pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Can Vehicle Motion Planning Generalize to Realistic Long-tail Scenarios?
Authors: Marcel Hallgarten, Julian Zapata, Martin Stoll, Katrin Renz, Andreas Zell
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Motion Planning, Navigate

Real-world autonomous driving systems must make safe decisions in the face of rare and diverse traffic scenarios. Current state-of-the-art planners are mostly evaluated on real-world datasets like nuScenes (open-loop) or nuPlan (closed-loop). In particular, nuPlan seems to be an expressive evaluation method since it is based on real-world data and closed-loop, yet it mostly covers basic driving scenarios. This makes it difficult to judge a planner's capabilities to generalize to rarely-seen situations. Therefore, we propose a novel closed-loop benchmark interPlan containing several edge cases and challenging driving scenarios. We assess existing state-of-the-art planners on our benchmark and show that neither rule-based nor learning-based planners can safely navigate the interPlan scenarios. A recently evolving direction is the usage of foundation models like large language models (LLM) to handle generalization. We evaluate an LLM-only planner and introduce a novel hybrid planner that combines an LLM-based behavior planner with a rule-based motion planner that achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark.
Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare
Authors: Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Angus Addlesee, Daniel Hernández García, Chris Reinke, Soraya Arias, Federica Arrigoni, Alex Auternaud, Lauriane Blavette, Cigdem Beyan, Luis Gomez Camara, Ohad Cohen, Alessandro Conti, Sébastien Dacunha, Christian Dondrup, Yoav Ellinson, Francesco Ferro, Sharon Gannot, Florian Gras, Nancie Gunson, Radu Horaud, Moreno D'Incà, Imad Kimouche, Séverin Lemaignan, Oliver Lemon, Cyril Liotard, Luca Marchionni, Mordehay Moradi, Tomas Pajdla, Maribel Pino, Michal Polic, Matthieu Py, Ariel Rado, Bin Ren, Elisa Ricci, Anne-Sophie Rigaud, Paolo Rota, Marta Romeo, Nicu Sebe, Weronika Sieińska, Pinchas Tandeitnik, Francesco Tonini, Nicolas Turro, Timothée Wintz, Yanchao Yu
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00

Despite the many recent achievements in developing and deploying social robotics, there are still many underexplored environments and applications for which systematic evaluation of such systems by end-users is necessary. While several robotic platforms have been used in gerontological healthcare, the question of whether or not a social interactive robot with multi-modal conversational capabilities will be useful and accepted in real-life facilities is yet to be answered. This paper is an attempt to partially answer this question, via two waves of experiments with patients and companions in a day-care gerontological facility in Paris with a full-sized humanoid robot endowed with social and conversational interaction capabilities. The software architecture, developed during the H2020 SPRING project, together with the experimental protocol, allowed us to evaluate the acceptability (AES) and usability (SUS) with more than 60 end-users. Overall, the users are receptive to this technology, especially when the robot perception and action skills are robust to environmental clutter and flexible to handle a plethora of different interactions.
Differentially Private Reinforcement Learning with Self-Play
Authors: Dan Qiao, Yu-Xiang Wang
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

We study the problem of multi-agent reinforcement learning (multi-agent RL) with differential privacy (DP) constraints. This is well-motivated by various real-world applications involving sensitive data, where it is critical to protect users' private information. We first extend the definitions of Joint DP (JDP) and Local DP (LDP) to two-player zero-sum episodic Markov Games, where both definitions ensure trajectory-wise privacy protection. Then we design a provably efficient algorithm based on optimistic Nash value iteration and privatization of Bernstein-type bonuses. The algorithm is able to satisfy JDP and LDP requirements when instantiated with appropriate privacy mechanisms. Furthermore, for both notions of DP, our regret bound generalizes the best known result under the single-agent RL case, while our regret could also reduce to the best known result for multi-agent RL without privacy constraints. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first line of results towards understanding trajectory-wise privacy protection in multi-agent RL.
From Words to Numbers: Your Large Language Model Is Secretly A Capable Regressor When Given In-Context Examples
Authors: Robert Vacareanu, Vlad-Andrei Negru, Vasile Suciu, Mihai Surdeanu
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, regression

We analyze how well pre-trained large language models (e.g., Llama2, GPT-4, Claude 3, etc) can do linear and non-linear regression when given in-context examples, without any additional training or gradient updates. Our findings reveal that several large language models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude 3) are able to perform regression tasks with a performance rivaling (or even outperforming) that of traditional supervised methods such as Random Forest, Bagging, or Gradient Boosting. For example, on the challenging Friedman #2 regression dataset, Claude 3 outperforms many supervised methods such as AdaBoost, SVM, Random Forest, KNN, or Gradient Boosting. We then investigate how well the performance of large language models scales with the number of in-context exemplars. We borrow from the notion of regret from online learning and empirically show that LLMs are capable of obtaining a sub-linear regret.
Exploring the Decentraland Economy: Multifaceted Parcel Attributes, Key Insights, and Benchmarking
Authors: Dipika Jha, Ankit K. Bhagat, Raju Halder, Rajendra N. Paramanik, Chandra M. Kumar
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Benchmarking

This paper presents a comprehensive Decentraland parcels dataset, called IITP-VDLand, sourced from diverse platforms such as Decentraland, OpenSea, Etherscan, Google BigQuery, and various Social Media Platforms. Unlike existing datasets which have limited attributes and records, IITP-VDLand offers a rich array of attributes, encompassing parcel characteristics, trading history, past activities, transactions, and social media interactions. Alongside, we introduce a key attribute in the dataset, namely Rarity score, which measures the uniqueness of each parcel within the virtual world. Addressing the significant challenge posed by the dispersed nature of this data across various sources, we employ a systematic approach, utilizing both available APIs and custom scripts, to gather it. Subsequently, we meticulously curate and organize the information into four distinct fragments: (1) Characteristics, (2) OpenSea Trading History, (3) Ethereum Activity Transactions, and (4) Social Media. We envisage that this dataset would serve as a robust resource for training machine- and deep-learning models specifically designed to address real-world challenges within the domain of Decentraland parcels. The performance benchmarking of more than 20 state-of-the-art price prediction models on our dataset yields promising results, achieving a maximum R2 score of 0.8251 and an accuracy of 74.23% in case of Extra Trees Regressor and Classifier. The key findings reveal that the ensemble models perform better than both deep learning and linear models for our dataset. We observe a significant impact of coordinates, geographical proximity, rarity score, and few other economic indicators on the prediction of parcel prices.
Bayesian Federated Model Compression for Communication and Computation Efficiency
Authors: Chengyu Xia, Danny H. K. Tsang, Vincent K. N. Lau
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Federated Learning, Model Compression

In this paper, we investigate Bayesian model compression in federated learning (FL) to construct sparse models that can achieve both communication and computation efficiencies. We propose a decentralized Turbo variational Bayesian inference (D-Turbo-VBI) FL framework where we firstly propose a hierarchical sparse prior to promote a clustered sparse structure in the weight matrix. Then, by carefully integrating message passing and VBI with a decentralized turbo framework, we propose the D-Turbo-VBI algorithm which can (i) reduce both upstream and downstream communication overhead during federated training, and (ii) reduce the computational complexity during local inference. Additionally, we establish the convergence property for thr proposed D-Turbo-VBI algorithm. Simulation results show the significant gain of our proposed algorithm over the baselines in reducing communication overhead during federated training and computational complexity of final model.
GNN-based Probabilistic Supply and Inventory Predictions in Supply Chain Networks
Authors: Hyung-il Ahn, Young Chol Song, Santiago Olivar, Hershel Mehta, Naveen Tewari
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Graph Neural Network, Prediction

Successful supply chain optimization must mitigate imbalances between supply and demand over time. While accurate demand prediction is essential for supply planning, it alone does not suffice. The key to successful supply planning for optimal and viable execution lies in maximizing predictability for both demand and supply throughout an execution horizon. Therefore, enhancing the accuracy of supply predictions is imperative to create an attainable supply plan that matches demand without overstocking or understocking. However, in complex supply chain networks with numerous nodes and edges, accurate supply predictions are challenging due to dynamic node interactions, cascading supply delays, resource availability, production and logistic capabilities. Consequently, supply executions often deviate from their initial plans. To address this, we present the Graph-based Supply Prediction (GSP) probabilistic model. Our attention-based graph neural network (GNN) model predicts supplies, inventory, and imbalances using graph-structured historical data, demand forecasting, and original supply plan inputs. The experiments, conducted using historical data from a global consumer goods company's large-scale supply chain, demonstrate that GSP significantly improves supply and inventory prediction accuracy, potentially offering supply plan corrections to optimize executions.
LATTE: Low-Precision Approximate Attention with Head-wise Trainable Threshold for Efficient Transformer
Authors: Jiing-Ping Wang, Ming-Guang Lin, An-Yeu, Wu
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00

With the rise of Transformer models in NLP and CV domain, Multi-Head Attention has been proven to be a game-changer. However, its expensive computation poses challenges to the model throughput and efficiency, especially for the long sequence tasks. Exploiting the sparsity in attention has been proven to be an effective way to reduce computation. Nevertheless, prior works do not consider the various distributions among different heads and lack a systematic method to determine the threshold. To address these challenges, we propose Low-Precision Approximate Attention with Head-wise Trainable Threshold for Efficient Transformer (LATTE). LATTE employs a headwise threshold-based filter with the low-precision dot product and computation reuse mechanism to reduce the computation of MHA. Moreover, the trainable threshold is introduced to provide a systematic method for adjusting the thresholds and enable end-to-end optimization. Experimental results indicate LATTE can smoothly adapt to both NLP and CV tasks, offering significant computation savings with only a minor compromise in performance. Also, the trainable threshold is shown to be essential for the leverage between the performance and the computation. As a result, LATTE filters up to 85.16% keys with only a 0.87% accuracy drop in the CV task and 89.91% keys with a 0.86 perplexity increase in the NLP task.
Generative Probabilistic Planning for Optimizing Supply Chain Networks
Authors: Hyung-il Ahn, Santiago Olivar, Hershel Mehta, Young Chol Song
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Offline RL

Supply chain networks in enterprises are typically composed of complex topological graphs involving various types of nodes and edges, accommodating numerous products with considerable demand and supply variability. However, as supply chain networks expand in size and complexity, traditional supply chain planning methods (e.g., those found in heuristic rule-based and operations research-based systems) tend to become locally optimal or lack computational scalability, resulting in substantial imbalances between supply and demand across nodes in the network. This paper introduces a novel Generative AI technique, which we call Generative Probabilistic Planning (GPP). GPP generates dynamic supply action plans that are globally optimized across all network nodes over the time horizon for changing objectives like maximizing profits or service levels, factoring in time-varying probabilistic demand, lead time, and production conditions. GPP leverages attention-based graph neural networks (GNN), offline deep reinforcement learning (Offline RL), and policy simulations to train generative policy models and create optimal plans through probabilistic simulations, effectively accounting for various uncertainties. Our experiments using historical data from a global consumer goods company with complex supply chain networks demonstrate that GPP accomplishes objective-adaptable, probabilistically resilient, and dynamic planning for supply chain networks, leading to significant improvements in performance and profitability for enterprises. Our work plays a pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of AI adoption within the supply chain domain.
Mitigating Object Dependencies: Improving Point Cloud Self-Supervised Learning through Object Exchange
Authors: Yanhao Wu, Tong Zhang, Wei Ke, Congpei Qiu, Sabine Susstrunk, Mathieu Salzmann
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Object, Scene Understanding, Self-Supervised Learning

In the realm of point cloud scene understanding, particularly in indoor scenes, objects are arranged following human habits, resulting in objects of certain semantics being closely positioned and displaying notable inter-object correlations. This can create a tendency for neural networks to exploit these strong dependencies, bypassing the individual object patterns. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) strategy. Our approach leverages both object patterns and contextual cues to produce robust features. It begins with the formulation of an object-exchanging strategy, where pairs of objects with comparable sizes are exchanged across different scenes, effectively disentangling the strong contextual dependencies. Subsequently, we introduce a context-aware feature learning strategy, which encodes object patterns without relying on their specific context by aggregating object features across various scenes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing SSL techniques, further showing its better robustness to environmental changes. Moreover, we showcase the applicability of our approach by transferring pre-trained models to diverse point cloud datasets.
Generating Counterfactual Explanations Using Cardinality Constraints
Authors: Rubén Ruiz-Torrubiano
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Fairness

Providing explanations about how machine learning algorithms work and/or make particular predictions is one of the main tools that can be used to improve their trusworthiness, fairness and robustness. Among the most intuitive type of explanations are counterfactuals, which are examples that differ from a given point only in the prediction target and some set of features, presenting which features need to be changed in the original example to flip the prediction for that example. However, such counterfactuals can have many different features than the original example, making their interpretation difficult. In this paper, we propose to explicitly add a cardinality constraint to counterfactual generation limiting how many features can be different from the original example, thus providing more interpretable and easily understantable counterfactuals.
Interactive Prompt Debugging with Sequence Salience
Authors: Ian Tenney, Ryan Mullins, Bin Du, Shree Pandya, Minsuk Kahng, Lucas Dixon
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

We present Sequence Salience, a visual tool for interactive prompt debugging with input salience methods. Sequence Salience builds on widely used salience methods for text classification and single-token prediction, and extends this to a system tailored for debugging complex LLM prompts. Our system is well-suited for long texts, and expands on previous work by 1) providing controllable aggregation of token-level salience to the word, sentence, or paragraph level, making salience over long inputs tractable; and 2) supporting rapid iteration where practitioners can act on salience results, refine prompts, and run salience on the new output. We include case studies showing how Sequence Salience can help practitioners work with several complex prompting strategies, including few-shot, chain-of-thought, and constitutional principles. Sequence Salience is built on the Learning Interpretability Tool, an open-source platform for ML model visualizations, and code, notebooks, and tutorials are available at http://goo.gle/sequence-salience.
Characterizing the Influence of Topology on Graph Learning Tasks
Authors: Kailong Wu, Yule Xie, Jiaxin Ding, Yuxiang Ren, Luoyi Fu, Xinbing Wang, Chenghu Zhou
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Stochastic Block Model

Graph neural networks (GNN) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of tasks by encoding features combined with topology to create effective representations. However, the fundamental problem of understanding and analyzing how graph topology influences the performance of learning models on downstream tasks has not yet been well understood. In this paper, we propose a metric, TopoInf, which characterizes the influence of graph topology by measuring the level of compatibility between the topological information of graph data and downstream task objectives. We provide analysis based on the decoupled GNNs on the contextual stochastic block model to demonstrate the effectiveness of the metric. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that TopoInf is an effective metric for measuring topological influence on corresponding tasks and can be further leveraged to enhance graph learning.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition by Fusing Video Semantic in MOOC Learning Scenarios
Authors: Yuan Zhang, Xiaomei Tao, Hanxu Ai, Tao Chen, Yanling Gan
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Emotion Recognition, Photoplethysmography (PPG)

In the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) learning scenario, the semantic information of instructional videos has a crucial impact on learners' emotional state. Learners mainly acquire knowledge by watching instructional videos, and the semantic information in the videos directly affects learners' emotional states. However, few studies have paid attention to the potential influence of the semantic information of instructional videos on learners' emotional states. To deeply explore the impact of video semantic information on learners' emotions, this paper innovatively proposes a multimodal emotion recognition method by fusing video semantic information and physiological signals. We generate video descriptions through a pre-trained large language model (LLM) to obtain high-level semantic information about instructional videos. Using the cross-attention mechanism for modal interaction, the semantic information is fused with the eye movement and PhotoPlethysmoGraphy (PPG) signals to obtain the features containing the critical information of the three modes. The accurate recognition of learners' emotional states is realized through the emotion classifier. The experimental results show that our method has significantly improved emotion recognition performance, providing a new perspective and efficient method for emotion recognition research in MOOC learning scenarios. The method proposed in this paper not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the impact of instructional videos on learners' emotional states but also provides a beneficial reference for future research on emotion recognition in MOOC learning scenarios.
Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models
Authors: Evan Shieh, Faye-Marie Vassel, Cassidy Sugimoto, Thema Monroe-White
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00

The rapid deployment of generative language models (LMs) has raised concerns about social biases affecting the well-being of diverse consumers. The extant literature on generative LMs has primarily examined bias via explicit identity prompting. However, prior research on bias in earlier language-based technology platforms, including search engines, has shown that discrimination can occur even when identity terms are not specified explicitly. Studies of bias in LM responses to open-ended prompts (where identity classifications are left unspecified) are lacking and have not yet been grounded in end-consumer harms. Here, we advance studies of generative LM bias by considering a broader set of natural use cases via open-ended prompting. In this "laissez-faire" setting, we find that synthetically generated texts from five of the most pervasive LMs (ChatGPT3.5, ChatGPT4, Claude2.0, Llama2, and PaLM2) perpetuate harms of omission, subordination, and stereotyping for minoritized individuals with intersectional race, gender, and/or sexual orientation identities (AI/AN, Asian, Black, Latine, MENA, NH/PI, Female, Non-binary, Queer). We find widespread evidence of bias to an extent that such individuals are hundreds to thousands of times more likely to encounter LM-generated outputs that portray their identities in a subordinated manner compared to representative or empowering portrayals. We also document a prevalence of stereotypes (e.g. perpetual foreigner) in LM-generated outputs that are known to trigger psychological harms that disproportionately affect minoritized individuals. These include stereotype threat, which leads to impaired cognitive performance and increased negative self-perception. Our findings highlight the urgent need to protect consumers from discriminatory harms caused by language models and invest in critical AI education programs tailored towards empowering diverse consumers.
Structure-aware Fine-tuning for Code Pre-trained Models
Authors: Jiayi Wu, Renyu Zhu, Nuo Chen, Qiushi Sun, Xiang Li, Ming Gao
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Over the past few years, we have witnessed remarkable advancements in Code Pre-trained Models (CodePTMs). These models achieved excellent representation capabilities by designing structure-based pre-training tasks for code. However, how to enhance the absorption of structural knowledge when fine-tuning CodePTMs still remains a significant challenge. To fill this gap, in this paper, we present Structure-aware Fine-tuning (SAT), a novel structure-enhanced and plug-and-play fine-tuning method for CodePTMs. We first propose a structure loss to quantify the difference between the information learned by CodePTMs and the knowledge extracted from code structure. Specifically, we use the attention scores extracted from Transformer layer as the learned structural information, and the shortest path length between leaves in abstract syntax trees as the structural knowledge. Subsequently, multi-task learning is introduced to improve the performance of fine-tuning. Experiments conducted on four pre-trained models and two generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method as a plug-and-play solution. Furthermore, we observed that SAT can benefit CodePTMs more with limited training data.