pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Semantic Ensemble Loss and Latent Refinement for High-Fidelity Neural Image Compression
Authors: Daxin Li, Yuanchao Bai, Kai Wang, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, MS-SSIM, SSIM

Recent advancements in neural compression have surpassed traditional codecs in PSNR and MS-SSIM measurements. However, at low bit-rates, these methods can introduce visually displeasing artifacts, such as blurring, color shifting, and texture loss, thereby compromising perceptual quality of images. To address these issues, this study presents an enhanced neural compression method designed for optimal visual fidelity. We have trained our model with a sophisticated semantic ensemble loss, integrating Charbonnier loss, perceptual loss, style loss, and a non-binary adversarial loss, to enhance the perceptual quality of image reconstructions. Additionally, we have implemented a latent refinement process to generate content-aware latent codes. These codes adhere to bit-rate constraints, balance the trade-off between distortion and fidelity, and prioritize bit allocation to regions of greater importance. Our empirical findings demonstrate that this approach significantly improves the statistical fidelity of neural image compression. On CLIC2024 validation set, our approach achieves a 62% bitrate saving compared to MS-ILLM under FID metric.
CMMU: A Benchmark for Chinese Multi-modal Multi-type Question Understanding and Reasoning
Authors: Zheqi He, Xinya Wu, Pengfei Zhou, Richeng Xuan, Guang Liu, Xi Yang, Qiannan Zhu, Hua Huang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Position

Multi-modal large language models(MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress and demonstrated powerful knowledge comprehension and reasoning abilities. However, the mastery of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for evaluating the intelligence of MLLMs, continues to be a challenge. Current multi-modal benchmarks for domain-specific knowledge concentrate on multiple-choice questions and are predominantly available in English, which imposes limitations on the comprehensiveness of the evaluation. To this end, we introduce CMMU, a novel benchmark for multi-modal and multi-type question understanding and reasoning in Chinese. CMMU consists of 3,603 questions in 7 subjects, covering knowledge from primary to high school. The questions can be categorized into 3 types: multiple-choice, multiple-response, and fill-in-the-blank, bringing greater challenges to MLLMs. In addition, we propose an evaluation strategy called Positional Error Variance for assessing multiple-choice questions. The strategy aims to perform a quantitative analysis of position bias. We evaluate seven open-source MLLMs along with GPT4-V, Gemini-Pro, and Qwen-VL-Plus. The results demonstrate that CMMU poses a significant challenge to the recent MLLMs. The data and code are available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/CMMU.
Conformal Prediction Sets Improve Human Decision Making
Authors: Jesse C. Cresswell, Yi Sui, Bhargava Kumar, Noël Vouitsis
Date: 2024-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Decision Making, Prediction

In response to everyday queries, humans explicitly signal uncertainty and offer alternative answers when they are unsure. Machine learning models that output calibrated prediction sets through conformal prediction mimic this human behaviour; larger sets signal greater uncertainty while providing alternatives. In this work, we study the usefulness of conformal prediction sets as an aid for human decision making by conducting a pre-registered randomized controlled trial with conformal prediction sets provided to human subjects. With statistical significance, we find that when humans are given conformal prediction sets their accuracy on tasks improves compared to fixed-size prediction sets with the same coverage guarantee. The results show that quantifying model uncertainty with conformal prediction is helpful for human-in-the-loop decision making and human-AI teams.
Linear Periodically Time-Variant Digital PLL Phase Noise Modeling Using Conversion Matrices and Uncorrelated Upsampling
Authors: Hongyu Lu, Patrick P. Mercier
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

This paper introduces a conversion matrix method for linear periodically time-variant (LPTV) digital phase-locked loop (DPLL) phase noise modeling that offers precise and computationally efficient results to enable rapid design iteration and optimization. Unlike many previous studies, which either assume linear time-invariance (LTI) and therefore overlook phase noise aliasing effects, or solve LPTV systems with noise folding and multiple sampling rate conversions that heightens modeling and computational complexity, the proposed conversion matrix method allows the designer to represent LPTV systems using intuitive LTI-like transfer functions with excellent accuracy. Additionally, the uncorrelated upsampling method addresses the cross-correlated spectrum of cyclostationary noise sources by a simple matrix multiplication. This eliminates the need to consider the beat frequency of the upsampled noise source and the system with different sampling rates, thus improving computational efficiency. The proposed algorithm is applied to modeling a integer-N DPLL with time-varying proportional loop gain, and the modeling accuracy is validated with Simulink transient simulations.
SWRNet: A Deep Learning Approach for Small Surface Water Area Recognition Onboard Satellite
Authors: Trong-An Bui, Pei-Jun Lee
Date: 2023-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 2023 10
Tasks: 2D Semantic Segmentation

This article proposes a deep learning approach for small surface water recognition using multispectral satellite imaging, which reduces the computational complexity by 18.66 times and increases the accuracy of surface water recognition by up to 14.1%. The proposed model uses near infrared combined with RGB spectral imagery to increase the accuracy of surface water recognition. In addition, since surface water only accounts for a small percentage of the remote sensing dataset, thus creating an imbalance problem, a proposed loss function is introduced to combine region-based and distribution-based loss. This article introduces an adaptive factor that automatically adjusts the weighting between distribution- and region-based loss functions. The proposed adaptive factor is determined based on the loss value of the previous training step. The mean intersection over union of surface water between predicted and ground truth regions is recorded as 0.80.
Multimodal Pathway: Improve Transformers with Irrelevant Data from Other Modalities
Authors: Yiyuan Zhang, Xiaohan Ding, Kaixiong Gong, Yixiao Ge, Ying Shan, Xiangyu Yue
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

We propose to improve transformers of a specific modality with irrelevant data from other modalities, e.g., improve an ImageNet model with audio or point cloud datasets. We would like to highlight that the data samples of the target modality are irrelevant to the other modalities, which distinguishes our method from other works utilizing paired (e.g., CLIP) or interleaved data of different modalities. We propose a methodology named Multimodal Pathway - given a target modality and a transformer designed for it, we use an auxiliary transformer trained with data of another modality and construct pathways to connect components of the two models so that data of the target modality can be processed by both models. In this way, we utilize the universal sequence-to-sequence modeling abilities of transformers obtained from two modalities. As a concrete implementation, we use a modality-specific tokenizer and task-specific head as usual but utilize the transformer blocks of the auxiliary model via a proposed method named Cross-Modal Re-parameterization, which exploits the auxiliary weights without any inference costs. On the image, point cloud, video, and audio recognition tasks, we observe significant and consistent performance improvements with irrelevant data from other modalities. The code and models are available at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/M2PT.
Adaptive Mobile Manipulation for Articulated Objects In the Open World
Authors: Haoyu Xiong, Russell Mendonca, Kenneth Shaw, Deepak Pathak
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to pick-move-place, which is arguably just the tip of the iceberg in this area. In this paper, we introduce Open-World Mobile Manipulation System, a full-stack approach to tackle realistic articulated object operation, e.g. real-world doors, cabinets, drawers, and refrigerators in open-ended unstructured environments. The robot utilizes an adaptive learning framework to initially learns from a small set of data through behavior cloning, followed by learning from online practice on novel objects that fall outside the training distribution. We also develop a low-cost mobile manipulation hardware platform capable of safe and autonomous online adaptation in unstructured environments with a cost of around 20,000 USD. In our experiments we utilize 20 articulate objects across 4 buildings in the CMU campus. With less than an hour of online learning for each object, the system is able to increase success rate from 50% of BC pre-training to 95% using online adaptation. Video results at https://open-world-mobilemanip.github.io/
TURNA: A Turkish Encoder-Decoder Language Model for Enhanced Understanding and Generation
Authors: Gökçe Uludoğan, Zeynep Yirmibeşoğlu Balal, Furkan Akkurt, Melikşah Türker, Onur Güngör, Susan Üsküdarlı
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding

The recent advances in natural language processing have predominantly favored well-resourced English-centric models, resulting in a significant gap with low-resource languages. In this work, we introduce the language model TURNA, which is developed for the low-resource language Turkish and is capable of both natural language understanding and generation tasks. TURNA is pretrained with an encoder-decoder architecture based on the unified framework UL2 with a diverse corpus that we specifically curated for this purpose. We evaluated TURNA with three generation tasks and five understanding tasks for Turkish. The results show that TURNA outperforms several multilingual models in both understanding and generation tasks, and competes with monolingual Turkish models in understanding tasks. TURNA is made available at https://huggingface.co/boun-tabi-LMG/TURNA .
Efficient Optimisation of Physical Reservoir Computers using only a Delayed Input
Authors: Enrico Picco, Lina Jaurigue, Kathy Lüdge, Serge Massar
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

We present an experimental validation of a recently proposed optimization technique for reservoir computing, using an optoelectronic setup. Reservoir computing is a robust framework for signal processing applications, and the development of efficient optimization approaches remains a key challenge. The technique we address leverages solely a delayed version of the input signal to identify the optimal operational region of the reservoir, simplifying the traditionally time-consuming task of hyperparameter tuning. We verify the effectiveness of this approach on different benchmark tasks and reservoir operating conditions.
Genie: Achieving Human Parity in Content-Grounded Datasets Generation
Authors: Asaf Yehudai, Boaz Carmeli, Yosi Mass, Ofir Arviv, Nathaniel Mills, Assaf Toledo, Eyal Shnarch, Leshem Choshen
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Long Form Question Answering, Question Answering

The lack of high-quality data for content-grounded generation tasks has been identified as a major obstacle to advancing these tasks. To address this gap, we propose Genie, a novel method for automatically generating high-quality content-grounded data. It consists of three stages: (a) Content Preparation, (b) Generation: creating task-specific examples from the content (e.g., question-answer pairs or summaries). (c) Filtering mechanism aiming to ensure the quality and faithfulness of the generated data. We showcase this methodology by generating three large-scale synthetic data, making wishes, for Long-Form Question-Answering (LFQA), summarization, and information extraction. In a human evaluation, our generated data was found to be natural and of high quality. Furthermore, we compare models trained on our data with models trained on human-written data -- ELI5 and ASQA for LFQA and CNN-DailyMail for Summarization. We show that our models are on par with or outperforming models trained on human-generated data and consistently outperforming them in faithfulness. Finally, we applied our method to create LFQA data within the medical domain and compared a model trained on it with models trained on other domains.
The Typing Cure: Experiences with Large Language Model Chatbots for Mental Health Support
Authors: Inhwa Song, Sachin R. Pendse, Neha Kumar, Munmun De Choudhury
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Navigate

People experiencing severe distress increasingly use Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots as mental health support tools. Discussions on social media have described how engagements were lifesaving for some, but evidence suggests that general-purpose LLM chatbots also have notable risks that could endanger the welfare of users if not designed responsibly. In this study, we investigate the lived experiences of people who have used LLM chatbots for mental health support. We build on interviews with 21 individuals from globally diverse backgrounds to analyze how users create unique support roles for their chatbots, fill in gaps in everyday care, and navigate associated cultural limitations when seeking support from chatbots. We ground our analysis in psychotherapy literature around effective support, and introduce the concept of therapeutic alignment, or aligning AI with therapeutic values for mental health contexts. Our study offers recommendations for how designers can approach the ethical and effective use of LLM chatbots and other AI mental health support tools in mental health care.
Progressive Multi-task Anti-Noise Learning and Distilling Frameworks for Fine-grained Vehicle Recognition
Authors: Dichao Liu
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Fine-Grained Image Classification, Image Denoising

Fine-grained vehicle recognition (FGVR) is an essential fundamental technology for intelligent transportation systems, but very difficult because of its inherent intra-class variation. Most previous FGVR studies only focus on the intra-class variation caused by different shooting angles, positions, etc., while the intra-class variation caused by image noise has received little attention. This paper proposes a progressive multi-task anti-noise learning (PMAL) framework and a progressive multi-task distilling (PMD) framework to solve the intra-class variation problem in FGVR due to image noise. The PMAL framework achieves high recognition accuracy by treating image denoising as an additional task in image recognition and progressively forcing a model to learn noise invariance. The PMD framework transfers the knowledge of the PMAL-trained model into the original backbone network, which produces a model with about the same recognition accuracy as the PMAL-trained model, but without any additional overheads over the original backbone network. Combining the two frameworks, we obtain models that significantly exceed previous state-of-the-art methods in recognition accuracy on two widely-used, standard FGVR datasets, namely Stanford Cars, and CompCars, as well as three additional surveillance image-based vehicle-type classification datasets, namely Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT)-Vehicle, Vehicle Type Image Data 2 (VTID2), and Vehicle Images Dataset for Make Model Recognition (VIDMMR), without any additional overheads over the original backbone networks. The source code is available at https://github.com/Dichao-Liu/Anti-noise_FGVR
Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughts
Authors: Maciej Besta, Florim Memedi, Zhenyu Zhang, Robert Gerstenberger, Guangyuan Piao, Nils Blach, Piotr Nyczyk, Marcin Copik, Grzegorz Kwaśniewski, Jürgen Müller, Lukas Gianinazzi, Ales Kubicek, Hubert Niewiadomski, Aidan O'Mahony, Onur Mutlu, Torsten Hoefler
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning, Prompt Engineering

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed significant progress in recent years, with a notable focus on improving large language models' (LLM) performance through innovative prompting techniques. Among these, prompt engineering coupled with structures has emerged as a promising paradigm, with designs such as Chain-of-Thought, Tree of Thoughts, or Graph of Thoughts, in which the overall LLM reasoning is guided by a structure such as a graph. As illustrated with numerous examples, this paradigm significantly enhances the LLM's capability to solve numerous tasks, ranging from logical or mathematical reasoning to planning or creative writing. To facilitate the understanding of this growing field and pave the way for future developments, we devise a general blueprint for effective and efficient LLM reasoning schemes. For this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the prompt execution pipeline, clarifying and clearly defining different concepts. We then build the first taxonomy of structure-enhanced LLM reasoning schemes. We focus on identifying fundamental classes of harnessed structures, and we analyze the representations of these structures, algorithms executed with these structures, and many others. We refer to these structures as reasoning topologies, because their representation becomes to a degree spatial, as they are contained within the LLM context. Our study compares existing prompting schemes using the proposed taxonomy, discussing how certain design choices lead to different patterns in performance and cost. We also outline theoretical underpinnings, relationships between prompting and other parts of the LLM ecosystem such as knowledge bases, and the associated research challenges. Our work will help to advance future prompt engineering techniques.
Single and bi-layered 2-D acoustic soft tactile skin (AST2)
Authors: Vishnu Rajendran, Simon Parsons, Amir Ghalamzan E
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

This paper aims to present an innovative and cost-effective design for Acoustic Soft Tactile (AST) Skin, with the primary goal of significantly enhancing the accuracy of 2-D tactile feature estimation. The existing challenge lies in achieving precise tactile feature estimation, especially concerning contact geometry characteristics, using cost-effective solutions. We hypothesise that by harnessing acoustic energy through dedicated acoustic channels in 2 layers beneath the sensing surface and analysing amplitude modulation, we can effectively decode interactions on the sensory surface, thereby improving tactile feature estimation. Our approach involves the distinct separation of hardware components responsible for emitting and receiving acoustic signals, resulting in a modular and highly customizable skin design. Practical tests demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel design, achieving remarkable precision in estimating contact normal forces (MAE < 0.8 N), 2D contact localisation (MAE < 0.7 mm), and contact surface diameter (MAE < 0.3 mm). In conclusion, the AST skin, with its innovative design and modular architecture, successfully addresses the challenge of tactile feature estimation. The presented results showcase its ability to precisely estimate various tactile features, making it a practical and cost-effective solution for robotic applications.
POUR-Net: A Population-Prior-Aided Over-Under-Representation Network for Low-Count PET Attenuation Map Generation
Authors: Bo Zhou, Jun Hou, Tianqi Chen, Yinchi Zhou, Xiongchao Chen, Huidong Xie, Qiong Liu, Xueqi Guo, Yu-Jung Tsai, Vladimir Y. Panin, Takuya Toyonaga, James S. Duncan, Chi Liu
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

Low-dose PET offers a valuable means of minimizing radiation exposure in PET imaging. However, the prevalent practice of employing additional CT scans for generating attenuation maps (u-map) for PET attenuation correction significantly elevates radiation doses. To address this concern and further mitigate radiation exposure in low-dose PET exams, we propose POUR-Net - an innovative population-prior-aided over-under-representation network that aims for high-quality attenuation map generation from low-dose PET. First, POUR-Net incorporates an over-under-representation network (OUR-Net) to facilitate efficient feature extraction, encompassing both low-resolution abstracted and fine-detail features, for assisting deep generation on the full-resolution level. Second, complementing OUR-Net, a population prior generation machine (PPGM) utilizing a comprehensive CT-derived u-map dataset, provides additional prior information to aid OUR-Net generation. The integration of OUR-Net and PPGM within a cascade framework enables iterative refinement of $\mu$-map generation, resulting in the production of high-quality $\mu$-maps. Experimental results underscore the effectiveness of POUR-Net, showing it as a promising solution for accurate CT-free low-count PET attenuation correction, which also surpasses the performance of previous baseline methods.
RomanSetu: Efficiently unlocking multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models via Romanization
Authors: Jaavid Aktar Husain, Raj Dabre, Aswanth Kumar, Jay Gala, Thanmay Jayakumar, Ratish Puduppully, Anoop Kunchukuttan
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Pretraining, Sentiment Analysis

This study addresses the challenge of extending Large Language Models (LLMs) to non-English languages that use non-Roman scripts. We propose an approach that utilizes the romanized form of text as an interface for LLMs, hypothesizing that its frequent informal use and shared tokens with English enhance cross-lingual alignment. Our approach involves the continual pretraining of an English LLM like Llama 2 on romanized text of non-English, non-Roman script languages, followed by instruction tuning on romanized data. The results indicate that romanized text not only reduces token fertility by 2x-4x but also matches or outperforms native script representation across various NLU, NLG, and MT tasks. Moreover, the embeddings computed on romanized text exhibit closer alignment with their English translations than those from the native script. Our approach presents a promising direction for leveraging the power of English LLMs in languages traditionally underrepresented in NLP. Our code is available on https://github.com/AI4Bharat/romansetu.
Transformers and Cortical Waves: Encoders for Pulling In Context Across Time
Authors: Lyle Muller, Patricia S. Churchland, Terrence J. Sejnowski
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The capabilities of transformer networks such as ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have captured the world's attention. The crucial computational mechanism underlying their performance relies on transforming a complete input sequence - for example, all the words in a sentence - into a long "encoding vector" that allows transformers to learn long-range temporal dependencies in naturalistic sequences. Specifically, "self-attention" applied to this encoding vector enhances temporal context in transformers by computing associations between pairs of words in the input sequence. We suggest that waves of neural activity traveling across single cortical areas or multiple regions at the whole-brain scale could implement a similar encoding principle. By encapsulating recent input history into a single spatial pattern at each moment in time, cortical waves may enable temporal context to be extracted from sequences of sensory inputs, the same computational principle used in transformers.