pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
`Eyes of a Hawk and Ears of a Fox': Part Prototype Network for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Joshua Feinglass, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Rushil Anirudh, T. S. Jayram, Yezhou Yang
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Generalized Zero-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Current approaches in Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) are built upon base models which consider only a single class attribute vector representation over the entire image. This is an oversimplification of the process of novel category recognition, where different regions of the image may have properties from different seen classes and thus have different predominant attributes. With this in mind, we take a fundamentally different approach: a pre-trained Vision-Language detector (VINVL) sensitive to attribute information is employed to efficiently obtain region features. A learned function maps the region features to region-specific attribute attention used to construct class part prototypes. We conduct experiments on a popular GZSL benchmark consisting of the CUB, SUN, and AWA2 datasets where our proposed Part Prototype Network (PPN) achieves promising results when compared with other popular base models. Corresponding ablation studies and analysis show that our approach is highly practical and has a distinct advantage over global attribute attention when localized proposals are available.
SCOUT+: Towards Practical Task-Driven Drivers' Gaze Prediction
Authors: Iuliia Kotseruba, John K. Tsotsos
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaze Prediction, Prediction

Accurate prediction of drivers' gaze is an important component of vision-based driver monitoring and assistive systems. Of particular interest are safety-critical episodes, such as performing maneuvers or crossing intersections. In such scenarios, drivers' gaze distribution changes significantly and becomes difficult to predict, especially if the task and context information is represented implicitly, as is common in many state-of-the-art models. However, explicit modeling of top-down factors affecting drivers' attention often requires additional information and annotations that may not be readily available. In this paper, we address the challenge of effective modeling of task and context with common sources of data for use in practical systems. To this end, we introduce SCOUT+, a task- and context-aware model for drivers' gaze prediction, which leverages route and map information inferred from commonly available GPS data. We evaluate our model on two datasets, DR(eye)VE and BDD-A, and demonstrate that using maps improves results compared to bottom-up models and reaches performance comparable to the top-down model SCOUT which relies on privileged ground truth information. Code is available at https://github.com/ykotseruba/SCOUT.
Data Limitations for Modeling Top-Down Effects on Drivers' Attention
Authors: Iuliia Kotseruba, John K. Tsotsos
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaze Prediction

Driving is a visuomotor task, i.e., there is a connection between what drivers see and what they do. While some models of drivers' gaze account for top-down effects of drivers' actions, the majority learn only bottom-up correlations between human gaze and driving footage. The crux of the problem is lack of public data with annotations that could be used to train top-down models and evaluate how well models of any kind capture effects of task on attention. As a result, top-down models are trained and evaluated on private data and public benchmarks measure only the overall fit to human data. In this paper, we focus on data limitations by examining four large-scale public datasets, DR(eye)VE, BDD-A, MAAD, and LBW, used to train and evaluate algorithms for drivers' gaze prediction. We define a set of driving tasks (lateral and longitudinal maneuvers) and context elements (intersections and right-of-way) known to affect drivers' attention, augment the datasets with annotations based on the said definitions, and analyze the characteristics of data recording and processing pipelines w.r.t. capturing what the drivers see and do. In sum, the contributions of this work are: 1) quantifying biases of the public datasets, 2) examining performance of the SOTA bottom-up models on subsets of the data involving non-trivial drivers' actions, 3) linking shortcomings of the bottom-up models to data limitations, and 4) recommendations for future data collection and processing. The new annotations and code for reproducing the results is available at https://github.com/ykotseruba/SCOUT.
Multibranch Generative Models for Multichannel Imaging with an Application to PET/CT Synergistic Reconstruction
Authors: Noel Jeffrey Pinton, Alexandre Bousse, Catherine Cheze-Le-Rest, Dimitris Visvikis
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Denoising, Dictionary Learning, Image Reconstruction

This paper presents a novel approach for learned synergistic reconstruction of medical images using multibranch generative models. Leveraging variational autoencoders (VAEs), our model learns from pairs of images simultaneously, enabling effective denoising and reconstruction. Synergistic image reconstruction is achieved by incorporating the trained models in a regularizer that evaluates the distance between the images and the model. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on both Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) and positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) datasets, showcasing improved image quality for low-dose imaging. Despite challenges such as patch decomposition and model limitations, our results underscore the potential of generative models for enhancing medical imaging reconstruction.
Personalized Collaborative Fine-Tuning for On-Device Large Language Models
Authors: Nicolas Wagner, Dongyang Fan, Martin Jaggi
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

We explore on-device self-supervised collaborative fine-tuning of large language models with limited local data availability. Taking inspiration from the collaborative learning community, we introduce three distinct trust-weighted gradient aggregation schemes: weight similarity-based, prediction similarity-based and validation performance-based. To minimize communication overhead, we integrate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and only exchange LoRA weight updates. Our protocols, driven by prediction and performance metrics, surpass both FedAvg and local fine-tuning methods, which is particularly evident in realistic scenarios with more diverse local data distributions. The results underscore the effectiveness of our approach in addressing heterogeneity and scarcity within local datasets.
Quantization of Large Language Models with an Overdetermined Basis
Authors: Daniil Merkulov, Daria Cherniuk, Alexander Rudikov, Ivan Oseledets, Ekaterina Muravleva, Aleksandr Mikhalev, Boris Kashin
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Compression, Quantization, text-classification, Text Classification

In this paper, we introduce an algorithm for data quantization based on the principles of Kashin representation. This approach hinges on decomposing any given vector, matrix, or tensor into two factors. The first factor maintains a small infinity norm, while the second exhibits a similarly constrained norm when multiplied by an orthogonal matrix. Surprisingly, the entries of factors after decomposition are well-concentrated around several peaks, which allows us to efficiently replace them with corresponding centroids for quantization purposes. We study the theoretical properties of the proposed approach and rigorously evaluate our compression algorithm in the context of next-word prediction tasks and on a set of downstream tasks for text classification. Our findings demonstrate that Kashin Quantization achieves competitive or superior quality in model performance while ensuring data compression, marking a significant advancement in the field of data quantization.
Convergence Analysis of Probability Flow ODE for Score-based Generative Models
Authors: Daniel Zhengyu Huang, Jiaoyang Huang, Zhengjiang Lin
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

Score-based generative models have emerged as a powerful approach for sampling high-dimensional probability distributions. Despite their effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively underdeveloped. In this work, we study the convergence properties of deterministic samplers based on probability flow ODEs from both theoretical and numerical perspectives. Assuming access to $L^2$-accurate estimates of the score function, we prove the total variation between the target and the generated data distributions can be bounded above by $\mathcal{O}(d^{3/4}\delta^{1/2})$ in the continuous time level, where $d$ denotes the data dimension and $\delta$ represents the $L^2$-score matching error. For practical implementations using a $p$-th order Runge-Kutta integrator with step size $h$, we establish error bounds of $\mathcal{O}(d^{3/4}\delta^{1/2} + d\cdot(dh)^p)$ at the discrete level. Finally, we present numerical studies on problems up to 128 dimensions to verify our theory.
Amplitude-Phase Fusion for Enhanced Electrocardiogram Morphological Analysis
Authors: Shuaicong Hu, Yanan Wang, Jian Liu, Jingyu Lin, Shengmei Qin, Zhenning Nie, Zhifeng Yao, Wenjie Cai, Cuiwei Yang
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Morphological Analysis

Considering the variability of amplitude and phase patterns in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals due to cardiac activity and individual differences, existing entropy-based studies have not fully utilized these two patterns and lack integration. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel fusion entropy metric, morphological ECG entropy (MEE) for the first time, specifically designed for ECG morphology, to comprehensively describe the fusion of amplitude and phase patterns. MEE is computed based on beat-level samples, enabling detailed analysis of each cardiac cycle. Experimental results demonstrate that MEE achieves rapid, accurate, and label-free localization of abnormal ECG arrhythmia regions. Furthermore, MEE provides a method for assessing sample diversity, facilitating compression of imbalanced training sets (via representative sample selection), and outperforms random pruning. Additionally, MEE exhibits the ability to describe areas of poor quality. By discussing, it proves the robustness of MEE value calculation to noise interference and its low computational complexity. Finally, we integrate this method into a clinical interactive interface to provide a more convenient and intuitive user experience. These findings indicate that MEE serves as a valuable clinical descriptor for ECG characterization. The implementation code can be referenced at the following link: https://github.com/fdu-harry/ECG-MEE-metric.
Scenario-Adaptive Fine-Grained Personalization Network: Tailoring User Behavior Representation to the Scenario Context
Authors: Moyu Zhang, Yongxiang Tang, Jinxin Hu, Yu Zhang
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

Existing methods often adjust representations adaptively only after aggregating user behavior sequences. This coarse-grained approach to re-weighting the entire user sequence hampers the model's ability to accurately model the user interest migration across different scenarios. To enhance the model's capacity to capture user interests from historical behavior sequences in each scenario, we develop a ranking framework named the Scenario-Adaptive Fine-Grained Personalization Network (SFPNet), which designs a kind of fine-grained method for multi-scenario personalized recommendations. Specifically, SFPNet comprises a series of blocks named as Scenario-Tailoring Block, stacked sequentially. Each block initially deploys a parameter personalization unit to integrate scenario information at a coarse-grained level by redefining fundamental features. Subsequently, we consolidate scenario-adaptively adjusted feature representations to serve as context information. By employing residual connection, we incorporate this context into the representation of each historical behavior, allowing for context-aware fine-grained customization of the behavior representations at the scenario-level, which in turn supports scenario-aware user interest modeling.
Kernel-based learning with guarantees for multi-agent applications
Authors: Krzysztof Kowalczyk, Paweł Wachel, Cristian R. Rojas
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

This paper addresses a kernel-based learning problem for a network of agents locally observing a latent multidimensional, nonlinear phenomenon in a noisy environment. We propose a learning algorithm that requires only mild a priori knowledge about the phenomenon under investigation and delivers a model with corresponding non-asymptotic high probability error bounds. Both non-asymptotic analysis of the method and numerical simulation results are presented and discussed in the paper.
AI Competitions and Benchmarks: Dataset Development
Authors: Romain Egele, Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Jan N. van Rijn, Isabelle Guyon, Xavier Baró, Albert Clapés, Prasanna Balaprakash, Sergio Escalera, Thomas Moeslund, Jun Wan
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Machine learning is now used in many applications thanks to its ability to predict, generate, or discover patterns from large quantities of data. However, the process of collecting and transforming data for practical use is intricate. Even in today's digital era, where substantial data is generated daily, it is uncommon for it to be readily usable; most often, it necessitates meticulous manual data preparation. The haste in developing new models can frequently result in various shortcomings, potentially posing risks when deployed in real-world scenarios (eg social discrimination, critical failures), leading to the failure or substantial escalation of costs in AI-based projects. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of established methodological tools, enriched by our practical experience, in the development of datasets for machine learning. Initially, we develop the tasks involved in dataset development and offer insights into their effective management (including requirements, design, implementation, evaluation, distribution, and maintenance). Then, we provide more details about the implementation process which includes data collection, transformation, and quality evaluation. Finally, we address practical considerations regarding dataset distribution and maintenance.
AntBatchInfer: Elastic Batch Inference in the Kubernetes Cluster
Authors: Siyuan Li, Youshao Xiao, Fanzhuang Meng, Lin Ju, Lei Liang, Lin Wang, Jun Zhou
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

Offline batch inference is a common task in the industry for deep learning applications, but it can be challenging to ensure stability and performance when dealing with large amounts of data and complicated inference pipelines. This paper demonstrated AntBatchInfer, an elastic batch inference framework, which is specially optimized for the non-dedicated cluster. AntBatchInfer addresses these challenges by providing multi-level fault-tolerant capabilities, enabling the stable execution of versatile and long-running inference tasks. It also improves inference efficiency by pipelining, intra-node, and inter-node scaling. It further optimizes the performance in complicated multiple-model batch inference scenarios. Through extensive experiments and real-world statistics, we demonstrate the superiority of our framework in terms of stability and efficiency. In the experiment, it outperforms the baseline by at least $2\times$ and $6\times$ in the single-model or multiple-model batch inference. Also, it is widely used at Ant Group, with thousands of daily jobs from various scenarios, including DLRM, CV, and NLP, which proves its practicability in the industry.
AntDT: A Self-Adaptive Distributed Training Framework for Leader and Straggler Nodes
Authors: Youshao Xiao, Lin Ju, Zhenglei Zhou, Siyuan Li, ZhaoXin Huan, Dalong Zhang, Rujie Jiang, Lin Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Lei Liang, Jun Zhou
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

Many distributed training techniques like Parameter Server and AllReduce have been proposed to take advantage of the increasingly large data and rich features. However, stragglers frequently occur in distributed training due to resource contention and hardware heterogeneity, which significantly hampers the training efficiency. Previous works only address part of the stragglers and could not adaptively solve various stragglers in practice. Additionally, it is challenging to use a systematic framework to address all stragglers because different stragglers require diverse data allocation and fault-tolerance mechanisms. Therefore, this paper proposes a unified distributed training framework called AntDT (Ant Distributed Training Framework) to adaptively solve the straggler problems. Firstly, the framework consists of four components, including the Stateful Dynamic Data Sharding service, Monitor, Controller, and Agent. These components work collaboratively to efficiently distribute workloads and provide a range of pre-defined straggler mitigation methods with fault tolerance, thereby hiding messy details of data allocation and fault handling. Secondly, the framework provides a high degree of flexibility, allowing for the customization of straggler mitigation solutions based on the specific circumstances of the cluster. Leveraging this flexibility, we introduce two straggler mitigation solutions, namely AntDT-ND for non-dedicated clusters and AntDT-DD for dedicated clusters, as practical examples to resolve various types of stragglers at Ant Group. Justified by our comprehensive experiments and industrial deployment statistics, AntDT outperforms other SOTA methods more than 3x in terms of training efficiency. Additionally, in Alipay's homepage recommendation scenario, using AntDT reduces the training duration of the ranking model from 27.8 hours to just 5.4 hours.
Closing the Gap in the Trade-off between Fair Representations and Accuracy
Authors: Biswajit Rout, Ananya B. Sai, Arun Rajkumar
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

The rapid developments of various machine learning models and their deployments in several applications has led to discussions around the importance of looking beyond the accuracies of these models. Fairness of such models is one such aspect that is deservedly gaining more attention. In this work, we analyse the natural language representations of documents and sentences (i.e., encodings) for any embedding-level bias that could potentially also affect the fairness of the downstream tasks that rely on them. We identify bias in these encodings either towards or against different sub-groups based on the difference in their reconstruction errors along various subsets of principal components. We explore and recommend ways to mitigate such bias in the encodings while also maintaining a decent accuracy in classification models that use them.
Sampling for Model Predictive Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving using Normalizing Flows
Authors: Georg Rabenstein, Lars Ullrich, Knut Graichen
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Efficient Exploration, Trajectory Planning, Variational Inference

Alongside optimization-based planners, sampling-based approaches are often used in trajectory planning for autonomous driving due to their simplicity. Model predictive path integral control is a framework that builds upon optimization principles while incorporating stochastic sampling of input trajectories. This paper investigates several sampling approaches for trajectory generation. In this context, normalizing flows originating from the field of variational inference are considered for the generation of sampling distributions, as they model transformations of simple to more complex distributions. Accordingly, learning-based normalizing flow models are trained for a more efficient exploration of the input domain for the task at hand. The developed algorithm and the proposed sampling distributions are evaluated in two simulation scenarios.
Learn Your Reference Model for Real Good Alignment
Authors: Alexey Gorbatovski, Boris Shaposhnikov, Alexey Malakhov, Nikita Surnachev, Yaroslav Aksenov, Ian Maksimov, Nikita Balagansky, Daniil Gavrilov
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

Despite the fact that offline methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) alignment do not require a direct reward model, they remain susceptible to overoptimization. This issue arises when the trained model deviates excessively from the reference policy, leading to a decrease in sample quality. We propose a new paradigm of offline alignment methods, called Trust Region (including variants TR-DPO, TR-IPO, TR-KTO), which dynamically updates the reference policy throughout the training process. Our results show that TR alignment methods effectively mitigate overoptimization, enabling models to maintain strong performance even when substantially deviating from the initial reference policy. We demonstrate the efficacy of these approaches not only through toy examples that exhibit reduced overoptimization, but also through direct, side-by-side comparisons in specific tasks such as helpful and harmless dialogue, as well as summarization, where they surpass conventional methods. Additionally, we report significant improvements in general-purpose assistant setups with the Llama3 model on the AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks, highlighting the advantages of Trust Region methods over classical approaches.
Safeguarding adaptive methods: global convergence of Barzilai-Borwein and other stepsize choices
Authors: Hongjia Ou, Andreas Themelis
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

Leveraging on recent advancements on adaptive methods for convex minimization problems, this paper provides a linesearch-free proximal gradient framework for globalizing the convergence of popular stepsize choices such as Barzilai-Borwein and one-dimensional Anderson acceleration. This framework can cope with problems in which the gradient of the differentiable function is merely locally H\"older continuous. Our analysis not only encompasses but also refines existing results upon which it builds. The theory is corroborated by numerical evidence that showcases the synergetic interplay between fast stepsize selections and adaptive methods.
Machine learning-based optimization workflow of the homogeneity of spunbond nonwovens with human validation
Authors: Viny Saajan Victor, Andre Schmeißer, Heike Leitte, Simone Gramsch
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

In the last ten years, the average annual growth rate of nonwoven production was 4%. In 2020 and 2021, nonwoven production has increased even further due to the huge demand for nonwoven products needed for protective clothing such as FFP2 masks to combat the COVID19 pandemic. Optimizing the production process is still a challenge due to its high nonlinearity. In this paper, we present a machine learning-based optimization workflow aimed at improving the homogeneity of spunbond nonwovens. The optimization workflow is based on a mathematical model that simulates the microstructures of nonwovens. Based on trainingy data coming from this simulator, different machine learning algorithms are trained in order to find a surrogate model for the time-consuming simulator. Human validation is employed to verify the outputs of machine learning algorithms by assessing the aesthetics of the nonwovens. We include scientific and expert knowledge into the training data to reduce the computational costs involved in the optimization process. We demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of our workflow in optimizing the homogeneity of nonwovens.