pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Style-Talker: Finetuning Audio Language Model and Style-Based Text-to-Speech Model for Fast Spoken Dialogue Generation
Authors: Yinghao Aaron Li, Xilin Jiang, Jordan Darefsky, Ge Zhu, Nima Mesgarani
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Dialogue Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly propelled the development of text-based chatbots, demonstrating their capability to engage in coherent and contextually relevant dialogues. However, extending these advancements to enable end-to-end speech-to-speech conversation bots remains a formidable challenge, primarily due to the extensive dataset and computational resources required. The conventional approach of cascading automatic speech recognition (ASR), LLM, and text-to-speech (TTS) models in a pipeline, while effective, suffers from unnatural prosody because it lacks direct interactions between the input audio and its transcribed text and the output audio. These systems are also limited by their inherent latency from the ASR process for real-time applications. This paper introduces Style-Talker, an innovative framework that fine-tunes an audio LLM alongside a style-based TTS model for fast spoken dialog generation. Style-Talker takes user input audio and uses transcribed chat history and speech styles to generate both the speaking style and text for the response. Subsequently, the TTS model synthesizes the speech, which is then played back to the user. While the response speech is being played, the input speech undergoes ASR processing to extract the transcription and speaking style, serving as the context for the ensuing dialogue turn. This novel pipeline accelerates the traditional cascade ASR-LLM-TTS systems while integrating rich paralinguistic information from input speech. Our experimental results show that Style-Talker significantly outperforms the conventional cascade and speech-to-speech baselines in terms of both dialogue naturalness and coherence while being more than 50% faster.
Parallel Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Draft Length
Authors: Tianyu Liu, Yun Li, Qitan Lv, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Winston Hu
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Speculative decoding (SD), where an extra draft model is employed to provide multiple \textit{draft} tokens first and then the original target model verifies these tokens in parallel, has shown great power for LLM inference acceleration. However, existing SD methods suffer from the mutual waiting problem, i.e., the target model gets stuck when the draft model is \textit{guessing} tokens, and vice versa. This problem is directly incurred by the asynchronous execution of the draft model and the target model, and is exacerbated due to the fixed draft length in speculative decoding. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework to boost speculative decoding, namely \textbf{P}arallel sp\textbf{E}culative decoding with \textbf{A}daptive d\textbf{R}aft \textbf{L}ength (PEARL). Specifically, PEARL proposes \textit{pre-verify} to verify the first draft token in advance during the drafting phase, and \textit{post-verify} to generate more draft tokens during the verification phase. PEARL parallels the drafting phase and the verification phase via applying the two strategies, and achieves adaptive draft length for different scenarios, which effectively alleviates the mutual waiting problem. Moreover, we theoretically demonstrate that the mean accepted tokens of PEARL is more than existing \textit{draft-then-verify} works. Experiments on various text generation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our \name, leading to a superior speedup performance up to \textbf{3.79$\times$} and \textbf{1.52$\times$}, compared to auto-regressive decoding and vanilla speculative decoding, respectively.
PyMarian: Fast Neural Machine Translation and Evaluation in Python
Authors: Thamme Gowda, Roman Grundkiewicz, Elijah Rippeth, Matt Post, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

The deep learning language of choice these days is Python; measured by factors such as available libraries and technical support, it is hard to beat. At the same time, software written in lower-level programming languages like C++ retain advantages in speed. We describe a Python interface to Marian NMT, a C++-based training and inference toolkit for sequence-to-sequence models, focusing on machine translation. This interface enables models trained with Marian to be connected to the rich, wide range of tools available in Python. A highlight of the interface is the ability to compute state-of-the-art COMET metrics from Python but using Marian's inference engine, with a speedup factor of up to 7.8$\times$ the existing implementations. We also briefly spotlight a number of other integrations, including Jupyter notebooks, connection with prebuilt models, and a web app interface provided with the package. PyMarian is available in PyPI via $\texttt{pip install pymarian}$.
Hermes 3 Technical Report
Authors: Ryan Teknium, Jeffrey Quesnelle, Chen Guang
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00

Instruct (or "chat") tuned models have become the primary way in which most people interact with large language models. As opposed to "base" or "foundation" models, instruct-tuned models are optimized to respond to imperative statements. We present Hermes 3, a neutrally-aligned generalist instruct and tool use model with strong reasoning and creative abilities. Its largest version, Hermes 3 405B, achieves state of the art performance among open weight models on several public benchmarks.
Could ChatGPT get an Engineering Degree? Evaluating Higher Education Vulnerability to AI Assistants
Authors: Beatriz Borges, Negar Foroutan, Deniz Bayazit, Anna Sotnikova, Syrielle Montariol, Tanya Nazaretzky, Mohammadreza Banaei, Alireza Sakhaeirad, Philippe Servant, Seyed Parsa Neshaei, Jibril Frej, Angelika Romanou, Gail Weiss, Sepideh Mamooler, Zeming Chen, Simin Fan, Silin Gao, Mete Ismayilzada, Debjit Paul, Alexandre Schöpfer, Andrej Janchevski, Anja Tiede, Clarence Linden, Emanuele Troiani, Francesco Salvi, Freya Behrens, Giacomo Orsi, Giovanni Piccioli, Hadrien Sevel, Louis Coulon, Manuela Pineros-Rodriguez, Marin Bonnassies, Pierre Hellich, Puck van Gerwen, Sankalp Gambhir, Solal Pirelli, Thomas Blanchard, Timothée Callens, Toni Abi Aoun, Yannick Calvino Alonso, Yuri Cho, Alberto Chiappa, Antonio Sclocchi, Étienne Bruno, Florian Hofhammer, Gabriel Pescia, Geovani Rizk, Leello Dadi, Lucas Stoffl, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Matthieu Bovel, Yueyang Pan, Aleksandra Radenovic, Alexandre Alahi, Alexander Mathis, Anne-Florence Bitbol, Boi Faltings, Cécile Hébert, Devis Tuia, François Maréchal, George Candea, Giuseppe Carleo, Jean-Cédric Chappelier, Nicolas Flammarion, Jean-Marie Fürbringer, Jean-Philippe Pellet, Karl Aberer, Lenka Zdeborová, Marcel Salathé, Martin Jaggi, Martin Rajman, Mathias Payer, Matthieu Wyart, Michael Gastpar, Michele Ceriotti, Ola Svensson, Olivier Lévêque, Paolo Ienne, Rachid Guerraoui, Robert West, Sanidhya Kashyap, Valerio Piazza, Viesturs Simanis, Viktor Kuncak, Volkan Cevher, Philippe Schwaller, Sacha Friedli, Patrick Jermann, Tanja Käser, Antoine Bosselut
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00

AI assistants are being increasingly used by students enrolled in higher education institutions. While these tools provide opportunities for improved teaching and education, they also pose significant challenges for assessment and learning outcomes. We conceptualize these challenges through the lens of vulnerability, the potential for university assessments and learning outcomes to be impacted by student use of generative AI. We investigate the potential scale of this vulnerability by measuring the degree to which AI assistants can complete assessment questions in standard university-level STEM courses. Specifically, we compile a novel dataset of textual assessment questions from 50 courses at EPFL and evaluate whether two AI assistants, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can adequately answer these questions. We use eight prompting strategies to produce responses and find that GPT-4 answers an average of 65.8% of questions correctly, and can even produce the correct answer across at least one prompting strategy for 85.1% of questions. When grouping courses in our dataset by degree program, these systems already pass non-project assessments of large numbers of core courses in various degree programs, posing risks to higher education accreditation that will be amplified as these models improve. Our results call for revising program-level assessment design in higher education in light of advances in generative AI.
State-of-the-art in Robot Learning for Multi-Robot Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Bin Wu, C Steve Suh
Date: 2024-08-03 00:00:00

With the continuous breakthroughs in core technology, the dawn of large-scale integration of robotic systems into daily human life is on the horizon. Multi-robot systems (MRS) built on this foundation are undergoing drastic evolution. The fusion of artificial intelligence technology with robot hardware is seeing broad application possibilities for MRS. This article surveys the state-of-the-art of robot learning in the context of Multi-Robot Cooperation (MRC) of recent. Commonly adopted robot learning methods (or frameworks) that are inspired by humans and animals are reviewed and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed along with the associated technical challenges. The potential trends of robot learning and MRS integration exploiting the merging of these methods with real-world applications is also discussed at length. Specifically statistical methods are used to quantitatively corroborate the ideas elaborated in the article.
AppAgent v2: Advanced Agent for Flexible Mobile Interactions
Authors: Yanda Li, Chi Zhang, Wanqi Yang, Bin Fu, Pei Cheng, Xin Chen, Ling Chen, Yunchao Wei
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG

With the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), LLM-driven visual agents are increasingly impacting software interfaces, particularly those with graphical user interfaces. This work introduces a novel LLM-based multimodal agent framework for mobile devices. This framework, capable of navigating mobile devices, emulates human-like interactions. Our agent constructs a flexible action space that enhances adaptability across various applications including parser, text and vision descriptions. The agent operates through two main phases: exploration and deployment. During the exploration phase, functionalities of user interface elements are documented either through agent-driven or manual explorations into a customized structured knowledge base. In the deployment phase, RAG technology enables efficient retrieval and update from this knowledge base, thereby empowering the agent to perform tasks effectively and accurately. This includes performing complex, multi-step operations across various applications, thereby demonstrating the framework's adaptability and precision in handling customized task workflows. Our experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate the framework's superior performance, confirming its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Our code will be open source soon.
SCREENER: A general framework for task-specific experiment design in quantitative MRI
Authors: Tianshu Zheng, Zican Wang, Timothy Bray, Daniel C. Alexander, Dan Wu, HUI ZHANG
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Diffusion  MRI, Multi-class Classification, Quantitative MRI

Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) is increasingly investigated for use in a variety of clinical tasks from diagnosis, through staging, to treatment monitoring. However, experiment design in qMRI, the identification of the optimal acquisition protocols, has been focused on obtaining the most precise parameter estimations, with no regard for the specific requirements of downstream tasks. Here we propose SCREENER: A general framework for task-specific experiment design in quantitative MRI. SCREENER incorporates a task-specific objective and seeks the optimal protocol with a deep-reinforcement-learning (DRL) based optimization strategy. To illustrate this framework, we employ a task of classifying the inflammation status of bone marrow using diffusion MRI data with intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) modelling. Results demonstrate SCREENER outperforms previous ad hoc and optimized protocols under clinical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, achieving significant improvement, both in binary classification tasks, e.g. from 67% to 89%, and in a multi-class classification task, from 46% to 59%. Additionally, we show this improvement is robust to the SNR. Lastly, we demonstrate the advantage of DRL-based optimization strategy, enabling zero-shot discovery of near-optimal protocols for a range of SNRs not used in training. In conclusion, SCREENER has the potential to enable wider uptake of qMRI in the clinic.
Joint PET-MRI Reconstruction with Diffusion Stochastic Differential Model
Authors: Taofeng Xie, Zhuoxu Cui, Congcong Liu, Chen Luo, Huayu Wang, Yuanzhi Zhang, Xuemei Wang, Yihang Zhou, Qiyu Jin, Guoqing Chen, Dong Liang, Haifeng Wang
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction

PET suffers from a low signal-to-noise ratio. Meanwhile, the k-space data acquisition process in MRI is time-consuming by PET-MRI systems. We aim to accelerate MRI and improve PET image quality. This paper proposed a novel joint reconstruction model by diffusion stochastic differential equations based on learning the joint probability distribution of PET and MRI. Compare the results underscore the qualitative and quantitative improvements our model brings to PET and MRI reconstruction, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methodologies. Joint PET-MRI reconstruction is a challenge in the PET-MRI system. This studies focused on the relationship extends beyond edges. In this study, PET is generated from MRI by learning joint probability distribution as the relationship.
Analysis of Unstructured High-Density Crowded Scenes for Crowd Monitoring
Authors: Alexandre Matov
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00

We are interested in developing an automated system for detection of organized movements in human crowds. Computer vision algorithms can extract information from videos of crowded scenes and automatically detect and track groups of individuals undergoing organized motion that represents an anomalous behavior in the context of conflict aversion. Our system can detect organized cohorts against the background of randomly moving objects and we can estimate the number of participants in an organized cohort, the speed and direction of motion in real time, within three to four video frames, which is less than one second from the onset of motion captured on a CCTV. We have performed preliminary analysis in this context in biological cell data containing up to four thousand objects per frame and will extend this numerically to a hundred-fold for public safety applications. We envisage using the existing infrastructure of video cameras for acquiring image datasets on-the-fly and deploying an easy-to-use data-driven software system for parsing of significant events by analyzing image sequences taken inside and outside of sports stadiums or other public venues. Other prospective users are organizers of political rallies, civic and wildlife organizations, security firms, and the military. We will optimize the performance of the software by implementing a classification method able to distinguish between activities posing a threat and those not posing a threat.
Revisiting, Benchmarking and Understanding Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation
Authors: Meihan Liu, Zhen Zhang, Jiachen Tang, Jiajun Bu, Bingsheng He, Sheng Zhou
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Domain Adaptation, GRAPH DOMAIN ADAPTATION

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) involves the transfer of knowledge from a label-rich source graph to an unlabeled target graph under domain discrepancies. Despite the proliferation of methods designed for this emerging task, the lack of standard experimental settings and fair performance comparisons makes it challenging to understand which and when models perform well across different scenarios. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for unsupervised graph domain adaptation named GDABench, which encompasses 16 algorithms across 5 datasets with 74 adaptation tasks. Through extensive experiments, we observe that the performance of current UGDA models varies significantly across different datasets and adaptation scenarios. Specifically, we recognize that when the source and target graphs face significant distribution shifts, it is imperative to formulate strategies to effectively address and mitigate graph structural shifts. We also find that with appropriate neighbourhood aggregation mechanisms, simple GNN variants can even surpass state-of-the-art UGDA baselines. To facilitate reproducibility, we have developed an easy-to-use library PyGDA for training and evaluating existing UGDA methods, providing a standardized platform in this community. Our source codes and datasets can be found at: https://github.com/pygda-team/pygda.
Android Malware Detection Using Machine Learning on Image Patterns
Authors: Fauzi Mohd Darus, Noor Azurati Ahmad Salleh, Aswami Fadillah Mohd Ariffin
Date: 2019-01-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: 2018 Cyber Resilience Conference (CRC) 2019 1
Tasks: Android Malware Detection, Malware Detection

Android platform has been targeted by cyber-criminals due to the increase number of Android users in 2017. More than 8,000 Android malware were identified everyday making it is difficult for the malware analyst to detect them. Traditional malware detection techniques are no longer reliable to detect newly created malware in short period of time. In this paper, we use a different approach to detect Android malware. The Android malware will be visualised into gray scale images and their image features will be extracted using GIST descriptor. The detection will be done and compare using three different classifiers namely k-nearest neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF), and Decision Tree (DT)
Interactive-T2S: Multi-Turn Interactions for Text-to-SQL with Large Language Models
Authors: Guanming Xiong, Junwei Bao, Hongfei Jiang, Yang song, Wen Zhao
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, SQL Parsing, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

This study explores text-to-SQL parsing by leveraging the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Despite recent advancements, existing LLM-based methods have not adequately addressed scalability, leading to inefficiencies when processing wide tables. Furthermore, current interaction-based approaches either lack a step-by-step, interpretable SQL generation process or fail to provide an efficient and universally applicable interaction design. To address these challenges, we introduce Interactive-T2S, a framework that generates SQL queries through direct interactions with databases. This framework includes four general tools that facilitate proactive and efficient information retrieval by the LLM. Additionally, we have developed detailed exemplars to demonstrate the step-wise reasoning processes within our framework. Our experiments on the BIRD-Dev dataset, employing a setting without oracle knowledge, reveal that our method achieves state-of-the-art results with only two exemplars, underscoring the effectiveness and robustness of our framework.
BKEE: Pioneering Event Extraction in the Vietnamese Language
Authors: Thi-Nhung Nguyen, Bang Tien Tran, Trong-Nghia Luu, Thien Huu Nguyen, Kiem-Hieu Nguyen
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC | COLING 2024 5
Tasks: Event Detection, Event Extraction, Vietnamese Datasets

Event Extraction (EE) is a fundamental task in information extraction, aimed at identifying events and their associated arguments within textual data. It holds significant importance in various applications and serves as a catalyst for the development of related tasks. Despite the availability of numerous datasets and methods for event extraction in various languages, there has been a notable absence of a dedicated dataset for the Vietnamese language. To address this limitation, we propose BKEE, a novel event extraction dataset for Vietnamese. BKEE encompasses over 33 distinct event types and 28 different event argument roles, providing a labeled dataset for entity mentions, event mentions, and event arguments on 1066 documents. Additionally, we establish robust baselines for potential downstream tasks on this dataset, facilitating the analysis of challenges and future development prospects in the field of Vietnamese event extraction.
Universal dimensions of visual representation
Authors: Zirui Chen, Michael F. Bonner
Date: 2024-08-23 00:00:00

Do neural network models of vision learn brain-aligned representations because they share architectural constraints and task objectives with biological vision or because they learn universal features of natural image processing? We characterized the universality of hundreds of thousands of representational dimensions from visual neural networks with varied construction. We found that networks with varied architectures and task objectives learn to represent natural images using a shared set of latent dimensions, despite appearing highly distinct at a surface level. Next, by comparing these networks with human brain representations measured with fMRI, we found that the most brain-aligned representations in neural networks are those that are universal and independent of a network's specific characteristics. Remarkably, each network can be reduced to fewer than ten of its most universal dimensions with little impact on its representational similarity to the human brain. These results suggest that the underlying similarities between artificial and biological vision are primarily governed by a core set of universal image representations that are convergently learned by diverse systems.
How Diffusion Models Learn to Factorize and Compose
Authors: Qiyao Liang, Ziming Liu, Mitchell Ostrow, Ila Fiete
Date: 2024-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Representation Learning

Diffusion models are capable of generating photo-realistic images that combine elements which likely do not appear together in the training set, demonstrating the ability to \textit{compositionally generalize}. Nonetheless, the precise mechanism of compositionality and how it is acquired through training remains elusive. Inspired by cognitive neuroscientific approaches, we consider a highly reduced setting to examine whether and when diffusion models learn semantically meaningful and factorized representations of composable features. We performed extensive controlled experiments on conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) trained to generate various forms of 2D Gaussian bump images. We found that the models learn factorized but not fully continuous manifold representations for encoding continuous features of variation underlying the data. With such representations, models demonstrate superior feature compositionality but limited ability to interpolate over unseen values of a given feature. Our experimental results further demonstrate that diffusion models can attain compositionality with few compositional examples, suggesting a more efficient way to train DDPMs. Finally, we connect manifold formation in diffusion models to percolation theory in physics, offering insight into the sudden onset of factorized representation learning. Our thorough toy experiments thus contribute a deeper understanding of how diffusion models capture compositional structure in data.