pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ROER: Regularized Optimal Experience Replay
Authors: Changling Li, Zhang-Wei Hong, Pulkit Agrawal, Divyansh Garg, Joni Pajarinen
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Experience replay serves as a key component in the success of online reinforcement learning (RL). Prioritized experience replay (PER) reweights experiences by the temporal difference (TD) error empirically enhancing the performance. However, few works have explored the motivation of using TD error. In this work, we provide an alternative perspective on TD-error-based reweighting. We show the connections between the experience prioritization and occupancy optimization. By using a regularized RL objective with $f-$divergence regularizer and employing its dual form, we show that an optimal solution to the objective is obtained by shifting the distribution of off-policy data in the replay buffer towards the on-policy optimal distribution using TD-error-based occupancy ratios. Our derivation results in a new pipeline of TD error prioritization. We specifically explore the KL divergence as the regularizer and obtain a new form of prioritization scheme, the regularized optimal experience replay (ROER). We evaluate the proposed prioritization scheme with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm in continuous control MuJoCo and DM Control benchmark tasks where our proposed scheme outperforms baselines in 6 out of 11 tasks while the results of the rest match with or do not deviate far from the baselines. Further, using pretraining, ROER achieves noticeable improvement on difficult Antmaze environment where baselines fail, showing applicability to offline-to-online fine-tuning. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/XavierChanglingLi/Regularized-Optimal-Experience-Replay}.
Unlocking the Potential of Model Merging for Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Mingxu Tao, Chen Zhang, Quzhe Huang, Tianyao Ma, Songfang Huang, Dongyan Zhao, Yansong Feng
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages typically involves continual pre-training (CT) followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this CT-then-SFT approach struggles with limited data in the context of low-resource languages, failing to balance language modeling and task-solving capabilities. We thus propose model merging as an alternative for low-resource languages, combining models with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. We use model merging to develop task-solving LLMs for low-resource languages without SFT data in the target languages. Our experiments based on Llama-2-7B demonstrate that model merging effectively endows LLMs for low-resource languages with task-solving abilities, outperforming CT-then-SFT in scenarios with extremely scarce data. Observing performance saturation in model merging with more training tokens, we further analyze the merging process and introduce a slack variable to the model merging algorithm to mitigate the loss of important parameters, thereby enhancing performance. We hope that model merging can benefit more human languages suffering from data scarcity with its higher data efficiency.
Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Following with Multiple Constraints Composition
Authors: Bosi Wen, Pei Ke, Xiaotao Gu, Lindong Wu, Hao Huang, Jinfeng Zhou, Wenchuang Li, Binxin Hu, Wendy Gao, Jiaxin Xu, Yiming Liu, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Instruction Following

Instruction following is one of the fundamental capabilities of large language models (LLMs). As the ability of LLMs is constantly improving, they have been increasingly applied to deal with complex human instructions in real-world scenarios. Therefore, how to evaluate the ability of complex instruction-following of LLMs has become a critical research problem. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on modeling different types of constraints in human instructions while neglecting the composition of different constraints, which is an indispensable constituent in complex instructions. To this end, we propose ComplexBench, a benchmark for comprehensively evaluating the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions composed of multiple constraints. We propose a hierarchical taxonomy for complex instructions, including 4 constraint types, 19 constraint dimensions, and 4 composition types, and manually collect a high-quality dataset accordingly. To make the evaluation reliable, we augment LLM-based evaluators with rules to effectively verify whether generated texts can satisfy each constraint and composition. Furthermore, we obtain the final evaluation score based on the dependency structure determined by different composition types. ComplexBench identifies significant deficiencies in existing LLMs when dealing with complex instructions with multiple constraints composition.
Craftium: An Extensible Framework for Creating Reinforcement Learning Environments
Authors: Mikel Malagón, Josu Ceberio, Jose A. Lozano
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Minecraft, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Most Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments are created by adapting existing physics simulators or video games. However, they usually lack the flexibility required for analyzing specific characteristics of RL methods often relevant to research. This paper presents Craftium, a novel framework for exploring and creating rich 3D visual RL environments that builds upon the Minetest game engine and the popular Gymnasium API. Minetest is built to be extended and can be used to easily create voxel-based 3D environments (often similar to Minecraft), while Gymnasium offers a simple and common interface for RL research. Craftium provides a platform that allows practitioners to create fully customized environments to suit their specific research requirements, ranging from simple visual tasks to infinite and procedurally generated worlds. We also provide five ready-to-use environments for benchmarking and as examples of how to develop new ones. The code and documentation are available at https://github.com/mikelma/craftium/.
Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks
Authors: Amit Parekh, Nikolas Vitsakis, Alessandro Suglia, Ioannis Konstas
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00

Evaluating the generalisation capabilities of multimodal models based solely on their performance on out-of-distribution data fails to capture their true robustness. This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework that systematically examines the role of instructions and inputs in the generalisation abilities of such models, considering architectural design, input perturbations across language and vision modalities, and increased task complexity. The proposed framework uncovers the resilience of multimodal models to extreme instruction perturbations and their vulnerability to observational changes, raising concerns about overfitting to spurious correlations. By employing this evaluation framework on current Transformer-based multimodal models for robotic manipulation tasks, we uncover limitations and suggest future advancements should focus on architectural and training innovations that better integrate multimodal inputs, enhancing a model's generalisation prowess by prioritising sensitivity to input content over incidental correlations.
Serialized Output Training by Learned Dominance
Authors: Ying Shi, Lantian Li, Shi Yin, Dong Wang, Jiqing Han
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Serialized Output Training (SOT) has showcased state-of-the-art performance in multi-talker speech recognition by sequentially decoding the speech of individual speakers. To address the challenging label-permutation issue, prior methods have relied on either the Permutation Invariant Training (PIT) or the time-based First-In-First-Out (FIFO) rule. This study presents a model-based serialization strategy that incorporates an auxiliary module into the Attention Encoder-Decoder architecture, autonomously identifying the crucial factors to order the output sequence of the speech components in multi-talker speech. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech and LibriMix databases reveal that our approach significantly outperforms the PIT and FIFO baselines in both 2-mix and 3-mix scenarios. Further analysis shows that the serialization module identifies dominant speech components in a mixture by factors including loudness and gender, and orders speech components based on the dominance score.
LLM-jp: A Cross-organizational Project for the Research and Development of Fully Open Japanese LLMs
Authors: LLM-jp, :, Akiko Aizawa, Eiji Aramaki, Bowen Chen, Fei Cheng, Hiroyuki Deguchi, Rintaro Enomoto, Kazuki Fujii, Kensuke Fukumoto, Takuya Fukushima, Namgi Han, Yuto Harada, Chikara Hashimoto, Tatsuya Hiraoka, Shohei Hisada, Sosuke Hosokawa, Lu Jie, Keisuke Kamata, Teruhito Kanazawa, Hiroki Kanezashi, Hiroshi Kataoka, Satoru Katsumata, Daisuke Kawahara, Seiya Kawano, Atsushi Keyaki, Keisuke Kiryu, Hirokazu Kiyomaru, Takashi Kodama, Takahiro Kubo, Yohei Kuga, Ryoma Kumon, Shuhei Kurita, Sadao Kurohashi, Conglong Li, Taiki Maekawa, Hiroshi Matsuda, Yusuke Miyao, Kentaro Mizuki, Sakae Mizuki, Yugo Murawaki, Akim Mousterou, Ryo Nakamura, Taishi Nakamura, Kouta Nakayama, Tomoka Nakazato, Takuro Niitsuma, Jiro Nishitoba, Yusuke Oda, Hayato Ogawa, Takumi Okamoto, Naoaki Okazaki, Yohei Oseki, Shintaro Ozaki, Koki Ryu, Rafal Rzepka, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Shota Sasaki, Satoshi Sekine, Kohei Suda, Saku Sugawara, Issa Sugiura, Hiroaki Sugiyama, Hisami Suzuki, Jun Suzuki, Toyotaro Suzumura, Kensuke Tachibana, Yu Takagi, Kyosuke Takami, Koichi Takeda, Masashi Takeshita, Masahiro Tanaka, Kenjiro Taura, Arseny Tolmachev, Nobuhiro Ueda, Zhen Wan, Shuntaro Yada, Sakiko Yahata, Yuya Yamamoto, Yusuke Yamauchi, Hitomi Yanaka, Rio Yokota, Koichiro Yoshino
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00

This paper introduces LLM-jp, a cross-organizational project for the research and development of Japanese large language models (LLMs). LLM-jp aims to develop open-source and strong Japanese LLMs, and as of this writing, more than 1,500 participants from academia and industry are working together for this purpose. This paper presents the background of the establishment of LLM-jp, summaries of its activities, and technical reports on the LLMs developed by LLM-jp. For the latest activities, visit https://llm-jp.nii.ac.jp/en/.
Diverse and Fine-Grained Instruction-Following Ability Exploration with Synthetic Data
Authors: Zihui Gu, Xingwu Sun, Fengzong Lian, Zhanhui Kang, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Ju Fan
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Instruction Following

Instruction-following is particularly crucial for large language models (LLMs) to support diverse user requests. While existing work has made progress in aligning LLMs with human preferences, evaluating their capabilities on instruction following remains a challenge due to complexity and diversity of real-world user instructions. While existing evaluation methods focus on general skills, they suffer from two main shortcomings, i.e., lack of fine-grained task-level evaluation and reliance on singular instruction expression. To address these problems, this paper introduces DINGO, a fine-grained and diverse instruction-following evaluation dataset that has two main advantages: (1) DINGO is based on a manual annotated, fine-grained and multi-level category tree with 130 nodes derived from real-world user requests; (2) DINGO includes diverse instructions, generated by both GPT-4 and human experts. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DINGO can not only provide more challenging and comprehensive evaluation for LLMs, but also provide task-level fine-grained directions to further improve LLMs.
Narrow Transformer: StarCoder-Based Java-LM For Desktop
Authors: Kamalkumar Rathinasamy, Balaji A J, Ankush Kumar, Gagan Gayari, Harshini K, Rajab Ali Mondal, Sreenivasa Raghavan K S, Swayam Singh, Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

This paper presents NT-Java-1.1B, an open-source specialized code language model built on StarCoderBase-1.1B, designed for coding tasks in Java programming. NT-Java-1.1B achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing its base model and majority of other models of similar size on MultiPL-E Java code benchmark. While there have been studies on extending large, generic pre-trained models to improve proficiency in specific programming languages like Python, similar investigations on small code models for other programming languages are lacking. Large code models require specialized hardware like GPUs for inference, highlighting the need for research into building small code models that can be deployed on developer desktops. This paper addresses this research gap by focusing on the development of a small Java code model, NT-Java-1.1B, and its quantized versions, which performs comparably to open models around 1.1B on MultiPL-E Java code benchmarks, making them ideal for desktop deployment. This paper establishes the foundation for specialized models across languages and sizes for a family of NT Models.
Dancing to the State of the Art? How Candidate Lists Influence LKH for Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem
Authors: Jonathan Heins, Lennart Schäpermeier, Pascal Kerschke, Darrell Whitley
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00

Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) remains a persistent challenge, despite its fundamental role in numerous generalized applications in modern contexts. Heuristic solvers address the demand for finding high-quality solutions efficiently. Among these solvers, the Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) heuristic stands out, as it complements the performance of genetic algorithms across a diverse range of problem instances. However, frequent timeouts on challenging instances hinder the practical applicability of the solver. Within this work, we investigate a previously overlooked factor contributing to many timeouts: The use of a fixed candidate set based on a tree structure. Our investigations reveal that candidate sets based on Hamiltonian circuits contain more optimal edges. We thus propose to integrate this promising initialization strategy, in the form of POPMUSIC, within an efficient restart version of LKH. As confirmed by our experimental studies, this refined TSP heuristic is much more efficient - causing fewer timeouts and improving the performance (in terms of penalized average runtime) by an order of magnitude - and thereby challenges the state of the art in TSP solving.
TwinLab: a framework for data-efficient training of non-intrusive reduced-order models for digital twins
Authors: Maximilian Kannapinn, Michael Schäfer, Oliver Weeger
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00

Purpose: Simulation-based digital twins represent an effort to provide high-accuracy real-time insights into operational physical processes. However, the computation time of many multi-physical simulation models is far from real-time. It might even exceed sensible time frames to produce sufficient data for training data-driven reduced-order models. This study presents TwinLab, a framework for data-efficient, yet accurate training of neural-ODE type reduced-order models with only two data sets. Design/methodology/approach: Correlations between test errors of reduced-order models and distinct features of corresponding training data are investigated. Having found the single best data sets for training, a second data set is sought with the help of similarity and error measures to enrich the training process effectively. Findings: Adding a suitable second training data set in the training process reduces the test error by up to 49% compared to the best base reduced-order model trained only with one data set. Such a second training data set should at least yield a good reduced-order model on its own and exhibit higher levels of dissimilarity to the base training data set regarding the respective excitation signal. Moreover, the base reduced-order model should have elevated test errors on the second data set. The relative error of the time series ranges from 0.18% to 0.49%. Prediction speed-ups of up to a factor of 36,000 are observed. Originality: The proposed computational framework facilitates the automated, data-efficient extraction of non-intrusive reduced-order models for digital twins from existing simulation models, independent of the simulation software.
CRiM-GS: Continuous Rigid Motion-Aware Gaussian Splatting from Motion-Blurred Images
Authors: Jungho Lee, Donghyeong Kim, Dogyoon Lee, Suhwan Cho, Minhyeok Lee, Sangyoun Lee
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Scene Reconstruction

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has gained significant attention for their high-quality novel view rendering, motivating research to address real-world challenges. A critical issue is the camera motion blur caused by movement during exposure, which hinders accurate 3D scene reconstruction. In this study, we propose CRiM-GS, a \textbf{C}ontinuous \textbf{Ri}gid \textbf{M}otion-aware \textbf{G}aussian \textbf{S}platting that reconstructs precise 3D scenes from motion-blurred images while maintaining real-time rendering speed. Considering the complex motion patterns inherent in real-world camera movements, we predict continuous camera trajectories using neural ordinary differential equations (ODE). To ensure accurate modeling, we employ rigid body transformations with proper regularization, preserving object shape and size. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive distortion-aware transformation to compensate for potential nonlinear distortions, such as rolling shutter effects, and unpredictable camera movements. By revisiting fundamental camera theory and leveraging advanced neural training techniques, we achieve precise modeling of continuous camera trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively on benchmark datasets.
MobileExperts: A Dynamic Tool-Enabled Agent Team in Mobile Devices
Authors: Jiayi Zhang, Chuang Zhao, Yihan Zhao, Zhaoyang Yu, Ming He, Jianping Fan
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00

The attainment of autonomous operations in mobile computing devices has consistently been a goal of human pursuit. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs), this aspiration is progressively turning into reality. While contemporary research has explored automation of simple tasks on mobile devices via VLMs, there remains significant room for improvement in handling complex tasks and reducing high reasoning costs. In this paper, we introduce MobileExperts, which for the first time introduces tool formulation and multi-agent collaboration to address the aforementioned challenges. More specifically, MobileExperts dynamically assembles teams based on the alignment of agent portraits with the human requirements. Following this, each agent embarks on an independent exploration phase, formulating its tools to evolve into an expert. Lastly, we develop a dual-layer planning mechanism to establish coordinate collaboration among experts. To validate our effectiveness, we design a new benchmark of hierarchical intelligence levels, offering insights into algorithm's capability to address tasks across a spectrum of complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that MobileExperts performs better on all intelligence levels and achieves ~ 22% reduction in reasoning costs, thus verifying the superiority of our design.
Do Generalised Classifiers really work on Human Drawn Sketches?
Authors: Hmrishav Bandyopadhyay, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Aneeshan Sain, Subhadeep Koley, Tao Xiang, Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Yi-Zhe Song
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

This paper, for the first time, marries large foundation models with human sketch understanding. We demonstrate what this brings -- a paradigm shift in terms of generalised sketch representation learning (e.g., classification). This generalisation happens on two fronts: (i) generalisation across unknown categories (i.e., open-set), and (ii) generalisation traversing abstraction levels (i.e., good and bad sketches), both being timely challenges that remain unsolved in the sketch literature. Our design is intuitive and centred around transferring the already stellar generalisation ability of CLIP to benefit generalised learning for sketches. We first "condition" the vanilla CLIP model by learning sketch-specific prompts using a novel auxiliary head of raster to vector sketch conversion. This importantly makes CLIP "sketch-aware". We then make CLIP acute to the inherently different sketch abstraction levels. This is achieved by learning a codebook of abstraction-specific prompt biases, a weighted combination of which facilitates the representation of sketches across abstraction levels -- low abstract edge-maps, medium abstract sketches in TU-Berlin, and highly abstract doodles in QuickDraw. Our framework surpasses popular sketch representation learning algorithms in both zero-shot and few-shot setups and in novel settings across different abstraction boundaries.
On the Effectiveness of Acoustic BPE in Decoder-Only TTS
Authors: Bohan Li, Feiyu Shen, Yiwei Guo, Shuai Wang, Xie Chen, Kai Yu
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Discretizing speech into tokens and generating them by a decoder-only model have been a promising direction for text-to-speech (TTS) and spoken language modeling (SLM). To shorten the sequence length of speech tokens, acoustic byte-pair encoding (BPE) has emerged in SLM that treats speech tokens from self-supervised semantic representations as characters to further compress the token sequence. But the gain in TTS has not been fully investigated, and the proper choice of acoustic BPE remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study on various settings of acoustic BPE to explore its effectiveness in decoder-only TTS models with semantic speech tokens. Experiments on LibriTTS verify that acoustic BPE uniformly increases the intelligibility and diversity of synthesized speech, while showing different features across BPE settings. Hence, acoustic BPE is a favorable tool for decoder-only TTS.
Controllable Conversations: Planning-Based Dialogue Agent with Large Language Models
Authors: Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Yong Cao, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, Yuqian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
Date: 2024-07-04 00:00:00

Conversational agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks. Despite the better user understanding and human-like responses, their lack of controllability remains a key challenge, often leading to unfocused conversations or task failure. To address this challenge, we propose Planning-based Conversational Agents (PCA), a novel dialogue framework aimed at enhancing the controllability of LLM-driven agents. Specifically, our approach introduces Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to regulate dialogue flow. To enable PCA to learn SOP, we curate a dataset comprising SOP-annotated multi-scenario dialogues, generated using a semi-automated role-playing system with GPT-4o and validated through strict manual quality control. Additionally, we propose a novel method that integrates Chain of Thought reasoning with supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction and utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search for optimal action planning during dialogues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, such as achieving a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also showing notable gains for open-source models. Dataset and codes are publicly available.