pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AI-Driven Frameworks for Enhancing Data Quality in Big Data Ecosystems: Error_Detection, Correction, and Metadata Integration
Authors: Widad Elouataoui
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Metadata quality

The widespread adoption of big data has ushered in a new era of data-driven decision-making, transforming numerous industries and sectors. However, the efficacy of these decisions hinges on the quality of the underlying data. Poor data quality can result in inaccurate analyses and deceptive conclusions. Managing the vast volume, velocity, and variety of data sources presents significant challenges, heightening the importance of addressing big data quality issues. While there has been increased attention from both academia and industry, current approaches often lack comprehensiveness and universality. They tend to focus on limited metrics, neglecting other dimensions of data quality. Moreover, existing methods are often context-specific, limiting their applicability across different domains. There is a clear need for intelligent, automated approaches leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for advanced data quality corrections. To bridge these gaps, this Ph.D. thesis proposes a novel set of interconnected frameworks aimed at enhancing big data quality comprehensively. Firstly, we introduce new quality metrics and a weighted scoring system for precise data quality assessment. Secondly, we present a generic framework for detecting various quality anomalies using AI models. Thirdly, we propose an innovative framework for correcting detected anomalies through predictive modeling. Additionally, we address metadata quality enhancement within big data ecosystems. These frameworks are rigorously tested on diverse datasets, demonstrating their efficacy in improving big data quality. Finally, the thesis concludes with insights and suggestions for future research directions.
Outlier Gradient Analysis: Efficiently Identifying Detrimental Training Samples for Deep Learning Models
Authors: Anshuman Chhabra, Bo Li, Jian Chen, Prasant Mohapatra, Hongfu Liu
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

A core data-centric learning challenge is the identification of training samples that are detrimental to model performance. Influence functions serve as a prominent tool for this task and offer a robust framework for assessing training data influence on model predictions. Despite their widespread use, their high computational cost associated with calculating the inverse of the Hessian matrix pose constraints, particularly when analyzing large-sized deep models. In this paper, we establish a bridge between identifying detrimental training samples via influence functions and outlier gradient detection. This transformation not only presents a straightforward and Hessian-free formulation but also provides insights into the role of the gradient in sample impact. Through systematic empirical evaluations, we first validate the hypothesis of our proposed outlier gradient analysis approach on synthetic datasets. We then demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting mislabeled samples in vision models and selecting data samples for improving performance of natural language processing transformer models. We also extend its use to influential sample identification for fine-tuning Large Language Models.
Information-driven Affordance Discovery for Efficient Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Pietro Mazzaglia, Taco Cohen, Daniel Dijkman
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or demonstrations. In this work, we argue that well-directed interactions with the environment can mitigate this problem and propose an information-based measure to augment the agent's objective and accelerate the affordance discovery process. We provide a theoretical justification of our approach and we empirically validate the approach both in simulation and real-world tasks. Our method, which we dub IDA, enables the efficient discovery of visual affordances for several action primitives, such as grasping, stacking objects, or opening drawers, strongly improving data efficiency in simulation, and it allows us to learn grasping affordances in a small number of interactions, on a real-world setup with a UFACTORY XArm 6 robot arm.
Learning Planning Abstractions from Language
Authors: Weiyu Liu, Geng Chen, Joy Hsu, Jiayuan Mao, Jiajun Wu
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

This paper presents a framework for learning state and action abstractions in sequential decision-making domains. Our framework, planning abstraction from language (PARL), utilizes language-annotated demonstrations to automatically discover a symbolic and abstract action space and induce a latent state abstraction based on it. PARL consists of three stages: 1) recovering object-level and action concepts, 2) learning state abstractions, abstract action feasibility, and transition models, and 3) applying low-level policies for abstract actions. During inference, given the task description, PARL first makes abstract action plans using the latent transition and feasibility functions, then refines the high-level plan using low-level policies. PARL generalizes across scenarios involving novel object instances and environments, unseen concept compositions, and tasks that require longer planning horizons than settings it is trained on.
Persona Inconstancy in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration: Conformity, Confabulation, and Impersonation
Authors: Razan Baltaji, Babak Hemmatian, Lav R. Varshney
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Chatbot, Decision Making, Diversity

Multi-agent AI systems can be used for simulating collective decision-making in scientific and practical applications. They can also be used to introduce a diverse group discussion step in chatbot pipelines, enhancing the cultural sensitivity of the chatbot's responses. These applications, however, are predicated on the ability of AI agents to reliably adopt assigned personas and mimic human interactions. To see whether LLM agents satisfy these requirements, we examine AI agent ensembles engaged in cross-national collaboration and debate by analyzing their private responses and chat transcripts. Our findings suggest that multi-agent discussions can support collective AI decisions that more often reflect diverse perspectives, yet this effect is tempered by the agents' susceptibility to conformity due to perceived peer pressure and occasional challenges in maintaining consistent personas and opinions. Instructions that encourage debate in support of one's opinions rather than collaboration increase the rate of inconstancy. Without addressing the factors we identify, the full potential of multi-agent frameworks for producing more culturally diverse AI outputs or more realistic simulations of group decision-making may remain untapped.
VSA4VQA: Scaling a Vector Symbolic Architecture to Visual Question Answering on Natural Images
Authors: Anna Penzkofer, Lei Shi, Andreas Bulling
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

While Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) are promising for modelling spatial cognition, their application is currently limited to artificially generated images and simple spatial queries. We propose VSA4VQA - a novel 4D implementation of VSAs that implements a mental representation of natural images for the challenging task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). VSA4VQA is the first model to scale a VSA to complex spatial queries. Our method is based on the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) to encode objects in a hyperdimensional vector space. To encode natural images, we extend the SPA to include dimensions for object's width and height in addition to their spatial location. To perform spatial queries we further introduce learned spatial query masks and integrate a pre-trained vision-language model for answering attribute-related questions. We evaluate our method on the GQA benchmark dataset and show that it can effectively encode natural images, achieving competitive performance to state-of-the-art deep learning methods for zero-shot VQA.
Self-Improving Customer Review Response Generation Based on LLMs
Authors: Guy Azov, Tatiana Pelc, Adi Fledel Alon, Gila Kamhi
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Response Generation, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Previous studies have demonstrated that proactive interaction with user reviews has a positive impact on the perception of app users and encourages them to submit revised ratings. Nevertheless, developers encounter challenges in managing a high volume of reviews, particularly in the case of popular apps with a substantial influx of daily reviews. Consequently, there is a demand for automated solutions aimed at streamlining the process of responding to user reviews. To address this, we have developed a new system for generating automatic responses by leveraging user-contributed documents with the help of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Our solution, named SCRABLE, represents an adaptive customer review response automation that enhances itself with self-optimizing prompts and a judging mechanism based on LLMs. Additionally, we introduce an automatic scoring mechanism that mimics the role of a human evaluator to assess the quality of responses generated in customer review domains. Extensive experiments and analyses conducted on real-world datasets reveal that our method is effective in producing high-quality responses, yielding improvement of more than 8.5% compared to the baseline. Further validation through manual examination of the generated responses underscores the efficacy our proposed system.
A Novel Cross-band CSI Prediction Scheme for Multi-band Fingerprint based Localization
Authors: Yuan Ruihao, Huang Kaixuan, Zhang Shunqing
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

Because of the advantages of computation complex- ity compared with traditional localization algorithms, fingerprint based localization is getting increasing demand. Expanding the fingerprint database from the frequency domain by channel reconstruction can improve localization accuracy. However, in a mobility environment, the channel reconstruction accuracy is limited by the time-varying parameters. In this paper, we proposed a system to extract the time-varying parameters based on space-alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE) algorithm, then used variational auto-encoder (VAE) to reconstruct the channel state information on another channel. The proposed scheme is tested on the data generated by the deep- MIMO channel model. Mathematical analysis for the viability of our system is also shown in this paper.
Guylingo: The Republic of Guyana Creole Corpora
Authors: Christopher Clarke, Roland Daynauth, Charlene Wilkinson, Hubert Devonish, Jason Mars
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Machine Translation

While major languages often enjoy substantial attention and resources, the linguistic diversity across the globe encompasses a multitude of smaller, indigenous, and regional languages that lack the same level of computational support. One such region is the Caribbean. While commonly labeled as "English speaking", the ex-British Caribbean region consists of a myriad of Creole languages thriving alongside English. In this paper, we present Guylingo: a comprehensive corpus designed for advancing NLP research in the domain of Creolese (Guyanese English-lexicon Creole), the most widely spoken language in the culturally rich nation of Guyana. We first outline our framework for gathering and digitizing this diverse corpus, inclusive of colloquial expressions, idioms, and regional variations in a low-resource language. We then demonstrate the challenges of training and evaluating NLP models for machine translation in Creole. Lastly, we discuss the unique opportunities presented by recent NLP advancements for accelerating the formal adoption of Creole languages as official languages in the Caribbean.
Organizing a Society of Language Models: Structures and Mechanisms for Enhanced Collective Intelligence
Authors: Silvan Ferreira, Ivanovitch Silva, Allan Martins
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly expanded their applications across various domains. However, the effectiveness of LLMs is often constrained when operating individually in complex environments. This paper introduces a transformative approach by organizing LLMs into community-based structures, aimed at enhancing their collective intelligence and problem-solving capabilities. We investigate different organizational models-hierarchical, flat, dynamic, and federated-each presenting unique benefits and challenges for collaborative AI systems. Within these structured communities, LLMs are designed to specialize in distinct cognitive tasks, employ advanced interaction mechanisms such as direct communication, voting systems, and market-based approaches, and dynamically adjust their governance structures to meet changing demands. The implementation of such communities holds substantial promise for improve problem-solving capabilities in AI, prompting an in-depth examination of their ethical considerations, management strategies, and scalability potential. This position paper seeks to lay the groundwork for future research, advocating a paradigm shift from isolated to synergistic operational frameworks in AI research and application.
Thoughtful Things: Building Human-Centric Smart Devices with Small Language Models
Authors: Evan King, Haoxiang Yu, Sahil Vartak, Jenna Jacob, Sangsu Lee, Christine Julien
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

Everyday devices like light bulbs and kitchen appliances are now embedded with so many features and automated behaviors that they have become complicated to actually use. While such "smart" capabilities can better support users' goals, the task of learning the "ins and outs" of different devices is daunting. Voice assistants aim to solve this problem by providing a natural language interface to devices, yet such assistants cannot understand loosely-constrained commands, they lack the ability to reason about and explain devices' behaviors to users, and they rely on connectivity to intrusive cloud infrastructure. Toward addressing these issues, we propose thoughtful things: devices that leverage lightweight, on-device language models to take actions and explain their behaviors in response to unconstrained user commands. We propose an end-to-end framework that leverages formal modeling, automated training data synthesis, and generative language models to create devices that are both capable and thoughtful in the presence of unconstrained user goals and inquiries. Our framework requires no labeled data and can be deployed on-device, with no cloud dependency. We implement two thoughtful things (a lamp and a thermostat) and deploy them on real hardware, evaluating their practical performance.
False Sense of Security in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Authors: Neo Christopher Chung, Hongkyou Chung, Hearim Lee, Lennart Brocki, Hongbeom Chung, George Dyer
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

A cautious interpretation of AI regulations and policy in the EU and the USA place explainability as a central deliverable of compliant AI systems. However, from a technical perspective, explainable AI (XAI) remains an elusive and complex target where even state of the art methods often reach erroneous, misleading, and incomplete explanations. "Explainability" has multiple meanings which are often used interchangeably, and there are an even greater number of XAI methods - none of which presents a clear edge. Indeed, there are multiple failure modes for each XAI method, which require application-specific development and continuous evaluation. In this paper, we analyze legislative and policy developments in the United States and the European Union, such as the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, the AI Act, the AI Liability Directive, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from a right to explanation perspective. We argue that these AI regulations and current market conditions threaten effective AI governance and safety because the objective of trustworthy, accountable, and transparent AI is intrinsically linked to the questionable ability of AI operators to provide meaningful explanations. Unless governments explicitly tackle the issue of explainability through clear legislative and policy statements that take into account technical realities, AI governance risks becoming a vacuous "box-ticking" exercise where scientific standards are replaced with legalistic thresholds, providing only a false sense of security in XAI.
SocialFormer: Social Interaction Modeling with Edge-enhanced Heterogeneous Graph Transformers for Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Zixu Wang, Zhigang Sun, Juergen Luettin, Lavdim Halilaj
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Graph Neural Network, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient autonomous driving. However, most existing methods overlook complex interactions between traffic participants that often govern their future trajectories. In this paper, we propose SocialFormer, an agent interaction-aware trajectory prediction method that leverages the semantic relationship between the target vehicle and surrounding vehicles by making use of the road topology. We also introduce an edge-enhanced heterogeneous graph transformer (EHGT) as the aggregator in a graph neural network (GNN) to encode the semantic and spatial agent interaction information. Additionally, we introduce a temporal encoder based on gated recurrent units (GRU) to model the temporal social behavior of agent movements. Finally, we present an information fusion framework that integrates agent encoding, lane encoding, and agent interaction encoding for a holistic representation of the traffic scene. We evaluate SocialFormer for the trajectory prediction task on the popular nuScenes benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improve Drug Discovery Prediction
Authors: Bing Hu, Ashish Saragadam, Anita Layton, Helen Chen
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Prediction

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in every stage of drug development. Continuing breakthroughs in AI-based methods for drug discovery require the creation, improvement, and refinement of drug discovery data. We posit a new data challenge that slows the advancement of drug discovery AI: datasets are often collected independently from each other, often with little overlap, creating data sparsity. Data sparsity makes data curation difficult for researchers looking to answer key research questions requiring values posed across multiple datasets. We propose a novel diffusion GNN model Syngand capable of generating ligand and pharmacokinetic data end-to-end. We show and provide a methodology for sampling pharmacokinetic data for existing ligands using our Syngand model. We show the initial promising results on the efficacy of the Syngand-generated synthetic target property data on downstream regression tasks with AqSolDB, LD50, and hERG central. Using our proposed model and methodology, researchers can easily generate synthetic ligand data to help them explore research questions that require data spanning multiple datasets.
On Adversarial Examples for Text Classification by Perturbing Latent Representations
Authors: Korn Sooksatra, Bikram Khanal, Pablo Rivas
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Recently, with the advancement of deep learning, several applications in text classification have advanced significantly. However, this improvement comes with a cost because deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial examples. This weakness indicates that deep learning is not very robust. Fortunately, the input of a text classifier is discrete. Hence, it can prevent the classifier from state-of-the-art attacks. Nonetheless, previous works have generated black-box attacks that successfully manipulate the discrete values of the input to find adversarial examples. Therefore, instead of changing the discrete values, we transform the input into its embedding vector containing real values to perform the state-of-the-art white-box attacks. Then, we convert the perturbed embedding vector back into a text and name it an adversarial example. In summary, we create a framework that measures the robustness of a text classifier by using the gradients of the classifier.
Is ReLU Adversarially Robust?
Authors: Korn Sooksatra, Greg Hamerly, Pablo Rivas
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The efficacy of deep learning models has been called into question by the presence of adversarial examples. Addressing the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial examples is crucial for ensuring their continued development and deployment. In this work, we focus on the role of rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation functions in the generation of adversarial examples. ReLU functions are commonly used in deep learning models because they facilitate the training process. However, our empirical analysis demonstrates that ReLU functions are not robust against adversarial examples. We propose a modified version of the ReLU function, which improves robustness against adversarial examples. Our results are supported by an experiment, which confirms the effectiveness of our proposed modification. Additionally, we demonstrate that applying adversarial training to our customized model further enhances its robustness compared to a general model.
Select to Perfect: Imitating desired behavior from large multi-agent data
Authors: Tim Franzmeyer, Edith Elkind, Philip Torr, Jakob Foerster, Joao Henriques
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent

AI agents are commonly trained with large datasets of demonstrations of human behavior. However, not all behaviors are equally safe or desirable. Desired characteristics for an AI agent can be expressed by assigning desirability scores, which we assume are not assigned to individual behaviors but to collective trajectories. For example, in a dataset of vehicle interactions, these scores might relate to the number of incidents that occurred. We first assess the effect of each individual agent's behavior on the collective desirability score, e.g., assessing how likely an agent is to cause incidents. This allows us to selectively imitate agents with a positive effect, e.g., only imitating agents that are unlikely to cause incidents. To enable this, we propose the concept of an agent's Exchange Value, which quantifies an individual agent's contribution to the collective desirability score. The Exchange Value is the expected change in desirability score when substituting the agent for a randomly selected agent. We propose additional methods for estimating Exchange Values from real-world datasets, enabling us to learn desired imitation policies that outperform relevant baselines. The project website can be found at https://tinyurl.com/select-to-perfect.