pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Grid-Based Projection of Spatial Data into Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Amin Anjomshoaa, Hannah Schuster, Axel Polleres
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

The Spatial Knowledge Graphs (SKG) are experiencing growing adoption as a means to model real-world entities, proving especially invaluable in domains like crisis management and urban planning. Considering that RDF specifications offer limited support for effectively managing spatial information, it's common practice to include text-based serializations of geometrical features, such as polygons and lines, as string literals in knowledge graphs. Consequently, Spatial Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) often rely on geo-enabled RDF Stores capable of parsing, interpreting, and indexing such serializations. In this paper, we leverage grid cells as the foundational element of SKGs and demonstrate how efficiently the spatial characteristics of real-world entities and their attributes can be encoded within knowledge graphs. Furthermore, we introduce a novel methodology for representing street networks in knowledge graphs, diverging from the conventional practice of individually capturing each street segment. Instead, our approach is based on tessellating the street network using grid cells and creating a simplified representation that could be utilized for various routing and navigation tasks, solely relying on RDF specifications.
On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback
Authors: Marcus Williams, Micah Carroll, Adhyyan Narang, Constantin Weisser, Brendan Murphy, Anca Dragan
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

As LLMs become more widely deployed, there is increasing interest in directly optimizing for feedback from end users (e.g. thumbs up) in addition to feedback from paid annotators. However, training to maximize human feedback creates a perverse incentive structure for the AI to resort to manipulative or deceptive tactics to obtain positive feedback from users who are vulnerable to such strategies. We study this phenomenon by training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning with simulated user feedback in environments of practical LLM usage. In our settings, we find that: 1) Extreme forms of "feedback gaming" such as manipulation and deception are learned reliably; 2) Even if only 2% of users are vulnerable to manipulative strategies, LLMs learn to identify and target them while behaving appropriately with other users, making such behaviors harder to detect; 3) To mitigate this issue, it may seem promising to leverage continued safety training or LLM-as-judges during training to filter problematic outputs. Instead, we found that while such approaches help in some of our settings, they backfire in others, sometimes even leading to subtler manipulative behaviors. We hope our results can serve as a case study which highlights the risks of using gameable feedback sources -- such as user feedback -- as a target for RL.
CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environments
Authors: Kung-Hsiang Huang, Akshara Prabhakar, Sidharth Dhawan, Yixin Mao, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Philippe Laban, Chien-Sheng Wu
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are vital for modern enterprises, providing a foundation for managing customer interactions and data. Integrating AI agents into CRM systems can automate routine processes and enhance personalized service. However, deploying and evaluating these agents is challenging due to the lack of realistic benchmarks that reflect the complexity of real-world CRM tasks. To address this issue, we introduce CRMArena, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on realistic tasks grounded in professional work environments. Following guidance from CRM experts and industry best practices, we designed CRMArena with nine customer service tasks distributed across three personas: service agent, analyst, and manager. The benchmark includes 16 commonly used industrial objects (e.g., account, order, knowledge article, case) with high interconnectivity, along with latent variables (e.g., complaint habits, policy violations) to simulate realistic data distributions. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art LLM agents succeed in less than 40% of the tasks with ReAct prompting, and less than 55% even with function-calling abilities. Our findings highlight the need for enhanced agent capabilities in function-calling and rule-following to be deployed in real-world work environments. CRMArena is an open challenge to the community: systems that can reliably complete tasks showcase direct business value in a popular work environment.
Hunyuan3D 1.0: A Unified Framework for Text-to-3D and Image-to-3D Generation
Authors: Xianghui Yang, Huiwen Shi, BoWen Zhang, Fan Yang, Jiacheng Wang, Hongxu Zhao, Xinhai Liu, Xinzhou Wang, Qingxiang Lin, Jiaao Yu, Lifu Wang, Jing Xu, Zebin He, Zhuo Chen, Sicong Liu, Junta Wu, Yihang Lian, Shaoxiong Yang, Yuhong Liu, Yong Yang, Di Wang, Jie Jiang, Chunchao Guo
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Image to 3D, Text to 3D

While 3D generative models have greatly improved artists' workflows, the existing diffusion models for 3D generation suffer from slow generation and poor generalization. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage approach named Hunyuan3D 1.0 including a lite version and a standard version, that both support text- and image-conditioned generation. In the first stage, we employ a multi-view diffusion model that efficiently generates multi-view RGB in approximately 4 seconds. These multi-view images capture rich details of the 3D asset from different viewpoints, relaxing the tasks from single-view to multi-view reconstruction. In the second stage, we introduce a feed-forward reconstruction model that rapidly and faithfully reconstructs the 3D asset given the generated multi-view images in approximately 7 seconds. The reconstruction network learns to handle noises and in-consistency introduced by the multi-view diffusion and leverages the available information from the condition image to efficiently recover the 3D structure. Our framework involves the text-to-image model, i.e., Hunyuan-DiT, making it a unified framework to support both text- and image-conditioned 3D generation. Our standard version has 3x more parameters than our lite and other existing model. Our Hunyuan3D 1.0 achieves an impressive balance between speed and quality, significantly reducing generation time while maintaining the quality and diversity of the produced assets.
ControlSynth Neural ODEs: Modeling Dynamical Systems with Guaranteed Convergence
Authors: Wenjie Mei, Dongzhe Zheng, Shihua Li
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

Neural ODEs (NODEs) are continuous-time neural networks (NNs) that can process data without the limitation of time intervals. They have advantages in learning and understanding the evolution of complex real dynamics. Many previous works have focused on NODEs in concise forms, while numerous physical systems taking straightforward forms, in fact, belong to their more complex quasi-classes, thus appealing to a class of general NODEs with high scalability and flexibility to model those systems. This, however, may result in intricate nonlinear properties. In this paper, we introduce ControlSynth Neural ODEs (CSODEs). We show that despite their highly nonlinear nature, convergence can be guaranteed via tractable linear inequalities. In the composition of CSODEs, we introduce an extra control term for learning the potential simultaneous capture of dynamics at different scales, which could be particularly useful for partial differential equation-formulated systems. Finally, we compare several representative NNs with CSODEs on important physical dynamics under the inductive biases of CSODEs, and illustrate that CSODEs have better learning and predictive abilities in these settings.
Federated GNNs for EEG-Based Stroke Assessment
Authors: Andrea Protani, Lorenzo Giusti, Albert Sund Aillet, Chiara Iacovelli, Giuseppe Reale, Simona Sacco, Paolo Manganotti, Lucio Marinelli, Diogo Reis Santos, Pierpaolo Brutti, Pietro Caliandro, Luigi Serio
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, EEG, Federated Learning

Machine learning (ML) has the potential to become an essential tool in supporting clinical decision-making processes, offering enhanced diagnostic capabilities and personalized treatment plans. However, outsourcing medical records to train ML models using patient data raises legal, privacy, and security concerns. Federated learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative ML, meeting healthcare institutions' requirements for robust models without sharing sensitive data and compromising patient privacy. This study proposes a novel method that combines federated learning (FL) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to predict stroke severity using electroencephalography (EEG) signals across multiple medical institutions. Our approach enables multiple hospitals to jointly train a shared GNN model on their local EEG data without exchanging patient information. Specifically, we address a regression problem by predicting the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS), a key indicator of stroke severity. The proposed model leverages a masked self-attention mechanism to capture salient brain connectivity patterns and employs EdgeSHAP to provide post-hoc explanations of the neurological states after a stroke. We evaluated our method on EEG recordings from four institutions, achieving a mean absolute error (MAE) of 3.23 in predicting NIHSS, close to the average error made by human experts (MAE $\approx$ 3.0). This demonstrates the method's effectiveness in providing accurate and explainable predictions while maintaining data privacy.
Breaking the Reclustering Barrier in Centroid-based Deep Clustering
Authors: Lukas Miklautz, Timo Klein, Kevin Sidak, Collin Leiber, Thomas Lang, Andrii Shkabrii, Sebastian Tschiatschek, Claudia Plant
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering, Image Clustering, Unsupervised Image Classification

This work investigates an important phenomenon in centroid-based deep clustering (DC) algorithms: Performance quickly saturates after a period of rapid early gains. Practitioners commonly address early saturation with periodic reclustering, which we demonstrate to be insufficient to address performance plateaus. We call this phenomenon the "reclustering barrier" and empirically show when the reclustering barrier occurs, what its underlying mechanisms are, and how it is possible to Break the Reclustering Barrier with our algorithm BRB. BRB avoids early over-commitment to initial clusterings and enables continuous adaptation to reinitialized clustering targets while remaining conceptually simple. Applying our algorithm to widely-used centroid-based DC algorithms, we show that (1) BRB consistently improves performance across a wide range of clustering benchmarks, (2) BRB enables training from scratch, and (3) BRB performs competitively against state-of-the-art DC algorithms when combined with a contrastive loss. We release our code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/Probabilistic-and-Interactive-ML/breaking-the-reclustering-barrier .
Combining Induction and Transduction for Abstract Reasoning
Authors: Wen-Ding Li, Keya Hu, Carter Larsen, Yuqing Wu, Simon Alford, Caleb Woo, Spencer M. Dunn, Hao Tang, Michelangelo Naim, Dat Nguyen, Wei-Long Zheng, Zenna Tavares, Yewen Pu, Kevin Ellis
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Program Synthesis

When learning an input-output mapping from very few examples, is it better to first infer a latent function that explains the examples, or is it better to directly predict new test outputs, e.g. using a neural network? We study this question on ARC by training neural models for induction (inferring latent functions) and transduction (directly predicting the test output for a given test input). We train on synthetically generated variations of Python programs that solve ARC training tasks. We find inductive and transductive models solve different kinds of test problems, despite having the same training problems and sharing the same neural architecture: Inductive program synthesis excels at precise computations, and at composing multiple concepts, while transduction succeeds on fuzzier perceptual concepts. Ensembling them approaches human-level performance on ARC.
On the Utilization of Unique Node Identifiers in Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Maya Bechler-Speicher, Moshe Eliasof, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Amir Globerson
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

Graph Neural Networks have inherent representational limitations due to their message-passing structure. Recent work has suggested that these limitations can be overcome by using unique node identifiers (UIDs). Here we argue that despite the advantages of UIDs, one of their disadvantages is that they lose the desirable property of permutation-equivariance. We thus propose to focus on UID models that are permutation-equivariant, and present theoretical arguments for their advantages. Motivated by this, we propose a method to regularize UID models towards permutation equivariance, via a contrastive loss. We empirically demonstrate that our approach improves generalization and extrapolation abilities while providing faster training convergence. On the recent BREC expressiveness benchmark, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other random-based approaches.
Hunyuan-Large: An Open-Source MoE Model with 52 Billion Activated Parameters by Tencent
Authors: Xingwu Sun, Yanfeng Chen, Yiqing Huang, Ruobing Xie, Jiaqi Zhu, Kai Zhang, Shuaipeng Li, Zhen Yang, Jonny Han, Xiaobo Shu, Jiahao Bu, Zhongzhi Chen, Xuemeng Huang, Fengzong Lian, Saiyong Yang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Xiaoqin Ren, Chao Yu, Lulu Wu, Yue Mao, Jun Xia, Tao Yang, Suncong Zheng, Kan Wu, Dian Jiao, Jinbao Xue, Xipeng Zhang, Decheng Wu, Kai Liu, Dengpeng Wu, Guanghui Xu, Shaohua Chen, Shuang Chen, Xiao Feng, Yigeng Hong, Junqiang Zheng, Chengcheng Xu, Zongwei Li, Xiong Kuang, Jianglu Hu, Yiqi Chen, Yuchi Deng, Guiyang Li, Ao Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Shihui Hu, Zilong Zhao, Zifan Wu, Yao Ding, Weichao Wang, Han Liu, Roberts Wang, Hao Fei, Peijie Yu, Ze Zhao, Xun Cao, Hai Wang, Fusheng Xiang, Mengyuan Huang, Zhiyuan Xiong, Bin Hu, Xuebin Hou, Lei Jiang, Jianqiang Ma, Jiajia Wu, Yaping Deng, Yi Shen, Qian Wang, Weijie Liu, Jie Liu, Meng Chen, Liang Dong, Weiwen Jia, Hu Chen, Feifei Liu, Rui Yuan, Huilin Xu, Zhenxiang Yan, Tengfei Cao, Zhichao Hu, Xinhua Feng, Dong Du, TingHao Yu, Yangyu Tao, Feng Zhang, Jianchen Zhu, Chengzhong Xu, Xirui Li, Chong Zha, Wen Ouyang, Yinben Xia, Xiang Li, Zekun He, Rongpeng Chen, Jiawei Song, Ruibin Chen, Fan Jiang, Chongqing Zhao, Bo wang, Hao Gong, Rong Gan, Winston Hu, Zhanhui Kang, Yong Yang, Yuhong Liu, Di Wang, Jie Jiang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Mathematical Problem-Solving, Mixture-of-Experts

In this paper, we introduce Hunyuan-Large, which is currently the largest open-source Transformer-based mixture of experts model, with a total of 389 billion parameters and 52 billion activation parameters, capable of handling up to 256K tokens. We conduct a thorough evaluation of Hunyuan-Large's superior performance across various benchmarks including language understanding and generation, logical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, coding, long-context, and aggregated tasks, where it outperforms LLama3.1-70B and exhibits comparable performance when compared to the significantly larger LLama3.1-405B model. Key practice of Hunyuan-Large include large-scale synthetic data that is orders larger than in previous literature, a mixed expert routing strategy, a key-value cache compression technique, and an expert-specific learning rate strategy. Additionally, we also investigate the scaling laws and learning rate schedule of mixture of experts models, providing valuable insights and guidances for future model development and optimization. The code and checkpoints of Hunyuan-Large are released to facilitate future innovations and applications. Codes: https://github.com/Tencent/Hunyuan-Large Models: https://huggingface.co/tencent/Tencent-Hunyuan-Large
The Enhancement of Software Delivery Performance through Enterprise DevSecOps and Generative Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Technology Firms
Authors: Jun Cui
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This study investigates the impact of integrating DevSecOps and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) on software delivery performance within technology firms. Utilizing a qualitative research methodology, the research involved semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners and analysis of case studies from organizations that have successfully implemented these methodologies. The findings reveal significant enhancements in research and development (R&D) efficiency, improved source code management, and heightened software quality and security. The integration of GAI facilitated automation of coding tasks and predictive analytics, while DevSecOps ensured that security measures were embedded throughout the development lifecycle. Despite the promising results, the study identifies gaps related to the generalizability of the findings due to the limited sample size and the qualitative nature of the research. This paper contributes valuable insights into the practical implementation of DevSecOps and GAI, highlighting their potential to transform software delivery processes in technology firms. Future research directions include quantitative assessments of the impact on specific business outcomes and comparative studies across different industries.
Positive Experience Reflection for Agents in Interactive Text Environments
Authors: Philip Lippmann, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Jie Yang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: text-based games

Intelligent agents designed for interactive environments face significant challenges in text-based games, a domain that demands complex reasoning and adaptability. While agents based on large language models (LLMs) using self-reflection have shown promise, they struggle when initially successful and exhibit reduced effectiveness when using smaller LLMs. We introduce Sweet&Sour, a novel approach that addresses these limitations in existing reflection methods by incorporating positive experiences and managed memory to enrich the context available to the agent at decision time. Our comprehensive analysis spans both closed- and open-source LLMs and demonstrates the effectiveness of Sweet&Sour in improving agent performance, particularly in scenarios where previous approaches fall short.
Improving Steering Vectors by Targeting Sparse Autoencoder Features
Authors: Sviatoslav Chalnev, Matthew Siu, Arthur Conmy
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

To control the behavior of language models, steering methods attempt to ensure that outputs of the model satisfy specific pre-defined properties. Adding steering vectors to the model is a promising method of model control that is easier than finetuning, and may be more robust than prompting. However, it can be difficult to anticipate the effects of steering vectors produced by methods such as CAA [Panickssery et al., 2024] or the direct use of SAE latents [Templeton et al., 2024]. In our work, we address this issue by using SAEs to measure the effects of steering vectors, giving us a method that can be used to understand the causal effect of any steering vector intervention. We use this method for measuring causal effects to develop an improved steering method, SAE-Targeted Steering (SAE-TS), which finds steering vectors to target specific SAE features while minimizing unintended side effects. We show that overall, SAE-TS balances steering effects with coherence better than CAA and SAE feature steering, when evaluated on a range of tasks.
Double Descent Meets Out-of-Distribution Detection: Theoretical Insights and Empirical Analysis on the role of model complexity
Authors: Mouïn Ben Ammar, David Brellmann, Arturo Mendoza, Antoine Manzanera, Gianni Franchi
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. In recent years, it has received increasing attention, particularly through post-hoc detection and training-based methods. In this paper, we focus on post-hoc OOD detection, which enables identifying OOD samples without altering the model's training procedure or objective. Our primary goal is to investigate the relationship between model capacity and its OOD detection performance. Specifically, we aim to answer the following question: Does the Double Descent phenomenon manifest in post-hoc OOD detection? This question is crucial, as it can reveal whether overparameterization, which is already known to benefit generalization, can also enhance OOD detection. Despite the growing interest in these topics by the classic supervised machine learning community, this intersection remains unexplored for OOD detection. We empirically demonstrate that the Double Descent effect does indeed appear in post-hoc OOD detection. Furthermore, we provide theoretical insights to explain why this phenomenon emerges in such setting. Finally, we show that the overparameterized regime does not yield superior results consistently, and we propose a method to identify the optimal regime for OOD detection based on our observations.
Detect an Object At Once without Fine-tuning
Authors: Junyu Hao, Jianheng Liu, Yongjia Zhao, Zuofan Chen, Qi Sun, Jinlong Chen, Jianguo Wei, Minghao Yang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

When presented with one or a few photos of a previously unseen object, humans can instantly recognize it in different scenes. Although the human brain mechanism behind this phenomenon is still not fully understood, this work introduces a novel technical realization of this task. It consists of two phases: (1) generating a Similarity Density Map (SDM) by convolving the scene image with the given object image patch(es) so that the highlight areas in the SDM indicate the possible locations; (2) obtaining the object occupied areas in the scene through a Region Alignment Network (RAN). The RAN is constructed on a backbone of Deep Siamese Network (DSN), and different from the traditional DSNs, it aims to obtain the object accurate regions by regressing the location and area differences between the ground truths and the predicted ones indicated by the highlight areas in SDM. By pre-learning from labels annotated in traditional datasets, the SDM-RAN can detect previously unknown objects without fine-tuning. Experiments were conducted on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC datasets. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the same task.
Behavioral Sequence Modeling with Ensemble Learning
Authors: Maxime Kawawa-Beaudan, Srijan Sood, Soham Palande, Ganapathy Mani, Tucker Balch, Manuela Veloso
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning

We investigate the use of sequence analysis for behavior modeling, emphasizing that sequential context often outweighs the value of aggregate features in understanding human behavior. We discuss framing common problems in fields like healthcare, finance, and e-commerce as sequence modeling tasks, and address challenges related to constructing coherent sequences from fragmented data and disentangling complex behavior patterns. We present a framework for sequence modeling using Ensembles of Hidden Markov Models, which are lightweight, interpretable, and efficient. Our ensemble-based scoring method enables robust comparison across sequences of different lengths and enhances performance in scenarios with imbalanced or scarce data. The framework scales in real-world scenarios, is compatible with downstream feature-based modeling, and is applicable in both supervised and unsupervised learning settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with results on a longitudinal human behavior dataset.