pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MALT: Multi-scale Action Learning Transformer for Online Action Detection
Authors: Zhipeng Yang, Ruoyu Wang, Yang Tan, Liping Xie
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Decoder, Online Action Detection

Online action detection (OAD) aims to identify ongoing actions from streaming video in real-time, without access to future frames. Since these actions manifest at varying scales of granularity, ranging from coarse to fine, projecting an entire set of action frames to a single latent encoding may result in a lack of local information, necessitating the acquisition of action features across multiple scales. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale action learning transformer (MALT), which includes a novel recurrent decoder (used for feature fusion) that includes fewer parameters and can be trained more efficiently. A hierarchical encoder with multiple encoding branches is further proposed to capture multi-scale action features. The output from the preceding branch is then incrementally input to the subsequent branch as part of a cross-attention calculation. In this way, output features transition from coarse to fine as the branches deepen. We also introduce an explicit frame scoring mechanism employing sparse attention, which filters irrelevant frames more efficiently, without requiring an additional network. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets (THUMOS'14 and TVSeries), outperforming all existing models used for comparison, with an mAP of 0.2% for THUMOS'14 and an mcAP of 0.1% for TVseries.
Paying to Do Better: Games with Payments between Learning Agents
Authors: Yoav Kolumbus, Joe Halpern, Éva Tardos
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00

In repeated games, such as auctions, players typically use learning algorithms to choose their actions. The use of such autonomous learning agents has become widespread on online platforms. In this paper, we explore the impact of players incorporating monetary transfer policies into their agents' algorithms, aiming to influence behavior in their favor through the dynamics between the agents. Our focus is on understanding when players have incentives to make use of monetary transfers, how such payments may affect learning dynamics, and what the implications are for welfare and its distribution among the players. We propose a simple and general game-theoretic model to capture such scenarios. Our results on general games show that in a very broad class of games, self-interested players benefit from letting their learning agents make payments to other learners during the game dynamics, and that in many cases, this kind of behavior improves welfare for all players. Our results on first- and second-price auctions show that in equilibria of the ``payment policy game,'' the agents' dynamics reach strong collusive outcomes with low revenue for the auctioneer. These results raise new questions and highlight a challenge for mechanism design in systems where automated learning agents can benefit from interacting with their peers in the digital ecosystem and outside the boundaries of the mechanism.
SelfGNN: Self-Supervised Graph Neural Networks for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Yuxi Liu, Lianghao Xia, Chao Huang
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Recommendation Systems, Self-Supervised Learning, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation effectively addresses information overload by modeling users' temporal and sequential interaction patterns. To overcome the limitations of supervision signals, recent approaches have adopted self-supervised learning techniques in recommender systems. However, there are still two critical challenges that remain unsolved. Firstly, existing sequential models primarily focus on long-term modeling of individual interaction sequences, overlooking the valuable short-term collaborative relationships among the behaviors of different users. Secondly, real-world data often contain noise, particularly in users' short-term behaviors, which can arise from temporary intents or misclicks. Such noise negatively impacts the accuracy of both graph and sequence models, further complicating the modeling process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called Self-Supervised Graph Neural Network (SelfGNN) for sequential recommendation. The SelfGNN framework encodes short-term graphs based on time intervals and utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn short-term collaborative relationships. It captures long-term user and item representations at multiple granularity levels through interval fusion and dynamic behavior modeling. Importantly, our personalized self-augmented learning structure enhances model robustness by mitigating noise in short-term graphs based on long-term user interests and personal stability. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that SelfGNN outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines. Our model implementation codes are available at https://github.com/HKUDS/SelfGNN.
Investigating Calibration and Corruption Robustness of Post-hoc Pruned Perception CNNs: An Image Classification Benchmark Study
Authors: Pallavi Mitra, Gesina Schwalbe, Nadja Klein
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. However, high computational and storage demands hinder their deployment into resource-constrained environments, such as embedded devices. Model pruning helps to meet these restrictions by reducing the model size, while maintaining superior performance. Meanwhile, safety-critical applications pose more than just resource and performance constraints. In particular, predictions must not be overly confident, i.e., provide properly calibrated uncertainty estimations (proper uncertainty calibration), and CNNs must be robust against corruptions like naturally occurring input perturbations (natural corruption robustness). This work investigates the important trade-off between uncertainty calibration, natural corruption robustness, and performance for current state-of-research post-hoc CNN pruning techniques in the context of image classification tasks. Our study reveals that post-hoc pruning substantially improves the model's uncertainty calibration, performance, and natural corruption robustness, sparking hope for safe and robust embedded CNNs.Furthermore, uncertainty calibration and natural corruption robustness are not mutually exclusive targets under pruning, as evidenced by the improved safety aspects obtained by post-hoc unstructured pruning with increasing compression.
Automatic Channel Pruning for Multi-Head Attention
Authors: Eunho Lee, Youngbae Hwang
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00

Despite the strong performance of Transformers, their quadratic computation complexity presents challenges in applying them to vision tasks. Automatic pruning is one of effective methods for reducing computation complexity without heuristic approaches. However, directly applying it to multi-head attention is not straightforward due to channel misalignment. In this paper, we propose an automatic channel pruning method to take into account the multi-head attention mechanism. First, we incorporate channel similarity-based weights into the pruning indicator to preserve more informative channels in each head. Then, we adjust pruning indicator to enforce removal of channels in equal proportions across all heads, preventing the channel misalignment. We also add a reweight module to compensate for information loss resulting from channel removal, and an effective initialization step for pruning indicator based on difference of attention between original structure and each channel. Our proposed method can be used to not only original attention, but also linear attention, which is more efficient as linear complexity with respect to the number of tokens. On ImageNet-1K, applying our pruning method to the FLattenTransformer, which includes both attention mechanisms, shows outperformed accuracy for several MACs compared with previous state-of-the-art efficient models and pruned methods. Code will be available soon.
ABodyBuilder3: Improved and scalable antibody structure predictions
Authors: Henry Kenlay, Frédéric A. Dreyer, Daniel Cutting, Daniel Nissley, Charlotte M. Deane
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Prediction

Accurate prediction of antibody structure is a central task in the design and development of monoclonal antibodies, notably to understand both their developability and their binding properties. In this article, we introduce ABodyBuilder3, an improved and scalable antibody structure prediction model based on ImmuneBuilder. We achieve a new state-of-the-art accuracy in the modelling of CDR loops by leveraging language model embeddings, and show how predicted structures can be further improved through careful relaxation strategies. Finally, we incorporate a predicted Local Distance Difference Test into the model output to allow for a more accurate estimation of uncertainties.
clembench-2024: A Challenging, Dynamic, Complementary, Multilingual Benchmark and Underlying Flexible Framework for LLMs as Multi-Action Agents
Authors: Anne Beyer, Kranti Chalamalasetti, Sherzod Hakimov, Brielen Madureira, Philipp Sadler, David Schlangen
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

It has been established in recent work that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be prompted to "self-play" conversational games that probe certain capabilities (general instruction following, strategic goal orientation, language understanding abilities), where the resulting interactive game play can be automatically scored. In this paper, we take one of the proposed frameworks for setting up such game-play environments, and further test its usefulness as an evaluation instrument, along a number of dimensions: We show that it can easily keep up with new developments while avoiding data contamination, we show that the tests implemented within it are not yet saturated (human performance is substantially higher than that of even the best models), and we show that it lends itself to investigating additional questions, such as the impact of the prompting language on performance. We believe that the approach forms a good basis for making decisions on model choice for building applied interactive systems, and perhaps ultimately setting up a closed-loop development environment of system and simulated evaluator.
SLIM: a Scalable Light-weight Root Cause Analysis for Imbalanced Data in Microservice
Authors: Rui Ren, Jingbang Yang, Linxiao Yang, Xinyue Gu, Liang Sun
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault localization

The newly deployed service -- one kind of change service, could lead to a new type of minority fault. Existing state-of-the-art methods for fault localization rarely consider the imbalanced fault classification in change service. This paper proposes a novel method that utilizes decision rule sets to deal with highly imbalanced data by optimizing the F1 score subject to cardinality constraints. The proposed method greedily generates the rule with maximal marginal gain and uses an efficient minorize-maximization (MM) approach to select rules iteratively, maximizing a non-monotone submodular lower bound. Compared with existing fault localization algorithms, our algorithm can adapt to the imbalanced fault scenario of change service, and provide interpretable fault causes which are easy to understand and verify. Our method can also be deployed in the online training setting, with only about 15% training overhead compared to the current SOTA methods. Empirical studies showcase that our algorithm outperforms existing fault localization algorithms in both accuracy and model interpretability.
Don't Buy it! Reassessing the Ad Understanding Abilities of Contrastive Multimodal Models
Authors: A. Bavaresco, A. Testoni, R. Fernández
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Reasoning, Retrieval

Image-based advertisements are complex multimodal stimuli that often contain unusual visual elements and figurative language. Previous research on automatic ad understanding has reported impressive zero-shot accuracy of contrastive vision-and-language models (VLMs) on an ad-explanation retrieval task. Here, we examine the original task setup and show that contrastive VLMs can solve it by exploiting grounding heuristics. To control for this confound, we introduce TRADE, a new evaluation test set with adversarial grounded explanations. While these explanations look implausible to humans, we show that they "fool" four different contrastive VLMs. Our findings highlight the need for an improved operationalisation of automatic ad understanding that truly evaluates VLMs' multimodal reasoning abilities. We make our code and TRADE available at https://github.com/dmg-illc/trade .
einspace: Searching for Neural Architectures from Fundamental Operations
Authors: Linus Ericsson, Miguel Espinosa, Chenhongyi Yang, Antreas Antoniou, Amos Storkey, Shay B. Cohen, Steven McDonagh, Elliot J. Crowley
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Neural architecture search (NAS) finds high performing networks for a given task. Yet the results of NAS are fairly prosaic; they did not e.g. create a shift from convolutional structures to transformers. This is not least because the search spaces in NAS often aren't diverse enough to include such transformations a priori. Instead, for NAS to provide greater potential for fundamental design shifts, we need a novel expressive search space design which is built from more fundamental operations. To this end, we introduce einspace, a search space based on a parameterised probabilistic context-free grammar. Our space is versatile, supporting architectures of various sizes and complexities, while also containing diverse network operations which allow it to model convolutions, attention components and more. It contains many existing competitive architectures, and provides flexibility for discovering new ones. Using this search space, we perform experiments to find novel architectures as well as improvements on existing ones on the diverse Unseen NAS datasets. We show that competitive architectures can be obtained by searching from scratch, and we consistently find large improvements when initialising the search with strong baselines. We believe that this work is an important advancement towards a transformative NAS paradigm where search space expressivity and strategic search initialisation play key roles.
Outliers and Calibration Sets have Diminishing Effect on Quantization of Modern LLMs
Authors: Davide Paglieri, Saurabh Dash, Tim Rocktäschel, Jack Parker-Holder
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) enhances the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling faster operation and compatibility with more accessible hardware through reduced memory usage, at the cost of small performance drops. We explore the role of calibration sets in PTQ, specifically their effect on hidden activations in various notable open-source LLMs. Calibration sets are crucial for evaluating activation magnitudes and identifying outliers, which can distort the quantization range and negatively impact performance. Our analysis reveals a marked contrast in quantization effectiveness across models. The older OPT model, upon which much of the quantization literature is based, shows significant performance deterioration and high susceptibility to outliers with varying calibration sets. In contrast, newer models like Llama-2 7B, Llama-3 8B, Command-R 35B, and Mistral 7B demonstrate strong robustness, with Mistral 7B showing near-immunity to outliers and stable activations. These findings suggest a shift in PTQ strategies might be needed. As advancements in pre-training methods reduce the relevance of outliers, there is an emerging need to reassess the fundamentals of current quantization literature. The emphasis should pivot towards optimizing inference speed, rather than primarily focusing on outlier preservation, to align with the evolving characteristics of state-of-the-art LLMs.
The AI Alignment Paradox
Authors: Robert West, Roland Aydin
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00

The field of AI alignment aims to steer AI systems toward human goals, preferences, and ethical principles. Its contributions have been instrumental for improving the output quality, safety, and trustworthiness of today's AI models. This perspective article draws attention to a fundamental challenge we see in all AI alignment endeavors, which we term the "AI alignment paradox": The better we align AI models with our values, the easier we may make it for adversaries to misalign the models. We illustrate the paradox by sketching three concrete example incarnations for the case of language models, each corresponding to a distinct way in which adversaries might exploit the paradox. With AI's increasing real-world impact, it is imperative that a broad community of researchers be aware of the AI alignment paradox and work to find ways to mitigate it, in order to ensure the beneficial use of AI for the good of humanity.
Ovis: Structural Embedding Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Model
Authors: Shiyin Lu, Yang Li, Qing-Guo Chen, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Han-Jia Ye
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Multimodal Large Language Model, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically integrate a pre-trained LLM with another pre-trained vision transformer through a connector, such as an MLP, endowing the LLM with visual capabilities. However, the misalignment between two embedding strategies in MLLMs -- the structural textual embeddings based on an embedding look-up table and the continuous embeddings generated directly by the vision encoder -- makes challenges for a more seamless fusion of visual and textual information. We propose Ovis, a novel MLLM architecture designed to structurally align visual and textual embeddings. Ovis integrates an additional learnable visual embedding table into the visual encoder's process. To capture rich visual semantics, each image patch indexes the visual embedding table multiple times, resulting in a final visual embedding that is a probabilistic combination of the indexed embeddings. This structural approach mirrors the method used for generating textual embeddings. Empirical evaluations on various multimodal benchmarks show that Ovis outperforms open-source MLLMs of similar parameter scales and even surpasses the proprietary model Qwen-VL-Plus overall. These results highlight the potential of Ovis' structured visual representation for advancing MLLM architectural design and promoting more effective multimodal learning. Code, datasets, and models are available at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Ovis.
InsightSee: Advancing Multi-agent Vision-Language Models for Enhanced Visual Understanding
Authors: Huaxiang Zhang, Yaojia Mu, Guo-Niu Zhu, Zhongxue Gan
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00

Accurate visual understanding is imperative for advancing autonomous systems and intelligent robots. Despite the powerful capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) in processing complex visual scenes, precisely recognizing obscured or ambiguously presented visual elements remains challenging. To tackle such issues, this paper proposes InsightSee, a multi-agent framework to enhance VLMs' interpretative capabilities in handling complex visual understanding scenarios. The framework comprises a description agent, two reasoning agents, and a decision agent, which are integrated to refine the process of visual information interpretation. The design of these agents and the mechanisms by which they can be enhanced in visual information processing are presented. Experimental results demonstrate that the InsightSee framework not only boosts performance on specific visual tasks but also retains the original models' strength. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in 6 out of 9 benchmark tests, with a substantial advancement in multimodal understanding.
OpenTensor: Reproducing Faster Matrix Multiplication Discovering Algorithms
Authors: Yiwen Sun, Wenye Li
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning

OpenTensor is a reproduction of AlphaTensor, which discovered a new algorithm that outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for matrix multiplication by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). While AlphaTensor provides a promising framework for solving scientific problems, it is really hard to reproduce due to the massive tricks and lack of source codes. In this paper, we clean up the algorithm pipeline, clarify the technical details, and make some improvements to the training process. Computational results show that OpenTensor can successfully find efficient matrix multiplication algorithms.
Trajectory Forecasting through Low-Rank Adaptation of Discrete Latent Codes
Authors: Riccardo Benaglia, Angelo Porrello, Pietro Buzzega, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Trajectory Forecasting

Trajectory forecasting is crucial for video surveillance analytics, as it enables the anticipation of future movements for a set of agents, e.g. basketball players engaged in intricate interactions with long-term intentions. Deep generative models offer a natural learning approach for trajectory forecasting, yet they encounter difficulties in achieving an optimal balance between sampling fidelity and diversity. We address this challenge by leveraging Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAEs), which utilize a discrete latent space to tackle the issue of posterior collapse. Specifically, we introduce an instance-based codebook that allows tailored latent representations for each example. In a nutshell, the rows of the codebook are dynamically adjusted to reflect contextual information (i.e., past motion patterns extracted from the observed trajectories). In this way, the discretization process gains flexibility, leading to improved reconstructions. Notably, instance-level dynamics are injected into the codebook through low-rank updates, which restrict the customization of the codebook to a lower dimension space. The resulting discrete space serves as the basis of the subsequent step, which regards the training of a diffusion-based predictive model. We show that such a two-fold framework, augmented with instance-level discretization, leads to accurate and diverse forecasts, yielding state-of-the-art performance on three established benchmarks.
Maximum Temperature Prediction Using Remote Sensing Data Via Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Lorenzo Innocenti, Giacomo Blanco, Luca Barco, Claudio Rossi
Date: 2024-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Integration

Urban heat islands, defined as specific zones exhibiting substantially higher temperatures than their immediate environs, pose significant threats to environmental sustainability and public health. This study introduces a novel machine-learning model that amalgamates data from the Sentinel-3 satellite, meteorological predictions, and additional remote sensing inputs. The primary aim is to generate detailed spatiotemporal maps that forecast the peak temperatures within a 24-hour period in Turin. Experimental results validate the model's proficiency in predicting temperature patterns, achieving a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 2.09 degrees Celsius for the year 2023 at a resolution of 20 meters per pixel, thereby enriching our knowledge of urban climatic behavior. This investigation enhances the understanding of urban microclimates, emphasizing the importance of cross-disciplinary data integration, and laying the groundwork for informed policy-making aimed at alleviating the negative impacts of extreme urban temperatures.