pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VirusT5: Harnessing Large Language Models to Predicting SARS-CoV-2 Evolution
Authors: Vishwajeet Marathe, Deewan Bajracharya, Changhui Yan
Date: 2024-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Translation

During a virus's evolution,various regions of the genome are subjected to distinct levels of functional constraints.Combined with factors like codon bias and DNA repair efficiency,these constraints contribute to unique mutation patterns within the genome or a specific gene. In this project, we harnessed the power of Large Language Models(LLMs) to predict the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. By treating the mutation process from one generation to the next as a translation task, we trained a transformer model, called VirusT5, to capture the mutation patterns underlying SARS-CoV-2 evolution. We evaluated the VirusT5's ability to detect these mutation patterns including its ability to identify mutation hotspots and explored the potential of using VirusT5 to predict future virus variants. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using a large language model to model viral evolution as a translation process. This study establishes the groundbreaking concept of "mutation-as-translation," paving the way for new methodologies and tools for combating virus threats
Lillama: Large Language Models Compression via Low-Rank Feature Distillation
Authors: Yaya Sy, Christophe Cerisara, Irina Illina
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Mamba

Current LLM structured pruning methods typically involve two steps: (1) compression with calibration data and (2) costly continued pretraining on billions of tokens to recover lost performance. This second step is necessary as the first significantly impacts model accuracy. Prior research suggests pretrained Transformer weights aren't inherently low-rank, unlike their activations, which may explain this drop. Based on this observation, we propose Lillama, a compression method that locally distills activations with low-rank weights. Using SVD for initialization and a joint loss combining teacher and student activations, we accelerate convergence and reduce memory use with local gradient updates. Lillama compresses Mixtral-8x7B within minutes on a single A100 GPU, removing 10 billion parameters while retaining over 95% of its original performance. Phi-2 3B can be compressed by 40% with just 13 million calibration tokens, resulting in a small model that competes with recent models of similar size. The method generalizes well to non-transformer architectures, compressing Mamba-3B by 20% while maintaining 99% performance.
From Histopathology Images to Cell Clouds: Learning Slide Representations with Hierarchical Cell Transformer
Authors: Zijiang Yang, Zhongwei Qiu, Tiancheng Lin, Hanqing Chao, Wanxing Chang, Yelin Yang, Yunshuo Zhang, Wenpei Jiao, Yixuan Shen, wenbin liu, Dongmei Fu, Dakai Jin, Ke Yan, Le Lu, Hui Jiang, Yun Bian
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Prediction, whole slide images

It is clinically crucial and potentially very beneficial to be able to analyze and model directly the spatial distributions of cells in histopathology whole slide images (WSI). However, most existing WSI datasets lack cell-level annotations, owing to the extremely high cost over giga-pixel images. Thus, it remains an open question whether deep learning models can directly and effectively analyze WSIs from the semantic aspect of cell distributions. In this work, we construct a large-scale WSI dataset with more than 5 billion cell-level annotations, termed WSI-Cell5B, and a novel hierarchical Cell Cloud Transformer (CCFormer) to tackle these challenges. WSI-Cell5B is based on 6,998 WSIs of 11 cancers from The Cancer Genome Atlas Program, and all WSIs are annotated per cell by coordinates and types. To the best of our knowledge, WSI-Cell5B is the first WSI-level large-scale dataset integrating cell-level annotations. On the other hand, CCFormer formulates the collection of cells in each WSI as a cell cloud and models cell spatial distribution. Specifically, Neighboring Information Embedding (NIE) is proposed to characterize the distribution of cells within the neighborhood of each cell, and a novel Hierarchical Spatial Perception (HSP) module is proposed to learn the spatial relationship among cells in a bottom-up manner. The clinical analysis indicates that WSI-Cell5B can be used to design clinical evaluation metrics based on counting cells that effectively assess the survival risk of patients. Extensive experiments on survival prediction and cancer staging show that learning from cell spatial distribution alone can already achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, i.e., CCFormer strongly outperforms other competing methods.
FAP-CD: Fairness-Driven Age-Friendly Community Planning via Conditional Diffusion Generation
Authors: Jinlin Li, Xintong Li, Xiao Zhou
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Denoising, Fairness

As global populations age rapidly, incorporating age-specific considerations into urban planning has become essential to addressing the urgent demand for age-friendly built environments and ensuring sustainable urban development. However, current practices often overlook these considerations, resulting in inadequate and unevenly distributed elderly services in cities. There is a pressing need for equitable and optimized urban renewal strategies to support effective age-friendly planning. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, Fairness-driven Age-friendly community Planning via Conditional Diffusion generation (FAP-CD). FAP-CD leverages a conditioned graph denoising diffusion probabilistic model to learn the joint probability distribution of aging facilities and their spatial relationships at a fine-grained regional level. Our framework generates optimized facility distributions by iteratively refining noisy graphs, conditioned on the needs of the elderly during the diffusion process. Key innovations include a demand-fairness pre-training module that integrates community demand features and facility characteristics using an attention mechanism and min-max optimization, ensuring equitable service distribution across regions. Additionally, a discrete graph structure captures walkable accessibility within regional road networks, guiding model sampling. To enhance information integration, we design a graph denoising network with an attribute augmentation module and a hybrid graph message aggregation module, combining local and global node and edge information. Empirical results across multiple metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of FAP-CD in balancing age-friendly needs with regional equity, achieving an average improvement of 41% over competitive baseline models.
Formal Language Knowledge Corpus for Retrieval Augmented Generation
Authors: Majd Zayyad, Yossi Adi
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Mathematical Proofs, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The integration of retrieval-augmented techniques with LLMs has shown promise in improving performance across various domains. However, their utility in tasks requiring advanced reasoning, such as generating and evaluating mathematical statements and proofs, remains underexplored. This study explores the use of Lean, a programming language for writing mathematical proofs, to populate the knowledge corpus used by RAG systems. We hope for this to lay the foundation to exploring different methods of using RAGs to improve the performance of LLMs in advanced logical reasoning tasks.
Subgoal Discovery Using a Free Energy Paradigm and State Aggregations
Authors: Amirhossein Mesbah, Reshad Hosseini, Seyed Pooya Shariatpanahi, Majid Nili Ahmadabadi
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a major role in solving complex sequential decision-making tasks. Hierarchical and goal-conditioned RL are promising methods for dealing with two major problems in RL, namely sample inefficiency and difficulties in reward shaping. These methods tackle the mentioned problems by decomposing a task into simpler subtasks and temporally abstracting a task in the action space. One of the key components for task decomposition of these methods is subgoal discovery. We can use the subgoal states to define hierarchies of actions and also use them in decomposing complex tasks. Under the assumption that subgoal states are more unpredictable, we propose a free energy paradigm to discover them. This is achieved by using free energy to select between two spaces, the main space and an aggregation space. The $model \; changes$ from neighboring states to a given state shows the unpredictability of a given state, and therefore it is used in this paper for subgoal discovery. Our empirical results on navigation tasks like grid-world environments show that our proposed method can be applied for subgoal discovery without prior knowledge of the task. Our proposed method is also robust to the stochasticity of environments.
The Task Shield: Enforcing Task Alignment to Defend Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents
Authors: Feiran Jia, Tong Wu, Xin Qin, Anna Squicciarini
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly being deployed as conversational assistants capable of performing complex real-world tasks through tool integration. This enhanced ability to interact with external systems and process various data sources, while powerful, introduces significant security vulnerabilities. In particular, indirect prompt injection attacks pose a critical threat, where malicious instructions embedded within external data sources can manipulate agents to deviate from user intentions. While existing defenses based on rule constraints, source spotlighting, and authentication protocols show promise, they struggle to maintain robust security while preserving task functionality. We propose a novel and orthogonal perspective that reframes agent security from preventing harmful actions to ensuring task alignment, requiring every agent action to serve user objectives. Based on this insight, we develop Task Shield, a test-time defense mechanism that systematically verifies whether each instruction and tool call contributes to user-specified goals. Through experiments on the AgentDojo benchmark, we demonstrate that Task Shield reduces attack success rates (2.07\%) while maintaining high task utility (69.79\%) on GPT-4o.
STAMPsy: Towards SpatioTemporal-Aware Mixed-Type Dialogues for Psychological Counseling
Authors: Jieyi Wang, Yue Huang, Zeming Liu, Dexuan Xu, Chuan Wang, Xiaoming Shi, Ruiyuan Guan, Hongxing Wang, Weihua Yue, Yu Huang
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, Dialogue Generation, Question Answering

Online psychological counseling dialogue systems are trending, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional in-person therapy. However, existing psychological counseling dialogue systems mainly focus on basic empathetic dialogue or QA with minimal professional knowledge and without goal guidance. In many real-world counseling scenarios, clients often seek multi-type help, such as diagnosis, consultation, therapy, console, and common questions, but existing dialogue systems struggle to combine different dialogue types naturally. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct mixed-type dialogue systems for psychological counseling that enable clients to clarify their goals before proceeding with counseling. To mitigate the challenge, we collect a mixed-type counseling dialogues corpus termed STAMPsy, covering five dialogue types, task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, knowledge-grounded dialogue, conversational recommendation, empathetic dialogue, and question answering, over 5,000 conversations. Moreover, spatiotemporal-aware knowledge enables systems to have world awareness and has been proven to affect one's mental health. Therefore, we link dialogues in STAMPsy to spatiotemporal state and propose a spatiotemporal-aware mixed-type psychological counseling dataset. Additionally, we build baselines on STAMPsy and develop an iterative self-feedback psychological dialogue generation framework, named Self-STAMPsy. Results indicate that clarifying dialogue goals in advance and utilizing spatiotemporal states are effective.
On Enhancing Network Throughput using Reinforcement Learning in Sliced Testbeds
Authors: Daniel Pereira Monteiro, Lucas Nardelli de Freitas Botelho Saar, Larissa Ferreira Rodrigues Moreira, Rodrigo Moreira
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Novel applications demand high throughput, low latency, and high reliability connectivity and still pose significant challenges to slicing orchestration architectures. The literature explores network slicing techniques that employ canonical methods, artificial intelligence, and combinatorial optimization to address errors and ensure throughput for network slice data plane. This paper introduces the Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB)-Agent as a new approach that uses Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a vertical application to enhance network slicing throughput to fit Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). The eMBB-Agent analyzes application transmission variables and proposes actions within a discrete space to adjust the reception window using a Deep Q-Network (DQN). This paper also presents experimental results that examine the impact of factors such as the channel error rate, DQN model layers, and learning rate on model convergence and achieved throughput, providing insights on embedding intelligence in network slicing.
Adversarial Attack Against Images Classification based on Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Yahe Yang
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Decision Making, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation

Adversarial attacks on image classification systems have always been an important problem in the field of machine learning, and generative adversarial networks (GANs), as popular models in the field of image generation, have been widely used in various novel scenarios due to their powerful generative capabilities. However, with the popularity of generative adversarial networks, the misuse of fake image technology has raised a series of security problems, such as malicious tampering with other people's photos and videos, and invasion of personal privacy. Inspired by the generative adversarial networks, this work proposes a novel adversarial attack method, aiming to gain insight into the weaknesses of the image classification system and improve its anti-attack ability. Specifically, the generative adversarial networks are used to generate adversarial samples with small perturbations but enough to affect the decision-making of the classifier, and the adversarial samples are generated through the adversarial learning of the training generator and the classifier. From extensive experiment analysis, we evaluate the effectiveness of the method on a classical image classification dataset, and the results show that our model successfully deceives a variety of advanced classifiers while maintaining the naturalness of adversarial samples.
Generalizable Articulated Object Perception with Superpoints
Authors: Qiaojun Yu, Ce Hao, Xibin Yuan, Li Zhang, Liu Liu, Yukang Huo, Rohit Agarwal, Cewu Lu
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object, Segmentation

Manipulating articulated objects with robotic arms is challenging due to the complex kinematic structure, which requires precise part segmentation for efficient manipulation. In this work, we introduce a novel superpoint-based perception method designed to improve part segmentation in 3D point clouds of articulated objects. We propose a learnable, part-aware superpoint generation technique that efficiently groups points based on their geometric and semantic similarities, resulting in clearer part boundaries. Furthermore, by leveraging the segmentation capabilities of the 2D foundation model SAM, we identify the centers of pixel regions and select corresponding superpoints as candidate query points. Integrating a query-based transformer decoder further enhances our method's ability to achieve precise part segmentation. Experimental results on the GAPartNet dataset show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in cross-category part segmentation, achieving AP50 scores of 77.9% for seen categories (4.4% improvement) and $39.3\%$ for unseen categories (11.6% improvement), with superior results in 5 out of 9 part categories for seen objects and outperforming all previous methods across all part categories for unseen objects.
Internalized Self-Correction for Large Language Models
Authors: Nishanth Upadhyaya, Raghavendra Sridharamurthy
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

In this article, we introduce 'Internalized Self-Correction' (InSeC) for large language models (LLMs). While many approaches exist for self-reflection at inference time, we propose a novel method that combines ideas from negative sampling, self-reflection during training, and inference time. InSeC allows LLMs to correct themselves by introducing mistakes and their corresponding corrections during training, thereby converting the learning process into a true supervised learning task with both positive and negative examples. This approach can be extended to improve instruction following and correct hallucinations or incorrect sentences generated by LLMs.
PB-UAP: Hybrid Universal Adversarial Attack For Image Segmentation
Authors: Yufei Song, Ziqi Zhou, Minghui Li, Xianlong Wang, Hangtao Zhang, Menghao Deng, Wei Wan, Shengshan Hu, Leo Yu Zhang
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

With the rapid advancement of deep learning, the model robustness has become a significant research hotspot, \ie, adversarial attacks on deep neural networks. Existing works primarily focus on image classification tasks, aiming to alter the model's predicted labels. Due to the output complexity and deeper network architectures, research on adversarial examples for segmentation models is still limited, particularly for universal adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we propose a novel universal adversarial attack method designed for segmentation models, which includes dual feature separation and low-frequency scattering modules. The two modules guide the training of adversarial examples in the pixel and frequency space, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high attack success rates surpassing the state-of-the-art methods, and exhibits strong transferability across different models.
TimeRAG: BOOSTING LLM Time Series Forecasting via Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Silin Yang, Dong Wang, Haoqi Zheng, Ruochun Jin
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Although the rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced new opportunities for time series forecasting, existing LLM-based solutions require excessive training and exhibit limited transferability. In view of these challenges, we propose TimeRAG, a framework that incorporates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) into time series forecasting LLMs, which constructs a time series knowledge base from historical sequences, retrieves reference sequences from the knowledge base that exhibit similar patterns to the query sequence measured by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and combines these reference sequences and the prediction query as a textual prompt to the time series forecasting LLM. Experiments on datasets from various domains show that the integration of RAG improved the prediction accuracy of the original model by 2.97% on average.
A Systems Thinking Approach to Algorithmic Fairness
Authors: Chris Lam
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Fairness

Systems thinking provides us with a way to model the algorithmic fairness problem by allowing us to encode prior knowledge and assumptions about where we believe bias might exist in the data generating process. We can then encode these beliefs as a series of causal graphs, enabling us to link AI/ML systems to politics and the law. This allows us to combine techniques from machine learning, causal inference, and system dynamics in order to capture different emergent aspects of the fairness problem. We can use systems thinking to help policymakers on both sides of the political aisle to understand the complex trade-offs that exist from different types of fairness policies, providing a sociotechnical foundation for designing AI policy that is aligned to their political agendas and with society's shared democratic values.
POEX: Understanding and Mitigating Policy Executable Jailbreak Attacks against Embodied AI
Authors: Xuancun Lu, Zhengxian Huang, Xinfeng Li, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu
Date: 2024-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: LLM Jailbreak, Red Teaming

Embodied AI systems are rapidly evolving due to the integration of LLMs as planning modules, which transform complex instructions into executable policies. However, LLMs are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which can generate malicious content. This paper investigates the feasibility and rationale behind applying traditional LLM jailbreak attacks to EAI systems. We aim to answer three questions: (1) Do traditional LLM jailbreak attacks apply to EAI systems? (2) What challenges arise if they do not? and (3) How can we defend against EAI jailbreak attacks? To this end, we first measure existing LLM-based EAI systems using a newly constructed dataset, i.e., the Harmful-RLbench. Our study confirms that traditional LLM jailbreak attacks are not directly applicable to EAI systems and identifies two unique challenges. First, the harmful text does not necessarily constitute harmful policies. Second, even if harmful policies can be generated, they are not necessarily executable by the EAI systems, which limits the potential risk. To facilitate a more comprehensive security analysis, we refine and introduce POEX, a novel red teaming framework that optimizes adversarial suffixes to induce harmful yet executable policies against EAI systems. The design of POEX employs adversarial constraints, policy evaluators, and suffix optimization to ensure successful policy execution while evading safety detection inside an EAI system. Experiments on the real-world robotic arm and simulator using Harmful-RLbench demonstrate the efficacy, highlighting severe safety vulnerabilities and high transferability across models. Finally, we propose prompt-based and model-based defenses, achieving an 85% success rate in mitigating attacks and enhancing safety awareness in EAI systems. Our findings underscore the urgent need for robust security measures to ensure the safe deployment of EAI in critical applications.