pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation
Authors: Rong Shan, Jiachen Zhu, Jianghao Lin, Chenxu Zhu, Bo Chen, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

In this paper, we address the lifelong sequential behavior incomprehension problem in large language models (LLMs) for recommendation, where LLMs struggle to extract useful information from long user behavior sequences, even within their context limits. To tackle this, we propose ReLLaX (Retrieval-enhanced Large Language models Plus), a framework offering optimization across data, prompt, and parameter levels. At the data level, we introduce Semantic User Behavior Retrieval (SUBR) to reduce sequence heterogeneity, making it easier for LLMs to extract key information. For prompt-level enhancement, we employ Soft Prompt Augmentation (SPA) to inject collaborative knowledge, aligning item representations with recommendation tasks and improving LLMs's exploration of item relationships. Finally, at the parameter level, we propose Component Fully-interactive LoRA (CFLoRA), which enhances LoRA's expressiveness by enabling interactions between its components, allowing better capture of sequential information. Moreover, we present new perspectives to compare current LoRA-based LLM4Rec methods, i.e. from both a composite and a decomposed view. We theoretically demonstrate that the ways they employ LoRA for recommendation are degraded versions of our CFLoRA, with different constraints on atom component interactions. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate ReLLaX's superiority over existing baselines and its ability to mitigate lifelong sequential behavior incomprehension effectively.
AgentRec: Agent Recommendation Using Sentence Embeddings Aligned to Human Feedback
Authors: Joshua Park, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings

Multi-agent systems must decide which agent is the most appropriate for a given task. We propose a novel architecture for recommending which LLM agent out of many should perform a task given a natural language prompt by extending the Sentence-BERT (SBERT) encoder model. On test data, we are able to achieve a top-1 accuracy of 92.2% with each classification taking less than 300 milliseconds. In contrast to traditional classification methods, our architecture is computationally cheap, adaptive to new classes, interpretable, and controllable with arbitrary metrics through reinforcement learning. By encoding natural language prompts into sentence embeddings, our model captures the semantic content relevant to recommending an agent. The distance between sentence embeddings that belong to the same agent is then minimized through fine-tuning and aligned to human values through reinforcement learning from human feedback. This allows the classification of natural language prompts based on their nearest neighbors by measuring the cosine similarity between embeddings. This work is made possible through the generation of a synthetic dataset for agent recommendation, which we have open-sourced to the public along with the code for AgentRec recommendation system at https://github.com/joshprk/agentrec.
Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics and Koopman operators with Shallow Recurrent Decoder Networks
Authors: Mars Liyao Gao, Jan P. Williams, J. Nathan Kutz
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Modeling real-world spatio-temporal data is exceptionally difficult due to inherent high dimensionality, measurement noise, partial observations, and often expensive data collection procedures. In this paper, we present Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics with SHallow REcurrent Decoder networks (SINDy-SHRED), a method to jointly solve the sensing and model identification problems with simple implementation, efficient computation, and robust performance. SINDy-SHRED uses Gated Recurrent Units to model the temporal sequence of sparse sensor measurements along with a shallow decoder network to reconstruct the full spatio-temporal field from the latent state space. Our algorithm introduces a SINDy-based regularization for which the latent space progressively converges to a SINDy-class functional, provided the projection remains within the set. In restricting SINDy to a linear model, a Koopman-SHRED model is generated. SINDy-SHRED (i) learns a symbolic and interpretable generative model of a parsimonious and low-dimensional latent space for the complex spatio-temporal dynamics, (ii) discovers new physics models even for well-known physical systems, (iii) achieves provably robust convergence with an observed globally convex loss landscape, and (iv) achieves superior accuracy, data efficiency, and training time, all with fewer model parameters. We conduct systematic experimental studies on PDE data such as turbulent flows, real-world sensor measurements for sea surface temperature, and direct video data. The interpretable SINDy and Koopman models of latent state dynamics enable stable and accurate long-term video predictions, outperforming all current baseline deep learning models in accuracy, training time, and data requirements, including Convolutional LSTM, PredRNN, ResNet, and SimVP.
Investigation of the Privacy Concerns in AI Systems for Young Digital Citizens: A Comparative Stakeholder Analysis
Authors: Molly Campbell, Ankur Barthwal, Sandhya Joshi, Austin Shouli, Ajay Kumar Shrestha
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, valid

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems into technologies used by young digital citizens raises significant privacy concerns. This study investigates these concerns through a comparative analysis of stakeholder perspectives. A total of 252 participants were surveyed, with the analysis focusing on 110 valid responses from parents/educators and 100 from AI professionals after data cleaning. Quantitative methods, including descriptive statistics and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, examined five validated constructs: Data Ownership and Control, Parental Data Sharing, Perceived Risks and Benefits, Transparency and Trust, and Education and Awareness. Results showed Education and Awareness significantly influenced data ownership and risk assessment, while Data Ownership and Control strongly impacted Transparency and Trust. Transparency and Trust, along with Perceived Risks and Benefits, showed minimal influence on Parental Data Sharing, suggesting other factors may play a larger role. The study underscores the need for user-centric privacy controls, tailored transparency strategies, and targeted educational initiatives. Incorporating diverse stakeholder perspectives offers actionable insights into ethical AI design and governance, balancing innovation with robust privacy protections to foster trust in a digital age.
Toward Ethical AI: A Qualitative Analysis of Stakeholder Perspectives
Authors: Ajay Kumar Shrestha, Sandhya Joshi
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly integrated into various aspects of daily life, concerns about privacy and ethical accountability are gaining prominence. This study explores stakeholder perspectives on privacy in AI systems, focusing on educators, parents, and AI professionals. Using qualitative analysis of survey responses from 227 participants, the research identifies key privacy risks, including data breaches, ethical misuse, and excessive data collection, alongside perceived benefits such as personalized services, enhanced efficiency, and educational advancements. Stakeholders emphasized the need for transparency, privacy-by-design, user empowerment, and ethical oversight to address privacy concerns effectively. The findings provide actionable insights into balancing the benefits of AI with robust privacy protections, catering to the diverse needs of stakeholders. Recommendations include implementing selective data use, fostering transparency, promoting user autonomy, and integrating ethical principles into AI development. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on ethical AI, offering guidance for designing privacy-centric systems that align with societal values and build trust among users. By addressing privacy challenges, this research underscores the importance of developing AI technologies that are not only innovative but also ethically sound and responsive to the concerns of all stakeholders.
Do's and Don'ts: Learning Desirable Skills with Instruction Videos
Authors: Hyunseung Kim, Byungkun Lee, Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Donghu Kim, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2024-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Navigate

Unsupervised skill discovery is a learning paradigm that aims to acquire diverse behaviors without explicit rewards. However, it faces challenges in learning complex behaviors and often leads to learning unsafe or undesirable behaviors. For instance, in various continuous control tasks, current unsupervised skill discovery methods succeed in learning basic locomotions like standing but struggle with learning more complex movements such as walking and running. Moreover, they may acquire unsafe behaviors like tripping and rolling or navigate to undesirable locations such as pitfalls or hazardous areas. In response, we present DoDont (Do's and Don'ts), an instruction-based skill discovery algorithm composed of two stages. First, in an instruction learning stage, DoDont leverages action-free instruction videos to train an instruction network to distinguish desirable transitions from undesirable ones. Then, in the skill learning stage, the instruction network adjusts the reward function of the skill discovery algorithm to weight the desired behaviors. Specifically, we integrate the instruction network into a distance-maximizing skill discovery algorithm, where the instruction network serves as the distance function. Empirically, with less than 8 instruction videos, DoDont effectively learns desirable behaviors and avoids undesirable ones across complex continuous control tasks. Code and videos are available at https://mynsng.github.io/dodont/
Precise and Robust Sidewalk Detection: Leveraging Ensemble Learning to Surpass LLM Limitations in Urban Environments
Authors: Ibne Farabi Shihab, Sudesh Ramesh Bhagat, Anuj Sharma
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, Large Language Model

This study aims to compare the effectiveness of a robust ensemble model with the state-of-the-art ONE-PEACE Large Language Model (LLM) for accurate detection of sidewalks. Accurate sidewalk detection is crucial in improving road safety and urban planning. The study evaluated the model's performance on Cityscapes, Ade20k, and the Boston Dataset. The results showed that the ensemble model performed better than the individual models, achieving mean Intersection Over Union (mIOU) scores of 93.1\%, 90.3\%, and 90.6\% on these datasets under ideal conditions. Additionally, the ensemble model maintained a consistent level of performance even in challenging conditions such as Salt-and-Pepper and Speckle noise, with only a gradual decrease in efficiency observed. On the other hand, the ONE-PEACE LLM performed slightly better than the ensemble model in ideal scenarios but experienced a significant decline in performance under noisy conditions. These findings demonstrate the robustness and reliability of the ensemble model, making it a valuable asset for improving urban infrastructure related to road safety and curb space management. This study contributes positively to the broader context of urban health and mobility.
Watching the AI Watchdogs: A Fairness and Robustness Analysis of AI Safety Moderation Classifiers
Authors: Akshit Achara, Anshuman Chhabra
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

AI Safety Moderation (ASM) classifiers are designed to moderate content on social media platforms and to serve as guardrails that prevent Large Language Models (LLMs) from being fine-tuned on unsafe inputs. Owing to their potential for disparate impact, it is crucial to ensure that these classifiers: (1) do not unfairly classify content belonging to users from minority groups as unsafe compared to those from majority groups and (2) that their behavior remains robust and consistent across similar inputs. In this work, we thus examine the fairness and robustness of four widely-used, closed-source ASM classifiers: OpenAI Moderation API, Perspective API, Google Cloud Natural Language (GCNL) API, and Clarifai API. We assess fairness using metrics such as demographic parity and conditional statistical parity, comparing their performance against ASM models and a fair-only baseline. Additionally, we analyze robustness by testing the classifiers' sensitivity to small and natural input perturbations. Our findings reveal potential fairness and robustness gaps, highlighting the need to mitigate these issues in future versions of these models.
RAMQA: A Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Modal Question Answering
Authors: Yang Bai, Christan Earl Grant, Daisy Zhe Wang
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Information Retrieval, Learning-To-Rank, Multi-Task Learning, Question Answering, Re-Ranking, Retrieval

Multi-modal retrieval-augmented Question Answering (MRAQA), integrating text and images, has gained significant attention in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Traditional ranking methods rely on small encoder-based language models, which are incompatible with modern decoder-based generative large language models (LLMs) that have advanced various NLP tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose RAMQA, a unified framework combining learning-to-rank methods with generative permutation-enhanced ranking techniques. We first train a pointwise multi-modal ranker using LLaVA as the backbone. Then, we apply instruction tuning to train a LLaMA model for re-ranking the top-k documents using an innovative autoregressive multi-task learning approach. Our generative ranking model generates re-ranked document IDs and specific answers from document candidates in various permutations. Experiments on two MRAQA benchmarks, WebQA and MultiModalQA, show significant improvements over strong baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/TonyBY/RAMQA
Parallel Belief Contraction via Order Aggregation
Authors: Jake Chandler, Richard Booth
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00

The standard ``serial'' (aka ``singleton'') model of belief contraction models the manner in which an agent's corpus of beliefs responds to the removal of a single item of information. One salient extension of this model introduces the idea of ``parallel'' (aka ``package'' or ``multiple'') change, in which an entire set of items of information are simultaneously removed. Existing research on the latter has largely focussed on single-step parallel contraction: understanding the behaviour of beliefs after a single parallel contraction. It has also focussed on generalisations to the parallel case of serial contraction operations whose characteristic properties are extremely weak. Here we consider how to extend serial contraction operations that obey stronger properties. Potentially more importantly, we also consider the iterated case: the behaviour of beliefs after a sequence of parallel contractions. We propose a general method for extending serial iterated belief change operators to handle parallel change based on an n-ary generalisation of Booth & Chandler's TeamQueue binary order aggregators.
Toyteller: AI-powered Visual Storytelling Through Toy-Playing with Character Symbols
Authors: John Joon Young Chung, Melissa Roemmele, Max Kreminski
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation, Text Generation, Visual Storytelling

We introduce Toyteller, an AI-powered storytelling system where users generate a mix of story text and visuals by directly manipulating character symbols like they are toy-playing. Anthropomorphized symbol motions can convey rich and nuanced social interactions; Toyteller leverages these motions (1) to let users steer story text generation and (2) as a visual output format that accompanies story text. We enabled motion-steered text generation and text-steered motion generation by mapping motions and text onto a shared semantic space so that large language models and motion generation models can use it as a translational layer. Technical evaluations showed that Toyteller outperforms a competitive baseline, GPT-4o. Our user study identified that toy-playing helps express intentions difficult to verbalize. However, only motions could not express all user intentions, suggesting combining it with other modalities like language. We discuss the design space of toy-playing interactions and implications for technical HCI research on human-AI interaction.
Experience with GitHub Copilot for Developer Productivity at Zoominfo
Authors: Gal Bakal, Ali Dasdan, Yaniv Katz, Michael Kaufman, Guy Levin
Date: 2025-01-23 00:00:00

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of GitHub Copilot's deployment and impact on developer productivity at Zoominfo, a leading Go-To-Market (GTM) Intelligence Platform. We describe our systematic four-phase approach to evaluating and deploying GitHub Copilot across our engineering organization, involving over 400 developers. Our analysis combines both quantitative metrics, focusing on acceptance rates of suggestions given by GitHub Copilot and qualitative feedback given by developers through developer satisfaction surveys. The results show an average acceptance rate of 33% for suggestions and 20% for lines of code, with high developer satisfaction scores of 72%. We also discuss language-specific performance variations, limitations, and lessons learned from this medium-scale enterprise deployment. Our findings contribute to the growing body of knowledge about AI-assisted software development in enterprise settings.
SRMT: Shared Memory for Multi-agent Lifelong Pathfinding
Authors: Alsu Sagirova, Yuri Kuratov, Mikhail Burtsev
Date: 2025-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) demonstrates significant progress in solving cooperative and competitive multi-agent problems in various environments. One of the principal challenges in MARL is the need for explicit prediction of the agents' behavior to achieve cooperation. To resolve this issue, we propose the Shared Recurrent Memory Transformer (SRMT) which extends memory transformers to multi-agent settings by pooling and globally broadcasting individual working memories, enabling agents to exchange information implicitly and coordinate their actions. We evaluate SRMT on the Partially Observable Multi-Agent Pathfinding problem in a toy Bottleneck navigation task that requires agents to pass through a narrow corridor and on a POGEMA benchmark set of tasks. In the Bottleneck task, SRMT consistently outperforms a variety of reinforcement learning baselines, especially under sparse rewards, and generalizes effectively to longer corridors than those seen during training. On POGEMA maps, including Mazes, Random, and MovingAI, SRMT is competitive with recent MARL, hybrid, and planning-based algorithms. These results suggest that incorporating shared recurrent memory into the transformer-based architectures can enhance coordination in decentralized multi-agent systems. The source code for training and evaluation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Aloriosa/srmt.
Learning in Log-Domain: Subthreshold Analog AI Accelerator Based on Stochastic Gradient Descent
Authors: Momen K Tageldeen, Yacine Belgaid, Vivek Mohan, Zhou Wang, Emmanuel M Drakakis
Date: 2025-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: L2 Regularization

The rapid proliferation of AI models, coupled with growing demand for edge deployment, necessitates the development of AI hardware that is both high-performance and energy-efficient. In this paper, we propose a novel analog accelerator architecture designed for AI/ML training workloads using stochastic gradient descent with L2 regularization (SGDr). The architecture leverages log-domain circuits in subthreshold MOS and incorporates volatile memory. We establish a mathematical framework for solving SGDr in the continuous time domain and detail the mapping of SGDr learning equations to log-domain circuits. By operating in the analog domain and utilizing weak inversion, the proposed design achieves significant reductions in transistor area and power consumption compared to digital implementations. Experimental results demonstrate that the architecture closely approximates ideal behavior, with a mean square error below 0.87% and precision as low as 8 bits. Furthermore, the architecture supports a wide range of hyperparameters. This work paves the way for energy-efficient analog AI hardware with on-chip training capabilities.
QuFeX: Quantum feature extraction module for hybrid quantum-classical deep neural networks
Authors: Naman jain, Amir Kalev
Date: 2025-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Image Segmentation, Quantum Machine Learning, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce Quantum Feature Extraction (QuFeX), a novel quantum machine learning module. The proposed module enables feature extraction in a reduced-dimensional space, significantly decreasing the number of parallel evaluations required in typical quantum convolutional neural network architectures. Its design allows seamless integration into deep classical neural networks, making it particularly suitable for hybrid quantum-classical models. As an application of QuFeX, we propose Qu-Net -- a hybrid architecture which integrates QuFeX at the bottleneck of a U-Net architecture. The latter is widely used for image segmentation tasks such as medical imaging and autonomous driving. Our numerical analysis indicates that the Qu-Net can achieve superior segmentation performance compared to a U-Net baseline. These results highlight the potential of QuFeX to enhance deep neural networks by leveraging hybrid computational paradigms, providing a path towards a robust framework for real-world applications requiring precise feature extraction.
AirRadar: Inferring Nationwide Air Quality in China with Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Qiongyan Wang, Yutong Xia, Siru Zhong, Weichuang Li, Yuankai Wu, Shifen Cheng, Junbo Zhang, Yu Zheng, Yuxuan Liang
Date: 2025-01-22 00:00:00

Monitoring real-time air quality is essential for safeguarding public health and fostering social progress. However, the widespread deployment of air quality monitoring stations is constrained by their significant costs. To address this limitation, we introduce \emph{AirRadar}, a deep neural network designed to accurately infer real-time air quality in locations lacking monitoring stations by utilizing data from existing ones. By leveraging learnable mask tokens, AirRadar reconstructs air quality features in unmonitored regions. Specifically, it operates in two stages: first capturing spatial correlations and then adjusting for distribution shifts. We validate AirRadar's efficacy using a year-long dataset from 1,085 monitoring stations across China, demonstrating its superiority over multiple baselines, even with varying degrees of unobserved data. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/AirRadar.