pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gradient Guided Hypotheses: A unified solution to enable machine learning models on scarce and noisy data regimes
Authors: Paulo Neves, Joerg K. Wegner, Philippe Schwaller
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation

Ensuring high-quality data is paramount for maximizing the performance of machine learning models and business intelligence systems. However, challenges in data quality, including noise in data capture, missing records, limited data production, and confounding variables, significantly constrain the potential performance of these systems. In this study, we propose an architecture-agnostic algorithm, Gradient Guided Hypotheses (GGH), designed to address these challenges. GGH analyses gradients from hypotheses as a proxy of distinct and possibly contradictory patterns in the data. This framework entails an additional step in machine learning training, where gradients can be included or excluded from backpropagation. In this manner, missing and noisy data are addressed through a unified solution that perceives both challenges as facets of the same overarching issue: the propagation of erroneous information. Experimental validation of GGH is conducted using real-world open-source datasets, where records with missing rates of up to 98.5% are simulated. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art imputation methods demonstrates a substantial improvement in model performance achieved by GGH. Specifically in very high scarcity regimes, GGH was found to be the only viable solution. Additionally, GGH's noise detection capabilities are showcased by introducing simulated noise into the datasets and observing enhanced model performance after filtering out the noisy data. This study presents GGH as a promising solution for improving data quality and model performance in various applications.
VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos
Authors: Ziyang Wang, Shoubin Yu, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Jaehong Yoon, Feng Cheng, Gedas Bertasius, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: EgoSchema, MME, Video MME, Video Understanding, Zero-Shot Video Question Answer

Long-form video understanding has been a challenging task due to the high redundancy in video data and the abundance of query-irrelevant information. To tackle this challenge, we propose VideoTree, a training-free framework which builds a query-adaptive and hierarchical video representation for LLM reasoning over long-form videos. First, VideoTree extracts query-relevant information from the input video through an iterative process, progressively refining the selection of keyframes based on their relevance to the query. Furthermore, VideoTree leverages the inherent hierarchical structure of long video data, which is often overlooked by existing LLM-based methods. Specifically, we incorporate multigranularity information into a tree-based representation, allowing VideoTree to extract query-relevant details from long videos in a coarse-to-fine manner. This enables the model to effectively handle a wide range of video queries with varying levels of detail. Finally, VideoTree aggregates the hierarchical query-relevant information within the tree structure and feeds it into an LLM reasoning model to answer the query. Our experiments show that our training-free method improves both reasoning accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods. Specifically, VideoTree outperforms the existing training-free approaches on the popular EgoSchema and NExT-QA benchmarks with less inference time, achieving 61.1% and 75.6% accuracy on the test set without additional video-specific training. Moreover, on the long split of Video-MME benchmark (average 44 minutes), the training-free VideoTree framework achieves better performance than the strong proprietary GPT-4V model and other MLLMs that were extensively trained on video data.
A Multi-Source Retrieval Question Answering Framework Based on RAG
Authors: Ridong Wu, Shuhong Chen, Xiangbiao Su, Yuankai Zhu, Yifei Liao, Jianming Wu
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

With the rapid development of large-scale language models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been widely adopted. However, existing RAG paradigms are inevitably influenced by erroneous retrieval information, thereby reducing the reliability and correctness of generated results. Therefore, to improve the relevance of retrieval information, this study proposes a method that replaces traditional retrievers with GPT-3.5, leveraging its vast corpus knowledge to generate retrieval information. We also propose a web retrieval based method to implement fine-grained knowledge retrieval, Utilizing the powerful reasoning capability of GPT-3.5 to realize semantic partitioning of problem.In order to mitigate the illusion of GPT retrieval and reduce noise in Web retrieval,we proposes a multi-source retrieval framework, named MSRAG, which combines GPT retrieval with web retrieval. Experiments on multiple knowledge-intensive QA datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework in this study performs better than existing RAG framework in enhancing the overall efficiency and accuracy of QA systems.
Vulnerable Road User Detection and Safety Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Renato M. Silva, Gregório F. Azevedo, Matheus V. V. Berto, Jean R. Rocha, Eduardo C. Fidelis, Matheus V. Nogueira, Pedro H. Lisboa, Tiago A. Almeida
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Survey

Traffic incidents involving vulnerable road users (VRUs) constitute a significant proportion of global road accidents. Advances in traffic communication ecosystems, coupled with sophisticated signal processing and machine learning techniques, have facilitated the utilization of data from diverse sensors. Despite these advancements and the availability of extensive datasets, substantial progress is required to mitigate traffic casualties. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art technologies and methodologies to enhance the safety of VRUs. The study delves into the communication networks between vehicles and VRUs, emphasizing the integration of advanced sensors and the availability of relevant datasets. It explores preprocessing techniques and data fusion methods to enhance sensor data quality. Furthermore, our study assesses critical simulation environments essential for developing and testing VRU safety systems. Our research also highlights recent advances in VRU detection and classification algorithms, addressing challenges such as variable environmental conditions. Additionally, we cover cutting-edge research in predicting VRU intentions and behaviors, which is crucial for proactive collision avoidance strategies. Through this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape of VRU safety technologies, identifying areas of progress and areas needing further research and development.
Going beyond Compositions, DDPMs Can Produce Zero-Shot Interpolations
Authors: Justin Deschenaux, Igor Krawczuk, Grigorios Chrysos, Volkan Cevher
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in image generation, with studies suggesting that they can generalize by composing latent factors learned from the training data. In this work, we go further and study DDPMs trained on strictly separate subsets of the data distribution with large gaps on the support of the latent factors. We show that such a model can effectively generate images in the unexplored, intermediate regions of the distribution. For instance, when trained on clearly smiling and non-smiling faces, we demonstrate a sampling procedure which can generate slightly smiling faces without reference images (zero-shot interpolation). We replicate these findings for other attributes as well as other datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/jdeschena/ddpm-zero-shot-interpolation.
Promoting Two-sided Fairness in Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem
Authors: Yufan Kang, Rongsheng Zhang, Wei Shao, Flora D. Salim, Jeffrey Chan
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP), is an extension of the classic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which is a fundamental problem in logistics and transportation. Typically, DVRPs involve two stakeholders: service providers that deliver services to customers and customers who raise requests from different locations. Many real-world applications can be formulated as DVRP such as ridesharing and non-compliance capture. Apart from original objectives like optimising total utility or efficiency, DVRP should also consider fairness for all parties. Unfairness can induce service providers and customers to give up on the systems, leading to negative financial and social impacts. However, most existing DVRP-related applications focus on improving fairness from a single side, and there have been few works considering two-sided fairness and utility optimisation concurrently. To this end, we propose a novel framework, a Two-sided Fairness-aware Genetic Algorithm (named 2FairGA), which expands the genetic algorithm from the original objective solely focusing on utility to multi-objectives that incorporate two-sided fairness. Subsequently, the impact of injecting two fairness definitions into the utility-focused model and the correlation between any pair of the three objectives are explored. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework compared to the state-of-the-art.
The ethical situation of DALL-E 2
Authors: Eduard Hogea, Josem Rocafortf
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

A hot topic of Artificial Intelligence right now is image generation from prompts. DALL-E 2 is one of the biggest names in this domain, as it allows people to create images from simple text inputs, to even more complicated ones. The company that made this possible, OpenAI, has assured everyone that visited their website that their mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. A noble idea in our opinion, that also stood as the motive behind us choosing this subject. This paper analyzes the ethical implications of an AI image generative system, with an emphasis on how society is responding to it, how it probably will and how it should if all the right measures are taken.
Transformers as Neural Operators for Solutions of Differential Equations with Finite Regularity
Authors: Benjamin Shih, Ahmad Peyvan, Zhongqiang Zhang, George Em Karniadakis
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Operator learning

Neural operator learning models have emerged as very effective surrogates in data-driven methods for partial differential equations (PDEs) across different applications from computational science and engineering. Such operator learning models not only predict particular instances of a physical or biological system in real-time but also forecast classes of solutions corresponding to a distribution of initial and boundary conditions or forcing terms. % DeepONet is the first neural operator model and has been tested extensively for a broad class of solutions, including Riemann problems. Transformers have not been used in that capacity, and specifically, they have not been tested for solutions of PDEs with low regularity. % In this work, we first establish the theoretical groundwork that transformers possess the universal approximation property as operator learning models. We then apply transformers to forecast solutions of diverse dynamical systems with solutions of finite regularity for a plurality of initial conditions and forcing terms. In particular, we consider three examples: the Izhikevich neuron model, the tempered fractional-order Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) model, and the one-dimensional Euler equation Riemann problem. For the latter problem, we also compare with variants of DeepONet, and we find that transformers outperform DeepONet in accuracy but they are computationally more expensive.
Learning from Litigation: Graphs and LLMs for Retrieval and Reasoning in eDiscovery
Authors: Sounak Lahiri, Sumit Pai, Tim Weninger, Sanmitra Bhattacharya
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval

Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) involves identifying relevant documents from a vast collection based on legal production requests. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) has transformed this process, helping document review and enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Although traditional approaches like BM25 or fine-tuned pre-trained models are common in eDiscovery, they face performance, computational, and interpretability challenges. In contrast, Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods prioritize interpretability but sacrifice performance and throughput. This paper introduces DISCOvery Graph (DISCOG), a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of two worlds: a heterogeneous graph-based method for accurate document relevance prediction and subsequent LLM-driven approach for reasoning. Graph representational learning generates embeddings and predicts links, ranking the corpus for a given request, and the LLMs provide reasoning for document relevance. Our approach handles datasets with balanced and imbalanced distributions, outperforming baselines in F1-score, precision, and recall by an average of 12%, 3%, and 16%, respectively. In an enterprise context, our approach drastically reduces document review costs by 99.9% compared to manual processes and by 95% compared to LLM-based classification methods
Does learning the right latent variables necessarily improve in-context learning?
Authors: Sarthak Mittal, Eric Elmoznino, Leo Gagnon, Sangnie Bhardwaj, Dhanya Sridhar, Guillaume Lajoie
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data factorizes: examples are independent given a task latent that generates the data, e.g., linear coefficients. While an optimal predictor leverages this factorization by inferring task latents, it is unclear if Transformers implicitly do so or if they instead exploit heuristics and statistical shortcuts enabled by attention layers. Both scenarios have inspired active ongoing work. In this paper, we systematically investigate the effect of explicitly inferring task latents. We minimally modify the Transformer architecture with a bottleneck designed to prevent shortcuts in favor of more structured solutions, and then compare performance against standard Transformers across various ICL tasks. Contrary to intuition and some recent works, we find little discernible difference between the two; biasing towards task-relevant latent variables does not lead to better out-of-distribution performance, in general. Curiously, we find that while the bottleneck effectively learns to extract latent task variables from context, downstream processing struggles to utilize them for robust prediction. Our study highlights the intrinsic limitations of Transformers in achieving structured ICL solutions that generalize, and shows that while inferring the right latents aids interpretability, it is not sufficient to alleviate this problem.
A Study of Plasticity Loss in On-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Arthur Juliani, Jordan T. Ash
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Montezuma's Revenge, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Continual learning with deep neural networks presents challenges distinct from both the fixed-dataset and convex continual learning regimes. One such challenge is plasticity loss, wherein a neural network trained in an online fashion displays a degraded ability to fit new tasks. This problem has been extensively studied in both supervised learning and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), where a number of remedies have been proposed. Still, plasticity loss has received less attention in the on-policy deep RL setting. Here we perform an extensive set of experiments examining plasticity loss and a variety of mitigation methods in on-policy deep RL. We demonstrate that plasticity loss is pervasive under domain shift in this regime, and that a number of methods developed to resolve it in other settings fail, sometimes even performing worse than applying no intervention at all. In contrast, we find that a class of ``regenerative'' methods are able to consistently mitigate plasticity loss in a variety of contexts, including in gridworld tasks and more challenging environments like Montezuma's Revenge and ProcGen.
CaLa: Complementary Association Learning for Augmenting Composed Image Retrieval
Authors: Xintong Jiang, Yaxiong Wang, Mengjian Li, Yujiao Wu, Bingwen Hu, Xueming Qian
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Image Retrieval, Relation, Retrieval, Triplet

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves searching for target images based on an image-text pair query. While current methods treat this as a query-target matching problem, we argue that CIR triplets contain additional associations beyond this primary relation. In our paper, we identify two new relations within triplets, treating each triplet as a graph node. Firstly, we introduce the concept of text-bridged image alignment, where the query text serves as a bridge between the query image and the target image. We propose a hinge-based cross-attention mechanism to incorporate this relation into network learning. Secondly, we explore complementary text reasoning, considering CIR as a form of cross-modal retrieval where two images compose to reason about complementary text. To integrate these perspectives effectively, we design a twin attention-based compositor. By combining these complementary associations with the explicit query pair-target image relation, we establish a comprehensive set of constraints for CIR. Our framework, CaLa (Complementary Association Learning for Augmenting Composed Image Retrieval), leverages these insights. We evaluate CaLa on CIRR and FashionIQ benchmarks with multiple backbones, demonstrating its superiority in composed image retrieval.
DGRC: An Effective Fine-tuning Framework for Distractor Generation in Chinese Multi-choice Reading Comprehension
Authors: Runfeng Lin, Dacheng Xu, Huijiang Wang, Zebiao Chen, Yating Wang, Shouqiang Liu
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Distractor Generation, Multiple-choice, Multi-Task Learning, Natural Questions, Reading Comprehension

When evaluating a learner's knowledge proficiency, the multiple-choice question is an efficient and widely used format in standardized tests. Nevertheless, generating these questions, particularly plausible distractors (incorrect options), poses a considerable challenge. Generally, the distractor generation can be classified into cloze-style distractor generation (CDG) and natural questions distractor generation (NQDG). In contrast to the CDG, utilizing pre-trained language models (PLMs) for NQDG presents three primary challenges: (1) PLMs are typically trained to generate ``correct'' content, like answers, while rarely trained to generate ``plausible" content, like distractors; (2) PLMs often struggle to produce content that aligns well with specific knowledge and the style of exams; (3) NQDG necessitates the model to produce longer, context-sensitive, and question-relevant distractors. In this study, we introduce a fine-tuning framework named DGRC for NQDG in Chinese multi-choice reading comprehension from authentic examinations. DGRC comprises three major components: hard chain-of-thought, multi-task learning, and generation mask patterns. The experiment results demonstrate that DGRC significantly enhances generation performance, achieving a more than 2.5-fold improvement in BLEU scores.
Analyzing Chat Protocols of Novice Programmers Solving Introductory Programming Tasks with ChatGPT
Authors: Andreas Scholl, Daniel Schiffner, Natalie Kiesler
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm, and students are assumed to use related tools at a great scale. In this research paper we aim to gain an understanding of how introductory programming students chat with LLMs and related tools, e.g., ChatGPT-3.5. To address this goal, computing students at a large German university were motivated to solve programming exercises with the assistance of ChatGPT as part of their weekly introductory course exercises. Then students (n=213) submitted their chat protocols (with 2335 prompts in sum) as data basis for this analysis. The data was analyzed w.r.t. the prompts, frequencies, the chats' progress, contents, and other use pattern, which revealed a great variety of interactions, both potentially supportive and concerning. Learning about students' interactions with ChatGPT will help inform and align teaching practices and instructions for future introductory programming courses in higher education.
Spatio-Spectral Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Simon Geisler, Arthur Kosmala, Daniel Herbst, Stephan Günnemann
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Graph Classification, Graph Neural Network, Graph Regression, Long-range modeling, Node Classification

Spatial Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (MPGNNs) are widely used for learning on graph-structured data. However, key limitations of l-step MPGNNs are that their "receptive field" is typically limited to the l-hop neighborhood of a node and that information exchange between distant nodes is limited by over-squashing. Motivated by these limitations, we propose Spatio-Spectral Graph Neural Networks (S$^2$GNNs) -- a new modeling paradigm for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that synergistically combines spatially and spectrally parametrized graph filters. Parameterizing filters partially in the frequency domain enables global yet efficient information propagation. We show that S$^2$GNNs vanquish over-squashing and yield strictly tighter approximation-theoretic error bounds than MPGNNs. Further, rethinking graph convolutions at a fundamental level unlocks new design spaces. For example, S$^2$GNNs allow for free positional encodings that make them strictly more expressive than the 1-Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test. Moreover, to obtain general-purpose S$^2$GNNs, we propose spectrally parametrized filters for directed graphs. S$^2$GNNs outperform spatial MPGNNs, graph transformers, and graph rewirings, e.g., on the peptide long-range benchmark tasks, and are competitive with state-of-the-art sequence modeling. On a 40 GB GPU, S$^2$GNNs scale to millions of nodes.