues for empirical research.
DCTX-Conformer: Dynamic context carry-over for low latency unified streaming and non-streaming Conformer ASR
Authors: Goeric Huybrechts, Srikanth Ronanki, Xilai Li, Hadis Nosrati, Sravan Bodapati, Katrin Kirchhoff
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Conformer-based end-to-end models have become ubiquitous these days and are commonly used in both streaming and non-streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR). Techniques like dual-mode and dynamic chunk training helped unify streaming and non-streaming systems. However, there remains a performance gap between streaming with a full and limited past context. To address this issue, we propose the integration of a novel dynamic contextual carry-over mechanism in a state-of-the-art (SOTA) unified ASR system. Our proposed dynamic context Conformer (DCTX-Conformer) utilizes a non-overlapping contextual carry-over mechanism that takes into account both the left context of a chunk and one or more preceding context embeddings. We outperform the SOTA by a relative 25.0% word error rate, with a negligible latency impact due to the additional context embeddings.
Reinforcement Learning-Driven Linker Design via Fast Attention-based Point Cloud Alignment
Authors: Rebecca M. Neeser, Mehmet Akdel, Daniel Kovtun, Luca Naef
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning

Proteolysis-Targeting Chimeras (PROTACs) represent a novel class of small molecules which are designed to act as a bridge between an E3 ligase and a disease-relevant protein, thereby promoting its subsequent degradation. PROTACs are composed of two protein binding "active" domains, linked by a "linker" domain. The design of the linker domain is challenging due to geometric and chemical constraints given by its interactions, and the need to maximize drug-likeness. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ShapeLinker, a method for de novo design of linkers. It performs fragment-linking using reinforcement learning on an autoregressive SMILES generator. The method optimizes for a composite score combining relevant physicochemical properties and a novel, attention-based point cloud alignment score. This new method successfully generates linkers that satisfy both relevant 2D and 3D requirements, and achieves state-of-the-art results in producing novel linkers assuming a target linker conformation. This allows for more rational and efficient PROTAC design and optimization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/aivant/ShapeLinker.
INT2.1: Towards Fine-Tunable Quantized Large Language Models with Error Correction through Low-Rank Adaptation
Authors: Yuji Chai, John Gkountouras, Glenn G. Ko, David Brooks, Gu-Yeon Wei
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Quantization

We introduce a method that dramatically reduces fine-tuning VRAM requirements and rectifies quantization errors in quantized Large Language Models. First, we develop an extremely memory-efficient fine-tuning (EMEF) method for quantized models using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and drawing upon it, we construct an error-correcting algorithm designed to minimize errors induced by the quantization process. Our method reduces the memory requirements by up to 5.6 times, which enables fine-tuning a 7 billion parameter Large Language Model (LLM) on consumer laptops. At the same time, we propose a Low-Rank Error Correction (LREC) method that exploits the added LoRA layers to ameliorate the gap between the quantized model and its float point counterpart. Our error correction framework leads to a fully functional INT2 quantized LLM with the capacity to generate coherent English text. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first INT2 Large Language Model that has been able to reach such a performance. The overhead of our method is merely a 1.05 times increase in model size, which translates to an effective precision of INT2.1. Also, our method readily generalizes to other quantization standards, such as INT3, INT4, and INT8, restoring their lost performance, which marks a significant milestone in the field of model quantization. The strategies delineated in this paper hold promising implications for the future development and optimization of quantized models, marking a pivotal shift in the landscape of low-resource machine learning computations.
h2oGPT: Democratizing Large Language Models
Authors: Arno Candel, Jon McKinney, Philipp Singer, Pascal Pfeiffer, Maximilian Jeblick, Prithvi Prabhu, Jeff Gambera, Mark Landry, Shivam Bansal, Ryan Chesler, Chun Ming Lee, Marcos V. Conde, Pasha Stetsenko, Olivier Grellier, SriSatish Ambati
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Fairness, NER, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification, Text Generation, Text Retrieval, Text Summarization, Translation

Applications built on top of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 represent a revolution in AI due to their human-level capabilities in natural language processing. However, they also pose many significant risks such as the presence of biased, private, or harmful text, and the unauthorized inclusion of copyrighted material. We introduce h2oGPT, a suite of open-source code repositories for the creation and use of LLMs based on Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs). The goal of this project is to create the world's best truly open-source alternative to closed-source approaches. In collaboration with and as part of the incredible and unstoppable open-source community, we open-source several fine-tuned h2oGPT models from 7 to 40 Billion parameters, ready for commercial use under fully permissive Apache 2.0 licenses. Included in our release is 100\% private document search using natural language. Open-source language models help boost AI development and make it more accessible and trustworthy. They lower entry hurdles, allowing people and groups to tailor these models to their needs. This openness increases innovation, transparency, and fairness. An open-source strategy is needed to share AI benefits fairly, and H2O.ai will continue to democratize AI and LLMs.
Sociodemographic Bias in Language Models: A Survey and Forward Path
Authors: Vipul Gupta, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Shomir Wilson, Rebecca J. Passonneau
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Sociodemographic bias in language models (LMs) has the potential for harm when deployed in real-world settings. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the past decade of research on sociodemographic bias in LMs, organized into a typology that facilitates examining the different aims: types of bias, quantifying bias, and debiasing techniques. We track the evolution of the latter two questions, then identify current trends and their limitations, as well as emerging techniques. To guide future research towards more effective and reliable solutions, and to help authors situate their work within this broad landscape, we conclude with a checklist of open questions.
Dynamic Bayesian Networks for Predicting Cryptocurrency Price Directions: Uncovering Causal Relationships
Authors: Rasoul Amirzadeh, Dhananjay Thiruvady, Asef Nazari, Mong Shan Ee
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering

Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity across various sectors, especially in finance and investment. Despite their growing popularity, cryptocurrencies can be a high-risk investment due to their price volatility. The inherent volatility in cryptocurrency prices, coupled with the effects of external global economic factors, makes predicting their price movements challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN)-based approach to uncover potential causal relationships among various features including social media data, traditional financial market factors, and technical indicators. Six popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Binance Coin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and Tether are studied in this work. The proposed model's performance is compared to five baseline models of auto-regressive integrated moving average, support vector regression, long short-term memory, random forests, and support vector machines. The results show that while DBN performance varies across cryptocurrencies, with some cryptocurrencies exhibiting higher predictive accuracy than others, the DBN significantly outperforms the baseline models.