pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TRIAGE: Ethical Benchmarking of AI Models Through Mass Casualty Simulations
Authors: Nathalie Maria Kirch, Konstantin Hebenstreit, Matthias Samwald
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Decision Making, Ethics

We present the TRIAGE Benchmark, a novel machine ethics (ME) benchmark that tests LLMs' ability to make ethical decisions during mass casualty incidents. It uses real-world ethical dilemmas with clear solutions designed by medical professionals, offering a more realistic alternative to annotation-based benchmarks. TRIAGE incorporates various prompting styles to evaluate model performance across different contexts. Most models consistently outperformed random guessing, suggesting LLMs may support decision-making in triage scenarios. Neutral or factual scenario formulations led to the best performance, unlike other ME benchmarks where ethical reminders improved outcomes. Adversarial prompts reduced performance but not to random guessing levels. Open-source models made more morally serious errors, and general capability overall predicted better performance.
Whither Bias Goes, I Will Go: An Integrative, Systematic Review of Algorithmic Bias Mitigation
Authors: Louis Hickman, Christopher Huynh, Jessica Gass, Brandon Booth, Jason Kuruzovich, Louis Tay
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly used for personnel assessment and selection (e.g., resume screeners, automatically scored interviews). However, concerns have been raised throughout society that ML assessments may be biased and perpetuate or exacerbate inequality. Although organizational researchers have begun investigating ML assessments from traditional psychometric and legal perspectives, there is a need to understand, clarify, and integrate fairness operationalizations and algorithmic bias mitigation methods from the computer science, data science, and organizational research literatures. We present a four-stage model of developing ML assessments and applying bias mitigation methods, including 1) generating the training data, 2) training the model, 3) testing the model, and 4) deploying the model. When introducing the four-stage model, we describe potential sources of bias and unfairness at each stage. Then, we systematically review definitions and operationalizations of algorithmic bias, legal requirements governing personnel selection from the United States and Europe, and research on algorithmic bias mitigation across multiple domains and integrate these findings into our framework. Our review provides insights for both research and practice by elucidating possible mechanisms of algorithmic bias while identifying which bias mitigation methods are legal and effective. This integrative framework also reveals gaps in the knowledge of algorithmic bias mitigation that should be addressed by future collaborative research between organizational researchers, computer scientists, and data scientists. We provide recommendations for developing and deploying ML assessments, as well as recommendations for future research into algorithmic bias and fairness.
Dual Space Training for GANs: A Pathway to Efficient and Creative Generative Models
Authors: Beka Modrekiladze
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated remarkable advancements in generative modeling; however, their training is often resource-intensive, requiring extensive computational time and hundreds of thousands of epochs. This paper proposes a novel optimization approach that transforms the training process by operating within a dual space of the initial data using invertible mappings, specifically autoencoders. By training GANs on the encoded representations in the dual space, which encapsulate the most salient features of the data, the generative process becomes significantly more efficient and potentially reveals underlying patterns beyond human recognition. This approach not only enhances training speed and resource usage but also explores the philosophical question of whether models can generate insights that transcend the human intelligence while being limited by the human-generated data.
Make LLMs better zero-shot reasoners: Structure-orientated autonomous reasoning
Authors: Pengfei He, Zitao Li, Yue Xing, Yaling Li, Jiliang Tang, Bolin Ding
Date: 2024-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Zero-shot reasoning methods with Large Language Models (LLMs) offer significant advantages including great generalization to novel tasks and reduced dependency on human-crafted examples. However, the current zero-shot methods still have limitations in complex tasks, e.g., answering questions that require multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing a novel structure-oriented analysis method to help LLMs better understand the question and guide the problem-solving process of LLMs. We first demonstrate how the existing reasoning strategies, Chain-of-Thought and ReAct, can benefit from our structure-oriented analysis. In addition to empirical investigations, we leverage the probabilistic graphical model to theoretically explain why our structure-oriented analysis can improve the LLM reasoning process. To further improve the reliability in complex question-answering tasks, we propose a multi-agent reasoning system, Structure-oriented Autonomous Reasoning Agents (SARA), that can better enforce the reasoning process following our structure-oriented analysis by refinement techniques and is equipped with external knowledge retrieval capability to reduce factual errors. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed reasoning system. Surprisingly, in some cases, the system even surpasses few-shot methods. Finally, the system not only improves reasoning accuracy in complex tasks but also demonstrates robustness against potential attacks that corrupt the reasoning process.
Multi-constraint generative adversarial network for dose prediction in radiotherapy
Authors: Bo Zhan
Date: 2021-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: Medical Image Analysis 2021 5
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Radiation therapy (RT) is regarded as the primary treatment for cancer in the clinic, aiming to deliver an accurate dose to the planning target volume (PTV) while protecting the surrounding organs at risk (OARs). To improve the effectiveness of the treatment planning, deep learning methods are widely adopted to predict dose distribution maps for clinical treatment planning. In this paper, we present a novel multi-constraint dose prediction model based on generative adversarial network, named Mc-GAN, to automatically predict the dose distribution map from the computer tomography (CT) images and the masks of PTV and OARs. Specifically, the generator is an embedded UNet-like structure with dilated convolution to capture both the global and local information. During the feature extraction, a dual attention module (DAM) is embedded to force the generator to take more heed of internal semantic relevance. To improve the prediction accuracy, two additional losses, i.e., the locality-constrained loss (LCL) and the self-supervised perceptual loss (SPL), are introduced besides the conventional global pixel-level loss and adversarial loss. Concretely, the LCL tries to focus on the predictions of locally important areas while the SPL aims to prevent the predicted dose maps from the possible distortion at the feature level. Evaluated on two in-house datasets, our proposed Mc-GAN has been demonstrated to outperform other state-of-the-art methods in almost all PTV and OARs criteria.
Alocação de Recursos em Redes de Distribuição Quântica de Chaves Multiprotocolo
Authors: Pimentel, Arthur; Abreu, Diego; Abelém, Antônio
Date: 2024-05-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: Workshop de Pesquisa Experimental da Internet do Futuro 2024 5

À medida que a criptografia quântica avança, torna-se cada vez mais importante desenvolver métodos que aprimorem a utilização de recursos em redes de Distribuição Quântica de Chaves (QKD). Enfrentando o desafio de agendar e alocar eficientemente as requisições em redes QKD, este estudo propõe uma abordagem para redes QKD multiprotocolo usando estratégias de roteamento e agendamento conscientes de recursos. Nossa proposta foca em melhorar a eficiência no uso de chaves quânticas, rotas e requisições, enquanto suporta vários protocolos de comunicação quântica. Utilizando duas topologias de redes QKD reais, a proposta foi avaliada em dois cenários de aplicação, com diferentes distribuições de requisições de aplicações de autenticação e criptografia. Avaliou-se o impacto da capacidade de qubit e quantidade de requisições. Os resultados demonstram a viabilidade de nossa abordagem em diversos ambientes.
Mechanism learning: Reverse causal inference in the presence of multiple unknown confounding through front-door causal bootstrapping
Authors: Jianqiao Mao, Max A. Little
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

A major limitation of machine learning (ML) prediction models is that they recover associational, rather than causal, predictive relationships between variables. In high-stakes automation applications of ML this is problematic, as the model often learns spurious, non-causal associations. This paper proposes mechanism learning, a simple method which uses front-door causal bootstrapping to deconfound observational data such that any appropriate ML model is forced to learn predictive relationships between effects and their causes (reverse causal inference), despite the potential presence of multiple unknown and unmeasured confounding. Effect variables can be very high dimensional, and the predictive relationship nonlinear, as is common in ML applications. This novel method is widely applicable, the only requirement is the existence of a mechanism variable mediating the cause (prediction target) and effect (feature data), which is independent of the (unmeasured) confounding variables. We test our method on fully synthetic, semi-synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it can discover reliable, unbiased, causal ML predictors where by contrast, the same ML predictor trained naively using classical supervised learning on the original observational data, is heavily biased by spurious associations. We provide code to implement the results in the paper, online.
On the Gaussian process limit of Bayesian Additive Regression Trees
Authors: Giacomo Petrillo
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a nonparametric Bayesian regression technique of rising fame. It is a sum-of-decision-trees model, and is in some sense the Bayesian version of boosting. In the limit of infinite trees, it becomes equivalent to Gaussian process (GP) regression. This limit is known but has not yet led to any useful analysis or application. For the first time, I derive and compute the exact BART prior covariance function. With it I implement the infinite trees limit of BART as GP regression. Through empirical tests, I show that this limit is worse than standard BART in a fixed configuration, but also that tuning the hyperparameters in the natural GP way yields a competitive method, although a properly tuned BART is still superior. The advantage of using a GP surrogate of BART is the analytical likelihood, which simplifies model building and sidesteps the complex BART MCMC. More generally, this study opens new ways to understand and develop BART and GP regression. The implementation of BART as GP is available in the Python package https://github.com/Gattocrucco/lsqfitgp .
AutoKaggle: A Multi-Agent Framework for Autonomous Data Science Competitions
Authors: Ziming Li, Qianbo Zang, David Ma, Jiawei Guo, Tuney Zheng, Minghao Liu, Xinyao Niu, Yue Wang, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Wanjun Zhong, Wangchunshu Zhou, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering

Data science tasks involving tabular data present complex challenges that require sophisticated problem-solving approaches. We propose AutoKaggle, a powerful and user-centric framework that assists data scientists in completing daily data pipelines through a collaborative multi-agent system. AutoKaggle implements an iterative development process that combines code execution, debugging, and comprehensive unit testing to ensure code correctness and logic consistency. The framework offers highly customizable workflows, allowing users to intervene at each phase, thus integrating automated intelligence with human expertise. Our universal data science toolkit, comprising validated functions for data cleaning, feature engineering, and modeling, forms the foundation of this solution, enhancing productivity by streamlining common tasks. We selected 8 Kaggle competitions to simulate data processing workflows in real-world application scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that AutoKaggle achieves a validation submission rate of 0.85 and a comprehensive score of 0.82 in typical data science pipelines, fully proving its effectiveness and practicality in handling complex data science tasks.
C^2DA: Contrastive and Context-aware Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Md. Al-Masrur Khan, Zheng Chen, Lantao Liu
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptive semantic segmentation (UDA-SS) aims to train a model on the source domain data (e.g., synthetic) and adapt the model to predict target domain data (e.g., real-world) without accessing target annotation data. Most existing UDA-SS methods only focus on inter-domain knowledge to mitigate the data-shift problem. However, learning the inherent structure of the images and exploring the intrinsic pixel distribution of both domains are ignored, which prevents the UDA-SS methods from producing satisfactory performance like supervised learning. Moreover, incorporating contextual knowledge is also often overlooked. Considering these issues, in this work, we propose a UDA-SS framework that learns both intra-domain and context-aware knowledge. To learn the intra-domain knowledge, we incorporate contrastive loss in both domains, which pulls pixels of similar classes together and pushes the rest away, facilitating intra-image-pixel-wise correlations. To learn context-aware knowledge, we modify the mixing technique by leveraging contextual dependency among the classes. Moreover, we adapt the Mask Image Modeling (MIM) technique to properly use context clues for robust visual recognition, using limited information about the masked images. Comprehensive experiments validate that our proposed method improves the state-of-the-art UDA-SS methods by a margin of 0.51% mIoU and 0.54% mIoU in the adaptation of GTA-V->Cityscapes and Synthia->Cityscapes, respectively. We open-source our C2DA code. Code link: github.com/Masrur02/C-Squared-DA
UTSRMorph: A Unified Transformer and Superresolution Network for Unsupervised Medical Image Registration
Authors: Runshi Zhang, Hao Mo, Junchen Wang, Bimeng Jie, Yang He, Nenghao Jin, Liang Zhu
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Registration, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Registration, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Image Registration

Complicated image registration is a key issue in medical image analysis, and deep learning-based methods have achieved better results than traditional methods. The methods include ConvNet-based and Transformer-based methods. Although ConvNets can effectively utilize local information to reduce redundancy via small neighborhood convolution, the limited receptive field results in the inability to capture global dependencies. Transformers can establish long-distance dependencies via a self-attention mechanism; however, the intense calculation of the relationships among all tokens leads to high redundancy. We propose a novel unsupervised image registration method named the unified Transformer and superresolution (UTSRMorph) network, which can enhance feature representation learning in the encoder and generate detailed displacement fields in the decoder to overcome these problems. We first propose a fusion attention block to integrate the advantages of ConvNets and Transformers, which inserts a ConvNet-based channel attention module into a multihead self-attention module. The overlapping attention block, a novel cross-attention method, uses overlapping windows to obtain abundant correlations with match information of a pair of images. Then, the blocks are flexibly stacked into a new powerful encoder. The decoder generation process of a high-resolution deformation displacement field from low-resolution features is considered as a superresolution process. Specifically, the superresolution module was employed to replace interpolation upsampling, which can overcome feature degradation. UTSRMorph was compared to state-of-the-art registration methods in the 3D brain MR (OASIS, IXI) and MR-CT datasets. The qualitative and quantitative results indicate that UTSRMorph achieves relatively better performance. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/Runshi-Zhang/UTSRMorph.
Step Guided Reasoning: Improving Mathematical Reasoning using Guidance Generation and Step Reasoning
Authors: Lang Cao, Chao Peng, Renhong Chen, Wu Ning, Yingtian Zou, Yitong Li
Date: 2024-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Mathematical Reasoning, MMLU

Mathematical reasoning has been challenging for large language models (LLMs). However, the introduction of step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) inference has significantly advanced the mathematical capabilities of LLMs. Despite this progress, current approaches either necessitate extensive inference datasets for training or depend on few-shot methods that frequently compromise computational accuracy. To address these bottlenecks in mathematical reasoning, we propose a novel method called Step Guidied Reasoning, which is more stable and generalizable than few-shot methods and does not involve further fine-tuning of the model. In this approach, LLMs reflect on small reasoning steps, similar to how humans deliberate and focus attention on what to do next. By incorporating this reflective process into the inference stage, LLMs can effectively guide their reasoning from one step to the next. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the significant effect of Step Guidied Reasoning in augmenting mathematical performance in state-of-the-art language models. Qwen2-72B-Instruct outperforms its math-specific counterpart, Qwen2.5-72B-Math-Instruct, on MMLU- STEM with a score of 90.9%, compared to 87.3%. The average scores of Qwen2-7B-Instruct and Qwen2-72B-Instruct increase from 27.1% to 36.3% and from 36.5% to 47.4% on the mathematics domain, respectively.
Fast Best-of-N Decoding via Speculative Rejection
Authors: Hanshi Sun, Momin Haider, Ruiqi Zhang, Huitao Yang, Jiahao Qiu, Ming Yin, Mengdi Wang, Peter Bartlett, Andrea Zanette
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00

The safe and effective deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) involves a critical step called alignment, which ensures that the model's responses are in accordance with human preferences. Prevalent alignment techniques, such as DPO, PPO and their variants, align LLMs by changing the pre-trained model weights during a phase called post-training. While predominant, these post-training methods add substantial complexity before LLMs can be deployed. Inference-time alignment methods avoid the complex post-training step and instead bias the generation towards responses that are aligned with human preferences. The best-known inference-time alignment method, called Best-of-N, is as effective as the state-of-the-art post-training procedures. Unfortunately, Best-of-N requires vastly more resources at inference time than standard decoding strategies, which makes it computationally not viable. In this work, we introduce Speculative Rejection, a computationally-viable inference-time alignment algorithm. It generates high-scoring responses according to a given reward model, like Best-of-N does, while being between 16 to 32 times more computationally efficient.
Air Quality Prediction with Physics-Guided Dual Neural ODEs in Open Systems
Authors: Jindong Tian, Yuxuan Liang, Ronghui Xu, Peng Chen, Chenjuan Guo, Aoying Zhou, Lujia Pan, Zhongwen Rao, Bin Yang
Date: 2024-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Air pollution significantly threatens human health and ecosystems, necessitating effective air quality prediction to inform public policy. Traditional approaches are generally categorized into physics-based and data-driven models. Physics-based models usually struggle with high computational demands and closed-system assumptions, while data-driven models may overlook essential physical dynamics, confusing the capturing of spatiotemporal correlations. Although some physics-guided approaches combine the strengths of both models, they often face a mismatch between explicit physical equations and implicit learned representations. To address these challenges, we propose Air-DualODE, a novel physics-guided approach that integrates dual branches of Neural ODEs for air quality prediction. The first branch applies open-system physical equations to capture spatiotemporal dependencies for learning physics dynamics, while the second branch identifies the dependencies not addressed by the first in a fully data-driven way. These dual representations are temporally aligned and fused to enhance prediction accuracy. Our experimental results demonstrate that Air-DualODE achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting pollutant concentrations across various spatial scales, thereby offering a promising solution for real-world air quality challenges.
Evolutionary algorithm incorporating reinforcement learning for energy-conscious flexible job-shop scheduling problem with transportation and setup times
Authors: Guohui Zhang, Shaofeng Yan, Xiaohui Song, Deyu Zhang, Shenghui Guo
Date: 2024-07-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2024 7
Tasks: Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

Flexible job-shop scheduling is considerably important in the modern intelligent manufacturing factory. In a real job shop, transportation and setup times account for a large percentage of the total processing flow, and with today’s companies demanding higher delivery times, the feasibility and punctuality of scheduling will be considerably reduced if these time constraints are ignored. Recently, several companies have become green in their manufacturing processes. However, transportation, setup, and delivery times have rarely been combined with energy efficiency. To solve this problem, we employed an integer programming approach to develop a complete mathematical model of the problem and simultaneously optimized four objectives: maximum completion time, total energy consumption, workload of critical machines, and penalties for earliness/tardiness. Subsequently, an evolutionary algorithm incorporating reinforcement learning was proposed to solve the model. The algorithm had the following features: (1) four initialization strategies were designed to obtain high-quality populations; (2) a reinforcement learning-based parameter-adaptive strategy was proposed to guide the population to select the best parameters; (3) a critical path-based neighborhood structure with transportation and setup times was designed, and according to the objectives of this study, four additional neighborhood structures were designed; (4) a reference point-based non-dominated sorting selection was presented to guide the solution toward the Pareto-optimal front; and (5) an external archive was proposed to enhance the utilization of abandoned historical solutions. Finally, the effectiveness of this algorithm was demonstrated using 33 benchmark instances of variants and comparison experiments.