pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TPE-Net: Track Point Extraction and Association Network for Rail Path Proposal Generation
Authors: Jungwon Kang, Mohammadjavad Ghorbanalivakili, Gunho Sohn, David Beach, Veronica Marin
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

One essential feature of an autonomous train is minimizing collision risks with third-party objects. To estimate the risk, the control system must identify topological information of all the rail routes ahead on which the train can possibly move, especially within merging or diverging rails. This way, the train can figure out the status of potential obstacles with respect to its route and hence, make a timely decision. Numerous studies have successfully extracted all rail tracks as a whole within forward-looking images without considering element instances. Still, some image-based methods have employed hard-coded prior knowledge of railway geometry on 3D data to associate left-right rails and generate rail route instances. However, we propose a rail path extraction pipeline in which left-right rail pixels of each rail route instance are extracted and associated through a fully convolutional encoder-decoder architecture called TPE-Net. Two different regression branches for TPE-Net are proposed to regress the locations of center points of each rail route, along with their corresponding left-right pixels. Extracted rail pixels are then spatially clustered to generate topological information of all the possible train routes (ego-paths), discarding non-ego-path ones. Experimental results on a challenging, publicly released benchmark show true-positive-pixel level average precision and recall of 0.9207 and 0.8721, respectively, at about 12 frames per second. Even though our evaluation results are not higher than the SOTA, the proposed regression pipeline performs remarkably in extracting the correspondences by looking once at the image. It generates strong rail route hypotheses without reliance on camera parameters, 3D data, and geometrical constraints.
Mutation-Based Adversarial Attacks on Neural Text Detectors
Authors: Gongbo Liang, Jesus Guerrero, Izzat Alsmadi
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00

Neural text detectors aim to decide the characteristics that distinguish neural (machine-generated) from human texts. To challenge such detectors, adversarial attacks can alter the statistical characteristics of the generated text, making the detection task more and more difficult. Inspired by the advances of mutation analysis in software development and testing, in this paper, we propose character- and word-based mutation operators for generating adversarial samples to attack state-of-the-art natural text detectors. This falls under white-box adversarial attacks. In such attacks, attackers have access to the original text and create mutation instances based on this original text. The ultimate goal is to confuse machine learning models and classifiers and decrease their prediction accuracy.
Distributional GFlowNets with Quantile Flows
Authors: Dinghuai Zhang, Ling Pan, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a new family of probabilistic samplers where an agent learns a stochastic policy for generating complex combinatorial structure through a series of decision-making steps. Despite being inspired from reinforcement learning, the current GFlowNet framework is relatively limited in its applicability and cannot handle stochasticity in the reward function. In this work, we adopt a distributional paradigm for GFlowNets, turning each flow function into a distribution, thus providing more informative learning signals during training. By parameterizing each edge flow through their quantile functions, our proposed \textit{quantile matching} GFlowNet learning algorithm is able to learn a risk-sensitive policy, an essential component for handling scenarios with risk uncertainty. Moreover, we find that the distributional approach can achieve substantial improvement on existing benchmarks compared to prior methods due to our enhanced training algorithm, even in settings with deterministic rewards.
How to prepare your task head for finetuning
Authors: Yi Ren, Shangmin Guo, Wonho Bae, Danica J. Sutherland
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00

In deep learning, transferring information from a pretrained network to a downstream task by finetuning has many benefits. The choice of task head plays an important role in fine-tuning, as the pretrained and downstream tasks are usually different. Although there exist many different designs for finetuning, a full understanding of when and why these algorithms work has been elusive. We analyze how the choice of task head controls feature adaptation and hence influences the downstream performance. By decomposing the learning dynamics of adaptation, we find that the key aspect is the training accuracy and loss at the beginning of finetuning, which determines the "energy" available for the feature's adaptation. We identify a significant trend in the effect of changes in this initial energy on the resulting features after fine-tuning. Specifically, as the energy increases, the Euclidean and cosine distances between the resulting and original features increase, while their dot products (and the resulting features' norm) first increase and then decrease. Inspired by this, we give several practical principles that lead to better downstream performance. We analytically prove this trend in an overparamterized linear setting and verify its applicability to different experimental settings.
Interpretable Deep Learning for Forecasting Online Advertising Costs: Insights from the Competitive Bidding Landscape
Authors: Fynn Oldenburg, Qiwei Han, Maximilian Kaiser
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Feature Importance, Marketing, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Clustering, Time Series Forecasting

As advertisers increasingly shift their budgets toward digital advertising, accurately forecasting advertising costs becomes essential for optimizing marketing campaign returns. This paper presents a comprehensive study that employs various time-series forecasting methods to predict daily average CPC in the online advertising market. We evaluate the performance of statistical models, machine learning techniques, and deep learning approaches, including the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT). Our findings reveal that incorporating multivariate models, enriched with covariates derived from competitors' CPC patterns through time-series clustering, significantly improves forecasting accuracy. We interpret the results by analyzing feature importance and temporal attention, demonstrating how the models leverage both the advertiser's data and insights from the competitive landscape. Additionally, our method proves robust during major market shifts, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, consistently outperforming models that rely solely on individual advertisers' data. This study introduces a scalable technique for selecting relevant covariates from a broad pool of advertisers, offering more accurate long-term forecasts and strategic insights into budget allocation and competitive dynamics in digital advertising.
Multispectral Contrastive Learning with Viewmaker Networks
Authors: Jasmine Bayrooti, Noah Goodman, Alex Tamkin
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive learning methods have been applied to a range of domains and modalities by training models to identify similar "views" of data points. However, specialized scientific modalities pose a challenge for this paradigm, as identifying good views for each scientific instrument is complex and time-intensive. In this paper, we focus on applying contrastive learning approaches to a variety of remote sensing datasets. We show that Viewmaker networks, a recently proposed method for generating views, are promising for producing views in this setting without requiring extensive domain knowledge and trial and error. We apply Viewmaker to four multispectral imaging problems, each with a different format, finding that Viewmaker can outperform cropping- and reflection-based methods for contrastive learning in every case when evaluated on downstream classification tasks. This provides additional evidence that domain-agnostic methods can empower contrastive learning to scale to real-world scientific domains. Open source code can be found at https://github.com/jbayrooti/divmaker.
Informing clinical assessment by contextualizing post-hoc explanations of risk prediction models in type-2 diabetes
Authors: Shruthi Chari, Prasant Acharya, Daniel M. Gruen, Olivia Zhang, Elif K. Eyigoz, Mohamed Ghalwash, Oshani Seneviratne, Fernando Suarez Saiz, Pablo Meyer, Prithwish Chakraborty, Deborah L. McGuinness
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Medical experts may use Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems with greater trust if these are supported by contextual explanations that let the practitioner connect system inferences to their context of use. However, their importance in improving model usage and understanding has not been extensively studied. Hence, we consider a comorbidity risk prediction scenario and focus on contexts regarding the patients clinical state, AI predictions about their risk of complications, and algorithmic explanations supporting the predictions. We explore how relevant information for such dimensions can be extracted from Medical guidelines to answer typical questions from clinical practitioners. We identify this as a question answering (QA) task and employ several state-of-the-art LLMs to present contexts around risk prediction model inferences and evaluate their acceptability. Finally, we study the benefits of contextual explanations by building an end-to-end AI pipeline including data cohorting, AI risk modeling, post-hoc model explanations, and prototyped a visual dashboard to present the combined insights from different context dimensions and data sources, while predicting and identifying the drivers of risk of Chronic Kidney Disease - a common type-2 diabetes comorbidity. All of these steps were performed in engagement with medical experts, including a final evaluation of the dashboard results by an expert medical panel. We show that LLMs, in particular BERT and SciBERT, can be readily deployed to extract some relevant explanations to support clinical usage. To understand the value-add of the contextual explanations, the expert panel evaluated these regarding actionable insights in the relevant clinical setting. Overall, our paper is one of the first end-to-end analyses identifying the feasibility and benefits of contextual explanations in a real-world clinical use case.
UGAE: A Novel Approach to Non-exponential Discounting
Authors: Ariel Kwiatkowski, Vicky Kalogeiton, Julien Pettré, Marie-Paule Cani
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00

The discounting mechanism in Reinforcement Learning determines the relative importance of future and present rewards. While exponential discounting is widely used in practice, non-exponential discounting methods that align with human behavior are often desirable for creating human-like agents. However, non-exponential discounting methods cannot be directly applied in modern on-policy actor-critic algorithms. To address this issue, we propose Universal Generalized Advantage Estimation (UGAE), which allows for the computation of GAE advantage values with arbitrary discounting. Additionally, we introduce Beta-weighted discounting, a continuous interpolation between exponential and hyperbolic discounting, to increase flexibility in choosing a discounting method. To showcase the utility of UGAE, we provide an analysis of the properties of various discounting methods. We also show experimentally that agents with non-exponential discounting trained via UGAE outperform variants trained with Monte Carlo advantage estimation. Through analysis of various discounting methods and experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of UGAE with Beta-weighted discounting over the Monte Carlo baseline on standard RL benchmarks. UGAE is simple and easily integrated into any advantage-based algorithm as a replacement for the standard recursive GAE.
A Brief Report on LawGPT 1.0: A Virtual Legal Assistant Based on GPT-3
Authors: Ha-Thanh Nguyen
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

LawGPT 1.0 is a virtual legal assistant built on the state-of-the-art language model GPT-3, fine-tuned for the legal domain. The system is designed to provide legal assistance to users in a conversational manner, helping them with tasks such as answering legal questions, generating legal documents, and providing legal advice. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of LawGPT 1.0, its architecture, and its performance on a set of legal benchmark tasks. Please note that the detailed information about the model is protected by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and cannot be disclosed in this report.
Learning by Applying: A General Framework for Mathematical Reasoning via Enhancing Explicit Knowledge Learning
Authors: Jiayu Liu, Zhenya Huang, ChengXiang Zhai, Qi Liu
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Mathematical Reasoning

Mathematical reasoning is one of the crucial abilities of general artificial intelligence, which requires machines to master mathematical logic and knowledge from solving problems. However, existing approaches are not transparent (thus not interpretable) in terms of what knowledge has been learned and applied in the reasoning process. In this paper, we propose a general Learning by Applying (LeAp) framework to enhance existing models (backbones) in a principled way by explicit knowledge learning. In LeAp, we perform knowledge learning in a novel problem-knowledge-expression paradigm, with a Knowledge Encoder to acquire knowledge from problem data and a Knowledge Decoder to apply knowledge for expression reasoning. The learned mathematical knowledge, including word-word relations and word-operator relations, forms an explicit knowledge graph, which bridges the knowledge "learning" and "applying" organically. Moreover, for problem solving, we design a semantics-enhanced module and a reasoning-enhanced module that apply knowledge to improve the problem comprehension and symbol reasoning abilities of any backbone, respectively. We theoretically prove the superiority of LeAp's autonomous learning mechanism. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that LeAp improves all backbones' performances, learns accurate knowledge, and achieves a more interpretable reasoning process.
HateProof: Are Hateful Meme Detection Systems really Robust?
Authors: Piush Aggarwal, Pranit Chawla, Mithun Das, Punyajoy Saha, Binny Mathew, Torsten Zesch, Animesh Mukherjee
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Exploiting social media to spread hate has tremendously increased over the years. Lately, multi-modal hateful content such as memes has drawn relatively more traction than uni-modal content. Moreover, the availability of implicit content payloads makes them fairly challenging to be detected by existing hateful meme detection systems. In this paper, we present a use case study to analyze such systems' vulnerabilities against external adversarial attacks. We find that even very simple perturbations in uni-modal and multi-modal settings performed by humans with little knowledge about the model can make the existing detection models highly vulnerable. Empirically, we find a noticeable performance drop of as high as 10% in the macro-F1 score for certain attacks. As a remedy, we attempt to boost the model's robustness using contrastive learning as well as an adversarial training-based method - VILLA. Using an ensemble of the above two approaches, in two of our high resolution datasets, we are able to (re)gain back the performance to a large extent for certain attacks. We believe that ours is a first step toward addressing this crucial problem in an adversarial setting and would inspire more such investigations in the future.
Compositional Exemplars for In-context Learning
Authors: Jiacheng Ye, Zhiyong Wu, Jiangtao Feng, Tao Yu, Lingpeng Kong
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Contrastive Learning, In-Context Learning, Natural Language Inference, Open-Domain Question Answering, Point Processes, Question Answering, Semantic Parsing, Sentiment Analysis

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have shown impressive In-Context Learning (ICL) ability, where the model learns to do an unseen task via a prompt consisting of input-output examples as the demonstration, without any parameter updates. The performance of ICL is highly dominated by the quality of the selected in-context examples. However, previous selection methods are mostly based on simple heuristics, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this work, we formulate in-context example selection as a subset selection problem. We propose CEIL (Compositional Exemplars for In-context Learning), which is instantiated by Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to model the interaction between the given input and in-context examples, and optimized through a carefully-designed contrastive learning objective to obtain preference from LMs. We validate CEIL on 12 classification and generation datasets from 7 distinct NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, natural language inference, commonsense reasoning, open-domain question answering, code generation, and semantic parsing. Extensive experiments demonstrate not only the state-of-the-art performance but also the transferability and compositionality of CEIL, shedding new light on effective and efficient in-context learning. Our code is released at https://github.com/HKUNLP/icl-ceil.
CatAlyst: Domain-Extensible Intervention for Preventing Task Procrastination Using Large Generative Models
Authors: Riku Arakawa, Hiromu Yakura, Masataka Goto
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00

CatAlyst uses generative models to help workers' progress by influencing their task engagement instead of directly contributing to their task outputs. It prompts distracted workers to resume their tasks by generating a continuation of their work and presenting it as an intervention that is more context-aware than conventional (predetermined) feedback. The prompt can function by drawing their interest and lowering the hurdle for resumption even when the generated continuation is insufficient to substitute their work, while recent human-AI collaboration research aiming at work substitution depends on a stable high accuracy. This frees CatAlyst from domain-specific model-tuning and makes it applicable to various tasks. Our studies involving writing and slide-editing tasks demonstrated CatAlyst's effectiveness in helping workers swiftly resume tasks with a lowered cognitive load. The results suggest a new form of human-AI collaboration where large generative models publicly available but imperfect for each individual domain can contribute to workers' digital well-being.
Counter-GAP: Counterfactual Bias Evaluation through Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns
Authors: Zhongbin Xie, Vid Kocijan, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oana-Maria Camburu
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, counterfactual, Data Augmentation

Bias-measuring datasets play a critical role in detecting biased behavior of language models and in evaluating progress of bias mitigation methods. In this work, we focus on evaluating gender bias through coreference resolution, where previous datasets are either hand-crafted or fail to reliably measure an explicitly defined bias. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel method to collect diverse, natural, and minimally distant text pairs via counterfactual generation, and construct Counter-GAP, an annotated dataset consisting of 4008 instances grouped into 1002 quadruples. We further identify a bias cancellation problem in previous group-level metrics on Counter-GAP, and propose to use the difference between inconsistency across genders and within genders to measure bias at a quadruple level. Our results show that four pre-trained language models are significantly more inconsistent across different gender groups than within each group, and that a name-based counterfactual data augmentation method is more effective to mitigate such bias than an anonymization-based method.
The Impact of Expertise in the Loop for Exploring Machine Rationality
Authors: Changkun Ou, Sven Mayer, Andreas Butz
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00

Human-in-the-loop optimization utilizes human expertise to guide machine optimizers iteratively and search for an optimal solution in a solution space. While prior empirical studies mainly investigated novices, we analyzed the impact of the levels of expertise on the outcome quality and corresponding subjective satisfaction. We conducted a study (N=60) in text, photo, and 3D mesh optimization contexts. We found that novices can achieve an expert level of quality performance, but participants with higher expertise led to more optimization iteration with more explicit preference while keeping satisfaction low. In contrast, novices were more easily satisfied and terminated faster. Therefore, we identified that experts seek more diverse outcomes while the machine reaches optimal results, and the observed behavior can be used as a performance indicator for human-in-the-loop system designers to improve underlying models. We inform future research to be cautious about the impact of user expertise when designing human-in-the-loop systems.
DocILE Benchmark for Document Information Localization and Extraction
Authors: Štěpán Šimsa, Milan Šulc, Michal Uřičář, Yash Patel, Ahmed Hamdi, Matěj Kocián, Matyáš Skalický, Jiří Matas, Antoine Doucet, Mickaël Coustaty, Dimosthenis Karatzas
Date: 2023-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Key Information Extraction, Unsupervised Pre-training

This paper introduces the DocILE benchmark with the largest dataset of business documents for the tasks of Key Information Localization and Extraction and Line Item Recognition. It contains 6.7k annotated business documents, 100k synthetically generated documents, and nearly~1M unlabeled documents for unsupervised pre-training. The dataset has been built with knowledge of domain- and task-specific aspects, resulting in the following key features: (i) annotations in 55 classes, which surpasses the granularity of previously published key information extraction datasets by a large margin; (ii) Line Item Recognition represents a highly practical information extraction task, where key information has to be assigned to items in a table; (iii) documents come from numerous layouts and the test set includes zero- and few-shot cases as well as layouts commonly seen in the training set. The benchmark comes with several baselines, including RoBERTa, LayoutLMv3 and DETR-based Table Transformer; applied to both tasks of the DocILE benchmark, with results shared in this paper, offering a quick starting point for future work. The dataset, baselines and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/rossumai/docile.