pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels
Authors: Honglei Zhuang, Zhen Qin, Kai Hui, Junru Wu, Le Yan, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00

Zero-shot text rankers powered by recent LLMs achieve remarkable ranking performance by simply prompting. Existing prompts for pointwise LLM rankers mostly ask the model to choose from binary relevance labels like "Yes" and "No". However, the lack of intermediate relevance label options may cause the LLM to provide noisy or biased answers for documents that are partially relevant to the query. We propose to incorporate fine-grained relevance labels into the prompt for LLM rankers, enabling them to better differentiate among documents with different levels of relevance to the query and thus derive a more accurate ranking. We study two variants of the prompt template, coupled with different numbers of relevance levels. Our experiments on 8 BEIR data sets show that adding fine-grained relevance labels significantly improves the performance of LLM rankers.
MARVEL: Unlocking the Multi-Modal Capability of Dense Retrieval via Visual Module Plugin
Authors: Tianshuo Zhou, Sen Mei, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Chenyan Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, Yu Gu, Ge Yu
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

This paper proposes Multi-modAl Retrieval model via Visual modulE pLugin (MARVEL), which learns an embedding space for queries and multi-modal documents to conduct retrieval. MARVEL encodes queries and multi-modal documents with a unified encoder model, which helps to alleviate the modality gap between images and texts. Specifically, we enable the image understanding ability of the well-trained dense retriever, T5-ANCE, by incorporating the visual module's encoded image features as its inputs. To facilitate the multi-modal retrieval tasks, we build the ClueWeb22-MM dataset based on the ClueWeb22 dataset, which regards anchor texts as queries, and extracts the related text and image documents from anchor-linked web pages. Our experiments show that MARVEL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the multi-modal retrieval dataset WebQA and ClueWeb22-MM. MARVEL provides an opportunity to broaden the advantages of text retrieval to the multi-modal scenario. Besides, we also illustrate that the language model has the ability to extract image semantics and partly map the image features to the input word embedding space. All codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/MARVEL.
Meta-optimized Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Yongjing Hao, Pengpeng Zhao, Junhua Fang, Jianfeng Qu, Guanfeng Liu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Victor S. Sheng, Xiaofang Zhou
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential Recommendation (SR) has received increasing attention due to its ability to capture user dynamic preferences. Recently, Contrastive Learning (CL) provides an effective approach for sequential recommendation by learning invariance from different views of an input. However, most existing data or model augmentation methods may destroy semantic sequential interaction characteristics and often rely on the hand-crafted property of their contrastive view-generation strategies. In this paper, we propose a Meta-optimized Seq2Seq Generator and Contrastive Learning (Meta-SGCL) for sequential recommendation, which applies the meta-optimized two-step training strategy to adaptive generate contrastive views. Specifically, Meta-SGCL first introduces a simple yet effective augmentation method called Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) generator, which treats the Variational AutoEncoders (VAE) as the view generator and can constitute contrastive views while preserving the original sequence's semantics. Next, the model employs a meta-optimized two-step training strategy, which aims to adaptively generate contrastive views without relying on manually designed view-generation techniques. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method Meta-SGCL using three public real-world datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and the code is available.
UnifiedSSR: A Unified Framework of Sequential Search and Recommendation
Authors: Jiayi Xie, Shang Liu, Gao Cong, Zhenzhong Chen
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

In this work, we propose a Unified framework of Sequential Search and Recommendation (UnifiedSSR) for joint learning of user behavior history in both search and recommendation scenarios. Specifically, we consider user-interacted products in the recommendation scenario, user-interacted products and user-issued queries in the search scenario as three distinct types of user behaviors. We propose a dual-branch network to encode the pair of interacted product history and issued query history in the search scenario in parallel. This allows for cross-scenario modeling by deactivating the query branch for the recommendation scenario. Through the parameter sharing between dual branches, as well as between product branches in two scenarios, we incorporate cross-view and cross-scenario associations of user behaviors, providing a comprehensive understanding of user behavior patterns. To further enhance user behavior modeling by capturing the underlying dynamic intent, an Intent-oriented Session Modeling module is designed for inferring intent-oriented semantic sessions from the contextual information in behavior sequences. In particular, we consider self-supervised learning signals from two perspectives for intent-oriented semantic session locating, which encourage session discrimination within each behavior sequence and session alignment between dual behavior sequences. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that UnifiedSSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods for both search and recommendation.
FABULA: Intelligence Report Generation Using Retrieval-Augmented Narrative Construction
Authors: Priyanka Ranade, Anupam Joshi
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Narrative construction is the process of representing disparate event information into a logical plot structure that models an end to end story. Intelligence analysis is an example of a domain that can benefit tremendously from narrative construction techniques, particularly in aiding analysts during the largely manual and costly process of synthesizing event information into comprehensive intelligence reports. Manual intelligence report generation is often prone to challenges such as integrating dynamic event information, writing fine-grained queries, and closing information gaps. This motivates the development of a system that retrieves and represents critical aspects of events in a form that aids in automatic generation of intelligence reports. We introduce a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach to augment prompting of an autoregressive decoder by retrieving structured information asserted in a knowledge graph to generate targeted information based on a narrative plot model. We apply our approach to the problem of neural intelligence report generation and introduce FABULA, framework to augment intelligence analysis workflows using RAG. An analyst can use FABULA to query an Event Plot Graph (EPG) to retrieve relevant event plot points, which can be used to augment prompting of a Large Language Model (LLM) during intelligence report generation. Our evaluation studies show that the plot points included in the generated intelligence reports have high semantic relevance, high coherency, and low data redundancy.
Cloud-Connected Wireless Holter Monitor Machine with Neural Networks Based ECG Analysis for Remote Health Monitoring
Authors: Azlaan Ranjha, Laiba Jabbar, Osaid Ahmed
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Diagnostic, ECG Classification

This study describes the creation of a wireless, transportable Holter monitor to improve the accuracy of cardiac disease diagnosis. The main goal of this study is to develop a low-cost cardiac screening system suited explicitly for underprivileged areas, addressing the rising rates of cardiovascular death. The suggested system includes a wireless Electrocardiogram (ECG) module for real-time cardiac signal gathering using attached electrodes, with data transfer made possible by WiFi to a cloud server for archival and analysis. The system uses a neural network model for automated ECG classification, concentrating on the identification of cardiac anomalies. The diagnostic performance of cardiologist-level ECG analysis is surpassed by our upgraded deep neural network architecture, which underwent thorough evaluation and showed a stunning accuracy rate of more than 88\%. A quick, accurate, and reasonably priced option for cardiac screening is provided by this ground-breaking technology, which smoothly merges wireless data transfer with AI-assisted diagnostics. In addition to providing a thorough overview of the development process, this paper also highlights methods used to improve model accuracy, such as data preparation, class imbalance correction using oversampling, and model fine-tuning. The work shows the viability of a comprehensive remote cardiac screening system powered by AI and maximising the use of wearable and cloud computing resources. Such cutting-edge remote health monitoring technologies have great promise for improved health outcomes and early identification, especially in resource-constrained countries.
B2C-AFM: Bi-Directional Co-Temporal and Cross-Spatial Attention Fusion Model for Human Action Recognition
Authors: Fangtai Guo, Tianlei Jin, Shiqiang Zhu, Xiangming Xi, Wen Wang, Qiwei Meng, Wei Song, and Jiakai Zhu
Date: 2023-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2023 8
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Human Action Recognition plays a driving engine of many human-computer interaction applications. Most current researches focus on improving the model generalization by integrating multiple homogeneous modalities, including RGB images, human poses, and optical flows. Furthermore, contextual interactions and out-of-context sign languages have been validated to depend on scene category and human per se. Those attempts to integrate appearance features and human poses have shown positive results. However, with human poses’ spatial errors and temporal ambiguities, existing methods are subject to poor scalability, limited robustness, and sub-optimal models. In this paper, inspired by the assumption that different modalities may maintain temporal consistency and spatial complementarity, we present a novel Bi-directional Co-temporal and Cross-spatial Attention Fusion Model (B2C-AFM). Our model is characterized by the asynchronous fusion strategy of multi-modal features along temporal and spatial dimensions. Besides, the novel explicit motion-oriented pose representations called Limb Flow Fields (Lff) are explored to alleviate the temporal ambiguity regarding human poses. Experiments on publicly available datasets validate our contributions. Abundant ablation studies experimentally show that B2C-AFM achieves robust performance across seen and unseen human actions. The codes are available at https://github.com/gftww/B2C.git.
Specialized Deep Residual Policy Safe Reinforcement Learning-Based Controller for Complex and Continuous State-Action Spaces
Authors: Ammar N. Abbas, Georgios C. Chasparis, John D. Kelleher
Date: 2023-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning

Traditional controllers have limitations as they rely on prior knowledge about the physics of the problem, require modeling of dynamics, and struggle to adapt to abnormal situations. Deep reinforcement learning has the potential to address these problems by learning optimal control policies through exploration in an environment. For safety-critical environments, it is impractical to explore randomly, and replacing conventional controllers with black-box models is also undesirable. Also, it is expensive in continuous state and action spaces, unless the search space is constrained. To address these challenges we propose a specialized deep residual policy safe reinforcement learning with a cycle of learning approach adapted for complex and continuous state-action spaces. Residual policy learning allows learning a hybrid control architecture where the reinforcement learning agent acts in synchronous collaboration with the conventional controller. The cycle of learning initiates the policy through the expert trajectory and guides the exploration around it. Further, the specialization through the input-output hidden Markov model helps to optimize policy that lies within the region of interest (such as abnormality), where the reinforcement learning agent is required and is activated. The proposed solution is validated on the Tennessee Eastman process control.
Adopting Self-Supervised Learning into Unsupervised Video Summarization through Restorative Score
Authors: Mehryar Abbasi, Parvaneh Saeedi
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Conference 2023 9
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Video Summarization, Video Summarization

In this paper, we present a new process for creating video summaries in an unsupervised manner. Our approach involves training a transformer encoder model to reconstruct missing frames in a video in a self-supervised way using the partially masked video as input. We then introduce an algorithm that utilizes the above-trained encoder to generate an importance score for each frame. Such frame importance scores are used to create the summary of the video. We show that the reconstruction loss of the model for a video with masked frames correlates with the representativeness of the remaining frames in the video. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on two benchmark datasets of TVSum and SumMe. We demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Additionally, our approach is more stable during the training process compared to SOTA techniques based on generative adversarial learning. Our source code is publicly available 1 .
Adopting Self-Supervised Learning into Unsupervised Video Summarization through Restorative Score.
Authors: Mehryar Abbasi, Parvaneh Saeedi
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Conference 2023 9
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Video Summarization, Video Summarization

In this paper, we present a new process for creating video summaries in an unsupervised manner. Our approach involves training a transformer encoder model to reconstruct missing frames in a video in a self-supervised way using the partially masked video as input. We then introduce an algorithm that utilizes the above-trained encoder to generate an importance score for each frame. Such frame importance scores are used to create the summary of the video. We show that the reconstruction loss of the model for a video with masked frames correlates with the representativeness of the remaining frames in the video. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on two benchmark datasets of TVSum and SumMe. We demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Additionally, our approach is more stable during the training process compared to SOTA techniques based on generative adversarial learning. Our source code is publicly available 1 .
Label Space Partition Selection for Multi-Object Tracking Using Two-Layer Partitioning
Authors: Ji Youn Lee, Changbeom Shim, Hoa Van Nguyen, Tran Thien Dat Nguyen, Hyunjin Choi, YoungHo Kim
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking

Estimating the trajectories of multi-objects poses a significant challenge due to data association ambiguity, which leads to a substantial increase in computational requirements. To address such problems, a divide-and-conquer manner has been employed with parallel computation. In this strategy, distinguished objects that have unique labels are grouped based on their statistical dependencies, the intersection of predicted measurements. Several geometry approaches have been used for label grouping since finding all intersected label pairs is clearly infeasible for large-scale tracking problems. This paper proposes an efficient implementation of label grouping for label-partitioned generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli filter framework using a secondary partitioning technique. This allows for parallel computation in the label graph indexing step, avoiding generating and eliminating duplicate comparisons. Additionally, we compare the performance of the proposed technique with several efficient spatial searching algorithms. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach on large-scale data sets, enabling scalable trajectory estimation.
FlipDyn with Control: Resource Takeover Games with Dynamics
Authors: Sandeep Banik, Shaunak D. Bopardikar
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00

We present the FlipDyn, a dynamic game in which two opponents (a defender and an adversary) choose strategies to optimally takeover a resource that involves a dynamical system. At any time instant, each player can take over the resource and thereby control the dynamical system after incurring a state-dependent and a control-dependent costs. The resulting model becomes a hybrid dynamical system where the discrete state (FlipDyn state) determines which player is in control of the resource. Our objective is to compute the Nash equilibria of this dynamic zero-sum game. Our contributions are four-fold. First, for any non-negative costs, we present analytical expressions for the saddle-point value of the FlipDyn game, along with the corresponding Nash equilibrium (NE) takeover strategies. Second, for continuous state, linear dynamical systems with quadratic costs, we establish sufficient conditions under which the game admits a NE in the space of linear state-feedback policies. Third, for scalar dynamical systems with quadratic costs, we derive the NE takeover strategies and saddle-point values independent of the continuous state of the dynamical system. Fourth and finally, for higher dimensional linear dynamical systems with quadratic costs, we derive approximate NE takeover strategies and control policies which enable the computation of bounds on the value functions of the game in each takeover state. We illustrate our findings through a numerical study involving the control of a linear dynamical system in the presence of an adversary.
Impact of Guidance and Interaction Strategies for LLM Use on Learner Performance and Perception
Authors: Harsh Kumar, Ilya Musabirov, Mohi Reza, Jiakai Shi, Xinyuan Wang, Joseph Jay Williams, Anastasia Kuzminykh, Michael Liut
Date: 2023-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Personalized chatbot-based teaching assistants can be crucial in addressing increasing classroom sizes, especially where direct teacher presence is limited. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue, with increasing research exploring their educational utility. However, the challenge lies not only in establishing the efficacy of LLMs but also in discerning the nuances of interaction between learners and these models, which impact learners' engagement and results. We conducted a formative study in an undergraduate computer science classroom (N=145) and a controlled experiment on Prolific (N=356) to explore the impact of four pedagogically informed guidance strategies on the learners' performance, confidence and trust in LLMs. Direct LLM answers marginally improved performance, while refining student solutions fostered trust. Structured guidance reduced random queries as well as instances of students copy-pasting assignment questions to the LLM. Our work highlights the role that teachers can play in shaping LLM-supported learning environments.
Automatic Sensor-free Affect Detection: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Felipe de Morais, Diógines Goldoni, Tiago Kautzmann, Rodrigo da Silva, Patricia A. Jaques
Date: 2023-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review

Emotions and other affective states play a pivotal role in cognition and, consequently, the learning process. It is well-established that computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) that can detect and adapt to students' affective states can enhance learning outcomes. However, practical constraints often pose challenges to the deployment of sensor-based affect detection in CBLEs, particularly for large-scale or long-term applications. As a result, sensor-free affect detection, which exclusively relies on logs of students' interactions with CBLEs, emerges as a compelling alternative. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on sensor-free affect detection. It delves into the most frequently identified affective states, the methodologies and techniques employed for sensor development, the defining attributes of CBLEs and data samples, as well as key research trends. Despite the field's evident maturity, demonstrated by the consistent performance of the models and the application of advanced machine learning techniques, there is ample scope for future research. Potential areas for further exploration include enhancing the performance of sensor-free detection models, amassing more samples of underrepresented emotions, and identifying additional emotions. There is also a need to refine model development practices and methods. This could involve comparing the accuracy of various data collection techniques, determining the optimal granularity of duration, establishing a shared database of action logs and emotion labels, and making the source code of these models publicly accessible. Future research should also prioritize the integration of models into CBLEs for real-time detection, the provision of meaningful interventions based on detected emotions, and a deeper understanding of the impact of emotions on learning.
Large language models in textual analysis for gesture selection
Authors: Laura B. Hensel, Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, Parisa Torshizi, Elena Minucci, Stacy Marsella
Date: 2023-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Generation

Gestures perform a variety of communicative functions that powerfully influence human face-to-face interaction. How this communicative function is achieved varies greatly between individuals and depends on the role of the speaker and the context of the interaction. Approaches to automatic gesture generation vary not only in the degree to which they rely on data-driven techniques but also the degree to which they can produce context and speaker specific gestures. However, these approaches face two major challenges: The first is obtaining sufficient training data that is appropriate for the context and the goal of the application. The second is related to designer control to realize their specific intent for the application. Here, we approach these challenges by using large language models (LLMs) to show that these powerful models of large amounts of data can be adapted for gesture analysis and generation. Specifically, we used ChatGPT as a tool for suggesting context-specific gestures that can realize designer intent based on minimal prompts. We also find that ChatGPT can suggests novel yet appropriate gestures not present in the minimal training data. The use of LLMs is a promising avenue for gesture generation that reduce the need for laborious annotations and has the potential to flexibly and quickly adapt to different designer intents.