pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Shapley Values-Powered Framework for Fair Reward Split in Content Produced by GenAI
Authors: Alex Glinsky, Alexey Sokolsky
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

It is evident that, currently, generative models are surpassed in quality by human professionals. However, with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence, this gap will narrow, leading to scenarios where individuals who have dedicated years of their lives to mastering a skill become obsolete due to their high costs, which are inherently linked to the time they require to complete a task -- a task that AI could accomplish in minutes or seconds. To avoid future social upheavals, we must, even now, contemplate how to fairly assess the contributions of such individuals in training generative models and how to compensate them for the reduction or complete loss of their incomes. In this work, we propose a method to structure collaboration between model developers and data providers. To achieve this, we employ Shapley Values to quantify the contribution of artist(s) in an image generated by the Stable Diffusion-v1.5 model and to equitably allocate the reward among them.
Neural Architecture Search for Sentence Classification with BERT
Authors: Philip Kenneweg, Sarah Schröder, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Classification, Neural Architecture Search, Sentence, Sentence Classification

Pre training of language models on large text corpora is common practice in Natural Language Processing. Following, fine tuning of these models is performed to achieve the best results on a variety of tasks. In this paper we question the common practice of only adding a single output layer as a classification head on top of the network. We perform an AutoML search to find architectures that outperform the current single layer at only a small compute cost. We validate our classification architecture on a variety of NLP benchmarks from the GLUE dataset.
Efficient Heatmap-Guided 6-Dof Grasp Detection in Cluttered Scenes
Authors: Siang Chen, Wei Tang, Pengwei Xie, Wenming Yang, Guijin Wang
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS 2023 7
Tasks: Grasp Generation

Fast and robust object grasping in clutter is a crucial component of robotics. Most current works resort to the whole observed point cloud for 6-Dof grasp generation, ignoring the guidance information excavated from global semantics, thus limiting high-quality grasp generation and real-time performance. In this work, we show that the widely used heatmaps are underestimated in the efficiency of 6-Dof grasp generation. Therefore, we propose an effective local grasp generator combined with grasp heatmaps as guidance, which infers in a global-to-local semantic-to-point way. Specifically, Gaussian encoding and the grid-based strategy are applied to predict grasp heatmaps as guidance to aggregate local points into graspable regions and provide global semantic information. Further, a novel non-uniform anchor sampling mechanism is designed to improve grasp accuracy and diversity. Benefiting from the high-efficiency encoding in the image space and focusing on points in local graspable regions, our framework can perform high-quality grasp detection in real-time and achieve state-of-the-art results. In addition, real robot experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with a success rate of 94% and a clutter completion rate of 100%. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-VCLab/HGGD.
A Path Towards Legal Autonomy: An interoperable and explainable approach to extracting, transforming, loading and computing legal information using large language models, expert systems and Bayesian networks
Authors: Axel Constant, Hannes Westermann, Bryan Wilson, Alex Kiefer, Ines Hipolito, Sylvain Pronovost, Steven Swanson, Mahault Albarracin, Maxwell J. D. Ramstead
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00

Legal autonomy - the lawful activity of artificial intelligence agents - can be achieved in one of two ways. It can be achieved either by imposing constraints on AI actors such as developers, deployers and users, and on AI resources such as data, or by imposing constraints on the range and scope of the impact that AI agents can have on the environment. The latter approach involves encoding extant rules concerning AI driven devices into the software of AI agents controlling those devices (e.g., encoding rules about limitations on zones of operations into the agent software of an autonomous drone device). This is a challenge since the effectivity of such an approach requires a method of extracting, loading, transforming and computing legal information that would be both explainable and legally interoperable, and that would enable AI agents to reason about the law. In this paper, we sketch a proof of principle for such a method using large language models (LLMs), expert legal systems known as legal decision paths, and Bayesian networks. We then show how the proposed method could be applied to extant regulation in matters of autonomous cars, such as the California Vehicle Code.
A Novel Behavior-Based Recommendation System for E-commerce
Authors: Reza Barzegar Nozari, Mahdi Divsalar, Sepehr Akbarzadeh Abkenar, Mohammadreza Fadavi Amiri, Ali Divsalar
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Recommendation Systems

The majority of existing recommender systems rely on user ratings, which are limited by the lack of user collaboration and the sparsity problem. To address these issues, this study proposes a behavior-based recommender system that leverages customers' natural behaviors, such as browsing and clicking, on e-commerce platforms. The proposed recommendation system involves clustering active customers, determining neighborhoods, collecting similar users, calculating product reputation based on similar users, and recommending high-reputation products. To overcome the complexity of customer behaviors and traditional clustering methods, an unsupervised clustering approach based on product categories is developed to enhance the recommendation methodology. This study makes notable contributions in several aspects. Firstly, a groundbreaking behavior-based recommendation methodology is developed, incorporating customer behavior to generate accurate and tailored recommendations leading to improved customer satisfaction and engagement. Secondly, an original unsupervised clustering method, focusing on product categories, enables more precise clustering and facilitates accurate recommendations. Finally, an approach to determine neighborhoods for active customers within clusters is established, ensuring grouping of customers with similar behavioral patterns to enhance recommendation accuracy and relevance. The proposed recommendation methodology and clustering method contribute to improved recommendation performance, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in the field of e-commerce recommendation systems. Additionally, the proposed method outperforms benchmark methods in experiments conducted using a behavior dataset from the well-known e-commerce site Alibaba.
Improving Line Search Methods for Large Scale Neural Network Training
Authors: Philip Kenneweg, Tristan Kenneweg, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00

In recent studies, line search methods have shown significant improvements in the performance of traditional stochastic gradient descent techniques, eliminating the need for a specific learning rate schedule. In this paper, we identify existing issues in state-of-the-art line search methods, propose enhancements, and rigorously evaluate their effectiveness. We test these methods on larger datasets and more complex data domains than before. Specifically, we improve the Armijo line search by integrating the momentum term from ADAM in its search direction, enabling efficient large-scale training, a task that was previously prone to failure using Armijo line search methods. Our optimization approach outperforms both the previous Armijo implementation and tuned learning rate schedules for Adam. Our evaluation focuses on Transformers and CNNs in the domains of NLP and image data. Our work is publicly available as a Python package, which provides a hyperparameter free Pytorch optimizer.
Faster Convergence for Transformer Fine-tuning with Line Search Methods
Authors: Philip Kenneweg, Leonardo Galli, Tristan Kenneweg, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00

Recent works have shown that line search methods greatly increase performance of traditional stochastic gradient descent methods on a variety of datasets and architectures [1], [2]. In this work we succeed in extending line search methods to the novel and highly popular Transformer architecture and dataset domains in natural language processing. More specifically, we combine the Armijo line search with the Adam optimizer and extend it by subdividing the networks architecture into sensible units and perform the line search separately on these local units. Our optimization method outperforms the traditional Adam optimizer and achieves significant performance improvements for small data sets or small training budgets, while performing equal or better for other tested cases. Our work is publicly available as a python package, which provides a hyperparameter-free pytorch optimizer that is compatible with arbitrary network architectures.
Impact of Employing Weather Forecast Data as Input to the Estimation of Evapotranspiration by Deep Neural Network Models
Authors: Pedro J. Vaz, Gabriela Schütz, Carlos Guerrero, Pedro J. S. Cardoso
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Reference Evapotranspiration (ET0) is a key parameter for designing smart irrigation scheduling, since it is related by a coefficient to the water needs of a crop. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, proposed a standard method for ET0 computation (FAO56PM), based on the parameterization of the Penman-Monteith equation, that is widely adopted in the literature. To compute ET0 using the FAO56-PM method, four main weather parameters are needed: temperature, humidity, wind, and solar radiation (SR). One way to make daily ET0 estimations for future days is to use freely available weather forecast services (WFSs), where many meteorological parameters are estimated up to the next 15 days. A problem with this method is that currently, SR is not provided as a free forecast parameter on most of those online services or, normally, such forecasts present a financial cost penalty. For this reason, several ET0 estimation models using machine and deep learning were developed and presented in the literature, that use as input features a reduced set of carefully selected weather parameters, that are compatible with common freely available WFSs. However, most studies on this topic have only evaluated model performance using data from weather stations (WSs), without considering the effect of using weather forecast data. In this study, the performance of authors' previous models is evaluated when using weather forecast data from two online WFSs, in the following scenarios: (i) direct ET0 estimation by an ANN model, and (ii) estimate SR by ANN model, and then use that estimation for ET0 computation, using the FAO56-PM method. Employing data collected from two WFSs and a WS located in Vale do Lobo, Portugal, the latter approach achieved the best result, with a coefficient of determination (R2) ranging between 0.893 and 0.667, when considering forecasts up to 15 days.
Synthesizing EEG Signals from Event-Related Potential Paradigms with Conditional Diffusion Models
Authors: Guido Klein, Pierre Guetschel, Gianluigi Silvestri, Michael Tangermann
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Specificity

Data scarcity in the brain-computer interface field can be alleviated through the use of generative models, specifically diffusion models. While diffusion models have previously been successfully applied to electroencephalogram (EEG) data, existing models lack flexibility w.r.t.~sampling or require alternative representations of the EEG data. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel approach to conditional diffusion models that utilizes classifier-free guidance to directly generate subject-, session-, and class-specific EEG data. In addition to commonly used metrics, domain-specific metrics are employed to evaluate the specificity of the generated samples. The results indicate that the proposed model can generate EEG data that resembles real data for each subject, session, and class.
CoBOS: Constraint-Based Online Scheduler for Human-Robot Collaboration
Authors: Marina Ionova, Jan Kristof Behrens
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Assembly processes involving humans and robots are challenging scenarios because the individual activities and access to shared workspace have to be coordinated. Fixed robot programs leave no room to diverge from a fixed protocol. Working on such a process can be stressful for the user and lead to ineffective behavior or failure. We propose a novel approach of online constraint-based scheduling in a reactive execution control framework facilitating behavior trees called CoBOS. This allows the robot to adapt to uncertain events such as delayed activity completions and activity selection (by the human). The user will experience less stress as the robotic coworkers adapt their behavior to best complement the human-selected activities to complete the common task. In addition to the improved working conditions, our algorithm leads to increased efficiency, even in highly uncertain scenarios. We evaluate our algorithm using a probabilistic simulation study with 56000 experiments. We outperform all other compared methods by a margin of 4-10%. Initial real robot experiments using a Franka Emika Panda robot and human tracking based on HTC Vive VR gloves look promising.
CoRAST: Towards Foundation Model-Powered Correlated Data Analysis in Resource-Constrained CPS and IoT
Authors: Yi Hu, Jinhang Zuo, Alanis Zhao, Bob Iannucci, Carlee Joe-Wong
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Representation Learning

Foundation models (FMs) emerge as a promising solution to harness distributed and diverse environmental data by leveraging prior knowledge to understand the complicated temporal and spatial correlations within heterogeneous datasets. Unlike distributed learning frameworks such as federated learning, which often struggle with multimodal data, FMs can transform diverse inputs into embeddings. This process facilitates the integration of information from various modalities and the application of prior learning to new domains. However, deploying FMs in resource-constrained edge systems poses significant challenges. To this end, we introduce CoRAST, a novel learning framework that utilizes FMs for enhanced analysis of distributed, correlated heterogeneous data. Utilizing a server-based FM, CoRAST can exploit existing environment information to extract temporal, spatial, and cross-modal correlations among sensor data. This enables CoRAST to offer context-aware insights for localized client tasks through FM-powered global representation learning. Our evaluation on real-world weather dataset demonstrates CoRAST's ability to exploit correlated heterogeneous data through environmental representation learning to reduce the forecast errors by up to 50.3% compared to the baselines.
U-Sketch: An Efficient Approach for Sketch to Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Ilias Mitsouras, Eleftherios Tsonis, Paraskevi Tzouveli, Athanasios Voulodimos
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in text-to-image synthesis, producing realistic and high resolution images that faithfully adhere to the corresponding text-prompts. Despite their great success, they still fall behind in sketch-to-image synthesis tasks, where in addition to text-prompts, the spatial layout of the generated images has to closely follow the outlines of certain reference sketches. Employing an MLP latent edge predictor to guide the spatial layout of the synthesized image by predicting edge maps at each denoising step has been recently proposed. Despite yielding promising results, the pixel-wise operation of the MLP does not take into account the spatial layout as a whole, and demands numerous denoising iterations to produce satisfactory images, leading to time inefficiency. To this end, we introduce U-Sketch, a framework featuring a U-Net type latent edge predictor, which is capable of efficiently capturing both local and global features, as well as spatial correlations between pixels. Moreover, we propose the addition of a sketch simplification network that offers the user the choice of preprocessing and simplifying input sketches for enhanced outputs. The experimental results, corroborated by user feedback, demonstrate that our proposed U-Net latent edge predictor leads to more realistic results, that are better aligned with the spatial outlines of the reference sketches, while drastically reducing the number of required denoising steps and, consequently, the overall execution time.
BioMedLM: A 2.7B Parameter Language Model Trained On Biomedical Text
Authors: Elliot Bolton, Abhinav Venigalla, Michihiro Yasunaga, David Hall, Betty Xiong, Tony Lee, Roxana Daneshjou, Jonathan Frankle, Percy Liang, Michael Carbin, Christopher D. Manning
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Medical Genetics, MMLU, Multiple-choice, Privacy Preserving, Question Answering

Models such as GPT-4 and Med-PaLM 2 have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide variety of biomedical NLP tasks. However, these models have hundreds of billions of parameters, are computationally expensive to run, require users to send their input data over the internet, and are trained on unknown data sources. Can smaller, more targeted models compete? To address this question, we build and release BioMedLM, a 2.7 billion parameter GPT-style autoregressive model trained exclusively on PubMed abstracts and full articles. When fine-tuned, BioMedLM can produce strong multiple-choice biomedical question-answering results competitive with much larger models, such as achieving a score of 57.3% on MedMCQA (dev) and 69.0% on the MMLU Medical Genetics exam. BioMedLM can also be fine-tuned to produce useful answers to patient questions on medical topics. This demonstrates that smaller models can potentially serve as transparent, privacy-preserving, economical and environmentally friendly foundations for particular NLP applications, such as in biomedicine. The model is available on the Hugging Face Hub: https://huggingface.co/stanford-crfm/BioMedLM.
A Channel-ensemble Approach: Unbiased and Low-variance Pseudo-labels is Critical for Semi-supervised Classification
Authors: Jiaqi Wu, Junbiao Pang, Baochang Zhang, Qingming Huang
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Pseudo Label

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a practical challenge in computer vision. Pseudo-label (PL) methods, e.g., FixMatch and FreeMatch, obtain the State Of The Art (SOTA) performances in SSL. These approaches employ a threshold-to-pseudo-label (T2L) process to generate PLs by truncating the confidence scores of unlabeled data predicted by the self-training method. However, self-trained models typically yield biased and high-variance predictions, especially in the scenarios when a little labeled data are supplied. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight channel-based ensemble method to effectively consolidate multiple inferior PLs into the theoretically guaranteed unbiased and low-variance one. Importantly, our approach can be readily extended to any SSL framework, such as FixMatch or FreeMatch. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on CIFAR10/100 in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
An Image Grid Can Be Worth a Video: Zero-shot Video Question Answering Using a VLM
Authors: Wonkyun Kim, Changin Choi, Wonseok Lee, Wonjong Rhee
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking, Video Question Answering, Zero-Shot Video Question Answer

Stimulated by the sophisticated reasoning capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs), a variety of strategies for bridging video modality have been devised. A prominent strategy involves Video Language Models (VideoLMs), which train a learnable interface with video data to connect advanced vision encoders with LLMs. Recently, an alternative strategy has surfaced, employing readily available foundation models, such as VideoLMs and LLMs, across multiple stages for modality bridging. In this study, we introduce a simple yet novel strategy where only a single Vision Language Model (VLM) is utilized. Our starting point is the plain insight that a video comprises a series of images, or frames, interwoven with temporal information. The essence of video comprehension lies in adeptly managing the temporal aspects along with the spatial details of each frame. Initially, we transform a video into a single composite image by arranging multiple frames in a grid layout. The resulting single image is termed as an image grid. This format, while maintaining the appearance of a solitary image, effectively retains temporal information within the grid structure. Therefore, the image grid approach enables direct application of a single high-performance VLM without necessitating any video-data training. Our extensive experimental analysis across ten zero-shot video question answering benchmarks, including five open-ended and five multiple-choice benchmarks, reveals that the proposed Image Grid Vision Language Model (IG-VLM) surpasses the existing methods in nine out of ten benchmarks.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Relevance Judgments in Legal Case Retrieval
Authors: Shengjie Ma, Chong Chen, Qi Chu, Jiaxin Mao
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval

Collecting relevant judgments for legal case retrieval is a challenging and time-consuming task. Accurately judging the relevance between two legal cases requires a considerable effort to read the lengthy text and a high level of domain expertise to extract Legal Facts and make juridical judgments. With the advent of advanced large language models, some recent studies have suggested that it is promising to use LLMs for relevance judgment. Nonetheless, the method of employing a general large language model for reliable relevance judgments in legal case retrieval is yet to be thoroughly explored. To fill this research gap, we devise a novel few-shot workflow tailored to the relevant judgment of legal cases. The proposed workflow breaks down the annotation process into a series of stages, imitating the process employed by human annotators and enabling a flexible integration of expert reasoning to enhance the accuracy of relevance judgments. By comparing the relevance judgments of LLMs and human experts, we empirically show that we can obtain reliable relevance judgments with the proposed workflow. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capacity to augment existing legal case retrieval models through the synthesis of data generated by the large language model.