pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Beyond Single-Feature Importance with ICECREAM
Authors: Michael Oesterle, Patrick Blöbaum, Atalanti A. Mastakouri, Elke Kirschbaum
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Feature Importance

Which set of features was responsible for a certain output of a machine learning model? Which components caused the failure of a cloud computing application? These are just two examples of questions we are addressing in this work by Identifying Coalition-based Explanations for Common and Rare Events in Any Model (ICECREAM). Specifically, we propose an information-theoretic quantitative measure for the influence of a coalition of variables on the distribution of a target variable. This allows us to identify which set of factors is essential to obtain a certain outcome, as opposed to well-established explainability and causal contribution analysis methods which can assign contributions only to individual factors and rank them by their importance. In experiments with synthetic and real-world data, we show that ICECREAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods for explainability and root cause analysis, and achieves impressive accuracy in both tasks.
Generating Redstone Style Cities in Minecraft
Authors: Shuo Huang, Chengpeng Hu, Julian Togelius, Jialin Liu
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Layout Generation, Minecraft

Procedurally generating cities in Minecraft provides players more diverse scenarios and could help understand and improve the design of cities in other digital worlds and the real world. This paper presents a city generator that was submitted as an entry to the 2023 Edition of Minecraft Settlement Generation Competition for Minecraft. The generation procedure is composed of six main steps, namely vegetation clearing, terrain reshaping, building layout generation, route planning, streetlight placement, and wall construction. Three algorithms, including a heuristic-based algorithm, an evolving layout algorithm, and a random one are applied to generate the building layout, thus determining where to place different redstone style buildings, and tested by generating cities on random maps in limited time. Experimental results show that the heuristic-based algorithm is capable of finding an acceptable building layout faster for flat maps, while the evolving layout algorithm performs better in evolving layout for rugged maps. A user study is conducted to compare our generator with outstanding entries of the competition's 2022 edition using the competition's evaluation criteria and shows that our generator performs well in the adaptation and functionality criteria
Perturbing a Neural Network to Infer Effective Connectivity: Evidence from Synthetic EEG Data
Authors: Peizhen Yang, Xinke Shen, Zongsheng Li, Zixiang Luo, Kexin Lou, Quanying Liu
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Identifying causal relationships among distinct brain areas, known as effective connectivity, holds key insights into the brain's information processing and cognitive functions. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals exhibit intricate dynamics and inter-areal interactions within the brain. However, methods for characterizing nonlinear causal interactions among multiple brain regions remain relatively underdeveloped. In this study, we proposed a data-driven framework to infer effective connectivity by perturbing the trained neural networks. Specifically, we trained neural networks (i.e., CNN, vanilla RNN, GRU, LSTM, and Transformer) to predict future EEG signals according to historical data and perturbed the networks' input to obtain effective connectivity (EC) between the perturbed EEG channel and the rest of the channels. The EC reflects the causal impact of perturbing one node on others. The performance was tested on the synthetic EEG generated by a biological-plausible Jansen-Rit model. CNN and Transformer obtained the best performance on both 3-channel and 90-channel synthetic EEG data, outperforming the classical Granger causality method. Our work demonstrated the potential of perturbing an artificial neural network, learned to predict future system dynamics, to uncover the underlying causal structure.
Sig-Splines: universal approximation and convex calibration of time series generative models
Authors: Magnus Wiese, Phillip Murray, Ralf Korn
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

We propose a novel generative model for multivariate discrete-time time series data. Drawing inspiration from the construction of neural spline flows, our algorithm incorporates linear transformations and the signature transform as a seamless substitution for traditional neural networks. This approach enables us to achieve not only the universality property inherent in neural networks but also introduces convexity in the model's parameters.
Towards Building More Robust Models with Frequency Bias
Authors: Qingwen Bu, Dong Huang, Heming Cui
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial samples has been a major impediment to their broad applications, despite their success in various fields. Recently, some works suggested that adversarially-trained models emphasize the importance of low-frequency information to achieve higher robustness. While several attempts have been made to leverage this frequency characteristic, they have all faced the issue that applying low-pass filters directly to input images leads to irreversible loss of discriminative information and poor generalizability to datasets with distinct frequency features. This paper presents a plug-and-play module called the Frequency Preference Control Module that adaptively reconfigures the low- and high-frequency components of intermediate feature representations, providing better utilization of frequency in robust learning. Empirical studies show that our proposed module can be easily incorporated into any adversarial training framework, further improving model robustness across different architectures and datasets. Additionally, experiments were conducted to examine how the frequency bias of robust models impacts the adversarial training process and its final robustness, revealing interesting insights.
Improving Surrogate Model Robustness to Perturbations for Dynamical Systems Through Machine Learning and Data Assimilation
Authors: Abhishek Ajayakumar, Soumyendu Raha
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Many real-world systems are modelled using complex ordinary differential equations (ODEs). However, the dimensionality of these systems can make them challenging to analyze. Dimensionality reduction techniques like Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) can be used in such cases. However, these reduced order models are susceptible to perturbations in the input. We propose a novel framework that combines machine learning and data assimilation techniques to improving surrogate models to handle perturbations in input data effectively. Through rigorous experiments on dynamical systems modelled on graphs, we demonstrate that our framework substantially improves the accuracy of surrogate models under input perturbations. Furthermore, we evaluate the framework's efficacy on alternative surrogate models, including neural ODEs, and the empirical results consistently show enhanced performance.
Space Engage: Collaborative Space Supervision for Contrastive-based Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Changqi Wang, Haoyu Xie, Yuhui Yuan, Chong Fu, Xiangyu Yue
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (S4) aims to train a segmentation model with limited labeled images and a substantial volume of unlabeled images. To improve the robustness of representations, powerful methods introduce a pixel-wise contrastive learning approach in latent space (i.e., representation space) that aggregates the representations to their prototypes in a fully supervised manner. However, previous contrastive-based S4 methods merely rely on the supervision from the model's output (logits) in logit space during unlabeled training. In contrast, we utilize the outputs in both logit space and representation space to obtain supervision in a collaborative way. The supervision from two spaces plays two roles: 1) reduces the risk of over-fitting to incorrect semantic information in logits with the help of representations; 2) enhances the knowledge exchange between the two spaces. Furthermore, unlike previous approaches, we use the similarity between representations and prototypes as a new indicator to tilt training those under-performing representations and achieve a more efficient contrastive learning process. Results on two public benchmarks demonstrate the competitive performance of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Information Retrieval Meets Large Language Models: A Strategic Report from Chinese IR Community
Authors: Qingyao Ai, Ting Bai, Zhao Cao, Yi Chang, Jiawei Chen, Zhumin Chen, Zhiyong Cheng, Shoubin Dong, Zhicheng Dou, Fuli Feng, Shen Gao, Jiafeng Guo, Xiangnan He, Yanyan Lan, Chenliang Li, Yiqun Liu, Ziyu Lyu, Weizhi Ma, Jun Ma, Zhaochun Ren, Pengjie Ren, Zhiqiang Wang, Mingwen Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Le Wu, Xin Xin, Jun Xu, Dawei Yin, Peng Zhang, Fan Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Min Zhang, Xiaofei Zhu
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

The research field of Information Retrieval (IR) has evolved significantly, expanding beyond traditional search to meet diverse user information needs. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in text understanding, generation, and knowledge inference, opening up exciting avenues for IR research. LLMs not only facilitate generative retrieval but also offer improved solutions for user understanding, model evaluation, and user-system interactions. More importantly, the synergistic relationship among IR models, LLMs, and humans forms a new technical paradigm that is more powerful for information seeking. IR models provide real-time and relevant information, LLMs contribute internal knowledge, and humans play a central role of demanders and evaluators to the reliability of information services. Nevertheless, significant challenges exist, including computational costs, credibility concerns, domain-specific limitations, and ethical considerations. To thoroughly discuss the transformative impact of LLMs on IR research, the Chinese IR community conducted a strategic workshop in April 2023, yielding valuable insights. This paper provides a summary of the workshop's outcomes, including the rethinking of IR's core values, the mutual enhancement of LLMs and IR, the proposal of a novel IR technical paradigm, and open challenges.
Enhancing conversational quality in language learning chatbots: An evaluation of GPT4 for ASR error correction
Authors: Long Mai, Julie Carson-Berndsen
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Textual Similarity, STS

The integration of natural language processing (NLP) technologies into educational applications has shown promising results, particularly in the language learning domain. Recently, many spoken open-domain chatbots have been used as speaking partners, helping language learners improve their language skills. However, one of the significant challenges is the high word-error-rate (WER) when recognizing non-native/non-fluent speech, which interrupts conversation flow and leads to disappointment for learners. This paper explores the use of GPT4 for ASR error correction in conversational settings. In addition to WER, we propose to use semantic textual similarity (STS) and next response sensibility (NRS) metrics to evaluate the impact of error correction models on the quality of the conversation. We find that transcriptions corrected by GPT4 lead to higher conversation quality, despite an increase in WER. GPT4 also outperforms standard error correction methods without the need for in-domain training data.
Multi-Grained Multimodal Interaction Network for Entity Linking
Authors: Pengfei Luo, Tong Xu, Shiwei Wu, Chen Zhu, Linli Xu, Enhong Chen
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Descriptive, Entity Linking, multimodal interaction

Multimodal entity linking (MEL) task, which aims at resolving ambiguous mentions to a multimodal knowledge graph, has attracted wide attention in recent years. Though large efforts have been made to explore the complementary effect among multiple modalities, however, they may fail to fully absorb the comprehensive expression of abbreviated textual context and implicit visual indication. Even worse, the inevitable noisy data may cause inconsistency of different modalities during the learning process, which severely degenerates the performance. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-GraIned Multimodal InteraCtion Network $\textbf{(MIMIC)}$ framework for solving the MEL task. Specifically, the unified inputs of mentions and entities are first encoded by textual/visual encoders separately, to extract global descriptive features and local detailed features. Then, to derive the similarity matching score for each mention-entity pair, we device three interaction units to comprehensively explore the intra-modal interaction and inter-modal fusion among features of entities and mentions. In particular, three modules, namely the Text-based Global-Local interaction Unit (TGLU), Vision-based DuaL interaction Unit (VDLU) and Cross-Modal Fusion-based interaction Unit (CMFU) are designed to capture and integrate the fine-grained representation lying in abbreviated text and implicit visual cues. Afterwards, we introduce a unit-consistency objective function via contrastive learning to avoid inconsistency and model degradation. Experimental results on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our solution outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines, and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of designed modules.
Two Tales of Platoon Intelligence for Autonomous Mobility Control: Enabling Deep Learning Recipes
Authors: Soohyun Park, Haemin Lee, Chanyoung Park, Soyi Jung, Minseok Choi, Joongheon Kim
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Management, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents the deep learning-based recent achievements to resolve the problem of autonomous mobility control and efficient resource management of autonomous vehicles and UAVs, i.e., (i) multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), and (ii) neural Myerson auction. Representatively, communication network (CommNet), which is one of the most popular MARL algorithms, is introduced to enable multiple agents to take actions in a distributed manner for their shared goals by training all agents' states and actions in a single neural network. Moreover, the neural Myerson auction guarantees trustfulness among multiple agents as well as achieves the optimal revenue of highly dynamic systems. Therefore, we survey the recent studies on autonomous mobility control based on MARL and neural Myerson auction. Furthermore, we emphasize that integration of MARL and neural Myerson auction is expected to be critical for efficient and trustful autonomous mobility services.
RaTE: a Reproducible automatic Taxonomy Evaluation by Filling the Gap
Authors: Tianjian Gao, Phillipe Langlais
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Taxonomies are an essential knowledge representation, yet most studies on automatic taxonomy construction (ATC) resort to manual evaluation to score proposed algorithms. We argue that automatic taxonomy evaluation (ATE) is just as important as taxonomy construction. We propose RaTE, an automatic label-free taxonomy scoring procedure, which relies on a large pre-trained language model. We apply our evaluation procedure to three state-of-the-art ATC algorithms with which we built seven taxonomies from the Yelp domain, and show that 1) RaTE correlates well with human judgments and 2) artificially degrading a taxonomy leads to decreasing RaTE score.
STRAPPER: Preference-based Reinforcement Learning via Self-training Augmentation and Peer Regularization
Authors: Yachen Kang, Li He, Jinxin Liu, Zifeng Zhuang, Donglin Wang
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, reinforcement-learning

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) promises to learn a complex reward function with binary human preference. However, such human-in-the-loop formulation requires considerable human effort to assign preference labels to segment pairs, hindering its large-scale applications. Recent approache has tried to reuse unlabeled segments, which implicitly elucidates the distribution of segments and thereby alleviates the human effort. And consistency regularization is further considered to improve the performance of semi-supervised learning. However, we notice that, unlike general classification tasks, in PbRL there exits a unique phenomenon that we defined as similarity trap in this paper. Intuitively, human can have diametrically opposite preferredness for similar segment pairs, but such similarity may trap consistency regularization fail in PbRL. Due to the existence of similarity trap, such consistency regularization improperly enhances the consistency possiblity of the model's predictions between segment pairs, and thus reduces the confidence in reward learning, since the augmented distribution does not match with the original one in PbRL. To overcome such issue, we present a self-training method along with our proposed peer regularization, which penalizes the reward model memorizing uninformative labels and acquires confident predictions. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach is capable of learning well a variety of locomotion and robotic manipulation behaviors using different semi-supervised alternatives and peer regularization.
PubMed and Beyond: Biomedical Literature Search in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Qiao Jin, Robert Leaman, Zhiyong Lu
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Survey

Biomedical research yields a wealth of information, much of which is only accessible through the literature. Consequently, literature search is an essential tool for building on prior knowledge in clinical and biomedical research. Although recent improvements in artificial intelligence have expanded functionality beyond keyword-based search, these advances may be unfamiliar to clinicians and researchers. In response, we present a survey of literature search tools tailored to both general and specific information needs in biomedicine, with the objective of helping readers efficiently fulfill their information needs. We first examine the widely used PubMed search engine, discussing recent improvements and continued challenges. We then describe literature search tools catering to five specific information needs: 1. Identifying high-quality clinical research for evidence-based medicine. 2. Retrieving gene-related information for precision medicine and genomics. 3. Searching by meaning, including natural language questions. 4. Locating related articles with literature recommendation. 5. Mining literature to discover associations between concepts such as diseases and genetic variants. Additionally, we cover practical considerations and best practices for choosing and using these tools. Finally, we provide a perspective on the future of literature search engines, considering recent breakthroughs in large language models such as ChatGPT. In summary, our survey provides a comprehensive view of biomedical literature search functionalities with 36 publicly available tools.
What's meant by explainable model: A Scoping Review
Authors: Mallika Mainali, Rosina O Weber
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

We often see the term explainable in the titles of papers that describe applications based on artificial intelligence (AI). However, the literature in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) indicates that explanations in XAI are application- and domain-specific, hence requiring evaluation whenever they are employed to explain a model that makes decisions for a specific application problem. Additionally, the literature reveals that the performance of post-hoc methods, particularly feature attribution methods, varies substantially hinting that they do not represent a solution to AI explainability. Therefore, when using XAI methods, the quality and suitability of their information outputs should be evaluated within the specific application. For these reasons, we used a scoping review methodology to investigate papers that apply AI models and adopt methods to generate post-hoc explanations while referring to said models as explainable. This paper investigates whether the term explainable model is adopted by authors under the assumption that incorporating a post-hoc XAI method suffices to characterize a model as explainable. To inspect this problem, our review analyzes whether these papers conducted evaluations. We found that 81% of the application papers that refer to their approaches as an explainable model do not conduct any form of evaluation on the XAI method they used.
Towards A Unified Agent with Foundation Models
Authors: Norman Di Palo, Arunkumar Byravan, Leonard Hasenclever, Markus Wulfmeier, Nicolas Heess, Martin Riedmiller
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scene Understanding, Scheduling

Language Models and Vision Language Models have recently demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in terms of understanding human intentions, reasoning, scene understanding, and planning-like behaviour, in text form, among many others. In this work, we investigate how to embed and leverage such abilities in Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. We design a framework that uses language as the core reasoning tool, exploring how this enables an agent to tackle a series of fundamental RL challenges, such as efficient exploration, reusing experience data, scheduling skills, and learning from observations, which traditionally require separate, vertically designed algorithms. We test our method on a sparse-reward simulated robotic manipulation environment, where a robot needs to stack a set of objects. We demonstrate substantial performance improvements over baselines in exploration efficiency and ability to reuse data from offline datasets, and illustrate how to reuse learned skills to solve novel tasks or imitate videos of human experts.