pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Kaleidoscope: Learnable Masks for Heterogeneous Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xinran Li, Ling Pan, Jun Zhang
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, MuJoCo, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Starcraft

In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), parameter sharing is commonly employed to enhance sample efficiency. However, the popular approach of full parameter sharing often leads to homogeneous policies among agents, potentially limiting the performance benefits that could be derived from policy diversity. To address this critical limitation, we introduce \emph{Kaleidoscope}, a novel adaptive partial parameter sharing scheme that fosters policy heterogeneity while still maintaining high sample efficiency. Specifically, Kaleidoscope maintains one set of common parameters alongside multiple sets of distinct, learnable masks for different agents, dictating the sharing of parameters. It promotes diversity among policy networks by encouraging discrepancy among these masks, without sacrificing the efficiencies of parameter sharing. This design allows Kaleidoscope to dynamically balance high sample efficiency with a broad policy representational capacity, effectively bridging the gap between full parameter sharing and non-parameter sharing across various environments. We further extend Kaleidoscope to critic ensembles in the context of actor-critic algorithms, which could help improve value estimations.Our empirical evaluations across extensive environments, including multi-agent particle environment, multi-agent MuJoCo and StarCraft multi-agent challenge v2, demonstrate the superior performance of Kaleidoscope compared with existing parameter sharing approaches, showcasing its potential for performance enhancement in MARL. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/LXXXXR/Kaleidoscope}.
VOVTrack: Exploring the Potentiality in Videos for Open-Vocabulary Object Tracking
Authors: Zekun Qian, Ruize Han, Junhui Hou, Linqi Song, Wei Feng
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking, Open-vocabulary object detection, Open Vocabulary Object Detection, Video Object Tracking

Open-vocabulary multi-object tracking (OVMOT) represents a critical new challenge involving the detection and tracking of diverse object categories in videos, encompassing both seen categories (base classes) and unseen categories (novel classes). This issue amalgamates the complexities of open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) and multi-object tracking (MOT). Existing approaches to OVMOT often merge OVD and MOT methodologies as separate modules, predominantly focusing on the problem through an image-centric lens. In this paper, we propose VOVTrack, a novel method that integrates object states relevant to MOT and video-centric training to address this challenge from a video object tracking standpoint. First, we consider the tracking-related state of the objects during tracking and propose a new prompt-guided attention mechanism for more accurate localization and classification (detection) of the time-varying objects. Subsequently, we leverage raw video data without annotations for training by formulating a self-supervised object similarity learning technique to facilitate temporal object association (tracking). Experimental results underscore that VOVTrack outperforms existing methods, establishing itself as a state-of-the-art solution for open-vocabulary tracking task.
Scaling Laws for Predicting Downstream Performance in LLMs
Authors: Yangyi Chen, Binxuan Huang, Yifan Gao, Zhengyang Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Heng Ji
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Precise estimation of downstream performance in large language models (LLMs) prior to training is essential for guiding their development process. Scaling laws analysis utilizes the statistics of a series of significantly smaller sampling language models (LMs) to predict the performance of the target LLM. For downstream performance prediction, the critical challenge lies in the emergent abilities in LLMs that occur beyond task-specific computational thresholds. In this work, we focus on the pre-training loss as a more computation-efficient metric for performance estimation. Our two-stage approach consists of first estimating a function that maps computational resources (e.g., FLOPs) to the pre-training Loss using a series of sampling models, followed by mapping the pre-training loss to downstream task Performance after the critical "emergent phase". In preliminary experiments, this FLP solution accurately predicts the performance of LLMs with 7B and 13B parameters using a series of sampling LMs up to 3B, achieving error margins of 5% and 10%, respectively, and significantly outperforming the FLOPs-to-Performance approach. This motivates FLP-M, a fundamental approach for performance prediction that addresses the practical need to integrate datasets from multiple sources during pre-training, specifically blending general corpora with code data to accurately represent the common necessity. FLP-M extends the power law analytical function to predict domain-specific pre-training loss based on FLOPs across data sources, and employs a two-layer neural network to model the non-linear relationship between multiple domain-specific loss and downstream performance. By utilizing a 3B LLM trained on a specific ratio and a series of smaller sampling LMs, FLP-M can effectively forecast the performance of 3B and 7B LLMs across various data mixtures for most benchmarks within 10% error margins.
"I Am the One and Only, Your Cyber BFF": Understanding the Impact of GenAI Requires Understanding the Impact of Anthropomorphic AI
Authors: Myra Cheng, Alicia DeVrio, Lisa Egede, Su Lin Blodgett, Alexandra Olteanu
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Many state-of-the-art generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly prone to anthropomorphic behaviors, i.e., to generating outputs that are perceived to be human-like. While this has led to scholars increasingly raising concerns about possible negative impacts such anthropomorphic AI systems can give rise to, anthropomorphism in AI development, deployment, and use remains vastly overlooked, understudied, and underspecified. In this perspective, we argue that we cannot thoroughly map the social impacts of generative AI without mapping the social impacts of anthropomorphic AI, and outline a call to action.
Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation via Semantic-Topo-Metric Representation Guided LLM Reasoning
Authors: Yunpeng Gao, Zhigang Wang, Linglin Jing, Dong Wang, Xuelong Li, Bin Zhao
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Navigate, Spatial Reasoning, Vision and Language Navigation

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a novel task enabling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to navigate in outdoor environments through natural language instructions and visual cues. It remains challenging due to the complex spatial relationships in outdoor aerial scenes. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end zero-shot framework for aerial VLN tasks, where the large language model (LLM) is introduced as our agent for action prediction. Specifically, we develop a novel Semantic-Topo-Metric Representation (STMR) to enhance the spatial reasoning ability of LLMs. This is achieved by extracting and projecting instruction-related semantic masks of landmarks into a top-down map that contains the location information of surrounding landmarks. Further, this map is transformed into a matrix representation with distance metrics as the text prompt to the LLM, for action prediction according to the instruction. Experiments conducted in real and simulation environments have successfully proved the effectiveness and robustness of our method, achieving 15.9% and 12.5% improvements (absolute) in Oracle Success Rate (OSR) on AerialVLN-S dataset.
A Systematic Review of Edge Case Detection in Automated Driving: Methods, Challenges and Future Directions
Authors: Saeed Rahmani, Sabine Rieder, Erwin de Gelder, Marcel Sonntag, Jorge Lorente Mallada, Sytze Kalisvaart, Vahid Hashemi, Simeon C. Calvert
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

The rapid development of automated vehicles (AVs) promises to revolutionize transportation by enhancing safety and efficiency. However, ensuring their reliability in diverse real-world conditions remains a significant challenge, particularly due to rare and unexpected situations known as edge cases. Although numerous approaches exist for detecting edge cases, there is a notable lack of a comprehensive survey that systematically reviews these techniques. This paper fills this gap by presenting a practical, hierarchical review and systematic classification of edge case detection and assessment methodologies. Our classification is structured on two levels: first, categorizing detection approaches according to AV modules, including perception-related and trajectory-related edge cases; and second, based on underlying methodologies and theories guiding these techniques. We extend this taxonomy by introducing a new class called "knowledge-driven" approaches, which is largely overlooked in the literature. Additionally, we review the techniques and metrics for the evaluation of edge case detection methods and identified edge cases. To our knowledge, this is the first survey to comprehensively cover edge case detection methods across all AV subsystems, discuss knowledge-driven edge cases, and explore evaluation techniques for detection methods. This structured and multi-faceted analysis aims to facilitate targeted research and modular testing of AVs. Moreover, by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches and discussing the challenges and future directions, this survey intends to assist AV developers, researchers, and policymakers in enhancing the safety and reliability of automated driving (AD) systems through effective edge case detection.
Dynamic Fusion Strategies for Federated Multimodal Recommendations
Authors: Zhiwei Li, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang, Chengqi Zhang
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Recommendation, Privacy Preserving, Recommendation Systems

Delivering deeply personalized recommendations necessitates understanding user interactions with diverse multimedia features, but achieving this within the constraints of Federated Recommendation Systems (FedRec) is severely hampered by communication bottlenecks, user heterogeneity, and the complexity of privacy-preserving multimodal fusion. To this end, we propose FedMR, a novel multimodal FedRec framework centered around the Mixing Feature Fusion Module (MFFM). FedMR employs a two-stage process: (1) Server-side centralized multimedia content processing provides rich, shared item context using pre-trained models, mitigating limitations from client sparsity and resource constraints efficiently. (2) Client-Side Personalized Refinement, where the MFFM dynamically adapts these server-provided multimodal representations based on client-specific interaction patterns, effectively tailoring recommendations and resolving heterogeneity in user preferences towards different modalities. Extensive experiments validate that FedMR seamlessly enhances existing ID-based FedRecs, effectively transforming them into high-performing federated multimodal systems.
GIVE: Structured Reasoning with Knowledge Graph Inspired Veracity Extrapolation
Authors: Jiashu He, Mingyu Derek Ma, Jinxuan Fan, Dan Roth, Wei Wang, Alejandro Ribeiro
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Response Generation, Retrieval

Existing retrieval-based reasoning approaches for large language models (LLMs) heavily rely on the density and quality of the non-parametric knowledge source to provide domain knowledge and explicit reasoning chain. However, inclusive knowledge sources are expensive and sometimes infeasible to build for scientific or corner domains. To tackle the challenges, we introduce Graph Inspired Veracity Extrapolation (GIVE), a novel reasoning framework that integrates the parametric and non-parametric memories to enhance both knowledge retrieval and faithful reasoning processes on very sparse knowledge graphs. By leveraging the external structured knowledge to inspire LLM to model the interconnections among relevant concepts, our method facilitates a more logical and step-wise reasoning approach akin to experts' problem-solving, rather than gold answer retrieval. Specifically, the framework prompts LLMs to decompose the query into crucial concepts and attributes, construct entity groups with relevant entities, and build an augmented reasoning chain by probing potential relationships among node pairs across these entity groups. Our method incorporates both factual and extrapolated linkages to enable comprehensive understanding and response generation. Extensive experiments on reasoning-intense benchmarks on biomedical and commonsense QA demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Specifically, GIVE enables GPT3.5-turbo to outperform advanced models like GPT4 without any additional training cost, thereby underscoring the efficacy of integrating structured information and internal reasoning ability of LLMs for tackling specialized tasks with limited external resources.
Deeper Insights into Deep Graph Convolutional Networks: Stability and Generalization
Authors: Guangrui Yang, Ming Li, Han Feng, Xiaosheng Zhuang
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have emerged as powerful models for graph learning tasks, exhibiting promising performance in various domains. While their empirical success is evident, there is a growing need to understand their essential ability from a theoretical perspective. Existing theoretical research has primarily focused on the analysis of single-layer GCNs, while a comprehensive theoretical exploration of the stability and generalization of deep GCNs remains limited. In this paper, we bridge this gap by delving into the stability and generalization properties of deep GCNs, aiming to provide valuable insights by characterizing rigorously the associated upper bounds. Our theoretical results reveal that the stability and generalization of deep GCNs are influenced by certain key factors, such as the maximum absolute eigenvalue of the graph filter operators and the depth of the network. Our theoretical studies contribute to a deeper understanding of the stability and generalization properties of deep GCNs, potentially paving the way for developing more reliable and well-performing models.
ARCap: Collecting High-quality Human Demonstrations for Robot Learning with Augmented Reality Feedback
Authors: Sirui Chen, Chen Wang, Kaden Nguyen, Li Fei-Fei, C. Karen Liu
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Recent progress in imitation learning from human demonstrations has shown promising results in teaching robots manipulation skills. To further scale up training datasets, recent works start to use portable data collection devices without the need for physical robot hardware. However, due to the absence of on-robot feedback during data collection, the data quality depends heavily on user expertise, and many devices are limited to specific robot embodiments. We propose ARCap, a portable data collection system that provides visual feedback through augmented reality (AR) and haptic warnings to guide users in collecting high-quality demonstrations. Through extensive user studies, we show that ARCap enables novice users to collect robot-executable data that matches robot kinematics and avoids collisions with the scenes. With data collected from ARCap, robots can perform challenging tasks, such as manipulation in cluttered environments and long-horizon cross-embodiment manipulation. ARCap is fully open-source and easy to calibrate; all components are built from off-the-shelf products. More details and results can be found on our website: https://stanford-tml.github.io/ARCap
Why pre-training is beneficial for downstream classification tasks?
Authors: Xin Jiang, Xu Cheng, Zechao Li
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Pre-training has exhibited notable benefits to downstream tasks by boosting accuracy and speeding up convergence, but the exact reasons for these benefits still remain unclear. To this end, we propose to quantitatively and explicitly explain effects of pre-training on the downstream task from a novel game-theoretic view, which also sheds new light into the learning behavior of deep neural networks (DNNs). Specifically, we extract and quantify the knowledge encoded by the pre-trained model, and further track the changes of such knowledge during the fine-tuning process. Interestingly, we discover that only a small amount of pre-trained model's knowledge is preserved for the inference of downstream tasks. However, such preserved knowledge is very challenging for a model training from scratch to learn. Thus, with the help of this exclusively learned and useful knowledge, the model fine-tuned from pre-training usually achieves better performance than the model training from scratch. Besides, we discover that pre-training can guide the fine-tuned model to learn target knowledge for the downstream task more directly and quickly, which accounts for the faster convergence of the fine-tuned model.
JurEE not Judges: safeguarding llm interactions with small, specialised Encoder Ensembles
Authors: Dom Nasrabadi
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Synthetic Data Generation

We introduce JurEE, an ensemble of efficient, encoder-only transformer models designed to strengthen safeguards in AI-User interactions within LLM-based systems. Unlike existing LLM-as-Judge methods, which often struggle with generalization across risk taxonomies and only provide textual outputs, JurEE offers probabilistic risk estimates across a wide range of prevalent risks. Our approach leverages diverse data sources and employs progressive synthetic data generation techniques, including LLM-assisted augmentation, to enhance model robustness and performance. We create an in-house benchmark comprising of other reputable benchmarks such as the OpenAI Moderation Dataset and ToxicChat, where we find JurEE significantly outperforms baseline models, demonstrating superior accuracy, speed, and cost-efficiency. This makes it particularly suitable for applications requiring stringent content moderation, such as customer-facing chatbots. The encoder-ensemble's modular design allows users to set tailored risk thresholds, enhancing its versatility across various safety-related applications. JurEE's collective decision-making process, where each specialized encoder model contributes to the final output, not only improves predictive accuracy but also enhances interpretability. This approach provides a more efficient, performant, and economical alternative to traditional LLMs for large-scale implementations requiring robust content moderation.
$\forall$uto$\exists$$\lor\!\land$L: Autonomous Evaluation of LLMs for Truth Maintenance and Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Rushang Karia, Daniel Bramblett, Daksh Dobhal, Siddharth Srivastava
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Logical Reasoning, Translation

This paper presents $\forall$uto$\exists$$\lor\!\land$L, a novel benchmark for scaling Large Language Model (LLM) assessment in formal tasks with clear notions of correctness, such as truth maintenance in translation and logical reasoning. $\forall$uto$\exists$$\lor\!\land$L is the first benchmarking paradigm that offers several key advantages necessary for scaling objective evaluation of LLMs without human labeling: (a) ability to evaluate LLMs of increasing sophistication by auto-generating tasks at different levels of difficulty; (b) auto-generation of ground truth that eliminates dependence on expensive and time-consuming human annotation; (c) the use of automatically generated, randomized datasets that mitigate the ability of successive LLMs to overfit to static datasets used in many contemporary benchmarks. Empirical analysis shows that an LLM's performance on $\forall$uto$\exists$$\lor\!\land$L is highly indicative of its performance on a diverse array of other benchmarks focusing on translation and reasoning tasks, making it a valuable autonomous evaluation paradigm in settings where hand-curated datasets can be hard to obtain and/or update.
Exploring the Role of Reasoning Structures for Constructing Proofs in Multi-Step Natural Language Reasoning with Large Language Models
Authors: Zi'ou Zheng, Christopher Malon, Martin Renqiang Min, Xiaodan Zhu
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

When performing complex multi-step reasoning tasks, the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive structured intermediate proof steps is important for ensuring that the models truly perform the desired reasoning and for improving models' explainability. This paper is centred around a focused study: whether the current state-of-the-art generalist LLMs can leverage the structures in a few examples to better construct the proof structures with \textit{in-context learning}. Our study specifically focuses on structure-aware demonstration and structure-aware pruning. We demonstrate that they both help improve performance. A detailed analysis is provided to help understand the results.
Efficient Fine-Grained Guidance for Diffusion Model Based Symbolic Music Generation
Authors: Tingyu Zhu, Haoyu Liu, Ziyu Wang, Zhimin Jiang, Zeyu Zheng
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

Developing generative models to create or conditionally create symbolic music presents unique challenges due to the combination of limited data availability and the need for high precision in note pitch. To address these challenges, we introduce an efficient Fine-Grained Guidance (FGG) approach within diffusion models. FGG guides the diffusion models to generate music that aligns more closely with the control and intent of expert composers, which is critical to improve the accuracy, listenability, and quality of generated music. This approach empowers diffusion models to excel in advanced applications such as improvisation, and interactive music creation. We derive theoretical characterizations for both the challenges in symbolic music generation and the effects of the FGG approach. We provide numerical experiments and subjective evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We have published a demo page to showcase performances, which enables real-time interactive generation.