pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Let people fail! Exploring the influence of explainable virtual and robotic agents in learning-by-doing tasks
Authors: Marco Matarese, Francesco Rea, Katharina J. Rohlfing, Alessandra Sciutti
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Collaborative decision-making with artificial intelligence (AI) agents presents opportunities and challenges. While human-AI performance often surpasses that of individuals, the impact of such technology on human behavior remains insufficiently understood, primarily when AI agents can provide justifiable explanations for their suggestions. This study compares the effects of classic vs. partner-aware explanations on human behavior and performance during a learning-by-doing task. Three participant groups were involved: one interacting with a computer, another with a humanoid robot, and a third one without assistance. Results indicated that partner-aware explanations influenced participants differently based on the type of artificial agents involved. With the computer, participants enhanced their task completion times. At the same time, those interacting with the humanoid robot were more inclined to follow its suggestions, although they did not reduce their timing. Interestingly, participants autonomously performing the learning-by-doing task demonstrated superior knowledge acquisition than those assisted by explainable AI (XAI). These findings raise profound questions and have significant implications for automated tutoring and human-AI collaboration.
The Surprising Ineffectiveness of Pre-Trained Visual Representations for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Moritz Schneider, Robert Krug, Narunas Vaskevicius, Luigi Palmieri, Joschka Boedecker
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Visual Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods often require extensive amounts of data. As opposed to model-free RL, model-based RL (MBRL) offers a potential solution with efficient data utilization through planning. Additionally, RL lacks generalization capabilities for real-world tasks. Prior work has shown that incorporating pre-trained visual representations (PVRs) enhances sample efficiency and generalization. While PVRs have been extensively studied in the context of model-free RL, their potential in MBRL remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we benchmark a set of PVRs on challenging control tasks in a model-based RL setting. We investigate the data efficiency, generalization capabilities, and the impact of different properties of PVRs on the performance of model-based agents. Our results, perhaps surprisingly, reveal that for MBRL current PVRs are not more sample efficient than learning representations from scratch, and that they do not generalize better to out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. To explain this, we analyze the quality of the trained dynamics model. Furthermore, we show that data diversity and network architecture are the most important contributors to OOD generalization performance.
A Hard-Label Cryptanalytic Extraction of Non-Fully Connected Deep Neural Networks using Side-Channel Attacks
Authors: Benoit Coqueret, Mathieu Carbone, Olivier Sentieys, Gabriel Zaid
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Model extraction

During the past decade, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) proved their value on a large variety of subjects. However despite their high value and public accessibility, the protection of the intellectual property of DNNs is still an issue and an emerging research field. Recent works have successfully extracted fully-connected DNNs using cryptanalytic methods in hard-label settings, proving that it was possible to copy a DNN with high fidelity, i.e., high similitude in the output predictions. However, the current cryptanalytic attacks cannot target complex, i.e., not fully connected, DNNs and are limited to special cases of neurons present in deep networks. In this work, we introduce a new end-to-end attack framework designed for model extraction of embedded DNNs with high fidelity. We describe a new black-box side-channel attack which splits the DNN in several linear parts for which we can perform cryptanalytic extraction and retrieve the weights in hard-label settings. With this method, we are able to adapt cryptanalytic extraction, for the first time, to non-fully connected DNNs, while maintaining a high fidelity. We validate our contributions by targeting several architectures implemented on a microcontroller unit, including a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) of 1.7 million parameters and a shortened MobileNetv1. Our framework successfully extracts all of these DNNs with high fidelity (88.4% for the MobileNetv1 and 93.2% for the MLP). Furthermore, we use the stolen model to generate adversarial examples and achieve close to white-box performance on the victim's model (95.8% and 96.7% transfer rate).
Semantics and Spatiality of Emergent Communication
Authors: Rotem Ben Zion, Boaz Carmeli, Orr Paradise, Yonatan Belinkov
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

When artificial agents are jointly trained to perform collaborative tasks using a communication channel, they develop opaque goal-oriented communication protocols. Good task performance is often considered sufficient evidence that meaningful communication is taking place, but existing empirical results show that communication strategies induced by common objectives can be counterintuitive whilst solving the task nearly perfectly. In this work, we identify a goal-agnostic prerequisite to meaningful communication, which we term semantic consistency, based on the idea that messages should have similar meanings across instances. We provide a formal definition for this idea, and use it to compare the two most common objectives in the field of emergent communication: discrimination and reconstruction. We prove, under mild assumptions, that semantically inconsistent communication protocols can be optimal solutions to the discrimination task, but not to reconstruction. We further show that the reconstruction objective encourages a stricter property, spatial meaningfulness, which also accounts for the distance between messages. Experiments with emergent communication games validate our theoretical results. These findings demonstrate an inherent advantage of distance-based communication goals, and contextualize previous empirical discoveries.
Increasing the Accessibility of Causal Domain Knowledge via Causal Information Extraction Methods: A Case Study in the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry
Authors: Houssam Razouk, Leonie Benischke, Daniel Garber, Roman Kern
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Representation Learning

The extraction of causal information from textual data is crucial in the industry for identifying and mitigating potential failures, enhancing process efficiency, prompting quality improvements, and addressing various operational challenges. This paper presents a study on the development of automated methods for causal information extraction from actual industrial documents in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. The study proposes two types of causal information extraction methods, single-stage sequence tagging (SST) and multi-stage sequence tagging (MST), and evaluates their performance using existing documents from a semiconductor manufacturing company, including presentation slides and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) documents. The study also investigates the effect of representation learning on downstream tasks. The presented case study showcases that the proposed MST methods for extracting causal information from industrial documents are suitable for practical applications, especially for semi structured documents such as FMEAs, with a 93\% F1 score. Additionally, MST achieves a 73\% F1 score on texts extracted from presentation slides. Finally, the study highlights the importance of choosing a language model that is more aligned with the domain and in-domain fine-tuning.
Imagine-2-Drive: Leveraging High-Fidelity World Models via Multi-Modal Diffusion Policies
Authors: Anant Garg, K Madhava Krishna
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Denoising, Future prediction, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Trajectory Prediction

World Model-based Reinforcement Learning (WMRL) enables sample efficient policy learning by reducing the need for online interactions which can potentially be costly and unsafe, especially for autonomous driving. However, existing world models often suffer from low prediction fidelity and compounding one-step errors, leading to policy degradation over long horizons. Additionally, traditional RL policies, often deterministic or single Gaussian-based, fail to capture the multi-modal nature of decision-making in complex driving scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Imagine-2-Drive, a novel WMRL framework that integrates a high-fidelity world model with a multi-modal diffusion-based policy actor. It consists of two key components: DiffDreamer, a diffusion-based world model that generates future observations simultaneously, mitigating error accumulation, and DPA (Diffusion Policy Actor), a diffusion-based policy that models diverse and multi-modal trajectory distributions. By training DPA within DiffDreamer, our method enables robust policy learning with minimal online interactions. We evaluate our method in CARLA using standard driving benchmarks and demonstrate that it outperforms prior world model baselines, improving Route Completion and Success Rate by 15% and 20% respectively.
Evaluating the role of `Constitutions' for learning from AI feedback
Authors: Saskia Redgate, Andrew M. Bean, Adam Mahdi
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have led to their use as substitutes for human feedback for training and assessing other LLMs. These methods often rely on `constitutions', written guidelines which a critic model uses to provide feedback and improve generations. We investigate how the choice of constitution affects feedback quality by using four different constitutions to improve patient-centered communication in medical interviews. In pairwise comparisons conducted by 215 human raters, we found that detailed constitutions led to better results regarding emotive qualities. However, none of the constitutions outperformed the baseline in learning more practically-oriented skills related to information gathering and provision. Our findings indicate that while detailed constitutions should be prioritised, there are possible limitations to the effectiveness of AI feedback as a reward signal in certain areas.
Mitigating Sycophancy in Decoder-Only Transformer Architectures: Synthetic Data Intervention
Authors: Libo Wang
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

To address the sycophancy problem caused by reinforcement learning from human feedback in large language models, this research applies synthetic data intervention technology to the decoder-only transformer architecture. Based on the research gaps in the existing literature, the researcher designed an experimental process to reduce the tendency of models to cater by generating diversified data, and used GPT4o as an experimental tool for verification. The experiment used 100 true and false questions, and compared the performance of the model trained with synthetic data intervention and the original untrained model on multiple indicators. The results show that the SDI training model supports the technology in terms of accuracy rate and sycophancy rate and has significant effectiveness in reducing sycophancy phenomena.
Causal Time-Series Synchronization for Multi-Dimensional Forecasting
Authors: Michael Mayr, Georgios C. Chasparis, Josef Küng
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Transfer Learning

The process industry's high expectations for Digital Twins require modeling approaches that can generalize across tasks and diverse domains with potentially different data dimensions and distributional shifts i.e., Foundational Models. Despite success in natural language processing and computer vision, transfer learning with (self-) supervised signals for pre-training general-purpose models is largely unexplored in the context of Digital Twins in the process industry due to challenges posed by multi-dimensional time-series data, lagged cause-effect dependencies, complex causal structures, and varying number of (exogenous) variables. We propose a novel channel-dependent pre-training strategy that leverages synchronized cause-effect pairs to overcome these challenges by breaking down the multi-dimensional time-series data into pairs of cause-effect variables. Our approach focuses on: (i) identifying highly lagged causal relationships using data-driven methods, (ii) synchronizing cause-effect pairs to generate training samples for channel-dependent pre-training, and (iii) evaluating the effectiveness of this approach in channel-dependent forecasting. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in forecasting accuracy and generalization capability compared to traditional training methods.
Legal Evalutions and Challenges of Large Language Models
Authors: Jiaqi Wang, Huan Zhao, Zhenyuan Yang, Peng Shu, JunHao Chen, Haobo Sun, Ruixi Liang, Shixin Li, Pengcheng Shi, Longjun Ma, Zongjia Liu, Zhengliang Liu, Tianyang Zhong, Yutong Zhang, Chong Ma, Xin Zhang, Tuo Zhang, Tianli Ding, Yudan Ren, Tianming Liu, Xi Jiang, Shu Zhang
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Legal Reasoning

In this paper, we review legal testing methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs), using the OPENAI o1 model as a case study to evaluate the performance of large models in applying legal provisions. We compare current state-of-the-art LLMs, including open-source, closed-source, and legal-specific models trained specifically for the legal domain. Systematic tests are conducted on English and Chinese legal cases, and the results are analyzed in depth. Through systematic testing of legal cases from common law systems and China, this paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs in understanding and applying legal texts, reasoning through legal issues, and predicting judgments. The experimental results highlight both the potential and limitations of LLMs in legal applications, particularly in terms of challenges related to the interpretation of legal language and the accuracy of legal reasoning. Finally, the paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of various types of models, offering valuable insights and references for the future application of AI in the legal field.
Memorization in Attention-only Transformers
Authors: Léo Dana, Muni Sreenivas Pydi, Yann Chevaleyre
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Recent research has explored the memorization capacity of multi-head attention, but these findings are constrained by unrealistic limitations on the context size. We present a novel proof for language-based Transformers that extends the current hypothesis to any context size. Our approach improves upon the state-of-the-art by achieving more effective exact memorization with an attention layer, while also introducing the concept of approximate memorization of distributions. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate that our proposed bounds more accurately reflect the true memorization capacity of language models, and provide a precise comparison with prior work.
Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People
Authors: Joon Sung Park, Carolyn Q. Zou, Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill, Carrie Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Robb Willer, Percy Liang, Michael S. Bernstein
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

The promise of human behavioral simulation--general-purpose computational agents that replicate human behavior across domains--could enable broad applications in policymaking and social science. We present a novel agent architecture that simulates the attitudes and behaviors of 1,052 real individuals--applying large language models to qualitative interviews about their lives, then measuring how well these agents replicate the attitudes and behaviors of the individuals that they represent. The generative agents replicate participants' responses on the General Social Survey 85% as accurately as participants replicate their own answers two weeks later, and perform comparably in predicting personality traits and outcomes in experimental replications. Our architecture reduces accuracy biases across racial and ideological groups compared to agents given demographic descriptions. This work provides a foundation for new tools that can help investigate individual and collective behavior.
Identifying Key Drivers of Heatwaves: A Novel Spatio-Temporal Framework for Extreme Event Detection
Authors: J. Pérez-Aracil, C. Peláez-Rodríguez, Ronan McAdam, Antonello Squintu, Cosmin M. Marina, Eugenio Lorente-Ramos, Niklas Luther, Veronica Torralba, Enrico Scoccimarro, Leone Cavicchia, Matteo Giuliani, Eduardo Zorita, Felicitas Hansen, David Barriopedro, Ricardo Garcia-Herrera, Pedro A. Gutiérrez, Jürg Luterbacher, Elena Xoplaki, Andrea Castelletti, S. Salcedo-Sanz
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Driver Identification, Event Detection

Heatwaves (HWs) are extreme atmospheric events that produce significant societal and environmental impacts. Predicting these extreme events remains challenging, as their complex interactions with large-scale atmospheric and climatic variables are difficult to capture with traditional statistical and dynamical models. This work presents a general method for driver identification in extreme climate events. A novel framework (STCO-FS) is proposed to identify key immediate (short-term) HW drivers by combining clustering algorithms with an ensemble evolutionary algorithm. The framework analyzes spatio-temporal data, reduces dimensionality by grouping similar geographical nodes for each variable, and develops driver selection in spatial and temporal domains, identifying the best time lags between predictive variables and HW occurrences. The proposed method has been applied to analyze HWs in the Adda river basin in Italy. The approach effectively identifies significant variables influencing HWs in this region. This research can potentially enhance our understanding of HW drivers and predictability.
Multi-Task Adversarial Variational Autoencoder for Estimating Biological Brain Age with Multimodal Neuroimaging
Authors: Muhammad Usman, Azka Rehman, Abdullah Shahid, Abd Ur Rehman, Sung-Min Gho, Aleum Lee, Tariq M. Khan, Imran Razzak
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Data Integration, Deep Learning, Functional Connectivity

Despite advances in deep learning for estimating brain age from structural MRI data, incorporating functional MRI data is challenging due to its complex structure and the noisy nature of functional connectivity measurements. To address this, we present the Multitask Adversarial Variational Autoencoder, a custom deep learning framework designed to improve brain age predictions through multimodal MRI data integration. This model separates latent variables into generic and unique codes, isolating shared and modality-specific features. By integrating multitask learning with sex classification as an additional task, the model captures sex-specific aging patterns. Evaluated on the OpenBHB dataset, a large multisite brain MRI collection, the model achieves a mean absolute error of 2.77 years, outperforming traditional methods. This success positions M-AVAE as a powerful tool for metaverse-based healthcare applications in brain age estimation.
AI and the Future of Work in Africa White Paper
Authors: Jacki O'Neill, Vukosi Marivate, Barbara Glover, Winnie Karanu, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Akua Gyekye, Anne Makena, Wesley Rosslyn-Smith, Matthew Grollnek, Charity Wayua, Rehema Baguma, Sarah Spencer, Daniel Kandie, Dennis Ndege Maari, Natasha Mutangana, Maxamed Axmed, Nyambura Kamau, Muhammad Adamu, Frank Swaniker, Brian Gatuguti, Jonathan Donner, Mark Graham, Janet Mumo, Caroline Mbindyo, Charlette N'Guessan, Irene Githinji, Lesego Makhafola, Sean Kruger, Olivia Etyang, Mulang Onando, Joe Sevilla, Nanjira Sambuli, Martin Mbaya, Paul Breloff, Gideon M. Anapey, Tebogo L. Mogaleemang, Tiyani Nghonyama, Muthoni Wanyoike, Bhekani Mbuli, Lawrence Nderu, Wambui Nyabero, Uzma Alam, Kayode Olaleye, Caroline Njenga, Abigail Sellen, David Kairo, Rutendo Chabikwa, Najeeb G. Abdulhamid, Ketry Kubasu, Chinasa T. Okolo, Eugenia Akpo, Joel Budu, Issa Karambal, Joseph Berkoh, William Wasswa, Muchai Njagwi, Rob Burnet, Loise Ochanda, Hanlie de Bod, Elizabeth Ankrah, Selemani Kinyunyu, Mutembei Kariuki, Angel Maduke, Kizito Kiyimba, Farida Eleshin, Lillian Secelela Madeje, Catherine Muraga, Ida Nganga, Judy Gichoya, Tabbz Maina, Samuel Maina, Muchai Mercy, Millicent Ochieng, Stephanie Nyairo
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

This white paper is the output of a multidisciplinary workshop in Nairobi (Nov 2023). Led by a cross-organisational team including Microsoft Research, NEPAD, Lelapa AI, and University of Oxford. The workshop brought together diverse thought-leaders from various sectors and backgrounds to discuss the implications of Generative AI for the future of work in Africa. Discussions centred around four key themes: Macroeconomic Impacts; Jobs, Skills and Labour Markets; Workers' Perspectives and Africa-Centris AI Platforms. The white paper provides an overview of the current state and trends of generative AI and its applications in different domains, as well as the challenges and risks associated with its adoption and regulation. It represents a diverse set of perspectives to create a set of insights and recommendations which aim to encourage debate and collaborative action towards creating a dignified future of work for everyone across Africa.
PFML: Self-Supervised Learning of Time-Series Data Without Representation Collapse
Authors: Einari Vaaras, Manu Airaksinen, Okko Räsänen
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, EEG, Emotion Recognition, Self-Supervised Learning, Time Series

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a data-driven learning approach that utilizes the innate structure of the data to guide the learning process. In contrast to supervised learning, which depends on external labels, SSL utilizes the inherent characteristics of the data to produce its own supervisory signal. However, one frequent issue with SSL methods is representation collapse, where the model outputs a constant input-invariant feature representation. This issue hinders the potential application of SSL methods to new data modalities, as trying to avoid representation collapse wastes researchers' time and effort. This paper introduces a novel SSL algorithm for time-series data called Prediction of Functionals from Masked Latents (PFML). Instead of predicting masked input signals or their latent representations directly, PFML operates by predicting statistical functionals of the input signal corresponding to masked embeddings, given a sequence of unmasked embeddings. The algorithm is designed to avoid representation collapse, rendering it straightforwardly applicable to different time-series data domains, such as novel sensor modalities in clinical data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PFML through complex, real-life classification tasks across three different data modalities: infant posture and movement classification from multi-sensor inertial measurement unit data, emotion recognition from speech data, and sleep stage classification from EEG data. The results show that PFML is superior to a conceptually similar SSL method and a contrastive learning-based SSL method. Additionally, PFML is on par with the current state-of-the-art SSL method, while also being conceptually simpler and without suffering from representation collapse.