pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Diversity Empowers Intelligence: Integrating Expertise of Software Engineering Agents
Authors: Kexun Zhang, Weiran Yao, Zuxin Liu, Yihao Feng, Zhiwei Liu, Rithesh Murthy, Tian Lan, Lei LI, Renze Lou, Jiacheng Xu, Bo Pang, Yingbo Zhou, Shelby Heinecke, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown great potential in solving real-world software engineering (SWE) problems. The most advanced open-source SWE agent can resolve over 27% of real GitHub issues in SWE-Bench Lite. However, these sophisticated agent frameworks exhibit varying strengths, excelling in certain tasks while underperforming in others. To fully harness the diversity of these agents, we propose DEI (Diversity Empowered Intelligence), a framework that leverages their unique expertise. DEI functions as a meta-module atop existing SWE agent frameworks, managing agent collectives for enhanced problem-solving. Experimental results show that a DEI-guided committee of agents is able to surpass the best individual agent's performance by a large margin. For instance, a group of open-source SWE agents, with a maximum individual resolve rate of 27.3% on SWE-Bench Lite, can achieve a 34.3% resolve rate with DEI, making a 25% improvement and beating most closed-source solutions. Our best-performing group excels with a 55% resolve rate, securing the highest ranking on SWE-Bench Lite. Our findings contribute to the growing body of research on collaborative AI systems and their potential to solve complex software engineering challenges.
Model Counting in the Wild
Authors: Arijit Shaw, Kuldeep S. Meel
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Model counting is a fundamental problem in automated reasoning with applications in probabilistic inference, network reliability, neural network verification, and more. Although model counting is computationally intractable from a theoretical perspective due to its #P-completeness, the past decade has seen significant progress in developing state-of-the-art model counters to address scalability challenges. In this work, we conduct a rigorous assessment of the scalability of model counters in the wild. To this end, we surveyed 11 application domains and collected an aggregate of 2262 benchmarks from these domains. We then evaluated six state-of-the-art model counters on these instances to assess scalability and runtime performance. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that the performance of model counters varies significantly across different application domains, underscoring the need for careful selection by the end user. Additionally, we investigated the behavior of different counters with respect to two parameters suggested by the model counting community, finding only a weak correlation. Our analysis highlights the challenges and opportunities for portfolio-based approaches in model counting.
A Survey on Model MoErging: Recycling and Routing Among Specialized Experts for Collaborative Learning
Authors: Prateek Yadav, Colin Raffel, Mohammed Muqeeth, Lucas Caccia, Haokun Liu, Tianlong Chen, Mohit Bansal, Leshem Choshen, Alessandro Sordoni
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Survey

The availability of performant pre-trained models has led to a proliferation of fine-tuned expert models that are specialized to a particular domain or task. Model MoErging methods aim to recycle expert models to create an aggregate system with improved performance or generalization. A key component of MoErging methods is the creation of a router that decides which expert model(s) to use for a particular input or application. The promise, effectiveness, and large design space of MoErging has spurred the development of many new methods over the past few years. This rapid pace of development has made it challenging to compare different MoErging methods, which are rarely compared to one another and are often validated in different experimental setups. To remedy such gaps, we present a comprehensive survey of MoErging methods that includes a novel taxonomy for cataloging key design choices and clarifying suitable applications for each method. Apart from surveying MoErging research, we inventory software tools and applications that make use of MoErging. We additionally discuss related fields of study such as model merging, multitask learning, and mixture-of-experts models. Taken as a whole, our survey provides a unified overview of existing MoErging methods and creates a solid foundation for future work in this burgeoning field.
The News Comment Gap and Algorithmic Agenda Setting in Online Forums
Authors: Flora Böwing, Patrick Gildersleve
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00

The disparity between news stories valued by journalists and those preferred by readers, known as the "News Gap", is well-documented. However, the difference in expectations regarding news related user-generated content is less studied. Comment sections, hosted by news websites, are popular venues for reader engagement, yet still subject to editorial decisions. It is thus important to understand journalist vs reader comment preferences and how these are served by various comment ranking algorithms that represent discussions differently. We analyse 1.2 million comments from Austrian newspaper Der Standard to understand the "News Comment Gap" and the effects of different ranking algorithms. We find that journalists prefer positive, timely, complex, direct responses, while readers favour comments similar to article content from elite authors. We introduce the versatile Feature-Oriented Ranking Utility Metric (FORUM) to assess the impact of different ranking algorithms and find dramatic differences in how they prioritise the display of comments by sentiment, topical relevance, lexical diversity, and readability. Journalists can exert substantial influence over the discourse through both curatorial and algorithmic means. Understanding these choices' implications is vital in fostering engaging and civil discussions while aligning with journalistic objectives, especially given the increasing legal scrutiny and societal importance of online discourse.
KAN You See It? KANs and Sentinel for Effective and Explainable Crop Field Segmentation
Authors: Daniele Rege Cambrin, Eleonora Poeta, Eliana Pastor, Tania Cerquitelli, Elena Baralis, Paolo Garza
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Segmentation of crop fields is essential for enhancing agricultural productivity, monitoring crop health, and promoting sustainable practices. Deep learning models adopted for this task must ensure accurate and reliable predictions to avoid economic losses and environmental impact. The newly proposed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) offer promising advancements in the performance of neural networks. This paper analyzes the integration of KAN layers into the U-Net architecture (U-KAN) to segment crop fields using Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 satellite images and provides an analysis of the performance and explainability of these networks. Our findings indicate a 2\% improvement in IoU compared to the traditional full-convolutional U-Net model in fewer GFLOPs. Furthermore, gradient-based explanation techniques show that U-KAN predictions are highly plausible and that the network has a very high ability to focus on the boundaries of cultivated areas rather than on the areas themselves. The per-channel relevance analysis also reveals that some channels are irrelevant to this task.
PathInsight: Instruction Tuning of Multimodal Datasets and Models for Intelligence Assisted Diagnosis in Histopathology
Authors: Xiaomin Wu, Rui Xu, Pengchen Wei, Wenkang Qin, Peixiang Huang, Ziheng Li, Lin Luo
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning

Pathological diagnosis remains the definitive standard for identifying tumors. The rise of multimodal large models has simplified the process of integrating image analysis with textual descriptions. Despite this advancement, the substantial costs associated with training and deploying these complex multimodal models, together with a scarcity of high-quality training datasets, create a significant divide between cutting-edge technology and its application in the clinical setting. We had meticulously compiled a dataset of approximately 45,000 cases, covering over 6 different tasks, including the classification of organ tissues, generating pathology report descriptions, and addressing pathology-related questions and answers. We have fine-tuned multimodal large models, specifically LLaVA, Qwen-VL, InternLM, with this dataset to enhance instruction-based performance. We conducted a qualitative assessment of the capabilities of the base model and the fine-tuned model in performing image captioning and classification tasks on the specific dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate that the fine-tuned model exhibits proficiency in addressing typical pathological questions. We hope that by making both our models and datasets publicly available, they can be valuable to the medical and research communities.
Defining and Measuring Disentanglement for non-Independent Factors of Variation
Authors: Antonio Almudévar, Alfonso Ortega, Luis Vicente, Antonio Miguel, Eduardo Lleida
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Representation Learning, valid

Representation learning is an approach that allows to discover and extract the factors of variation from the data. Intuitively, a representation is said to be disentangled if it separates the different factors of variation in a way that is understandable to humans. Definitions of disentanglement and metrics to measure it usually assume that the factors of variation are independent of each other. However, this is generally false in the real world, which limits the use of these definitions and metrics to very specific and unrealistic scenarios. In this paper we give a definition of disentanglement based on information theory that is also valid when the factors of variation are not independent. Furthermore, we relate this definition to the Information Bottleneck Method. Finally, we propose a method to measure the degree of disentanglement from the given definition that works when the factors of variation are not independent. We show through different experiments that the method proposed in this paper correctly measures disentanglement with non-independent factors of variation, while other methods fail in this scenario.
Casper: Prompt Sanitization for Protecting User Privacy in Web-Based Large Language Models
Authors: Chun Jie Chong, Chenxi Hou, Zhihao Yao, Seyed Mohammadjavad Seyed Talebi
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Web-based Large Language Model (LLM) services have been widely adopted and have become an integral part of our Internet experience. Third-party plugins enhance the functionalities of LLM by enabling access to real-world data and services. However, the privacy consequences associated with these services and their third-party plugins are not well understood. Sensitive prompt data are stored, processed, and shared by cloud-based LLM providers and third-party plugins. In this paper, we propose Casper, a prompt sanitization technique that aims to protect user privacy by detecting and removing sensitive information from user inputs before sending them to LLM services. Casper runs entirely on the user's device as a browser extension and does not require any changes to the online LLM services. At the core of Casper is a three-layered sanitization mechanism consisting of a rule-based filter, a Machine Learning (ML)-based named entity recognizer, and a browser-based local LLM topic identifier. We evaluate Casper on a dataset of 4000 synthesized prompts and show that it can effectively filter out Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and privacy-sensitive topics with high accuracy, at 98.5% and 89.9%, respectively.
Generative AI for automatic topic labelling
Authors: Diego Kozlowski, Carolina Pradier, Pierre Benz
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Topic Modeling has become a prominent tool for the study of scientific fields, as they allow for a large scale interpretation of research trends. Nevertheless, the output of these models is structured as a list of keywords which requires a manual interpretation for the labelling. This paper proposes to assess the reliability of three LLMs, namely flan, GPT-4o, and GPT-4 mini for topic labelling. Drawing on previous research leveraging BERTopic, we generate topics from a dataset of all the scientific articles (n=34,797) authored by all biology professors in Switzerland (n=465) between 2008 and 2020, as recorded in the Web of Science database. We assess the output of the three models both quantitatively and qualitatively and find that, first, both GPT models are capable of accurately and precisely label topics from the models' output keywords. Second, 3-word labels are preferable to grasp the complexity of research topics.
LLMs can Schedule
Authors: Henrik Abgaryan, Ararat Harutyunyan, Tristan Cazenave
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

The job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) remains a significant hurdle in optimizing production processes. This challenge involves efficiently allocating jobs to a limited number of machines while minimizing factors like total processing time or job delays. While recent advancements in artificial intelligence have yielded promising solutions, such as reinforcement learning and graph neural networks, this paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for JSSP. We introduce the very first supervised 120k dataset specifically designed to train LLMs for JSSP. Surprisingly, our findings demonstrate that LLM-based scheduling can achieve performance comparable to other neural approaches. Furthermore, we propose a sampling method that enhances the effectiveness of LLMs in tackling JSSP.
SpectralGaussians: Semantic, spectral 3D Gaussian splatting for multi-spectral scene representation, visualization and analysis
Authors: Saptarshi Neil Sinha, Holger Graf, Michael Weinmann
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Scene Understanding, Style Transfer

We propose a novel cross-spectral rendering framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that generates realistic and semantically meaningful splats from registered multi-view spectrum and segmentation maps. This extension enhances the representation of scenes with multiple spectra, providing insights into the underlying materials and segmentation. We introduce an improved physically-based rendering approach for Gaussian splats, estimating reflectance and lights per spectra, thereby enhancing accuracy and realism. In a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate the superior performance of our approach with respect to other recent learning-based spectral scene representation approaches (i.e., XNeRF and SpectralNeRF) as well as other non-spectral state-of-the-art learning-based approaches. Our work also demonstrates the potential of spectral scene understanding for precise scene editing techniques like style transfer, inpainting, and removal. Thereby, our contributions address challenges in multi-spectral scene representation, rendering, and editing, offering new possibilities for diverse applications.
Neural Speech and Audio Coding: Modern AI Technology Meets Traditional Codecs
Authors: Minje Kim, Jan Skoglund
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00

This paper explores the integration of model-based and data-driven approaches within the realm of neural speech and audio coding systems. It highlights the challenges posed by the subjective evaluation processes of speech and audio codecs and discusses the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, which often require inefficiently large architectures to match the performance of model-based methods. The study presents hybrid systems as a viable solution, offering significant improvements to the performance of conventional codecs through meticulously chosen design enhancements. Specifically, it introduces a neural network-based signal enhancer designed to post-process existing codecs' output, along with the autoencoder-based end-to-end models and LPCNet--hybrid systems that combine linear predictive coding (LPC) with neural networks. Furthermore, the paper delves into predictive models operating within custom feature spaces (TF-Codec) or predefined transform domains (MDCTNet) and examines the use of psychoacoustically calibrated loss functions to train end-to-end neural audio codecs. Through these investigations, the paper demonstrates the potential of hybrid systems to advance the field of speech and audio coding by bridging the gap between traditional model-based approaches and modern data-driven techniques.
Heavy-Ball Momentum Accelerated Actor-Critic With Function Approximation
Authors: Yanjie Dong, Haijun Zhang, Gang Wang, Shisheng Cui, Xiping Hu
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00

By using an parametric value function to replace the Monte-Carlo rollouts for value estimation, the actor-critic (AC) algorithms can reduce the variance of stochastic policy gradient so that to improve the convergence rate. While existing works mainly focus on analyzing convergence rate of AC algorithms under Markovian noise, the impacts of momentum on AC algorithms remain largely unexplored. In this work, we first propose a heavy-ball momentum based advantage actor-critic (\mbox{HB-A2C}) algorithm by integrating the heavy-ball momentum into the critic recursion that is parameterized by a linear function. When the sample trajectory follows a Markov decision process, we quantitatively certify the acceleration capability of the proposed HB-A2C algorithm. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the proposed HB-A2C finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point with $\oo{\epsilon^{-2}}$ iterations for reinforcement learning tasks with Markovian noise. Moreover, we also reveal the dependence of learning rates on the length of the sample trajectory. By carefully selecting the momentum factor of the critic recursion, the proposed HB-A2C can balance the errors introduced by the initialization and the stoschastic approximation.
The advantages of context specific language models: the case of the Erasmian Language Model
Authors: João Gonçalves, Nick Jelicic, Michele Murgia, Evert Stamhuis
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The current trend to improve language model performance seems to be based on scaling up with the number of parameters (e.g. the state of the art GPT4 model has approximately 1.7 trillion parameters) or the amount of training data fed into the model. However this comes at significant costs in terms of computational resources and energy costs that compromise the sustainability of AI solutions, as well as risk relating to privacy and misuse. In this paper we present the Erasmian Language Model (ELM) a small context specific, 900 million parameter model, pre-trained and fine-tuned by and for Erasmus University Rotterdam. We show how the model performs adequately in a classroom context for essay writing, and how it achieves superior performance in subjects that are part of its context. This has implications for a wide range of institutions and organizations, showing that context specific language models may be a viable alternative for resource constrained, privacy sensitive use cases.
Diagnosis extraction from unstructured Dutch echocardiogram reports using span- and document-level characteristic classification
Authors: Bauke Arends, Melle Vessies, Dirk van Osch, Arco Teske, Pim van der Harst, René van Es, Bram van Es
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification

Clinical machine learning research and AI driven clinical decision support models rely on clinically accurate labels. Manually extracting these labels with the help of clinical specialists is often time-consuming and expensive. This study tests the feasibility of automatic span- and document-level diagnosis extraction from unstructured Dutch echocardiogram reports. We included 115,692 unstructured echocardiogram reports from the UMCU a large university hospital in the Netherlands. A randomly selected subset was manually annotated for the occurrence and severity of eleven commonly described cardiac characteristics. We developed and tested several automatic labelling techniques at both span and document levels, using weighted and macro F1-score, precision, and recall for performance evaluation. We compared the performance of span labelling against document labelling methods, which included both direct document classifiers and indirect document classifiers that rely on span classification results. The SpanCategorizer and MedRoBERTa$.$nl models outperformed all other span and document classifiers, respectively. The weighted F1-score varied between characteristics, ranging from 0.60 to 0.93 in SpanCategorizer and 0.96 to 0.98 in MedRoBERTa$.$nl. Direct document classification was superior to indirect document classification using span classifiers. SetFit achieved competitive document classification performance using only 10% of the training data. Utilizing a reduced label set yielded near-perfect document classification results. We recommend using our published SpanCategorizer and MedRoBERTa$.$nl models for span- and document-level diagnosis extraction from Dutch echocardiography reports. For settings with limited training data, SetFit may be a promising alternative for document classification.
Temporal Variability and Multi-Viewed Self-Supervised Representations to Tackle the ASVspoof5 Deepfake Challenge
Authors: Yuankun Xie, Xiaopeng Wang, Zhiyong Wang, Ruibo Fu, Zhengqi Wen, Haonan Cheng, Long Ye
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Deepfake Detection, Data Augmentation, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Self-Supervised Learning

ASVspoof5, the fifth edition of the ASVspoof series, is one of the largest global audio security challenges. It aims to advance the development of countermeasure (CM) to discriminate bonafide and spoofed speech utterances. In this paper, we focus on addressing the problem of open-domain audio deepfake detection, which corresponds directly to the ASVspoof5 Track1 open condition. At first, we comprehensively investigate various CM on ASVspoof5, including data expansion, data augmentation, and self-supervised learning (SSL) features. Due to the high-frequency gaps characteristic of the ASVspoof5 dataset, we introduce Frequency Mask, a data augmentation method that masks specific frequency bands to improve CM robustness. Combining various scale of temporal information with multiple SSL features, our experiments achieved a minDCF of 0.0158 and an EER of 0.55% on the ASVspoof 5 Track 1 evaluation progress set.